Why do women outlive men? Science zeroes in on answer →

According to this study, since the introduction of antibiotics and modern hygiene infrastructure, it's mostly about habits:

In the first part of the 20th century, smoking was much more common among men than women, Beltran-Sanchez said.
By looking at data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the team saw that the gender gap in life expectancy really opened up when people started eating more animal fats, a shift that began in adults born at the end of the 19th century in most of the countries researchers examined. Other studies suggest that men born between 1950 and 1985 eat more animal products than women do, the researchers noted.

A Mismatch Between Need and Affluence: American communities with high standards of living often have low charitable giving rates →

It’s a common combination across the country: Residents of areas with high standards of living, low poverty, and low crime give less to charity than those in less well off areas.
That’s one finding from new data, compiled by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, combining giving behavior with quality-of-life measurements for 2,670 counties across the United States. It's based on data from The Chronicle’s How America Gives study, which shows the share of income Americans in different parts of the country have donated and the Opportunity Index, created by two antipoverty nonprofits, which assigns scores of socioeconomic well-being to counties based on measurements such as housing costs, preschool attendance, Internet access, and percent of residents with advanced degrees.
The inverse relationship between opportunity and giving is "a compelling, counterintuitive finding" that pushes against our assumptions that "places with higher scores would have higher rates of giving," said Russell Krumnow, managing director of Opportunity Nation, one of the nonprofits behind the Opportunity Index. "We really need everyone’s hands in this work, and the work of expanding opportunity is everyone’s."

The politics of China’s stock market collapse →

So while every international affairs pundit and their mother are focused on the travails of an economy the size of Louisiana, the second-largest economy is experiencing a teeny-weentsy stock market meltdown. From Bloomberg:
Almost 200 stocks halted trading after the close on Monday, bringing the total number of suspensions to 745, or 26 percent of listed firms on mainland exchanges, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Most of the halts are by companies listed in Shenzhen, which is dominated by smaller businesses.
The suspensions have locked up $1.4 trillion of shares, or 21 percent of China’s market capitalization, and are becoming increasingly popular as equity prices tumble. If not for the halts, a 28 percent plunge in the Shanghai Composite Index from its June 12 peak would probably be even deeper….
The rout in Chinese shares has erased at least $3.2 trillion in value, or twice the size of India’s entire stock market. 
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This doesn’t necessarily mean that financial contagion will infect China’s real economy. Chinese equity markets are pretty thin and small as a percentage of GDP compared to the developed world. Less than 20 percent of household assets were in the stock market. Financially, it would be difficult to argue that this is China’s Lehman moment.
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The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts will leave it to the Chinese economic experts to hash out that debate. The one thing that these analysts and everyone else agrees upon is that this will put a serious dent into Xi Jinping’s efforts to liberalize the Chinese economy on issues ranging from capital account liberalization to simply letting the market play a ‘decisive’ rolein the economy.

Millennials want a work-life balance. Their bosses just don’t get why. →

Workers around the globe have been finding it harder to juggle the demands of work and the rest of life in the past five years, a new report shows, with many working longer hours, deciding to delay or forgo having children, discontinuing education, or struggling to pay tuition for their children.
Why?
A big reason is the economy: Professional workers in companies that shed employees in the Great Recession are still doing the work of two or more people and working longer hours. Salaries have stagnated, and costs continue to rise, according to a new survey of nearly 10,000 workers in eight countries by Ernst & Young’s Global Generations Research.
But another big reason? The boss just doesn’t get it.
Close to 80 percent of millennials surveyed are part of dual-income couples in which both work full time. Of Generation X workers, people in their 30s and 40s now, 73 percent are. But of baby boomers, the generation born just after World War II that now occupies most top management positions, just 47 percent have a full-time working spouse. More than a quarter of baby-boomer workers have a spouse at home, or one who works part time or with flexible hours and is responsible for taking care of all home-front duties.
“I really see that there’s an empathy gap in the workplace,” said Karyn Twaronite, EY global-diversity and inclusiveness officer. “When there’s frustration about work-life balance in the workplace, and you think your boss doesn’t get it, that very likely could be true. ”

Why Can't We Fall Asleep? →

...But going to sleep isn’t always a simple process, and it seems to have grown more problematic in recent years, as I learned through a series of conversations this May, when some of the world’s leading sleep experts met with me to share their ongoing research into the nature of sleeping. (The meetings were facilitated by a Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship.) According to Charles Czeisler, the chief of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, over the past five decades our average sleep duration on work nights has decreased by an hour and a half, down from eight and a half to just under seven. Thirty-one per cent of us sleep fewer than six hours a night, and sixty-nine per cent report insufficient sleep. When Lisa Matricciani, a sleep researcher at the University of South Australia, looked at available sleep data for children from 1905 to 2008, she found that they’d lost nearly a minute of sleep a year. It’s not just a trend for the adult world. We are, as a population, sleeping less now than we ever have.
The problem, on the whole, isn’t that we’re waking up earlier. Much of the change has to do with when we choose to go to bed—and with how we decide to do so...

The Myth of Big, Bad Gluten →

AS many as one in three Americans tries to avoid gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. Gluten-free menus, gluten-free labels and gluten-free guests at summer dinners have proliferated.
Some of the anti-glutenists argue that we haven’t eaten wheat for long enough to adapt to it as a species. Agriculture began just 12,000 years ago, not enough time for our bodies, which evolved over millions of years, primarily in Africa, to adjust. According to this theory, we’re intrinsically hunter-gatherers, not bread-eaters. If exposed to gluten, some of us will develop celiac disease or gluten intolerance, or we’ll simply feel lousy.
Most of these assertions, however, are contradicted by significant evidence, and distract us from our actual problem: an immune system that has become overly sensitive.
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Here’s the lesson: Adaptation to a new food stuff can occur quickly — in a few millenniums in this case. So if it happened with milk, why not with wheat?
“If eating wheat was so bad for us, it’s hard to imagine that populations that ate it would have tolerated it for 10,000 years,” Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies lactase persistence, told me.
For Dr. Bana Jabri, director of research at the University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center, it’s the genetics of celiac disease that contradict the argument that wheat is intrinsically toxic.
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So the real mystery of celiac disease is what breaks that tolerance, and whatever that agent is, why has it become more common in recent decades?
An important clue comes from the fact that other disorders of immune dysfunction have also increased. We’re more sensitive to pollens (hay fever), our own microbes (inflammatory bowel disease) and our own tissues (multiple sclerosis).
Perhaps the sugary, greasy Western diet — increasingly recognized as pro-inflammatory — is partly responsible. Maybe shifts in our intestinal microbial communities, driven by antibiotics and hygiene, have contributed. Whatever the eventual answer, just-so stories about what we evolved eating, and what that means, blind us to this bigger, and really much more worrisome, problem: The modern immune system appears to have gone on the fritz.
Maybe we should stop asking what’s wrong with wheat, and begin asking what’s wrong with us.