In the 1600s, a man named James Mattock was expelled from the First Church of Boston. His crime? It wasn’t using lewd language or smiling on the sabbath or anything else that we might think the Puritans had disapproved of. Rather, James Mattock had refused to have sex with his wife for two years. Though Mattock’s community clearly saw his self-deprivation as improper, it is quite possible that they had his wife’s suffering in mind when they decided to shun him. The Puritans believed that sexual desire was a normal and natural part of human life for both men and women (as long as it was heterosexual and confined to marriage), but that women wanted and needed sex more than men. A man could choose to give up sex with relatively little trouble, but for a woman to be so deprived would be much more difficult for her.
Category: culture
Rikers: Where Mental Illness Meets Brutality in Jail
After being arrested on a misdemeanor charge following a family dispute last year, Jose Bautista was unable to post $250 bail and ended up in a jail cell on Rikers Island.
A few days later, he tore his underwear, looped it around his neck and tried to hang himself from the cell’s highest bar. Four correction officers rushed in and cut him down. But instead of notifying medical personnel, they handcuffed Mr. Bautista, forced him to lie face down on the cell floor and began punching him with such force, according to New York City investigators, that he suffered a perforated bowel and needed emergency surgery.
Beatlemaniacs, Beliebers, Directioners — why do they scream?
When One Direction and 5 Seconds of Summer perform at Nationals Park next month, you’ll have to squint your ears to hear the boy bands’ hits amid a more ancient and fascinating sound: the emptying of adolescent lungs.
Academia’s seamier side: Lying, cheating and fraud
The seamier side of academia, lying, cheating and occasionally stealing, this is the world revealed by a blog which, by all rights, should be dry and boring, like its name, “Retraction Watch.”
Why people fall for dumb Internet hoaxes
Last month brought a great deal of fanfare, and accompanying snarky outrage, about a new “Satire” tag on Facebook for content sources like The Onion. Yet fake “news” items — which run deeper than satire — continue to propagate rapidly across the site, as well as on other social media platforms, such as Twitter.
An Opera Under Fire
When the arts play with contemporary history, they play with fire. The Metropolitan Opera has learned this lesson anew in the furious protests that have raged in advance of the company premiere, on Monday, of John Adams’s ruminative, unsettled, unsettling 1991 operatic masterpiece, “The Death of Klinghoffer.”
Battered, Bereaved, and Behind Bars
Arlena Lindley’s boyfriend Alonzo Turner beat her for months and murdered her child — so why was she sent to prison for 45 years? A BuzzFeed News Investigation.
Strict Mistress? The world’s secret sexual preferences revealed by Google
When it comes to sex, people lie to surveys but can’t deceive their search engines.
The Telegraph
I’m Rich. You’re Hot.
The cold mathematics of sugar daddy dating.
Photographer documents people carrying heavy loads on their heads
A photographer has travelled the world photographing people with unwieldy objects balanced on their heads. French photographer Floriane De Lassée travelled across some of the world’s most rural landscapes, from East Africa to South America, in search of people for her ongoing photo series, How Much Can You Carry.