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    Daters are astonished by the high prices of wining and dining a romantic interest with inflation at its highest rate in over 40 years. The consumer price index category for food away from home rose 7.7% in June 2022 from a year earlier, while full-service restaurants climbed 8.9%. For those testing the waters with a cocktail or two, prices for alcoholic beverages rose by 4%.

    Those searching for love say they’re feeling the pain. Among 3,000 users on the popular dating app Hinge, almost 41% said they were more concerned with the cost of dates now versus a year ago, with Generation Z respondents more likely to feel the pressure. Emily Derby, a 27-year-old in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said her dating costs have doubled from $200 to $400 a month.

    As costs escalate, some singles are scaling back and being more selective about the dates they’re going on, while others are pausing their search for “the one” entirely. On dating site OKCupid, 34% of 70,000 users reported that inflation was impacting their love life.

    “In the fall of 2020, I was going on dates left and right not really thinking about the costs,” said Seth Rosenberg, a 25-year-old in Philadelphia. “Now, it’s harder to be excited because if a date goes bad, you’re out anywhere from $50 to $100.”

    Those still in the dating game have both love and money on the mind. New York City-based dating coach Amy Nobile said even her wealthy clients, many of whom pay $15,000 for a four-month program, are trying to cut their dating costs in half. Clients who would typically spend as much as $150 on a date are seeing if they can get away with $75 or less.

    “People are feeling rising prices,” she said. “For those in the long game to find a partner, they feel like they really need to monitor their money flow in the dating world.” As a result, people are on the hunt for less expensive options, said Logan Ury, director of relationship science at Hinge.

(Paulina Cachero. www.bloomberg.com, 21.07.2022. Adaptado.)

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    People who have never outgrown an aversion to broccoli, or an addiction to potato chips, can place part of the blame on their genes, preliminary research suggests. The study, of over 6,200 adults, turned up correlations between certain taste-related genes and people’s preferences for particular food groups. Those whose genes made them sensitive to bitter flavors, for example, tended to eat fewer whole grains. Meanwhile, people with a particularly acute ability to sense savory flavors were less likely to eat their veggies. Still, none of that means genes determine your food preferences, experts said.

    Diet is complicated, and influenced by everything from culture to economics, said researcher Julie Gervis, a doctoral candidate at Tufts University. But, she said, the findings do highlight the role of taste-related genes in food choices. People often don’t know why they struggle with eating things they know are good for them, like green vegetables, Gervis noted. Understanding the influence of genes can shed some light on the matter.

    Eventually, Gervis said, dietitians may be able to use genetic information to give people more precise diet counseling. “We’re moving away from general nutrition advice to a more personalized approach,” Gervis said. But, she added, any real-world use of genetic analysis is still a long way off. Gervis will present the findings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition. Studies released at meetings are considered preliminary until they are published in a peer-reviewed journal.

(Amy Norton. www.usnews.com, 14.06.2022. Adaptado.)

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    “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth
without making some other Englishman despise him,”
playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote in the preface to
Pygmalion in 1913. Recent headlines suggest that accent
prejudice (or “accentism”) is no relic of the past but continues
to blight the university experience of many students.
    There is a hierarchy of accents in Britain which has
changed little over the years. The accents of Britain’s highest
classes are seen as neutral, “accentless” and correct,
while others are seen as inferior and are often stigmatised.
As such, those who have “non-standard” accents are
seen as legitimate and admissible targets for comment
and judgement. They are also loaded with an apparent
responsibility to change how they sound.
    The higher-class standard accent — “Received
Pronunciation” (RP) — is consistently rated the highest
on scales such as prestige and perceived intelligence.
Such judgments continually reproduce and reaffirm social
inequalities.
    The association between the ability to speak in a
certain way and being intelligent is especially relevant in the
university context, where this particular trait is most valued.
Being able to sound intelligent in a classroom translates
directly into gaining recognition and respect amongst peers
and teachers. The repercussions of accentism in the job
market are a further consequence for students.
    University is a place and a time where people come
together from all over the country and all over the world. This
can have very interesting effects on students’ accents as
they might naturally start to change the way that they speak
due to their new surroundings. This is a completely normal
process known as accommodation. It is not the same thing
as the enforced undermining of credibility and intelligence
through the stereotyping of someone’s regional accent.
    There are many interesting things to learn about how
someone from another part of the country has a different
way of pronouncing a word or uses a different word for
the same thing. For instance, have you ever seen how
many different words there are for a bread roll? We need
to counteract our biases by understanding and celebrating
such diversity, instead of ridiculing those who don’t conform
to an ideological standard rooted in discrimination from
the start.

(Monika Schmid, Amanda Cole and Ella Jeffries.
www.theconversation.com, 26.10.2020. Adapted.)

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    The ways homelessness affects people is considerable. Homelessness contributes to challenges regaining stability and getting to work and school, and can have a lifelong impact.

    When you become homeless, you lose so much. You no longer have a place to sleep, store food, cook, and eat. There is nowhere to keep your clothes, or go to the bathroom and take a bath or shower. You may need to leave your neighbors and neighborhood and may have a harder time getting to school or work. Homelessness leads to increased feelings of uncertainty, vulnerability, and isolation.

    Homeless people experience great physical and mental stress. This can result in health challenges while homeless and exacerbate pre-existing conditions and disabilities. Being homeless can lead to increased chances of having chronic pain; skin, foot, and dental problems; diseases and illnesses such as tuberculosis, hypertension, asthma, and diabetes.

    Many homeless people do not have access to medicine or regular physical or mental health care treatment. They tend to be hospitalized more often than people with homes. Homeless people are more likely to die prematurely as a result of injuries, unintentional overdoses, and extreme weather.

(www.invisiblepeople.tv. Adaptado.)

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The End of Poverty

     Equality is a very big idea, connected to freedom, but an idea doesn’t come for free. In a world where distance no longer determines who your neighbor is, paying the price for equality is not just heart, it’s smart. The destinies of the “haves” are intrinsically linked to the fates of the “have-nothing-at-alls”. If we didn’t know this already, it became too clear on September 11, 2001. Africa is not the front line in the war against terror, but it soon could be.

     “The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty.” Who said that? Not me. Not some beatnik peace group. Secretary of State Colin Powell. And when a military man starts talking like that perhaps we should listen. In tense, nervous times isn’t it cheaper – and smarter – to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them?

    We could be the first generation to outlaw the kind of extreme, stupid poverty that sees a child die of hunger in a world of plenty, or of a disease preventable by a twenty-cent inoculation. We are the first generation that has enough power to do that. The first generation that is powerful enough to unknot the whole tangle of bad trade, bad debt, and bad luck. The first generation that can end a corrupt relationship between the powerful and the weaker parts of the world which has been so wrong for so long.

    If the rich nations decided they could become slightly “poorer”, they would truly help the nations in need. If they agreed to write off the old debts of the poor countries, the whole world would be safer. This year millions of people gathered to persuade world leaders to invest more in fighting poverty and disease in Africa.

     We cannot save energy life. But the ones we can, we must. It is – or it ought to be – unacceptable that an accident of longitude determines whether a child lives or dies. Fifteen thousand people dying needlessly every day from AIDS, TB, and malaria. Behind each of these statistics is someone’s daughter, someone’s son, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother.

    This is Africa’s crisis. That it’s not on the nightly news, that we do not treat this as an emergency – that’s our crisis.

(adapted from Bono’s foreword to the End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs, Penguin Press, and “This is Generation’s Moon Shot”, by Bono in Time)

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Smoking damages eyes as well as lungs

    Millions of people in the UK are putting their sight at risk by continuing to smoke, warn specialists. Despite the clear connection, only one in five people recognise that smoking can lead to blindness, a poll for the Association of Optometrists (AOP) finds. Smokers are twice as likely to lose their sight compared with non-smokers.

    That is because tobacco smoke can cause and worsen a number of eye conditions. Cigarette smoke contains toxic chemicals that can irritate and harm the eyes. For example, heavy metals, such as lead and copper, can collect in the lens - the transparent bit that sits behind the pupil and brings rays of light into focus - and lead to cataracts, where the lens becomes cloudy.

    Smoking can make diabetes-related sight problems worse by damaging blood vessels at the back of the eye (the retina). In the poll of 2,006 adults, 18% correctly said that smoking increased the risk of blindness or sight loss, while three-quarters (76%) knew smoking was linked to cancer. The AOP says stopping or avoiding smoking is one of the best steps you can take to protect your vision, along with having regular sight checks.

(www.bbc.com, 02.07.2019. Adaptado.)