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How to Banish Plastic Straws From Your Life Forever

by JeniferSchaefer Posted on September 24, 2016

The anti-plastic straw movement grows stronger by the day. Campaigns are springing up around the country, urging people to hold the straw with their next drink, understand why this is such a big deal, and discover reusable alternatives.

The numbers are sufficiently shocking to make anyone want to change their habits. Americans use an estimated 500 million plastic straws daily enough to fill 127 school buses and circle the earths circumference 2.5 times. Five hundred million straws weigh about the same as 1,000 cars (close to 3 million pounds), which is a massive amount of plastic to throw in landfills on a daily basis.

Straws, which are made of a petroleum byproduct called polypropylene mixed with colorants and plasticizers, do not biodegrade naturally in the environment. They are also nearly impossible to recycle, so nobody really bothers. Some are incinerated, which releases toxic chemicals into the air, but most end up in the ground, where they will hang around for an estimated 400 years and leach chemicals into the ground. That means that every straw ever used still exists on this planet.

Fortunately, resistance is growing stronger, and several interesting efforts to promote the straw-free message have gained traction in recent years. There are also more companies offering reusable alternatives to plastic straws.

Check out the following list of resources to learn how you can get involved, educate others around you, and banish plastic straws forever from your life.

TheOne Less Strawcampaign has its official start on October 1, but individuals, businesses, and schools can sign up now. It has a nifty accountability system whereby, for every straw that you accidentally use (i.e. you forget to tell the server you dont want one), you have to pay into a fund that will then get donated to your school to promote environmental education. (See TreeHugger storyhere.)

The Last Plastic Strawurges restaurants and bars to change their policy to straws available upon request, in order to get people thinking about the issue and drastically cutting down on the number handed out each day. This group inspired Bacardi to launch itsHold the Straw campaign.

U-Konserve, seller of reusable food storage containers, has a fabulous Pinterest page called Switch the Straw with many helpful links to anti-plastic straw campaigns, infographics, and alternative products. U-Konserve is also offering a free straw-cleaning brush with the purchase of any reusable straws right now.

Straw Sleevesis a U.S. company that manufacturers cute little cloth bags to store reusable straws for easy accessibility when youre out for dinner or drinks. It also has an activeInstagram accountwith some great content, including facts about plastic pollution and photos of abandoned straws in beautiful natural settings, which is enough to inspire anyone to change their habits!

Where to find reusable straws:

Glass strawsGlass Dharmamakes borosilicate glass straws that come in a variety of lengths and diameters.
Strawsomealso sells handmade glass straws, made in USA with lifetime guarantee and free US/Canada shipping. They come in different colors, shapes, diameters, and lengths.

Metal strawsMulled Mindsells made-in-USA stainless straws that are shipped in recycled and reused materials.
Sets of 4 stainless steel straws with a cleaning brushsold by Life Without Plastic.

Bamboo straws These 10bamboo strawsare entirely unprocessed; theyre just dried hollow stalks that can be washed, air-dried, and used for many years.
Bambu Home sellsslightly shorter straws, at 8.5 long. They are made from organic bamboo, harvested from wild groves, rather than plantations, and are finished with an organic flax seed oil.

Paper straws Paper straws still generate some waste, so theyre not as good as reusable options, but a huge improvement over plastic. You can order fromAardvark Straws(made in USA).

Straw straws Straws that are made from straw? Its the most logical material out there. Thiscompanyhas an online store set to open in October 2016, so youll be able to place orders shortly.

Pasta straws Its the ultimate zero waste solution and kids will love it. Look forbucatini or perciatelli, long spaghetti-like, tube-shaped noodles with holes in the middle, through which its possible to sip liquids. Then you can cook your straws and eat them for dinner.

Get ready to watch the STRAWS documentary film, currently undergoing production. It will delve deep into the disturbing world of plastic straw pollution, one of the top five marine polluters. Filming is supposed to be done by autumn 2016. Learn morehere.

Written by Katherine Martinko.This post originally appeared onTreeHugger.

Photo Credit: One Less Straw Campaign/Facebook

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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How to Banish Plastic Straws From Your Life Forever

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The Perfect Horse – Elizabeth Letts

by Myrna Posted on September 5, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Perfect Horse

The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis

Elizabeth Letts

Genre: Nature

Price: $14.99

Publish Date: August 23, 2016

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of The Eighty-Dollar Champion, the remarkable story of the heroic rescue of priceless horses in the closing days of World War II   In the chaotic last days of the war a small troop of battle-weary American soldiers captures a German spy and makes an astonishing find—his briefcase is empty but for photos of beautiful white horses that have been stolen and kept on a secret farm behind enemy lines. Hitler has stockpiled the world’s finest purebreds in order to breed the perfect military machine—an equine master race. But with the starving Russian army closing in, the animals are in imminent danger of being slaughtered for food.   With only hours to spare, one of the Army’s last great cavalrymen, American colonel Hank Reed, makes a bold decision—with General George Patton’s blessing—to mount a covert rescue operation. Racing against time, Reed’s small but determined force of soldiers, aided by several turncoat Germans, steals across enemy lines in a last-ditch effort to save the horses.   Pulling together this multistranded story, Elizabeth Letts introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters: Alois Podhajsky, director of the famed Spanish Riding School of Vienna, a former Olympic medalist who is forced to flee the bomb-ravaged Austrian capital with his entire stable in tow; Gustav Rau, Hitler’s imperious chief of horse breeding, a proponent of eugenics who dreams of genetically engineering the perfect warhorse for Germany; and Tom Stewart, a senator’s son who makes a daring moonlight ride on a white stallion to secure the farm’s surrender.   A compelling account for animal lovers and World War II buffs alike, The Perfect Horse tells for the first time the full story of these events. Elizabeth Letts’s exhilarating tale of behind-enemy-lines adventure, courage, and sacrifice brings to life one of the most inspiring chapters in the annals of human valor. Praise for The Perfect Horse   “Letts, a lifelong equestrienne, eloquently brings together the many facets of this unlikely, poignant story underscoring the love and respect of man for horses. . . . The author’s elegant narrative conveys how the love for these amazing creatures transcends national animosities.” — Kirkus Reviews From the Hardcover edition.

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The Perfect Horse – Elizabeth Letts

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FX Series "Atlanta" Is Like the Black "Master of None"

by PorterBignold Posted on September 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Triple threat Donald Glover—writer, actor, and rapper—can now tuck another feather into his cap, as showrunner of Atlanta, a worthy new series premiering September 6 on FX. The 32-year-old Glover, known for his portrayal of the lovable Troy on Community, opted to leave that series after five seasons to pursue a show of his own. With Atlanta, he looked to his own roots on the periphery of the Atlanta drug scene who attended an elite northeastern college to bring a bit of realism to a fictional story.

Glover, a native of Stone Mountain, Georgia, and a graduate of NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, plays Earn (Ernest), a Princeton dropout and a young dad who is “technically homeless” but at the moment is living with Vanessa (Zazie Beets), his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his daughter. Earn’s job selling travel deals at the airport only pays him on commission, which means his finances are constantly in disarray—at times he gets so desperate he has to borrow $20 just to take Van, whom he’s struggling to win back, to dinner. Discouraged and at his wit’s end, Earn approaches his rapper cousin Alfred (a.k.a. Paper Boi, played by Brian Tyree Henry) whose career is beginning to take off locally, and asks if he can be Alfred’s manager.

As is the case with most dramedies, many of the jokes here aren’t laugh-out-loud funny, even though Glover, during a previous three-year stint as a writer for 30 Rock, gave us many of Tracy Morgan’s absurd lines. Rather, Atlanta has a similar feel to Aziz Ansari’s Netflix hit Master of None. It provides an introspective look into the lives of millennial men navigating work, romance, and their own shortcomings as they become painfully aware of the people they’ve grown up to be.

Glover largely trades in his sillier comedic sensibilities for a more nuanced approach, while bringing much of the same charming awkwardness to Earn that he brought to Troy on Community. As a writer, Glover saves his most humorous lines for Darius (Keith Stanfield), Paper Boi’s hilariously enigmatic right-hand man.

What makes Atlanta particularly unique in the world of half-hour comedies is that fact that all its writers are black, and many are rookies in the writers’ room. “I wanted to show white people, you don’t know everything about black culture,” Glover told Vulture last month. The premise of exploring race in a comedic format is compelling enough, but Atlanta also manages to tackle gun violence, mass incarceration, sexual identity, and authoritarian abuse in the Black community (all within the first four episodes). Glover relies on humor, not preaching, to get his serious points across.

In the debut episode, Earn runs into a (presumably) old friend, a white man around his age. The friend uses the N-word while telling Earn a story about a party he’d attended, but he doesn’t use it when he tells the story to Paper Boi—a discrepancy highlighting flawed notions of whether, when, and with whom it’s appropriate for a white person to use the word.

In another episode, Paper Boi, now a rising star, spots a child playing outside with a toy gun pretending to shoot another child and proclaiming he’s “just like Paper Boi.” The rapper’s efforts to set the kid straight are lost on the child, thwarted by Paper Bio’s public persona. Elsewhere, as Earn awaits bond after being on a weapons charge after pulling a gun from his cousin’s glove compartment, another man in the jail’s holding area (where most are black) runs into his ex, a trans woman, who’s also awaiting bond. In this uncomfortable scene, the other men ridicule the man as a “faggot.” Glover then breaks the tension with humor: “Sexuality is a spectrum,” he stage-whispers to the distraught guy. “You can really do whatever you want.”

But then our attention is then drawn to a mentally unstable man clad in a hospital gown. Earn asks a guard why the man is even there—”He looks like he needs help”—and is told to shut up. Then, after the unhinged man spits some toilet water he’s been drinking on a guard, he is repaid with a beatdown.

Social issues aside, the show gives a dreamlike window into Earn’s personal growth (or lack thereof) and his life, which seems to consist of one obstacle after another. “I just keep losing,” Earn tells a wise stranger on a city bus. Yet if Atlanta maintains its careful balance of laughs and gritty reality, the show could well prove to be a winner.

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FX Series "Atlanta" Is Like the Black "Master of None"

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Here’s the Problem With California’s Groundbreaking Sex Ed Law

by KayleigXuo Posted on September 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Five years ago, budget cutbacks in the Fresno Unified School District put an end to “Sociology for Living,” a half-year course for ninth graders—and the only mandatory class taught in the 74,000-student district that involved sex education. Fresno has some of California’s highest rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia, plus the sixth-highest teen birth rate in the state. Yet school officials dismantled the curriculum, according to an investigation by the Fresno Bee, passing off lessons from the class, including HIV prevention, to other teachers. They explained the cut as a way for students to fit more AP classes and electives into their schedules.

A local teen pregnancy prevention group, Fresno Barrios Unidos, soon began a four-year effort to institute comprehensive sex education, according to executive director Socorro Santillan. They met with school board officials and trained youth to advocate comprehensive sex education in their high schools. But only after California passed the Healthy Youth Act in October 2015, making sex education mandatory in all districts, were they able to reach an agreement with the district. Classroom teachers would cover basic lessons like goal setting and life planning, while Fresno Barrios Unidos volunteers would teach subjects that were, Santillan says, “a little more touchy,” like STDs and birth control.

When the Healthy Youth Act passed last fall, California joined 23 other states in requiring that all schools teach teenagers about sex. But California’s law goes further, mandating that comprehensive lessons start in middle school and include information on abortion, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. It’s also the only state to require sex education be medically accurate, age-appropriate, and culturally inclusive, without promoting religion. Sharla Smith, who has overseen HIV and sex education for the California Department of Education since 2005, calls the new law “the most robust sex education law in the country.” Most lessons will start this school year.

There’s just one problem: The state has little way to ensure school districts teach to these new standards. While Smith heads a team that keeps in touch with counties and districts, the state stopped auditing districts for compliance about four years ago because of dwindling funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We’re trying to do the best we can by hook or by crook,” Smith said. “I literally just do not have the money.”

“How will we know that everyone is actually being taught this? Because the law has gotten a lot of publicity,” said Christopher Pepper, who oversees San Francisco Unified’s sex education program. “I’m hoping that leads to greater compliance.”

While districts like San Francisco and Los Angeles Unified have long taught comprehensive sex education and are simply tweaking parts of their curriculum or adapting existing lessons for middle school use, it’s a different story in poor, rural areas like the Central Valley, according to Phyllida Burlingame, who works on the issue for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Northern California office. With fewer resources and a more conservative culture, some of those districts have a history of ignoring even the state’s old, looser requirements. That was the case in Clovis Unified School District, which the ACLU sued in 2012 for inadequate sex education—including using a textbook that lacked a single mention of condoms. (A judge ruled against the district last year.) “School district administrators feel that this is a complicated and challenging subject and parents in their community may not support it,” Burlingame said. “They tend to self-censor what they teach.”

Since 2003, the state has told schools that if they chose to teach sex education, they had to make sure lessons were comprehensive rather than focused on abstinence until marriage. Yet a 2011 survey from researchers at the University of California-San Francisco found that many school districts were not complying with the law. Forty-two percent did not teach about FDA-approved contraception methods in middle and high school, and only 25 percent mentioned emergency contraception. Sixteen percent told their students that condoms “are not an effective means” of protecting against pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease—an inaccurate statement, the study noted.

“California’s state financial crisis has eroded much of its network of valuable preventative health programs for young people, making schools one of the last strongholds for providing adolescents with comprehensive sex education,” the authors wrote. “Policies set at the district level may not correspond to the actual instruction taking place.”

After the financial crash, many schools also stopped teaching health classes or changed them from a graduation requirement to an elective, Smith says, and lessons on HIV and STD prevention were incorporated into science or English classes instead. Schools that dropped their health programs will not be subject to a second law, also passed last year, requiring health curricula to include information on affirmative consent—the “yes means yes” standard for consent on California college campuses.

Smith is optimistic, though, that schools will continue to react to rising STD rates among teenagers by implementing the comprehensive lessons required under the new law. “Schools have really been clamoring to teach more sex education, saying we need to do this for our students’ health,” she said.

Still, in the absence of state oversight, the task of ensuring that school districts are talking to kids about safe sex will fall to local groups like Fresno Barrios Unidos. And as the schools get back into gear for the fall and begin implement their lessons, the ACLU will be watching and lending support, Burlingame says: “Districts are aware of this new law and understand they should be implementing it. We’re counting on them to do so.”

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Here’s the Problem With California’s Groundbreaking Sex Ed Law

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In a Major Reversal, Labor Board Says Graduate Student Workers at Private Colleges Can Unionize

by AustinTLSM Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Reversing a landmark ruling from the George W. Bush era, the National Labor Relations Board ruled today that graduate students who work as teaching and research assistants at private universities have the right to form labor unions.

“This is a historic moment,” said Julie Kushner, director of the northeast chapter of the United Auto Workers, which challenged the Bush-era NLRB ruling on behalf of graduate-student workers at Columbia University. “There are tens of thousands of workers at private universities across the United States that will reap the benefits of unionization.”

In 2004, the NLRB barred grad students at Brown University from engaging collective bargaining, contending that their status as students constrained their right to unionize. Yet in a 3-1 vote along partisan lines today, the Democratic-controlled NLRB reversed the prior board’s decision, arguing that graduate workers can be both students and workers at the same time. The students’ right to organize “is not foreclosed by the existence of some other, additional relationship,” the decision says.

Columbia grad students cheered the decision. “When I am working on my own research I clearly am a student,” said Paul Katz, a fourth-year PhD. student in Latin American history, “but when I am at the front of the room teaching 15 students about, say, the history of ancient Greece, there is no doubt in my mind that I am a worker, doing work that makes Columbia University great.”

Columbia University released a statement objecting with the ruling. “Columbia—along with many of our peer institutions—disagrees with this outcome because we believe the academic relationship students have with faculty members and departments as part of their studies is not the same as between employer and employee,” the statement said. “First and foremost, students serving as research or teaching assistants come to Columbia to gain knowledge and expertise, and we believe there are legitimate concerns about the impact of involving a non-academic third-party in this scholarly training.”

Columbia and other Ivy League universities have long argued that granting collective bargaining rights to graduate students could impinge on academic freedom by, for example, allowing unions to negotiate over whether tests should consist of multiple choice questions or essays. But the American Association of University Professors disagreed, telling the NLRB that giving unionization rights to grad workers would actually improve academic freedom by making it legally protected in labor contracts.

Today’s decision applies only to private universities. Grad students at public universities are already considered employees by many states. The United Auto Workers, for example, represents student workers at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Washington, the University of California, and California State University. It also represents grad workers New York University, which is private, but in 2002 voluntarily recognized a UAW union.

Columbia graduate students point to NYU as evidence that collective bargaining makes a difference. The NYU contract eliminated healthcare premiums and increased graduate student stipends from $12,500 to $22,000 a year—still a pittance, given the cost of living in New York and the amount of time many grad students spend teaching classes and grading papers.

The Columbia students also aim to push for a grievance procedure for sexual harassment and more certainty about pay and benefits. Similar unionization efforts are underway at Harvard and New York’s New School.

“I don’t think anybody expects unions to figure out what grade a student gets in a class,” says Eric Foner, a Columbia history professor who supports the union efforts, “but when it comes to stipends or healthcare or housing, it is clear that those are labor issues.”

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In a Major Reversal, Labor Board Says Graduate Student Workers at Private Colleges Can Unionize

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This List Shows You How Divided America’s Schools Are

by IolaHopkins Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the wealthy West Jefferson Hills School District in western Pennsylvania, a new high school with an eight-lane swimming pool and terrazzo flooring was recently approved for construction. Meanwhile, in neighboring Clairton, where the district’s poverty rate is 48 percent, officials wrestled with whether to close schools earlier this year.

That striking disparity is just one of many in a new report that maps the country’s 33,500 school district borders and highlights places where high-poverty districts bump up against wealthy neighbors. The report, put out by the nonprofit EdBuild, sheds light on how these well-established boundaries create “barriers to progress that segregate children” and even worse inequities in the public education system. It also notes that existing school finance system, in which districts rely heavily on property taxes as a source of local funding for schools, creates an incentive for wealthier families to move across district lines to more well-resourced areas.

Between 1990 and 2010, income-based segregation among American school districts grew, according to Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis. Such disparities among districts result in unequal access to resources, such as underqualified teachers and subpar facilities, and could lead to gaps in academic achievement. Another recent Stanford study found that children in the wealthiest school districts performed, on average, four grade levels above children in the poorest school districts. In May, on the anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Government Accountability Office found that the share of schools with a high concentration of poor, black, and Hispanic students increased from 9 to 16 percent between 2000 and 2014.

“We’ve created and maintained a system of schools segregated by class and bolstered by arbitrary borders that, in effect, serve as the new status quo for separate but unequal…” conclude the authors of the EdBuild report. “Increasingly, the story of American school districts is a tale of two cities, one well-off and one poor—one with the funds necessary to provide its children ample educational opportunities and one without adequate resources to help its children catch up.”

Here’s a look at the biggest disparities in poverty between neighboring districts:

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This List Shows You How Divided America’s Schools Are

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Enjoy it while you can: Climate change is already hitting the Olympics hard

by Anh40L3815000 Posted on August 8, 2016

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Enjoy it while you can: Climate change is already hitting the Olympics hard

By on Aug 8, 2016Share

Sewage water isn’t the only thing competitors may be worrying about at the Rio Olympics: Hot temperatures and air pollution are already interfering with athletic performance. In a preliminary racewalking competition before the games began, 11 out of 18 competitors suffered from heat-related injuries. One athlete even passed out.

But this Olympics might be the best it gets. According to a report from Brazil’s Climate Observatory, as climate records keep falling, outdoor sports records could become much harder to break.

Already, marathon times are 2 minutes slower on average for every 10 degree Fahrenheit that temperature rises. In Rio, the problems are even more pronounced, because poor air quality from vehicle congestion makes high-performance outdoor sports difficult — even deadly. Each year, thousands of Rio’s citizens die from complications of air pollution, which is tied to lung cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and asthma.

“On hot days in polluted areas, it is healthier to go out and have a beer (in the shade) than to practice sport outdoors,” said Luzimar Teixeira, professor at the School of physical education at the University of São Paulo.

The report notes that competitors may be able to mitigate the effects of climate change through technological advances like high-tech equipment and clothing, but those advances are not likely to be available to athletes from less wealthy nations.

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Enjoy it while you can: Climate change is already hitting the Olympics hard

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The Trump Files: Watch Donald Not Be Able to Multiply 17 By 6

by AlbertiLafferty Posted on June 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Until the election, we’re bringing you “The Trump Files,” a daily dose of telling episodes, strange-but-true stories, or curious scenes from the life of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.

Donald Trump was a frequent and favorite guest on Howard Stern’s radio show, and one day in 2006 he brought his children Ivanka and Donald Jr., along for an episode. At one point during the nearly hour-long appearance, the Trump kids explained how they got into the famed Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, their dad’s alma mater, on their own merits. The pair talked up their high SAT scores and told Stern that no one, even parents of friends who allegedly donated large amounts to Wharton, could buy their way into the school.

Then Stern gave the Trumps a pop quiz in simple math. The kids struggled to get the answer right—and Trump himself couldn’t do the basic calculation. But, in what might have been a telling moment, the elder Trump insisted that his answer was correct.

Read the rest of “The Trump Files”:

Trump Files #1: The Time Andrew Dice Clay Thanked Donald for the Hookers
Trump Files #2: When Donald Tried to Stop Charlie Sheen’s Marriage to Brooke Mueller
Trump Files #3: The Brief Life of the “Trump Chateau for the Indigent”
Trump Files #4: Donald Thinks Asbestos Fears Are a Mob Conspiracy
Trump Files #5: Donald’s Nuclear Negotiating Fantasy
Trump Files #6: Donald Wants a Powerball for Spies
Trump Files #7: Donald Gets An Allowance
Trump Files #8: The Time He Went Bananas on a Water Cooler
Trump Files #9: The Great Geico Boycott
Trump Files #10: Donald Trump, Tax-Hike Crusader
Trump Files #11: Watch Donald Trump Say He Would Have Done Better as a Black Man

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The Trump Files: Watch Donald Not Be Able to Multiply 17 By 6

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One Crazy Fact That Science Says Could Decide Game 7 of the NBA Finals

by CurtH47vgljcd Posted on June 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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When the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers tip off Sunday night for Game 7 of the NBA Finals, don’t be dismayed if your team is slightly behind at half time. In fact, it might be a good thing.

That’s the surprising finding of a study that Jonah Berger—a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania—published several years ago. Along with his colleague Devin Pope, Berger found that NBA teams that were losing by just one point at the end of the second quarter were more likely to win than teams leading by a point. Why? On this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Berger tells host Indre Viskontas that it all comes down to motivation. “They say, ‘I’m almost there, I’m close to winning, but I’m not there yet,” says Berger. “It encourages them to work harder.”

It’s a phenomenon that goes beyond basketball and that, according to Berger, has serious real-world implication. As he and Pope wrote in the New York Times in 2009:

Understanding what motivates employees, researchers and, yes, sports teams, has important implications. Encouraging people to see themselves as slightly behind others should increase motivation. Companies competing to win contracts or research prizes would be wise to focus employees on ways their competitors are a little ahead.

Berger is known for his 2013 bestseller Contagious: Why Things Catch On, where he unpacks the social science behind why word-of-mouth publicity is better than any ad and why anti-drug commercials could actually lead to an increase in drug use. His latest book is Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior. In it, Berger writes about the power of influence and why we conform in some situations and rebel in others. According to Berger, your attraction to a certain sports car, designer handbag, catchy pop song, or good-looking person has less to do with your actual preferences than you might think. “It also depends on social dynamics and the fact that we tend to follow others,” Berger says.

What becomes popular is seldom the just result of objective measures of quality. Berger points out that before Elvis Presley was “The King,” he was told he couldn’t sing. People told Walt Disney he wasn’t creative. And publishers repeatedly turned down J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter before Bloomsbury picked it up in 1997. (The series made history when the seventh book sold 8.3 million copies in the first 24 hours after it was released.)

Social influence helps us form likes and dislikes, and it also fires up our competitive edge. For example, while studies show that simply educating residents on how to save energy isn’t particularly effective, hinting that they’re not “keeping up with the Joneses” can have a much bigger impact. When software company Opower informed residents on their bill that some of their neighbors were being more energy efficient than they were, it led to decreases in consumption.

So as you crowd around the television, clenching your fists during Game 7 this weekend, it’s worth remembering that the same competitive spirt driving Steph Curry and LeBron James can help you save a few bucks on your electric bill.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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One Crazy Fact That Science Says Could Decide Game 7 of the NBA Finals

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5 Times Rubio Slammed Trump—Before Promising to Vote for Him

by NicoleXZKZ Posted on May 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Marco Rubio will vote for Donald Trump this November. He’s not yet ready to say the words “I will vote for Donald Trump,” but based on this tweet, a quick process of elimination makes his intentions clear.

The senator from Florida has come a long way since this past winter, when he attacked Trump with increasing savagery. In the final weeks of his presidential campaign, Rubio swung hard at the Republican front-runner in an attempt to win his home state. He failed, and dropped out the night he lost the Florida primary, but not before calling Trump a whole lot of names.

Here’s a sampling of the epithets and insults Rubio slung just a few short months ago at the man he is now supporting for president:

February 26: Rubio called Trump a “con artist who is telling people one thing but has spent 40 years sticking it to working Americans and now claims to be their champion.”

February 26: Rubio questioned Trump’s most basic qualifications, including his ability to spell words. “How does this guy—not one tweet, but three tweets—misspell words so badly?” he asked. “And I only come to two conclusions. No. 1, that’s how they spell those words at the Wharton School of Business, where he went, and No. 2, just like Trump Tower, he must have hired a foreign worker to do his own tweets.” Zing!

February 27: He said Trump is a “a lunatic trying to get ahold of nuclear weapons in America.”

February 29: He implied Trump has a small penis. “He’s like 6’2″, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5’2″,” Rubio said. “Have you seen his hands? They’re like this. And you know what they say about men with small hands?” Rubio paused, then added, “You can’t trust them!”

March 12: He went after Trump for encouraging violence at his rallies, accusing him of “feeding into language that basically justifies assaulting people who disagree with you.” The same day, he called Trump “rude and obnoxious and offensive—deliberately offensive for the purposes of driving media narrative.”

Now Rubio will be voting for Trump. What happened to the man who said, “Friends do not let friends vote for con artists”?

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5 Times Rubio Slammed Trump—Before Promising to Vote for Him

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