VICE: The Scariest Part About America’s LGBTQ Suicide Epidemic Is What We Don’t Know About It

Results, predictably, were grim. In almost every facet of their personal health, LGB students fare worse than their peers. 23 percent reported experiencing sexual dating violence, and 18 percent reported experiencing physical dating violence, compared with 9 percent and 8 percent of heterosexual students, respectively. More than 10 percent said they've had to miss school at least once during the past month out of concern for their safety.

Perhaps most shocking was the data pertaining to suicide: Some 29.4 percent of LGB students tried to kill themselves in 2015, almost five times as many as straight students. And 42.8 percent experienced some form of suicidal ideation. [...]

While the survey's results were revelatory to some, and merely further evidence of conclusions already known to others, it provokes a more alarming series of questions about the ways in which we still fail to fully comprehend the scope of LGBTQ health risks in America. [...]

The limited nature of such data complicates the work of officials and researchers who deal in public health, and for whom LGBTQ suicides demand an informed policy response. Haas in particular coauthored a 2011 study in the Journal of Homosexuality which found that LGBTQ Americans showed a lifetime propensity for anxiety, mood swings and mental health disorders well beyond adolescence. But without proper data collection on the part of health agencies, it's hard to understand suicide as a lifelong problem for marginalized communities, or how America's changing attitudes towards homosexuality may be trickling down to the crucible of the schoolyard.

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Time: The Other Side: Life as a Syrian Refugee in Germany

As both photographer and subject, Kasem traveled as a refugee from his home in Damascus to Europe in the summer of 2015. He arrived in Germany after going overland to Turkey and crossing to Greece by boat. Once in Bavaria, in southern Germany, he was assigned to the refugee camp at the Balthasar-Neumann-Kaserne military base in Würzburg, where most of the pictures from this series were taken.

The photo diary – which he calls A Small Forest on the Other Side – helped Kasem come to terms with the reality of his new life in Europe.

An estimated 11 million Syrians have fled their homes since the outbreak of civil war in March 2011. The majority have sought refuge in neighboring countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt, while 6.6 million are displaced within Syria itself, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Just over one million have requested asylum within Europe. Germany, with more than 300,000 cumulated applications, and Sweden, with 100,000, are the E.U.’s top receiving countries. [...]

“You change your country, you go through a weird journey and then you are stuck in a weird place,” says Kasem. “You cannot really interact with the German people. It’s not closed, you can go out, but you feel somehow that you’re treated like a different thing. But after you are out of the camp, it’s normal. Those feelings start to fade away.”

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IFLScience: Asteroid Mining Company Reveals New Mission To Land On An Asteroid By 2020

Asteroid mining is one of those things that sounds good in principle, but we’re not sure how good it’ll be in practice. However, one company in the US is making headway with its own plans to make the idea a reality, and they’ve recently announced a new mission.

The company is Deep Space Industries (DSI), based in California. Earlier this year, we brought you the news they wanted to launch a demonstration spacecraft, called Prospector-X, at some point in 2017. Now, they’ve revealed a new mission to launch by 2020 that will visit an asteroid, called Prospector-1.

“During the next decade, we will begin the harvest of space resources from asteroids,” said Daniel Faber, CEO of DSI, in a statement. “We are changing the paradigm of business operations in space, from one where our customers carry everything with them, to one in which the supplies they need are waiting for them when they get there.”

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Quartz: We sold feminism to the masses, and now it means nothing

Bitch magazine cofounder Andi Zeisler describes this phenomenon as “marketplace feminism.” “Marketplace feminism is in many ways about just branding feminism as an identity that everyone can and should consume,” she writes in her new book We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. Tarnished by conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s who equated feminism with misandry and bra-burning, the movement has undergone an ideological shift to make it more palatable to the mainstream. This brand of feminism lite has been called a variety of things over the years, from “pop feminism” to “white feminism,” to my personal favorite (and coinage), “cupcake feminism.” Because the ideal feminist is the image of a woman double-fisting cupcakes. “Riots not diets!” [...]

Feminism in this capacity has come to mean everything, and, consequently, nothing. Getting rid of the word “feminist” itself is case in point. Last month, Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams was celebrated by the media for telling Entertainment Weekly that “we should stop calling feminists ‘feminists’ and just start calling people who aren’t feminist ‘sexist’—and then everyone else is just a human.” Everybody wins, right? “I sometimes really worry about speaking up about feminist subjects out of fear of being bashed by women on social media,” she continued. [...]

“The problem is—the problem has always been—that feminism is not fun,” Zeisler declares. “It’s not supposed to be fun. It’s complex and hard and it pisses people off. It’s serious because it is about people demanding that their humanity be recognized as valuable. The root issues that feminism confronts—wage inequality, gendered divisions of labor, institutional racism and sexism, structural violence and, of course, bodily autonomy—are deeply unsexy.”

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Al Jazeera: Child labour in Mexico

"Education for everyone" has been a popular slogan since the Mexican revolution over 100 years ago.

But according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, eight out of 100 Mexican children who enroll in elementary school, do not show up for classes.

While barely 50 complete middle school, 20 graduate from high school, 13 get a bachelor's degree, and only two become graduate students.

A study released by UNESCO last year says the children who don't attend school are mostly working. The report reveals that at least 21 percent of all Mexican youth between the ages of seven and 14 drop out of school - that's around 651,000 children. That means Mexico has one of the largest child labor forces in Latin America, second only to Colombia. [...]

One of the ways Mexico has tried to keep children in school is through the so-called Prospera programme. It was launched in 1997 and offers what NGOs call "conditional cash transfers".

The payments are an incentive for parents to keep their children in school and, in exchange, the families have to meet certain requirements and attend workshops including sex education and family planning.

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IFLScience: Divorce Rates Are Highest After Family Vacations

Overall, the months of March and August consistently saw the highest divorce rates, leading the researchers to suggest that this could be a delayed result of Christmas holidays and summer vacations – times when couples try to "fix" their relationships by taking holidays. They noted it takes two to three months to find attorneys, file the paperwork, arrange finances, and even to mount the courage.

The study by associate professor Julie Brines and doctoral candidate Brian Serafini looked at monthly divorce rates from different counties in Washington. Their findings were recently presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Seattle. [...]

n an attempt to explain this trend, Professor Brines said: "People tend to face the holidays with rising expectations, despite what disappointments they might have had in years past.

"They represent periods in the year when there's the anticipation or the opportunity for a new beginning, a new start, something different, a transition into a new period of life," she added. "It's like an optimism cycle, in a sense. They're very symbolically charged moments in time for the culture."

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Business Insider: The popularity of tiny houses is beginning to have a big impact on the real estate market

Tiny houses are exactly as they’re described: small homes that are often built on a trailer to be portable. The maximum square footage for tiny living varies by the company or individual, but these small dwellings are typically under 500 to 700 square feet. Tiny homes are often designed to meet function first – whether it's a loft bed or composting toilet – and can cost less than $10,000 and up to $100,000, depending on the size, style and functionality of the space.

Interest in tiny homes gained momentum during the recession that began in 2007, as people sought a simpler, less expensive way to live. And as the U.S. pulled itself out of economic crisis, the desire for simple living didn’t wane. [...]

It’s not just a matter of being able to downsize to a trailer’s worth of belongings. Living in such a small space requires a commitment to simplifying your entire lifestyle. Otherwise, Mitchell says you can find yourself going back to a traditional home all too quickly.

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Associated Press: Analysis: Turkey's potentially momentous shift on Assad

The statement Saturday by Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim was nuanced: On one hand, "Assad does not appear to be someone who can bring (Syrians) together" — but on the other, "there may be talks (with Assad) for the transition."

Until now, Syria's neighbor to the north was determined to see him out of power — providing refuge and supply lines for a variety of Syrian rebel groups and turning something of a blind eye to the use of its territory by Islamic State jihadis waging their own fight with Assad as well.

Turkey had several reasons for offering critical support to the rebellion. Though not an Arab state, Turkey is predominantly Sunni, like most of the rebels, and it naturally chafes at the domination of Syria by Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam and part of a regional axis that includes Lebanon's Hezbollah group and Iran. The government of President Recep Teyyip Erdogan is Islamist-rooted while Assad is avowedly secularist. And Turkey is a NATO member which until now has supported the West's efforts to end the repressive authoritarian system in Damascus. [...]

The Syrian Kurds have emerged as the main force fighting the Islamic State group, affording them a great deal of autonomy in their enclave in the north of the country, bordering Turkey. The strengthening of the Syrian Kurds has in turn emboldened Turkey's own minority Kurds; that's a worrying development for Ankara, which has long tried to keep down Kurdish power and ambitions. [...]

Ayham Kamel, a Middle East analyst with the Eurasia Group consultancy, said Turkey's position on Assad is becoming significantly more flexible as Russia plays a more active role, and that the Syrian government's recent and unprecedented bombing of U.S.-backed Kurdish positions sought to show Ankara that Assad is the only serious partner who can guarantee that Syria's Kurds remain contained.

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The Atlantic: Best Friends Build Shared Memory Networks

In science, this is known as a transactive memory system. Transactive memory systems (TMS) are repositories of knowledge that are shared between two or more people. A shared memory of events, like with me and my friends, above, can be part of it, but it’s also a way of calling up facts that other people know. If you say “Oh, what’s the movie that starts with that whistling cartoon rooster?” and I say “Robin Hood,” that’s transactive memory. You have access to my knowledge, and vice versa. But, it only works if we trust each other that we both know what we’re talking about, and that we know we can call on each other for the knowledge if we need it.

These systems have so far been studied in romantic relationships and work groups (coworkers, classmates, groups slapped together in the lab). A new paper published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships looks at transactive memory in the context of best friendships. The researchers asked people to answer questions about their relationship with their best friend—how satisfied and committed they were to the friendship, how long they’d been friends, things like that, as well as questions designed to measure the strength of their TMS, like “I trust that my best friend has credible knowledge.” [...]

There are two different structures of a TMS—differentiated and integrated. In an integrated TMS, friends share similar knowledge and are able to reinforce or remind each other of what they know. In a differentiated TMS, they have knowledge of different things, and can consult each other like encyclopedias. The researchers found that in mixed-gender best friendships, TMSs were more likely to be differentiated, while in same-gender best friendships, they were more likely to be integrated. But regardless of the gender makeup, the systems were equally strong.

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Quartz: Denmark has figured out how to teach kids empathy and make them happier adults

A University of Michigan study of nearly 14,000 college students found that students today have about 40% less empathy than college kids had in the 1980s and 1990s. Michele Borba, an educational psychologist and author of Unselfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our-All-About-Me World, argues that that the rise of narcissism and loss of empathy are key reasons for why nearly a third of college kids are depressed and mental health problems among kids are on the rise.

Denmark, the land of the happiest people in the world (pdf), takes empathy seriously, with an hour of empathy-building each week a required part the national curriculum for all kids aged 6 to 16. [...]

Measuring its effectiveness is difficult. Danes are famously among the happiest people in the world due to everything from high levels of income equality and the generosity of its citizens to each other, though some wonder whether this is because they have very low expectations for happiness. The country’s remarkable social safety net means there are fewer reasons for people to feel unhappy, since they know they have good health care, education, and elder care. Even so, one recent study showed 38% of Danish women and 32% of Danish men received treatment for a mental disorder at some point during their life, higher than global averages and certainly high for such purportedly happy people.

Happiness is a complex concept, so perhaps Klassen Tid‘s “success” is simply recognizing that empathy is a skill and not an inherent trait. Kids need to practice it the same way they work at math or soccer.

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