Quartz: “Eighth Grade” shows the difference between how the US and Europe think about teens and sex

in evaluating ratings for children, but tougher on sex and non-sexual nudity (frontal male nudity in particular). As Bramesco writes for Vox, citing the 2006 investigative documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, “Sex scenes are picked through with a fine-toothed comb, any detail—a wiping of the chin, a moan too emphatically acted, any maneuver beyond the most vanilla standards—sufficient to bump a film up to the R zone and limit its reach.” It’s hard to predict what “vanilla” will mean for the MPAA; the rules are so opaque that directors like Bo Burnham often have to guess what it is about their movie that earned them an R rating. [...]

“In general, the US does tend to rate sexuality more harshly than violence, and that is pretty much flipped everywhere else in the world,” Betsy Bozdech, the executive editor of ratings and reviews for Common Sense Media, a non-profit that rates and reviews movies to help parents make decisions about the content their kids watch, tells Quartz. For her part, Bozdech says that Common Sense Media gave Eighth Grade a 14+ rating, and that both parents and kids on their site gave the movie a 12+ rating. “I hope that parents will take their kids to see it,” she said.

For many European movie ratings agencies, including the British Board of Film Classification, scenes that depict sex are deemed more acceptable for adolescents. European attitudes hold that sexual exploration is a normal part of growing up, and that kids should be allowed to see it on screen. That’s part of a broader difference between how Americans and Europeans view sex. For example, a 2013 Pew poll found that 30% of US adults still think that sex between unmarried adults is morally unacceptable, but in Europe, only 6-13% of respondents thought it was unacceptable.

There are some questionable dynamics at stake in the MPAA’s movie ratings. For example, the Classification & Ratings Administration has been accused of being biased against depictions of women’s sexuality and queer sex, much more so than against heterosexual or male sexual pleasure. That bias becomes evident when comparing American and European ratings of movies depicting queer sex: For example, the critically-acclaimed 2013 movie Blue is the Warmest Color had lengthy scenes of lesbian sex between a teenager and her older lover. The film was rated NC-17 in the US, but in France, where the movie was filmed, it was rated acceptable for kids above the age of 12—the equivalent of the American PG-13–by the French National Center for Cinema and Animated Image (CNC). When a Catholic group tried to sue the Ministry of Culture for its rating, saying the movie should not be allowed for children below 16, the country’s highest administrative jurisdiction, the Conseil d’état, ruled in favor of the “12” rating, saying that “Although true that the sex scenes in question, although simulated, present a character of undeniable realism, they are both free of all violence, and filmed without degrading intent.”

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The Atlantic: Why Don’t More Men Take Their Wife’s Last Name?

And so it is that, even after generations of feminist progress, the expectation, at least for straight couples, has remained: Women take the man’s last name. Seventy-two percent of adults polled in a 2011 study said they believe a woman should give up her maiden name when she gets married, and half of those who responded said they believe that it should be a legal requirement, not a choice. In some states, married women could not legally vote under their maiden name until the mid-1970s. 

The opposite—a man taking his wife’s name—remains incredibly rare: In a recent study of 877 heterosexual married men, less than 3 percent took their wife’s name when they got married. When her fiancé, Avery, announced that he wanted to take her last name, Becca Lamb, a 23-year-old administrative assistant living in Washington, D.C., told me that, at first, she said no: “It shocked me. I had always expected to take my husband’s last name someday. I didn’t want to do anything too out of the norm.”

But the prospect of a married man adopting his wife’s last name hasn’t always been so startling in Western cultures. In medieval England, men who married women from wealthier, more prestigious families would sometimes take their wife’s last name, says Stephanie Coontz, a professor of marriage and family history at Evergreen State College. From the 12th to the 15th century, Coontz told me, in many “highly hierarchical societies” in England and France, “class outweighed gender.” It was common during this period for upper-class English families to take the name of their estates. If a bride-to-be was associated with a particularly flashy castle, the man, Coontz says, would want to benefit from the association. “Men dreamed of marrying a princess,” she says. “It wasn’t just women dreaming of marrying a prince.”

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Quartz: Republican opposition to climate action is cracking in districts won by Hillary Clinton

Divisions were laid bare this week when Republican representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida announced (paywall) a bill to cut the federal gasoline tax, and impose a new tax on carbon emissions. Revenue would fund low-income housing, coastal flooding relief, renewable energy and aid displaced coal workers. The “Market Choice Act,” the first GOP proposal to put a price on carbon in about a decade, won over the libertarian think tank Niskanen Center and The Nature Conservancy, but failed to impress many Republican colleagues. Just days earlier, all but seven of 236 House Republicans voted for a non-binding resolution calling a carbon tax “detrimental to American families and businesses, and is not in the best interest of the United States.”(Six voted against the resolution, and one voted present.)

Yet Curbelo is not alone in his climate efforts. Calls by pragmatic moderates and younger Republican voters to take action on climate are now too hard for some in the GOP to ignore. That pressure has been most intense on Republicans in districts won by Clinton in the 2016. Data collected by Ballotopedia show that 60% of Republican officials in congressional districts carried by Clinton have broken with party orthodoxy to join the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. Founded by Curbelo and Florida Democrat Ted Deutch, the group is dedicated to pushing economic measures to slow global warming. It claims 43 Democrats, and 43 Republicans, 15 of whom are in congressional districts won by Clinton in 2016 (see list below). [...]

For now, most GOP members remain committed the status quo. Even the majority of Republicans in the Climate Solutions Caucus, which some have called a fig-leaf for Republicans unwilling to take meaningful climate action, voted to condemn a carbon tax in last week’s House resolution. Curbelo said he had more GOP support for his bill, but declined to name specific backers. But that’s progress, Mark Reynolds of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby told The Washington Post (paywall). In previous congresses, every member of the GOP member voted to condemn a carbon tax.

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The Huffington Post: One Of My Son’s Killers Claimed 'Gay Panic' Made Him Do It. Never Again.

The shocking reality is this: The so-called “gay panic defense” is only explicitly banned in three states – California, Illinois and, as of this month, Rhode Island. In the 20 years since Matt’s death, just these three states have made the move. And, of course, Wyoming, where he was killed, is not one of them. As a further slap in the face, Wyoming, along with four other states, still doesn’t have a hate crime law of any kind in place.

But recently, two members of Congress ― Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Joe Kennedy, both of Massachusetts ― have offered a countermeasure to those attempting to use the “gay panic” excuse. Their legislation, the Gay and Trans Panic Defense Prohibition Act, that would ban the use of the defense in federal court as a legal justification for anti-LGBTQ violence. [...]

Right now in Massachusetts, a local teen is claiming “gay panic” motivated him to allegedly hold a man hostage for days, beating him while shouting anti-gay slurs. In Texas recently, a light sentence given a man prosecuted for stabbing a neighbor to death raised concerns that the “gay panic” defense had come into play. [...]

Most legal professionals actually advise against it. The American Bar Association, which in 2013 unanimously approved a resolution calling for an end to the use anti-LGBT panic defense in court, sent a letter to Markey expressing its support of the proposed legislation: “These defenses have no place in either our society or justice system and should be legislated out of existence.”

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The Washington Post: The Crane Who Fell in Love with a Human

In past years, Crowe would have taken this opportunity to inject Walnut with a syringe of crane semen. Alas, a matchmaker in Memphis — the keeper of the white-naped crane studbook, whose job is to ensure a genetically diverse captive population — has decreed that they don’t need any more babies from Walnut, at least not this year. But that doesn’t stop Crowe and Walnut from going through the motions all summer long, five days a week, sometimes several times a day. “It’s not exactly fun for me, but it keeps Walnut happy,” Crowe says.

More to the point, this strange cross-species seduction has helped ensure that white-naped cranes continue to exist, at least in captivity, says Warren Lynch, a fellow zookeeper at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. “It’s amazing, what Chris has accomplished with Walnut,” Lynch says. “This isn’t something just anyone can do.” [...]

Though it would have been better to return the birds to the wild, international tensions in 1978 made that impossible, Putnam recalls. Plus, no one knew exactly where in China they had been captured, or what the birds might have been exposed to during transit. “We didn’t want to release birds that might carry diseases and put them back into the wild flock,” Putnam says. [...]

In addition to demanding vast areas of untrammeled wilderness, these difficult birds seem almost drawn to marginal places. For instance, one of the white-naped cranes’ most important wintering grounds is the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea. There, in a strange, de facto nature preserve, white-naped cranes and their even-more endangered cousins, red-crowned cranes, root for tubers among the land mines they are too light to trigger. If tensions between the Koreas subside, however, the cranes will be in trouble. Farmers are already clamoring for access to the nutrient-rich land, and developers are planning for a reunification city and deepwater port. [...]

Standards for raising cranes have changed since then. Now, highly trained zookeepers take care of the birds, and chicks are either left with their parents or raised by foster parent cranes, if at all possible. That’s because the job of crane parent is more nuanced than we humans once realized. Cranes have elaborate body language and sophisticated hunting techniques — skills that chicks learn, at least in part, from observing their parents. In addition, if a captive-born chick is slated to be released into the wild, a fear of humans is crucial to their survival.

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BBC: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

Previous research found possible signs of intermittent liquid water flowing on the martian surface, but this is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day. [...]

The result is exciting because scientists have long searched for signs of present-day liquid water on Mars, but these have come up empty or yielded ambiguous findings. It will also interest those studying the possibilities for life beyond Earth - though it does not yet raise the stakes in the search for biology. [...]

Marsis wasn't able to determine how thick the layer of water might be, but the research team estimate that it is a minimum of one metre. [...]

"We are not closer to actually detecting life," Dr Patel told BBC News, "but what this finding does is give us the location of where to look on Mars. It is like a treasure map - except in this case, there will be lots of 'X's marking the spots."

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