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Understandable

A vegan woman has filed a suit against her neighbors in the Australian supreme court after complaining about the smell of meat and fish emanating from their barbecues.

Study Performed in Our Basement

Patience is a virtue, but it's becoming an exceedingly rare quality in modern society. According to a new survey of 2,000 British adults, all of the luxuries of modern life have made most people incredibly impatient – across pretty much every aspect of their lives. Three quarters of those surveyed said they believe the dominance of digital technology, such as smartphones and on-demand TVs, are to blame for this ever growing lack of patience.

Great, Just Freakin' Great

Pope Francis unexpectedly named 13 new cardinals on Sunday, choices that have again revealed his wish for the Church to go out to the peripheries and the developing world.

But they also reveal Churchmen supportive of other issues close to his heart, including open migration policies, concern for the environment and populism, a diplomatic rather than realist stance toward Islam, and sympathies for those supportive of homosexual issues.

A Senior Moment

John Senior is not well known today beyond certain circles, but he enjoyed a brilliant early career in academia, writing a dissertation in the 1950s under Mark Van Doren at Columbia, landing a first teaching post at Cornell, publishing a promising first book with the university's press, and serving as editor for prominent journals.

But he was not happy. At Cornell, through reading Aquinas and Newman, he converted to Catholicism and left the Ivies to teach and work a ranch in Laramie, Wyoming.

On Malcolm Gladwell and His New Book

Nearly 20 years and millions of sales after his nonfiction debut, Mr. Gladwell is at something of a professional tipping point. He elicits from readers the kind of polarized reactions usually reserved for talk-radio hosts. To one camp, he is a master storyteller, pithily translating business concepts and behavioral science to a lay audience. To others, he is a faux intellectual, dressing up ordinary truths (such as an “Outliers” argument that success results from a combination of hard work and opportunity) as counterintuitive genius. How “Talking to Strangers” is received could cement Mr. Gladwell in one of those camps for good.

No Gay Gene . . . or Jim, John, or Fred

The authors say that the genetic similarities still cannot show whether a given individual is gay. “It's the end of the 'gay gene,'” says Eric Vilain, a geneticist at Children's National Health System in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study.

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