Atlantic Miscellany

Miscellaneous passages from this month's Atlantic:

[A] new study published in the British Medical Journal . . . finds that early retirees have higher mortality than workers who stay on the job.

[A new] survey indicates that one in four U.S. workers reads blogs regularly while at work, losing, on average, some nine percent of the workweek. This amounts to 551,000 years of labor lost in 2005 alone.

[A] new study provides some information about the impact of parental-notification and parental-consent laws on U.S. teenagers' sexual behavior. It finds that laws in both categories correlate with a reduced rate of gonorrhea infection–a marker of high-risk sexual activity. After such laws were passed, gonorrhea rates fell by 20 percent among Hispanic teenage girls and by 12 percent among their white counterparts.

[T]he Muslim terrorist has all but disappeared [from the movies]: the film of Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears de-Islamicized the bad guys and turned them into German neo-Nazis, and Sean Penn's The Interpreter eighty-sixed the Muslims and made them terrorists from the little-known African republic of Matobo. Post-9/11 Hollywood perversely recoiled from its preferred villains of the 1980s and 1990s, and now your poor Arab thespian can't even get gainful employment as a crazed jihadi.