Extra Credit: Our pick of stories from around the web that bridge the gap between news and scholarship. Brought to you each Tuesday from the editors of JSTOR Daily.
In the front-row seats for evolution (Quanta Magazine)
by Emily Singer
Imagine watching the differentiation of species that Darwin documented emerging in real time. That’s what Rosemary and Peter Grant have been doing since 1973, carefully recording changes in birds on a tiny island in the Galapagos where the climate changes drastically from year to year.
Does code-switching make you smarter? (Aeon)
by Michael Erard
We’ve all seen the stories and ads suggesting that learning French or Chinese will make your brain work better. If there’s a cognitive advantage to being bilingual, some studies suggest the same benefit results from speaking two dialects, like Standard American English and African-American Vernacular English.
Why does Clinton look so mad? (The New York Times)
By Lisa Feldman Barrett
Does Hillary Clinton seem angry to you? As a female candidate, she has had to deal with a particularly tricky issue when it comes to her expressions. Research shows that we tend to interpret facial expressions very differently depending on whether we identify someone as male or female.
The radical demands of curbing climate change (The New Republic)
by Bill McKibben
How many new coal mines and oil wells can we add to the world if we went to hit the target of keeping global warming under 2 degrees Celsius? A new study offers a worrisome answer: none.
What does stop-and-frisk do? (The Washington Post)
by Max Ehrenfreund
Donald Trump has been promoting the idea that stop-and-frisk policing “worked incredibly well” to control crime in New York City. Legal scholars have found that the technique can have some value in reducing crime when it’s deployed surgically, but, as a blanket policy, it’s not only ineffective but also damaging.
Have you seen a story online that does a good job of bridging the gap between the news and scholarship? Or something that seems particularly well-researched? Let us know and we may include it in next week’s roundup. Email us at jstordaily_submissions (at) jstor (dot) org.
