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.

What religious repression really looks like in the Muslim world (from the Washington Post)
by Daniel Philpott
Majority Muslim countries are, on average, more likely to curb religious freedom than other nations. But look closer. In many cases this is not Sharia law. It’s secular modernist regimes that often restrict the practice of both Islam and minority religions.

Channeling empathy for good (from the New York Times)
by Daryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht, and William A. Cunningham
The bad news is our empathy doesn’t always extend to large groups of suffering people, or people from other races and nations. The good news is this is something we can change.

Life as we don’t know it (from Aeon)
by Sarah Scoles
What if alien life evolved in a completely different way than we did? What if the same thing happened here on earth, parallel to the evolution we’re familiar with?

Child abuse and thought crimes (from The Atlantic)
by Maurice Chammah
Does a widely used test to identify high-risk pedophiles actually work?

What’s sleep for? (from the New Yorker)
by Maria Konnikova
Scientists are learning more about why we sleep. One answer: physically cleaning toxins from our brain.

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.