Matthew Rozsa, Salon

"I hate to say it from a veterinarian's perspective — we love them because they're like hitting the lotto, you know — but the poor animals suffer from the day they're born."

"They say, 'Look at that face! And they've got little ears!'" Mader said, assuming the high-pitched, cooing tone that many dog owners take up when talking about their pets. "But that's not normal, you know. It's not normal at all. And it's the poor dogs that are so inbred suffer," Mader observed.

Indeed, he warned that if brachycephalic dogs continue to be inbred at current rates, they may not exist in the near future. In other words, we appear to have hit a tipping point when it comes to inbreeding man's best friend. And other experts agree with him....

When Royal Society Secretary Henry Oldenburg asked Leeuwenhoek to look at semen, the Dutch draper initially did not reply "because he felt it was 'unseemly.'"

Despite living in the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, Leeuwenhoek's story could be mistaken for embodying the American Dream. He was never formally trained as a scientist, but he had a strong work ethic and a powerful mind. Armed with those tools, Leeuwenhoek made discoveries that transformed how human beings view the world. By the end of his life, he was a prosperous pillar of his community and regarded throughout the West as an intellectual giant. He owed all of this to one thing: His cutting edge microscopes and their ability to study "animalcules," as bacteria were then called. His microscopes indisputably proved to humanity that it shared this planet with countless single-celled organisms.

Yet when Leeuwenhoek discovered sperm, he anticipated that the world would be disgusted....

It was a presidential election year. A magazine called "Fact" had reached out to all 12,356 members of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) about the Republican presidential candidate, who hailed from the party's extreme right-wing and was intensely disliked by liberals. Of the 2,417 psychiatrists who responded, nearly half said the Republican nominee was psychologically unfit to be president (1,189), with the rest split almost evenly between saying that he was fit (657) and demurring altogether (571). Even though this means that fewer than 10 percent of the APA members actually denounced the Republican candidate as mentally unfit for office, the ones who did so used such colorful and memorable language that it made headlines. To understand way, simply look at one one of the quotes from the anti-Goldwater psychiatrists:

"He is a mass-murderer at heart and ... a dangerous lunatic. ... Any psychiatrist who does not agree with the above is himself psychologically unfit to be a psychiatrist."

While one might imagine those words being written about former President Donald Trump, their actual target was Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who ran in the 1964 election against President Lyndon Johnson. Even though the Johnson-Goldwater contest happened nearly six decades ago, Americans are still living with the ramifications of these psychiatrists' public statements. For one thing, it will never be clear if they contributed to his landslide defeat; that said, Goldwater eventually sued Fact magazine for defamation and won, achieving an important symbolic victory over the liberal media outlets that had attacked him. Even before Goldwater's legal victory, however, the APA released a new rule — later dubbed "the Goldwater Rule" — which prohibits psychiatrists from publicly commenting on an individual unless they have previously performed a "thorough clinical examination" on them as a patient.

In theory, the Goldwater Rule stops psychiatrists from abusing the public's trust by misleadingly presenting subjective partisan opinions as objective medical information. Yet a bipartisan case could be made that the Goldwater Rule is out-of-date. Many of Trump's critics claim that the Republican shows signs of narcissism and serious psychological diseases, while President Joe Biden's opponents often accuse him of dementia and other cognitive disorders. Few medical experts would argue that it is appropriate for laypeople like pundits to diagnose politicians — but does that mean mental health professionals should not be able to offer informed observations?...

President Joe Biden, who turned 80 earlier this week, is now officially America's first ever octogenarian president. Thanks to his party's over-performance in the recent midterm elections, early reports reveal that Biden is seriously considering running for president again in 2024. If he does so and wins, he will be 82 on the day of his second inauguration, and 86 at the end of his second term. Meanwhile the opponent that Biden defeated in the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump, has already launched his campaign. If Trump wins, and thereby joins Grover Cleveland as one of the only presidents to serve non-consecutive terms, he will be 78 upon resuming office — and 82 by the end of his second term.

This article originally appeared at Salon.

Having an octogenarian president may be a first for the United States, but is it something to raise an eyebrow at? Casual observers of the American political scene have perhaps noticed that Biden's critics frequently point to his age as proof of his unfitness for office. He has been accused of senility, stupidity and a wide spectrum of other incompetencies. (Trump's critics, it seems, have been less fixated on age.)...

American Thanksgiving and turkeys are forever, inextricably linked together. Turkey may very well have been served at the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth more than 400 years ago, and today the delicious bird is so ubiquitous that consumers fret over turkey prices and whether its meat makes you sleepy. Yet in addition to being a food, turkeys are also birds — intelligent birds, at that.

This article originally appeared at Salon.

Indeed, turkeys are so intelligent that just like another intelligent animal (humans), turkeys will form complex social hierarchies. There is even a popular colloquial term for those hierarchies: A pecking order, which is used as a metonym for any social hierarchy, particularly workplace ones. The phrase isn't just used for turkeys, but for most birds (and especially those renowned for pecking, like chickens)....