Author: Neil Schoenherr

Spend $200 on a great Christmas gift at the big box store and get a $50 gift card. Sounds like a great offer. It may, in fact, entice you to spend more than you normally would, warns a marketing expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Several Washington University in St. Louis faculty members served as panelists for a congressional briefing titled “Human Trafficking and the Impact on Children and Families,” held Nov. 14 in Washington.

Since the industrial revolution, coal, oil and natural gas have driven unprecedented growth in life span, population, income, education and quality of life. They have done so by providing us with energy 24/7/365, and the International Energy Agency projects that fossil fuels will account for a whopping 77 percent of our energy use in 2040.

The inaugural Masters and Johnson Annual Lecture, “The Beautiful Tension: Would Masters and Johnson Have Said Sex Is More Like Dancing or Digestion?” will be presented at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 14, in the Clark-Fox Forum at Hillman Hall. Leonore Tiefer, founder of the New View Campaign, which opposes medicalization of sexuality, will deliver the talk.

The situating and selling of soul food in retail spaces shows the ways in which blackness so often becomes compartmentalized and detached from the experiences of black people. Collard greens will never just be collard greens and chitlins will never just be chitlins, even when they’re served with champagne at the country’s finest department store.

“Never Again: Forging a Convention for Crimes Against Humanity,” a film produced by the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, will be shown at 12:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 11, during the 26th annual St. Louis International Film Festival.

A month has passed since Congress allowed the funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program to expire. While states are using available funds to keep the program in place until Congress acts, eventually if they do not act this could lead to the demise of one of the most successful government programs ever implemented.

The U.S. House of Representatives Republican tax proposal, released Nov. 2, would institute a number of wholesale changes to the American tax code, including the end of neutrality in the international tax system, says an expert on international tax law at Washington University in St. Louis.

The bipartisan bill proposed by U.S. Sens. Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray, aimed at shoring up the troubled health insurance markets, has some approaches that would help fix the marketplaces, but more changes are needed, says a health economist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Malnutrition problems can be traced to poor-quality diets lacking in diversity, a recent phenomenon in evolutionary history, according to a new paper from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.