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Derek Thompson calculates the economic cost of hangovers:

Excessive drinking costs the economy more than $220 billion — or about $1.90 per drink, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which studies the negative externalities of alcohol consumption each decade. Seventy-two percent of the costs came from lost workplace productivity, according to the 2006 survey, which suggests that the economic drag from hangovers is about $160 billion  (… also the total cost of natural catastrophes in 2012.)

Brad Plumer is suspicious, noting that “when you add up all the different studies on lost workplace productivity over the years, it starts to seem like a miracle the United States even has a functioning economy”:

[M]any of these estimates are outright silly. The idea that coffee breaks or or a little Internet browsing cost billions in lost productivity is highly questionable. As Jack Shafer pointed out back in 2010, many people are likely to waste time during the workday no matter what. The fact that they might do so by playing fantasy football rather than, say, taking a leisurely trip to the water cooler doesn’t seem terribly important. …

[N]o one’s ever done a rigorous analysis of all these supposed productivity-killers. The findings are usually just large numbers tossed around to draw attention to pet issues. A new study finding that spam or yawning or picking your nose costs billions of dollars in lost productivity might make for good headlines. But it rarely tells us anything useful about the economy.

Nicole Pasulka delves into the history of the Village People and the YMCA:

At the Y, a spiritual man was a well-built, muscular man. The organization’s leadership positioned the regional branches as destinations that could protect newcomers from “negative” influences. It was here that many young guys had their first homosexual experiences. So [Village People members] Jacques Morali and Randy Jones were part of a history that included both diligent Christian bodybuilders and men cruising for “trade”—straight-identified, masculine men. According to John Donald Gustav-Wrathall’s meticulous history of male-male relationships within the organization, homosexual cruising and weight lifting went hand in hand. Though the organization condemned homosexual sex as “immorality” or “perversion,” by emphasizing fitness, the Y didn’t just make sex between men possible, it “shaped same-sex sexual desire.”

The astonishing scene above is from one of my favorite bad movies of all time: Can’t Stop The Music. Steve Guttenberg’s neck veins and Bruce Jenner’s exposed midriff – combined with absurd disco choreography and manically coked up acting – it’s a classic. Back to Pasulka, on the 1978 hit single “Macho Man”:

[Producer Henri] Belolo says the title track was meant to appeal to “the ego of all the people… going to the health club building muscles.” Somewhere along the way, that came to include millions of straight people.

In 1979, [musician Jacques] Morali told Rolling Stone, “When Macho Man came out, I did it believing that the gay audiences were going to like it very much. But the straight audiences liked the song much more, because straight guys in America want to get the macho look.” As the producers were learning, they didn’t have to specify their target. “Macho Man” made it to number twenty-five on 1978’s Billboard Hot 100 chart and hit platinum. Either the Village People had found an audience beyond the gay discos or a lot of people were pumping up their disco tits.

In fact, both were kind of true. While gay men in the Village had been bulking up, slowly trading angora for ripped T-shirts and pegged pants for Levi’s, straight men had registered that the “macho” look was en vogue in stylish cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Some straight men even started wearing bandannas in their back pockets—a method gay men used to signal their preference for different kinds of sex. Though they were oblivious to the code, straight men had figured out this was the “in” look.

This post struck a chord with a lot of readers. Here are a few of many we are planning to post:

I feel your pain.  We have had to put four dogs to sleep and one cat (age 18.5). This is not counting my parents’ pets. When we put our last dog, sweet golden retriever Zella, to sleep (very unexpectedly), I did as I always do and stayed with her through the whole procedure.  My husband couldn’t bear to be there, and so he said good-bye and left to wait outside.

This, however, made Zella a bit agitated – “Why is Papa leaving?” She was not feeling well (she had hemangiosarcoma, which is basically a blood-fed tumor, in her case larger than a softball and pressing on her liver), but she perked up when the vet came in because he had been working with hamsters and his hands and shirt smelled so awesome. So she was wagging her tail and smiling when we invited her to sit on the floor, which she did not want to do.  So I sat on a bench in the room and she hopped up next to me and sat/leaned against me. As the serum was injected, Zella just leaned on me more and more and ended up with her head in my lap. It was really a very peaceful and sweet way to die.

The vet told me afterwards that he wished every pet owner would stay with their pet at the end, because when they leave the room, the pet gets agitated and it’s harder for the staff to keep them still, making the whole process so much more stressful for the pet.  He also said that the women always stay, but only about half of men do, which I thought was interesting.

I’ve attached a picture of sweet Zella on the day before we took her in.  She was SUCH a great dog! I am very sorry about Dusty’s health.  It is so, so hard to say goodbye to a wonderful dog.  I will be thinking of you when that day comes.

Another reader:

The decisions you have to make on behalf of your companion animals just rip you apart.  We recently faced that problem with our beagle, Buddy. By age 14 he had lost almost all of his teeth (we never could get him to floss), he had been blind for two years and almost completely deaf, yet he seemed to get some enjoyment out of life.  He still loved to eat, of course; he could still consume a milk bone with no teeth. And he could usually make it out the doggy door to the back yard when he needed too.  Most of all, he seemed to get very happy when we would lie down next to him and pet him.

But sadly, about a month ago, things got suddenly worse.  He refused to eat his kibble (he would still eat treats) and his back legs were giving out, so he could not stand up reliably.  He could no longer make it through the doggy door; we had to carry him outside and back in.  He barely recognized us and he slept 99% of the time.  When he would stand up, he seemed to be in pain.  After conferring with the vet, we decided it was time.  However, he had been my best friend for so long … it took me a couple of days to agree.  But we finally put him in the car for his last ride.

He always hated going to the vet.  Nasty things seemed to happen there.  This time he knew where he was, and tried to struggle before going in the vet’s door; then he sort of gave up.  They got us into a room in short order, and we spent some quiet time with him.  The doctor came in and asked us if we wanted to stay while she gave him the shots.  There was never any question; we had him since he was eight weeks old, so we were going to be there at the end.

By this time he was just lying on the table anyway, seemingly passed out.  When she gave him the final shots, it seemed to make very little difference; his shallow breathing just stopped entirely.  I took one last look at him and just lost it, bawling all the way home.

When we got our house, our other beagle, Cloe, gave us a quizzical look seemingly asking, “Where is he?”  That night, she kept getting up and wandering around the house, then letting out a short high-pitched yelp, and looking at us questioningly.  She knew he was missing.

The next day, she seemed to adapt and life went on.  So we gave her a lot of love, and we adapted too, but we always remember Buddy.  I cannot find the actual quote, but I am sure that Arthur C. Clarke once wrote something like the following: “One of greatest tragedies of human life is the all too short lives of our animal best friends.”  So Andrew, prepare yourself.

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[Re-posted with new questions suggested by readers]

Michael Wahid Hanna will join us to answer your questions related to the ousting of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the ensuing violence, and what’s next for Egyptians. Hanna’s Twitter feed continues to be a must-read for anyone following the events in Egypt. From his bio:

Michael Wahid Hanna is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. He works on issues of international security, international law, and U.S. foreign policy in the broader Middle East and South Asia. He recently served as a co-director of The Century Foundation’s International Task Force on Afghanistan, co-chaired by Thomas Pickering and Lakhdar Brahimi. He has published widely on U.S. foreign policy in newspapers and journals, including articles in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, theBoston Globe,  Christian Science Monitor, the New Republic, and World Policy Journal, among other publications, and is a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy. He appears regularly on NPR, BBC, and al-Jazeera.

To submit a question for Hanna, simply enter it into the Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing him answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care.

Readers push back against the notion that Fat Acceptance (FA) be treated like an oppressed group:

I take issue with Anna Mollow comparing fatness to sexual orientation: “Body size is determined primarily by genetics”. This statement is missing half of the equation.  Genetics plus caloric intake determine body size; the two halves necessarily go together.  Compare that to sexual orientation: you can be gay and celibate but you’re still gay.  If you’re genetically predisposed to fatness but your calorie intake is low (because of food availability, quality, poverty, or whatever), you won’t be fat.

Fat attraction is different.  That sounds more like another sexual interest along the great spectrum of human sexuality.

Another reader:

I’m sorry, but give me a freaking break. Do we need a separate acceptance movement for short people?

Or people with ugly noses? With bacne? What about an acceptance movement for unintelligent people with lousy personalities?  I mean, why should I have to try and not be a stupid asshole towards people; shouldn’t the onus be on them to accept me for the stupid asshole I am?  After all, it’s not like I can control my stupid genes or asshole-ish upbringing!

Look, nobody’s perfect.  Some of those imperfections can be fixed, mitigated or papered-over.  But sometimes, we just gotta do the best we can with the hand that the good lord dealt us, and hope to meet people who either don’t mind the imperfection or to whom it’s not an imperfection, but a bonus. Demanding that everyone ignore your particular imperfections or be branded some kind of bigot is both unrealistic and a bit self-centered.

And I say this as a fat person whose family is full of fat people.  No “thin privilege” here.

Another:

“Body size is determined primarily by genetics.” Anyone who wants to convince us of that needs to explain why our genetic pool has changed so drastically in the past half century to produce the dramatic rise in obesity within the US. Fat-shaming is not cool and may well be counter productive. But if one is going to make extraordinary scientific claims about genetics, one needs to produce extraordinary evidence to back them up.

Another:

If obesity was primarily a genetic disease, you’d see it all over the world, not just in large numbers in the United States. In most other countries in the world, people simply don’t get as fat as they do here. And more interestingly, immigrants from those same countries to the US become obese at the same rates as Americans. Unless people have conditions like hypothyroidism or the rare Prader-Willi syndrome (most obese people don’t), making a comparison between gay people and fat people is irresponsible and unfair to both.

For three years, Richard Mosse worked with a discontinued infrared military surveillance film to photograph war zones in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where at least 5.4 million people have died of war-related causes since 1998. The resulting body of work, The Enclave, was presented at the Irish Pavilion of this year’s Venice Biennale, and is featured in a new book. Rebecca Horne evaluates the artist’s choice of medium:

The false-color infrared satellite film was initially used for aerial reconnaissance, showing healthy foliage as pink and red and thereby highlighting camouflage as blue or purple. Here, it is the medium for on-the-ground images from war zones of the Congo. As with the film’s properties that switch one color for another on the spectrum, viewers may become unsure of what they are looking at, and where it fits in the cultural spectrum. Through [Mosse’s] lens, a world of sinister machismo is seen in the hues of prom dresses and flowers. Is it an art project or a serious documentary? Either way, the images upend these tidy categories and introduce messy questions about objectivity and aesthetics.

Mosse recounts the hazards of working on the project:

Working in eastern Congo with a large wooden camera on a tripod was never going to be simple. You have to walk for days through the jungle to reach certain rebel groups, walking across shifting front lines, and brushing shoulders with suspicious guerrillas along the mucky track. The rain and lightning assault the landscape around you, sweeping through your tent at night. Perhaps the most frustrating, however, was the land’s entrenched corruption, and its greedy officials. Each little village seems to have a mwami (chief), his queen, and a retinue of immigration officials, intelligence officers, and police, who will keep you in a little shed all day, shouting or pushing papers around their desk, until they receive a $20 bill. The national army are the worst, extorting the local civilian population as they process through the jungle to sell their produce on market day. You can see why rebel groups have formed to fight the government. People are so burned out, disillusioned by insidious corruption that has become institutionalized over several generations. They are humiliated, and that humiliation expresses itself in the most horrifying violence, cycles of massacre and systematic sexual violence. Recently, the massacres have been so horrific that unborn babies have been cut from their mother’s belly while entire families are slaughtered by spear.

Mosse describes more about the project here.  Gallery here.

(Photo: Platon, 2012. Farm near Bihambwe, Masisi Territory, North Kivu. This rich pastureland is fiercely fought over in an escalating territorial conflict. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.)