Day: March 9, 2015

I graduated college 10 years ago. A lot has happened in that time. Society is very different from what it was then. Smartphones didn’t really exist yet. MySpace was dominating Facebook, and no one had heard of Twitter. Our culture was in some ways monolithic, since we still relied on traditional media forms to learn about trends and such. I’ve changed, too, but I don’t think anywhere near as drastically.

I didn’t have a cell phone in high school. When the bottom fell out of the economy, I was already on my second job in my career in journalism. I’ve never agreed with being called a “Millennial,” because there’s a big difference culturally between myself and people five years younger than me. Ten years gone, I’m certain that college life looks very different than it did when I was there–it’s probably changed more in the past decade than any other 10-year span.

But one thing that hasn’t changed is Greek life. Why do we still have fraternities, anyway? Continue reading The McBournie Minute: Why do we have frats anymore?

If you were looking forward to trying out some wine from the Civil War, you can give up now.

A panel of wine tasters sampled one of five bottles recovered from a ship that sank in 1864 bound for the South. It was pretty much just seawater, which shouldn’t be shocking, considering that the liquid was milky and grey.

At this point we should just stop getting excited about booze recovered from shipwrecks, especially if the bottles are sealed with corks that allow in seawater. Centuries from now, people will enjoy screw-top and bag wines from modern shipwrecks.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston tested an oxytocin nasal spray on men to measure its effect on appetite and food choices. The Guys don’t have to explain oxytocin — the hormone that makes both finches and humans feel like they’re in love — to our regular readers. (And we just did to non-regular readers. How about that?)

On average, overweight and obese men who inhaled a spritz of oxytocin ate 122 fewer calories in general and 80 fewer calories from fat at breakfast than those who sucked down some placebo. So, while oxytocin does help men feel more in love with people, it has no effect on man’s love of bacon. Of course, it’s entirely possible that it’s impossible for men to love bacon any more than we already do, and no spray can make us love 110 percent.

Unfortunately, oxytocin nasal spray is not available for sale in the U.S., so you’ll either have to order it from Europe or just moon extra hard during your meals.