People often throw the phrase "obsessive-compulsive disorder" (OCD) around as jokey shorthand for being excessively particular or high-strung, casting the disorder as a sort of innocuous, yet desexualizing, set of anxieties.

But OCD isn’t a quirk. It's a mental health condition that more than 2 percent of people experience at some point. It takes the random thoughts that flash through people's heads—that irrational fear of having done something wrong, or an unbidden, bizarre fantasy—and, instead of allowing them to quickly fade, forces them to the forefront of their minds in distressing spirals. Because these obsessions don’t respond well to reason, people with OCD develop rituals in an attempt to bring themselves relief from those anxieties. But that relief is fleeting, and people get stuck in this cycle of obsession and ritual. Many become dependent on a growing list of compulsions, which can become their own sources of anxiety and shame.

Obsessions and rituals can bleed directly into sex, as well. People with contamination obsessions often talk about fixating on the perceived dirtiness of genitals or bodily fluids and putting up hard limits on how they have sex. By some estimates, at least one in 10 people with OCD will also at some point develop obsessions about sex, constantly questioning their sexualities or worrying they might be developing harmful urges and building rituals into their relationships, their masturbation habits, their engagement with porn, to test or reassure themselves about their desires. Fears of being misunderstood—or actually dangerous—force some people with sexual obsessions to avoid intimacy altogether. Often, current or potential romantic partners who face the realities of OCD write those with the condition off as just too much.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.

A new study led by Ekin Ok at the University of British Columbia has found people who signal virtue and victimhood are more likely to have dark triad personality traits.

The dark triad comprises narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and duplicity) and psychopathy (callousness and cynicism). People with dark triad traits can be seductive.

A study led by psychologists at the University of Durham found that women rated the same man as more attractive when he had dark triad traits. The dark triad man was about one standard deviation more attractive than an ordinary man.

In psychologist Justin Lehmiller’s book Tell Me What You Want, he reveals the most fantasized-about superhero among women is Batman. In contrast, gay men preferred Superman and Captain America. One possible reason that women like Batman is because he would score higher on dark triad traits compared with other superheroes.

A civil rights complaint in Michigan has accused a math teacher of creating a racially hostile environment by displaying black students' poor grades to the class and calling them criminals.

Mother Charmelle Kelsey filed the complaint on Monday with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights on behalf of her daughter Makayla, a rising junior at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor.

The complaint was filed in conjunction with a 14-page letter composed by the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School, which details the allegations of Makayla and several other named and unnamed students.

Change is afoot in corporate America. For the past two months, everyone from Chevron to Comcast and Hershey’s to Harvard Business School has put out statements containing the phrase “We stand in solidarity with the Black community,” or some very close variant. The sudden outpourings of corporate sentiment were widely dismissed as meaningless, hypocritical, opportunistic, or all three. But there’s reason to believe that such vocal calls for change from corporations could actually be worse than meaningless—and in fact damage the chances that corporations will follow through on meaningful change in the months and years ahead.

Why? Less than a year ago, nearly 200 CEOs signed a solemn pledge, issued by the Business Roundtable, to stop caring primarily about their shareholders and to serve the needs of their workers, communities, and country too. The Wharton management professor Tyler Wry has been compiling data on the signatories’ behavior since. “We were interested in whether these statements were worth the paper they were printed on, or just symbolic,” he told me recently. “When COVID hit, it was a natural experiment and a chance to see if companies were living up to their word.”

The results have startled him. As COVID-19 spread in March and April, did signers give less of their capital to shareholders (via dividends and stock buybacks)? No. On average, signers actually paid out 20 percent more of their capital than similar companies that did not sign the statement. Then, as the coronavirus swept the country, did they lay off fewer workers? On the contrary, in the first four weeks of the crisis, Wry found, signers were almost 20 percent more prone to announce layoffs or furloughs. Signers were less likely to donate to relief efforts, less likely to offer customer discounts, and less likely to shift production to pandemic-related goods. “Signing this statement had zero positive effect,” said Wry. Why, though, would it produce a negative effect?

Wearing headlamps and muck boots, the band of volunteer conservationists trudges into dark forests in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and surrounding communities, turning over leaves and shining lights on tree trunks. Their quarry is a tiny frog called the coqui. No bigger than a quarter, the coqui makes an ear-splitting call as loud as a lawn mower: Ko-kee! Ko-kee! It takes special know-how and fortitude to home in on a frog in a blackened forest ringing with frog calls. But the coquistodores are efficient cutthroats. When they find a coqui, they catch it, and drench it in citric acid, killing it.

Reported by both Windows Latest and MSPowerUser, Gmail users are discovering that Microsoft’s Windows 10 built-in Mail client is deleting their emails and/or sending them to spam automatically.

In a time where easily sharable video provides weekly, if not daily, evidence of America’s violent racism, a constant cacophony of individual voices respond in real-time. At the beginning of this week, the conversation-provoking event was a video of a white woman, Amy Cooper, calling the police to claim her life was being threatened by Christian Cooper, a black man peacefully watching birds in Central Park. That news was followed quickly by the excruciating footage of the police killing George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. These videos have sparked protests, demands for America to address its deadly racism, and a certain kind of social media scolding, often openly addressed to “Fellow White Women.”

For as long as social media has provided a platform for activism, slactivism, and sometimes outright grandstanding, the phrase has popped up. But since the 2016 election, when white women proved to be the tipping demographic in the election of bigoted game show host Donald Trump as President of the United States, it seems to have come into heavy usage.

Exercise and physical therapy often are recommended to help people who have arthritis. Both can strengthen muscle — a benefit that also can reduce joint pain. But building muscle mass and strength can take many months and be difficult in the face of joint pain from osteoarthritis, particularly for older people who are overweight. A new study in mice at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, however, suggests gene therapy one day may help those patients.

The research shows that gene therapy helped build significant muscle mass quickly and reduced the severity of osteoarthritis in the mice, even though they didn’t exercise more. The therapy also staved off obesity, even when the mice ate an extremely high-fat diet.

Higher ticket prices, temperature checks before boarding, and no inflight alcohol: Airline travel in the post-coronavirus era will look very different from the low-cost "getaway" trips of the past — and you should probably pack your lunch.

No one noticed when an 82-year-old man, forced into quarantine after returning from a trip to another state, died in his home in the village of Mohammadpur Khala in Uttar Pradesh.

His neighbors, who had refused to go near the man’s house out of fear he had brought back the coronavirus with him, only noticed something was wrong when the stench from his decomposing body became overwhelming.

Elsewhere in India, farmers are taking their own lives because they can’t get laborers to harvest their crops. Police are accused of beating lockdown violators to death. Migrant workers are dropping dead after being forced to walk hundreds of miles home. Alcoholics are dying from drinking methanol because all alcohol sales have been banned. Children are dying of starvation.

It?s not such a stretch then to suggest that a popular TV program, such as The Brady Bunch, might have had a significant impact on how people have raised their children since. Millions of people have grown up watching The Brady Bunch, and many have seen it either as the perfect version of normal, or as the way they wished that they were raised in their own childhood. Would it influence the way they might one day raise their own children?

I think so.

Yet if we look at kids today, we see evidence of a pronounced lack of discipline. I submit that a generation of people who were raised on The Brady Bunch might come to see some legitimacy in the weak response from the TV parents, as though it?s somehow the enlightened course of action.

I also submit that it?s that kind lack of discipline that has contributed to an explosion in the number of incarcerations. Some 65 million people in the US have criminal records; is it too far-fetched to connect the dots between a lack of discipline in the home, and the need for the criminal justice system to do in adult life what the parents wouldn?t do in childhood?

Real life isn?t The Brady Bunch, and it?s beyond silly to think that that kind of non-discipline has any use at all. Sadly, it seems to have become the new normal in American households today.

The sister of actor Matthew Broderick said she received preferential treatment at a California hospital while battling the coronavirus.

Janet Broderick, a pastor at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, was hospitalized last month after falling ill upon returning from a conference in Kentucky. She has since recovered and is back home.

Broderick told New York Magazine that her general practitioner didn't know about her famous familial connection and "didn't care very much." But that changed when the pastor went to an emergency room at a Beverly Hills hospital.

"As soon as I got ahold of the guy at the hospital who knew who Matthew was, I was given the name of the head of the emergency room," she said. "Well, trust me, the folks I've spent my lifetime working with in Jersey City would never have been given the name of the head of the emergency room. If they were, it would have been disregarded."

"I think I'm absolute living proof that this system is completely corrupt," she told the outlet.

With daily life changing for many around the world due to the coronavirus pandemic, a huge surge in internet traffic has led to worries over the resilience of the infrastructure that keeps things humming.

As the COVID-19 disease spreads, authorities in many countries — from the U.K. to India — have implemented nationwide lockdowns, forcing people to work remotely while children are sent home from schools.

In Britain, internet service providers have seen double-digit increases in broadband usage, with BT claiming traffic on its fixed network climbed as much as 60% compared to normal weekdays, while Vodafone says it’s seen mobile data traffic increase by 50% in some markets.

“This is an increase we would normally expect to see in a year,” Chintan Patel, Cisco’s chief technologist in the U.K., told CNBC. “We’re now obviously seeing that in a matter of days and weeks.”

The big uncertainty going forward, he says, is not knowing how long the pandemic — and the nationwide shutdowns it has caused — will last.

If engineers are required to self-isolate, for instance, this may make it harder for telecommunications companies to maintain the copper and fiber cables and other equipment needed to deliver broadband.

“With physical networks, you still need to do a certain amount of maintenance,” Thillien told CNBC. “Whether or not this continues for longer time is the main uncertainty.”

With more than two-thirds of the U.S. population ordered to stay home amid the coronavirus pandemic, it’s tougher for burglars to find an empty house to target. But the cooped-up residents seem more likely to fight each other.

That’s what crime statistics show in major U.S. cities where residents are spending almost all their time inside.

In Los Angeles, property crime was down 18% in the four weeks that ended March 21 from the previous four weeks. Calls for police services in Chicago have declined 30% for the month and crime in New York City fell almost 25% in the week ended March 22, compared with the week before.

But with people stuck indoors enduring the stress of an unprecedented public-health crisis and worrying about jobs disappearing, domestic squabbles are rising.

In Seattle, police got 614 domestic violence calls in the first two weeks of March, a 22% increase from a year earlier.