A British woman says her co-genderists on this side of the pond are happier and healthier because they drink less alcohol, which sounds a lot like a challenge to me. Ladies, will you stand up for America?

After many decades of winning the war on death, American women are now losing their lifespan gains over men. Especially in the Deep South and in rural counties, American women in their early 70s are now dropping off at a terrifying rate—70 should be long enough for anyone, but a girl child born today has an expected lifespan of 81 years, while boy children born today have the male disadvantage of a 76-year lifespan.

The question is why women are losing this advantage, if living longer can even be considered an advantage, especially in the Deep South or America's Heartland or the rural Western states.

According to Fox [...]

• "She holds out her right arm to show me her tattoo of Marilyn Monroe. All that remains of Marilyn is a few drops of black against skin that is the color the moon possesses in the thin air of northern winters."—Stephen Marche on Megan Fox, Esquire, February 2013.

• "Her skin is lined and slightly worn and depends on light from other sources—from her eyes, from her smile, even from the hounding incandescence of television."—Tom Junod on Hillary Clinton, Esquire, February 2008.

• "I can't help but notice her skin. It's the smoothest skin I've seen outside of a Clinique ad."—A.J. Jaocbs on Rosario Dawson, Esquire, [...]

Americans watch presidential debates to serve many different goals. Older people need shameless pandering, because they are lonely. Corporate ladder-climbers need "water cooler talk." And the nation's much-maligned "undecided voters" want to put a face to a name, so they can vote for the white person.

For a certain small but social-media-savvy demographic of needy political fanatics, debates are an opportunity to quickly identify memes and catch phrases and then recycle these memorable bits into short-lived Internet destinations. Time is of the essence, because this stuff is utterly forgotten within 48 hours—by the time Saturday Night Live gets to it on the weekend, it's all over.

If you didn't [...]

I hate to be the 8-millionth person to jump on the bandwagon, but we need to talk about that show about young women on TV! In it, a group of young women have awful, degrading sexual relations due to their economic circumstances, and try to convince themselves that it’s anything but degrading. The characters are desperately struggling to make ends meet, but nearly every problem can be solved with a man ejaculating to an incongruous indie music soundtrack. And our heroine, with her back against the wall and not a dollar to her name, does what any woman in her situation would: get a job at a sensual massage parlor [...]

Since we gathered a truly huge pile of data from our online dating survey, we've published advice about how to improve online dating for everyone, for folks who date men and folks who date women. Now, in our final installment of this very special dating survey roundup, we bring you: The Most Horrific Things Encountered While Online Dating. A word of warning here? Most of these are really funny. And then, in a small section towards the end, some of them are absolutely not funny. We're including some extremely frank stuff, including about sexual assault. If you're not up for reading about that today, you should take a [...]

If you fly a lot, you'll either be caught up on your fine literature reading or more likely on the comedies that are available in the iTunes store, home of DRM and overpriced rentals. (Also home to movies that are difficult to watch on planes, because suddenly there's boobies on your bright portable device and you're like "Oh my God, there's an eight-year-old about 20 inches behind me.") After the comedies that launched a thousand post-"Are Women Funny" magazine pieces, then in the iterated form of "Are Women Box Office" magazine pieces—those would be about Bridesmaids and then about Anna Faris, because of course we're all so very concerned about [...]

I was barely a moment inside Walmart, studying the cucumbers and avocados, when a middle-aged man came up to say hi.

We started talking about the oil boom sweeping Williston, North Dakota. He said his coworkers were losing it out here in the middle of nowhere. Maybe he would lose it too.

"You gotta really be focused on your shit," he said. "And it's hard. And on that note, that's why you should let me take you to dinner."

I declined. He called later that evening to ask me on a date. He said he'd take me to Pizza Hut. I was not pining for a rendezvous with a roustabout [...]

It seems like only yesterday that America's women were finally allowed to be killed in front-line combat. But it was a hollow victory, as so many victories are, because after losing something like nine consecutive wars, America now fights its foreign battles using genderless drone airships that will never cry or come home unemployable.

But ladies can still die "like a man" without even being sent to Camp Victory:

U.S. women who smoke today have a much greater risk of dying from lung cancer than they did decades ago, partly because they are starting younger and smoking more—that is, they are lighting up like men, new research shows. [...]

So the n+1 editors know about Sandra Tsing Loh, right?

"Female bosses are less likely to make jokes in the boardroom because they are met with an awkward silence for eight out of every ten attempts at humour, a study has revealed."

"In 1845… the cost of mailing a letter was reduced to three cents, making the mail accessible to working women, middle-class housewives, and schoolgirls with pocket money. Suddenly, wide swaths of women had access to two dangerous things—the mail and the post office."

"All my adult life, I’ve been pretty sure I’m a sentient, even semi-competent human being. I have a job and an apartment; I know how to read and vote; I make regular, mostly autonomous decisions about what to eat for lunch and which cat videos I will watch whilst eating my lunch. But in the past couple of months, certain powerful figures in media and politics have cracked open that certitude. You see, like most women, I was born with the chromosome abnormality known as 'XX,' a deviation of the normative 'XY' pattern."

I have three or four things I want to put together. First is The Social Network which I resisted seeing for a very long time (“You’ll love it. It’s great!” It wasn’t.) And second is The Rite which I’ve wanted to see ever since those previews months back. I finally had my paws on The Rite thanks to Netflix but then I couldn’t find anyone to watch it with me at this artist colony I’ve been at all month and I’m leaving tomorrow. So alone and in the deep of the night I watched The Rite in bed. Third and fourth I think is the current economic crisis in America [...]

"Women get dressed up to go to the farmer’s market because they think the farmers are hot. The greenmarkets are like Desperate Housewives meets Northern Exposure."

"Women look their oldest at 3.30pm every Wednesday, a study has found, because that is when energy levels plummet, work stress is at a peak and the effects of any weekend late nights finally kick in." But? There must be a but, right? Ah, yes. "But they reveal Thursday is the day they are most likely to have sex. It gives them a youthful rosy glow which could contribute to why women feel so happy on a Friday – 60 per cent name it as their happiest day." God, ladies, I don't know how you put up with it sometimes.

"In early 2013, the LRRL proposed a simple solution: a curfew for men. Every male person over the age of thirteen would be legally required to be accompanied by at least one female person over the age of eighteen when leaving his home between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m." —Is this how humanity will stop rape?

"A survey has concluded that around 11pm on a Saturday night is the most common time for a woman to feel amorous."

Last week, the American Society of Magazine Editors released its list of nominees for the 2012 National Magazine Award. In the so-called "brass ring" long-form categories—reporting, feature writing, profile writing, essays and criticism and columns and commentary—all 25 of the writers nominated were men.

For an organization that usually gets talked about exactly twice a year—once when it announces the nominations, and again when it declares the winners—suddenly people had a lot to say about ASME.

"Women can’t write, says ASME," went the Daily News headline. David Carr called it a "sausage-fest." Disdain for the organization manifested in the Twitter hashtag #ASSME.

It's easy to imagine the [...]

If perhaps you were intrigued by the idea of podcasts by comedians but you aren't interested in living in a male-only world, as Paul Brownfield, the author of this past weekend's Times mag piece on podcasts by comedians does, here are a few things for you to explore!

• In the print version of the magazine, but not online, How Was Your Week?, by Awl pal Julie Klausner, got tied for his final pick. That's… nice that it got a mention! It's very good. Perhaps you will enjoy, if you can stand the fact that Julie doesn't have a penis.

• There is also the podcast of [...]