Britain’s oldest couple, Phyllis and Ralph Tarrant, are both over 100, have been married 77 years and still live happily and independently together in their own flat. How did they do that?

His wife has put the secret of their long-lasting marriage and relationship down to 'getting on with each other, a good diet, exercise, avoiding cigarettes - and a tot of whisky each night'.

But they admit to the occasional tiff - usually down to Mrs Tarrant not being able to decide what she wants her husband to cook for tea, or one of them putting the television on too loud.

'Having little rows is good for a relationship,' Mrs Tarrant said recently. 'It keeps it healthy.'

The Tarrants married in 1933 when times were financially tough, no doubt, and they lived through two world wars (Mr Tarrant served in the RAF during World… click here to read whole article and make comments

With the summer season well under way, I’ve had the joy of celebrating with friends as they embark on married life together. Since I am looking forward as well to my own wedding a question that has inevitably come up is, “Will you take your husband’s last name?”

A recent study by social psychologists at Tilburg University in the Netherlands suggests that this is not a good idea. The study finds that women who took their husband’s last names are judged as more caring, more dependent, less intelligent, less competent and less ambitious than those women who kept their own name.

“Finally, a job applicant who took her partner's name, in comparison with one with her own name, was less likely to be hired for a job and her monthly salary was estimated €861,21 lower (calculated to a working life, €361.708,20).”

Women may choose to… click here to read whole article and make comments

Here is a useful little nugget of information -- an abstract describing a study that showed the protective effect of marriage for the health of newborn babies. The study concerned African American women and showed that the lowest risk for a low birth weight baby was found when marriage preceded childbirth for two generations.

This study used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) on two generations of African American women who gave birth from 1967 to 2005 to describe changing relationships between marital status and low birth weight (LBW) across the generations. An increasing protection of marriage on infant LBW across the two generations was found after adjusting for socioeconomic and demographic confounding factors via (a) logistic regression using generalized estimating equations, (b) propensity score analyses taking into account the differential distribution of confounders across the generations, and (c) sensitivity analyses that adjusted for childhood health… click here to read whole article and make comments

I have never been a fan of Time, so the recent news that the magazine is withdrawing a lot of free content from its online version did not cost me one wink of sleep. But this week’s cover story promoting the one-child family as the new American family model annoyed me -- at least, what I read of it from other sources as well as the summary Time published online.

What’s at issue here is not how many children any particular couple have, which is their own business, but the suggestion that society as a whole has outgrown the need for more than one, or at least the ability to afford a bigger family.

Lauren Sandler, the author of “One and Done” (online: “The Only Child: Debunking the Myths”) builds her case on personal experience (she is 35 with a two-year-old daughter, and was an only child herself); on… click here to read whole article and make comments

Explicit sex, violence, and profanity-laced dialogue—how much worse can prime-time television get? Well, thanks to a new US federal court decision, TV content is likely to slide still further, even faster.

This week a United States appeal court threw out the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) current “decency policy,” siding with several broadcasters who claimed that the policy infringed their First Amendment right to free speech. The FCC’s regulations forbade broadcast TV from airing “patently offensive” content involving “sexual or excretory organs or activities” during hours when children were likely to be watching.

In 2004, in response to viewer complaints, the FCC tightened that policy to include fines for “fleeting expletives”. A single violation, like the “F-bomb” dropped by U-2 star Bono during a prime-time music awards show, carried potential fines of up to $325,000. Cable programming, unlike the free content available on broadcast TV, is not covered by… click here to read whole article and make comments

What has football done to deserve its reputation for attracting thousands of prostitutes to its major fixtures? A report from CNN says the sex trade in South Africa actually slumped during the World Cup -- but tens of thousands of visitors surged through art galleries and museums.

Prior to the World Cup event just ended, as also before the 2006 event in Germany, informed sources were predicting that as many as 40,000 prostitutes -- many of them trafficked women -- would converge on the host nation to meet the “demand” from soccer fans.

There may well have been some increased activity of that sort around game venues in Germany, where prostitution is legal anyway, but a report by the Council of Europe found that there was almost no evidence of trafficking. Perhaps because of official prevention measures, but also, perhaps, because the connection between sport and sex is exaggerated.

… click here to read whole article and make comments

The computer can be a wonderful research and communication device, but just how disadvantaged are children whose families are too poor to provide one at home? Some economists have been studying the question and their findings may surprise you. Then again, they may not.

Writing from Silicon Valley business professor Randall Stross describes the research. In Romania recently the government invited low-income families to apply for vouchers worth 200 euros that could be used for buying a home computer. Two American economists studied those who qualified and those who, despite wanting a computer as much as the others and often having incomes only slightly higher, missed out on a voucher.

In a draft of an article that the Quarterly Journal of Economics will publish early next year, the professors report finding “strong evidence that children in households who won a voucher received significantly lower school grades in math, English and… click here to read whole article and make comments

Youth unemployment is a worldwide phenomenon and yet there is a field wide open for tomorrow’s young workforce: healthcare and related science.

Why are high school seniors not queuing up to find out about careers in nursing, physiotherapy and medical sciences? A recent survey among 604 high school students conducted for the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, USA, found that 45 per cent of 13 to 18-year-olds are not even considering pursuing such careers.

With the ageing of populations, healthcare is one of the fastest growing employment sectors, bringing 3.2 million new jobs in the US between 2008 and 2018.

Many students who responded negatively said they did not know enough about the subjects; 21 per cent felt that were not good at healthcare and science subjects in school; 19 per cent did not feel ready to study these subjects at college level; and 12 per cent felt… click here to read whole article and make comments

A study showing the contagious nature of divorce among social networks has been receiving a good bit of attention this week. Not only friends, siblings and people you work with, but also friends of friends are more likely to divorce if you do. Children can protect you from this contagion (although not, apparently, from more direct causes of divorce) -- the more children the better.

The report is based on the Framingham Heart Study -- a longitudinal study of the population of a small Massachusetts town near Boston which was started in 1948 to investigate risk for heart disease. Now it seems to shed some light on matters of the heart in a figurative sense -- focusing again on “disease”.

The Guardian summarises:

The researchers have called it "divorce clustering" and say that a split up between immediate friends increases your own chances of getting divorced by… click here to read whole article and make comments

Maybe something is changing for the better out there among Generation Y. A British journalist in her early 30s has written a book about renouncing sex for a year in order to get control of her emotional life. It’s called Chastened.

OK, so it was only a year without sexual intimacies and Hephzibah Anderson is still a little confused about what it all means, but let’s give the woman credit for seeing that there was a problem in the first place. She had spent her twenties falling into “a casual sort of intimacy without intimacy” with successive dates, not receiving so much as an “I love you” in return (let alone before), and began to see that sex was clouding her judgement.

In an interview with The Atlantic (which seems to have adopted female disillusionment with modern sex as a theme -- see click here to read whole article and make comments