We were drawn in by New York's new article, "This Old Sperm: Do Cougars Have the Smartest Kids." Who would have thought it was lamentation against sensationalistic science journalism?

Certainly not someone who read the first half of the piece and was informed of a medical journal article concluding that, in writer Emily Nussbaum's words, "older fathers have dumber kids," that "older mothers were associated with smarter children" and, if one extrapolates from the data,

the most intelligent children... must be the outcome of 45-year-old career women inseminated by their 21-year-old personal trainers...

Ha!

Suddenly, however, in the last paragraph, the reader learns that the juicy cougar news was just fodder for some highbrow New York-esque point about how the media is always transforming "nuanced scientific data" into "social gamesmanship," e.g. older women are desperate for sex, or men are programmed to cheat, etc. etc.

Come on. You just said that, Nussbaum, so you'd have an excuse to talk about cougars having sex with personal trainers, thus shredding the very scientific nuances you claim to be protecting. (Needless to say, we would never pull a stunt like that ourselves. Ahem.)