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One of the things I do at the University of Minnesota is serve as faculty advisor for a group called Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Development (IPID).

As its name indicates, IPID’s mission is to get people together to talk about development from a variety of perspectives. So for example, one of the events IPID is organizing this year will feature Colby College’s Laura Seay (perhaps equally well-known as @texasinafrica), who will be giving a public lecture in April that will be open to the entire University of Minnesota community.

Another thing IPID does is run a student journal called Reconsidering Development. Their most recent call for papers landed in my inbox last week, and I thought some readers of this blog might be interested in submitting an article for publication:

Look, if homeopathic remedies make you feel better, take them. If the Paleo diet helps you eat fewer TV dinners, that’s great—even if the Paleo diet is probably premised more on The Flintstones than it is on any actual evidence about human evolutionary history. If non-organic crumbs bother you, avoid them. And there’s much to praise in Whole Foods’ commitment to sustainability and healthful foods.

Still: a significant portion of what Whole Foods sells is based on simple pseudoscience. And sometimes that can spill over into outright anti-science (think What Doctors Don’t Tell You, or Whole Foods’ overblown GMO campaign, which could merit its own article). If scientific accuracy in the public sphere is your jam, is there really that much of a difference between Creation Museum founder Ken Ham, who seems to have made a career marketing pseudoscience about the origins of the world, and John Mackey, a founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, who seems to have made a career, in part, out of marketing pseudoscience about health?

From a must-read Daily Beast article titled “Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudo-Science,” which contrasts the left’s embrace of pseudo-science in the form of dubious claims about foods (from homeopathic “remedies” to GMOs). I really wish I had been the one to write this, and bonus points for referencing the Whole Foods store that was the one grocery store within walking distance from our house when we lived in North Carolina.

Besides the left’s own love affair with pseudo-science in the form of bogus health claims, I never understood why the same left — usually so quick to decry the Tea Party, the Koch Brothers, and rag on “libertardians” — loves Whole Foods so much, given its CEO’s professed love of Ayn Rand and Austrian economists and his comparing Obamacare to fascism, no less.

Since around 1965, we have been living in the era of the self-expressive marriage. Americans now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth. Fueled by the countercultural currents of the 1960s, they have come to view marriage less as an essential institution and more as an elective means of achieving personal fulfillment. …

As a psychologist, I could not help noticing that this history of marriage echoes the classic “hierarchy of needs” outlined in the 1940s by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. According to Maslow, human needs fit into a five-level hierarchy: The lowest need is that of physiological well-being — including the need to eat and drink — followed by the need for safety, then for belonging and love, then for esteem and finally for self-actualization. …

My colleagues and I contend that an analogous process has occurred in our expectations about marriage.

From a New York Times op-ed on marriage by Eli J. Finkel, a psychologist at Northwestern University.

I guess what this means is that, much like development policy, the institution of marriage has stopped working because the average married American expects way too much for his or her partner. Or: much like there is such a thing as development bloat, there is also such a thing as marriage bloat?

Our own marriage is far from perfect, but when we read Finkel’s op-ed on Sunday morning, my wife and I both admitted that we hadn’t married each other for “self-expression,” for which we can each turn to our own individual interests, hobbies, and friends. In fact, when we find self-expression in each other, it really comes more as a positive externality than anything else. Given that, it might be that managing one’s expectations that one’s partner will always and forever be all that and a bag of chips the best prescription for a long and healthy marriage.