Society

In the state's first decision involving juries and social media, the Massachusetts Appeals Court has called on judges to better police jurors' use of the Internet to make sure they do not discuss cases online, and thus risk a mistrial. The court said judges need to do more to explain to jurors that refraining from conversations about a case also means not posting anything about it on Facebook or Twitter, common practice in today's technology-driven world. "Jurors must separate and insulate their jury service from their digital lives," the court said in a ruling involving a Plymouth Superior Court...

Dr. Richard V. Aghababian, the founding chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who is now retired, was elected to lead the Massachusetts Medical Society at the group's annual meeting Thursday morning. Aghababian, who is from Southborough, will succeed Worcester pediatrician Dr. Lynda Young for a one-year term starting next week. He has a long history of involvement with the society, which represents about 24,000 physicians and medical students in the state.

Is fiction good for us? We spend huge chunks of our lives immersed in novels, films, TV shows, and other forms of fiction. Some see this as a positive thing, arguing that made-up stories cultivate our mental and moral development. But others have argued that fiction is mentally and ethically corrosive. It's an ancient question: Does fiction build the morality of individuals and societies, or does it break it down? This controversy has been flaring up — sometimes literally, in the form of book burnings — ever since Plato tried to ban fiction from his ideal republic.

The following was submitted by the Polymnia Choral Society: Under the baton of Music Director Murray Kidd, Polymnia will present "A Salute to the Great White Way" on Saturday, June 9, at 7:30 pm in Memorial Hall, 590 Main Street, Melrose.  Music will include a wide variety of songs from Broadway composers such as Rogers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, and "Fats" Waller.  Devin McCall, Melrose High School senior and winner of Polymnia's "Spotlight on High School Talent" contest, will sing with the choral group.

NEWTON - Dan Kennedy will graduate from Boston College on Monday, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and the recipient of the school's most prestigious prize, the Edward H. Finnegan Award. Winners of the Finnegan, given to the student who best exemplifies the BC motto, "ever to excel," tend to go big - top grad schools, Wall Street, overseas fellowships. Kennedy is planning to give away his computer, recycle his Blackberry, and move to a modest communal house in St. Paul, Minn.

WASHINGTON -- Garnett Stackelberg, a Washington society writer whose work appeared in newspapers and magazines, died Wednesday at Georgetown University Hospital. She was 95. Over the years, Ms. Stackelberg's columns appeared in the Washington Star, the Baltimore News-American, Dossier magazine, Washington Life Magazine, and L'Official, an international fashion magazine. Ms. Stackelberg spent the past decades writing a weekly society column for the Palm Beach Daily News. A native of Nebraska, Ms. Stackelberg traveled to Shanghai in 1932, where she met and married William...

I WRITE in regard to the Penn State sexual abuse scandal. Dr. Harry Kozol, a renowned Boston neurologist and psychiatrist who died some years ago, and whose son Jonathan is a well-known educator, was an expert on the dark side of human behavior. As a Boston radio reporter in the late 1970s, I remember interviewing him on the subject of child abuse. In the interview he said something that has stayed with me my whole life (I'm paraphrasing): A civilized society can only judge itself by the way it treats its children.

LEXINGTON, Va. -- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia disagrees with judges who believe the Constitution should be reinterpreted as society changes, saying that allows courts to bend the law to suit a political agenda. Scalia, speaking to students and faculty on Friday at Washington and Lee University, also said increasing partisanship among judges was one reason why the Senate questions nominees about their personal views on issues such as abortion and confirms only candidates regarded as "moderate.

Vienna Blood By Frank TallisRandom House, 485 pp., $15 In Frank Tallis's new mystery "Vienna Blood," Sigmund Freud and his disciples interpret dreams, and Gustave Mahler conducts the opera. The story unfolds amidst the ornate public buildings, elegant concert halls, bustling cafes, and plush dining rooms of fin de siecle Vienna. The many varieties of pastry are lovingly detailed. But Tallis, a clinical psychologist in London, does more than showcase Vienna's glories; the novel, the second in a series, views the city from the inside as much as from the outside,...

BostonGlobe.com, the Globe's paid subscription website, has been named the "World's Best Designed" site for 2011 by the Society for News Design. In citing BostonGlobe.com, which launched last year, judges in the SND annual Best of Digital News Design competition said it "decisively raised the bar for digital news design. " "The Globe site is a refreshing shift away from crafting news design as a single artifact and toward news design as an organism that responds to context, to device, and to the user," they said.

Obesity, once seen as a failure of personal responsibility and lack of willpower, has been repackaged in a four-part HBO documentary airing tonight through Thursday as a complicated phenomenon that's largely resulting from societal pressures that make it far easier for us to commute by car rather than by bike and to eat McDonald's rather than steamed vegetables with tofu. We're told that 60 to 70 percent of the risk for becoming obese lies in genes inherited from our parents but that these genes don't act in a vacuum; how they're expressed depends on...

By Johanna Kaiser, Town Correspondent Half a dozen Bunker Hill Community College students have been recognized for their school work in science and engineering. The Society of Latino Engineers and Scientists recognized six of the college's students for their academic achievements at an awards ceremony last month. The students--Alejandra Marin, Lewis Taveras, Ana Keough, Hudson Gloria, Kamila Souza, and Luis Rodrigues--were honored along with students from MIT, Harvard University, Tufts University, Suffolk University, Boston...

RE "THANKS, Obama, but wealth is not theft" (Op-ed, May 6): It's sad that the CEO of today requires a multimillion-dollar performance bonus to run a company properly, like a child whose parents have fallen into the trap of paying him to clean his room. Mark Lutton Brookline, N.H.

WHO: Globe writer James H. Burnett III, his wife, and toddler son WHERE: Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary WHAT: Bird-watching, interacting with animals, hiking nature trails, and sampling farm work. You don't have to look far in Greater Boston to find an animal to watch or pet. Between the pound, the zoo, and your neighbors' backyards, there's plenty of four-legged fodder. But if you want an educational experience with your animal ogling, there may be no better place in New England than Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, the headquarters of the Massachusetts...

Mariano Malave was not the worst kid in the world, but all he wanted to do was smoke weed. To smoke it all the time he had to sell it all the time, and as he was not invisible he was frequently arrested by members of the Boston Police Department. This brought him into regular and unavoidable contact with Trina Higgins, a probation officer at Dorchester District Court. Higgins has been around the block and can tell the difference between a banger and a kid who is just hopelessly stuck in a rut, and it was in that second category that she placed Mariano.

By Justin A. Rice, Globe Correspondent Sport in Society at Northeastern University and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association will begin accepting applications for an anti-bullying leadership training initiative Tuesday. With support from the PI Garden Fund, a two-day summer training institute on anti-bullying leadership and education will train student-athletes, adult advocates, and community members on how to create a bully-free culture in their schools.

WASHINGTON -- Judy Mann, a longtime columnist for The Washington Post who often wrote about issues facing women in American society, died Friday. She was 61. Ms. Mann was suffering from breast cancer when she died at a hospital in Palm Springs, Calif., where she and her husband had a home, her daughter, Katherine Mann, said in a statement. Ms. Mann retired from the Post at the end of 2001 after writing a column for the paper for more than 23 years. She told readers that she was fortunate to have been able to have a voice over concerns that were frequently unpopular and at odds with...

Understanding the American consumer society--how we shop, what advertising does to us, why certain stores and products stick and others don't--has become an obsession of economists, marketers, even psychologists. What we consume offers insights into not only the wider culture, but also our own personal values and motives. In today's society, data abound to answer such questions. But there's another way to explore American consumerism: by going through the trash. Americans' buying habits have deep roots, and when it comes to telling the longer story of American consumption, archeology...

Former Governor Mike Dukakis and wife Kitty made the scene at the New England Historic Genealogical Society's annual dinner at the Four Seasons. The couple was presented with a detailed genealogical history of their families by NEHGS president D. Brenton Simons. Coincidentally, Dukakis and his wife are just back from a trip tracing their family histories. (For him, that meant the Greek Islands, and for her it was Hungary, France, and Germany.) Guests included Dukakis's onetime political rival John Sears, Susan Sloan, John Cabot, Henry Lee, and Bill Crozier.

NEW YORK - John A. Hoyt, who made the Humane Society of the United States the largest anticruelty organization in the country in an era in which changing cultural attitudes were greatly expanding the number of animal protection groups, died April 15 in Fredericksburg, Va. He was 80. The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare brain disorder, said his daughter Peggy Hoyt. Mr. Hoyt, who was president and chief executive of the Humane Society from 1970 to 1996, was best known for expanding its traditional stewardship over dogs and...