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Norman Lear, Common, Shonda Rhimes To Explore Inequality In Epix Documentary Series

Norman Lear, Common, Shonda Rhimes To Explore Inequality In Epix Documentary Series

By Meredith Blake, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Super-producers Norman Lear and Shonda Rhimes will team with celebrities including Amy Poehler and Common for a documentary series on Epix exploring inequality, the network announced Tuesday.

The series, America Divided, will feature celebrity correspondents including Lear, Common, Poehler, Zach Galifianakis and America Ferrera investigating aspects of social, economic and political division. The series will premiere on the premium cable network in fall 2016.

“We thought this was an amazing opportunity to help raise the level of the dialogue and focus the conversation on the inequities that exist in our country,” Epix Chief Executive Mark S. Greenberg told The Times.

“It’s all of deep concern and paramount interest,” added Lear, the producer behind such socially conscious, provocative sitcoms as All in the Family, Good Times and Maude. “The whole subject is a great part of my life.”

Lear and Common will executive produce with Rhimes. The series was created by Lucian Read, Solly Granatstein and Richard Rowley, who previously collaborated on Showtime’s climate change documentary series Years of Living Dangerously.

The series will air in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, but Lear, long associated with liberal politics, insists it is not advancing any particular agenda.

“I never think of myself as coming at it from any place but love of America,” he told The Times. “I’m not there to doubt anybody’s patriotism and I don’t think I have to wear a button to prove I’m an American and I care. This kind of involvement says much more than that button.”

The series will be made available at a later date on Hulu, Amazon and Sony Vue, widening its reach beyond the Epix subscriber base, Greenberg said.

©2016 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Norman Lear at Vicki Abelson’s Women Who Write. Louise Palanker via Flickr

Study: Married Couples Have More DNA In Common Than Random Pairs Of People

Study: Married Couples Have More DNA In Common Than Random Pairs Of People

By Monte Morin, Los Angeles Times

A study of white married couples in the U.S. — the majority of who were born in the 1930s — concluded that spouses are more genetically similar to each other than they are to random individuals.

In a paper published Monday in the journal PNAS, a team of social and behavior scientists investigated the statistical likelihood that people will marry someone with a similar genotype.

“It is well established that individuals are more similar to their spouses than other individuals on important traits, such as education level,” wrote lead study author Benjamin Domingue, a behavioral science researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues.

“The genetic similarity, or lack thereof, between spouses is less well understood,” authors wrote.

Study authors based their conclusion on data from 9,429 non-Hispanic white individuals in the ongoing Health and Retirement Study, which is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging.

The sample included 825 spousal pairs who were all born between 1920 and 1970. Fifty-nine percent were born during the 1930s, authors wrote.

Research also included the comparison of 1.7 million single nucleotide polymorphisms — the point at which a sequence of DNA differs between individuals.

Study authors said that while they did find that married couples were more genetically similar than randomly generated pairs of people in the same population, this similarity was just one-third the magnitude of educational similarity between spouses.

Study authors noted that their research was limited by the fact it focused on opposite-sex, non-Hispanic white couples within the United States, and said they encouraged further research.

“The results represented here only represent a first step in understanding the ways in which humans may assortively mate with respect to their genome,” authors wrote.

 AFP Photo/Ho