National Post

Toddler fight club: Daycare workers arrested after allegedly encouraging children to punch each other
Three daycare workers in Delaware have been arrested for allegedly encouraging toddlers to fight each other.

Police said they were shocked when they came across a video that recorded a fight between two three-year-olds while investigating another matter.

In the video, one child is heard yelling, “He’s pinching me.” A daycare worker allegedly responded, “No pinching, only punching.” (AP Photo/Jason Minto)

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Chuck Palahniuk writes a Hell of a story
For Madison Spencer, the 13-year-old narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel Damned, the most unpleasant thing about being doomed to Hell isn’t the “noxious Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm,” or even the giant, flesh-eating demons, but rather, endless screenings of The English Patient.

Not that Palahniuk, 49, wants to start a literary beef with Canadian author Michael Ondaatje, whose book the movie is based on. “I just wanted something that Madison would not really appreciate,” he says over the phone from his home in Portland, Ore. “And that’s a movie that was kind of a slog to get through, so Madison and I agree on that point.”

Besides, it seems nothing is safe from satire in the Fight Club author’s 12th novel, which can best be described as a cross between Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club and Dante’s Inferno. Like the latter, Damned is the first book in a planned trilogy, and Palahniuk says he’s almost finished writing the second. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

Spoiler alert: Why knowing the ending isn’t always a bad thing
Bruce Willis is dead. Edward Norton is Tyler Durden. Clint Eastwood pulls the plug: As annoying as it can be, finding out how films end may not be such a downer after all. According to research carried out at UC San Diego, spoilers may actually enhance our enjoyment.

Nicholas Christenfeld, a professor of psychology at the California university, and his student Jonathan Leavitt recently tested the effect of spoilers using short stories, and their results will be published in the upcoming issue of Psychological Science. The study had three groups of participants: one that read the stories unaltered, one that read versions of the stories that had spoilers embedded in them, and one that was given a spoiler paragraph before they even started the story.

Although the embedded paragraph had no effect, it turns out that the subjects who knew how the stories would end before picking them up enjoyed them the most.

“The margin’s small,” says Christenfeld, referring to enjoyment numbers. “It’s not a huge effect — it’s not the case that you make people indifferent or ecstatic with spoilers. But, there’s a significant uptick in pleasure on the 10-point scale. … And [participants are] reading the exact same story, so any movement is interesting, and of course, this is in the opposite direction from what you’d expect.”