Customary marriage (nikāḥ ‘urfī)—non-official married life of a couple—is a new phenomenon increasingly spreading throughout the Arab world. Legal and social consequences of customary marriage have led many socio-jurisprudential scholars to forbid all its varieties. The strategy has, nevertheless, failed to restrain the spread of this type of marriage. In this paper, I argue that one f...

An auction is “a market institution with an explicit set of rules determining resource allocation and prices on the basis of bids from the market participants” (McAfee and McMillan, 1987).1 Auctions are among the oldest market institutions; “marriage auctions” for brides were used in Babylon as early as 500 BC. Products commonly bought and sold using auctions include art and jewelry, US Treasur...

BACKGROUND The health benefits of marriage have been demonstrated mainly by studies on Western populations. This study aims to test whether the benefits are also valid in East Asian populations. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Individuals (n = 8,538) from China, Japan, Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea were sampled from the 2006 East Asian Social Survey. The association between self-rated heal...

Now that some of the historic barriers to economic success for U.S. women and minorities have begun to fall, women and blacks, in particular, are moving upward on the nation's socioeconomic ladder. Melissa Kearney reviews evidence that improved economic opportunities for these two groups make sex and race less important than they once were in determining economic status. But sex- and race-based...

The Web relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to resolve the hostname portion of URLs into IP addresses. This marriage-of-convenience enabled the Web’s meteoric rise, but the resulting entanglement is now hindering both infrastructures—the Web is overly constrained by the limitations of DNS, and DNS is unduly burdened by the demands of the Web. There has been much commentary on this sad state-...

As an immediate form of modern ethnic and ethnocultural relations, we can refer to interethnic marriage. Taking into account the current polyethylene situation in countries Central Asia, it is clear that cross-cultural relations these regions have a special place. The purpose article determine whether marriage Asia contributes transformation family model changes many traditional ideas. Using st...