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No, Mornings Don’t Make You Moral
The New Yorker: e idea of the virtuous early bird goes back at least to Aristotle, who wrote, in his Economics, that “Rising before daylight is … to be commended; it is a healthy habit.” Benjamin Franklin, of course, framed the same sentiment in catchier terms: “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise.” More recently, there has been a push for ever earlier work starts, conference calls, and breakfast meetings, and a steady stream of advice to leave Twitter and Facebook to the afternoon and spend the morning getting real things done.
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Angry Tweets Predict Patterns Of Heart Disease, Researchers Say
NPR: Let's go from art to science. Our colleague Shankar Vedantam regularly joins us on the program to talk about social science research. And today, he chats with our colleague David Greene about heart disease. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Not just heart disease, heart disease and Twitter, David. Heart disease and Twitter. OK, tell me more. VEDANTAM: David, there's been a lot of interest recently in using technology to track diseases.
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When Job Hunting, Make Sure Your Voice Is Heard
New York Magazine: Some people are really good at getting their foot in the doors of prospective employers, even when there aren't any jobs available: They'll aggressively seek out informational interviews, lunch, or coffee with the people who make hiring decisions, and so on. As someone who has always lacked this level of initiative when job hunting, I've often wondered whether there are some limits to this approach. Doesn't it sometimes come off as overbearing?
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The Psychology of the Firefighter
The Huffington Post: Firefighters experience a steady onslaught of trauma and intense human emotion. Perilous flames, collapsing buildings, the anguish of burn victims, explosions, automobile accidents, suicide attempts, and even terrorist attacks, dismemberment and death. Such harrowing events come with the territory of first responders. It would seem that such repeated exposure to adversity must, over time, take a psychological toll, challenging even the most seasoned firefighters. Yet that doesn't seem to be the case.
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Shutterbug Parents and Overexposed Lives
The New York Times: In “The Entire History of You,” the third episode of the dystopian British series “Black Mirror,” humans have developed implanted memory “grains” that record everything they see and hear. When users “redo” a memory by playing it back, the recreation even surpasses the original; they can zoom in on details or activate a lip-reading function to decipher unheard speech. I thought of the episode when a friend showed me some pictures and videos of his two young children. There is more visual documentation of his kids from the last couple of months than of my entire childhood in the ’80s and ’90s. They’re growing up in a world far closer to one of grains and redos. ...
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To Make Better Decisions, Pretend You’re Deciding for Someone Else
New York Magazine: Perhaps the very last person you should turn to for advice is yourself, according to a new post from the Association for Psychological Science, which references research published last year in Psychological Science. We tend to make wiser decisions when thinking about someone else's problems than when thinking about our own issues, researchers from the University of Waterloo and the University of Michigan found, but there's a way around this. Think through your own decisions from a third-person perspective, suggest the researchers, led by Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
