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How Environment Can Boost Creativity
The Atlantic: It took F. Scott Fitzgerald nearly a decade to finish Tender is the Night, his semi-autobiographical novel about the physical, financial, and moral decline of a man with nearly limitless potential. While working on the novel, Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, moved between France, Switzerland, and the United States, eventually spending eighteen months at La Paix, an old country house north of Baltimore that he rented while Zelda was treated for schizophrenia at a nearby clinic. The Turnbull family owned the estate, and Andrew Turnbull, who was 11 at the time, later recounted Fitzgerald’s stay in his biography, Scott Fitzgerald. ... Kathleen D.
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Religious or not, we all misbehave
Science: Benjamin Franklin tracked his prideful, sloppy, and gluttonous acts in a daily journal, marking each moral failing with a black ink dot. Now, scientists have devised a modern update to Franklin’s little book, using smart phones to track the sins and good deeds of more than 1200 people. The new data—among the first to be gathered on moral behavior outside of the lab—confirm what psychologists have long suspected: Religious and nonreligious people are equally prone to immoral acts.
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Beware of Joy
The New York Times: If you’re a defensive pessimist (or even just a regular pessimist), you may already be familiar with the phenomenon known as “fear of happiness.” If you’re not, Bettina Chang of Pacific Standard offers a baseball-related example: “Give me a game where my team is winning in the final seconds, and I’ll enumerate the ways to lose the lead before it’s over. It’s come to the point where I get more anxious when my team is winning than when it is losing.
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Morning person, or night owl? It matters
Marketplace: It can be hard to do the right thing, the ethical thing — especially if you’re tired. That's something Chuck Collins, a 38-year-old bouncer, knows all about. By day — or by afternoon, really, if you've got an eye on the clock — he's a comic book artist. But come night, he's standing post at the Bleecker Street Bar in Soho. “I've gone to people and told them, 'Look — listen, I’m too tired to deal with it right now,' because at this point this is gone," he says, pointing to his head. "You need to leave or something bad is going to happen to you.” ...
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For Heartache, Take 2 Aspirin and Call Me in the Morning
New York Magazine: Heartache. A broken heart. A hurtful breakup. Is the language we use to describe the pain of romantic rejection just a metaphor, or could it capture a biological reality? That’s a question scientists are beginning to explore. In a 2011 experiment, people who had recently experienced an unwanted breakup viewed a photograph of their ex-partner and thought about their rejection. As they did this, their brains were being scanned by fMRI. In another condition, the same individuals experienced intense physical pain from thermal stimulation to their forearm.
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The joys of grazing
The Guardian: “The commonest thing is delightful, if only one hides it,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Perhaps this is why illicit fridge grazing – that slice of ham folded swiftly into the mouth and washed down with a glug of juice, straight from the bottle – is such a delightful pastime. “Don’t pick,” my mother used to tell me, shooing me out of the kitchen. But I live for picking – a habit that inspires disgust and irritation in equal measure. When I cook, my chef’s tasting gets out of control because snatched morsels and licked spoons are too tempting. Everything tastes better in a sneaky forkful, consumed when passing the stove, fridge or cupboard.
