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Time to Write? Go Outside
The New York Times: Fall promises crisp days with ample sunlight, a lifting of the humidity and ideal temperatures for being outdoors. This also means my writing will be getting better. Nothing coaxes jumbled thoughts into coherent sentences like sitting under a shade tree on a pleasant day. With a slight breeze blowing, birds chirping melodies, wee bugs scurrying around me and a fully charged laptop or yellow legal pad at hand, I know I’ll produce my best work. I stumbled upon my ideal writing conditions quite by accident.
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You Call That Aggressive? Not Compared to ‘Grand Theft Auto’!
Pacific Standard: Early Tuesday morning, a Londoner bought one of the first available copies of the highly anticipated, just-released Grand Theft Auto V—and was mugged on his way home. While the K word (hint: It rhymes with “pharma”) immediately comes to mind, it’s impossible to know if the assailant who made off with the game—which, The New York Times reports, begins “with an extended bout of cop killing”—was a personal fan of the crime-heavy series, or simply a thug planning to sell it on the black market. But over the past few years, a whole lot of research has found a link between playing violent video games and aggressive thoughts and behaviors.
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Smart Teenage Brains May Get Some Extra Learning Time
NPR: John Hewitt is a neuroscientist who studies the biology of intelligence. He's also a parent. Over the years, Hewitt has periodically drawn upon his scientific knowledge in making parenting decisions. "I'm a father of four children myself and I never worried too much about the environments that I was providing for my children because I thought, well, it would all work out in the end anyway — aren't the genes especially powerful?" Hewitt says. ... What Hewitt, director of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado, is talking about is a new understanding of the interplay between your genetic inheritance and how you learn from the environment.
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An Honest Wage: Dollars, Hours, And Ethics
The Huffington Post: In the nation's capital this month, Mayor Vincent Gray vetoed legislation that would have forced large retailers to pay more than the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour. Gray was under pressure from Wal-Mart, which threatened not to expand operations in Washington if the so-called "living wage" bill were passed. Passionate debate on the issue has dominated the local news for months. This debate took me back to when I was a young man, working in a thread factory for $1.60 an hour. That was the minimum wage at the time, just raised from $1.40 the year before. I was a student, living on nothing, so I didn't need a living wage.
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To Help a Shy Child, Listen
The New York Times: Toward the end of the summer, I was seeing a middle-school girl for a physical. The notes from a clinic visit last spring said she was a good student but didn’t talk enough in class. So I asked her: Is this still a problem for you? I’m shy, she said. I’m just shy. Should I have turned to her mother and suggested — a counselor? An academic evaluation? Should I have probed further? How do you feel in school, do you have some friends, is anybody bullying you? Or should I have said: Lots of people are shy. It’s one of the healthy, normal styles of being human. ...
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Why Paying Kids to Do Homework Can Backfire
TIME: Money talks, right? So why should kids be any less susceptible to what the dollars are telling them? They aren’t, and that’s the problem. Enticing kids with monetary rewards for reading books or performing well on tests is certainly tempting for parents, especially if their children are game. But the latest studies on paying kids to do academic tasks like reading more books, or to improve test scores found a negligible to zero positive effect on their standardized test results, and other measures of academic performance. ...
