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The Happiness of Pursuit
TIME: If you’re an American and you’re not having fun, it just might be your own fault. Our long national expedition is entering its 238th year, and from the start, it was clear that this would be a bracing place to live. There would be plenty of food, plenty of land, plenty of minerals in the mountains and timber in the wilderness. You might have to work hard, but you’d have a grand time doing it. That promise, for the most part, has been kept. There would be land rushes and gold rushes and wagon trains and riverboats and cities built hard against cities until there was no place to build but up, so we went in that direction too.
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Why Brainteasers Don’t Belong in Job Interviews
The New Yorker: Imagine that you are the captain of a pirate ship. You’ve captured some booty, and you need to divide it among your crew. But first the crew will vote on your plan. If you have the support of fewer than half of them, you will die. How do you propose to divide the gold, so that you still have some for yourself—but live to tell the tale? ... This phenomenon is broadly known as “thin-slice” judgment. As early as 1937, Gordon Allport, a pioneer of personality psychology, argued that we constantly form sweeping opinions of others based on incredibly limited information and exposure.
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A (New And Revised) Silver Linings Playbook
The Huffington Post: The Serenity Prayer is the cornerstone of many addiction recovery programs, including Alcoholics Anonymous. Borrowed from the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, it is most often recited this way today: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." ... But psychological scientist Iris Mauss, of UC Berkeley, doesn't believe that cognitive reappraisal tells the whole story. Aren't there circumstances, she wondered, when such a coping strategy is self-defeating, when acceptance and reappraisal keep us from taking charge of our lives?
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50 Shades of Gray Matter
The Chronicle of Higher Education: You’ve seen the headlines: This is your brain on God, envy, cocaine. And you’ve seen the evidence: slices of brain with Technicolor splotches lit up like the Las Vegas Strip. On average, one new book about the brain appears every week. In universities, new disciplines of neuroeconomics, neuroaesthetics, and neurolaw are flourishing. “If Warhol were around today, he’d have a series of silkscreens dedicated to the cortex; the amygdala would hang alongside Marilyn Monroe,” one observer quipped. It is easy to see why the brain is a hot commodity.
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Why Stage Parents Push Their Kids
TIME: In the first study to experimentally investigate the phenomenon, researchers say it’s the unfulfilled ambitions of moms and dads that fuel their pushy parenting. Tigers moms and sports dads, according to the investigation published in the journal PLOS One, are trying to mitigate their own failures by living through their children.
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How Reading Makes Us More Human
The Atlantic: A battle over books has erupted recently on the pages of The New York Times and Time. The opening salvo was Gregory Currie's essay, "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" which asserts that the widely held belief that reading makes us more moral has little support. In response, Annie Murphy Paul weighed in with "Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer." Her argument is that "deep reading," the kind of reading great literature requires, is a distinctive cognitive activity that contributes to our ability to empathize with others; it therefore can, in fact, makes us "smarter and nicer," among other things.
