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In Defense of Spoilers
The Atlantic: Last October, one week after the Breaking Bad series finale, I was having breakfast with a friend in Chicago. "Do not tell me the end of the Breaking Bad," he said. "I just started Season 2 and I have been off the Internet for the last few days. Total blackout. I've stopped following the news just to stay away from spoilers. Do not say a word." "It was a great episode," I said. "No, not another word," he responded. "Seriously." Forty-five minutes later, after coffee and pancakes, I glanced at my phone and starting giggling at the table. "What is it," he said. Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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Eating Comfort Foods May Not Be So Comforting After All
NPR: For many of us, chicken soup can soothe the soul and mac and cheese can erase a bad day. We eat chocolate when we feel gloomy, or when we've been in the presence of a Dementor. And we eat chocolate ice cream to help us get over a bad breakup. These comfort foods usually aren't so good for our arteries, but we tend to think they have healing properties — that they're the antidote for all our emotional afflictions. But maybe they're not, says Traci Mann, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. In a recent study, Mann and some colleagues induced a bad mood in 100 college students by making them watch clips from sad movies.
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Positive Implicit Messages May Improve Older Adults’ Physical Functioning
Older adults who were exposed to positive stereotypes about aging without being aware of it showed improved physical functioning that lasted up to several weeks, according to research forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. A team of researchers led by psychological scientist Becca Levy of the Yale School of Public Health used a novel intervention method to examine whether exposure to positive age stereotypes could weaken negative age stereotypes and their effects over time, and lead to healthier outcomes.
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WHAT WE LEARNED FROM SENDING 1,000 COLD EMAILS
Fast Company: Cold emails can be awful. And yet--we’ve formed valuable mentor relationships via cold email. As journalists, cold emails are often our only avenue for reaching important sources; in our businesses, cold emails are frequently how we make sales and drive growth. The point of cold email is typically to get something out of someone else. And yet, as Adam Grant finds in his 2013 book, Give and Take, “Givers” tend to be far more successful salespeople and engineers and entrepreneurs and humans than “Takers” who are out for themselves. So how does one reconcile the inherent “Taker” nature of cold email with the desire to be more successful (and make the world less crappy)?
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Are Angry People Also Angry Drivers? Not Necessarily
Whether you’re a driver, a pedestrian, or a cyclist, chances are you’ve had at least a few first-hand experiences with someone with an anger problem behind the wheel. Aggressive driving, which includes deliberately driving unsafely in order to punish or get even with someone, is a major road hazard. A study from the AAA Foundation looking at more than 10,000 road rage incidents found that altercations between angry drivers resulted in at least 218 murders and another 12,610 injury cases over the course of seven years.
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Remember Me: Personal Legacy and Global Warming
Later this month, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change will release its fifth and latest assessment of the scientific evidence regarding human interference in the world’s climate. Based on the working papers that have preceded this final synthesis, the IPCC will echo the alarms of earlier assessments—that global warming is unequivocal and unprecedented and extremely likely to have been caused by human activity. The report will call for new policies to mitigate climate change and the likelihood of severe and irreversible consequences.
