What would you do if your son wanted to be a girl? Some doctors have a new and troubling answer.
Author: Hanna Rosin | Source: The Atlantic (November2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Individuality, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
Airport security in America is a sham—“security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease.
Author: Jeffrey Goldberg | Source: The Atlantic (November2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Terrorism
Fact-checking was a theme of Donald Trump’s first presidency. Journalists kept count of those first-term fictions—30,573 in all, per one count—guided by the optimism that checking the president’s words might also serve as a check on his power. In late 2020, when Trump claimed victory in the presidential election he had lost, scholars saw in his declaration the kind of propaganda … [ Read more ]
Author: Megan Garber | Source: The Atlantic (April 29, 2025) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Concepts, Life & Society, News | Media | Publishing, Politics & Public Policy, Truth | Right | Wrong
We feel our way through life, then rationalize our actions, as if emotion were a shameful scar on the countenance of reason. […] Our emotional lives [are] the root of our motives beneath the topsoil of reason and rationalization. – Maria Popova
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We suffer primarily because we are so insentient to our own emotions, so illiterate in reading ourselves. – Maria Popova
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The main difficulty that faces … [ Read more ]
Authors: John Macmurray, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Senses, Thought | Inquiry
“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” – William James
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“Nothing we do or experience … is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that … [ Read more ]
Authors: Andy Clark, Maria Popova, William James | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Insight, Psychology | Behavior, Senses, Thought | Inquiry
Psychologist and law professor Dan Kahan and his collaborators have described two phenomena that affect the ways in which people form different beliefs from the same information.
The first is called “identity-protective cognition.” This describes how individuals are motivated to adopt the empirical beliefs of groups they identify with in order to signal that they belong.
The second is “cultural cognition”: people tend to say that a … [ Read more ]
Author: James Steiner-Dillon | Source: The Conversation (March 2, 2023) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
As the Republican Party evolves from a party focused on individual liberty and limits on government power to a party that more fully embraces government control of the economy and morality, it is reversing many of its previous stances on free speech in public universities, in public education, and in private corporations. Driven by a combination of partisan animosity and public fear, it is embracing … [ Read more ]
Author: David French | Source: The Atlantic (April 11, 2022) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Freedom | Liberty, Politics & Public Policy
Logic is the bedrock of pretty much all human knowledge. As such, philosophers have killed many trees over the centuries, analyzing and determining the principles that define logic and reason. Their ambition has been to determine what we can know to be true and what we cannot know to be true.
What most people don’t realize is that logical fallacies—that is, errors in judgment and reasoning—are … [ Read more ]
Author: Mark Manson | Subjects: Communication, Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy, Thought | Inquiry
Years before Walter Lippmann explored stereotypes and the psychology of prejudice, rooted in the disquieting fact that “we do not first see, and then define, [but] define first and then see,” and decades before Hannah Arendt observed that “society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed” before she … [ Read more ]
Authors: Elsie Clews Parsons, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (March 11, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Immigration, Life & Society, Power, Sociology | Anthropology
Third World poverty may often be a contributing factor in terrorism, but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause, argues Richard K. Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University […] “Economic development in an area where the political and religious impulses remain unresolved could serve to improve the resource base for terrorism rather than undercut it.”
[…]
Terrorism is … [ Read more ]
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Summer2002) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Foreign Policy, International, Terrorism
When people want to believe that the world is just, and that bad things won’t happen to them, empathy can suffer.
Author: Kayleigh Roberts | Source: The Atlantic (October 5, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior
Doctors Haidt and Graham […] argue that there is great debate over the nature of right and wrong, but that the debate is over the meaning of five moral foundations rather than over what morality is — most of the time. Those five foundations are:
Author: Scotty Hendricks | Source: Big Think (April 1, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Excerpts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Values
In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.
As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function … [ Read more ]
Authors: Hunter S. Thompson, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 4, 2013) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Career, Excerpts, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement
My question … was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?” Differently expressed,
Authors: Leo Tolstoy, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (June 3, 2014) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Meaning, Philosophy, Psychology | Behavior, Religion
According to Emily Esfahani Smith, happiness arises from a deep sense of contentment rather than the incessant and unyielding grasping for pleasure. This contentment can be derived by seeking, cultivating, and maintaining the four pillars of meaning,
Author: Derek Beres | Source: Big Think (January 23, 2018) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Happiness, Meaning, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
As Ruth Bader Ginsburg, quoting a California judicial opinion, told the Supreme Court in 1971, “the pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.” When we declare that men will always be brutes and women can only shrug from on high, we engage in what President George W. Bush once called the soft bigotry … [ Read more ]
Author: Irin Carmon | Source: The New York Times (December 9, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Feminism, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
In 1908, Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das wrote to Leo Tolstoy, by then one of the most famous public figures in the world, asking for the author’s support in India’s independence from British colonial rule. On December 14, Tolstoy, who had spent the last twenty years seeking the answers to life’s greatest moral questions, was moved to reply in a long letter, which Das published in … [ Read more ]
Author: Leo Tolstoy | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 21, 2014) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Freedom | Liberty, History, Life & Society, Love, Sociology | Anthropology
“What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.”
Authors: Joseph Brodsky, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (October 25, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Good & Evil, Insight, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology