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
Why asset bubbles are a part of the human condition that regulation can’t cure.
Author: Virginia Postrel | Source: The Atlantic (December2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Culture, Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
Human beings are creatures of mimicry. We are evolutionarily supercharged to do one thing better than anyone else: learn by watching and copying others. And the most important thing we learn is how to want.
As we grow up and live our lives, we watch others and learn what it is we ought to want. Aside from the basics, like food, water, shelter and sex, our … [ Read more ]
Author: Alex Danco | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
The savanna theory of happiness is the idea that life satisfaction is not only determined by what’s happening in the present but also influenced by the ways our ancestors may have reacted to the event. Evolutionary psychology argues that, just like any other organ, the human brain has been designed for and adapted to the conditions of an ancestral environment. Therefore, the researchers argue, our … [ Read more ]
Author: Sarah Sloat | Source: Inverse (December 6, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Happiness, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
In his new book, historian Rutger Bregman argues that people are actually fundamentally good.
Author: Mike Jakeman | Source: strategy+business (June 12, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology
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
The rapid expansion of relief efforts since the end of the Cold War has produced a surprising result: a series of difficult moral questions about the humanitarian enterprise.
Author: G. Pascal Zachary | Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Summer2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Foreign Policy, International, Life & Society, Philanthropy, Politics & Public Policy, Sociology | Anthropology
How the emergence of IQ tests contracted rather than expanding our understanding of intelligence and what we can do to transcend their perilous cultural legacy is what practicing physician, research scientist, and Pulitzer-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee explores throughout The Gene: An Intimate History — a rigorously researched, beautifully written detective story about the genetic components of what we experience as the self.
[…]
A crucial agent in … [ Read more ]
Authors: Maria Popova, Siddhartha Mukherjee | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 30, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Race Relations, Sociology | Anthropology
We can identify four “turnings” that each last about 20 years — the length of a generation. Think of these as recurring seasons, starting with spring and ending with winter. In every turning, a new generation is born and each older generation ages into its next phase of life.
Author: Neil Howe | Source: The Washington Post (February 24, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Foreign Policy, History, Politics & Public Policy, Sociology | Anthropology
The Strange New Pathologies of the World’s First Rich Failed State
Author: Umair Haque | Source: Eudaimonia (January 25, 2018) | Subjects: America, Articles & Links, Excerpts, International, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology
Lines can bring fairness and order to what might otherwise be a free-for-all. There’s even a science, called queuing theory, that examines the optimal ways to make lines move equitably and efficiently. But they don’t always work that way; sometimes, they can operate to institutionalize unfairness and inequality. That’s why Arlie Russell Hochschild uses lines as a metaphor for the challenges facing contemporary American society … [ Read more ]
Author: Nitin Nohria | Source: The Atlantic (December 2, 2017) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
Theories of international relations
Of the large range of theories that have emerged on how states get along with each other, or not as the case may be, I will draw, in simplified terms, on two leading schools today: liberalism and structural realism.
Author: Michael A. Witt | Source: Insead Knowledge (January 2, 2017) | Subjects: Excerpts, Foreign Policy, History, International, Military | War | Peace, Politics & Public Policy, Sociology | Anthropology
Despite his enormous contributions to science, Albert Einstein was no reclusive genius, his ever-eager conversations and correspondence engaging such diverse partners as the Indian philosopher Tagore and a young South African girl who wanted to be a scientist. In 1931, the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited the renowned physicist to a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas about politics and peace with a thinker of his choosing. … [ Read more ]
Authors: Albert Einstein, Maria Popova, Sigmund Freud | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (May 6, 2013) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Military | War | Peace, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
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
[The] trend toward rationality and enlightenment was endangered long before the advent of the Internet. As Neil Postman noted in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the rise of television introduced not just a new medium but a new discourse: a gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn meant a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment. … [ Read more ]
Author: Hossein Derakhshan | Source: WIRED (October 19, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Communication, Culture, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, 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
Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict – and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong.
Author: Sarah Smarsh | Source: The Guardian (October 13, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Journalism, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Sociology | Anthropology
When she was 30, Suzy Hansen left the US for Istanbul – and began to realize that Americans will never understand their own country until they see it as the rest of the world does.
Author: Suzy Hansen | Source: The Guardian (August 8, 2017) | Subjects: America, Culture, Demographics, Excerpts, International, Life & Society, Race Relations, Sociology | Anthropology
Certain universal moral precepts may be biologically dictated as well. One such rule is at play in an ethical puzzle known as “the trolley problem.” Researchers pose the dilemma to subjects this way: A trolley barreling down a hill is headed straight for five people who have been tied to the tracks, but you can pull a switch to move the trolley onto a path … [ Read more ]
Author: Marc D. Hauser | Sources: Nature, The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2009) | Note(s): Original Source: “The Possibility of Impossible Cultures” | Nature, July 9, 2009. | Subjects: Articles & Links, Culture, Sociology | Anthropology