From afar, America’s presidential contests often look more like playground antics than a shining example of democracy. But looks can be deceiving.
Author: Denis MacShane
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2008)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, International, Politics & Public Policy
“Pollsters and pundits” has become a dismissive epithet in modern politics. Pollsters, at least, deserve much better.
Author: Scott Keeter
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2008)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy
Eating “green” is not so easy.
Authors: Christopher L. Weber, H. Scott Matthews
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2008)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Environment | Sustainability, Excerpts, Food
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
A self-schema is the information and beliefs you hold about yourself. This cognitive framework influences how you feel, how you react, your actual behavior, and your perception of your place in the world.
How your self-schema influences your actions can be nuanced: For example, you may have internalized that you’re not athletic during childhood — and then, later in life, limit yourself when you want to … [ Read more ]
Author: Sarah Sloat
Source: Inverse (April 22, 2025)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
An excerpt from the book, The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics.
A wide range of academic scholarship exploring political belief-formation reveals that those who identify themselves as politically conservative, for example, exhibit distinctive values underpinning their world view and their orientation towards political competition.
Conservatives, argues researcher Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, are less tolerant of compromise; … [ Read more ]
Author: Thomas B. Edsall
Source: The Atlantic (February 6, 2012)
Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy
Max Weber wondered how the leaders of states derive legitimacy, the claim to rule rightfully. He thought it boiled down to two choices. One is rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms…
The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” … [ Read more ]
Author: Jonathan Rauch
Source: The Atlantic (February 24, 2025)
Subjects: America, Excerpts, International, Politics & Public Policy, Trump
Populism is never separate from this “voice of passion.” That is its defining characteristic. It begins in deep grievance. Some of those grievances can be quite real and consequential — such as when modern populist anger is rooted in fury over the Great Recession, long wars in the Middle East or shuttered factories in the Midwest.
Some of the problems, however, that motivate populists aren’t problems … [ Read more ]
Author: David French
Source: The New York Times (February 9, 2025)
Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Trump
Because complex goods and services require much planning and coordination, management (even though it is only indirectly productive) adds a great deal of value. And managers as a class capture much of this value as pay. This makes the question of who gets to be a manager extremely consequential.
[…]
Middle managers, able to plan and coordinate production independently of elite-executive control, shared not just the … [ Read more ]
Author: Daniel Markovits
Source: The Atlantic (February2020)
Subjects: Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Author: Julie Beck
Source: The Atlantic (June 10, 2022)
Subjects: Excerpts, Family & Friends, Life & Society
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
—
“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
Cognitive flexibility is a skill that enables us to switch between different concepts, or to adapt behaviour to achieve goals in a novel or changing environment. It is essentially about learning to learn and being able to be flexible about the way you learn. This includes changing strategies for optimal decision-making.
[…]
Cognitive flexibility provides us with the ability to see that what we are doing is … [ Read more ]
Authors: Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, Christelle Langley, Victoria Leong
Source: The Conversation (June 21, 2021)
Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Thought | Inquiry
The value flows from corporations to households through eight different pathways. If you take a dollar of revenue that the average corporation generates, 25 cents of that flows through as labor income: wages, salaries, and other benefits to employees. Seven cents of that dollar goes to capital income, meaning dividends, share buybacks, and interest payments to debtholders. Six cents goes to investment—earnings that are retained … [ Read more ]
Authors: Clarisse Magnin-Mallez, Michael Birshan, Sean Brown
Source: McKinsey Quarterly (November 12, 2021)
Subjects: Business, Economics | Economy, Excerpts
Since the 1950s, political scientists have theorized that political polarization—increased numbers of “political partisans” who view the world with an ideological bias—is associated with an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world.
But little is known about the biological mechanisms through which such biased perceptions arise.
To investigate that question, scientists measured and compared the brain activity of committed partisans … [ Read more ]
Authors: Corrie Pikul-Brown, David J. Halpern, Jeroen van Baar, Oriel FeldmanHall
Source: Futurity (May 14, 2021)
Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
Since 1992, people have been talking about “Dunbar’s number,” the supposed upper limit of the number of people with whom a person can maintain stable social relationships. Named for British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, its value, rounded from 148 to 150, has permeated both professional and popular culture. […] It’s also probably wrong. Despite its fame, Dunbar’s number has always been controversial. A new study … [ Read more ]
Authors: Robin Dunbar, Scotty Hendricks
Source: Big Think (May2021)
Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty.
Risk Compensation
One of the most important problems undermining the pandemic response has been the mistrust and paternalism that some public-health agencies … [ Read more ]
Author: Zeynep Tufekci
Source: The Atlantic (February 26, 2021)
Subjects: Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy
Forty-two percent of Americans say that humans were created in their present form within the past 10,000 years — a percentage that hasn’t changed much since 1982, when Gallup started polling views on evolution.
Several lines of evidence, from the fossil record, comparative anatomy, and genetics, tell another story. But you don’t have to read all the research to find signs of our evolutionary history — … [ Read more ]
Sources: Vox, YouTube (March 17, 2016)
Subjects: Health & Medicine, Math & Science
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
Just over a decade ago, in their paper “Hypotheses on Status Competition,” William C. Wohlforth and David C. Kang, professors of government at Dartmouth and the University of Southern California, wrote that “social status is one of the most important motivators of human behavior” and yet “over the past 35 years, no more … [ Read more ]
Author: Thomas B. Edsall
Source: The New York Times (December 9, 2020)
Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Motivation, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became… The illusion of control is what prevented … [ Read more ]
Authors: Maria Konnikova, Maria Popova
Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 8, 2020)
Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The divide between urban and rural voters is growing everywhere: from New York City to farm towns.
Authors: Ian Chipman, Jonathan Rodden
Source: Stanford University (May 2, 2017)
Subjects: America, Excerpts, International, Politics & Public Policy
Originalism sells itself as a way of constraining judges. But it’s more often a way of unleashing them.
Author: Ian Millhiser
Source: Vox (October 12, 2020)
Subjects: Excerpts, Law | Legal
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, it will set off tectonic shifts in the American political landscape not seen since the civil-rights movement—or perhaps even the Civil War.
Author: Jeffrey Rosen
Source: The Atlantic (June2006)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Law | Legal, 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
By the close of the 1990s the United States had become more unequal than at any other time since the dawn of the New Deal—indeed, it was the most unequal society in the advanced democratic world. The top 20 percent of households earned 56 percent of the nation’s income and commanded an astonishing 83 percent of the nation’s wealth. Even more striking, the top one … [ Read more ]
Author: Ray Boshara
Source: The Atlantic (January2003)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy
Alec Nevala-Lee, author of Astounding, a forthcoming book on the history of science fiction, digs into the writing career of L. Ron Hubbard, gaining new insights into the life of the controversial founder of dianetics and the origins and nature of Scientology itself.
Source: Longreads (February 1, 2017)
Subjects: Excerpts, Literature | Arts, Religion
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