19 Posts found for source_month: November

Public anxiety over “excessive” consumer debt has a long, and misguided, history.

Author: Virginia Postrel | Source: The Atlantic (November2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Economics | Economy, Excerpts

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

An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind” another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy … [ Read more ]

Author: Paul Bloom | Source: The Atlantic (November2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior

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

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

Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there’s a third ingredient that’s not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.

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Which leads us to the second feature of this kind of obsession: there is no point. A bus ticket collector’s love is disinterested. They’re not doing it to impress us or to … [ Read more ]

Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Ability | Skill, Excerpts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

There are three major styles of attachment: secure, anxious and avoidant. […] A person’s attachment style is largely influenced by whether or not they bonded successfully with their primary caregivers – parents or otherwise – in childhood, though more recent research suggests that genes, and our romantic history as adults, may also be influential factors. Analysis of studies in North America and Europe found that … [ Read more ]

Author: Elle Hunt | Source: The Guardian (November 5, 2019) | Subjects: Character, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

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.

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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

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

“The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.” – Simone Weil

Nowhere do we muddle these two notions more liberally than in our treatment of democracy and its foundational principle of equality — a basic right to be conferred … [ Read more ]

Authors: C.S. Lewis, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 29, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

Setting aside the title, George Lakoff provides an interesting framework to explain fundamental differences between conservatives and liberals or progressives. Specifically, he introduces the idea of the Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative). He also discusses the folly of considering demographics vs. worldview or values and how that relates to specific issues.

Author: George Lakoff | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Trump

“The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different idealizations of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative).

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Many union members are strict fathers at home or in their private life. They believe in ‘traditional family values’ — a conservative code word — and … [ Read more ]

Author: George Lakoff | Source: The National Memo (November 27, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Trump

In short, it appears as though educational levels are the critical factor in predicting shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016. You can come to that conclusion with a relatively simple analysis, like the one I’ve conducted above, or by using fancier methods. In a regression analysis at the county level, for instance, lower-income counties were no more likely to shift to Trump once … [ Read more ]

Author: Nate Silver | Source: FiveThirtyEight (November 22, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Trump

Corporate Democrats have never advanced their interests—and at least Republicans offer a persuasive story about why they are getting screwed.

Author: Kirk Noden | Source: The Nation (November 17, 2016) | Subjects: America, Articles & Links, Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

So he won. The nation takes a deep breath. Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure.

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The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their … [ Read more ]

Author: Garrison Keillor | Source: The Washington Post (November 9, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Trump

The founders envisioned electors as people who could prevent an irresponsible demagogue from taking office.

Author: Peter Beinart | Source: The Atlantic (November 21, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, History, Politics & Public Policy, Trump

When a society has shed its crutches of inequality in a relatively short period — from finally recognizing the dignity of all love with marriage equality to finally taking stock of a generations-old wound with Black Lives Matter — vast swaths of the population are perhaps bound to find the rate of change intolerable, bound to find themselves tossed into a brave new world that … [ Read more ]

Authors: H.L. Mencken, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 11, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Politics & Public Policy

Here is a small treasury of excerpts from some of the addresses Theodore Roosevelt gave during his lifetime. When you look at anthologies of all his speeches, you find that the themes he hits in these selections were the ones he offered, with only slight alterations, over and over and over again, in every town and city he visited on country-crossing whistle stop tours. You’ll … [ Read more ]

Authors: Brett McKay, Kate McKay, Theodore Roosevelt | Source: The Art of Manliness (November 7, 2016) | Subjects: America, Articles & Links, Excerpts, History, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Some years ago, public intellectual Noam Chomsky warned that the political climate in the U.S. was ripe for the rise of an authoritarian figure. Now, he shares his thoughts on the aftermath of this election, the moribund state of the U.S. political system and why Trump is a real threat to the world and the planet in general.

Authors: C.J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky | Source: EcoWatch (November 14, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Trump