Tag: health and happiness
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Take two strapping young men. Give one of them a job as a lifeguard from May until September. For the same period, pay the other one to "farm gold" in World of Warcraft, sitting in a windowless basement. Come fall, the one who has been baked by the sun will be tan (a consequence of his skin's ... Read More
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A recent performance of Anne Nelson's moving 9/11 play The Guys introduced me to the concept of the "square rooter"—people on a team who are only out for themselves (when your formula is "me times me," your square root is me). Square rooters may be brave and energetic and effective, but there's ... Read More
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When I hand my one-year-old son something to eat, he spends a short time looking at it and a long time looking at me: Is this good? Is it tasty? Is this what we eat? The answer (olive from me, yes; bug from floor, no) has a bit to do with the chemical and physiological process of perceiving the ... Read More
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What did you do, really, when Irene struck? As you listen to people tell tales that make them sound more threatened, more casual-cool or more heroic than they really were, you might think: Wouldn't it be great if you could just push a button and make them incapable, or at least less capable, of ... Read More
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"I know I will not make old bones," says Achilles in Christopher Logue's modern Iliad. I personally have seen enough old people staring, drooling, groaning and pissing into their giant diapers to sympathize with a wish to quit while you're still ahead. Today, though, we're all supposed to want to ... Read More
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Carlo Maria Broschi, better known as Farinelli, was one of the most celebrated opera singers of all time, and the 18th century equivalent of a rock star ("One God and one Farinelli," one lady cried out after he'd finished an aria). Handel courted him for years. Mozart sought him out. His voice was ... Read More
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New technologies bring forth new art forms, and those forms create new ways to understand life. The theater gave everyone his or her say (even the man the Queen's grandfather overthrew, even the guy who had tried to conquer the audience's city). So it gave its audience the new experience of hearing ... Read More
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People's attitudes lag behind their times, as Hermann Broch observed. At the height of the European Enlightenment, philosophers who dreamed of universal rights accepted that men would be broken on the wheel. In the late 19th century, men who read Marx and promoted workers' rights found it natural ... Read More
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There's little doubt that sports are good for the bodies and minds of people who play them. For people who watch them, though, sports are a negative. Never mind the enormous amounts of money consumed every year by soccer, football, baseball, basketball, hockey and all the rest. Never mind the ... Read More
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Six months out of the year I try to spend as much time as possible on the roof of my building in Brooklyn, where I'm cooled by a non-air-conditioned breeze, hear birds singing over the street sounds below, and see boats in the distant harbor going by the Statue of Liberty. There's a lot of ... Read More
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About Mind Matters
In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. Mind Matters is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. Most importantly, it's about how this sea change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that still run on the presumption that people act rationally.
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In A Shipwreck, Your Heart Is More Likely To Go On If You're Male