Happiness studies and positive psychology, which started seriously taking off in the 1990s, are “scholarly fields that combine Eastern religions, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and behavioral economics – but above all represent a shift of focus among some psychologists from mental illness to mental health, from depression and anxiety to subjective well-being.”
Tag: 03.13.18
Your License To Be Bad
You might wonder how people who seem so good by occupation could be so bad in private. The theory of moral licensing could help explain why: When humans are good, it says, we give ourselves license to be bad.
Can Writers Who Wrote Beautifully While Drunk And Who Stop Drinking Still Write Well?
Ask David Foster Wallace – or Leslie Jamison: “I’d been afraid that meetings were basically lobotomies served alongside coffee-flavored water and Chips Ahoy!; afraid that even if sobriety could offer stability and sincerity and maybe even salvation, it could never be a story. But Infinite Jest knew better. It wasn’t that the novel’s brilliance survived the deadening force of sobriety. Its brilliance depended on what sobriety had wrought.”
Irish Dance Dresses Used To Be Hand-Embroidered, And Then Came The Great Bedazzling
This isn’t new; once digital designs became possible, and embroidery machines could run all day and night, the costumes had to step it up to match. The early days of change were harsh: “Irish dancing solo costumes went through a very bad period in the early 2000s. …There were feathers, animal prints. It was almost like the more gaudy you could make it, the better.” Now it’s all Swarovski crystals, and “classic Celtic patterns are once again in style, just a lot more blinged out, blindingly so.”
Why The Search For A Utopia Is Doomed To Fail
The belief that humans are perfectible leads, inevitably, to mistakes when ‘a perfect society’ is designed for an imperfect species. There is no best way to live because there is so much variation in how people want to live. Therefore, there is no best society, only multiple variations on a handful of themes as dictated by our nature.
When An Injury Costs You Your Dance Career
“As dancers, we grow up in studios surrounded by people with similar abilities. We take for granted these incredible skills that we’ve spent years perfecting because everybody around us can do much the same as us. We sympathize with our friends who end up in “boots” for their broken metatarsals and we mourn the loss of the incredibly refined senior dancers once they retire. But the demands of being in a ballet company are such that we don’t waste much time considering the potential loss of our own career.”
270 Years After Bach, Fugues Are All Over YouTube
“The use of YouTube is no accident. The internet is a great way for fans to party contrapuntally. Online musicians have turned dozens of songs into fugues, from ‘Uptown Funk‘ to the ‘Star Wars‘ theme and ‘Old MacDonald‘.” (Even the fight songs of the two Super Bowl teams got fuguified.) “Others are making older pieces easier to understand. By adding scrolling videos to the music – each voice marked by different lines of colour – Stephen Malinowski lets fans follow the subject with their eyes as well as their ears.”
Study: University Experience Changes Students, It Doesn’t Just Deliver Knowledge
“We see quite clearly that students’ personalities change when they go to university,” Sonja Kassenboehmer of Monash University, the paper’s lead author, said in announcing the findings. “It is good news that universities not only seem to teach subject-specific skills, but also seem to succeed in shaping skills valued by employers and society.”
Jazz Might Be One Our Most Contemporaneously Relevant Art Forms
People think that to appreciate jazz you have to take ten years of music theory. Really, jazz or any kind of improvisational music, when done right, is simply a conversation without words. If you think about your own conversations at parties, [they’re all improvisation].
Lost Work By Galen, Father Of Medical Science, Found In Ancient Monks’ Hymnbook
A translation into Syriac of one of the 2nd-century Greek physician’s treatises has been discovered as a palimpsest on the pages of an 11th-century Syriac psalter that once belonged to the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Silicon Valley are now scanning the book to recover as much text as possible.