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Powerful and Coldhearted
The New York Times: I FEEL your pain. These words are famously associated with Bill Clinton, who as a politician seemed to ooze empathy. A skeptic might wonder, though, whether he truly was personally distressed by the suffering of average Americans. Can people in high positions of power — presidents, bosses, celebrities, even dominant spouses — easily empathize with those beneath them? Psychological research suggests the answer is no.
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How to Trick Your Kids Into Reading All Summer Long
The Atlantic: As the school year ends, students’ thoughts turn to summer vacation staples like swimming, camp, and popsicles. Teachers—and most parents—would like them to think about reading, too. School and district officials offer summer reading lists, hoping that specific recommendations will move students away from video games and toward books. But most will ignore these worthy suggestions, and indeed will read very little. How can parents nudge kids toward books this summer? The natural strategies most parents would think of first should not be the ones they actually try first. One is to offer rewards for reading.
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Have and Have Not: The Widening Gap
The late Peter Drucker is widely viewed as the inventor of modern corporate management, although before his death he was discouraged by the short-sightedness of many business leaders. He was especially concerned about the widening pay gap between CEOs and the average worker—a trend he had observed with alarm for decades. As far back as 1984, Drucker had warned that the pay gap should not exceed 20-to-1. Anything beyond that, he believed, would foster mistrust and resentment and erode the kind of teamwork needed for long-term growth. The actual pay gap today is 354-to-1. So why aren’t workers marching and picketing and otherwise complaining about this inequity?
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Is Postpartum Depression a Disease of Modern Civilization?
The Huffington Post: In the current issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert describes her family's brief and not-entirely-successful experiment with the Paleolithic diet. Her account is humorous, but it also explores some of the science underlying this popular style of eating, which basically avoids everything but meat, tubers and fresh fruits and vegetables. The idea behind "Paleo" meals and menus is to get back to the healthier diet that our ancient ancestors consumed before the advent of agriculture, which has led to all sorts of dietary and lifestyle changes -- and to a host of modern diseases.
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Getting Over Procrastination
The New Yorker: Want to hear my favorite procrastination joke? I’ll tell you later. Piers Steel, a psychologist at the University of Calgary, has saved up countless such lines while researching the nature of procrastination. Formerly a terrible procrastinator himself, he figures a dose of humor can’t hurt. It’s certainly better than continually building up anxiety about work you should do now but put off until later and later, as your chances of completing it grow ever slimmer, and the consequences loom ever larger. Read the whole story: The New Yorker
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How Family Game Night Makes Kids Into Better Students
The Atlantic: There has been a lot of recent attention focused on the importance of executive function for successful learning. Many researchers and educators believe that this group of skills, which enable a child to formulate and pursue goals, are more important to learning and educational success than IQ or inherent academic talent. Kids with weak executive function face numerous challenges in school. They find it difficult to focus their attention or control their behavior—to plan, prioritize, strategize, switch tasks, or hold information in their working memory. As a teacher and a parent, I’m always looking for fun ways to shore up these skills in my students and my children.
