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Why You Need a Network of Low-Stakes, Casual Friendships
When I was laid off in 2015, I told people about it the way any good millennial would: By tweeting it. My hope was that someone on the fringes of my social sphere would point me to potential opportunities. To my surprise, the gambit worked. Shortly after my public plea for employment, a friend of a friend sent me a Facebook message alerting me to an opening in her department. Three rounds of interviews later, this acquaintance was my boss. (She’s now one of my closest friends). Think of the parents you see in the drop-off line at school. Your favorite bartender. The other dog owners at the park.
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Can Botox and Cosmetic Surgery Chill Our Relationships With Others?
Let’s say you’re walking down the street and coming toward you is someone pushing a baby in a stroller. The baby looks right at you and bursts into a big, gummy grin. What do you do? If you’re like most people, you reflexively smile back and your insides just melt. The baby might react by smiling even more broadly and maybe kicking its feet with delight, which will only deepen your smile and add to the warm feeling spreading in your chest. But what if you couldn’t smile naturally, with the usual crinkles around your eyes and creases in your cheeks?
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It’s great to be ‘in the zone’ — while working, exercising and creating art. Here’s how to get there.
By mile 10 of my first half-marathon, the persistent, frigid drizzle had forced my fingers into a clenched C shape. The thrill of running alongside thousands of people after weeks of solo training had mellowed into a quiet, somewhat dull drive toward the finish line. Then, without warning or conscious effort, my body started moving faster. The hard pavement felt like a supportive mattress. A sense of elegance freed me from my clumsy body. I was — there is no other way to put it — at one with the cityscape around me. I was in the zone.
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‘ScreenTime: Diane Sawyer Reporting,’ 2-hour ABC News special, challenges families to rethink technology consumption
How much time do you spend looking at your phone? If you're like the average American, it adds up to about 49 days out of the year. ABC News' Diane Sawyer spent six months traveling the country and talking to families, teachers, doctors and even tech insiders to put together a two-hour special about how screen time is affecting us and what we can do about it. As part of the special, researchers helped Sawyer's team recreate a study in which parents scroll through their phones without looking up for two minutes straight while their children play nearby. In the footage, 2-year-old Jensen begs his mom to pay attention to him no less than 7 times in that short span.
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Collaborative problem solvers are made not born – here’s what you need to know
Challenges are a fact of life. Whether it’s a high-tech company figuring out how to shrink its carbon footprint, or a local community trying to identify new revenue sources, people are continually dealing with problems that require input from others. In the modern world, we face problems that are broad in scope and great in scale of impact – think of trying to understand and identify potential solutions related to climate change, cybersecurity or authoritarian leaders. But people usually aren’t born competent in collaborative problem-solving. In fact, a famous turn of phrase about teams is that a team of experts does not make an expert team.
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You Will Never Smell My World the Way I Do
The scent of lily of the valley cannot be easily bottled. For decades companies that make soap, lotions and perfumes have relied on a chemical called bourgeonal to imbue their products with the sweet smell of the little white flowers. A tiny drop can be extraordinarily intense. If you can smell it at all, that is. For a small percentage of people, it fails to register as anything. Similarly, the earthy compound 2-ethylfenchol, present in beets, is so powerful for some people that a small chunk of the root vegetable smells like a heap of dirt. For others, that same compound is as undetectable as the scent of bottled water. --- Of course, genes are not the only determinant of scent.
