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A Stanford researcher says we shouldn’t start working full time until age 40
For people smack in the mad mid-life rush of managing full-time careers, dependent children, and aging parents, nothing feels so short in supply as time. But there is time to get it all done, says psychologist Laura Carstensen, the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. The only problem is that we’ve arranged life all wrong. A woman who is 40 years old today can expect to live another 45 years, on average, while 5% will live to see their 100th birthday. The average 40-year-old man will live another 42. For many people, most of those years will be healthy enough to continue work that doesn’t involve intense physical labor.
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Raising Kids Who Want To Read — Even During The Summer
You sneak them into backpacks and let them commingle with the video games (hoping some of the latter's appeal will rub off). You lay them around the kids' beds like stepping stones through the Slough of Despond and, for good measure, Vitamix them to an imperceptible pulp for the occasional smoothie. Books are everywhere in your house, and yet ... they're not being consumed. Because it's summer, and kids have so many other things they'd rather do.
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Who Gets Power — And Why It Can Corrupt Even The Best Of Us
If you've ever visited the palm-lined neighborhoods of Beverly Hills, you've probably noticed that the rich and famous aren't the only ones drawn there. Stargazers also flock to this exclusive enclave, seeking a chance to peer into — and fantasize about — the lives of movie stars and film directors. Call it adulation, adoration, idolization: we humans are fascinated by glamour and power. But this turns out to be only one side of our psychology. We also feel envious — even resentful of the rich and powerful — and that ambivalence is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history.
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The Despondent Mind: Are Our Brains Wired for Doom and Gloom?
If it seems the state of the world is on an endless downward trajectory these days, take heart. Things might not be quite as bad as you think. New research, published on June 29 in Science, suggests that as social problems such as extreme poverty or violence become less prevalent, people may be prone to perceive that they linger—and are perhaps even getting worse. Led by psychologist Daniel Gilbert at Harvard University, the researchers found people readily and unconsciously change how they define certain concepts—ranging from specific colors to unethical behavior—based on how frequently they run into them. “On almost every dimension, the world is getting better.
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Can Crows Make Mental Pictures of Tools?
New Caledonian crows are known for their toolmaking, but Alex Taylor and his colleagues wanted to understand just how advanced they could be. Crows from New Caledonia, an island in the South Pacific, can break off pieces of a branch to form a hook, using it to pull a grub out of a log, for instance. Once, in captivity, when a New Caledonian male crow had taken all the available hooks, its mate Betty took a straight piece of wire and bent it to make one. “They are head and shoulders above almost every other avian subjects” at toolmaking, said Irene Pepperberg, an avian cognition expert and research associate in Harvard University’s department of psychology. “These crows are just amazing.”
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Mr. Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children
For the millions of adults who grew up watching him on public television, Fred Rogers represents the most important human values: respect, compassion, kindness, integrity, humility. On Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the show that he created 50 years ago and starred in, he was the epitome of simple, natural ease. But as I write in my forthcoming book, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, Rogers’s placidity belied the intense care he took in shaping each episode of his program.
