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The Teenage Brain: How Do We Measure Maturity?
Holden Caulfield is the archetypal American teenager. Or at least he was, way back in the 20th century. His misadventures, narrated in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, may seem quaint by today’s standards, yet the 17-year-old reveals many of the worrisome traits that we still associate with adolescence. He acts and speaks impulsively, then regrets his actions. He is unfocused, a poor student who gets himself expelled from school. He gets into fights, drinks way too much, solicits a prostitute and gets beat up by her pimp in his seedy hotel room. The best life plan he can come up with is moving west to live as a deaf-mute. He ends up narrating his lonely story from a psychiatric bed.
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Damned Spot: Guilt, Scrubbing, and More Guilt
Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most complex characters, and by far the bard’s most obsessive. Immorally ambitious, she prods her husband to murder Scotland’s king, and then deludes herself into believing that “a little water will clear us of this deed.” But for all of her repeated hand washing, the ritual cannot cleanse her of her consuming guilt, and by Act V the stubborn blood stains have driven the illegitimate queen to madness and suicide. Cruel fate. But Lady Macbeth has recently enjoyed something of a second career, this one in the field of psychological science.
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Can Our Beliefs About Exercise Make Us Fat?
Everyone is an expert when it comes to weight and weight control, and I’m no exception. I am what’s known as an “exercise theorist.” That is, I ascribe to the lay theory that sedentary lifestyle is a major cause of obesity, and that regular exercise is the cure. That’s one of the reasons I show up at the gym most days—and nag others to come with me. Not everyone agrees with this. In fact, so-called “diet theorists” believe that food is much more important than exercise. These everyday theorists believe that the obesity epidemic sweeping the U.S. and other developed countries is a consequence of portion size and fattening food choices.
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A New Look at Perception (Thank you, El Greco)
El Greco was one of the greatest artists of the Spanish Renaissance, and also one of its most idiosyncratic. His contemporaries were puzzled by his fantastic use of color, and even more so by his oddly distorted vision. Many of his figures—Saint John the Baptist and The Repentant Magdalen and even his own self-portrait—are unnaturally elongated, as if they are being stretched from toe to head. El Greco found a more appreciative reception among 20th century art historians, but the puzzle of his style persisted. Then, in the early 1900s, one expert came up with an explanation: The painter suffered from a severe astigmatism—a distortion of the eye—which “stretches” the world vertically.
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How To Defuse a Hateful Slur
I grew up in a town, and a time, with a great deal of racial and ethnic tension, and I heard hateful slurs constantly at school. African-Americans, then politely called Negroes, were disparaged as niggers, and Italian-Americans, as wops or guineas. The Puerto Ricans in the neighboring communities were spics. Perhaps because of this, I was taught early and forcefully never to use these cruel labels. And that included any stigmatizing label—queer, bitch, kike—all of which I heard a lot. This rule was an absolute in my family, no exceptions, and it worked. I don’t even like writing these words right now.
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Freshman Funk: Is Harmful Thinking Contagious?
I know very few people who would describe first semester, freshman year of college, as a time of unqualified joy. I was certainly ready to leave home, but even so it was a disruptive time. I was disconnected from my family and close friends for the first time and, even more difficult, thrown into a dormitory full of strangers—young men from unfamiliar places with diverse experiences and values. This social disruption was not an altogether bad thing in the long run. I knew nothing about anything when I arrived on campus, and these new classmates, including my roommate, opened my mind to all sorts of ideas I might not have encountered otherwise. The intellectual life was contagious.
