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Smash the Ceiling
The New Yorker: In the past few years, the U.S. economy has been beset by the subprime meltdown, skyrocketing oil prices, the Eurozone debt crisis, and even the Tohoku earthquake. Now it’s staring at a new problem—a failure to raise the debt ceiling, which would almost certainly throw the economy back into recession. Unlike those other problems, however, this one would be wholly of our own making. If the economy suffers as a result, it’ll be what a soccer fan might call the biggest own goal in history. The truth is that the United States doesn’t need, and shouldn’t have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.
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Bipolar Disorder: The Drawbacks of Excessive Positive Emotion
The Epoch Times: Too much positive emotion in the wrong context can act negatively on people’s health, according to a new article in the August edition of Current Directions in Psychological Science journal. Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, is a psychiatric condition characterized by mood swings in which sufferers alternate between periods of depression and mania, for example extreme self-confidence, irritability, increased energy, and less sleeping. Psychologist June Gruber at Yale University examined the extreme positive emotions experienced by people in remission from bipolar disorder in a series of different contexts.
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Who Takes Risks?
It’s a common belief that women take fewer risks than men, and that adolescents always plunge in headlong without considering the consequences. But the reality of who takes risks when is actually a bit more complicated, according to the authors of a new paper which will be published in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Adolescents can be as cool-headed as anyone, and in some realms, women take more risks than men. A lot of what psychologists know about risk-taking comes from lab studies where people are asked to choose between a guaranteed amount of money or a gamble for a larger amount.
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The Hazy Science of Hot Weather and Violence
Wired News: The link between violence and hot weather is so intuitive that it’s embedded in our language: Hotheads lose tempers that flare, anger simmers and comes to a boil, and eventually we cool down. So what does science have to say? Do tempers truly soar with temperature? The answer, appropriately enough for these triple-digit days, is hazy and hotly contested. To be sure, extensive literature exists on hot weather and violence, stretching from poorly controlled regional studies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — oh, those hot-blooded southerners! — to more sophisticated modern analyses.
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Polling the Stars and Stripes
The Wall Street Journal: Showing American voters an image of the American flag while asking whom they plan to vote for shifts them toward the Republican Party, a new study finds—and the effects of that exposure are still evident eight months later. Researchers recruited some 200 potential voters in fall 2008, about a month before the presidential election, through social-networking sites. Participants were queried two times before the election; again a few days after the election; and yet again in July 2009. Read more: The Wall Street Journal
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The Saddest Movie in the World
Smithsonian.com: In 1979, director Franco Zeffirelli remade a 1931 Oscar-winning film called The Champ, about a washed-up boxer trying to mount a comeback in the ring. Zeffirelli’s version got tepid reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes website gives it only a 38 percent approval rating. But The Champ did succeed in launching the acting career of 9-year-old Ricky Schroder, who was cast as the son of the boxer. At the movie’s climax, the boxer, played by Jon Voight, dies in front of his young son. “Champ, wake up!” sobs an inconsolable T.J., played by Schroder. The performance would win him a Golden Globe Award. Read more: Smithsonian.com
