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There’s a surprisingly strong link between climate change and violence
The Washington Post: Earlier this year, when a study came out suggesting global warming will increase the rates of violent crimes in the United States -- producing "an additional 22,ooo murders, 180,000 cases of rape," and many other crime increases by the year 2099 -- it drew widespread criticism. "This ... is what people who are losing the argument look like," noted the conservative publication National Review. One study may seem easy to dismiss. But the combined results of 56 of them? Not so much.
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The debate about spanking children is over. It’s just wrong.
The Washington Post: U.S. sports continue to struggle with the controversies surrounding Ray Rice’s domestic violence case, and the arrest of Slava Voynov on suspicion of domestic violence. But what has not been a matter of debate is where the line is for men hitting women. The media and the public have been nearly uniform in rallying around the idea that no man should ever hit a woman, including Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr, who wrote: So this is not just about Palmer, but about all our mothers, sisters, daughters, lovers and friends and the violence against them that is still too common and too commonly ignored.
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How Trustworthy Is The Voice of Your GPS?
One goal of the voice-based GPS directions is to ensure that drivers are able to keep their eyes and attention on the road while navigating. But how do people respond when the navigation instructions come from Yoda, Mr. T, or Burt Reynolds? New research from psychological scientists David R. Large and Gary E. Burnett of University of Nottingham suggests that drivers’ decision making and behavior on the road can be influenced by the voice of their GPS. Driving directions from a Jedi Master may be hilarious, but drivers don’t necessarily believe the Force is strong with their GPS when the navigation directions come from Yoda.
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In Praise of Spacing Out
New York Magazine: The only time I’ve ever missed a flight, I was physically at the airport. But my mind was … not. I was wandering through the bookstore, lost in thought, my daydreams apparently intense enough to drown out both the final boarding call and my own name over the paging system. This kind of stuff happens to me with disheartening regularity, and it’s something I feel especially bad about these days, now that mindfulness — the ability to tether your thoughts to the present moment — has become such a huge part of the cultural conversation.
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A Musical Fix for American Schools
The Wall Street Journal: American education is in perpetual crisis. Our students are falling ever farther behind their peers in the rest of the world. Learning disabilities have reached epidemic proportions, affecting as many as one in five of our children. Illiteracy costs American businesses $80 billion a year. Many solutions have been tried, but few have succeeded. So I propose a different approach: music training. A growing body of evidence suggests that music could trump many of the much more expensive “fixes” that we have thrown at the education system. Plenty of outstanding achievers have attributed at least some of their success to music study.
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Amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experiences make us social misfits
The Boston Globe: As anyone who has signed on to Facebook recently can see, social media takes the propensity for sharing extraordinary experiences to the maximum. A Facebook feed can read like a list of epic moments from friends near and far: a gnarly mountain bike ride; an exquisite meal in Italy; a celebrity sighting. But a new study led by a Harvard researcher suggests that the human desire to share out-of-the-ordinary experiences with others may amount to a fundamental miscalculation of what brings people together — and could even be a social liability.
