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Life After Autism
Slate: Alex, age 10, bounds onto his bed to pose with his Aaron Rodgers poster, grinning as proudly as if he had recruited the Green Bay Packers’ quarterback himself. Continuing the tour of his suburban New York bedroom, he points out his Packers-themed alarm clock, his soccer trophy, his Boy Scout trophy, and then the big reveal: a homemade foam box in Packers green and gold. ... Most children with autism will forever have the disorder. But a handful of studies in the past three years indicate that for reasons no one understands, a minority of children, like Alex, shed the core symptoms necessary for an autism diagnosis.
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Are College Lectures Unfair?
The New York Times: DOES the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent? The notion may seem absurd on its face. The lecture is an old and well-established tradition in education. To most of us, it simply is the way college courses are taught. Even online courses are largely conventional lectures uploaded to the web. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminating against others, including women, minorities and low-income and first-generation college students.
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The Science of Story Time
Science Friday: The ritual of bedtime reading isn’t just about getting junior to (finally) go to sleep. Studies show reading with kids has positive effects ranging from increased vocabulary to greater success reading independently. What is it about Goodnight, Moon and If You Give a Moose a Muffin that boosts children’s literacy? Psychologist Jessica Montag says it might have to do with the words that kids’ books contain. She walks Ira through her recent study in Psychological Science. Read the whole story: Science Friday
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Beyond the Paycheck
The Atlantic: There’s a belief that what gets some workers to keep coming into work every day is their “psychic wages”—the fulfillment that comes with doing meaningful work. That thinking is usually applied to authors, or doctors, or social workers, but the assumption for why a different class of workers—janitors, factory workers, call-center employees—keeps showing up every day is often simpler: They aren’t there for anything but money. But Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, believes that jobs are about more than money, for both blue- and white-collar workers alike. When he was trained as a psychologist, decades ago, the thinking of B. F.
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Friends at Work? Not So Much
The New York Times: ONCE, work was a major source of friendships. We took our families to company picnics and invited our colleagues over for dinner. Now, work is a more transactional place. We go to the office to be efficient, not to form bonds. We have plenty of productive conversations but fewer meaningful relationships. In 1985, about half of Americans said they had a close friend at work; by 2004, this was true for only 30 percent. And in nationally representative surveys of American high school seniors, the proportion who said it was very important to find a job where they could make friends dropped from 54 percent in 1976, to 48 percent in 1991, to 41 percent in 2006.
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Personal Identity In Our Morals, Not Our Memory
The Wall Street Journal: This summer my 93-year-old mother-in-law died, a few months after her 94–year-old husband. For the last five years, she had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. By the end, she had forgotten almost everything, even her children’s names, and had lost much of what defined her—her lively intelligence, her passion for literature and history. Still, what remained was her goodness, a characteristic warmth and sweetness that seemed to shine even more brightly as she grew older. Alzheimer’s can make you feel that you’ve lost the person you loved, even though they’re still alive.
