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The Ice-Bucket Racket
The New York Times: Ever since the ice-bucket challenge swept the Internet this summer, raising more than $115 million for A.L.S. research, a legion of imitators has sprung up to try and cash in themselves. In the approaching holiday season, as fund-raising appeals swell, we can now smash a pie in our faces, snap selfies first thing in the morning or take a photo of ourselves grabbing our crotches, among other tasteful gestures, to express solidarity with various worthy causes.
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Have You Heard? Gossip Is Actually Good and Useful
The Atlantic: While gossiping is a behavior that has long been frowned upon, perhaps no one has frowned quite so intensely as the 16th- and 17th-century British. Back then, gossips, or “scolds” were sometimes forced to wear a menacing iron cage on their heads, called the “branks” or “scold’s bridle.” These masks purportedly had iron spikes or bits that went in the mouth and prevented the wearer from speaking. (And of course, of course, this ghastly punishment seems to have been mostly for women who were talking too much.) Today, people who gossip are still not very well-liked, though we tend to resist the urge to cage their heads. Progress.
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One Thing Everyone Agrees On: CEOs Make Too Much Money
In 2013, the average American worker’s salary was estimated at $35,293. American CEOs, on the other hand, earned a staggering individual average salary of $11.7 million — 331 times that of the average employee. Major discrepancies in pay between CEOs and workers has been a contentious subject not just in the United States, but also across the world. Just last year in Switzerland, voters considered (and ended up rejecting) a national cap on CEO pay at a ratio of 12-to-1 compared to salaries of the lowest-paid workers.
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How to Get in Shape Using Psychology: 6 New Tricks From Research
Time: Why is there an obesity epidemic? It’s not because we eat the wrong things or we lack exercise. Research shows that, plain and simple, most of us just eat too much: "Reported consumption increased by 268 calories for men and 143 calories for women between the two surveys. This increase is more than enough to explain the increase in steady-state weight… The available evidence suggests that calories expended have not changed significantly since 1980, while calories consumed have risen markedly." That’s hardly shocking. But what’s interesting is there’s a way to fix this that doesn’t involve exercise or being deprived of your favorite foods. Read the whole story: Time
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How to Study the Brain
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons and trillions, perhaps hundreds of trillions, of intricate interconnections among those neurons. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of different kinds of cells within the brain. And—after nearly two centuries of research—exactly zero convincing theories of how it all works. Why is it so hard to figure out how the brain functions, and what can we do to face the challenges?
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Why do we cry tears of joy?
The Telegraph: It may seem like a strange response: to break down in tears when you are happy. But now a group of psychologists say they have found the reason why, and that crying tears of joy may well be the body’s way of restoring “emotional equilibrium”. The psychologists say that, by responding to an overwhelmingly positive emotion with a negative one, people are able to recover better from strong emotions. Oriana Aragon, the lead author of the report which will be published in the journal Psychological Science, said: “People may be restoring emotional equilibrium with these expressions.
