-
The Paradox of Idleness
Would Sisyphus have been happier just sitting in a jail cell, twiddling his thumbs? After all, the punishment Zeus meted out to him was nothing more than make-work: rolling that boulder up the hill again and again and again, without purpose or sense of accomplishment. It couldn’t have been very satisfying. What if Zeus had softened, and granted him a reprieve—and eternal idleness? An interesting new study suggests that the mythical prisoner would not have liked it in the least. Indeed he would have longed for his days of rock pushing. Make-work may be pointless and demeaning, but at least it’s work; it’s an activity.
-
How lucky charms really work
Wade Boggs, the former Red Sox slugger and third baseman, was very ritualistic about his warm-ups. For night games, he took batting practice at precisely 5:17 and ran wind sprints at exactly 7:17. He fielded 150 ground balls before every game, never more nor less, and always ended his infield practice by stepping—in the same order—on third, second and first base, then the baseline, followed by two steps in the coaching box and four more steps into the dugout. He ate chicken before every game, and even though he was not Jewish, he scratched the Hebrew word for “life” in the dirt before every at-bat. Boggs had a career batting average of .328, earning him a spot on the Hall of Fame.
-
The perils of the ‘halfalogue’
“Class” “Uh-huh” “Seven” (Laughing) “That’s what she said!” “No, not that way” “Yeah” “So you’ll” “So you” “So snacks and” “All right” “All right” “And beer” That’s a snippet of conversation I overheard on my morning bus ride today. A young woman was chatting on her cell phone, and even though she wasn’t especially loud or animated, I found it very distracting. All I wanted to do was read the sports pages, but the fractured dialogue made it very difficult to concentrate. That’s not a literal transcript obviously, but you get the idea. You’ve no doubt heard similar bits of chatter recently, now that cell phones are ubiquitous in public places.
-
The perils of ‘having it all’
It’s fair to say that Thurston Howell III doesn’t savor the little things in life. One of seven castaways on an uncharted Pacific island, the WASPy billionaire never stops scheming to get back to his money. While the others often seem content in their tropical paradise, Howell mostly likes to talk and dream about his assets, which include a coconut plantation, a railroad, an oil well, a diamond mine and all of Denver, Colorado. He never seems to understand that his wealth won’t buy him happiness on Gilligan’s Island. Okay, so Gilligan’s Island isn’t real. I get that. But is it possible this old TV fantasy contained a grain of psychological truth?
-
A new twist on child abuse
Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel Oliver Twist has been called a textbook case of child abuse. The young hero is beaten again and again, locked up in the dark, and starved—for both food and affection. His world is a world of cruelty and alcoholism and crime and domestic violence, and he shows many predictable consequences of such harshness: passivity, fragile self-esteem, depression, delinquency. Dickens was ahead of his time in sounding the alarm about the mistreatment of children. Indeed, the word “Dickensian” is used today to describe the crushing poverty and social dysfunction that can damage the mental health of the young.
-
Kids understand the relationship between humans and other animals
Science Centric: Parents, educators and developmental psychologists have long been interested in how children understand the relationship between human and non-human animals. For decades, the consensus was that as children begin reasoning about the biological world, they adopt only one - markedly 'anthropocentric' - vantage point, favouring humans over non-human animals when it comes to learning about properties of animals. A new study from Northwestern University researchers challenges this long-held assumption. In two experiments, with the results to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 17, research by Patricia Herrmann, Sandra R. Waxman and Douglas L.
