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Five myths about our habits
The Washington Post: Each year, nearly 50 percent of Americans vow to change their behavior come Jan. 1, resolving to lose weight (one-third of us want to slim down every year), get more organized or fall in love. Odds are, they won’t succeed. Just 8 percent achieve their New Year’s resolutions. One-quarter give up after the first week. These statistics are bleak but not surprising. Many New Year’s pledges involve trying to establish new habits or conquer bad ones. And there’s a lot of misinformation swirling around about how habits are formed and how they can be changed. Here are some of the most common. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Everything You Need To Know About Making New Year’s Resolutions
The Huffington Post: Statistically speaking, new year's resolutions are a losing game. A whopping 92 percent of people who set resolutions don't succeed, according to University of Scranton research. Still, that doesn't mean that the start of a new year isn't a good time to commit to working towards any goals or self-improvement projects that you've put on the back burner. Succeeding with your resolutions may simply be a matter of being smarter about them. If you are going to set some goals this year, maximize your chances of success by following some tried-and-true, science-backed guidelines. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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A Strategic Guide to Swearing
The Atlantic: n 2013, Martin Scorsese’s darkly comic depiction of white-collar crime and hedonism, The Wolf of Wall Street, claimed the title for most uses of fuck ever in a Hollywood feature film. Over the course of three hours, the film’s characters utter the word and its derivatives more than 500 times. They deploy it as a noun, a verb, an adjective, an interjection, and an infix (that’s an affix inserted inside a word—as in, absofuckinglutely). They swear in the company of friends, colleagues, and adversaries, in moments of anger, excitement, and awe. If research is any guide, this surfeit is not the result of a limited vocabulary or a lack of imagination.
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Time for a reset? How to make your New Year’s resolutions work
The Conversation: New Year’s resolutions are set with the best of intentions. But they notoriously fail to translate into lasting behavioural changes. The new gym membership falls into disuse come February; items forbidden from the new diet sneak back into the pantry by March. Even goals to work less and spend more time with friends and family seem to fall by the wayside almost as soon as the holiday break is over and the brimming email inbox beckons. But recent psychological research highlights several reasons why these kinds of resolutions might actually work – as well as simple ways to set yourself up for success. ...
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The Year in U.S. Policing
City Lab: Whether or not he realized it at the time, McLay had crossed a line. It was a line drawn not by the Black Lives Matter activists who’d spoken out about the link between racial bias and police brutality throughout 2014. Rather, the line would be drawn by the police union representatives who would go on to spend much of 2015 denouncing seemingly any public statement that alluded to a need for changes in U.S. policing culture. “The police union went crazy in denouncing [McLay],” said law professor and policing expert David A. Harris when Citylab spoke with him earlier this year.
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Academic Success: Are Teenagers Paying Too High a Price?
NPR: Silicon Valley's Palo Alto school district is in crisis. The suicide rate for teenagers there is four to five times the national average. This tragic statistic has made the city a symbol of the pressure kids live under in affluent communities to get into elite colleges, to excel at everything, to succeed at all costs. This week, as high school seniors and their families gather around computers racing to finish their college applications, we ask whether the obsession with getting into the best colleges is hurting kids more than helping them, and what schools, parents and students can do lessen the stress. Read the whole story: NPR
