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The joys of grazing
The Guardian: “The commonest thing is delightful, if only one hides it,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Perhaps this is why illicit fridge grazing – that slice of ham folded swiftly into the mouth and washed down with a glug of juice, straight from the bottle – is such a delightful pastime. “Don’t pick,” my mother used to tell me, shooing me out of the kitchen. But I live for picking – a habit that inspires disgust and irritation in equal measure. When I cook, my chef’s tasting gets out of control because snatched morsels and licked spoons are too tempting. Everything tastes better in a sneaky forkful, consumed when passing the stove, fridge or cupboard.
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Kids And Screen Time: Cutting Through The Static
NPR: The walls are lined with robots and movie posters for Star Wars and Back to the Future. But this is no 1980s nerd den. It's the technology lab at Westside Neighborhood School in Los Angeles, and the domain of its ed-tech coordinator, Don Fitz-Roy. "So we're gonna be talking about digital citizenship today." Fitz-Roy is a mountain of a man, bald with just the hint of a goatee. Of the half-dozen students sitting in small, plastic chairs around him, any three could easily fit inside his shirt. And he's trying to keep them safe — from the Internet. He's talking about the laundry list of athletes and actors these kids have seen, of late, making fools of themselves using social media. ...
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I Tried to Make a Search Engine Write Me a Poem
The New York Times: Before I started writing this, I took a creativity test. Many different such tests exist, but I took one of the best-known ones: Guilford’s Alternative Uses Task, which simply requires that you come up with as many applications for a particular object as possible. I picked a paper coffee cup. After 10 minutes (an amount of time I’d arbitrarily chosen), I had 39 uses, from the prosaic (“hold coffee”) to the probably impractical (“poke holes in the bottom and it could be a shower head for a short amount of time before it collapses”). I did this because I wanted to test the effectiveness of Yossarian, a new search engine that aims to boost creativity.
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The Happiness Racket: When the Pressure to Be Happy Makes You Miserable
U.S. News & World Report: Ever have that feeling, like last time you checked your Facebook, that everyone else is happy except you? And that there must be something wrong with you for not being happy? The pressure to be happy sometimes feels as American as your citizenship. From the chirpy “how are you?” to the beloved Pharrell Williams "Happy" song to the pervasive mindfulness movement, happiness is a cultural trend – and a Constitutional right. But does the pressure to conform to happiness actually do more harm than good? “It's like the coach of a losing team giving a pep talk,” says Corey Kimer, a 20-year-old student at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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What the Marshmallow Test Really Teaches About Self-Control
The Atlantic: The image is iconic: A little kid sits at a table, his face contorted in concentration, staring down a marshmallow. Over the last 50 years, the “Marshmallow Test” has become synonymous with temptation, willpower, and grit. Walter Mischel’s work permeates popular culture. There are “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow!” t-shirts and Sesame Street episodes where Cookie Monster learns delayed gratification so he can join the Cookie Connoisseurs Club.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: State and Trait Effects on Individual Differences in Children's Mathematical Development Drew H. Bailey, Tyler W. Watts, Andrew K. Littlefield, and David C. Geary Research indicating a relationship between children's early math achievement and their later math achievement seems to be at odds with findings showing that the effects of early math interventions diminish over time.
