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How Solitude and Isolation Can Affect Your Social Skills
Neil Ansell became a hermit entirely by accident. Back in the 1980s, he was living in a squat in London with 20 other people. Then someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: a cottage in the Welsh mountains, with rent of just £100 ($130) per year. This was a place so wild, the night sky was a continuous carpet of stars – and the neighbours were a pair of ravens, who had lived in the same cedar tree for 20 years. The catch was that the scenic views came with extreme isolation – by standards achievable in the UK, anyway. He lived on a hill farm inhabited by a single elderly tenant, miles from the nearest village.
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A Key to Healthier Adult Diets: Healthier Baby Diets
Feeding babies the right healthy foods during a critical window of time may help set them up for better health as adults, emerging research suggests. As the federal government weighs the first-ever dietary guidelines for children under 2, there’s evidence that the food habits of young kids influence their diet—and their health—later on. The science is still nascent and studies are generally small. But with childhood obesity on the rise and a growing understanding that the seeds of adult illnesses like Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease are planted in childhood, there’s increasing interest in how to shape the youngest palates. ...
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Feeling Lots Of….Feelings? Journaling Can Help
The term "journaling" encompasses a lot of different things: the list of birds you've seen in your neighborhood; the descriptions of sights you saw on your last vacation; the notes you jotted down about the dream you had last night. But the general, tried and true everything is a bit much in my life right now, and I have to write it down type of journaling can really help when, well, everything is a bit much.
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After 2016, People Are Rethinking How They’ll Spend Election Night This Year
Ask me what I was doing on November 7, 2016, and I’d shrug. Another day lost to the march of my life. But November 8 remains vivid, a montage that has gotten far too many replays: The morning stroll to the polls before catching the subway to work. The margaritas at a Mexican restaurant in Queens. The glimpse of Florida’s returns on the TV screen as we left. For me, as for many others, the day of the 2016 presidential election is completely unforgettable. “It’s like the JFK assassination or 9/11,” Robert McClellan, podcast host and authorof Leaving Trump’s America, tells OprahMag.com. ...
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Is Everybody Doing … OK? Let’s Ask Social Media
Which was the saddest day of them all? This is the question you may be asking yourself, surveying the wreckage of 2020 thus far. There are so many contenders to consider: was it Thursday, March 12, the day after Tom Hanks announced he was sick and the N.B.A. announced it was canceled? Was it Monday, June 1, the day peaceful protesters were tear gassed so that President Trump could comfortably stroll to his Bible-wielding photo op? Actually, it was neither, according to the Computational Story Lab of the University of Vermont. Instead, the lab offers this answer: Sunday, May 31.
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‘The WEIRDest People in the World’ Review: Marriage Story
We may think that the culture of a society or civilization grows out of a variety of forces—social, political, historical, even biological. But what if culture is itself a potent force, one that, in part, shapes the others? “Culture,” Joseph Henrich writes, “can and does alter our brains, hormones, and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, [and] emotions.” He assumes, for instance, a high degree of literacy in his readers and thus confidently describes certain features of their brains: e.g., slight abnormalities in the left ventral occipito-temporal region, part of a structure that favors verbal memory and analytic processing skills.
