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Rethinking Work
The New York Times: HOW satisfied are we with our jobs? Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be. Why? One possibility is that it’s just human nature to dislike work. This was the view of Adam Smith, the father of industrial capitalism, who felt that people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay.
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Want to Excel at Work? Take a Vacation
A comprehensive review finds that regular vacations are essential for keeping employees performing at their best.
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[Retracted] Feeling Blue and Seeing Blue: Sadness May Impair Color Perception
This story was removed on November 5, 2015 because the research report on which it is based has been retracted. The full retraction notice is available online: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/26/11/1822.full
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Conversation Piece
The Chronicle of Higher Education: These quotations, in their various ways, get to a deceptively simple truth about good writing. That is, it should be similar to speech, but … The “but” is expressed by Sterne in “properly managed,” by Steffens in “would,” by Wilder in “the impression,” by Maugham in “should” and “well-bred.” Everyone knows that pure speech doesn’t work on the page. Transcribe any conversation (except maybe one between John Updike and Clive James) and you will see rampant halts and starts, “um”s and “uh”s, redundancies, ellipses, grammatical solecisms, and all manner of infelicities. ...
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Relax: Daycare Doesn’t Make Kids Aggressive!
Parenting: Parents who work tend to stress about sending their children to daycare. But a new study involving almost 1,000 Norwegian children enrolled in daycare found that spending time in childcare settings had little impact on aggressive behavior. The majority of families need a duel income these days (and, of course, single parents heading back to work after baby need childcare, too) — which means many babies and kids are sent to daycare. In Norway, super-lucky parents have up to a year of parent leave, so children in that country rarely start attending daycare before they are 9 months old.
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Is “Baby Brain” a Myth?
Scientific American: As many as four out of every five pregnant women say that they suffer from “pregnancy brain”—deficits in memory and cognitive ability that arise during pregnancy, making women more forgetful and slow-witted. Yet studies on the phenomenon have generally not supported these claims: although some have found evidence of problems on certain types of tasks, others, including a recent paper published by researchers in Utah, have found no signs of cognitive problems at all. ...
