Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
For most people I talk to, when I tell them I have an anxiety disorder, they nod their head and tell me it’ll be okay. When I tell them, “I’m sorry, I’m having a bad anxiety day, can we reschedule?” They smile and tell me there’s nothing to worry about and if I just get…
That its the beginning of Suicide Prevention Week feels a little like a joke to me, as I carry home little plastic containers of Xanax and Celexa. A few weeks ago, I was handling depression through that magical combination of eating right and exercise, and then something in my brain switched on and began playing…
There remains a pervasive notion that happiness can only truly come from finding a spouse, lest one rot of loneliness in some dusty attic. But a new study out of the University of California at Santa Barbara provides a very different view of singledom, one that this single woman finds enormously encouraging. In work presented…
Pour scorn elsewhere. / Joanna Slodownik Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the…
(iStock) On June 4, the satirical news site the Science Post published a block of “lorem ipsum” text under a frightening headline: “Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.” Nearly 46,000 people shared the post, some of them quite earnestly — an inadvertent example, perhaps, of life imitating comedy….
(iStock) My wife and I recently packed our 2-year-old twins into their car seats and moved them halfway across the country to a new home in Minnesota. During the five or so days we spent on the road with them, we had ample opportunity to reflect on what sorts of terrible harms we were inflicting on…
We all know smart people who do stupid things. At work we see people with brilliant minds make the most simple mistakes. At home we might live with someone who is intellectually gifted but also has no idea. We all have friends who have impressive IQs but lack basic common sense. For more than a…
The national suicide rate is at its highest in nearly 30 years. Why? (Photo: Silvia Sala/Flickr) So much for a country built on boundless optimism. More Americans are committing suicide now than at any other time in the last 30 years, according to a new analysis by the National Center for Health Statistics. The NCHS…
coins metadata inserted by kblog-metadata After Willem de Kooning Challenging the biological basis of sex and dispensing with the nature vs. nurture opposition ANNE Fausto-Sterling is professor of biology and gender studies at Brown University. In books like Myths of Gender and Sexing the Body, Fausto-Sterling pioneered the application of a feminist critique to biological studies of gender, adding…
You probably know at least one person who always tends to bet on the loser. From laserdiscs to New Coke, they adore the unpopular product. Turns out that that’s a predictable trait, and the people who display it are “Harbingers of Failure.” What happens when a group of professors from MIT, Northwestern University, and the…