Why Do We Even Listen To New Music?
Listening to new music is hard. Not hard compared to going to space or war, but hard compared to listening to music we already know. Our brains reward us for seeking out what we already know. So why should we reach to listen to something we don’t?
Parents: Let Your Kids Fail. You’ll Be Doing Them A Favor
We seem to be more worried about raising happy children than competent or autonomous ones. Middle-school students wilted in the face of challenge. They didn’t love learning like they used to. Parents took bad grades personally. Everyone was unhappy.
Instagram, My Daughter, And Me
What Instagram has allowed me to do is to employ a kind of digital physics, to warp my experience of space and time in my favor. In the offline world, I spend precious hours with her and then she disappears. But online, she is with me again when I post, and then again each time I receive a notification.
Couples Living Apart Together And Why It Works
Living apart together has its tangled roots in both the aristocracy and queer culture, and its contemporary branch comprises couples looking to prioritize individualism and moments of intentional solitude as features of longterm relationships, not roadblocks to togetherness.
How Not To Care When People Don’t Like You
When you’re not wasting energy molding your personality to someone else’s to be accepted, you’re more likely to find people who genuinely like you for you, and those relationships are far less exhausting to keep up. Still, it sucks to feel disliked. Here’s how to get through it without falling down a rabbit hole of sadness.
What Really Happens When You Donate Your Clothes—And Why It’s Bad
Contrary to popular (naive) belief, less than 20 percent of clothing donations sent to charities are actually resold at those charities. The other 80 percent is sent to textile recyclers who then determine the next cycle of the garment’s life.
Why Millennials Are The “Death Positive” Generation
Why do people in the prime of their lives seem to be preparing for their demise? The answers vary widely, from eminently practical concerns, such as crushing debt and climate change, to social factors, like wellness culture, diverse spiritual practices, and the desire of some millennials to “curate their afterlives.”
How To Find Your Purpose And Do What You Love
Why prestige is the enemy of passion, or how to master the balance of setting boundaries and making friends. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.
Emotional Intelligence: The Social Skills You Weren’t Taught in School
How much of what you learned in school do you still remember? Even more importantly, how much of it do you actually use on a daily basis? Most of us aren’t taught how to identify or deal with our own emotions, or the emotions of others. These skills can be valuable, but you’ll never get them in a classroom.
The Parents Raising Their Kids On The Road
What is it like to raise your kids on the road? Two families describe how they changed their children’s lives by showing them the world, while a mum-to-be explains why she plans to do just that with her six-month-old baby.
What Romance Really Means After 10 Years Of Marriage
After a decade of marriage, if things go well, you don’t need any more proof. What you have instead — and what I would argue is the most deeply romantic thing of all — is this palpable, reassuring sense that it’s okay to be a human being.
What Would Happen If Facebook Were Turned Off?
Facebook is blamed for all sorts of social horrors: from addiction and bullying to the erosion of fact-based political discourse and the enabling of genocide. New research—and there is more all the time—suggests such accusations are not entirely without merit. It may be time to consider what life without Facebook would be like.
Raising The Minimum Wage By $1 May Prevent Thousands Of Suicides, Study Shows
Between 1990 and 2015, raising the minimum wage by $1 in each state might have saved more than 27,000 lives, according to a report published this week in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. An increase of $2 in each state’s minimum wage could have prevented more than 57,000 suicides.
Revisiting An American Town Where Black People Weren’t Welcome After Dark
Anna is a city of a little more than 4,000 people located in the middle of Union County, where soybean fields and flatlands to the north give way to the forests and sandstone canyons of southern Illinois. Most people I met, wish the racist lore behind the city’s name would go away. So why hasn’t it?
How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger
Back in the 1960s, a Harvard graduate student made a landmark discovery about the nature of human anger. There were no roads, no heating systems, no grocery stores. Winter temperatures could easily dip below minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Briggs persuaded an Inuit family to “adopt” her and “try to keep her alive.”
How Ketamine Became The Drug Of Choice For Our Dissociated Moment
Technically speaking, ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic, meaning that it numbs your body and makes you feel apart from your environment — like you’re watching your own life happen instead of living it. But that doesn’t begin to capture the weirdness of what it feels like to get high on K.
Nietzsche On How To Find Yourself And The True Value Of Education
Friedrich Nietzsche considered the journey of self-discovery one of the greatest and most fertile existential difficulties. “Any human being who does not wish to be part of the masses need only stop making things easy for himself. “Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, all that is not you.”
How To Optimize Your Life
You’ve only got — on average — 78.53 years on this planet, total. And you’re likely already spending a precious 5 hours each day on email, not to mention the time spent waiting in line or stuck in transit. But what if there were ways to make more time out of time?
How To Prepare Your Kids For Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet
Artificial Intelligence will rule the jobs of the future, so learning how to work with it will be key. “There’s three job opportunities coming in the future,” says Avi Goldfarb. He divides them up into people who build AI, people who tell the machines what to do and determine what to do with their output, and, finally, celebrities.
How To Explain Anything To Anyone
You were talking about something relatively complex and you could practically see the moment that your listener checked out. Not only is it uncomfortable but it’s also disheartening when what you’re saying is important, cool or valuable to the listener. Here are 4 steps to clearer communication.
The Man Feeding A Remote Alaska Town With A Costco Card And A Ship
Gustavus is remote in a way that only Alaskans can truly grasp. When the town’s usual transport methods were disrupted, its 446 residents found themselves in the midst of a pandemic with diminished access to affordable food. And one man — the town grocer — decided to take matters into his own hands.