It reports “close intercultural romantic relationships” stimulate creativity — even after the affair is over. This finding offers “a compelling reason for people to go out of their comfort zone to develop meaningful and long-lasting relationships with individuals from other cultures,” a research team led by Jackson Lu of Columbia University writes in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Category: ideas
Are Human Rights Anything More Than A Legal Construct?
“Philosophers have debated the nature of human rights since at least the 12th century, often under the name of ‘natural rights’. These natural rights were supposed to be possessed by everyone and discoverable with the aid of our ordinary powers of reason (our ‘natural reason’), as opposed to rights established by law or disclosed through divine revelation. Wherever there are philosophers, however, there is disagreement.”
A History Of Our Notions Of Inequality
uman inequality is commonly described by its defenders as a discovery, but we can allow ourselves to think that it, indeed, is socially constructed. Many different kinds of inequality appear in human history, and each one must be overcome if humanity and equality are to triumph in the practical as well as the ideological world. We have to deal with geographic inequality (the barbarians on the other side of the border), racial inequality (whites or Chinese and the inferior “others”), hierarchical inequality (masters and slaves, aristocrats and commoners), and economic inequality (the rich, the poor, and the desperately poor). These four inequalities are very old and ever-renewed; we know them well. Siep Stuurman adds a fifth to this list, which he thinks is peculiarly modern: temporal inequality. “We” are advanced, and “they” are backward.
In The Service Economy, Politeness Is No Longer Enough: Friendliness Is Required, And That Is Not Good
The dateline notwithstanding, this is not a joke article: “emotional labor” is a real phenomenon, much studied by sociologists and behavioral economists, and it can lead to real burnout.
Our Culture is Bored. Boring? Art Has A Role To Play
Right now, boredom is a fundamental problem of western culture. There used to be a natural coupling: “Safe and boring.” We used it about jobs, about people, about societies. It implied a trade-off: dullness being compensated by security. But “safe and boring” doesn’t really make sense any more. Boredom is a source of deep insecurity.
Where Does Moral Authority In Our Culture Come From? An Elite/Populist Struggle
“Today’s elite angst about so-called post-fact or post-truth public discourse is but the latest version of an historical struggle – a struggle over the question of who possesses moral and intellectual authority. Indeed, the rejection of the values and outlook of the holders of cultural power in many Western societies has long been portrayed as a rejection of truth itself. The reason elite values have been enshrined as ‘the truth’, right from the Ancient Greeks onwards, is because the rulers of society need to secure the deference of the masses. The masses are being encouraged to defer not to the power of the elites, but to the truth of elite values.”
Is Wine-Tasting Jargon A Complete Farce?
No, but it’s hard to describe smells. “While we may know as many as 30,000 words in our native language, we’re not nearly so good at defining the hundreds of thousands of distinct smells our brains process.”
Is It Time To End Gender-Specific Awards?
In Britain, the National Television Awards have been gender-neutral for a while, like the Grammys in the U.S. Could this ever work for something like the Oscars?
Our Stories About The Founding Of The U.S. Are Split, And That’s One Reason For The Culture Wars
The U.S. should see itself as a land of “civil religion” rather than a land of “radical secularism” or “religious nationalism,” says one historian. Would this solve our wars over culture? (Would the N.E.A. be fully funded? Would ‘Sesame Street’ be on the chopping block?)
It’s The Best Of Times, But About To Subside Back To The Worst Of Times, For Craft Beer
You can blame mergers and a weirdly laissez-faire U.S. Department of Justice. “This unwillingness to use effective antitrust enforcement to protect American economic interests is in stark contrast to how the rest of the world operates.”