Category: ideas

“A man’s image of the perfect romantic partner varies depending upon whether he is feeling hungry. That’s the conclusion of a newly published study, which finds peckish males prefer females who are heavier, taller and older.”

A new study finds that, “that, in transmitting bad behavior from one generation to the next, the issue isn’t strictly the use of physical force. … In short, if a kid feels he’s being punished arbitrarily at home, he is more likely to engage in arbitrary punishment on the streets or in the schoolyard.”

“As a Chinese-American growing up in California, my introduction to Confucius was mostly through media caricatures and kitschy sayings embedded in fortune cookies. My father, on the other hand, was raised in Taiwan, where locals revered Confucius as a messiah-like figure. On our trip to Qufu, I hoped to gain a better understanding of the man who had loomed so large in my father’s mind.”

“A lack of sleep could help toxic plaques develop in the brain, accelerating the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.”

“Sometime in the late 1950s, the taste for comedy based on edgy political satire (think Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl) mutated into shtick based on insult (think Don Rickles and Jackie Mason). People, as it turned out, found it highly entertaining to watch other people being insulted.”

“Champions of free will, take heart. A landmark 1980s experiment that purported to show free will doesn’t exist is being challenged.”

The word is Japanese for “a kick in the eye” or “sudden illumination”; one Zen master defines it as “the acquiring of a new point of view in our dealings with life and the world” in which “our entire surroundings are viewed from quite an unexpected angle of perception.” Joscelyn Jurich offers some examples of satori in Western literature, from Camus to Calvino to McCullers.

“The very idea of ‘Greek love’ or ‘Greek homosexuality’ as a single social institution comes to seem somewhat misguided as [author James] Davidson shows how very differently people behaved in, say, Sparta, Elis, and Athens.”

“Innovation is one of those things just about everybody is for. But despite all the talk, and for a society so caught up in its individual technologies, what do we really know about how technological innovation actually happens?”

“In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we heard (and I believed) that cultural studies would fan out across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, inducing them to become at once more self-critical and more open to public engagement. … [But] over the past 25 years, there has been a great deal of cultural-studies triumphalism that now seems unwarranted and embarrassing.”