Two Harvard psychologists are studying “whether honesty may instead be the result of controlling a desire to lie (a conscious process) or of not feeling the temptation to lie in the first place (an automatic process).”
Tag: 08.17.09
This Is Out There, Even For The Fringe: An Actual Tupperware Party (With Drag Queen)
“Commanding the room is Dixie Longate herself. She is quite a creation: a 6ft, Titian-haired, trailer-trash drag queen in crotch-grazing gingham, peacock-blue eyeshadow and white stilettos. … Dixie may be the alter ego of American actor Kris Andersson, but is also a bona fide Tupperware salesperson. The catalogue I’m holding contains an order form and a UK sales contact. If I want to order those collapsible salad bowls, I can.”
It’s The Truth: The Most Attractive Men Really Are Taken (And That’s Because …)
“Women: do you have a man? If you do, better beware. Chances are that some lone female has her eye on him. A new study provides evidence for what many have long suspected: that single women are much keener on pursuing a man who’s already taken than a singleton.”
Is Theatre Taking Up Where Religion Has Left Off?
“From the 17th century onwards, an essential secularity seems to have been established in theatre, both in terms of content and architecture. … Yet, in our contemporary world, a certain amount of ecclesiastical atmosphere has been reintroduced into the theatre. Directors make more of the echoing silences of large spaces, while contemplation and awe are encouraged … Meanwhile, much of what’s left of contemporary Christianity seems to have forsaken the same sense of awe and reverence in favour of light-filled modern halls, with barely a nod to traditional religious architecture.”
Mystery Behind Obama-As-Joker Picture Halfway Solved
“When cryptic posters portraying President Obama as the Joker from Batman began popping up around Los Angeles and other cities, the question many asked was, Who is behind the image? Was it an ultra-conservative grassroots group or a disgruntled street artist going against the grain? Nope, it turns out, just a 20-year-old college student from Chicago.” (The question of who added the word “socialism” and spread the image around remains unanswered.)
Research: Contact With Nature Linked To Selflessness
“A series of studies suggests immersion in nature ‘brings individuals closer to others, whereas human-made environments orient goals toward more selfish or self-interested ends,’ according to a paper posted on the Web site of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. This appears to be the first research to examine the impact of the natural world on people’s values and aspirations, and its findings have intriguing implications for architects, designers and urban planners.”
Downloading Music Is The Greener Path, Study Says
“The study, which was financed by both Microsoft and Intel and written by two academics at Carnegie Mellon University and a third affiliated with Stanford University, found that buying an album digitally reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 40 to 80 percent relative to a best-case scenario for purchasing a CD.”
Met Sets A Record With First-Day Sales
“The Metropolitan Opera is trumpeting record first-day sales for its upcoming season, with the Met box office taking in $2.5 million for the 2009-10 season.”
Lost $600K Violin + Taxi + GPS = Happy Reunion
The latest version of the evergreen string-instrument-lost-in-a-cab story: Korean violinist Hanh-Bin “took a cab from Lincoln Center to his apartment in Chinatown, arriving at 12:40 a.m. Monday. Exhausted from the trip, he did not realize that his credit card and his violin, an 18th-century instrument built by Giovanni Francesco Pressenda, were still in the cab….”
Why Yale Press Shouldn’t Self-Censor Mohammed Images
“The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn’t even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism … that is spreading across our culture. … Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility.”