Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2576

Gratitude Gains

by Zoe Pollock

Saying "thank you" isn't just polite; it's better for business:

The simple act of having a boss come by and offer a public thanks to one group [of university fundraisers:], but not the other, really packed a wallop...[W:]hile there was no change in the average number of calls made by the group that was not offered thanks, the folks who heard a warm two-sentence thank you from a boss made an average of about 50% more calls during the subsequent week.

(Hat tip: Eric Barker)

...

Staying Alive

 

(Photo of the 2,000 year-old welwitschia miribilis in Namibia, by Rachel Sussman)

by Zoe Pollock

In a project that is part science, part philosophy and part art, Rachel Sussman photographs the oldest continuously living organisms in the world. Her fascinating TED talk is here.

Philosophy - Namibia - History - People - Titan Quest

Clouds In Your Coffee

by Zoe Pollock

Eileen Reynolds interviews Carolyn de la Peña, the author of "Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda:

How will a backlash against high-fructose corn syrup figure into the ongoing battle between different...

About My Job: The Historian

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I am a historian, and I watch people get history wrong all the time. The thing I would emphasize most is that while people like to assert that in the old days it was like THIS, in fact human history is very diverse. There are almost no generalizations that apply to all human societies. Some people in the past were less materialistic than we are, but others just as much so. Some were less violent, some more violent. Some were relatively egalitarian, others...

Long Live The King

by Zoe Pollock

Stefany Anne Golberg has written a deeply arresting essay on the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and what a country's secret files can do to the psychology of a people:

It's no easy task to kill a dictator. Partly this is because they have a special kind of life. A double life. In 1957, Ernst Kantorowicz published a classic study on the medieval theory of the rights of kings, which he called "The King's Two Bodies." Every king has two bodies, he explained: the body...

The Benefit Of The Doubt

by Zoe Pollock

Diane Silver draws a parallel between self-defense karate style and the constant self-defense of "an out lesbian and a non-Christian living in nation where more than 75 percent of the people are Christian:"

Intellectually, I know every Christian isn't anti-gay or disrespectful of other people's religious beliefs, but my little girl self doesn't live in the land of logic. My little girl self wants to hurt them as much as they've hurt me. I can be the closest of friends with...

How To Die Best

by Zoe Pollock

Iris Monica Vargas reviews the new book Final Exam by surgeon Pauline Chen:

Chen says, "we learn not only to avoid but also to define death as the result of errors, imperfect technique, and poor judgment. Death is no longer a natural event but a ritual gone awry." For Chen, it is a physician's rituals that allow him or her to evade death, literally and figuratively. "Concentrating on the ritual becomes [the:] professional method of coping, an action that allows him or her to...

Tune In, Drop Out

by Zoe Pollock

Robert Wright returns from a meditation retreat, clicks on a Paris Hilton video, and ponders our plugged in lives:

In the space of only a few minutes, the grid had sent a succession of emotions coursing through my body, none that I'm especially proud of. And I feel especially not proud of them right after a meditation retreat, which grants enough critical distance from your feelings to highlight their frequent pointlessness, if not absurdity...

So there you go: covetousness...

How The System Works

by Zoe Pollock

The Catholic cover-ups continue, this time captured in a conversation between Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels and an unnamed 42 year-old victim of childhood sexual abuse who secretly recorded his meetings with the Cardinal.Two Flemish-language newspapers, De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad, published the texts last Saturday and Faith World reports, providing one of the better English translations available online:

"What do you really want?" asks Danneels, cutting the...

"Remembrance Of Lives Past"

by Zoe Pollock

Clare Stein gives reincarnation the literary treatment:

In Joyce's Ulysses, Molly Bloom mispronounces metempsychosis as "met him pike hoses." In some cases, this is what the eagerness to believe in reincarnation strikes me as: a mispronunciation of the Collective Unconscious, or something like it. The wealth of history inhabiting the places we like to claim as exclusively ours– mistaken for immortality.

James Joyce - Ulysses - Molly Bloom - Reincarnation - Aut...