Cultureplaces

They Had It Coming The parents indicted in the college-admissions scandal were responding to a changing America, with rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs. Felicity Huffman leaves a federal courthouse on April 3. GRETCHEN ERTL / REUTERS Updated at 5:23 p.m. ET on April 9, 2018. Sweet Christ, vindication! How long has it been? Years? No, decades. If hope is the thing with feathers, I was a plucked bird. Long ago, I surrendered myself to the fact that the horrible, horrible private-school parents of Los Angeles would get away with their nastiness forever. But even before the molting, never in my wildest imaginings had I dared to dream that the arc of the moral universe could describe a 90-degree angle and smite down mine enemies with such a hammer fist of fire and fury that even I have had a moment of thinking,  Could this be a bit too much? Let’s back up. Thirty years ago, having tapped out of a Ph.D. program, ...

The inconvenient truth about genetics and success By  KATHRYN PAIGE HARDEN |   NEW YORK DAILY NEWS   | APR 19, 2019  |   11:11 AM    By reminding us that we don’t have perfect control over every aspect of our lives, genetics can encourage us to be more compassionate of ourselves and more tolerant of the differences we see in other people. Some of us are born with genes that make us struggle to lose weight and keep it off. This was the conclusion of a new  genetics study  published this week, where scientists analyzed information from over 2 million locations in people’s genetic code. Middle-aged adults who had the highest genetic risk were  25 times  more likely to be obese than those who had the lowest genetic risk. This type of research has been  greeted with cheers by activists fighting fat phobia : If body weight is seen as genetic, then heavier people might be less stigmatize...

'Thirst for knowledge' may be opium craving  One of my first blog posts--13 years ago.  I believe this addiction accounts for my own malady, keeping me from engaging in more sensible activities like marriage and a career. T.O.M. Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix. The "click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited article in the latest issue of  American Scientist . "While you're trying to understand a difficult theorem, it's not fun," said Biederman, professor of neuroscience in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. "But once you get it, you just feel fabulous." The brain's craving for a fix motivates humans to maximize the rate at which t...

By   Jesse Singal When it comes to the heated subject of differences between how men and women behave, debate in psychology has centered on mate preferences and general interests. The available research shows that when it comes to (heterosexual) mating preferences, men are relatively more interested in physical beauty, while women are relatively more interested in earning capacity. As for general interests, men are more interested in physical things, while women are more interested in people. Even the staunchest evolutionary psychologists would acknowledge these are partially overlapping bell curves: There are plenty of men who are fascinated by other people, and plenty of women looking for physical beauty in a partner above all else. Yet the findings have been met with fierce resistance in some quarters. One of the more sophisticated rejoinders is known as social roles theory: The differences  do  exist, but they’re entirely or largely the result of gender roles imp...

Fast forward to 7:00 + for Tucker's take on the plight of men

  by  Joseph Henrich     (Author) Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains―on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrate...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FptGxaxJyms