Am I dreaming, or did it used to be stronger? Twenty years ago, it seemed like a good dose of jet lag could mess you up for a week. After six or seven hours in the air, zooming toward the sun or away from it in a pressurized cigar tube with carcinogenic upholstery, you were useless . Remember? Up was …
Can a clean smell make you a better person? That’s the provocative suggestion of a recent study in the journal Psychological Science. A team of researchers found that when people were in a room recently spritzed with a citrus-scented cleanser, they behaved more fairly when playing a classic trust game. In another experiment, the smell of cleanser made subjects more …
Amy Advocat gently shut the door to ensure she wouldn’t wake her roommate as she conjured a bizarre, parallel musical world in her Brookline living room.
If you work at a large company, and especially if you manage other people, chances are you’ve gone through diversity training. The vast majority of the Fortune 500 and, by some estimates, the majority of American employers offer diversity training programs for their employees. Many make such training mandatory. The amount of money spent on it in the United States …
When we read Tolstoy’s works in English translation – or those of Kafka, de Beauvoir, Sebald, or any other foreign author – what exactly are we reading? We may be reading a great writer’s sense, but not his or her actual words. It’s easy to forget that a translated book has been, in essence, rewritten by someone else.
Since the global financial system started unraveling in dramatic fashion two years ago, distinguished economists have suffered a crisis of their own. Ivy League professors who had trumpeted the dawn of a new era of stability have scrambled to explain how, exactly, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression had ambushed their entire profession.
Part of the fun of being interested in language is sorting through fine distinctions of meaning. Whether we’re playing the “I’m firm, you’re stubborn, he’s pig-headed” game, or just spending time finding what Flaubert called “le mot juste,” choosing which word we want to use can be like choosing the perfect crayon from a box of several million.
A new book says economic inequality is the social division we should be worrying about.
When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close. But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly.
Harvard professor Ellen Langer’s research transformed psychology. Now she wants it to transform you.