Washington University political science professor Betsy Sinclair co-authored a study that found angry partisans more likely than non-angry partisans to become so socially polarized, they would refuse to help an out-partisan neighbor or avoid a conversation with one. This kind of negativity spreads like a noxious gas, and it becomes easier to insult, vilify, wish the other dead.
Wilde’s solution to work was machines, and they did make life easier. AI will make a lot of life easier, too. But many of us—if we are lucky enough to still be employed—will shift from doing work to making sure it gets done, updating and downloading and programming and monitoring and double-checking. All of which is far more stressful than doing the work itself.
Still from ‘The Boys in Red Hats,’ Shark Dog Films The Boys in Red Hats (2021) is about the 2019 encounter between field-tripping students from an all-boys Catholic school and a small Native American group on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The film is worth a…
Parents used to lecture their kids to clean their plates because little children in Africa were starving. The smartasses would retort, “Then wrap it up and send it to them.” I would like to snatch an octuple bypass burger and do exactly that.
Shallow breathing starves us of air; gulps through the mouth come in cold and unfiltered, and our lungs hate us for it. We breathe in many ways—and most of them are wrong.
Photo courtesy Bibliothek Wissenschaftspark Albert Einstein, Wikimedia Commons Another swing around the sun, so I will try again to define what I have tried before: Let’s say you have good health and time. A clean little space, cool in the summer and warm in the winter, a bed…
Absence only makes the heart grow fonder under limited conditions; extend it, and you are looking at a different cliché entirely: out of sight, out of mind.
For Black Americans, the questions might be asked, what does Christmas mean to us? And how can we make Christmas something usable for us? If, as Frederick Douglass argues, Christmas was tainted by the power politics of slavery, as the stories in Collier-Thomas’s collection make clear, it was equally tainted by Jim Crow and segregation.
Millan had some of the same challenges as Black actor in dealing with certain types of “minority” roles, but he also had some advantages in getting more roles. Latino actors were often all-purpose “minority” actors, playing East Indians, Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, any of a wide swath of so-called “people of color.”
What does it mean to live in a country where anger is entertainment and power, and fights break out on airplanes? Some of this rage is by now a cultural habit; the rest is raw and fresh.