The Year We Made No Resolutions
We have just broken a 4,000-year-old tradition that began with the ancient Babylonians.
By Jeannette Cooperman
The Color Purple
After centuries of art and ritual, color symbolism is so richly layered that we can pick what we like, impose our own symbolism. Maybe Kamala Harris has ascended to our version of royalty, and the purple was her robe, sans ermine trim. Maybe she was preparing for a brazen old age, as clubby women do. Or bracing to be wounded in battle.
Please Let COVID Kill the Buffet
Empiricists love buffets, because they can peer at all their options, maybe even spoon something up and study it before deciding whether to take more.
What Would It Take to Be Whole Again?
Nearly everything in our culture, including companies and music and social media sites, is now forced to choose sides. I am right there keeping score and applauding, because too much damage has been done to talk fatuously of unity.
What QAnon Calls Research
To those of us not playing, QAnon feels like the nightmarish but logical conclusion to the gradual realization, in valid disciplines, that all truth is subjective and relative; that the observer can alter the situation; that facts can be bent to support a false narrative.
Baring Pixar’s Soul
Soul may be a children’s movie, but two weeks later, I am still trying to figure it out. Granted, I overthink everything. But I like director (and Pixar creative chief) Pete Docter’s willingness to tackle abstract concepts (Up, Inside Out) so I want to know what he is saying.
What You Wear to a Coup
It stands to reason that participants wanted to advertise, in costume, their political beliefs, because once you dive beneath support for Trump and blind faith that the election was stolen, the agendas vary dramatically.
What Julius Caesar, Gertrude Stein, Donald Trump, Marilyn Monroe, Miss Manners, and Jesus Have in Common
Distancing the Self by addressing it in the second or third person is calming, neuropsychiatrists now tell us. It reduces “overwhelm,” a feeling so common these days that it has become a noun. Emotional distress drops quickly—within one second, in fact—when someone shifts to third person, seeing themselves as others might, or as they see others.
A Less Than Civil War
Is there enough rage to launch a civil war? “Is there a way to avoid one?” counters the newly cynical voice inside my head. Because we cannot talk this through, operating as we are from entirely different assumptions about truth, facts, and the Constitution.
Sick As a Dog
his is more than a story about how dogs bankrupt you and drive you crazy. It is a story about the damage that can be done to any of us when we do not get what we need.
The Most Important and Most Neglected Virtue
As director of The Honesty Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, Dr. Christian Miller wants to rectify the omission. “Honesty was neglected in the realm of academic philosophy for much of the twentieth century,” he points out, “and there’s no clear answer why.” Maybe it scares us.
Fate Can Be Cruel, Friends Crueller
Social media only exaggerates the power of a mean remark, spreading it far and wide, memorializing it forever. Which is why Mich Hancock, who built a company on her adroit use of social, is now pushing to “make the internet a kinder place.” She admits her plan sounds “a little fluffy”—but when she tells me what drove her, it is clear just how much weight has landed behind simple kindness.