Guest Post: The psychology of anthropomorphism, or why I felt empathy towards a piece of trash

In early January, the sidewalks in my neighborhood are lined with discarded Christmas trees. It’s the collective holiday hangover trash, and quite frankly it makes me sad; the trees mark the moment of winter where all that is left are several cheerless months of cold and drudgery. My dog, however, goes apeshit over them. He [...]

The (Un)Happiness Project

My husband and I have been in the same apartment for more than four years. It’s a truly lovely place — spacious (for New York) with high ceilings, stained glass, and parquet wood floors. Each room has the appropriate furniture and many of the walls have been painted a color of my own choosing. We [...]

You’re Not as Happy as You Think You Are, Behavioral Scientists Report

Marriage is like a sweater. A yellow sweater you bought, and couldn’t return. So says Dan Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard, and one of the 20 outrageously accomplished behavioral scientists who spoke at a 1-day summit at Stanford last week. Gilbert studies happiness, not knitwear. And his main point is that we humans are terrible [...]

Brave New Worlds

I remember the day the horses arrived. It had been raining, and for two kids cooped up inside, the afternoon seemed to stretch into years . And then there were horses. Some were dark as thunderclouds, some roan, some palomino. There were wild mustangs and Icelandic horses with manes like clouds. My best friend and [...]

From Freud to Feynman: Curious Thoughts of Curious Minds

I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!  The poet: Richard P. Feynman. The occasion: an undergraduate philosophy term paper at MIT. A great work of poetry? Perhaps not. An example of profound thinking and the ability to render a complex [...]

How Not to Be Blown to Smithereens

Last week a British treasure-hunter, Ian Snook, barely escaped a rather unpleasant end when his metal detector began clicking madly on a beach in Dorset, England. Answering the siren call of potential loot, Snook began digging furiously, only to find a battered metal sign. It read “Precaution–bombs fire instantly on breaking in air. Stringent precautions must [...]