Alex Curmi in The Guardian:
‘What should I do?” Whether openly stated or implicit, this is the question a new client usually raises in their first therapy session. People come to see me for many reasons: relationship problems, addiction and mental health difficulties, such as anxiety. Increasingly, I have found that beneath all of these disparate problems lies a common theme: indecision, the sense of feeling stuck, and lack of clarity as to the way forward.
Making decisions is difficult. Anyone who has lain awake contemplating a romantic dilemma, or a sudden financial crisis, knows how hard it can be to choose a course of action. This is understandable, given that in any scenario we must contend with a myriad conflicting thoughts and emotions – painful recollections from the past, hopes for the future, and the expectations of family, friends, and co-workers.
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At 70, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous book, Lolita, is decidedly problematic. It is, after all, a novel narrated by a pedophile, kidnapper, and rapist (also, lest we forget, murderer) who tells his story from prison, who relates his crimes with a pyrotechnic verbal exhilaration that is tantamount to glee, who seduces each reader into complicity simply through the act of reading: to read the novel to the end is to have succumbed to Humbert Humbert’s insidious, sullying charms. Framed by the banal platitudes of John Ray Jr., the fictional psychologist whose foreword introduces the account (“‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world”), Humbert’s exuberant voice seduces the reader, even as so many of the novel’s characters are foolishly, sometimes fatally, seduced. What are we doing, when we read this book with such pleasure? What was Nabokov doing, in writing this unsettling novel?
They say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but for computer scientists, two birds in a hole are better still. That’s because those cohabiting birds are the protagonists of a deceptively simple mathematical theorem called the pigeonhole principle. It’s easy to sum up in one short sentence: If six pigeons nestle into five pigeonholes, at least two of them must share a hole. That’s it — that’s the whole thing.
The Trump administration’s assault on higher education continues to escalate. The White House has 
What was Emersonian? I first saw the term used in an essay by Harold Bloom called “The New Transcendentalism” about “the visionary strain” in the American poets W. S. Merwin, John Ashbery, and A. R. Ammons. Their excellence as poets (Bloom ranked them 3, 2, 1) depended almost entirely on their Emersonianism. Bloom wrote as if everyone, including the women he omitted, knew what it meant. Now I think he meant unrestrained by conventions of a closed system, like Christianity or the Boy Scouts of America. To be Emersonian was to be true to one’s own system, whatever that might be, idealist, visionary, in any case, a poetry of the sublime and the large statement, the lingua franca of Wallace Stevens, say, but also the kitchen sink realism of William Carlos Williams, though not as wild and visionary as William Blake, or as talented. Could we say existentialist? American poets who dwelt in the Emersonian sunshine might write free verse or in song meters, like Blake. Nevertheless, Emerson’s idealism was both principle and excuse for their poetry, with Whitman and Dickinson as influential figures. Whitman’s muse was installed amid the kitchenware. Dickinson’s lived in her upstairs bedroom. Domesticated but wild, wolves in Victorian sheepskin, these Emersonians were ordained to go uncollared but prophetic, unpenned with fountain pen in hand.
If there’s anyone who knows how to play a wealthy man with a secret, it’s Jon Hamm. From Mad Men‘s Don Draper to Andrew Cooper turning to a life of crime to maintain his lavish lifestyle in his new series Your Friends and Neighbors (
For sheer cushiness
The classic liberal society of participatory institutions, competitive markets, and social mobility, which formerly nurtured and sustained the American belief in individual freedom and opportunity along with popular self-rule, is today scarcely a memory. In its place, the corporate organization of society—expanding for 150 years with its encompassing hierarchies and concentrations of power—recast American society and its popular practices and expectations. Amid the unending acceleration of production and technological innovation, omnipresent merchandisers and round-the-clock digital stimulants cajole and persuade individuals to pursue unprecedented enticements: indulgence in limitless appetitive striving and the pseudo-celebrity of ceaseless self-inflation. Facing an ever more constricting social reality and temptations ever less compatible with the core liberal virtues of moderation and self-restraint, Americans may wonder what is still liberal about their axiomatically liberal society. If the answer is cautionary, where does this leave us? And what options do we have?
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A unique aspect of human developmental systems are our rich, cumulative cultures, which we inherit along with our genes. Thousands of years of gendered cultures, together with our evolved and unparalleled capacity for social learning, might have reduced the need for genes to be the ‘carriers’ of sex-linked behavioural features. Instead, as John Dupré, Daphna Joel and I have 
So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, “The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,” Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help explain not just why people are prone to ideology but how they perceive and share information.