Novelty-Seeking (Neophilia) Can Be a Predictor of Well-Being - John Tierney via NYTimes.com -
I have a deep-seated desire for novelty, and I am happy to learn that it’s not all bad:
John Tierney via NYTimes.com
“Novelty-seeking is one of the traits that keeps you healthy and happy and fosters personality growth as you age,” says C. Robert Cloninger, the psychiatrist who developed personality tests for measuring this trait. The problems with novelty-seeking showed up in his early research in the 1990s; the advantages have become apparent after he and his colleagues tested and tracked thousands of people in the United States, Israel and Finland.
“It can lead to antisocial behavior,” he says, “but if you combine this adventurousness and curiosity with persistence and a sense that it’s not all about you, then you get the kind of creativity that benefits society as a whole.”
Fans of this trait are calling it “neophilia” and pointing to genetic evidence of its importance as humans migrated throughout the world. In her survey of the recent research, “New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change,” the journalist Winifred Gallagher argues that neophilia has always been the quintessential human survival skill, whether adapting to climate change on the ancestral African savanna or coping with the latest digital toy from Silicon Valley.
“Nothing reveals your personality more succinctly than your characteristic emotional reaction to novelty and change over time and across many situations,” Ms. Gallagher says. “It’s also the most important behavioral difference among individuals.” Drawing on the work of Dr. Cloninger and other personality researchers, she classifies people as neophobes, neophiles and, at the most extreme, neophiliacs. (To classify yourself, you can take a quiz on the Well blog.)
“Although we’re a neophilic species,” Ms. Gallagher says, “as individuals we differ in our reactions to novelty, because a population’s survival is enhanced by some adventurers who explore for new resources and worriers who are attuned to the risks involved.”
Good character traits for a world exploding with new, new, new.
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(Source: bananafest, via couriersandkings)
Jos Albert, Snowy Landscape
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Max von Sydow has been making movies since 1949, with everyone from Ingmar Bergman to Woody Allen. Now, at 82, he could be about to win his first Oscar.
Kate Upton, who got to the cover of Sports Illustrated after her Dougie Dance video went viral.
Potato galette (Taken with instagram)
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Hervé This’ Chocolate Mousse
Serves 4Ingredients
3/4 cup (6 ounces) water
8 ounces chocolate (we used 70% bittersweet — choose a high quality chocolate you love)
whipped cream for topping (optional)
Directions
Simply pour water into a saucepan (which will be improved from the gastronomic point of view if it is flavored with orange juice, for example, or cassis puree). Then, over medium-low heat, whisk in the chocolate. The result is a homogenous sauce.
Put the saucepan in a bowl partly filled with ice cubes (or pour into another bowl over the ice — it will chill faster), then whisk the chocolate sauce, either manually with a whisk or with an electric mixer (if using an electric mixer, watch closely — it will thicken faster). Whisking creates large air bubbles in the sauce, which steadily thickens. After a while strands of chocolate form inside the loops of the whisk. Pour or spoon immediately into ramekins, small bowls or jars and let set.
Note: Three things can go wrong. Here’s how to fix them. If your chocolate doesn’t contain enough fat, melt the mixture again, add some chocolate, and then whisk it again. If the mousse is not light enough, melt the mixture again, add some water, and whisk it once more. If you whisk it too much, so that it becomes grainy, this means that the foam has turned into an emulsion. In that case simply melt the mixture and whisk it again, adding nothing.
Serve immediately, or refrigerate. Top with whipped cream if desire
Huge unrest in Greece after technocrats manage to coerce the Parliament to agree to more austerity measures demanded by the troika — European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund — even when many believers the austerity is being imposed as a way to get northern Europeans to accept the costs of salvaging Greece, even while the austerity measures are not linked with turning Greece’s troubled economy around. And, even after all that, consensus seems to be shifting toward the inevitable failure of these measures:
Niki Kitsantonis and Rachel Donadio via NYTimes.com
The new austerity measures include, among others, a 22 percent cut in the benchmark minimum wage and 150,000 government layoffs by 2015 — a bitter prospect in a country ravaged by five years of recession and with unemployment at 21 percent and rising.
But the chaos on the streets of Athens, where more than 80,000 people turned out to protest on Sunday, and in other cities across Greece reflected a growing dread — certainly among Greeks, but also among economists and perhaps even European officials — that the sharp belt-tightening and the bailout money it brings will still not be enough to keep the country from going over a precipice.
Angry protesters in the capital threw rocks at the police, who fired back with tear gas. After nightfall, demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails, setting fire to more than 40 buildings, including a historic theater in downtown Athens, the worst damage in the city since May 2010, when three people were killed when protesters firebombed a bank. There were clashes in Salonika in the north, Patra in the west, Volos in central Greece, and on the islands of Crete and Corfu.
Greece and its foreign lenders are locked in a dangerous brinkmanship over the future of the nation and the euro. Until recently, a Greek default and exit from the euro zone was seen as unthinkable. Now, though experts say that the European Union is not prepared for a default and does not want one, the dynamic has shifted from trying to save Greece to trying to contain the damage if it turns out to be unsalvageable.
“They’re trying to lay the ground for it, trying to limit the contagion from it,” said Simon Tilford, the chief economist at the Center for European Reform, a research institute in London. Still, he added, letting Greece go would set a dangerous precedent, and it would be “fanciful” to think otherwise.
Greece’s limping economy yields large trade and budget deficits, and none but the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund — known collectively as the troika — are willing to lend the nation the money it needs to stay afloat. The troika is demanding more concessions to placate Germany and other northern European countries, where the bailout of Greece is a hard sell to voters. For its part, Greece is trying to preserve social and political cohesion in the face of growing unrest, political extremism and a devastated economy that is expected to worsen with more austerity. And the feeling is growing here and abroad that the troika’s strategy for Greece is failing.
The likely outcome — because the alternatives are completely unsustainable for the presumed duration of the big payback of all these loans, devalued or not — is that the technocratic government will be voted out of office in April, and a populist movement will win office on a platform of default and exiting the Eurozone (and probably the EU). And continued riots and unrest until then.
At least with a default, and the return to a devalued Drachma, the Greeks can begin to turn their economy around. This will immediately increase productivity and exports. And while there will be enormous disruption in the economy, it will be a disruption of their own making, and one that will force a great deal of the pain onto investors and banks, and will not solely be borne on the backs of Greek citizens.
Bill Marsh/The New York Times
“Measuring Mate Preferences: A Replication and Extension” by Christine B. Whelan, University of Pittsburgh, and Christie F. Boxer and Mary Noonan, University of Iowa
“No one can sing a Leonard Cohen song the way Cohen himself can’t.” — cited by Jesse Kornbluth in Leonard Cohen, King of Pop?
Gwendoline Christie by Jez Tozer
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Today’s [Egyptian] revolutionaries and activists have precisely the same demands for social justice, national dignity and representative government as the opponents of military rule did six decades ago.
After a brief honeymoon with a political class and public that regarded Nasser and his collaborators as saviors, opposition to the Free Officers emerged over suspicions that the commanders were reneging on their promises to clean up a corrupt political system and quickly hand power back to civilians.
In response to the determination of organized labor, the left, political parties and students to resist the Free Officers, the commanders used a combination of coercive measures — outright force and military tribunals — to subdue the opposition, followed by a variety of rules, decrees and regulations to prevent further challenges to the Free Officers’ authority. These institutions were authoritarian and constituted the foundation of Egypt’s nondemocratic politics for the ensuing 60 years.
The world has changed dramatically since the Free Officers whipped up instability in the streets of Cairo to justify their rule. Still, understanding the political patterns of the past provides insight into why and how leaders thwart popular demands for democratic governance. It can also help today’s activists, party leaders and average Egyptians write a new and considerably brighter political history for their country.
This is particularly important because even as Egypt’s current military rulers promise that they are preparing the ground for democracy, their actions belie this claim.
Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who currently holds executive authority, and his senior commanders have a compelling interest in salvaging as much as they can of the old political order, which made them the source of legitimacy, authority and power; provided the military with the benefits of vast business interests; and, to the minds of the officers, ensured stability and social cohesion.
These interests clearly contradict the basic features of a democracy — in which the people are the source of legitimacy, the military’s activities are subject to civilian oversight, politics are unpredictable and power changes hands.
” —- Steven Cook, Egypt’s Never-Ending Revolution
Cook thinks the military will try to retain power, resisting democratic rule.