Botox your feelings away
From a review of Marianne LaFrance’s Lip Service, in The Wall Street Journal: “The importance of the smile is most apparent when we can’t produce one. When a person can’t smile – due to injury, illness, nerve damage, severe depression or cosmetic surgery gone awry – it is not only the observer who is spooked. The person’s own ability to feel emotions and empathize with others, Ms. LaFrance explains, is also substantially reduced. The evolutionary purpose of smiling (and other facial expressions) is to communicate our emotions not only to others but also to ourselves. Your mother was right: Smile and you’ll feel happier; put the muscles of your face into a snarl and you’ll feel angrier. This is why, as Ms. LaFrance shows, Botox treatments smooth out feelings as well as wrinkles.”
All it takes to change
“To change the beliefs of an entire community,” says Discovery News, “only 10 per cent of the population needs to become convinced of a new or different opinion, suggests a new study done at the social cognitive networks academic research centre at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At that tipping point, the idea can spread through social networks and alter behaviours on a large scale.”
Spot the narcissist
Stars are finally being called out on Twitter for tweets that feign humility but are really just bragging, says The Daily Beast. Some “humblebrags”:
“Just passed my billboard on Sunset Blvd – After all these years, I still ask myself ‘is that me?’” (RuPaul)
“People ask me every day to pose for pictures but the camera never works the first time – they are never prepared or maybe just very nervous!” (Donald Trump)
“On the phone with my editor, book publicist, and marketing person. Man, books take work. Mainstream ones.” (Chris Brogan)
What’s up, cop?
“Police in Idaho say they advised a man not to wear his bunny suit in public after neighbours complained about him scaring children,” reports United Press International. “Idaho Falls police said an officer responded … when a resident reported William Falkingham, 34, had frightened a child by wearing a bunny suit and hiding behind a tree. The officer spoke to multiple neighbours who said they had been disturbed by Mr. Falkingham wearing the suit. They said he sometimes wears a tutu over the costume. Police said Mr. Falkingham was advised not to wear the suit in public. He told officers he enjoys wearing the bunny suit but understands the concerns of his neighbours.”
A life in judo
“After 98 years, the phone call finally came,” writes Meredith May in The San Francisco Chronicle. “Last week, Sensei Keiko Fukuda of San Francisco became the first woman to be promoted to judo’s highest level: 10th degree black belt. Only three people in the world, all men living in Japan, have ever reached that mark. The martial arts promotion by USA Judo brought 98-year-old Fukuda to tears at the women’s dojo where she still teaches in Noe Valley. … She gave up marriage and left her homeland to dedicate her life to judo, fighting gender discrimination that kept her at lower belt levels decades longer than men less skilled than she.”
The reading minority
“While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to,” writes Alan Jacobs in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “And that’s to be expected. Serious ‘deep attention’ reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit … In 2005, Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, sociologists from Northwestern University, published a paper concluding that while there was a period in which extraordinarily many Americans practised long-form reading, whether they liked it or not, that period was indeed extraordinary and not sustainable in the long run. ‘We are now seeing such reading return to its social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.’ I don’t think of the distinction between readers and non-readers – better, those who love reading and those who don’t so much – in terms of class which may be a function … of my knowledge that readers can be found at all social stations. But whatever designations we want to use, it has to be admitted that much of the anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree, arises at frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of ‘the reading class’ beyond what may be its natural limits.”
Thought du jour
“When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap – people shouldn’t read that stuff.” – Mike Tyson (1966- ), retired American boxer
