Category: Books

  • Beyond Happiness

    A New Gauge to See What’s Beyond Happiness (NYT): In his 2008 book, “Gross National Happiness,” Dr. Brooks argues that what’s crucial to well-being is not how cheerful you feel, not how much money you make, but rather the meaning you find in life and your sense of “earned success” — the belief that you…

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  • “Serenity Parenting”

    Bryan Caplan looks at twin studies and concludes:  Have More Kids. Pay Less Attention to Them (WSJ): The obvious lesson to draw is that parents should lighten up.  I call it “Serenity Parenting”: Parents need the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they can, and (thank you…

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  • The Mind’s Eye

    Latest by writing neuologist, Oliver Sacks is excerpted here, read from/discussed live here.  A handful of Sacks’ New Yorker pieces are available in-full here. The excerpt begins like this: Dear Dr. Sacks, My (very unusual) problem, in one sentence, and in non-medical terms, is: I can’t read. I can’t read music, or anything else. In the…

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  • Mindfulness Exercises

    From The Mindful Way Through Anxiety–or, rather, from the book’s website–some audio mindfulness exercises.  (The promo material at the beginning of each ends quickly.)

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  • Proofiness

    Beware of iffy-seeming stats:  An interview with Charles Seife, author of Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception. The issue is that in medicine or any other field of study, it’s really easy to show that two things are linked in some manner…A number of years ago there was a study that showed the higher…

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