The Benjamin Franklin Effect The Misconception: You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate. The Truth: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm.
Category Archives: serious stuff
what a drag it is getting old
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done It gets lonely. George Burns was told to date girls his age. “There are no girls my age.” For all of us, there are fewer and fewer people our age. Who wants to be the last one on board? I am happy I knew them. They […]
honesty
Monday, November 28, 2011
Don’t always protect people from your truth. It won’t make things right One of the day-to-day reasons that relationships between human beings become so screwed up has to do with this well-intentioned deception. We protect those we interact with from the negative aspects of our feelings about them, because we want to be nice and […]
The other ‘9/11’
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Chile: The other 9/11 Following Allende’s election, the US Ambassador cabled Washington: “Chile voted calmly to have a Marxist-Leninist state, the first country in the world to make this choice freely and knowingly.”
Dear Jack,
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
thanks for your letter. Politics aside, this hit me hard. i’ve just lost a summer to anger and fear and despair, despite many good things happening. Optimism i can kind of do, but my hope always goes nowhere, and love? i can’t even start, despair and fear and anger always follow when i try to […]
Why we fight
Friday, June 17, 2011
Eisenhower’s worst fears came true. We invent enemies to buy the bombs It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them.
Vote splitting
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Vote splitting crucial : NDP strength swung Liberal votes to Tories The first returns suggest the rising support for the NDP has drawn enough votes to allow the Tories to capture 13 seats perviously [sic] held by Liberals and one held by the Bloc Québé cois [sic]. Although the Greens saw their popular vote again […]
Meanwhile in America
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
What’s Left of the Left Even then, these economists recognized what a paltry, bowdlerized proxy for the left they were: six academics, and by any broad ideological standard a pretty moderate group, comfortable with markets and free trade. But liberals had long ago ceased to rally around class. “In the United States,” Blinder told me […]
nah, i don’t think we’re screwed
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Rules of Misbehavior Dan Savage, the brilliant and foul-mouthed sex columnist, has become one of the most important ethicists in America. Are we screwed? […] If Savage’s ethical guidelines—disclosure, autonomy, mutual exchange, and minimum standards of performance—seem familiar or intuitive, it’s probably because they also govern expectations in the markets for goods and services.
