If You’re Happy and You Know It, Take A Survey

How Can We Most Effectively Measure Happiness?

John Stuart Mill famously wrote, “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” Ask yourself to put a metric on it, and it’s even worse. And yet we do need measurements of happiness, for all sorts of reasons. If nothing else, we need to fend off social policies that promote misery instead of well-being. So then it’s just about finding a way to put some numbers on it. In advance of “Does Happiness Keep the Doctor Away?”, a Zócalo event, we asked several people in the …

Take Two Mitzvahs and Call Me In the Morning

If You Want a Long and Healthy Life, Try Altruism

What if there were a drug out there that cost nothing to produce, required no prescription, and made people live longer, feel happier and less stressed, and sleep better? There’d …

You Won’t Sound Like Santana-At First

Psychologist Gary Marcus On Learning When Old (or Older)

What inspired an accomplished scientist with no known musical aptitude to learn to play guitar just before turning 40? At an event co-presented by Kaiser Permanente in front of a …

Let There Be Shredding

What Have We Learned From Video Games Like Guitar Hero?

 

Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and numerous other immersive games have connected people to music in a new way. Some have even found themselves tapping into musical reserves they didn’t know …

Enjoy Your Weird Cult of Food

Just Don’t Lose All Sense of Irony

Adam Gopnik’s defense of molecular gastronomy is simple. “I love magic tricks,” he said. “You know it’s a trick; you know it’s not magic. But the very fact of doing …

Oh, Sweet Velveeta!

What Should We Miss From the Decades When Salad Meant Jello?

 

Americans have never had as many food choices as they do today. Nor have they ever relished food more for its own sake. It’s all very haute, this attention to …