anotherpanacea

Tag: narratives

  • If we know how to cultivate intimacy, why don’t we?

    Replication-gate continues, this time with a successful replication of Arthur Aron’s interpersonal closeness study: To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This. The odd thing is that the author tried it, found it caused feelings of intimacy with a potential sexual partner, and now calls that love. Because Aron’s whole point was that our brains…

  • Stories of Decline, Stasis, and Progress

    Peter Levine asks, “Why do we feel compelled to argue from decline?” in areas where objective measures suggest progress or growth: You can care deeply about public education, civic education, teenagers’ behavior, or–if you must–gun rights, but there is no basis for arguing that these things are worse than they used to be. I am…

  • Deciding Whether or Not to Tell a Story

    When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “Truth and Beauty” with the poet Ann Lauterbach. It was basically a class on reading and writing essays, but I took it because I was a philosophy major and I thought it would be about aesthetics, i.e. about whether judgments about beauty can be true…

  • Two Theories of Wikileaks, or Just One?

    So far as  I can tell, the news coverage of the latest diplomatic infodump breaks along a line orthogonal to ordinary US partisanship. Either: 1. There’s nothing new here, although the possibility of future exposure may hamper diplomatic efforts in the near term. or 2. Secrecy is bad, here are some secrets. Neither perspective is particular…