Unwanted side effects of democracy

Maybe it’s the legacy of the Cold War — all of those years of being the bastion of freedom and democracy — but somehow Americans got in the habit of viewing democracy as something completely good, something that everyone in his or her right mind must want, like a chocolate sundae with no calories.
But democracy, [...]

The Cold War is history

Many conditions were necessary for the end of the Cold War to happen as it did.
In an academic conference, entitled The Cold War is History (iTunes, website), Stanford historian James Sheehan reminds us that even when the Berlin wall fell, reunification of Germany was not a done deal. In fact, there were two enormously important [...]

We think what we speak

Each language has a toolkit to help us learn what to pay attention to.
So argues Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky during this episode of the Stanford University radio show Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature) (website, iTunes).
Boroditsky studies how the languages we use influence the way we think. And she’s come up with some startling [...]

Why Americans hate government

When Ronald Reagan said in 1981 “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was tapping into a long history of American suspicion of government.
UCLA political science professor Brian Walker has a theory about where that suspicion came from. He lays out his ideas in the Oct. 10 lecture (download [...]

Freud was wrong about catharsis

Why does the “talking cure” pioneered by Sigmund Freud and his students help relieve anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses?
Freud famously taught that psychotherapy helped the patient achieve catharsis, or purging of the emotions. This was helpful, Freud thought, because he imagined that our emotions exist in a closed hydraulic system like a steam [...]

Are we a ‘touch-starved’ culture?

UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner thinks we Americans are definitely touch-deprived.  In lecture 8 of his excellent course Human Happiness (feed),  Keltner presents evidence that when we touch each other, we feel less stressed, more altruistic and well — happier. He’s talking here about casual everyday touches, everything from a bear hug to [...]

Want to improve your memory? Get some sleep.

Psychologist Matt Walker has some bad news for students who don’t crack the books until the night before the big exam. Not only are students who “pull an all nighter” groggy and punch-drunk the next day, they also significantly degrade their memory circuits and impede the learning process.
That is the big take-home lesson in Walker’s [...]

How the Biblical texts became Holy Scripture

After reading Bible scholar James Kugel’s great book, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now I was thrilled to find his lecture Can The Torah Make Its Peace With Modern Biblical Scholarship? (website). Kugel was formally a star lecturer at Harvard where his courses were routinely packed, and he now [...]

Allons enfants de la Patrie

I’m a bit late for Bastille Day, but surely it’s never too late for a great bit of history. The story of La Marseillaise, the stirring and bloody-minded French national anthem is the backdrop to the Feb. 28 lecture of historian Margaret Anderson’s excellent survey course The Making of Modern Europe, 1453 to the Present [...]

The ‘Game of Life’ and the 1960s Counterculture

I lived through the late 1960s as a student at UC Berkeley, the epicenter of the counterculture and radical chic. And yet somehow I missed the grand intellectual underpinnings of hippie-dom and the Summer of Love. (The people I knew who championed “People’s Park” and wore dashikis were mainly the lazy kids who’d rather [...]