Thought of the Day from Albert Einstein
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
People often show an amazing ability to emotionally recover from difficult circumstances. I devoted my second book, You’re Stronger Than You Think, to this topic. Now comes some really cool research, showing that people’s ability to bounce back from adversity depends, not all that surprisingly, on their underlying personality traits. Although this result is not…
I recently posted several humorous pictures illustrating the risks of assuming that correlation amounts to causation. But now comes along another interesting picture, that practically forces me to abandon scientific rigor and embrace the inevitable conclusion – that chocolate consumption leads to genius: Is everybody on board with my reasoning? (Click here to view comments)
“An extroverted mathematician, goes an old joke, is one who looks at your feet while he’s talking.” Alex Stone recounts this joke in his book, Fooling Houdini, which I wrote about in a previous post. As a philosophy major, I love to think there might be a college major more full of nerds and introverts…
As Jim Newton pointed out several times in his book on the White House Years, Eisenhower valued balancing the budget. Sometimes that meant controlling social welfare spending. But it also meant trying to restrain military spending and foregoing tax cuts, even when his Vice President, Richard Nixon, was running for Presidency and needed a lift in…

The best thing about bad art is that it makes fodder for great reviews. Take the opening line of Mina Strohminger’s review of Colin McGee’s “The Meaning of Disgust”: “In disgust research,” she writes in The Journal of Aesthetics and Critical Art, “there is shit, and then there is bullshit.”
Guess which category she thinks McGee’s book falls under?
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Andrew Solomon wrote a wonderful article in the New Yorker recently about Adam Lanza’s father and his search for answers to his son’s awful behavior. The piece included a quote I thought I would share with you today: All parenting involves choosing between the day (why have another argument at dinner?) and the years (the…