Write about what?

Sir Thomas More, a scholar, lawyer and statesman published a novel in 1516 describing a perfect civilization. According to the book, this too real to be true society existed on an imaginary island that he dubbed Utopia.  Of course More was not the first to attempt to do this; he was actually heavily influenced by Plato‘s Republic, written over 18 centuries earlier. The utopian novel is an ancient idea.

The word More coined was used a few hundred years later by John Stuart Mill to create another new term, dystopia, a society too bad to be true. Dystopian literature is by no means new either. There are ancient texts that describe a future in which society is deeply flawed, and yet citizens continue to serve the powers that be, unaware of their enslavement. The creator of modern works in this vein is often credited to…

There is a flood of dystopian novels compared to those that feature utopias because a society without problems has a tendency to be boring.  However, if you start reading The Republic by Plato, and you may discover that his ideal society has some pretty disturbing aspects.  The discourses that comprise The Republic supposedly record the discussions of the sage Socrates, who would eventually be executed for corrupting the youth. We really do not know how much Plato hid his own opinions behind the words that he claimed Socrates spoke.

The Republic proposes equal education for men and women, both physical and mental, so they could perform the same work. Then, he states what seems to follow logically. If men and woman are to have a status of equality, then marriage and the family must be abolished. The rulers will determine which people can mate and produce children. These children…

While watching a recent bone crunching pro-football game on TV, I saw a player dive into a fracas and come up the fumbled football. He took off for his goal, running for the sidelines to avoid being pummel by a pile of opposing players.  With the TV camera in close I could see his grin as his teammates gave him congratulatory fists to the his helmet. It looked like his head was being knocked around inside his helmet.

“Doesn’t that hurt him?” I asked.

“Players frequently do things to their own players that would result in a penalty if they did  it to an opponent,” was the response of a more sage sports aficionado.

If you read many of the current sports books you will find there is a much darker side to sports than the painful  celebratory punching that occurs between team members. The same sports aficionado advised me…

Why can’t we be all like adolescent girls, and laugh more? The topic of the discussion thread caught my attention. Evidently girls between the ages of 11 and 18 all over the world laugh more than any other group. In the past, I have often been in classrooms where teenage girls were unable to suppress their laughter. Most of the time there was nothing particularly amusing to start the laughter. However, the very sound of an initial giggle seemed to generate the impulse for laughter to spread. It frequently turned into a high pitched and disruptive twitter, bringing the class to a halt. I suspected that was the reason the girls were giggling so much.

It turns out that I was not far from right. Girls don’t giggling all the time because they are having fun, but because they are building their first line of defense. Giggling is an attempt…

The group of women sat around a table, discussing their mother’s instructions on being a “Southern Lady. ” In their story telling manner they competed with each to relate the most outlandish piece of advice.

“I never could understand that bit about making sure I had on clean underwear before going on a car trip in case I was in an accident,” one drawled.

“Me neither,” agreed a second woman with a honeyed giggle. “If I were in a car crash and bleeding, I doubt anyone would be worried about how clean my underwear was.”

The first woman continued. “Still she would remind me every time we got in the car. Sometime she simply would insist that I go back in the house and put on another pair, but I would have none of that.”

“My mother would insist that I put on clean underwear, too,” a third woman chimed…

Investing money cc-by-sa-2.0

Optimism and pessimism are not two distinct styles but rather ends of a continuum. At the optimistic end people expect only good events to happen to them. They concentrate on stimuli that indicates a rosy outlook and ignore warning signs of unpleasant possibilities. At the pessimistic end people expect bad events to happen to them and become preoccupied with signs that something is going wrong.  Recently we have been told the further one is on the optimistic side, without reaching the oblivious dysfunctional state of being unable to see any pitfalls, the better life is.  Look at the all the benefits that some psychological researchers claim to have found for people who are higher on the optimism scale; they are purportedly happier, healthier and make more money.

However, careful examination of these claims show that social support[1], health, higher income[2] and optimism are really…