Toxic masculinity is not just front page news these days, its the top topic on the front page. Masculinity rests on real biological differences between the genders, but how those differences turn into norms of “being a man” is shaped heavily by history and culture. Most researchers see it as an interaction, not either/or. The biological roots of it lie in hormones. Prenatal and pubertal testosterone shape body size, muscle mass, and some behavioral tendencies.…
One day in 2015, when Kim and I had moved to Staten Island so I could pursue my crazy vision of building the world’s largest observation wheel on New York Harbor (why does that sound so idiotic today when it made total sense at the time?), I heard her conversing with someone out on our patio. The patio overlooked the parking lot for the half dozen orange ferries that plied the waters from there to…
Every day we deal with personalities. We do that mostly without noticing. We read and adjust to personality in nearly every interaction. We are forced to read people and form quick trait impressions from voice, posture, and word choice, and they’re often surprisingly accurate, especially for extraversion. We are constantly adjusting our approach to people based on our assessment of their personality. We give the anxious colleague more reassurance, we keep it brief with the…
Being in the moment means your attention is on what’s actually happening now, rather than replaying the past or rehearsing the future. You notice the conversation you’re in, the food you’re eating or the road ahead, instead of half-living it while your mind is somewhere else. It doesn’t mean having no thoughts. It means noticing when your mind has wandered off and bringing it back. Writing is my best tool for staying in the moment…
The midterms are Tuesday, November 3, a month out from today. Democrats are favored to take the House, and the Senate is close to a coin flip, with a slight edge for the Democrats. While I say a Paul Krugman podcast today that suggested that the House odds were now at 99% in favor of Democrats, the prediction markets, which are the most objective source of sentiment, give Democrats about 85% odds of winning the…
Today I read an article on listening and how to do it better. They called it “reflective listening”. What is reflective listening? Reflective listening is most often used by therapists (remember the “how does that make you feel” questions?). But psychologists who have studied the technique say it’s a tool everyone should have in their back pocket in order to get the most out of our communication with others and therefore in our relationship with…
You’ve heard of the “last mile”. It’s a phrase that ostensibly comes from telecommunications, where it described the final stretch of a network: the copper line, cable, or fiber running from the local exchange or hub to an individual home or business. Telephone engineers had long called this segment the “local loop.” “Last mile” became the popular term, likely in the 1980s–90s as cable, broadband, and telecom deregulation made that final connection the costliest and…
When I receive my monthly National Geographic magazine, I usually put it on my side table next to my spot on the living room sofa. The great thing about NatGeo is that the articles in it are mostly timeless and can be read whenever the spirit moves you. Besides being timeless, most of those articles are also entirely optional in that there is nothing about them that is mandatory reading. They are often fascinating and…
In Dante’s Inferno, hell is a funnel with nine circles. Each circle holds worse sinners than the one above it. It starts with Limbo. Virtuous non-Christians and unbaptized souls, such as Homer, Virgil, and Socrates live here. There’s no torment here, only an eternal longing for God. Then there’s Lust. The lustful are whipped around forever by a violent storm. Many of us live here and we men, especially, shrug and explain this one away…
A few years ago I wrote about my travails in getting fire insurance in the collapsing homeowners insurance market of California. The problem was mostly wildfire related (perhaps some seismic and tsunami in certain areas, but no so much here). Since then we had the devastating Palisades and Altadena fires in L.A. that further crashed down on the heads of insurers and caused the state’s assigned fire risk pool plan, called The FAIR Plan to…