What should we think as Donald Trump urges people to vote in January, confuses places and names, fumbles for words, simplifies his speech patterns, describes recent experiences that did not happen and in public seems increasingly vulgar, menacing and unfiltered? When President Biden showed his age and stumbled through the …
Read More »Philip Zimbardo, 91, Whose Stanford Prison Experiment Studied Evil, Dies
Philip G. Zimbardo, a towering figure in social psychology who explored how good people turn evil in the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, which devolved into chaos after college students acting as guards started abusing other students acting as prisoners, died on Oct. 14 at his home in San Francisco. He …
Read More »U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says
An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment. The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues …
Read More »At the Grocery Store, Blinded by the Light of the ‘Health Halo’
shop talk At the Grocery Store, Blinded by the Light of the ‘Health Halo’ The term refers to the perception that a food product is generally good for us based on a single claim, casting subliminal power over our diets and dollars. By Dani Blum This article is part of …
Read More »In Sedona, a Psychic and a Skeptic Walk Into a Vortex
On a clear spring day, my mother and I hiked an unmarked spur trail to Subway Cave, in Boynton Canyon, near Sedona, Ariz. As we scrambled up a cliff to the cave’s opening, we heard a little boy ask his father, “Do you think moons could be spaceships? We’re always …
Read More »Afraid of Flying? Here’s How to Make It Feel Less Scary.
More than 25 million Americans have a severe fear of flying, or aerophobia, the Cleveland Clinic estimates. Aerophobia can cause extreme anxiety before and during a flight as the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center, goes into overdrive over perceived dangers. Yet flying is one of the safest forms of transportation. …
Read More »Why Can’t I Get This Song Out of My Head?
Q: I have had a Kacey Musgraves song stuck in my head for two weeks and it’s making me crazy. Why is this happening? First, some reassurance: You’re not alone. Research suggests that catchy songs that get lodged in your head — colloquially known as earworms — are common, and …
Read More »Why Do Apes Make Gestures?
In the 1960s, Jane Goodall started spending weeks at a time in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania watching chimpanzees. One of her most important discoveries was that the apes regularly made gestures to one another. Male chimpanzees tipped their heads up as a threat, for example, while mothers motioned …
Read More »Meeting the Mental Health Challenge in School and at Home (Published 2022)
This article is part of our Learning special report about how the pandemic has continued to change how we approach education. Last year, Leticia Guerrero-Castaneda’s 11-year-old son, Isaiah, was struggling. He was in the fifth grade when the pandemic shutdown occurred, and his reaction was to shut himself down; he …
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