how to procrastinate well.

procrastination isn't always bad?

the risks are minute in comparison to the alternative.

because the looming risk of childhood death is out of sight, it is also largely out of mind, leading a growing number of Americans to worry about what is in fact a much lesser risk: the ill effects of vaccines.

“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”

A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback.

10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West

In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever.

“science alone isn’t enough … People are getting hurt. The parent who reads what Jenny McCarthy says and thinks, ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t get this vaccine,’ and their child dies of Hib meningitis,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s such a fundamental failure on our part that we haven’t convinced that parent.”

Offit has become the main target of a grassroots movement that opposes the systematic vaccination of children and the laws that require it

He boldly states — in speeches, in journal articles, and in his 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets — that vaccines do not cause autism or autoimmune disease or any of the other chronic conditions that have been blamed on them.

“God only made a few perfect heads, and the rest lie covered with hair.”

where I was told that every meal should consist of a brown thing, a white thing, a yellow thing and a green thing; that it was not right to lick the spoon while cooking; and that the inside of a dress seam was as important as the outside.

A preparation-for-life curriculum would not consist of courses on Victorian Thought and French Romanticism, but of things like How to Cope With Marital Breakdown, Getting More for your Footwear Dollar, Dealing With Stress, and How To Keep Your Fingernails from Breaking Off by Always Filing Them Towards the Center; in other words, it would read like the contents page of Homemakers Magazine, which is why Homemakers Magazine is so widely read, even by me. Or, for boys, Forbes or The Economist , and Improving Your Place in the Power Hierarchy by Choosing the Right Suit. (Dark blue with a faint white pinstripe, not too far apart, in case you’re interested.)

As for your university degree, there are definitely going to be days when you will feel that you’ve been given a refrigerator and sent to the middle of a jungle, where there are no three-pronged grounded plugholes.

state of joblessness, angst and cosmic depression which everyone knows is indispensable for novelists and poets, although nobody has ever claimed the same for geologists, dentists or chartered accountants.

to give credit for approved online courses. (Eighty-five per cent of the state’s community colleges currently have course waiting lists.) Following a trial run at San José State University which yielded higher-than-usual pass rates, eleven schools in the California State University system moved to incorporate MOOCs into their curricula. In addition to having their own professors teach, say, electrical engineering, these colleges may use videos by teachers at schools such as M.I.T.

calculates that at today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets.

Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

should be below two degrees Celsius

our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you,

ethologists actually believe that animals are simply rational calculating machines.

astonishingly, was never struck by a nun or molested by a priest

shaped me in many ways

I relished my role as the bad boy among the goody-goodies.

I relished my role as the bad boy among the goody-goodies.

There was the smart kids’ class, and there was the dumb kids’ class.

St. Petronille’s

I attended Catholic grade schools,

The rhetorical willingness to break eggs became, in practice , only a thrifty capacity for finding the sermon in every stone. Burn the literature, Ti-Grace Atkinson said in effect when it was suggested that, even come the revolution, thee would still be left the whole body of "sexist" Western literature. But of course no books would be burned: the women of this movement were perfectly capable of crafting didactic revisions of whatever apparently intractable material came to hand.

The model used was a JUGS Supergun II. It looks like a black space gun with a big snout

calisthenics

All work is gendered

must organize their workplaces or the work that most women do will continue to be undervalued

Female-dominated sectors such as retail sales, food service, and home health care are some of the fastest-growing fields in the new economy, and even in those fields, women earn less;

women in the restaurant industry earn 83 cents to a man’s dollar

my passion evolved into frustration and annoyance.

For most people, it's easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I've been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion.

But you might also notice some familiar patterns in my story that will give you confirmation (or confirmation bias) that your own success wasn't entirely luck.

people with Williams can have trouble deepening relationships. This saddens and frustrates them. They know no strangers but can claim few friends.

Many with Williams have so vague a concept of space, for instance, that even as adults they will fail at six-piece jigsaw puzzles, easily get lost, draw like a preschooler and struggle to replicate a simple T or X shape built with a half-dozen building blocks.

They told the group of the genetic accident underlying Williams, the heart and vascular problems that eventually kill many who have it, their intense enjoyment of talk, music and story, their frustration in trying to make friends, the slights and cruelties they suffered growing up, their difficulty understanding the world. When they finished, most of the bikers were in tears.

“Williams personality”: a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition.

forty-four per cent will have barely a moment to breathe before undergoing the transformation from student to suit.

In the eighteen-thirties, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather Warren Delano II made the family fortune exporting the drug to China, and Delano was able to sugarcoat his activities so plausibly that no one ever accused his grandson of being the scion of a drug lord.

what if children also learn the things that make them who they are–that shape their characters and personalities–from their peer group?

Adolescents aren’t trying to be like adults–they are trying to contrast themselves with adults,

sometimes an experience outside the home can back up what the parent has been saying.

Just by looking at a kid’s record, you can usually tell when he began smoking pot,

Those skills are spiritual

Then they look at their parents and see that none of this stuff guarantees happiness. The best way to teach a child is by example, and parents have to look at what their own lives are saying to their children.”

For years she has seen the dark side of Cobb County’s affluence – the kids damaged by broken families, undue expectations, and the rigid social categorization of other schools – and now she reaches an unsettling conclusion about American high schools.

nd confident in our ability to find someone else, usually someone better, monogamy and the old thinking about commitment will be challenged very harshly.”

Every bout of diarrhea or measles, he found, can bump a child off his growth curve.

The results were startling: adult slaves, Steckel found, were nearly as tall as free whites, and three to five inches taller than the average Africans of the time.

“Men grow taller and faster the wealthier their country,” the French hygienist and statistician Louis-René Villermé wrote in 1829. “In other words, misery . . . produces short people.”

And those experiences are spelled out in their bodies.

Any decent diet can send us sprouting at these ages, but take away any one of forty-five or fifty essential nutrients and the body stops growing. (“Iodine deficiency alone can knock off ten centimetres and fifteen I.Q. points,” one nutritionist told me.)

Biologists say that we achieve our stature in three spurts: the first in infancy, the second between the ages of six and eight, the last in adolescence.

That’s why the United Nations now uses height to monitor nutrition in developing countries.

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

At the Killing Fields, babies were held by their feet and smashed against a designated tree, the Baby-Smashing Tree.

torture to obtain confessions (including near drownings, the removal of toe- and fingernails followed by a dousing of alcohol, electric shocks applied to genitals, suffocation with plastic bags, and forcing prisoners to eat human excrement); that he ordered the murder of at least 15,000 people

In that first spasm of violence, everyone wearing glasses was killed. Everyone who spoke a foreign language was killed. Everyone with a university education was killed. Word was sent to expats living abroad to come home and join the new Cambodia; when a thousand or so arrived on special flights from Beijing, they were killed. Monks, so revered in Cambodian society and long the voice of conscience there, were killed. Lawyers, doctors, and diplomats were killed. Bureaucrats, soldiers, and policemen, even factory workers (who in the minds of the Khmer Rouge were equivalent to industrialization itself), were killed.

15,000 others were sentenced and exterminated in nearby pastureland famously known as the Killing Fields. But then, as fate would have it, he would emerge as one of only seven survivors from the prison camp

While the odds were roughly one in four of dying—and worse depending on your demographic

But we should also cut ourselves a little slack when our intentions are good.

“Democrat” and “Republican” don’t mean a goddamn thing.

I try to remind myself that honoring the works of the amazing humans who gave their hearts, souls, blood, sweat, genius, jail time, and even their LIVES so women could occupy an equal place in this world is far more important than any personal discomfort I may feel in fighting/living for what I believe.

some of the harshest critics of feminism are self-proclaimed feminists.

Some of the most inspiring feminists in my life have been men!

Some feminists are teachers, some are helpers, defenders and reminders, and some just gently let people be themselves. All are needed. We especially need more men feeling invited and helping out.

HUMANS! There isn’t one core group that sticks out, I found: it seems to be a bunch of self-aware folks, mostly women, some in clumps and some alone, who (to whatever extremes) think everyone should get their fair shake.

water still flows from our faucets, the grass is still green, and the supermarkets are full of food.

implement

solve our food problems with new or soon-to-be-developed genetically modified crops

Our strongest arguments for a healthy environment are selfish

We need to prevent toxic substances from accumulating in our water

bees,

That's a familiar problem today.

"The Chinese participants tended to associate love with negative features, e.g., heartbreak, and spontaneously listed more negative items than Americans, who associated love with more positive features, e.g., adoration."

Plus, the MRI gave me some supposedly objective proof of my feelings.

"Your brain is not just seeing pure reward, the way it is in the beginning of a relationship.

And if I understand how I love my wife, maybe I can learn how to love her better.

When I told friends and family I was trying to scientifically assess my love for Julie,

If love is simply chemicals, doesn't that change its meaning?

I think I love my wife. At least most of the time.

That’s Papasan,” she says. That’s the guy who yelled at a child for not dancing well enough.

at’s how a girl 13 years old walks into a bar and gets a job.

When you are poor, you wait.

"When you are poor, you substitute time for money," says Randy Albelda, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. "You have to work a lot of hours and still not make a lot of money. You get squeezed, and your money is squeezed."

According to the Census Bureau, more than 37 million people in the country live below the poverty line. The poor know these facts of life. These facts become their lives.

Like food: You don't have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe's, where the middle class goes to save money. You don't have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

One has to go quite far back to find another group of sophisticated students who took for granted the idea that the universe is a just and orderly place—

They have relatively little generational consciousness. That's because this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.

It's hard to imagine a recruiting poster of a few decades ago appealing to students' desire to make their parents happy.

"I lived an incredibly ragged life," Kathryn Taylor, class of 1974, now an administrator in alumni affairs, told me of her college days. "It never would have dawned on me to try to look nice. They seem to be much more conscious of apparel."

And you have been rewarded with a place at a wonderful university filled with smart, successful, and cheerful people like yourself. Wouldn't you be just like the students I found walking around Princeton?

Today's ramped-up parental authority rests on three pillars: science, safety, and achievement.

Now a mere scooter ride requires body armor, and in many families kids aren't permitted to ride out of sight of the house.

He wrote that if I followed his recommendation of taking 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C, I would live not only 25 years longer, but probably more."

adolescence

The whole idea of milestones, of course, is something of an anachronism; it implies a lockstep march toward adulthood that is rare these days. Kids don’t shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace. Some never achieve all five milestones, including those who are single or childless by choice, or unable to marry even if they wanted to because they’re gay. Others reach the milestones completely out of order, advancing professionally before committing to a monogamous relationship, having children young and marrying later, leaving school to go to work and returning to school long after becoming financially secure.

marrying and having a child

In a documentary film about Keiko, his Reino Aventura trainers, two beautiful young women, were nearly hysterical about his departure, saying he was not just a whale or a job but their closest friend.

More than a hundred and thirty orcas have been captured for display since Moby Doll's misadventures

Many of them came from Iceland, until all whaling in the country was halted in 1989

Sea World's Tillikum,

Iceland

But Keiko -- which means "lucky one" in Japanese

where the wind never huffs or puffs but simply blows your house down

You know, you move from one place to another and you bring the element with you,

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called HOPE VI,

drug dealers control the stairwells, where children can’t go outside to play, where mothers put their infants to bed in bathtubs.

“these enclaves of poverty,”

Legal scholars today often compare the case’s significance to that of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

In 1949 in Chicago, a rumor that a black family was moving onto a white block prompted a riot that grew to 10,000 people in four days.

Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected.

as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty.

Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

The session had none of the raucous air of precinct meetings you see on cop shows.

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become.

alternative

Harvard Magazine was that he himself had, for several years, employed graduates of Harvard to make abstruse statistical arguments.

'We're not going to use him as a pinch runner. If you don't want us to use him, trade him.''

''Do you want to go down and release Magnante?''

feelings that come with cheating weren't there at the time,

she's new

he picked up the phone and said, Yeah honey, don't worry, having a drink with Brian, I'll bring home a pizza.

I believe that everybody cheats.

Working-memory capacity is closely tied to general powers of intellect and decision-making. When it’s not working well, you’re not as sharp.

the test-taker surrenders to the stereotyped identity by disengaging emotionally and intellectually

It’s a failure of cognition. Call it a cognichoke.

Beilock contends that such failures come not from unwelcome attention, as explicit monitoring does, but from a deficit of needed attention

And there are chokes, she asserts, that rise not from overthinking but from poor thinking.

Their bodies knew the hitting process well enough to do it with a distracted brain.

a useful distraction

“But once you’ve learned it, you’ve got to leave it alone.”

By consciously trying to direct a physical action that you’ve practiced until it’s automatic, you botch it.

“conscious attention to normally automatized physical operations that destroys the athlete’s normal fluidity.”

classic chokes — appear to rise from the process known colloquially as “thinking too much” or “paralysis through analysis,” and among cognitive scientists as “explicit monitoring.”

Even the greatest athletes sometimes choke.

How to Win A STARING CONTEST

I took one, too, just for good measure. It seemed a small sort of bullying. I could do far worse with my eyes. Anyone can. The tool can always become the weapon.

I had to force myself to stop reading every twitch, every sideways glance, every brush of the hair. I had to stop treating the world like a poker game, in which every movement might be a tell.

So I tried to concentrate on eyelashes, but this made my own eyes jump as I talked. My head bobbed, too, and I was hit with a sense of motion sickness. Women constantly excused themselves after talking to me to check their faces in the mirror. I was forced to apologize, telling them that I was just spacing out, not paying attention--the direct opposite of what I was hoping to convey in the first place. It was as if I had become a mirror in which people saw their own tiny imperfections, magnified by my glance.

When I paid attention to it, I found that my tendency was to click in, lock eyes for a second or less, then look upward or outward into the distance. It's just not my rhythm to stare.

The eye-contact specialist is like the one guy in the game of pickup basketball who knows only how to box out for a rebound

These people may be as dumb as streetlamps, but they are an undeniable presence in the room. They know they must be dealt with. You know it, too.

But the truth is, I got nothing. No sign. Bubkes. In fact, the more I looked at his eyes, the more I began to realize that my dad had no idea that I was lying. None. He looked straight back at me, waiting to hear the next thing I would tell him. In fact, he was hanging on my words. There was no voice of God. My father wasn't listening to anyone but me. He had no idea when I was lying, especially if I stared him down the whole time.

THE ONE HANDSHAKE I most remember was my father's when I went to visit him in a nursing-care center in Albany, where he is recovering from a stroke. He was in his wheelchair when I got there, facing the window. I reached over his shoulder to touch his hands, and he pulled me around for a look and a shake."Pop," I said, reaching out and taking his hand. It was smooth as ever, though a little loose. I gave him the extra pressure, a bit of a sidewinder pull, and bent down for a kiss. "Wow, nice grip," he said. "Your hands are soft. You must be making real money." I told him I was doing okay. I asked how he was, and he allowed that he'd been better. He told me he loved the trees where he lived now. Didn't I like the trees? I turned for a look, but it was hard to see, because he held my grip. I have learned that sometimes you don't let go.

and I just knew he was pretending to be small for me.

I found that if I held on just two beats longer than usual, people stopped what they were saying and eyeballed me. They saw me. This worked particularly well with people who were working for me--the desk clerks, the bellmen, the valets, the concierge. I knocked down at least one suite upgrade with that alone. I also discovered that if I gradually increased the pressure of a shake, people would automatically smile. Really. It was like I was blowing up some balloon in their face. Unless you went at it too hard. And once I had them smiling, then, well, I had them.

a man who has a good handshake can do any goddamned thing he wants. I'm not saying he will; I'm saying he can.

You're a good kisser." I groaned. My teenage son was there, cutting a peach into little pieces, not paying much attention. "A kiss is not that easy," he said. He doesn't talk much, but I could tell he was speaking from experience--recent experience. "It's not like a handshake or anything." Most Popular The Largest Destroyer Ever Built Is Officially Out to Sea The Official Drinker's Bucket List The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word So true, my little man, so true. A kiss is not like a handshake. It's far easier than a handshake. A kiss you perform mostly in private, again and again. Why wouldn't you get better?

last thing he looks is short.

short men too, have smuggled their way into our affections through the same cognitive door that was meant to open only for the infants.

This is because resources, easily found, are easily squandered.

That all across the animal kingdom this cross-pollination occurs

he tilts her head to look enticing. Why? Well, the neck, with its thick layer of virtual bubble-wrap, is one of the most heavily defended parts of the body.

professionalize childhood."

"I'm seeing 15 to 30 kids a year who are younger than 11 years old and in need of surgery," he says. "It's unheard of."

"Little Johnny's going to blow his arm out just hoping to make his daddy feel good."

"It's about winning," he said. "But not just about winning — it's fun, too. I want to do it for the rest of my life."

“Instead, they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to get them to leave the country.”

And I felt so up. I felt so up! It had been quite an astonishing experience. Even though I didn’t believe in the animist principles behind it, all of these people had been gathered together, cheering for me, and it was very exhilarating.

And then when I had finished the Coke, they said, “Okay, now we have the final parts of the ritual. First you have to put your hands by your sides and stand very straight and very erect.” And I said, “Okay,” and then they tied me up with the intestines of the ram. In the meanwhile its body was hanging from a nearby tree, and someone was doing some butchering of it, and they took various little bits of it out. And then I had to kind of shuffle over, all tied up in intestines, which most of you probably haven’t done, but it’s hard.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options.

This disappointing air of saggy trouser seats, bunchy underarms, and wobbly shoulder vanes may be the result of imaginative indolence, the sort that would permit a grown man to tell himself he will find gratification in walking the exhibition floor wearing a pair of Dockers, a Jägermeister hoodie, and a rubber Venom mask complete with punched-out eyeholes and flopping rubber bockwurst of a tongue.

As a fat person, burdened with the knowledge that your only valid cultural utility is as a "before" picture to inspire Kirstie Alley to eschew that third handful of GoLean Crunch, there is no socially acceptable posture but that of constant apology. Oh, I'm sorry, thin people, for eating where you can see me—but don't worry, I'll just have this salad so as not to confirm your suspicions about my disturbing fettuccine alfredo addiction.