Motivating teenagers: How do you do it? Photo by Bevan Gold Swain/Thinkstock Ian was sitting at his usual place during what his parents had decreed was his nightly homework time. But he had his chair turned away from his open books and calculator, and he was removing the fourth raw hot dog from the package. He gingerly placed it sideways on the family dog Walter’s muzzle and commanded him to “walk.” Ian got the idea after a liberal sampling of YouTube’s stupid pet trick videos. Ian’s mother, Debbie, peeked in on her son and then turned around to stare at her husband. “Ian, it's almost 8, let’s get going!” “Ian, if you don’t get started now, I will not help you with your math.” Ian commenced homework but soon drifted to watching more dumb pet tricks on YouTube. Michael and Debbie had realized early that Ian was extremely bright but that he couldn’t often work up to his capabilities.
Lately, we have been schooled on the hell that is adolescence, and more specifically, the collateral damage this phase of life inflicts on parents. Ira Glass to Glenn Beck: Great magazine stories about talk radio. Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for The Webby Awards. Every weekend, Longform shares a collection of great stories from its archive with Slate. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform’s app to read the latest picks, plus features from dozens of other magazines, including Slate. Hey, did you hear? Longform just started a podcast! We’re producing it in collaboration with the Atavist; every week we’ll interview a nonfiction writer about their career, how they work, and how they tell stories. In honor of the show, here’s a collection of stories on talk radio from the Longform archive: Cliff Doerksen • Chicago Reader • May 2002 How Zion, Ill., a fundamentalist Christian settlement with a population of 6,250, created one of the most popular stations in the country during the early days of radio.
“The seeds of Zion's brief season as a mass media capital were sown at the time of the town's creation. A GIF Guide to the U.S. Gymnastics Team's Biggest Rivals - National. You've met your American gymnastics heroines, now it's time to understand their mortal enemies. The American women's gymnastics team are the favorites to win the team competition, the individual all-around, the vault, and maybe more at the London Olympics.
But there are still lots of foreign ladies to root against. Among them is He Kexin, who was named to the Chinese team Tuesday and who was suspected of being underage at the Beijing games in 2008. She's not the only woman who could steal the gold from the American teenage stars. Allow us to introduce to you the women's gymnastics bad guys, in GIFs. Russia Russia will be the U.S.' One of the big things that separates the Americans from other teams is that every single American teammate has an Amanar on vault -- that's when you dive backwards onto the vaulting table and push upwards to do one and a half flips and two and a half twists. She represents the more balletic Soviet style that dominated until the cold war ended. China Romania. Fourteen Ways of Looking at a New Yorker Cartoon.
Deirdre N. McCloskey: Happyism. The creepy new economics of pleasure. Before 2013 begins, catch up on the best of 2012. From now until the New Year, we will be re-posting some of The New Republic’s most thought-provoking pieces of the year. Enjoy. IN THE FIRST PANEL of a Peanuts strip—the preceding ones had been about Lucy scolding her little brother, Linus, for not being a good brother—Lucy asks what Linus is offering her: “What’s this?” That about sums it up. But nowadays there is a new science of happiness, and some of the psychologists and almost all the economists involved want you to think that happiness is just pleasure. On a long view, understand, it is only recently that we have been guiltlessly obsessed with either pleasure or happiness. The un-happiness doctrine made it seem pointless to attempt to abolish poverty or slavery or wife-beating. Then, in the eighteenth century, our earthly happiness became important to us, in high intellectual fashion.
“Our only goal.” It’s not science. But wait a minute. How Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain. The most persuasive evidence comes from several new studies of lab animals living in busy, exciting cages. It has long been known that so-called “enriched” environments — homes filled with toys and engaging, novel tasks — lead to improvements in the brainpower of lab animals. In most instances, such environmental enrichment also includes a running wheel, because mice and rats generally enjoy running. Until recently, there was little research done to tease out the particular effects of running versus those of playing with new toys or engaging the mind in other ways that don’t increase the heart rate. So, last year a team of researchers led by Justin S. Rhodes, a psychology professor at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, gathered four groups of mice and set them into four distinct living arrangements.
Afterward, Rhodes’s team put the mice through the same cognitive tests and examined brain tissues.
The Sound and the Fury and The Simpsons by Noel Holston | LikeTheDew.com. The Simpsons’ landmark 500th episode is coming up Sunday, February 19, and I’ve been trying to justify writing about the animated comedy on a website devoted to Southern politics and culture. I would like to believe I have found two rationales. For starters, I would suggest that Homer Simpson, with his abiding fondness for beer, deep-fried everything and lassitude, is only a coon dog and a 12-gauge away from being prototypical of a certain sort of Southern man (and maybe not even a coon dog if you count Santa’s Little Helper). From left: Homer, Santa's Little Helper (dog), Marge, Lisa, Snowball II (cat), Maggie and Bart Simpson. © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Second, I would argue that Springfield, the Simpson family’s fictional home town, located in coyly nonspecific “middle” America, is the closest that TV has ever come to a realm of characters and themes as diverse and rich as William Faulkner’s “apocryphal” Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
If not, well, so be it. South Park? Oktoberfest: Try these five delicious styles of German beer. - By Mark Garrison. Oktoberfest began on Saturday, Sept. 17, which means tourist hordes have begun staggering through Munich hoisting 9-euro beers to wash down pretzels the size of infants, weisswurst, and a menagerie of roasted meats. They'll be served by locals diligently playing along in dirndls and lederhosen. Elsewhere in the world, bartenders will try to cash in by offering up Oktoberfest-themed food and beer, or poor facsimiles of the like. Corporate brewers will lend a hand, supplying crates of decorations, gamely attempting to link their flavorless macrobrews with hundreds of years of German beer craftsmanship.
Oktoberfest is a bad thing for good beer. Don't get me wrong, there will be some world-class beer served in the overstuffed Oktoberfest tents (though most of the tipsy tourists will be too wasted to notice). But every drop of it will be Munich-style beer. You can see this pernicious misimpression at work in German-themed bars around the world. Aecht Schlenkerla's Rauchbier Maerzen. 1. You Become What You Pretend To Be. Revenge of the Introvert. After ten years as a psychologist practicing psychodynamic psychotherapy , I reclined on the couch of my own analyst feeling burdened by my chosen work. After a day of seeing patients, I was drained. I had been trained to listen at many levels—words, emotions, unconscious disclosures—and I took all of that in and sorted it out in my mind. I was good at helping others discover and pursue what they wanted out of life.
But at day's end I had no resources left to do it for myself. Then I heard myself say: "I don't like being a therapist. " Suddenly I felt free, loosed from expectations that never fit. As a card-carrying introvert , I am one of the many people whose personality confers on them a preference for the inner world of their own mind rather than the outer world of sociability. Over the past two decades, scientists have whittled down to five those clusters of cognitions, emotions, motivations, and behaviors that we mean by "personality" factors. Introversion in Action.
The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox | Rolling Stone Culture. Her killer did a bad job. It was amateur work: There were bloody fingerprints and footprints all over the apartment, and the killer even defecated in the toilet and forgot to flush. But that wasn't the worst of it. Whoever murdered Meredith Kercher didn't know how to use a knife. The first two wounds weren't deep enough to do fatal damage, the knife catching on bone. On the third try, the killer found a soft spot in the left side of her throat and plunged the blade full to its hilt. The attacker then pulled the weapon from left to right several times in a sawing motion, then up and back, leaving a gash more than three inches long and three inches deep. It was clear, from the purposeful savagery of this final blow, that the intent was to kill. After the stabbing, the killer's behavior was peculiar, displaying an attitude rarely evident in a crime scene: remorse.
Photo Gallery: Americans (In Trouble) Abroad And yet, less than a day after her murder, Meredith Kercher was all but forgotten. "You Can No Longer Think of Yourselves as Peace Officers": Militarizing "Lockdown High" It was Friday the 13th, and Skylar Walters thought he was going to die. The 16-year-old inmate of Orangeville Jr. -Sr. High in Illinois was in gym class when a deranged-looking man barged into the school and began firing what appeared to be a handgun at several of the other students. "I started praying to God and saying my last words," Skylar later recalled. "I was scared. I didn't know what to do. " As the intruder fired his gun, he called out the name of a particular student; the youngster quite sensibly fled the building.
That last sadistic touch is what distinguished the May 13 "active shooter drill" in Orangeville from countless other performances of its kind staged in schools across the Soyuz by the Police State Play Actors' Guild. Last October 10, for example, a mob of "between 80 and 100 officials" from law enforcement agencies staged a little Garrison State melodrama in New York's William H. "Fire alarms sounded at 9:31 a.m., drawing closed doors. WKRG.com News "Freeze! "
Politics. Education career academic.