Is there anything left to say about Mohandas K. Gandhi that has not already been said? If the sheer volume of writing by and about Gandhi is any indication, the answer is a resounding no. Consider the section of any university library where the books on Gandhi are located. There is, first of all, the works of the very prolific man himself. His Collected Works — autobiography, political treatises, letters, newspaper articles — now run to more than 100 thick volumes. The sheer weight and often contradictory nature of his output is both an archival goldmine and a great challenge for ... Read More
Local TV News Spreads Cancer Fatalism
January 31, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Coming up on Action News at 11: Man arrested in fatal stabbing! Huge winter storm approaches! And in our health segment: Pretty much everything causes cancer, and there’s nothing you can do about it! That’s the troubling subtext viewers seem to be picking up from local television newscasts. Two newly published research papers suggest a regular diet of health coverage provided by your hometown news team may inspire fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention. By focusing on shocking new studies that reveal a “novel or controversial” potential cause of the disease, local ... Read More
Photos Implant ‘Memories’ of Fictional News Events
November 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Remember that botched mission to rescue captured British soldiers in Baghdad during the Iraq War? And how Prime Minister Tony Blair subsequently rebuffed calls for his resignation? If you answered no, it’s for a good reason: The event never happened. But if you answered yes, the photograph of a pensive Blair that accompanies this blog post may be partially to blame. That’s the conclusion of a troubling new study about false memories, which was recently published in the journal Acta Psychologica. It reports a fake news headline is more likely to be accepted as factual if it is ... Read More
Putting Sustainability to Music
November 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The tradition of celebrities flitting from cause to cause is a well-engrained meme in the Western pop psyche. But a body of environmentally minded musicians and music industry types, while not abandoning the public face of action, are working to create institutional change behind the scenes. Speaking Friday during the second annual New Noise Santa Barbara conference in California, a collection of businesspeople, artists and a conservation scientist outlined some of the structural improvements, current and speculative, washing over the music biz. The conference is a sort of “South by ... Read More
In Disney Films, Beauty Is Far From Beastly
November 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Highly attractive people are smarter, more socially adept and generally superior to the rest of us, and they tend to live happier lives. At least, that’s a widely shared stereotype that psychologists first identified in the early 1970s and recent research suggests is somewhat self-perpetuating. (Having been fawned over from an early age, good-looking people tend to have higher levels of self-esteem, which is an important ingredient in positive life outcomes.) But how exactly does the good-is-beautiful belief get passed down from one generation to the next? Newly published research ... Read More