Phoenix of Love

If you’ve noticed with dismay the lack of posts from me in the past few days, I’d like to put you in touch with the management of the hotel I’ve been staying at this weekend. This delightful establishment, which because of a football game is currently home to several thousand people in orange and black [...]

One of the comparisons that pop psychology books love to draw between men and women is that, while women show support for friends’ problems by listening and sympathizing, guys like to jump in and suggest solutions after hearing the first few words. Most probably the man is doing this while slouching in an armchair watching [...]

I haven’t disappeared from the face of the earth; just traveling and working 12-hour days. Regular posts to reappear shortly.

What is the deal with the six-way intersections in Midwestern cities? They absolutely baffle me. Four years in New England gave me an intimate understanding of roundabouts and other bizarre traffic artifacts, but these six-way intersections creep me out. For those sadly unacquainted with this phenomenon, it’s what happens when you shove a random diagonal [...]

It can be fascinating to learn about our psychological blind spots: the predictable mistakes that we’re uncannily likely to make because of the way our brains work. Loss-averse thinking is one of these. We will put more effort into avoiding a loss than we will into achieving an equal gain.
Here’s another of these oddities that [...]

Here’s another astonishing tidbit along the same lines as the Joshua-Bell-in-the-Washington-subway fiasco. A couple of psychologists conducted an experiment a while ago in which researchers stopped random pedestrians and asked them for directions. Partway through the directions, a couple of “construction workers” carried a large wooden door between the pedestrian and the researcher—and while the [...]

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.” — Einstein

It’s astonishing and frightening how completely people can tune out what’s going on around them and become selectively oblivious. A while ago, the Washington Post conducted a clever and slightly wacky experiment, and had Joshua Bell, the world-famous virtuoso violinist, pose as a street musician in the Washington D.C. subway. The article is well worth [...]

It’s amazing how the best way to get what you want is often to focus your efforts on what other people want. In this world of specialization, most of the time what we want is at least partly under the control of others, and it’s nearly impossible to satisfy all of our needs without involving [...]

“I burned my life, that I might find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.
“With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind’s [...]