Saturday 27th April 2024

The Happiness Trinity

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After writing about how and why Americans are depressed, I thought I’d turn things around for a change. What matters most for happiness—marriage, money, or something else entirely?


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No One Has a Right to Protest in My Home

As a constitutional scholar and the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, I strongly defend the right to speak one’s mind in public forums. But the rancorous debate over the Israel-Hamas war seems to be blurring some people’s sense of which settings are public and which are not. Until recently, neither my wife—Catherine Fisk, a UC Berkeley law professor—nor I ever imagined a moment when our right to limit a protest at a dinner held at our own home would become the subject of any controversy.

Ever since I became a law-school dean, in 2008, the two of us have established a custom of inviting each class of first-year students over for a meal. These dinners help create and reinforce a warm community, and, to accommodate all students, they take place on many evenings during the year. The only exceptions were in 2020 and 2021 because of COVID. So last year and this year, at the request of the presidents of the third-year classes, we organized make-up dinners on three successive nights and invited each of the 400 graduating students to attend one.


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Photos of the Week: Wheelbarrow Race, Count Binface, Orange Skies

A volcanic eruption in Indonesia, a tilting tower in Taiwan, a growing refugee camp in Chad, the Tokyo Rainbow Pride Parade in Japan, humanitarian aid parachuted into Gaza, protests opposing Israel’s attacks on Gaza in the United States, a performance by Phish at the Sphere in Las Vegas, and much more

Spiral bookshelves are seen in a bookshop in Guangzhou, China, on April 23, 2024 #


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Is India an Autocracy?

Last October, Indian authorities revived legal proceedings against the novelist and activist Arundhati Roy. In a case first registered against her in 2010, Roy stood accused of “provocative speech” that aroused “enmity between different groups” for having said that Kashmir was not an “integral” part of India. The charge carries a maximum sentence of seven years and kept her from traveling to Germany to deliver the opening address at the 2023 Munich Literature Festival.

The assault on expression, and on virtually every other mainstay of democracy, has become commonplace under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, and it is the backdrop against which Indians have begun voting to elect their next Parliament and prime minister. Of the nearly 1 billion eligible voters, perhaps more than 600 million will cast their votes over a six-week-long process. Modi, who heads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is widely expected to win a third term as prime minister in his bitter contest against a motley alliance of opposition parties, the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance (INDIA).


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What the Author of ‘Frankenstein’ Knew About Human Nature

An 1826 novel encourages people to practice humility in the face of nature’s awesome forces.

During the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, when many countries were enacting variations of lockdown protocols, air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions decreased drastically. A meme began to spread across social media proclaiming that, with so many people spending most of their time at home, nature was healing. Images of clear canals, clean skies, and wild animals roaming empty city streets were accompanied by the phrase “We are the virus.” The memes quickly turned silly, and their core claims were roundly debunked as overly simplistic, plain wrong, and somewhat eugenicist. Beyond all this, the trend was deeply ironic: By diagnosing themselves as a pox upon the Earth, people were revealing their degree of self-obsession—a belief that humanity is so powerful and important that the briefest pause in our normal activities would have meaningful consequences for the planet.


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Bad Bunny Has It All—And That’s the Problem

The Puerto Rican superstar is known for his anthems of community. His latest tour is about his own isolation.

Near the end of Bad Bunny’s 2022 World’s Hottest Tour in Las Vegas, all the lights went out. The Puerto Rican singer and rapper filled the darkness before the song “El Apagón” with a six-minute speech in Spanish about what makes his home island bien cabrón—“really fucking awesome.” He highlighted not only Puerto Rico’s beauty but also its resilience in the face of immense challenges: corrupt governance, poor electricity and water access, a hurricane only five years after the devastation of Hurricane María. Although “it is always becoming harder for Puerto Ricans to live on the island,” he said, their strong sense of kinship saves them: “The leaders are the people, who always help one another.”


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A New Sweetener Has Joined the Ranks of Aspartame and Stevia

A few months ago, my doctor uttered a phrase I’d long dreaded: Your blood sugar is too high. With my family history of diabetes, and occasional powerful cravings for chocolate, I knew this was coming and what it would mean: To satisfy my sweet fix, I’d have to turn to sugar substitutes. Ughhhh.

Dupes such as aspartame, stevia, and sucralose (the main ingredient in Splenda) are sweet and have few or zero calories, so they typically don’t spike your blood sugar like the real thing. But while there are now more sugar alternatives than ever, many people find that they taste terrible. The aspartame in Diet Coke leaves the taste of pennies in my mouth. And in large amounts, substitutes are bad for you: Last year, the World Health Organization warned that artificial sweeteners could raise the risk of certain diseases, singling out aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic.”


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Columbia University’s Impossible Position

At Columbia University, administrators and pro-Palestinian students occupying the main quad on campus are in a standoff. President Minouche Shafik has satisfied neither those clamoring for order nor those who want untrammeled protests. Yet a different leader may not have performed any better. The tensions here between free-speech values and antidiscrimination law are unusually complex and difficult, if not impossible, to resolve.

Shafik presides over a lavishly funded center of research, teaching, civic acculturation, and student activism. Such institutions cannot thrive without strong free-speech cultures. Neither can they thrive without limits on when and where protests are permitted—especially when protesters disrupt the institution as a tactic to get what they want. As Shafik told Congress in recent testimony, “Trying to reconcile the free-speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination has been the central challenge on our campus, and many others, in recent months.”


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We’re All Reading Wrong

Reading, while not technically medicine, is a fundamentally wholesome activity. It can prevent cognitive decline, improve sleep, and lower blood pressure. In one study, book readers outlived their nonreading peers by nearly two years. People have intuitively understood reading’s benefits for thousands of years: The earliest known library, in ancient Egypt, bore an inscription that read The house of healing for the soul.

But the ancients read differently than we do today. Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud. Silent reading was terribly strange, and, frankly, missed the point of sharing words to entertain, educate, and bond. Even in the 20th century, before radio and TV and smartphones and streaming entered American living rooms, couples once approached the evening hours by reading aloud to each other.


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The Trumpification of the Supreme Court

The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.

The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.


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