Critical Issues in Literature

"I came to the conclusion that wonderful people are made, not born - that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments. If we wanted to be gimmicky, we could say these accomplishments amounted to a moral bucket list, the experiences one should have on the way toward the richest possible inner life. Here, quickly, are some of them:"

"In the tradition of Paul Tough's How Children Succeed and Wendy Mogel's The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, this groundbreaking manifesto focuses on the critical school years when parents must learn to allow their children to experience the disappointment and frustration that occur from life's inevitable problems so that they can grow up to be successful, resilient, and self-reliant adults."

"How to raise successful kids - without over-parenting," is live on the TED.com website after airing on PBS stations nationwide as part of the program "TED Talks: Education Revolution." It clocks in just under 15 minutes long, and (in accordance with the message of How to Raise an Adult) makes the case for parents to stop defining their children's success via grades and test scores and focus on loving our kids unconditionally for who they are."

"What should we do to improve the lives of children growing up in adversity? From the best-selling author of How Children Succeed, a handbook to guide readers through the new science of success."

"At Challenge Success, we believe that our society has become too focused on grades, test scores, and performance, leaving little time for kids to develop the necessary skills to become resilient, ethical, and motivated learners. We provide families and schools with the practical, research-based tools they need to create a more balanced and academically fulfilling life for kids. After all, success is measured over the course of a lifetime, not at the end of a semester."

"But Maslow's hierarchy as we commonly know it is incomplete, says Nichol Bradford. Later in his life, after the hierarchy had been published, Maslow began work on a final stage of human motivation. Self-actualization was not the pinnacle of individual human achievement, but rather self-transcendence. Not an elevation of the self, but a subverting of it. This takes us to different perspectives on human psychology itself. Achieving self-actualization means resting comfortably inside the boundaries of human psychology - accomplishing what is knowable and testable - while self-transcendence means pushing beyond them. Whether through spiritual meditation, self-denial, or more recently through technological means, challenging the definition of consciousness to expand into new areas of knowledge - beyond self-knowledge - may be the ultimate stage of human development. One technological path toward self-transcendence is the singularity, an event in which human biology and computers become one. Integrating hardware and software into the flesh and mind of our bodies represents an opportunity to literally overcome our present physical limitations. While this may yet prove a promising endeavor, Bradford says human problems still have human solutions. Overcoming the narrow confines of the self may be as simple as giving yourself over to others: their dreams, their goals, their passions. And by doing so, you become one with them."

"Well I'm here to suggest there's a better way, that less might actually equal more. I bet most of us have experienced at some point the joys of less: college -- in your dorm, traveling -- in a hotel room, camping -- rig up basically nothing, maybe a boat. Whatever it was for you, I bet that, among other things, this gave you a little more freedom, a little more time. So I'm going to suggest that less stuff and less space are going to equal a smaller footprint. It's actually a great way to save you some money. And it's going to give you a little more ease in your life."

"Some students gained insight into learning itself. Griffith, who examined non-cognitive skills, valued the casual give-and-take among students and teachers, and credited it with deepening her understanding of the subject matter. "It was learning in a different way," she says. "You asked more questions, you got to go deeper. And when you get to go that deep, you learn more and more," she adds. Alexis Greenblatt brightens when she talks about her project on happiness, disputing what Epicurus considered its three prerequisites and explaining how her findings-that kids are more sentimental and less materialistic than our culture concedes-help her better understand her own friends."

"It's back to school week across the U.S. for everyone from preschoolers to graduate students. And while there are myriad approaches to education in all disciplines, from calculus to literature to language to chemistry, if you want to learn about magical people hiding under rocks, say, or unconventional physics, you might have to look outside the realm of traditional schooling. If you're hoping to further your education, consider these nine schools in the Atlas that diverge somewhat from the standard curriculum."

"An explosive memoir by Carine McCandless provides new details about a toxic family environment that drove her brother to embark on the famous and fatal quest immortalized by Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild"

"We chose these 18 articles from The Times by first individually sifting through the paper and its archives and picking pieces that resonated. Then we shared our finds in a Google doc and noticed that we had all chosen things that could be categorized in one of three ways: Education, Happiness or Social Awareness. We hope our picks can inform, enlighten and entertain any up-and-coming adult."

"As Brain Pickings turns nine, I continue to stand by these seven reflections, but the time has come to add two more. "

"Do you know what I learned from writing [How We Die], if I learned nothing else? The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are… And when I say universal, I don't mean universal only within our culture… There's a lot of balderdash thrown around - "You don't understand people who live in Sri Lanka and their response to the tsunami because you just don't know that culture." Well, there's an element of that - but, to me, cultural differences are a kind of patina over the deepest psychosexual feelings that we have, that all human beings share."

"The commencement speech season is underway and recent grads are soaking up the advice and wisdom from speakers across the country."

"I'VE NEVER BEFORE TOLD A PIECE of memoir without notes, or not reading from a manuscript. At least not in public. Of course, I've told stories at the dinner table, in the car, and over the phone, but it was something different and utterly new when I was asked to come to the WNYC studios and relate a piece of memoir for the great PRI show, Studio 360. Sitting across a table from a producer, I was asked to just tell it. So I did. The story is about how a piece of art changed my life. Please listen in. Enjoy."

"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories."

"With the traditional round of speeches come the usual sentiments: Thank your mother. Dream big. Go out and change the world. Sometimes, it's the quips rather than the soaring rhetoric that are most memorable. Kurt Vonnegut famously did not tell the Class of 1997 to "wear sunscreen" - that was the advice of the Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich, fantasizing about the commencement address she would give if ever invited. Below are speeches that were actually given by the people credited; you can watch the videos if you want proof. We'll be collecting more as the season goes on, and would love to hear from readers which ones you like best, and why."

"Below, you'll find a categorized collection of Times articles and Opinion pieces from the 2014-15 academic year about all aspects of higher education - from getting in, to thinking about why you are there, to considering how to fix what's broken. We hope you'll find plenty to discuss. As the school year began last September, Frank Bruni, a Times Op-Ed columnist, issued a challenge to college freshmen to "construct their world from scratch" and seek out people who think differently: Now more than ever, college needs to be an expansive adventure, yanking students toward unfamiliar horizons and untested identities rather than indulging and flattering who and where they already are. And students need to insist on that, taking control of all facets of their college experience and making it as eclectic as possible. We hope some of the pieces below can help."

"A few weeks ago, I asked readers to send in essays describing their purpose in life and how they found it. A few thousand submitted contributions, and many essays are online. I'll write more about the lessons they shared in the weeks ahead, but one common theme surprised me. I expected most contributors would follow the commencement-speech clichés of our high-achieving culture: dream big; set ambitious goals; try to change the world. In fact, a surprising number of people found their purpose by going the other way, by pursuing the small, happy life."

"Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who became a household name after conducting the Stanford prison experiments, argues that our online culture is disproportionately harming boys, who watch more pornography, waste more time playing video games, and are increasingly bored with their sedentary office jobs.  The cause, Zimbardo explains in his new book "Man (Dis)connected: How Technology has Sabotaged What it Means to Be Male," is biological in nature. Men have what psychologists call "single-cue arousability," meaning one mere stimulus brings them closer to happiness, such as a naked person on a screen, when compared to women who require more complex stimuli to become aroused."