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It is almost as though we have forgotten the matchless healing power of relationships, a power that I can attest to, since I have been on the couch for almost 45 years with the same person.

Still, it was her warmth and consistency as much as her illuminations that were nudging me away from my puppetlike relation to my impulses.

To her mind, it was good that our relationship was that deep and strong. To my mind, too.

Facebook’s new plan to host news publications’ stories directly is not only about page views, advertising revenue or the number of seconds it takes for an article to load. It is about who owns the relationship with readers.

It’s why Google, a search engine, started a social network and why Facebook, a social network, started a search engine. It’s why Amazon, a shopping site, made a phone and why Apple, a phone maker, got into shopping.

Facebook’s experiment, called instant articles, is small to start — just a few articles from nine media companies, including The New York Times. But it signals a major shift in the relationship between publications and their readers. If you want to read the news, Facebook is saying, come to Facebook, not to NBC News or The Atlantic or The Times — and when you come, don’t leave. (For now, these articles can be viewed on an iPhone running the Facebook app.)

That’s why the brain today has what scientists call a negativity bias. I describe it as like Velcro for the bad, Teflon for the good. For example, negative information about someone is more memorable than positive information, which is why negative ads dominate politics. In relationships, studies show that a good, strong relationship needs at least a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions.

Positive experiences use standard memory systems: moving from short-term buffers to long-term storage

Today some universities have courses in the Philosophy of Music. They study such questions as: What is the definition of music? What makes us say that a particular set of sounds is music while another set of sounds is not? What is the relationship of music to the mind? How does music affect (a) our emotions, (b) our intellect? How can we evaluate the value of any given piece of music

There we can see what issues about music are being debated by the current academic establishment.

This is historical, describing what some individual philosophers have said about music. I could not find any website that gives an account of how significant philosophical ideas about music have developed over time. That time seems to me to end with Friedrich Nietzsche, who died in 1900. Since then, it seems to me, no great name in philosophy has given music a significant place in his philosophy – although there are of course many lesser philosophers who are not (relatively) household names who are referred to in the Encyclopedia.

Some of the newest evidence suggests that people who focus on living with a sense of purpose as they age are more likely to remain cognitively intact, have better mental health and even live longer than people who focus on achieving feelings of happiness.

"Eudaimonia" is a Greek word associated with Aristotle and often mistranslated as "happiness"—which has contributed to misunderstandings about what happiness is. Some experts say Aristotle meant "well-being" when he wrote that humans can attain eudaimonia by fulfilling their potential. Today, the goal of understanding happiness and well-being, beyond philosophical interest, is part of a broad inquiry into aging and why some people avoid early death and disease. Psychologists investigating eudaimonic versus hedonic types of happiness over the past five to 10 years have looked at each type's unique effects on physical and psychological health.

In a separate analysis of the same group of subjects, researchers have found those with greater purpose in life were less likely to be impaired in carrying out living and mobility functions, like housekeeping, managing money and walking up or down stairs. And over a five-year period they were significantly less likely to die—by some 57%— than those with low purpose in life.

A meaningful life, she claims, is distinct from a happy life or a morally good one. In her view, “meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” A meaningful life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile.  The person living the life must be engaged by it.  A life of commitment to causes that are generally defined as worthy — like feeding and clothing the poor or ministering to the ill — but that do not move the person participating in them will lack meaningfulness in this sense. However, for a life to be meaningful, it must also be worthwhile

the first step we might take beyond what Wolf tells us is to recognize that lives unfold over time.  A life is not an unrelated series of actions or projects or states of being.  A life has, we might say, a trajectory.

If a life has a trajectory, then it can be conceived narratively.  A human life can be seen as a story, or as a series of stories that are more or less related. 

the country’s two main political parties have “fundamental philosophical differences.” But what exactly does that mean?

In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding.

Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Self-described libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion.

What could Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) have to teach us about love? More than we might suppose.

Even during these times, between physical suffering and intense periods of writing, he pursued the company of learned women. Moreover, Nietzsche grew up in a family of women, turned to women for friendship, and witnessed his friends courtin

By calling our attention to the base, vulgar and selfish qualities of (heterosexual) erotic or sexual love, Nietzsche aims to strip love of its privileged status and demonstrate that what we conceive to be its opposites, such as egoism and greed, are in many instances inextricably bound up in the experience of love.

THE history of moral philosophy is a history of disagreement, but on one point there has been virtual unanimity: It would be absurd to suggest that we should do what we couldn’t possibly do.

This principle — that “ought” implies “can,” that our moral obligations can’t exceed our abilities — played a central role in the work of Immanuel Kant and has been widely accepted since.

His thought experiments go something like this: Suppose that you and a friend are both up for the same job in another city. She interviewed last weekend, and your flight for the interview is this evening. Your car is in the shop, though, so your friend promises to drive you to the airport. But on the way, her car breaks down — the gas tank is leaking — so you miss your flight and don’t get the job.Would it make any sense to tell your friend, stranded at the side of the road, that she ought to drive you to the airport? The answer seems to be an obvious no (after all, she can’t drive you), and most philosophers treat this as all the confirmation they need for the principle.Suppose, however, that the situation is slightly different. What if your friend intentionally punctures her own gas tank to make sure that you miss the flight and she gets the job? In this case, it makes perfect sense to insist that your friend still has an obligation to drive you to the airport. In other words, we might indeed say that someone ought to do what she can’t — if we’re blaming her.

We’ve all heard the argument that philosophy is isolated, an “ivory tower” discipline cut off from virtually every other progress-making pursuit of knowledge, including math and the sciences, as well as from the actual concerns of daily life. The reasons given for this are many. In a widely read essay in this series, “When Philosophy Lost Its Way,” Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle claim that it was philosophy’s institutionalization in the university in the late 19th century that separated it from the study of humanity and nature, now the province of social and natural sciences.

This institutionalization, the authors claim, led it to betray its central aim of articulating the knowledge needed to live virtuous and rewarding lives. I have a different view: Philosophy isn’t separated from the social, natural or mathematical sciences, nor is it neglecting the study of goodness, justice and virtue, which was never its central aim.

identified philosophy with informal linguistic analysis. Fortunately, this narrow view didn’t stop them from contributing to the science of language and the study of law. Now long gone, neither movement defined the philosophy of its day and neither arose from locating it in universities.

That led him to ask the right questions. First: how does free enterprise capitalism work in practice? Second: what is the relationship between economic power and government policy? Third: what is the interrelationship between such economic power and the life of the mind - otherwise known as education and the more general public awareness and perception of reality? Fourth: what questions do and do not get asked within a capitalist society? Fifth: what will be the nature of the next new system?

To honor his commitment to the dialectical process, I will offer relatively short commentaries on those questions so that we will have time to engage each other in dialogue. One. Marx built upon the foundation laid by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo; but he transcended their explanation of the capitalist process

Two. Marx once called the government of capitalist political economies little more than the executive committee of the high bourgeoisie.

After decades of rarely apologising for anything, Silicon Valley suddenly seems to be apologising for everything. They are sorry about the trolls. They are sorry about the bots. They are sorry about the fake news and the Russians, and the cartoons that are terrifying your kids on YouTube. But they are especially sorry about our brains.

Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook – who was played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network – has publicly lamented the “unintended consequences” of the platform he helped create: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Parker, Rosenstein and the other insiders now talking about the harms of smartphones and social media belong to an informal yet influential current of tech critics emerging within Silicon Valley. You could call them the “tech humanists”. Amid rising public concern about the power of the industry, they argue that the primary problem with its products is that they threaten our health and our humanity.

The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.

So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?

Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.

Experiments that don’t rely on self-reporting regularly show that physical attractiveness is exquisitely, at times incomparably, important to both men and women. Status (however you want to measure it: income, formal education, et cetera) is often not far behind

In real-life dating studies, which get closer to genuine intentions, physical attractiveness and earning potential strongly predict romantic attraction.

when it comes to beauty and income, more is almost always seen as better. On these “consensually-ranked” traits, people seem to aspire to partners who rank more highly than themselves. They don’t want a match so much as a jackpot.

T Magazine had a very good idea. They gathered some artists and museum curators and asked them to name the artworks that define the contemporary age — pieces created anywhere in the world since 1970.

of the 25 works they chose, very few are paintings or sculptures.

Most of the pieces selected are intellectual concepts or political attitudes expressed through video, photographs, installations or words.

One important fact is that the brain works in some ways like television transmission, in that it processes stable backgrounds without much attention and moving parts more intensely and differently.

Recent research in babies shows that they respond most to unexpected events and use these to evaluate the environment and learn.

But, the over arching analysis of visual signals depends on what is expected.

Excellence Runs in the Family. Her Novel’s Heroine Wants Something Else

Kaitlyn Greenidge and her sisters achieved success in their respective fields

In her historical novel, “Libertie,” she focuses on a Black woman who doesn’t yearn to be the first or only one of anything.

One Year Together, Apart

The pandemic redefined relationships and self-reliance.

In the year since the pandemic began, people learned to be together while apart and navigated the pain of feeling apart while together

Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.

By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.

Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.

If you've ever stayed in a relationship too long or stuck with a project that was going nowhere, you're not alone.

If you've ever stayed in a relationship too long or stuck with a project that was going nowhere, you're not alone.

It's called the "sunk costs" phenomenon, where the more resources we sink into an endeavor, the likelier we are to continue -- even if we sense it's futile.