psychology dector

A magazine I’ve fallen in love with recently is The American Scholar , currently edited by Robert Wilson.   The title comes from an essay/speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson , and the magazine aspires to the Emersonian ideals of “independent thinking, self-knowledge, and a commitment to the affairs of the world as well as to books, history, and science.”   Published quarterly since 1932, (Summer, 2014 is on newsstands now), The American Scholar is the literary magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society . What drew me in was the article in the Spring number written by James McWilliams entitled, “Loving Animals to Death.”   He takes us through the hypocrisies and hysterics in the Food Movement, “a loosely organized but powerful coalition of progressive interests” that aims “to localize, downsize, and decentralize the North American food system in order to usher consumers ‘beyond the barcode’ and into a world of wholesome whole food.”   Specifically, what does “free ran...

Shambhala Sun: Buddhism Culture Meditation Life Bimonthly; $29.95 per year www.shambhalasun.com Maybe it was the smiling cover photo of Pema Chodron , whom I have written about previously . Maybe it was my ongoing pursuit of peace and tranquility amid an increasingly cacophonous world. In any case, I grabbed the March, 2011 issue of the magazine, Shambhala Sun . The magazine is filled with ads offering retreats, seminars, and lectures on the Buddhist lifestyle. The Dalai Lama will be visiting the University of Arkansas under their Distinguished Lecture series next month. The two sessions sound interesting, but I would not expect him to visit Arkansas. Nothing against the folks from Arkansas; I just didn’t think there would be that many Buddhists there, although Buddhism is a religion where one could follow the philosophy—non-violence, meditation-prayer, and compassion for the world and its people—without actually being a Buddhist. Jesus, in fact, would have made a good Buddhist. Ther...

Here are a few interesting tidbits from Harper’s Magazine , March 2011: “Estimated percentage change since 2000 in the U.S. defense budget, not including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: +80.” Can you imagine what our education system would be like if the budget for schools increased eighty percent in ten years? Even though the statistic above does not include the wars, what if we added it all together? What would American education be like if we spent, over the last ten years, the equivalent of what we have spent on defense and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Libya no-fly zone? And if the government had shut down last week, who were the people whose paychecks would be immediately delayed? Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shouldn’t there be some kind of clause in the budget that says no matter what, our men and women in uniform still get paid? I mean they are dodging bullets for this country. Moving on: “Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks la...

Time Magazine September 20, 2010 $49.00 for one year subscription www.time.com Time Magazine devoted its September 20 National Service Issue to a sixteen-page report on education. Managing editor Richard Stengel says they threw two reporters at the subject, Amanda Ripley and John Cloud. The results are two articles that offer a thumbnail sketch of the national discussion about education currently in progress. Amanda Ripley’s article is about the Davis Guggenheim documentary that will be released on September 24 entitled Waiting For “Superman.” Guggenheim is the Academy Award-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth . The movie sounds interesting, moving, and absolutely necessary to further the discussion of American education in the twenty-first century. The article also comes with sidebars containing statistics regarding the state of education in this country. Ripley focuses on how the project came about, the challenges faced during production, and what the possible effects the ...

Mental Floss Magazine Published bimonthly, 6 issues per year, $21.97 (U.S.) Digital subscriptions are available www.mentalfloss.com A good magazine should follow the rule to leave the reader smarter. That is what Mental Floss Magazine does under the tagline, “Feel smart again.” Can one return to smartness? Nah. Smart people enjoy smart reading, and Mental Floss simply enhances smartness and gives us stuff to talk about with other smart people. If one knows no smart people, there are plenty of ads for MENSA in every issue. I found this magazine several years ago on my news stand racks, and I have been hooked ever since. A usual assignment in my writing classes is to have students each take a magazine—think New Yorker , Atlantic, and Harper’s , not People —and do a presentation on the publication for the class, detailing subscription rates, content, number of ads, history, submission policies, and include a sample article or feature. The first time out, the results were predictable:...

One of my favorite writers, Joan Didion , wrote a book in 2005 about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne . I thought it was her best work, and that is saying a lot since her books of essays, The White Album and Slouching Toward Bethlehem changed me on a molecular level and continue to influence my writing to this day. Joyce Carol Oates has always been, in my mind, the counterpart to Didion. They are the two women writers who set the bar by which all others are measured. Oates is extremely prolific, churning out novels, plays, and essays at a breakneck pace, all while teaching English at Princeton. Didion tends to take longer with her novels and essay collections, publishing frequently in magazines and journals like The New York Review of Books before gathering her work together for a book. In the current issue of The Atlantic , Oates writes a piece on the death of her husband, Raymond Smith , well-known editor of the literary magazine Ontario Review , a project the husba...