Manic Nation: Dr. Peter Whybrow Says We’re Addicted to Stress –
>>“In the past, you either fought and won or you died, but either way the stress disappeared,” explains Whybrow. “Now the alarm bells go off much of the time as we encounter one prolonged threat.”<<

The Curse of Political Purity by Garry Wills | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
“But the man being voted for, no matter what he says, dances with the party that brought him, dependent on its support, resources, and clientele. That is why one should always vote on the party, instead of the candidate. The party has some continuity of commitment, no matter how compromised. What you are really voting for is the party’s constituency.”

Multitaskers are incompetent
“We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.”

Holy levitating Slinky!
“In this series of slow motion clips, you can see that if you hold a Slinky by one end and drop it, the bottom end doesn’t actually move until the top end catches up with it.”

Reinforcement sensitivity theory – Wikipedia

Quick study: Satoshi Kanazawa on intelligence: The disadvantage of smarts | The Economist
“Most of the problems that we have to solve today—how to excel in school, how to find jobs, how to do virtually everything on a computer—are evolutionarily novel. So intelligent people do well in almost every sphere of modern life, except for the most important things, like how to find a mate, how to raise a child, how to make friends. Intelligence does not confer any advantage for solving all the evolutionarily familiar problems that our ancestors encountered.”

Team Spirit: The New Yorker
Adam Gopnik writes about Olympic nationalistic pride. “Sports are about human character inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as they show that you can master anything with enough effort. Seen in this light, our urge to give the full measure of our national devotion to the synchronized swimmers—and the shot-putters and even the heel-and-toe walkers and the beach-volleyball women in their bikinis—is logical and even admirable. We are embracing the marginalized masters among us in order to make a team, as we have embraced once marginalized people to make a nation.”