The Atlantic’s Post

What happens when new evidence doesn't support conventional wisdom? "Good on Paper," a new policy show hosted by Jerusalem Demsas, examines how the finer details can complicate a prevailing narrative. Coming June 4: https://lnkd.in/eRiVa232

Diet culture has been a part of American life for more than a century. Perhaps nothing is more American than our complicated relationship with food, Yasmin Tayag writes in Time-Travel Thursdays.

If you really love books or want to love them more, Elisa Gabbert has five recommendations. They’re not dry or academic: They focus on the many connections we can form with what we read.

Research about changing jobs illuminates trends that can guide your decision making, help lower uncertainty, and manage your expectations, Arthur Brooks writes. https://lnkd.in/en6zHD-S ⁠ Research has established that #job satisfaction usually does indeed rise when people start new #employment. But at the six-month mark on average, an inflection occurs, depending on the “career orientation” of the job changer. People with a self-oriented #career orientation—defined as those who see themselves as independently responsible for managing their career—have more churn and less job satisfaction than those with an organization-oriented career orientation—those who prioritize loyalty and security, and envision their career as part of a greater whole. Research also shows that people who are generally happier tend to be more adaptable in their career. In fact, happiness is the most significant predictor of being able to make the best of professional changes. ⁠ ⁠ If you are considering a change of job but feel paralyzed by fear of the unknown, the research offers a few practical lessons to help assuage your anxiety, Brooks continues. First, manage your expectations: The change most likely won’t make you worse off, but don’t romanticize it. If your expectations are too high, you will be disappointed; then you might find yourself on the job market over and over again, stuck in a cycle of unmet hopes. Next, look for happiness outside of work. When things are good in the rest of your life, they seem more stable and less bothersome at the job.⁠ ⁠ Last, jump before you’re pushed. Getting fired or laid off from work commonly provokes frustration, guilt, embarrassment, and anger—and is likely to coincide with less satisfaction when you find a new job. “Sometimes, losing your job comes as a complete surprise, but advance warning can take such forms as a change of management, a hiring freeze, or a switch in product line,” Brooks writes. “If you stay alert, you have a better chance of leaving on your own terms.”⁠ (From 2023) Read more: ⁠https://lnkd.in/en6zHD-S

A new novel sees procrastination as one of the last bastions of the creative mind, Hillary Kelly writes. https://lnkd.in/ejGN7sd6 “Practice,” Rosalind Brown’s debut novel, is “a welcome gift for those who dither about their dithering,” Kelly writes. In our productivity-obsessed era, when wasting time is a tic people are desperate to dispel, Brown’s novel “presents procrastination as a vital, life-affirming antidote to the cult of self-discipline, while also giving the reader a delicious text with which to while away her leisure time.” The novel’s protagonist, an Oxford student named Annabel, has one task: to write a paper on Shakespeare’s sonnets. But very little writing happens in the book. “Annabel’s vaunted self-discipline encounters barrier after barrier,” Kelly writes. “She wants to ‘thicken her own concentration,’ but instead she takes walks, pees, fidgets, ambles down the unkept byways of her mind. She procrastinates like a champ.” “Brown’s novel elevates procrastination into an essential act, arguing that those pockets of time between stretches of productivity are where living and creating actually happen,” Kelly writes. “Screwing around, on the job and otherwise, isn’t just revenge against capitalism; it’s part of the work of living. And what better format for examining this anarchy than the novel, a form that is created by underpaid wandering minds?” Brown’s debut complements a recent spate of workplace nonfiction “that wonders what exactly we’re all doing with our precious waking weekly hours,” Kelly writes. “Work was supposed to be a promised land of fulfillment, a place where your aptitudes would flourish … But no job could live up to such a high standard,” Kelly writes. In these books, what’s missing in characters’ lives is “the space for rumination, the necessary lapses our brains need to live creatively, no matter our careers,” Kelly continues at the link in our bio. “Annabel understands that if art is created out of life, the latter has to have space to happen.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/ejGN7sd6 📸: Daniel Dorsa

“Even some of those skeptical of [Kamala] Harris are moving toward the belief that she presents a better bet than continuing with a diminished Biden,” Ronald Brownstein writes of his conversations with Democratic Party leaders:

“If the war in Ukraine is any guide, the next great-power conflict will be defined by technology adapted from the commercial market. Start-ups will influence how states fund, arm, and marshal their militaries,” Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff write:

Consider using your time off as an opportunity to learn something wonderful, Arthur Brooks wrote in 2023. ⁠https://lnkd.in/euXhSpw5 ⁠ To get the most contentment from your vacation, it is worthwhile to understand that “an abundance of basic positive emotions such as joy, surprise, and anticipation is what you seek.” But Brooks notes that “you shouldn’t neglect another positive emotion of special importance: interest—the feeling of curiosity or fascination that captures your attention.” The well-being effect from learning is not as straightforward as it is for other activities, such as eating a doughnut. Investing in an activity to raise competency can lower your moment-to-moment happiness but can boost well-being measured over a longer time frame of hours and days. In that respect, learning is like exercise: sometimes painful in the moment, but rewarding overall. A key to maximizing satisfaction through learning is intrinsic motivation, or what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “autotelic learning”: learning for its own sake. ⁠ ⁠ You can choose a range of ways to achieve satisfaction from learning about an interest, whether cheap and casual or expensive and formal, Brooks continues at the link in our bio. Perhaps you want to learn how to cook Punjabi cuisine, or follow one of the many “massive open online classes” (MOOCs, for short). For a more intensive (and expensive) option, you could hire a teacher to give you a head start on playing the guitar or speaking Mandarin. At the most rigorous level, you might go all in and spend your vacation on a guided silent retreat in one spiritual tradition or another. ⁠ ⁠ Feeling compelled to relax and have fun is a common and counterproductive mistake. Telling yourself “I will be refreshed and not think about work!” is bound to lead in the wrong direction. Instead, Brooks urges, “turn your leisure into learning. You might just have your best holiday ever.”⁠ Read more: https://lnkd.in/euXhSpw5 ⁠ 🎨: Jan Buchczik

On the debate stage, Joe Biden came across as largely frail and shaky. But on other days, he appears to be much more lucid. Scientists have a term for this: cognitive fluctuations. Yasmin Tayag reports:

The decline of cursive instruction in schools has left students unable to parse archival documents written in script, Drew Gilpin Faust wrote in 2022. Can you study history if you can’t read cursive?