There’s something inherently happy-making about being told you’re happy. I mean, what’s more cheerifying than the news that your fellow citizens—and you among them—have been given a berth on a list of the world’s lightest souls? And so it is with Canadians, who were prominently included recently in a ranking of the world’s happiest people. This is the 24/7 Wall St. list of the Countries With the Happiest People, a...
Candy’s dandy, and liquor’s quicker, but nothing’s as powerful as community when it comes to comforting someone enduring the personal issues surrounding a health crisis. So says a wide-ranging piece of research coming out of a website established to provide just that to people staring down some crummy bit of news about their health or someone else’s. A full 91% of the more than 4,000 respondents to this...
A scientist approaches God and says, “Listen, we’ve decided we no longer need you. Nowadays, we can clone people, transplant hearts and do all kinds of things that were once considered miraculous.” God hears the guy out before replying. “All right,” he says. “To see whether or not you still need me, why don’t we have a man-making contest?” “I’m in,” says the scientist. “Now, we’re going to do this just...
“Your face, my Thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters.” So said Lady Macbeth to her nervous husband on the eve of their planned regicide. And while the rest of us may not have king-murdering schemes written across our features, all of our faces are vast repositories of information about the personalities that lurk behind them. Personology is the science of reading faces, wherein a person’s...
Something there is about a list. Its orderly encapsulation of trailing bits of knowledge appeals to our inherent desire to categorize, to contain in neat packages the glut of the world’s information. If we can catalogue it, we can imagine it. To wit, the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People, a compilation recently published by an esoteric British publication called The Watkins Review, applies a sense of...