It’s an idea whose time has come. Timebanks, having languished in anticipation of the world’s resounding and grateful acknowledgement for too long, may just be the answer to our current spate of financial woes. Through them, we might redefine our understanding of currency to better reflect the value of those goods and services it purports to represent. And if we introduce a new economic model for a population...
It is, depending on your point of view, solid science or utter bunk. Either way, it can’t hurt. It is prayer and, says a just-published study, more of us are giving it a whirl in pursuit of relief from what ails us than ever before. University of Massachusetts researchers, whose results are published this month in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, have found that more people are praying for their...
There’s something magical about the arrival of summer, and it’s more than just the opportunity it affords to wear less clothing and play hooky on a stretch of sand. The summer solstice, poised to arrive in our hemisphere on June 21 at 1:17 pm EDT, has long been wrapped up in a kind of mystical aura. Though actually a mere instant in time—the precise moment when the earth’s axial tilt is most inclined toward the...
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...