In Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society, author Danny Fingeroth says:

Whether they’re super-powered aliens, lone vigilantes, or teenage sidekicks, all superheroes share certain characteristics in common, “some sort of strength of character (though it may be buried), some system of positive values, and a determination to, no matter what, protect those values … the superhero-more than even the ordinary fictional hero-has to represent the values of the society that produces him”

There’s plenty of theories of why and how the idea of a superhero is so popular, but there’s also plenty of discussion about the fact that superheros aren’t really a new idea. While they weren’t referred to as such, myths and mythology are packed with individuals who are basically superheroes. There are plenty of larger-than-life characters, from gods and goddesses to sprites, spirits, and even fellow human beings completing feats of great physical or emotional strength.

There’s plenty of theories as to why superheroes are so important and why we often identify with them. One theory is that these characters reflect our worries and concerns, as was explained in publication The Blade:

“People who aren’t comic-book freaks can relate to having multiple identities” such as “Batman as Bruce Wayne, Superman as Clark Kent,” said Richard Reynolds, an English college professor whose published book Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology deals with the cultural importance of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man.

“We put on a special face to mask our identity. Superman migrates to the United States from Krypton, and also he’s the country boy from Kansas who goes to the big city and has to become someone else when he gets there. Cut through to what they’re saying about the nature of life in a modern metropolis and the multiple identities and the elements of I think comics have such longevity.”

Another theory, as publication Lateral outlines, is more that we learn from and idolize these characters for the fact they approach ethical dilemmas in productive ways. Quote:

There is a strong relationship between comic books and superheroes, and the field of psychology. The former have a long history of reflecting societal change: they are often progressive and this challenges both children’s and adults’ moral development, while the characters are so exaggerated that they give people the opportunity to compare and contrast individual traits. They are based on us, and we feed off their images, integrating their characteristics into our personalities, ethics and morals.

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The word “favorite” is an intriguing one, because it means “preferred before all others of the same kind.” Which, linguistically, means that selecting a second favorite anything is almost cross purposes. If you take the meaning of “favorite” to mean “preferred” or “best,” then it makes a little bit more sense.

But – picking a second favorite seems almost more difficult than picking a favorite, because it requires a full ranking of your preferences around something (be it media, or just about anything else). But this ranking implies quite a few things about how you approach the world.

As Gretchen Ruin wrote in her blog, quote:

I dislike being asked to identify my “favorite.” Some people seem to love this exercise. Favorite book, favorite movie, favorite restaurant, favorite memory.

I, however, find this exercise distressing. First of all–how can I possibly pick something like a “favorite” book? It’s impossible! And to me, picking a “favorite” somehow makes all the other options seem less interesting. I don’t even like picking something like a favorite part of the day. Sometimes, like Maria, I’ll pick a few of my favorite things–but I can rarely pick just one favorite.

And perhaps instead of picking a few favorite anything, not picking favorites at all could be a legitimate strategy too.

Written by journalist Emina Bajra reflecting on her interview with one of the world’s oldest people, Jiroemon Kimura, quote:

It was impossible to get Kimura to name a favorite anything.

Favorite food? “Everything.” he smiled.

Favorite memory? “Many things, whatever came my way.”

What do you love about Kyotango? “Nothing in particular!”

What are you most thankful for? “I would say everything.”

Kimura lived in a world free of likes and dislikes.  Yet rather than being an empty person devoid of interests, Kimura exuded a rare fullness, brimming with the humanity and passion that comes from being open to all things.

In Zen philosophy, which underlies Japanese culture, the Faith-Mind Sutra teaches that “the Great Way is not difficult; it only avoids picking and choosing.  But make even the slightest distinction, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.”

By not choosing favorites, Kimura seemed to have mastered the art of ‘taking his life as it comes.’

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The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, which we’ve discussed previously on this podcast, lists divorces and separation as the number 2 and 3 most stressful experiences in life — and for very good reason. Relationships (romantic or otherwise) are one of the defining factors in our lives.

As the paper “Who am I without you? The influence of romantic breakup on the self-concept” discusses, after a breakup most people experience “reduced self-concept clarity” — or, put differently – you lose the sense of who you are. This is because we often define ourselves as a part of a relationship, and so we need to figure out what our personality even is again.

What I find particularly interesting is how most breakup advice is written – in a heavily gendered way. I suppose it’s not entirely surprising, given that there’s plenty of heteronormativity still built in to research and language. Quoting from an article in Big Think:

Researchers from Binghamton University and University College London asked 5,705 participants in 96 countries to dig deep into those emotional memories and recall their last breakup. The researchers then asked the participants to rate their emotional and physical pain following that breakup on a scale of one (none) to 10 (horrible). Women tended to feel the strongest effects following a breakup. Their average rating for emotional and physical pain being 6.84 and 4.21. The men on the other hand averaged 6.58 for emotional anguish and 3.75 for physical. So, still hurt, just not as much.

Which makes sense, given the emotional and physical differences in how genders are coached to handle emotional expression. It’s the rest of the quote from that article that leans heavily on gendered evolutionary biology, saying:

Lead author Craig Morris, a research associate at Binghamton University, offered a suggestion in a press release for why this difference exists:

“Put simply, women are evolved to invest far more in a relationship than a man. A brief romantic encounter could lead to nine months of pregnancy followed by many years of lactation for an ancestral woman, while the man may have ‘left the scene’ literally minutes after the encounter, with no further biological investment. It is this ‘risk’ of higher biological investment that, over evolutionary time, has made women choosier about selecting a high-quality mate. Hence, the loss of a relationship with a high-quality mate ‘hurts’ more for a woman.”

Given this particular mindset, what I find particularly amusing is not the different advice, but how similar the advice for getting over a breakup is in both Cosmopolitan and

There’s a single personality test is routinely deployed by 89 of the Fortune 100 companies, the US government, hundreds of universities, and online dating sites – the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. That’s to say nothing about the runaway success of the Ennearam personality test, especially in Christian circles. Or the prevalence of the phrase “type A personality” in our language, or the hundreds of other options that are available out there in the world.

As author Merve Emre wrote, quote:

Type is intensely democratizing in its vision of the world, weird and wonderful in its commitment to flattening the material differences between people only to construct new and imaginary borders around the self.

While some argue that systems intended to organize, categorize, and interrogate personality are navel-gazing, others argue that these systems help us identify and understand the complex world of human interaction, communication, and psychology.

As Chris Heuertz, author of “The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth,” said in an interview:

The Enneagram helps us begin an honest interrogation of the depths of our identity, of who we really are. When we accept our inherent beauty, we find the courage to examine what makes us beautiful—to honestly encounter both the good and the bad, the shadow and the light. More than anything I’ve encountered, the Enneagram helps us do just that. A lot of other people, including Christians, are discovering this too.

You can even go back to the 1920s when psychologist Carl Jung wrote his treatise Psychological Types, He was aiming for some kind of universality, saying, quote:

Naturally, at first, one is inclined to regard such differences as mere individual idiosyncrasies. But anyone with the opportunity of gaining a fundamental knowledge of many men will soon discover that such a far-reaching contrast does not merely concern the individual case, but is a question of typical attitudes, with a universality far greater than a limited psychological experience would at first assume.

But – perhaps all of these tests have more to do with reading in what we want and less with a research-supported personality category. In 1948, psychologist and professor Bertram R. Forer devised a test given to students that reportedly measured their personality — and then gave all of them a fairly generic result to read. In that study and in ongoing studies, when asked to rate the accuracy of the result on a scale of 0 to 5, the test gets an average 4.2, or 84% accurate, reading.

In other words, no matter how you measure personality, it

Weapons – like many objects invested with a long history, lots of controversy, and quite a bit of emotional energy – are both physical objects and symbolic objects. The idea of openly carrying firearms is one that is mixed up with both physical reality and symbolic meanings, in many different countries.

There are four basic categories of firearm laws across the world.

Shall-issue permitting means governments issue firearm permits – or allow open carry – for citizens who meet certain criteria. This is often also referred to as permissive gun legislation.

May-issue permitting means governments will issue firearm permits to citizens with special reasons or situations, or may choose to not issue at their discretion.

There’s also may-issue in law but no-issue in practice, where it can be legal to carry a weapon but it’s almost impossible to actually get a permit.

Finally, there’s no-issue, where permits are not or are practically or definitely not ever issued.

As Wikipedia lays out, quote:

The only countries with permissive gun legislation are: Albania, Austria, Chad, Republic of Congo, Honduras, Micronesia, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Senegal, Tanzania, the United States, Yemen and Zambia, although several other countries like Canada and the Czech Republic, despite theoretically being restrictive, are shall-issue countries.

In many of these countries, the United States included, overall permissive gun laws doesn’t necessarily mean those permissions universally apply. And those laws and attitudes are changing. In the 1960s, the NRA argued very strongly for increasing gun regulation and restricting open carry — but this was also after the Black Panther party took up the banner of open carry gun rights as a way of protecting themselves from racially discriminatory policing.

In other words, gun and weapon legislation and attitudes are rarely shaped only by the weapons themselves, but also by the society they are in. Those laws and attitudes do also have real-world impacts. Quoting from an article in the Washington Post:

Researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health found that states with shall-issue laws had handgun homicide rates that were 10.6 percent higher than may-issue states. Additionally, shall-issue states had firearm homicide rates that were 8.6 percent higher and overall homicide rates that were 6.5 percent higher than may-issue states.

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The passport, as it currently exists in the world, is a much more modern document than I originally thought.

That doesn’t mean that the passport is an entirely new idea. In Britain, there are records of this document going back hundreds of years. As The Guardian published in 2006:

In Britain, the earliest surviving reference to a “safe conduct” document appears during the reign of Henry V, in an Act of Parliament dated 1414. At that time, documents like these could be issued by the king to anyone, whether they were English or not. Foreign nationals even got theirs free of charge, while English subjects had to pay.

By the 1540s, the word passport was used in Britain, but were in no way standardized. It was only in the aftermath of the first world war, that the League of Nations championed the idea of a worldwide standard for nation-based identity documents. While not all countries were a big fan of the idea, the fact that some countries embraced the idea meant that others were forced into having some kind of national travel document.

As Gulia Pines wrote in National Geographic, quote:

“Cooked up by a Western-centric organization trying to get a handle on a post-war world, the passport was almost destined to be an object of freedom for the advantaged, and a burden for others.”

As The Smithsonian reported, In the first half of the 19th century, the State Department only issued a few hundred passports per year, for the very basic reason that international travel was far too expensive for most average people. And it wasn’t until 1937 that married women were issued their own passports under their own names, instead of as footnotes of their husband’s documents.

As the cost of travel went down, and as passports became more popular forms of identification, more and more were issued. According to the US State department, in 2017 over 21 million passports were issued.  

Passports are also not an incorruptible proof of national identity. As one researcher points out, national identity is essentially for sale in some areas. For example, countries like Malta and Cyprus essentially sell citizenship—the former for over $1 million, the latter for significant investments.

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Bullying is a topic de jour for sure – across the world and in sociological, psychological, communication, childhood development, and about a dozen other fields of study. Getting into what is behind the cultural zeitgeist would likely take us days to properly break down.

Part of this difficulty would be based in the fact that defining bullying, as opposed to harassment or even abuse, can be a bit difficult — which is understandable, because they are closely interrelated. As Catherine Mattice wrote about workplace bullying:

The defining difference is that workplace bullying is legal in most of the U.S., and discrimination and harassment are illegal. Harassment is about protected characteristics, and workplace bullying is not.

If people are bullied because of their race, religion, gender, sex, sexual orientation, perceived sexual orientation, disability, perceived disability, nationality, or a whole host of other reasons, then that behavior is against the law because it is harassment, and the targets of that behavior have legal recourse.

If a person is an equal-opportunity offender, and bullies a variety of people from a variety of categories, then it is not considered harassment and it is therefore legal.

When you’re not dealing with workplaces or other formal situations where discrimination comes with legal implications — such as in school — the difference is even harder to tell. In other words, they are both behaviors that cause physical, psychological, and emotional impacts. Even the Red Cross of Canada says both are forms of aggression where there is a power imbalance.

In 2013, researcher William Copeland, a clinical psychologist at Duke University Medical Center and his colleagues dug into some of the numbers and those impacts of bullying, based on a study that started 20 years prior. They found that, quote:

Before age 16, participants were asked whether they had been bullied or bullied others, how frequently, and where any bullying occurred, among other questions.

Using this data, the researchers divided the kids into four groups: kids uninvolved in bullying; pure victims who were bullied but did not bully others; pure bullies who were never victimized themselves; and “bully/victims,” a group of kids who both bullied and were bullied.

Five percent of the kids, or 112, were bullies only, and 21.6 percent, or 335 kids, were pure victims. Another 4.5 percent were bully/victims. The rest were neither.

So how to deal with this power imbalance? As an

It’s difficult to overstate the impact that smartphones have had on dozens of industries — and photography is one of the most often cited examples. The statistics I could find said that in the year 2000, Kodak announced that 80 million photos had been taken that year. And in 2017, the best estimates say that somewhere between 1.2 and 1.3 billion photos were taken. In other words, 1.12 trillion more photos than just 17 years before.

What I’m intrigued by is the impact this has had on the printing industry — after all, the only way to see your photos used to be to drop them off for development and see what came out. Now, people are selecting which photos they wish to print instead.

As Harald Johnson wrote in PetaPixel in 2013:

Research firm InfoTrends did a survey of Internet connected households in EU, and photo printing went up 11% in 2012 compared to 2007-2008. Similarly, U.S.-based online photo printing has become a big deal, growing by about 20% annually between 2007-2012 according to market research firm IbisWorld.

One of the coolest things to see is that photo printing is expanding — at least in styles. While your options used to be only in the size of photos or a few specialty items you had to mail off to order. Now, there’s an explosion in options, from printing photos on glass to canvas to metal to wood, or more.

As Daven Mathies wrote in Digital Trends:

To be sure, digital has indeed changed how we print, and there’s no going back. The number of standard 4 x 6-inch photo prints is expected to decline to 39 billion this year, down from 47 billion in 2014, according to information provided to Digital Trends by Keypoint Intelligence. Keypoint Intelligence also expects the downward trend is slowing, and will level out at around 36 billion prints by 2021.

Rather than bemoan the decline in quantity of photos printed, let’s celebrate the fact that digital has given us new technology and new avenues for producing high quality prints. We have the tools today to make better prints than ever before.

And, as one digital grandfathers and grandmothers have pointed out more than a few times — there is no completely stable digital storage media. Unless you’re constantly modernizing your digital archives, they may become very difficult to read. An archive-quality printed photo could survive well over 100 years without a need for updating — just careful storage.

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From wake up to out of the door — it’s a process that can take a lot of energy for a single person, much less a family. Research firm YouGov, in 2012, did a survey taking a look at exactly how much time that process takes. They found that, quote:

The majority of us (56%) take any time between 11 and 30 minutes getting ready

Only 2% take less than 5 minutes and 3% over an hour

15% educated up to high school and 9% of college graduates take 10 minutes or less but 4% of graduates take over an hour – this is only 2% for high school or less

It’s not just a function of education, however — there’s a huge disparity in the amount of time it takes to get ready for men and women. Glamour, in 2016, broke down the time differential of the quote-unquote average individual. Quoting from Hello Giggle’s article about this video:

They broke it all down activity by activity, even getting as detailed as comparing shampoo times (an average of 3 minutes per shampoo for a woman and 2 minutes for a man). While some time differences don’t seem substantial, like that shampoo stat, they actually add up quite a bit. For that shampoo example (based on an average of 183 shampoos per year), women spend almost three hours more per year – just on washing their hair. Other, more gender-neutral activities – like brushing your teeth and using mouthwash – are about equal. But, of course, a woman’s hair and makeup routine can really add up, significantly increasing a woman’s average morning routine time. Hair and makeup alone adds an estimated 39 minutes a day to a woman’s time. The final tally? It takes a woman 24 days, 7 hours and 40 minutes to be a woman – versus 9 days, 5 hours, and 27 minutes for a man.

These are, of course, averages. Some women choose to go without makeup, and some men have much more extensive skin-care routines, for example. But it’s an interesting study not only in how you break down your time, but also in the expectations and norms that end up costing time, f not also money. A pink clock tax, perhaps.

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In the book The Economics of Experiences, the Arts and Entertainment, the authors find that, quote:

“there is no economically meaningful way to distinguish art from entertainment, if such a distinction is to be based on the inherent qualities of products. Instead, an analysis of the activities of interest groups, politicians and other gatekeepers to the world of the arts serves to illuminate how a designation as art serves to abolish market prices and suppress competition, in contrast to the much less distorted market for entertainment products.”

Translation: when something is identified as or named as “art” as opposed to “entertainment,” the biggest difference is that the usual forces of economics don’t quite apply in the same way.

So when you’re thinking about which arts or performance experiences you spend money on, your choice of what you see live may not be priced on a purely supply-and-demand basis. But that doesn’t mean that we’re spending less on experiences. Quite the opposite, in fact — a 2014 study by Eventbrite  found that

Since 1987, the share of consumer spending on live experiences and events relative to total U.S. consumer spending increased 70%. Nearly 8 in 10 (77%) millennials say some of their best memories are from an event or live experience they attended or participated in. 69% believe attending live events and experiences make them more connected to other people, the community, and the world.

And while we may be spending more on these performances and experiences, it’s not a new thing to spend cash on seeing a performance. According to Wikipedia, the five highest-attended single-artist concerts happened in 2017 (Vasco Rossi), 1990 (Paul McCartney), 1988 (Tina Turner), 1980 (Frank Sinatra), and 2005 (Luciano Ligabue).

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