In 2016, a survey of 1,003 UK parents by online bookseller The Book People found that 33% would steer clear of books for their children containing frightening characters. As The Guardian wrote:

Asked about the fictional creations they found scariest as children, a fifth of parents cited the Wicked Witch of the West from L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with the Child Catcher from Ian Fleming’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang in second place. Third was the Big Bad Wolf, in his grandmother-swallowing Little Red Riding Hood incarnation

All of these also are pretty tame scary things, compared to the original Grimm’s fairy tales of excruciating pain and death.

But some argue that shielding kids from scary situations could be doing them a disservice. As quoted by Cari Romm in The Cut:

Scary stories, like nightmares, are a sort of dress rehearsal for real-life fear, helping kids learn to cope with the emotion in a low-stakes setting. “How can you feel safe and secure until you know what it’s like to be afraid?” psychologist Emma Kenny told the Guardian. “The world can be a scary place — children will get into situations where they’re told off by teachers, or fall out with friends. Knowing how to confront fear is a good thing.”

Part of the process of confronting fear is also the process of understanding as much as you can about what you’re facing and how to process it. As Dr. Margee Kerr the staff sociologist at ScareHouse, a haunted house in Pittsburgh, put it to the Atlantic:

Not everyone enjoys being afraid, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that no one wants to experience a truly life-threatening situation. But there are those of us (well, a lot of us) who really enjoy the experience. First, the natural high from the fight or flight response can feel great. There is strong evidence that this isn’t just about personal choice, but our brain chemistry. The chemicals that are released during fight-or-flight can work like glue to build strong memories (“flashbulb memories”) of scary experiences, and if you’re too young to know the monsters are fake, it can be quite traumatic and something you’ll never forget, in a bad way. Our brain is lightning-fast at processing threat. I’ve seen the process thousands of times from behind the walls in ScareHouse—someone screams and jumps and then immediately starts laughing and smiling. It’s amazing to observe.

In other words, fear is an emotional reaction that our brain processes differently depending on the information it has given. And experience is information — even though information can be a good or a bad thing. So what has your experience been?

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Several years ago when I first asked this question, I had no idea it would be as…. Relevant… as it seems to have become. It’s not like dishonesty in politics is a new thing — heck, it’s the butt of so many jokes it’s practically a trope. Of course politicians lie, and of course they’re hypocritical. As Olga Khazan wrote:

Dan Stalder, a psychology professor at University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, told me that people don’t typically realize when they’re being hypocrites, and they usually don’t stop after they’re called out for it, either. Instead, they might deny the accusation so they can “stay in a state of hypocrisy,” he said. Less commonly, hypocrites might “acknowledge the inconsistency and either undo it or vow to do better.”

According to Daniel Effron, a professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School, people underestimate how much they’ll be condemned for being a hypocrite. The condemnation is painful, and if it’s painful enough, people might try to resolve the inconsistency.

That repercussion from lying — from behaving in ways contrary to the way they said they would, or even saying two different things, could be losing face, losing office, or hundreds of other things. In this question, it’s about forcible outing — which, frankly, could have two different meanings. It could be that impeachment — a process that sometimes is successful, and sometimes not.

In March of 2016, University of Nottingham’s Simon Gaechter completed a study that examined honesty in a dice game in 23 different countries (but not the United States) and then compared them to a corruption index for those countries. The more corrupt a society was, the more likely the people there were willing to deceive in the simple dice game. In other words, consequences rom lying don’t always happen.

Forcible outing can mean something very different, though, too. Forcible outing can also mean having one’s gender identity or sexuality disclosed publicly without your consent.

For many in the GLBTQIA community, myself included, it’s a painful question. There are plenty of politicians who act contrary to their stated positions and beliefs — enough that even the magazine The Advocate has an article listing 16 anti-gay activists who were outed as possibly gay or bi.

But – as Arielle P. Schwartz, Holley Law Fellow, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force writes:

We do know that outing—the act of exposing an individual’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity— has been linked to suicide. Marcus Wayman committed suicide after a police officer threatened to tell his family that he was gay. Thereafter, a federal court held in Sterling v. Borough

Ah, a question that is often asked for college essays, in thinkpieces, and conversations with parents left and right. In an article for the Futures Center, built by Forum for the Future, the authors outline the problem by saying, quote:

Rapid change […] characterises life in the 21st century, which often gives communities little time to catch their breath and reflect on before another wave of innovation sweeps over them. The only thing one can say for certain is that many of the challenges ahead will also be solved within these communities – online and off, local and global, old and new. The World Economic Forum coined the phrase the ‘Fourth industrial Revolution’ to describe the period of technological change we’re living through. This revolution has the potential to underpin the creation of a new, sustainable economy – one that is equal, circular, low-carbon and focused on human well-being. Or it could have negative effects, destroying jobs, reducing privacy and driving over-consumption.

As May Wang wrote in Medium, drawing on her experience as a product designer:

Golden Krishna’s “The Best Interface is No Interface” predicted back in 2012 that technology would be and should be moving away from interfaces and screens, which are the very evil that many anti-technologists decry. Teenagers are often accused of being glued to their phones instead of making real conversation, but most of the time it’s because they’re texting each other. They’re just using their phone screens as a medium to connect with other people. The machine interface is just a medium, not an end goal. That’s why it’s so easily replaceable and vulnerable to elimination. When screens disappear, I believe that technology will help us find new ways to connect with each other.

One thing is for sure – technology has changed how we connect and interact. Technology has also institutionalized the stratification of communication that often happens thanks to the differences in access to technology.

Looking for something to listen to this weekend?

May I suggest the Launch podcast? It’s technically a completed podcast, since it’s a one-series show — but it’s still an awesome show to listen to if you’re an bibliophile. It follows the publishing of a book, from finding a publication house through the actual printing process. John August and Wondry put it together as an advertisement, yes, but it is so much more. It’s an intimate look at the love and care one author puts through the entire process of getting a book published, from idea to font and book tour and beyond.  

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When it was nominated for an Oscar award, the movie The Shape of Water saw an over 240% increase in ticket sales. Even so-called losers that didn’t see as much of a bump still saw at least a 47% increase in sales.

Fortune magazine examined what the impact might be as well in 2015, finding that, quote:

Between 1990 and 2009, movies that won the award for Best Picture immediately saw an increase in box office receipts, to the tune of $14 million on average. This phenomenon is known as the “Oscar bump,” and it’s easy to imagine that something similar happens when a show wins an Emmy. However, this often isn’t the case. In 2013, writer Don Kaplan wrote in the New York Daily News that the financial effect of winning an Emmy is noticeably less spectacular than that associated with an Oscar win, simply because of the long-term nature of the negotiations. “TV deals usually span several years,” he wrote. “In the movie business, actors, producers and directors are more like mercenaries, constantly on the hunt for a new deal — and an Oscar unquestionably helps command higher paychecks.”

This bump in audience can possibly be attributed to the pure visibility that awards and recognitions bring. And it’s not like awards come from completely unbiased sources. As Wired UK puts it:

Don’t be tricked into thinking that movie-ranking sites give some kind of objective rating on how good a film is. All three of the above sites are skewed pretty heavily towards the opinions of men. Take IMDb’s top-ranked film for example – The Shawshank Redemption. Its score of 9.3 is based on the votes of around 1.86 million IMDb users. 1.2 million of those votes came from men. IMDb does tweak its rankings to lessen the influence of particular demographics, but men often make up over 70 per cent of the voters for any film. And it turns out that men tend to look much more favourably on films with more masculine themes, or male leading actors. IMDb breaks down the voting demographics for all of its films. Take a flick through them and you’ll see that men consistently rank masculine films higher than films that feature female leads or more traditionally female themes.

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Around 2007 and 2008, there were two separate sets of stories that both had a focus on a very specific idea — one week of work. I have no idea if one of these ideas influenced the other, but either way it’s an example of synchronicity of ideas.

The first is a project by then-recent college graduate Sean Aiken, who started a project called the One Week Job. As he explains it, quote:

How it worked: Anyone, anywhere, could offer Sean a job for one week. Any money he earned for the work, he asked the employer to donate towards the ONE / Make Poverty History campaign. On his quest, Sean trekked more than 55,000 miles, slept on 55 couches, and tried every job he could: Bungee Instructor, Dairy Farmer, Advertising Executive, Baker, Stock Trader, Firefighter, and more.

Around the same time, then then-small web company Weebly was trying out something very similar. As they explained to CNBC in 2016, quote:

“We were hiring our first person. We knew it was a critical hire and we couldn’t make up our minds,” Rusenko, CEO of the web publishing start-up, tells CNBC. “So we thought, well why don’t we bring them in for a week and work with them? We’ll pay them and just see whether it works.” It ended up being “one of the best things we ever did,” the CEO says, and this process evolved into what Weebly now calls its “trial week.”

“You do real work,” Rusenko says of the trial week, which every prospective employee gets paid to complete before getting an offer. “You get in and hit the ground running. It’s an opportunity for people to show their work and show the quality of their work.” At the end of the trial week, the candidates present their work to three to five employees.

“Usually there’s a project, so you have the opportunity to show your work and the progress you were able to make on the project,” Rusenko explains. “That day, we would follow up with an offer or not. … There’s a 75 percent pass rate.”

It’s a pretty big idea for sure — to try out something for a week instead of dedicating yourself to something that you may or may not have a good feel for before you agree.

As British author Roman Krznaric puts it in Salon,

instead of pondering your ideal occupation long and hard, just pick something. Nearly anything will do. “We need to act first and think afterwards,” he said. Once you’ve tried something, you’re in a much better position to decide whether you like it or not.

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If you want to set off a spirited debate on any wedding message board, ask the question of how much say parents should get in the wedding if they pay for it. Even Martha Stewart has a guide for what parents should and shouldn’t get a say in when they pay for parts of a wedding. Specifically, that guide says parents who help pay for a wedding get to have a say in the venue, guest list, and the wording of the invitations, but not the ceremony or bridal party attire. The idea is that if parents are helping to finance an event, then they do get some kind of say in what the event is like.

There’s a similar parental debate over financing higher education — on Get Rich Slowly, where a mother writes in to ask:

My husband and I have worked hard to save for our daughter’s education so that she should not have to take out much in student loans if she completes her degree in four years. But, we hadn’t anticipated that our hard-earned dollars might go to pay for a course of study that has questionable financial prospects. We are torn about whether to pay for her to study anything that she wants, or to withhold or limit our financial support if she insists on majoring in something we feel is frivolous. If we “hold our nose” and write the checks, we risk wasting a lot of money on a degree that may not help our daughter launch a solid career.

There’s also 257 comments on this article that present a number of different sides to the argument.

There’s even a question of how much say you get in exchange for resources and money when it comes to investing. There’s different types of stocks — called voting and non-voting — that differentiate how much say a stockholder may get in exchange for owning a part of the company. But – should resources actually equal say? Or is there more complex calculation at play?

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In February of 2014, the blog NeoAcademic wrote:

It is certainly intuitive that someone writing about someone else whom they know well should be able to provide an honest and objective assessment of that person’s capabilities.  But despite their ubiquity, little research is available on the actual validity of recommendation letters in predicting academic and job performance. They look like they predict performance; but do they really?

There’s some very strong data — both quantitative and qualitative – on both sides of this question.

Aimee Batemen wrote on LinkedIn, quote:

Back when I was a recruitment consultant, if I had a candidate’s profile, I’d skip straight past the experience and go straight to the recommendations first. The competition for jobs was so competitive, I needed to look for that ‘edge’. The same rings true today.

There’s a lot of data that, from a search side and purchasing side at least, what other people have to say has a big impact on things. As far back as 2013, 88% of people who responded to an online survey read online reviews to help make their decision about a local business. 39% did so on a regular basis.

That would indicate that yes, reviews and recommendations do have a big impact. Another study that looked at the impact of language in reviews academics write for one another — and found that, in general, women tended to be described with language that was not as strong or complimentary as men, even when the letters themselves were written by women. The authors of that 2016 study argued that this may have some correlation to the fact that women tend to face more difficulty attaining higher academic positions.

That would be another notch in the idea that these letters may have a big impact. Yet returning to the NeoAcadmic post — quote —

In a recent issue of the International Journal of Selection and Assessment, Kuncel, Kochevar and Ones examine the predictive value of recommendation letters for college and graduate school admissions, both in terms of raw relationships with various outcomes of interest and incrementally beyond standardized test scores and GPA. The short answer: letters do weakly predict outcomes, but generally don’t add much beyond test scores and GPA.

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There’s two terms intermixed here that, technically, have two different meanings. National languages are the traditional or generally understood languages that coincide with geographic areas or national groups. Those national groups do not always exactly match geopolitical borders. On the other hand, official languages are the legally sanctioned languages that government entities put in to place.

The World Economic Forum website reported in 2017 that, quote:

India, with a population of over 1.3 billion, has 454 living languages and is one of the world’s most multilingual countries, according to a 2016 ranking by Ethnologue. English and Hindi, which is spoken by 30% of the population, are the official languages at national level. However there are a total of 16 in India because states can also choose their own official languages. Palau, an archipelago of more than 500 islands in the western Pacific Ocean, has five official languages – Palauan, English, Sonsorolese, Tobi and Angaur.

Countries with four official languages include Austria, Bahrain, Spain and Singapore. English is the most widely used official language in the world, although perhaps surprisingly it does not have official status in the UK (Welsh is the UK’s only official language) or Australia, where many indigenous and minority languages are also spoken.

In 2006, the UK’s Independent reported that the United States had voted to create an official national language. That report said, quote:

In a confusing debate passions ran high, with the Democratic minority leader Harry Reid labeling the amendment “racist”, and Ken Salazar, a Colorado Democrat of Hispanic ancestry, calling it “divisive and anti-American”. Not only does it overrule any claims to multilingual services, but the measure also stipulates rigorous testing to ensure would-be citizens have a sound knowledge of both the English language and US history.

But… maybe not. Politifact reported in 2007 that, quote:

The non-partisan Congressional Research Service has examined this question several times, most recently in January 2007. It concluded that designating English “official” or “national” would have no practical impact. An official designation alone would not cancel government programs, and although several pieces of legislation now pending in Congress would repeal some federal mandates on things such as non-English ballots, none of the bills would go so far as to prohibit governments from helping non-English speakers. A 2000 presidential executive order, signed by Bill Clinton, makes it federal policy that multilingual services are considered to be among the rights guaranteed in federal civil rights law.

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Public libraries have long been a part of the fabric of cities, towns, and counties. In 1901, the New York Public Library issued its first library card, and that’s a tradition that continues at nearly every lending library out there.

In 2017 the Pew Research Center reported that, quote:

46% of adults ages 18 and older say they used a public library or bookmobile in the previous 12 months.

That same report also found that there are significant generational and demographic differences in the people who make up that 46%. Quote:

53% of Millennials (those ages 18 to 35 at the time) say they used a library or bookmobile in the previous 12 months. That compares with 45% of Gen Xers, 43% of Baby Boomers and 36% of those in the Silent Generation.

According to the American Library Association, when you combine the visits Americans make to academic, public, and school libraries — they visit these institutions three times as often as they go to movies. There’s also the fact that, quote:

There are more public libraries than Starbucks in the U.S.—a total of 17,566 including branches.

It is also worth noting that, since there are 30% of people who actively use libraries who still aren’t sure what all the services a library might offer are, there’s plenty more than the physical lending of books offered by many of these institutions. Libraries have since started offering e-book lending, internet access, business services, 3D printers, technology petting zoos, coworking spaces, and more. Heck, the Spokane Public Library even offers everything any aspiring podcaster might need to get their idea off the ground.

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Though it wasn’t a brand-new idea in the 1950s, the whole idea of people directly selling a product to their friends and family via home parties really took off with Tupperware. Quoting from the Smithsonian Institute’s article about Tupperware:

Although she didn’t create the home party sales model, Brownie Wise pioneered it for Tupperware and used it to transform the company’s reputation. Wise was so successful in selling Tupperware to women in their own homes that Earl Tupper couldn’t help but notice. His company had been struggling to sell its plastic containers off shelves in department stores, so in 1951, he made Wise a vice president of the newly formed Tupperware Home Parties Inc. and put her in charge of developing a large-scale Hostess party plan for the company. Lorna Boyd, speaking in 2004 about her mother, Sylvia Boyd, a Tupperware dealer in the 1960s, remarked: “Tupperware . . . took those moms out of the kitchen where they were ‘supposed to be’ and let them enter the workforce, and let them have something outside the home.”

However, that doesn’t mean that this sales model is without challenges. As BBC News Magazine put it in 2011, quote:

But Wise also personified the precarious position of female executives in the era. In 1958 she was dismissed from her post, despite being the single biggest driving force in the company’s success, apparently because the puritanical Tupper disapproved of her flamboyant lifestyle. Susan Vincent, professor of anthropology at Canada’s St Francis Xavier University, says that rather than breaking down barriers, Tupperware perpetuated gender stereotypes. “It always assumed a close association between women and the domestic sphere,” she says. “Plus, the exploitation of social networks is ultimately quite destructive. It relies on family and friends – not for social support, but it commercialises them.”

Today, there are hundreds if not thousands of companies that promise you can sell products to your friends and family to make money while working from home. Now, those sales happen as often via online “parties” as they do via in-person parties. And a very very strong debate rages about if these direct-sales companies are actually multi-level marketing pyramid schemes or not. Some say that they are, since they require financial input that may or may not be paid back by your friends and family — and others say that selling to your friends and family is the best way to make a few extra bucks.

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