Tweet // < ![CDATA[ digg_url = "http://digg.com/arts_culture/Portraits_in_Charisma_Charisma_vs_Charm"; // ]]>Pickup artists have one of the best definition for charisma that I think I’ve ever heard: Charisma is the ability to suck other people into your reality. People enter into every interaction with a frame: for example a dominant frame, a submissive frame, a negative frame, a [...]
Tweet Two great pieces on the level of unconscious genius that goes into fast-paced athletics. First is one from the blog The Situationist. It uses baseball players as a specific example. The other is an older, but related piece from the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell called “The Physical Genius.” Not much commentary from me [...]
Tweet I predict a lot of people will be talking about Fox’s new show Moment of Truth. Yes, it looks like typical Fox tackiness. Yes, it looks controversial, exploitative and in poor taste. But damn if I’m not going to watch every last minute! As a guy who’s into human nature and the raw, unfiltered [...]
Tweet Somewhat sad news. Chess champion Bobby Fischer is dead. The story of his life is one of great triumph followed by great tragedy: Fisher went on to become a bizarre, shadowy figure (hence the irony of the title of the 1993 movie about a child chess prodigy, Searching for Bobby Fischer). Over the years, [...]
Tweet I have been recording American Idol on my DVR, but I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet. I’m really not enthused about the show anymore after an incredibly lackluster last season. I prefer the criminally underrated sister show So You Think You Can Dance, but since Idol is the show people talk about [...]
Tweet Saw a post over at the gaping void. It’s a story about a guy who was great at his hobby, ended up making it into a career, and became a raging alcoholic that lost it all. And here, supposedly, is the moral of the story: “That’s why you should never turn your hobby into [...]
Tweet In Part 1, we focused on how human nature is driven by two primary drives, the drive of self-preservation and the drive to spread our genes through reproduction. In this part, we’ll focus on the role one particular aspect of our human nature, the tendency to stereotype, satisfies those two drives. First things first, [...]
Tweet Every New Year, posts about resolutions pop up all over the blogosphere, and this year was no different. I can’t stand that stuff. I somewhat forgive women for making those posts, because symbolic rebirths and brand new personal declarations seem to provide them with some sort of emotional release, and to women experiencing emotions [...]
Tweet [Note: This post was revised from the original published version. Hence some of the comments below may be responding to an earlier, slightly different draft.] I wanted to take some time to discuss stereotyping. The tendency to stereotype is a part of human nature, meaning at some point it must have traditionally gave people [...]
