Words interest me, which I suppose makes sense given that I do a lot of reading and writing. I’m particularly interested in the power that some words have, how we decide how much power to give them, and what informs our choices about what words to use. The idea of language reclamation seems quite appealing …
Guns kill people, and sometimes they kill a bunch of people in one go, as happened in the recent grocery store shooting in Buffalo, New York, and the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Thoughts and prayers, yada yada yada, but what can be done to actually reduce gun violence? This post focuses on youth gun …
This post explores some of the issues that came up in Todd Rose’s book Collective Illusions, which I reviewed a few months ago. Collective illusions (also known as pluralistic ignorance) are the social norms and expectations that we think everyone else agrees with, when in reality, most people don’t privately agree with those norms and …
Illusions of Normal: How Well Do We Know What Others Think? Read More »
This was originally going to be a book review of The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. However, at 800 pages, it’s a serious commitment, and I only made it partway through. Still, he had me convinced, and I wanted to share my thoughts on what I did get through. In the book, …
A couple of months ago, I came across a blog post that mentioned Glennon Doyle. I didn’t know what that was, so off I went to Google. It turns out she’s a feminist author, and I stumbled across a 2016 blog post of hers titled Quit Hating Her. The chatter in the comments fascinated me, …
The incel (a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate”) phenomenon, at least in its present incarnation, has emerged in the last decade and a bit. It’s come into the public eye through acts of violence committed by the likes of Elliot Rodger (in 2014 in Isla Vista, California) and Alek Minassian (in 2018 in Toronto, Ontario). Misogyny, …
Exploring the Psychology of the Incel Phenomenon Read More »
I think online privacy is a bit of a myth, in that most of us don’t have much. So I’m curious, how important is it for you to try to maintain some modicum of privacy in the online world? I recently came across a blog that was using Hu-manity.co for data privacy management. When I …
I’m generally pretty out of the loop when it comes to pop psychology phenomena, so I just stumbled across the term toxic productivity fairly recently. While I hadn’t heard the term before, I’m at least with it enough to know that productivity talk is all over the internet. What is toxic productivity? Toxic productivity is …
It seems like everyone’s talking about gaslighting these days. But if everyone and their dog seems to be gaslighting (or being gaslit by) everyone else and their cat (or if cat and dog are both accusing the other of gaslighting them), is it really a meaningful descriptor of emotional abuse? Or does it just get …
I find religion to be quite fascinating, despite the fact that I’m a soft atheist and don’t personally believe the fundamentals of any of them. This post will be a bit of a meander through thoughts kicking around in my head related to religion and atheism. Hard vs. soft atheism I would say that I …
