Cav > Books: culture‎ (464)

"We all have defining moments in our lives—meaningful experiences that stand out in our memory. Many of them owe a great deal to chance: A lucky encounter with someone who becomes the love of your life. A new teacher who spots a talent you didn’t know you had. A sudden loss that upends the certainties of your life. A realization that you don’t want to spend one more day in your job. These moments seem to be the product of fate or luck or maybe a higher power’s interventions. We can’t control them.
But is that true? Must our defining moments just happen to us?"

"In this book, we have two goals: First, we want to examine defining moments and identify the traits they have in common. What, specifically, makes a particular experience memorable and meaningful? Our research shows that defining moments share a set of common elements.
Second, we want to show you how you can create defining moments by making use of those elements. Why would you want to create them? To enrich your life. To connect with others. To make memories. To improve the experience of customers or patients or employees.
Our lives are measured in moments, and defining moments are the ones that endure in our memories. In the pages ahead, we’ll show you how to make more of them."

"...Or, rather, it could have been just one of the things you did, if you did it, like smoking hams, mending the roof and the fences, and hoeing the vegetable patch.
Black or white, Northern or Southern, rural life consisted of one job after another, just to stay alive. Sometimes, particularly among African Americans, music accompanied work, as it also did among sailors or excavating crews. “Field hollers” may have been African survivals, and recordings of prisoners in the fields doing agricultural work, giving off with whoops and pieces of melody, sound eerie to our ears."

"We often, bizarrely, hear the claim that American history is taught mostly from the political right—and that it presents our nation as bucolic.
In fact, many of the best-selling social science books of the past few decades focus on the idea that the “real” history of the United States was a virtually unending bloodbath. A short list of influential texts of this kind would have to include Marxist Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, the New York Times–originating recent bestseller The 1619 Project, and . . . well . . . James W. Loewen’s 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me. This entire body of work draws from and ties into the modern American obsession with racism."

"...But this brings us to a key point, which serves as something of a central theme for this book.
Modern American morality is an aberration. If we don’t understand that, then history will be nothing but one long shock to our naive systems."

"...The practice of building a personal collection of curious objects goes back centuries, although it wasn’t until the 1600s that they really started to take off in Europe. By the 1700s, the trend had spread even to England.
These “wonder rooms,” as they were sometimes called, usually served two purposes. They offered a fun hobby for bored aristocrats to show off their wealth and well-traveled light fingers. Think of them as the private souvenir drawers of various European colonizers, with all the complex baggage that comes with that language."

"...One of these iconic wars was the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Students of history have at least some basic knowledge of the conflict, which raged for three years and drew in other nations.
Spain’s civil war has come to be seen as a foretelling of the horrors of the Second World War. Nevertheless, the story of the conflict that set Spain on fire is still relevant. This book traces the conflict from its origins to its bloody aftermath in chronological order and clearly narrates the main events. Some analysis is provided to give the reader a better understanding of the main issues and the big questions raised by the conflict that are still hotly debated today, such as if war can be averted and what the role of the international community in such conflicts should be."

"All too often, the Spanish Civil War has been portrayed as a simple case of a conflict between Left and Right. In reality, it was much more complex. There was so much propaganda during and after the conflict that many people still hold misconceptions about the war. This work is based on the most up-to-date research and offers the readers an insight into the war without the distortions of ideologues and propaganda, allowing them to learn the facts.
Few civil wars have excited the interest of the international community like the Spanish Civil War. The international actors that participated in the civil war are discussed, as well as their culpability in the tragedy."

"...Suggestion can make cheap wine taste like Château Margaux, warp our perception of time, and alter our memories. We know that psychedelic substances, illusions, and other dramatic effects can also alter our levels of suggestibility. But, paradoxically, being susceptible to suggestions hardly means we’re feeble-minded or gullible."

"Here, I share some of my best stories about the science of suggestion, the bread and butter of my professional life. Throughout my academic career, I have focused specifically on the role that suggestion plays in the effectiveness of psychiatric medications, alongside how attention, selfregulation, placebo phenomena, and expectations affect human consciousness. For example, sometimes placebos work even when people know that they are taking them. The fields of developmental psychopathology and transcultural psychiatry teach us how much our communities and social standards can shape our thoughts, emotions, and cognitive processing. And using imaging of the living human brain and other state-of-the-art techniques, my research has helped unravel the mental experiences of hypnosis and meditation."

"...by repeatedly showing participants photographs of famous and respected Black people, such as Martin Luther King Jr., and photographs of infamous and disapproved white people, such as criminal and cult leader Charles Manson, negative attitudes waned by more than 50 percent.57 Similarly, videos of Black people during positive activities such as going to church or enjoying a family barbecue also reduced implicit bias.58 These early efforts to change the social context and, through it, reduce automatic prejudice and preference have paved the road to diversity education."

"...In this way, and others, we can apply the science of suggestion—in a way that transcends lip service and performative activism—to result in real social impact, health outcomes, and political change."

"...No surprise, then, that the nocebo effect has been called “the placebo effect’s evil twin.” In our view, the nocebo effect can be summarized as “the occurrence of a harmful event that stems from consciously or subconsciously expecting it.” The core of the nocebo effect is that adverse health effects occur as a result of negative expectations. Expectations come up in everyday conversation, like when you tell a friend that you’re stuck in traffic but expect to meet them for dinner in twenty minutes. But it’s also an important technical term that academics use (sometimes interchangeably with expectancy), and it was popularized by Dr. Irving Kirsch at Harvard University. Expectancies can teach us a lot about our behavior and actions. They are critical to our health and well-being. The nocebo effect, then, can be thought of as the scientific term for saying that when you expect to feel sick, you are more likely to feel sick."

"...For more than a year I’d bided my time, waiting for the right moment to escape. I was eighteen years old and scared to death that my carefully laid plans might backfire. But my heart was full of rebellion against the constant fear, cruel rules and ancient customs that stifle and sometimes kill girls like me in Saudi Arabia. And it soared when I imagined a life away from them.
I had my phone, but my passport was with my eldest brother. Getting it and hiding it so I would have it when the time came to run was key. I was trying to be cool, trying to look like the dutiful daughter packing for a holiday, trying to calm the waves of anxiety as I watched from my bedroom the family prepare for departure and then gather for lunch before setting out for Kuwait."

"...Most of this usage presents mindfulness as a condition solely of the mind and often related to the practice of meditation. But mindfulness—as my students and I have shown—is instead the simple process of actively noticing things, no meditation required. When mindful, we notice things we didn’t notice before, and we come to see that we didn’t know the things we thought we knew as well as we thought we knew them. Everything becomes interesting and potentially useful in a new way..."

"But my use of the word “mindfulness” also, importantly, refers to a condition of the body. Indeed, I believe our psychology may be the most important determinant of our health. I’m not just speaking of harmony between mind and body. I believe the mind and body comprise a single system, and every change in the human being is essentially simultaneously a change at the level of the mind (that is, a cognitive change) as well as the body (a hormonal, neural, and/or behavioral change). When we open our minds to this idea of mind-body unity, new possibilities for controlling our health become real. Making use of the power of a mindful body is well within our grasp."

"Schopenhauer is presumed to have said, “All research passes through three phases: First it is ridiculed; then it is violently opposed; and third it is accepted as self-evident.”

"...People seeking enlightenment or relief from stress, anxiety, and pain have been the primary audience.
Therefore, most mindfulness teachers have continued to discuss mindfulness within that frame. That frame has been so narrow for so long it might seem that mindfulness is only for the spiritually inclined, or for people with challenging medical issues, such as panic attacks, paralyzing anxiety, and deep depression, or people who just want some stress relief.
That couldn't be further from the truth..."

"I don't know why you picked up this book, but given the title it might be that you've had the thought, “What the hell is all the hype about mindfulness?” You may be one of the millions of people who have been curious about mindfulness but don't want to be associated with the spiritual crowd that so often drowns out its core meaning. Perhaps you recoil at the thought of listening to someone breathlessly guide meditations in a sickly sweet voice. Maybe you thought you'd need to join a yoga studio and get a subscription for monthly deliveries of incense. If any of those have been keeping you from trying out mindfulness, this book is for you. In these pages, I peel back the layers of hype and hyperbole about mindfulness and provide a practical and demystified approach to reaping the real benefits from a consistent mindfulness practice over just an 8-week period.
The concept of "Mindfulness" is not new, despite the many new Western practitioners who have emerged in the last few decades. Although mindful practices are just hitting an upswing here, they have been a component of Eastern philosophy, namely Hinduism and Buddhism, for a few thousand years."

"Mindfulness is an ability to keep attention on one's present moment experience without getting too caught up in automatic thoughts and judgments."

"Attending my first mindfulness teacher training course was quite a shock. In the morning on the first day, the teachers came into the room holding small bells, wearing Buddhist beads, and carrying special cushions on which they meditated. This struck me as odd, because I had signed up for the “secular” mindfulness teacher training. It did not take long to gather that this “secular” training was going to be deeply intertwined with overtly spiritual and new-age thoughts, positions, and perspectives. There were–I kid you not–even Tarot card readings at an evening event and scores of participant comments during the training were met with the response, “That's so beautiful.” If you want to turn off a corporate audience and never be invited back beyond what your original contract stipulated, just do what's in this paragraph."

"As you progress through the book and do the exercises, you can gain a greater ability to respond thoughtfully and calmly in the midst of high-pressure and complex situations, become more agile in the face of change, and pay more attention to the things you deem most important. You will learn practices that are known to lead to enhanced mental focus, empathy, and resilience. Through consistent practice, you can become aware of some of your self-created challenges and learn ways to avoid automatically falling into the same patterns so you can get out of your own way. You will learn ways to be less affected by unhelpful internal dialogue, limiting beliefs, and irrational feelings of fear (failure, embarrassment, and criticism), allowing you to see and seize opportunities to grow beyond what you previously thought possible and unlock your latent potential. Finally, you'll also begin to be able to connect with people around you more fully and effectively. These benefits cascade and compound, resulting in improvements in performance, leadership, and well-being."

"...In Revenge of the Tipping Point, I want to look at the underside of the possibilities I explored so long ago. If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who knows where and when to push has real power. So who are those people? What are their intentions? What techniques are they using? In the world of law enforcement, the word forensic refers to an investigation of the origins and scope of a criminal act: “reasons, culprits, and consequences.” Revenge of the Tipping Point is an attempt to do a forensic investigation of social epidemics."

"Engaging with music, whether as a listener or a player, facilitates entry into the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), a path to the subconscious that is instrumental to everything from problem-solving to relaxation, from creativity to immune system function. And for many, music can connect us to a sense of a higher power, of great and enduring beauty, and listening to or playing it can provide some of the most exhilarating and meaningful moments of our lives."

"This is a book to help you change things. We consider change at every level—individual, organizational, and societal. Maybe you want to help your brother beat his gambling addiction. Maybe you need your team at work to act more frugally because of market conditions. Maybe you wish more of your neighbors would bike to work.
Usually these topics are treated separately—there is “change management” advice for executives and “self-help” advice for individuals and “change the world” advice for activists. That’s a shame, because all change efforts have something in common: For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently. Your brother has got to stay out of the casino; your employees have got to start booking coach fares. Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to start behaving in a new way?..."

"...It sets their stories against the backdrop of Afghanistan’s past as a battleground for outside powers, including the legacy of Britain’s 19thcentury colonial invasions, the Soviet occupation during the Cold War and America’s role in backing the anti-Soviet mujahideen. And it interweaves their journeys with my own, as an outsider who spent two decades working and living in Afghanistan. In my work as a reporter, I was focused on the war. But in my day-to-day life, I was witness to a country changing and growing in spite of it. So this is also my perspective on that other side to Afghanistan’s story."

"Calling Afghanistan the graveyard of empires overlooks the fact that it was itself the foundation of empires, including that of its own 18th-century Durrani dynasty. The term is also inaccurate. While both Britain and the USSR were badly mauled in Afghanistan, that wasn’t the reason their two empires came to an end. Most important of all, the term ignores the reality that it is Afghanistan rather than its invaders that has always paid the heaviest price, becoming a graveyard for its own people. And that pattern continued after the Soviet withdrawal in February 1989."

"Often enough, men and women going about their lives with no intention of harming anyone are getting thwacked, unexpectedly and at times haphazardly, by our multitude of statutes, rules, regulations, orders, edicts, and decrees. Almost always, one authority or another replies that, while the impact on the individual at hand is most regrettable, we should really focus on the greater good our laws and regulations seek to achieve and the collective social progress they promise."

"This isn’t an academic work or a legal brief. It is a book of stories— stories about real people, their struggles to make their way in a world awash with law, and the toll on their lives and families. You will not meet lawyers in these pages but fishermen and foster parents, an Amish community, hair braiders and monks, even a magician and the polydactyl descendants of Ernest Hemingway’s cat."

"Reflecting on these developments sometimes reminds us of Parkinson’s Law. In 1955, a noted historian, C. Northcote Parkinson, posited that the number of employees in a bureaucracy rises by about five percent per year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”
He based his amusing theory on the example of the British Royal Navy, where the number of administrative officers on land grew by 78 percent between 1914 and 1928, during which time the number of navy ships fell by 67 percent and the number of navy officers and seamen dropped by 31 percent. It seemed to Parkinson that in the decades after World War I, Britain had created a “magnificent Navy on land.” (He also quipped that the number of officials would have “multiplied at the same rate had there been no actual seamen at all.”)

"...This is not to say that flying in these magnificent monstrosities provided me with some sort of spiritual moment or religious exaltation. This is to say that to be on a gunship, to carry out its mission, is to feel as powerful as any deity from the pantheons of old. But these gods, like all gods, are not interested in creation. To use the 105, a gun that is loaded with forty-five-pound bullets, a gun that, when fired, causes the 155,000-pound plane it’s mounted on to buck so far to the right that the pilot must actively correct the flight path, is to be Zeus hurling Hephaestus’s bolts. To fire a Griffin missile from an altitude so great that the men on the ground could only know of it in the same moment that it kills them is to be Mars flinging his spear."

"Being a DSO in Afghanistan meant making life and death decisions (and not or). We could decide who lived, and who died. When we had flown a mission, and done our job right, it was no lie or even an exaggeration to say we had done something that very few other people were capable of doing.
When I did it, I was one of only two DSOs who spoke both Dari and Pashto; there was only one other person on Earth who had received the training I had, who could do the work I did.
Because I experienced all of the things I did in the Air Force at a young age, it might have been impossible for them to be anything but formative.
Because very little else that followed was imbued with the same amount of life and death, other things will always pale in comparison. Or maybe it really was the most important thing I’ve ever done, or will ever do. And so, though everything in this book is true, and most of it is about me, it is not a memoir, as I don’t know how to tell you who I am. Nor is it a war book, as I don’t know how to make you understand war. All this book can do—all I can do—is show you what I was.
I was a DSO.
And this is what I heard."