“Liberation begins in the mind… Black folks have never been given the opportunity to define our own reality.”
Tag: Psychology
Politics—Not Psychology—Drives Politics
Social psychologists know conservative media politicizes its viewers. But by focusing on individuals, they miss how to enact political change.
Economics: Theories vs. Stories
In the rubble of the Richard Nixon years, a University of Chicago economist named Arthur Laffer drew a diagram on a napkin to illustrate the hidden blessings of ...
Ben Lerner’s Intoxicating Honesty
Does fiction require anonymity? And if an author chooses to draw heavily from their own life, and the lives of those they know and love, how should a reader judge ...
Virtual Roundtable on “The Ego and the Id”
Freud’s ideas have long been absorbed by popular culture, but what role do they continue to play in the academy, in the ...
How Did Humanism Die? How Did It Survive?
In 2019, the idea of “humanism” feels passé. If humanism means “universally shared values,” or “progress,” or an exceptionalism based on the power of ...
Our Drugs, Ourselves
Is the term “drugs” still meaningful? Many of us would confess to being at least mildly dependent on some substance, be it single-origin coffee or Sancerre, antidepressants or anti-inflammatories ...
B-Sides: Marion Milner’s “A Life of One’s Own”
I rarely fail to remember my first encounter with a book—it usually becomes merged with the story of the book itself—so it is disconcerting to me to realize ...
Charlotte Salomon’s Triumphant “No”
Charlotte Salomon’s short life was haunted—by the rise of the Nazis, who ultimately took her life, but also by her family’s history of severe mental illness ...
A Meeting of Two Minds
We all make mistakes. No matter how well trained, smart, or astute we are, faulty reasoning marks our thinking and leads us astray. The psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed us just ...
The World in a Blot of Ink
What might this be? A moth, a bat, a winged musical conductor, a spaceship? Whatever you may see, you are also looking at Card I of the Rorschach test ...