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The most important new book I read last year was Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. It shows how, once a nation has reached a certain level of income among its citizens (which Europe and North America have reached but which most Third-World countries have not), it’s not the absolute level of average national income that predicts health and well-being. It’s difference in income within the society: not economics but psychology.

Because of a cloud of volcanic ash, I was marooned in Europe for eight days. To start with, I was in Helsinki, where the cloud seemed determined to hover indefinitely. After difficulties in buying tickets—please take a number—I travelled by ferry and by train to Paris. Arrival there was a relief because it was nearer home. While I was there I thought I would make a little pilgrimage to places where Marcel Proust had lived.

A love story on a grand scale, Therefore Choose is set in a world where a single choice can affect the direction of a life, a country, or even a continent. Facing decisions that will forever alter the course of their lives, George, Anna, and Werner must choose and live with the irrevocable consequences.

I would like to be home in Toronto for the publication of my book but, due to a cloud of volcanic ash, I am involuntarily confined to Europe at least until the weekend.

Fiction enables us to overcome the actor-observer discrepancy, to understand from the position of being inside someone how that person might act in a particular situation. The way I have put it is that in planning and acting in our own lives we use an aspect of our mind that I’ve called the planning processor. With it, we use our knowledge of how the world works to understand the effects of possible actions and, as we pursue our goals, we can thus plan what to do. When we read fiction and identify with a protagonist, we enter mentally into a quiet space and put aside our own goals.

mong the interesting results of this approach is the finding by Kate McLean (2006) that in adolescence people stop thinking of themselves in terms of what they like and dislike (”my favorite colour is yellow, and I don’t like pizza”) and start thinking of themselves in terms of a story of their actions and the outcomes of these actions extended in time.

I realize that one could not call a play: Schubert and German Romanticism … Ehem. But that would be a closer title than the one it now has. The play was written, and is performed, by Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy, and Dave Malloy. All act brilliantly, each in several parts, to represent Schubertian goings-on at the beginnings of both the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. All play the piano(s), exquisitely. All sing, beautifully. And, although for the most part they speak in English, all of them occasionally also make a bit of a hash of German. For a couple of the songs, for which they didn’t like the music Schubert provided, the writers have composed some of their own.

It has been known for a long time, since the famous experiments of Alice Isen (e.g. Isen & Levin, 1972), that feeling happy facilitates the helping of others. In the second experiment of the current study, Schnall et al. included a control group in which participants became happy at watching a television episode that was funny. The results were that participants who watched the elevation clip had more subjective feelings of elevation and also did substantially and significantly more actual helping than those who watched the funny clip.

In a TVO “Flying Solo” clip, the University of Toronto literary theorist Nick Mount was asked to talk on what art can and cannot do (click here). He says that although art might inspire, the Holocaust contradicts the idea that literary art can make us better, and he cites George Steiner’s assertion: “We know that [...]

Paul Silvia says aesthetics are usually about taking pleasure in things, for instance because they are beautiful. He offers what he calls a tour of unusual emotions that can’t be grouped with pleasure. He describes three families of such emotions: knowledge emotions (interest, confusion, and surprise), hostile emotions (anger disgust and contempt), and self conscious emotions (pride, shame and embarrassment) which occur in fiction.