My Absolute best reads

What Is a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP)?

Social stress is perceived as more taxing to most people than other types of stress. This kind of stress can be particularly difficult for someone who can perceive many different ways that things could go wrong in a conflict, for example, or can perceive hostility or tension where others may not notice it.

14 Things Highly Sensitive People Absolutely Need to Be Happy

Because most people are not highly sensitive, they simply don’t understand what it’s like to get very stressed out by, say, a startling noise, a busy weekend, or a violent scene in a movie. Not everyone will understand, and that’s okay. But what an HSP needs is at least a few people — preferably the people closest to them — to “get” their sensitivity. Someone who not only gets it, but helps protect them from overstimulation (“Yes, it’s perfectly okay that we leave the party now. I can see all over your face that you’re overstimulated.”). And, someone who sees all the wonderful gifts that come with this rare trait.

Opinion | We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too?

Nor was the principle of objectivity “meant to imply that journalists were free of bias,” as Tom Rosenstiel, a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland and former executive director of the American Press Institute, and Bill Kovach, a former top editor, wrote in their book, “The Elements of Journalism.” “Quite the contrary,” they noted. The term arose “out of a growing recognition that journalists were full of bias, often unconsciously. Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information — a transparent approach to evidence — precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.”

Kathleen Stock: The Oxford kids are alright

This is not the fatuous argument, made by opportunistic identitarians and anti-woke warriors alike, that we should “listen to young people” — usually made while smoothly guiding listeners to exactly those young people whose views happen to coincide with their own. Nor is it the pretence that we oldies should just shut up and listen to young people generally, no matter what they say — as if today’s youth had miraculously gained hitherto unknown oracular powers, what with all that gaming and watching of TikTok videos. Of course, we shouldn’t be shy of arguing robustly with younger generations, when they talk what appears to be nonsense. They can both dish it and take it. The question is: can we?

The Problem With Reparations

Contrary to Blackhawk (and his reviewer), no American who received a basic elementary (let alone high-school) education nowadays can be unaware of the injustice and cruelty meted out to North America’s prior inhabitants as European settlers, themselves often fleeing poverty, oppression, starvation, and serfdom abroad, settled the frontier. But as with the Benin bronzes, we might wonder: how did the tribes inhabiting this continent at the time of European settlement themselves acquire their land? In all likelihood they did so by the conquest and expulsion of prior occupants. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, North America was not a continent of Edenlike peace and innocence. The New World was already rife with the same human violence that plagued the old. Should this country then not rather be judged, nowadays, by the unprecedented set of free political and economic institutions it established – and into which its native inhabitants were welcomed in the end?

How to Make Your Relationships Authentically Harmonious | by Anna Mercury

That it takes a monastic level of spiritual retreat to exist in surroundings that don’t reinforce the illusion that we are nouns, and by extension, good or bad nouns, is a sign that everything about our world is very, very messed up. Reality should not be a spiritual pursuit or a radical proposal. It should be a given. Instead, we live in such an intensely illusory world that reality seems foreign and otherworldly.
understood as the art of ‘sober calculation’ about ‘choice and avoidance’. Prudence helps us determine what produces pleasure over the long-term, encouraging us to choose pains that produce greater pleasure (eg, exercising to increase health), and avoiding pleasures if they result in more pain (eg, credit card debt; hangovers). Prudence, in other words, tells us that ‘drinking bouts and continuous partying’ are not a great life strategy. Prudence keeps us out of the proverbial gutter and helps us achieve or approximate tranquility.

Onomarie Uriri Honours Chude Jideonwo as He Turns 30! “A Birthday Tribute to the King of Misfits.

Those who have met Chude and interacted closely with him will attest to these three things: meeting Chude will confuse, challenge and eventually change you. Confuse you, because he’s thinking/doing a zillion and one things at the same time, and it’s hard to keep up. While you’re in 2015, I can assure you, that Chude has already scoped out 2045. Challenge you because, he never allows you to peacefully exist in a state of inertia or ordinariness. If you have a hidden skill or talent that you are leaving to waste, you can be sure that Chude will sniff it out and ensure you put it to good use. Change you because, though he is a prodigy, and by extension, naturally impatient,

Witch trials, TERF wars and the voice of conscience in a new podcast about J.K. Rowling.

The heroes in Rowling’s books are not flawless. They are not worthy of our blind adoration or tribal allegiance. They are at their best when they are listening, searching and doubting, acknowledging the complexity and diversity of the world around them. Perhaps Rowling could have remained silent, and remained beloved. But, for wrong or right, that is not what her heroes do.

The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido.

It’s a relief to see a film so frank about sex, and so open to sex’s complexities, especially when so much of current cinema is sexless to a disheartening degree. Sex isn’t just sex. It’s healing and cathartic and just plain old fun, fun with no object other than it’s fun to have fun. These are tough topics.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande rewrites onscreen nudity.

How much more shameful could we get than saying that this thing that keeps us alive and gives us pleasure and does all these things for you, the most important thing is how it looks. We say that to everyone – we say it to our kids and we say it to everyone around us and to ourselves. What a bloody waste of time and energy. That shame then leads into sexual shame. We are soaked in it, in a culture that tells us that. So we have to really try and stand outside of it. Ema [Thompson] likes to say it doesn’t necessarily mean self-love. It’s not looking at your body and going, ‘I love the way it looks’. It’s saying the way it looks isn’t the most important thing about it

Nigeria is a very unhappy country — but it’s not because of poverty

It’s Good To Be Difficult: Shonda Rhimes’s Leadership Lessons.

I never thought there was a problem with being called bossy, bitchy, or difficult. That might be the way I was raised. I was the youngest of six, with a lot of sisters. It just never occurred to me “bossy” was a negative thing. Speaking my mind, standing up for what I want…I was raised to believe I belong in every single room I’ve ever been in. To be concerned that somebody else thinks I’m bossy or difficult suggests their opinion of me is more important than my own belief in myself.

Netflix’s ‘Harry & Meghan’ Review: A Royal Rerun

There’s an air of duty about the entire enterprise of “Harry & Meghan,” as if they’re honor-bound to keep reciting their personal story until we eventually lose interest.

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s “Against Decolonisation”

One can critique Eurocentric narratives, broaden one’s intellectual and cultural palate beyond the Euro-American canon and believe that African societies and cultures deserve respect and should not be slandered—without the specialised and mostly incomprehensible terminology, shrill posturing and reactionary pseudo-radicalism that define decolonial politics.

The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’

It’s essentially a turf war. Only Latino authors can write novels about Latinos. Only Holocaust survivors can convey the truth of the Holocaust. Only disabled people can portray disabled people. Everyone else is out.
This is one point of view, and as with most points of view, some of it is valid. Clearly those who have lived through something — whether it’s a tsunami or a lifetime of racial discrimination — have a story to tell. Their perspective is distinct and it’s valuable. But it is, crucially, only one perspective.

Assured Misery

The inability to deal with the hassle, delay, setback, and nonsense, caused by a desire to squeeze maximum efficiency out of everything we do