Social Life

Sometimes a person is the victim of harrowing personal misfortunes. But sometimes we escape injury and death when it rains down liberally on many of the people around us. Read More

Dear Irene, I'm a junior in high school who has never been the most popular person. I'm generally the weird girl who eats lunch alone reading a book. However, over the past couple of years, I've made a few incredible friends. Read More

What makes Jeremy Lin a special point guard? One answer might be that his teammates trust him. Read More

The purpose of school anti-bullying policies and campaigns is to promote the development of morality in children. Unfortunately, they tend to promote hatred. To reverse this trend, we need to be teaching "Love your enemy." Read More

If a person is forced to speak his own words, he gives a more reliable sense of the validity of his ideas. He also makes a connection with the person he is speaking to, and out of that connection new ideas can flow. Read More

When others are unhappy, it is difficult for us to flourish. Read More

On Valentine’s Day, HBO presented the documentary The Loving Story. The film tells about an interracial couple in Virginia in 1958 jailed for violating the state’s anti-miscegenation law. Their case eventually led to the Supreme Court’s 1967 unanimous decision in Loving v. Virginia declaring laws against intermarriage unconstitutional. Read More

Self-Injury is sometimes viewed as addictive, but sociological research shows that people can and do quit for reasons and at points in their self-injury careers that follow predictable patterns. Read More

We've known for some time that bonobos (previously known as "pygmy chimpanzees") are among the most sexual of all living animals—besides of course, humans. Frans de Waal dubbed them the "make love, not war" species, since they seem to resolve the majority of conflicts through sexual activity. Read More