Sensational and vicious readings have always attracted readers
Newspapers changed the moment that Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun in 1833. It was not so much his paper that changed everything but his way of selling it: on the street, one copy at a time. He hired the unemployed to hawk his papers and immediately solved a major problem that had plagued the party presses: unpaid subscriptions. Day's "cash and carry" method offered no credit. You bought and walked. The Sun, with this simple innovation in distribution, invented the news and the newspaper. A thousand imitators followed.
These papers weren't delivered to your doorstep. They had to be exciting and loud enough to fight for their sales on street corners, in barrooms, and at train stations.* Because of the change in distribution methods and the increased speed of the printing press, newspapers truly became newspapers. Their sole aim was to get new information, get it to print faster, get it more exclusively than their competition. It meant the decline of the editorial. These papers relied on gossip. Papers that resisted failed and went out of business—like abolitionist Horace Greeley's disastrous attempt at a gossip-free cash-and-carry paper shortly before Day's.
In 1835, shortly after Day began, James Gordon Bennett, Sr. launched the New York Herald. Within just a few years the Herald would be the largest circulation daily in the United States, perhaps in the world. It would also be the most sensational and vicious. It was all these things not because of Bennett’s personal beliefs but because of his business beliefs. He knew that the newspaper’s role was “not to instruct but to startle.” His paper was anti-black, anti-immigrant, and anti-subtlety. These causes sold papers—to both people who loved them for it and people who hated them for it. And they bought and they bought.
Giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate your life to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction. The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.
When we get angry, we suffer.
If you really understand that, you also will be able to understand that when the other person is angry, it means that she is suffering.
When someone insults you or behaves violently towards you, you have to be intelligent enough to see that the person suffers from his own violence and anger.
But we tend to forget. We think that we are the only one that suffers, and the other person is our oppressor. This is enough to make anger arise, and to strengthen our desire to punish. We want to punish the other ...
There is nothing more attractive and convincing than spontaneity whether it is to be found in a child, in an ...
Psychologists have found a surprisingly small relationship between money and happiness. One answer is that people aren’t spending it right, but money itself might only be part of the problem.
Jennifer L. Aaker in her 2011 paper “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy, Consider Time” argues, that time plays a critical role in understanding happiness, and it complements the money-spending happiness principles by offering five time-spending happiness principles:
1) spend time with the right people: it is not only whether you spend your time with others that influences your happiness, but also who you spend your time with Interaction partners associated with the greatest happiness levels include friends, family, and significant others, whereas bosses and coworkers tend to be associated with the least happiness
2) spend time on the right activities: to what degree is the content of that experience “evergreen” – perennially fresh and enduring?
3) enjoy the experience without spending the time: the part of the brain responsible for feeling pleasure, the mesolimbic dopamine system, can be activated when merely thinking : the brain sometimes enjoys anticipating a reward more than receiving the reward.
4) expand your time: focus on “the here and now” : Why? One possible benefit of being present-focused is that thinking about the present moment (vs. the future) slows down the perceived passage of time, allowing people to feel less rushed and hurried
5) be aware that happiness changes over time: for instance, younger people are more likely to associate happiness with excitement, whereas older individuals are more likely to experience happiness as feeling peaceful.
Souce : Jennifer Aaker, Melanie Rudd, Cassie Mogilner If Money Doesn't Make You Happy, Consider Time, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2011
How do you get people interested in a topic? You point out a gap in their knowledge (…) Knowledge gaps ...
