On the day Adam Resnick learned what an internship was, he called up Late Night With David Letterman. From there, his career would be marked by cult classics he’d rather not revisit. We’ll revisit. Hear the story of Resnick’s first big break, and everything he’s regretted making since. The good news? He’s finally found something he is proud of, and that’s his new book Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation. For the Spiel, how should the pro-choice movement consider the Planned Parenthood videos?
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Facebook and LinkedIn fail to impress Wall Street. Twitter plummets. And Whole Food slips. Our analysts tackle those stories and discuss when to sell a stock. Plus, MarketWatch columnist Chuck Jaffe talks Apple, mutual funds, and investor sentiment.
It has been reported that as many as 20,000 foreign fighters have joined militants in the Middle East and that they make up around 10% of ISIS. Wesley Stephenson and Federica Cocco look at the numbers behind those claims and examine where those fighting in places like Syria and Iraq come from.
On The Gist, Politico’s Manu Raju joins us from the Senate Periodical Press Gallery to discuss the recent Ted Cruz blowup in the Senate, and its lasting impact on his relationship with the GOP. How might his disregard for traditional procedure and the GOP agenda appeal to Republican voters? For the Spiel, a look at 50 years of Medicare.
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Unlike the character in the movie The Sixth Sense, we actually don’t see dead people. Westerners go to great lengths to excise thoughts about death (real death, that is, not movie death) or being in the presence of death. Sheldon Solomon, on the other hand, routinely thinks about the unthinkable, and how humans behave differently when the unthinkable forces its way into their thoughts.
Solomon, a social psychologist at New York’s Skidmore College, along with two other experimental social psychologists, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, developed the idea of ‘terror management theory’ more than three decades ago to test out scientifically how the mere specter of mortality alters behavior.
Here, in conversation with Social Science Bites’ Nigel Warburton, Solomon specifically addresses the fear of death and how his views were derived from the earlier work of Ernest Becker. Becker, Solomon explains, called the fear of death the “main spring of human activity.” Nonetheless we don’t want to face death directly, Solomon adds, and so, “Just like most of us are unaware of the internal dynamics of the engine that drives our car, we are equally unaware of what it is that impels us to do what we do every day.”
Various experiments bear that out. When primed with the thought of death, judges reminded of death mete out tougher penalties, American voters shifted their prospective votes from a liberal to a conservative, shoppers shift from bargain brands to status symbols.
“And now the real work can commence,” he explains, “which is the nuances: what are the personality variables that influence how vigorously and how defensively one will react? And we know some of those. We know that insecurely-attached and highly-neurotic people respond more defensively when they are reminded of death. But now, we’re in the process, in part we’re studying people who are terminally ill in hospice settings because we know that there has to be tremendous variation - that some people are more comfortable with the prospect of the inevitability of death than others. That’s really what we want to get a handle on right now.”
Solomon earned a bachelor’s degree from Franklin and Marshall College and a doctorate from the University of Kansas. He’s taught at Skidmore, where he’s currently the Ross Professor for Interdisciplinary Studies, since 1980 after joining the faculty at age 26. (He also co-owns a restaurant in the Skidmore’s home of Saratoga Springs.) Along with Greenberg and Pyszczynski he wrote the 2003 book In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror, in which terror management theory (which is not in itself about terrorism) is used to analyze the roots of terrorism.
The truth about the death of Samuel DuBose at the hands of Ray Tensing in Cincinnati might never have come to light if not for Tensing's own body camera. Matthew Feeney comments.
Thundercat is the alter-ego of bassist and singer-songwriter Stephen Bruner. He’s played bass for both Suicidal Tendencies and Erykah Badu and went on to help shape Kendrick Lamar's 'To Pimp a Butterfly.' In this episode, Thundercat will break down the song "Them Changes" off his new mini-album. Thundercat co-produced the track with long-time collaborator Flying Lotus, with Kamasi Washington on saxophone.
Yeah, you heard that right. But first, it’s a continuation of Monday’s episode with Nathanael. He turned the interview back on me, and we continued the exchange. Overall I’m very happy to have talked with Nathanael and while I of course disagree with any supernatural claims, he’s a great guy who is doing a lot … Continue reading AS158: “My Father’s Funeral Was Stopped By Gay Marriage” →
