On The Gist, Maria Konnikova of the New Yorker shares what’s she’s learned from research into ginger’s super food status. For the Spiel, hear a performance from last night’s live Gist from Moth champ and professional storyteller Matthew Dicks. He’s the author of The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs, available now.
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Chicago isn't quite done regulating small-time food entrepreneurs. Hilary Gowins of the Illinois Policy Institute comments from the State Policy Network's annual meeting.
On The Gist, a shaved-down tale from an elder Pesca. Mike and The Gist staff are busy preparing for our first live show, so on Tuesday we present a favorite from the Pesca family dinner table. Joe Pesca tells it best. We’ll be back on Wednesday with a full Gist episode.
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On The Gist, TV writer Phil Rosenthal explains how he came to host his own PBS show about food and travel. His new show, I’ll Have What Phil’s Having, premieres Monday on PBS. For the Spiel, Mike poops on the pope’s media coverage. Can you gush your way into heaven?
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On Start the Week Mary Ann Sieghart explores how far leaders and governments have shaped our world. Matt Ridley dismisses the assumption that history has been made by those on high, whether in government, business or religion, and argues for a system of evolution in which ideas and events develop from the bottom up. The historian Tom Holland revels in the antics of the house of Caesar, from Augustus to Nero, and how this imperial family greatly influenced the ancient world. Barry Cunliffe tells the story of the beginnings of civilisation across Europe and the Far East over the course of ten millennia while the curator Julia Farley concentrates on one of those groups - the Celts - and celebrates their distinctive stylised art in a new exhibition at the British Museum.
Producer: Katy Hickman.
How reliable is psychology science? The Reproducibility of Psychological Science project reported recently and it made grim reading. Having replicated 100 psychological studies published in three psychology journals only thirty six had significant results compared to 97% first time around. So is there a problem with psychological science and what should be done to fix it. Decimate Tim used the word in an interview last week to mean devastate rather than cut by ten percent ? many listeners said this was unforgivable ? was it? ? We ask Oliver Kamm - Author of 'Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage'.
Happiness, says sociologist Will Davies, is “all the rage” right now. Not actually being happy, by the way, but offering to provide happiness, or to measure it, or to study it, to legislate it, or even to exploit it.
If that sounds vaguely corporate, Davies is unlikely to disagree. The author of the new book, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing, is concerned that real happiness may be getting left on the side of the road choking on clouds of neuromarketing and touchy-feely excess in the pursuit of happiness.
“I suppose I think that happiness is better than a lot of what the ‘happiness industry’ represents it as,” Davies tells interviewer David Edmonds in the latest Social Science Bites podcast. “I think that we can do better than extrapolate from studies of individual behavior, or studies of particular fMRI scans, all of which have their own merit and validity within particular scientific limits, but the reductionism of a lot of happiness science, or ‘happiness industry’, or certainly the way it then gets picked up by the business world, and some people in the policy world, is regrettable.”
For one thing, the focus on the positive attributes of being happy ignores the very real reasons people may be unhappy, which Davies also thinks should be taken seriously – even if it’s uncomfortable for policymakers or less than lucrative for the business-minded. It’s something Davies, who also wrote The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (published last year by SAGE), understands well from his own examination of economic psychology as a tool of governance and the politics of corporate ownership.
Davies is a senior lecturer in politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he joined the Department of Politics last year to develop a new politics, philosophy and economics degree. Before that, he worked for policy think tanks and at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies and Oxford’s Institute for Science Innovation & Society and its Centre for Mutual & Employee-owned Business.
On The Gist, remembering Phil Patton. Then, writer and filmmaker Leslye Headland explains how she brought lessons from theater and heartbreak into the making of the indie comedy Sleeping With Other People. For the Spiel, highlights from the Values Voter Summit.
Today’s sponsors:
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