In a semi-sequel to the classic movie ep on Patriot’s Day (CTH083), the gang takes a look at Peter Berg’s 2012 blockbuster Battleship. We imagine a world where board games rule cinema IP over superheroes, talk about disgracing WWII vets, and wonder if these are the weakest movie aliens of all time.
L.A.: Our live show is THIS SATURDAY, 10/8/22 at The Theater at the Ace Hotel. We are going to do a limited ticket giveaway on Patreon and on twitter this Wednesday (10/5/22). Details posted to Patreon imminently.
All dates & Tickets to all our upcoming shows: https://www.chapotraphouse.com/live
There’s the always charming notion that “deep down we’re all the same,” suggesting all of humanity shares a universal core of shared emotions.
Batja Mesquita, a social psychologist at Belgium’s University of Leuven where she is director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, begs to disagree. Based on her pioneering work into the field of cultural psychology, she theorizes that what many would consider universal emotions – say anger or maternal love – are actually products of culture. “We’re making these categories that obviously have things in common,” she acknowledges, “but they’re not a ‘thing’ that’s in your head. When you compare between cultures, the commonalities become fewer and fewer.”
In this Social Science Bites podcast, she explains how this is so to interviewer David Edmonds. “In contrast to how many Western people think about emotions, there’s not a thing that you can see when you lift the skull – there’s not thing there for you to discover,” Mesquita says. “What we call emotions are often events in the world that feel a certain way … certain physical experiences.”
She gives the example of anger.
“In many cultures there is something like not liking what another person imposes on you, or not liking another person’s behavior, but anger, and all the instances of anger that we think about when we think about anger, that is not universal. I’m saying ‘instances of anger’ because I also don’t think that emotions are necessarily ‘in the head,’ that they’re inside you as feelings. What we recognize as emotions are often happening between people.”
That idea that emotions are not some ‘thing’ residing individually in each of our collective heads informs much of Mesquita’s message, in particular her delineation between MINE and OUR emotions (a subject she fleshes out in depth in her latest book, Between Us: How cultures create emotion).
MINE emotions, as the name suggests, are the mental feelings within the person. OUR emotions are the emotions that happen between people, emotions that are relational and dependent on the situation. Does this communal emotion-making sound revolutionary to many ears? Perhaps that’s because it deviates from the Western tradition.
“We haven’t done very much research aside from university students in Western cultures,” Mesquita notes. “The people who have developed emotion theories were all from the same cultures and were mostly doing research with the same cultures, and so they were comfortably confirmed in their hypotheses.”
Also, she continued, Western psychology looks at psychological processes as things, such as ‘memories’ or ‘cognition.’ “We like to think if we went deep enough into the brain we would find these things.
“The new brain science doesn’t actually find these things. But it’s still a very attractive way to analyze human emotion.” Just, in her view, the wrong way.
Mariann shares how she and her UX research team at Stack Overflow are taking steps to create a more inclusive product experience, while reflecting on her experiences as a mother to a neurodiverse daughter.
Wesley talks about what it’s like to be a developer with dyslexia and why self-empathy and self-compassion have been important to his evolution as a senior leader.
Ceora explains why it’s important to be on a psychologically safe team from her perspective as a Black woman who is also neurodivergent.
We talk about giving people the space necessary to do their best work, implementing more inclusive hiring practices, and everyday routines that help us stay our happiest and most productive.
We conclude with a note about why supporting neurodiversity is good for everyone of all walks of life.
When a disaster like Hurricane Ian destroys a house, the clock starts ticking. It gets harder for sick people to take their medications, medical devices may stop working without electricity, excessive temperatures, mold, or other factors may threaten someone's health. Every day without stable shelter puts people in danger.
The federal government is supposed to help prevent that cascade of problems, but an NPR investigation finds that the people who need help the most are often less likely to get it. Today we encore a conversation between NPR climate reporter Rebecca Hersher and Short Wave guest host Rhitu Chatterjee.
Kwame Alexander's new novel aimed at teens, The Door of No Return, focuses on the history of slavery. It follows a boy growing up in Ghana in 1860, and it aims to help readers understand the wholeness of the lives and experiences of Africans before they walked through that "door of no return" – and were shipped to the Americas. In an interview with NPR's Rachel Martin, Alexander talks about how he used poetry to make the heavy subject palatable for children.
Amanda Holmes reads Jessica Greenbaum’s poem “The Yellow Star That Goes With Me.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
While today most American universities offer all sorts of dining accommodations, the on-campus dining scene in the 1950s was far less welcoming for students with specific dietary needs. For students who observed the Jewish dietary laws known as kashrut, and therefore didn’t mix milk with meat or eat pork or shellfish (among other restrictions), their options for elite colleges were narrowed even further, often to schools in big cities where kosher meat and other offerings could more easily be procured.
So when a kosher-keeping high school senior from New York City wanted to attend Brown in the late 1950s, he was directed to an observant Jewish home near campus in Providence, RI, where Miriam Smith cooked kosher meals for him and, soon, an increasing number of observant Brown and Pembroke students.
Episode 5 of Gatecrashers features reflections from Meryl Smith Raskin (Pembroke ‘66), Herschel Smith (Brown ‘62), Richard Hirsch (Brown ‘63), and others about Mrs. Smith’s kitchen and the fight to get the campus to provide—and subsidize—kosher meals. Scholars Rachel Gordan of the University of Florida and Zev Eleff of Gratz College offer a broader look at mid-century American Jewish life and the growth of America’s kosher food industry in the post-war period.
The most valuable crypto stories for Monday, Oct. 3, 2022.
Reality TV star Kim Kardashian has paid $1.26 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges relating to her promotion of the EthereumMax digital token.
"The Hash" hosts discuss this plus, Coinbase has fixed a technical problem that caused it to temporarily halt payments and withdrawals involving U.S. bank accounts.
This episode has been edited by Michele Musso. Our executive producer is Jared Schwartz. Our theme song is “Neon Beach.”
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