Today’s post is an arti­cle writ­ten by Gor­don Man­ley, one of my stu­dents at the Inter­na­tional School of Brus­sels. In it he shares his insights into pop cul­ture, moral­ity and the oblig­a­tions of pub­lic life. I watched Tiger Woods’ apol­ogy the other day, and I have to say I was dumb­struck by one of his comments. […]

A doc­u­men­tary on liv­ing hap­pily recently aired on PBS. A lot of the clips from the show (called This Emo­tional Life) are avail­able on YouTube (here). Here’s an inter­est­ing one on inti­macy: This par­tic­u­lar insight (from Eliz­a­beth Gilbert) was inter­est­ing to me partly because I’m read­ing her book Eat, Pray, Love at the moment. The […]

I am by day a mild-mannered Econ­o­mist, qui­etly cor­rect­ing stu­dents’ sup­ply and demand dia­grams, dis­cussing the long-term profit pos­si­bil­i­ties in oli­gop­o­lies. But by night, I get to pur­sue my real pas­sion in life: surf­ing –both chan­nel and web. Some­times I do both at once! So I live a pretty full exis­tence. Some­times on my quests, […]

Seth Men­achem is an LA direc­tor who, in his spare time, asks elderly strangers for advice. I grew up far away from my grand­par­ents and I’ve lived over­seas, away from my own par­ents, for a long time. Maybe this is why I love these clips from Life Advice from Old peo­ple. These are two of my […]

Check out this music video from the group Ok Go. Mes­mer­iz­ing. Cool, huh? It reminds me of Feist’s 1234 video and the tread­mill video –also by Ok Go. These guys have it fig­ured out. There is some­thing sub­tly com­pelling about these videos. I can watch them over and over again. I think we appre­ci­ate seeing […]

Barry Schwartz explains why hav­ing the free­dom to choose can actu­ally decrease your happiness.

Run­ning a coun­try is not easy. As hard as you try, you sim­ply can’t make every­one happy. Or can you? In the late Eigh­teenth cen­tury, Eng­lish­man Jeremy Ben­tham sug­gested a Util­i­tar­ian approach –gov­ern­ments should aim to bring the great­est hap­pi­ness to the great­est num­ber of peo­ple. His con­tem­po­raries in the New World agreed and declared “the […]