Tag Archives: personality

This Is Your Brain on Parasites – Kathleen McAuliffe

by Myrna Posted on January 16, 2019

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This Is Your Brain on Parasites

How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

Kathleen McAuliffe

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: May 16, 2017

Publisher: HMH Books

Seller: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company


“Engrossing … [An] expedition through the hidden and sometimes horrifying microbial domain.” — Wall Street Journal “Fascinating—and full of the kind of factoids you can't wait to share.” — Scientific American   Parasites can live only inside another animal and, as Kathleen McAuliffe reveals, these tiny organisms have many evolutionary motives for manipulating the behavior of their hosts. With astonishing precision, parasites can coax rats to approach cats, spiders to transform the patterns of their webs, and fish to draw the attention of birds that then swoop down to feast on them. We humans are hardly immune to their influence. Organisms we pick up from our own pets are strongly suspected of changing our personality traits and contributing to recklessness and impulsivity—even suicide. Germs that cause colds and the flu may alter our behavior even before symptoms become apparent.   Parasites influence our species on the cultural level, too. Drawing on a huge body of research, McAuliffe argues that our dread of contamination is an evolved defense against parasites. The horror and revulsion we are programmed to feel when we come in contact with people who appear diseased or dirty helped pave the way for civilization, but may also be the basis for major divisions in societies that persist to this day. This Is Your Brain on Parasites is both a journey into cutting-edge science and a revelatory examination of what it means to be human.   “If you’ve ever doubted the power of microbes to shape society and offer us a grander view of life, read on and find yourself duly impressed.” —Heather Havrilesky, Bookforum  

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This Is Your Brain on Parasites – Kathleen McAuliffe

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Sex on Six Legs – Marlene Zuk

by Myrna Posted on November 17, 2018

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Sex on Six Legs
Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World
Marlene Zuk

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: August 2, 2011

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


A biologist presents a “consistently delightful” look at the mysteries of insect behavior ( The New York Times Book Review ).   Insects have inspired fear, fascination, and enlightenment for centuries. They are capable of incredibly complex behavior, even with brains often the size of a poppy seed. How do they accomplish feats that look like human activity—personality, language, childcare—with completely different pathways from our own? What is going on inside the mind of those ants that march like boot-camp graduates across your kitchen floor? How does the lead ant know exactly where to take her colony, to that one bread crumb that your nightly sweep missed? Can insects be taught new skills as easily as your new puppy?   Sex on Six Legs is a startling and exciting book that provides answers to these questions and many more, examining not only the bedroom lives of creepy crawlies but also some of our own long-held assumptions about learning, the nature of personality, and what our own large brains might be for.   “Smart, engaging . . . Zuk approaches her subject with such humor and enthusiasm for the intricacies of insect life, even bug-phobes will relish her account.” — Publishers Weekly , starred review

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Sex on Six Legs – Marlene Zuk

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In Trumpland, Who’s Conning Whom?

by JanelleWeldon2 Posted on April 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is getting a lot of flak from liberals for this confession from his new campaign honcho:

Trump’s newly hired senior aide, Paul Manafort, made the case to Republican National Committee members that Trump has two personalities: one in private and one onstage. “When he’s out on the stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose,” Manafort said in a private briefing.

….The Associated Press obtained a recording of the closed-door exchange. “He gets it,” Manafort said of Trump’s need to moderate his personality. “The part that he’s been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expecting, but he wasn’t ready for, because he had first to complete the first phase. The negatives will come down. The image is going to change.”

This is basically being taken as an admission that Trump has just been conning his followers so far, and he’ll turn on a dime when he needs to. But that’s not how I take it.

First, I doubt that this recording was leaked. Rather, it was “leaked.” The Trump campaign wanted it to become public. Sure, it will inspire some mockery from liberals and campaign reporters, but that’s never done Trump any harm. And since leaks are usually taken as a glimpse into the real behind-the-scenes truth, this is the most effective way to get his message out to the public in a credible way.

And how will the public respond? Unlike us hyper-engaged folks, they’ll just take it as an assurance that Trump can act like an adult when he wants to. More subtly, his current fans will also take it as a hint that his adult persona will be meant primarily not to con them, but to con centrist Republicans. With a wink and a nod, he’s telling them he’ll do what he has to do in order to appeal to the corrupt establishment folks, but not to take it too seriously.

And if Trump can pull it off, it might very well work: the establishment folks will start to fall in line, impressed by the “new” Donald. They’re so certain that only yokels can be conned, it will never occur to them that they’re the real marks.

But that’s if Trump can do it. Can he?

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In Trumpland, Who’s Conning Whom?

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Clinton Endorses a Proposal to Help Ex-Cons Find Work

by Marguer2605 Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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After her two leading rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination became targets of the Black Lives Matter movement, Hillary Clinton came armed with policy arguments when she met with members of the African-American activist group last week. The protesters from Massachusetts had shown up too late to disrupt the Clinton event in New Hampshire, but Clinton’s campaign arranged a short meeting afterward. A video of the session appeared last night on MSNBC and subsequently on YouTube via GOOD Magazine.

Clinton encouraged the activists to present a more coherent policy prescription for helping black people, telling them, “Let’s get an agenda that addresses as much of the problem as we can.” The agenda she laid out included housing programs, job opportunities, and one specific policy that has become a rallying cry among social justice activists: “Ban the Box.”

The argument behind the Ban the Box campaign is simple. Many job applications currently include a small box that potential employees must check if they’ve been convicted of a crime. It’s a tool employers frequently use to weed out applicants. This makes it significantly harder for people with a criminal record to land a job: Studies have shown that men who said they had criminal records were 50 percent less likely to hear back from an employer, and the effect is more pronounced for black men. According to the National Institute of Justice, between 60 and 75 percent of ex-offenders cannot find a job within a year of being released from prison.

Clinton’s Democratic opponents Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley have already both explicitly endorsed banning the box in the position papers they released on criminal and racial justice.

Unlike Sanders and O’Malley, Clinton has yet to put forward a comprehensive plan for criminal justice reform. The Clinton campaign didn’t respond to a request to clarify Clinton’s views on Ban the Box, but in an earlier speech the same day as her meeting with the activists, she touted the idea. “At the end of the day, people can make their own judgment” on whether to hire someone, she told a man in the audience who had been convicted of murder and struggled to find a job after being released. “But you shouldn’t be automatically disqualified.” She went on to explain what banning the box would allow: “You can get through the process and then, before somebody has to make a decision about you, you tell them. So they’re looking at you not as a statistic, but as a person. If you have the skills and the personality and the other qualities that might lead them to give you a job, you wouldn’t be eliminated at the very beginning.”

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Clinton Endorses a Proposal to Help Ex-Cons Find Work

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The Seat of the Soul – Gary Zukav

by Myrna Posted on July 15, 2013

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The Seat of the Soul
Gary Zukav

Genre: Spirituality

Price: $10.99

Publish Date: January 15, 1990

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Seller: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc.


A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This hardcover edition of The Seat of the Soul celebrates its tenth anniversary. The Seat of the Soul became a national bestseller when it was first published, but more people are buying it now than ever before. Why is this? It is because a new species is being born. The Seat of the Soul is about this birth. This new species longs for harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for Life. It uses higher orders of logic and justice — those of the heart. The number of people who are becoming aware of this birth is growing very fast, because the new species is being born inside all of us. The Seat of the Soul provides a vocabulary for this new species — a vocabulary of authentic power, the alignment of the personality with the soul. Human experience is exploding beyond the five senses, and The Seat of the Soul is about that, too. This is the most exciting time to be on Earth, and The Seat of the Soul describes why. As we become aware of our new abilities and values, like a baby opening its eyes and stretching its arms and legs for the first time, we are also becoming aware of an entirely new potential that we have never had before. I have been writing a book about this new potential for nine years. I am looking forward to sharing that with you, too. The tremendous growth of interest in The Seat of the Soul is humbling to me. I dream of a world where people respect each other and the living Earth, and spiritual growth is the first priority. I work daily to develop the awareness, compassion, and intentions that are necessary to create it. The extraordinary reception of The Seat of the Soul shows me, among other things, how many fellow souls are doing the same. The more this happens, the more I see myself, with gratitude, as a traveler among travelers, an experimenter among experimenters, and a soul among souls. Gary Zukav 1999

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The Seat of the Soul – Gary Zukav

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