January 2012
6 posts
A psychological explanation for why fights between children escalate so quickly: “You underestimate a force when you generate it, so as one child hits another, they predict the sensory movement consequences and subtract it off, thinking they’ve hit the other less hard than they have. Whereas the recipient doesn’t make the prediction so feels the full blow. So if they retaliate with the same force, it will appear to the first child to have been escalated.”
“He hit me first!” “He hit me harder!”
A how-to guide from NYU’s Alistair Smith on how to be a dictator. Building a cult of personality isn’t, strictly speaking, necessary: “That’s window dressing. It’s useful in identifying whose side people are on. If you act crazy and the people tell you you’re crazy then they’re not as loyal as you might think.”
The Clock
The Go-Betweens
—The Go-Betweens, “The Clock,” The Friends of Rachel Worth (2000)
I’m not sure if this album, a kinda-sorta-collaboration with Sleater-Kinney, is my favorite Go-Betweens album. But I’m quite sure that this is my favorite sentence comparing the two bands: “Sleater-Kinney sound as if they want the world and they want it now; the Go-Betweens sound as if they want breakfast but could probably hold out till lunch.”
