Why American Jews Eat Chinese Food on Christmas

A lack of dining options may have started Jewish Christmas, but now it's a full-fledged ritual.

Kent Wang / Flickr

If there’s a single identifiable moment when Jewish Christmas—the annual American tradition where Jews overindulge on Chinese food on December 25—transitioned from kitsch into codified custom, it was during Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s 2010 confirmation hearing.

What Retirement Without Savings Looks Like

By Paul Sisolak, Contributor

In a perfect world, the perfect retirement is where life begins. But for people like Debra Leigh Scott, there’s the very bleak possibility that retirement is where life might end.

“Suicide is my retirement plan,” Scott, a 60-year-old adjunct professor, said in an interview with Vitae. “Unless you have a spouse or partner, you’re looking at dire poverty in old age. In addition to poverty, you’re looking at getting no additional work because of your age, or you’re looking at dropping dead in the classroom.”

We have so many machines. Why are there still so many jobs?

Photo: Matthew Hurst/Flickr

At TEDxCambridge, MIT economist David Autor explores why decades of automation hasn’t led to near-complete job loss for humanity. Machines, he says, don’t necessarily replace humans in the workplace, but instead complement our expertise, judgment, and creativity.

Croatian President Kolinda Grabar- Kitarovic from peace, recession to feminism

Source: https://www.youtube.com/user/GlobalConversationYT/

How the son of an African goat herder became a Nobel Prize contender

Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Daniel A. Anderson/UC Irvine Communications)

By Chandrahas Choudhury

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of the novels “Arzee the Dwarf” and the forthcoming “Clouds.”

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is Africa’s most celebrated novelist, a writer and activist who has been a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize in literature. For more than five decades, Thiong’o has in his novels (“Weep Not, Child,” “Petals of Blood”), plays (“The Black Hermit,” “The Time Tomorrow”) and essays (“Barrel of a Pen”) sparked much fruitful discussion and controversy about power and justice in colonial and post-colonial Kenya and — in a literary version of the same question — the place of English vis-a-vis other languages in modern African literature.

7 Things You Need To Lose To Make 2016 Your Best Year

by Luke Miller Truth Theory

We live in a world of gains and goal, new year’s resolutions and the pursuit of more. While I am not saying we shouldn’t be striving for more in some areas of our lives, you will usually see more bang for your buck in what you lose, than what you gain.

Think of it like this, we are born into the world and as long as there are no issues with the birth, we pretty much have a clean slate. As time goes by we pick up habits, some good, and some bad. By the time we leave school we have so many habits stacked on top of one another that we generally do not know our true self, from our conditioned self.

By the time we are deep into adulthood, we have been pushed, pulled and guided in a  million directions, which can often lead to a huge sense of overwhelm. Then every New Year we try and add another 5 habits to the million we already have.

In this article I am trying another approach, the opposite to resolution, what I would like to call a reso¬lose-ions were we focus on losing habits that are unhealthy and sabotaging our growth, instead of gaining new ones!

Radical Hope: Philosopher Jonathan Lear on the Paradoxical Seedbed of Courage and Cultural Resilience

“Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future,”wrote the poet and philosopher David Whyte in contemplating crisis as a testing ground for courage. But the future at which courage must aim its gaze is often one obscured by the blinders of our culture’s current scope of possibility.

In January of 2009, Elizabeth Alexander took the podium at the Washington Mall and welcomed Barack Obama to the presidency with her exquisite poem “Praise Song for the Day,” which made her only the fourth poet in history to read at an American presidential inauguration. Seven years later, facing a radically different and radically dispiriting landscape of possibility,

J.K. Rowling Loses Her Billionaire Status Because Of Being Too Generous

J.K. Rowling was one of the richest people in the world in 2011, but since then her fortunes have decreased to such an extent that she is no longer a billionaire. Forbes announced their yearly list of the World’s Billionaires, but the Harry Potter author’s name was noticeably absent.

She was one of 129 people to be removed from the list that year, but her reason for leaving is a little different to the normal reason. The 51-year-old author’s departure was due to her sizeable donations to charity, as well as the high British taxes she is asked to pay.

Debate Continues: Did Your Seafood Feel Pain?

Part of our weekly "In Focus" series—stepping back, looking closer.

Chefs have been grappling with the question for years: What's the best way to humanely kill a lobster?

Some cooks recommend tucking the invertebrate into the freezer for an hour, while others prefer quickly stabbing it behind the eyes. For the serious seafood gourmand, there are even stun devices that are advertised as the only way to humanely kill your joint-legged dinner.

All of this hand-wringing and contradictory advice raises a basic, but as yet unresolved question. Can lobsters and other creatures most of us know as seafood actually feel pain?

The scientific debate on the subject has intensified recently, with a team of British researchers proposing this month that electroshock tests suggest crabs indeed feel pain. But the study has drawn scrutiny, while another study late last year pushed back on the idea that fish, more closely related to humans than are crabs, feel pain.