By
Jan -
February 18, 2011
Because China has never had a humanist revolution, sex and marriage have always been relatively divorced. That is why many Asian cultures have an immensely commercialised and categorised [sex industry]. … [I]f a husband is a man of means, and has a significant income, then he can take on a second wife without violating his obligation to his first wife. … This does not mean that the Chinese are incapable of love, it means that romantic love competes with that transactional element in a society where people are insecure because their individual interests are not institutionally protected.
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Nice post on Slate about how developmental milestones can be meaningless and create needless worry. A little less than a century ago, Arnold Gesell, a developmental scientist at Yale, proposed that motor skills were related to the maturing of the brain. This led to the pronouncement that all infants would pass through the same steps…
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A personals ad from a recent New York Review of Books:
WOMAN, 79 (LOOKS 78), Upper West Side pseudo-intellectual, Europe 4 years, wants man’s company occasionally for chamber concerts, lectures, meals. Platonic.
I’d love to meet this woman. I imagine her life as a Henry James novel written by Oscar Wilde.
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By
Jan -
September 17, 2009
Source: Amazon Anyone who has an interest in Carl Jung will want to read this New York Times article on the upcoming publication of Jung’s The Red Book. For most of the last century, the very existence of this work has been only a rumor. Jung wrote this illustrated journal between the ages of 39…
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Mascara, eye-liner, and shadow can make the eyes stand out and look much larger than they actually are. Lipstick can make the lips look rounder and puffier. Why do we find this attractive? Properly applied, eye make-up and lipstick will emphasize facial features that make an adult look more like a baby. And we are…
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Source: fotosbydesign If you want to increase the chances recovering a lost wallet, be sure to include baby photos. Researchers set up an experiment in which 240 wallets were left on the streets of Edinburgh. Some of the wallets had photos, either a baby, a cute puppy, a family snapshot, or an elderly couple. One…
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Source: flickr Never underestimate a cat. Researchers in Britain have analyzed a special “meow” many cats use when they want something right now: Food, toys, an open door. It’s called a “solicitation purr” and combines a high-frequency cry within an otherwise pleasant purr. Insistent meowing might be ignored as annoying, but by embedding the high-frequency…
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Photo by Laurent Champoussin Click photo for larger view. I’m currently watching a series of lectures by Malcolm W. Watson on Theories of Human Development. Watson talks mostly about theories of childhood, such as Freud’s outdated theory of the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages. The discussion of Eric Erikson, however, follows stages of…
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Because China has never had a humanist revolution, sex and marriage have always been relatively divorced. That is why many Asian cultures have an immensely commercialised and categorised [sex industry]. … [I]f a husband is a man of means, and has a significant income, then he can take on a second wife without violating his obligation to his first wife. … This does not mean that the Chinese are incapable of love, it means that romantic love competes with that transactional element in a society where people are insecure because their individual interests are not institutionally protected.
