I know I’m not the only one feeling this right now. It’s a sentiment I’ve been hearing a lot from friends and on social media, and it’s no surprise given the strange and stressful circumstances we find ourselves in. The unpredictability of the pandemic and the global economy, coupled with the strain of adjusting to new realities of work, childcare, and school, have almost everyone I know craving an escape.
Yet with travel restricted in many places, a carefree getaway isn’t in the cards for most people.
Still, vacations are an important part of well-being. One study, for example, showed that when men at risk for heart disease didn’t take annual vacations, they had a 32 percent higher risk of having a fatal heart attack than those who did. Likewise, a study of women showed that those who took vacation rarely — i.e., once every six years or less often — were eight times more likely to develop heart disease. Other studies have shown an increase in sleep quality and an improvement in reaction times of up to 80 percent after taking a vacation.
Still other research has shown that regular vacations are more important than money to overall well-being, so much that a regular vacationer making less than $24,000 a year might even be happier than a non-vacationer making more than $120,000 a year.
Many parents of young children struggle to introduce new foods into their kids’ diets. About half of American children are picky eaters by the age of two; they are, in the vernacular of nutritionists, “food neophobic.” Our pediatrician once told me that one of our sons, who was a fussy eater, would need to try new food at least six times before the taste would no longer fill him with fear and loathing. My wife and I wanted to fight our son’s food neophobia for some practical, nutritional reasons, but more fundamentally, we wanted him to eat adventurously so he could enjoy this part of life. Openness to a wide variety of tastes and smells enhances the pleasure of eating.
This is an instance of a larger truth: Openness to a wide variety of life experiences, from visiting interesting places to considering unusual political views, brings happiness. “Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet, “will himself sound the depths of his own being.”
The word “gerrymandering” prompts an image: district maps that look less like a tangible community than a Rorschach blot—perhaps one that suggests a “broken-winged pterodactyl,” as one federal judge referred to Maryland’s 3rd district. Read a line like that, and a certain intuition kicks in: There must be something wrong here.
The problem is that our intuition isn’t necessarily correct.
“While badly shaped districts are a fairly successful flag that somebody was trying to do something, they don’t really tell us what their agenda was, or whether it was nefarious or benign,” says Moon Duchin, a mathematician at Tufts University and an expert on gerrymandering. “Bad shapes are not necessarily bad, and good shapes are not necessarily good.”
For the past five years, Duchin has led Tufts’ Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group, a lab that has quietly upended conventional wisdom about how gerrymandering works by approaching the issue less as a political problem than a mathematical one. As the country sprints into a new redistricting cycle, understanding redistricting in those terms has taken on new importance—especially in light of a controversial change to the Census Bureau data that will be used to draw the new district maps.
I have a tenet that I follow when it comes to social media conflagrations: Don’t add your air to someone else’s fire.
This rule has saved my butt multiple times. For example, during one social media snafu, a writer responded to a post I made of an article I’d written, saying she wanted to discuss our opposing views—in a Facebook forum of thousands of people. The wording and tone of her comment showed she wasn’t interested in a real dialog, so I didn’t respond. Had I agreed to the requestor made a snarky comment like “Get your own damn articles published,” I would have been following her playbook to gain attention for herself and undermine me and my work. Should I have done something else? I figured I’d check with the experts.
“You did the right thing by not responding,” says Michele Borba, an educational psychologist and author of Thrivers. “No response is a great response, and often the most powerful response. The person wants the attention, and you are not giving it to them. She clearly wanted to use and undermine you by hijacking your platform. If you shamed her, you would have lost credibility and would be in a position of defending yourself.”
You’re catching up with your aunt when you look over to see your three-year-old grab a toy away from another child. After you send your toddler off for a time-out, a cousin pulls you aside and says, “I think you could have handled that better” and gives you a lesson in disciplining children.
How would you feel?
Odds are, you wouldn’t be grateful. No one likes to be lectured.
What’s ironic is even though we can all see that receiving this kind of unsolicited advice is a giant downer, most of us have done this. It’s common to give out advice when we see someone struggling.
Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life – money, power, jobs, university admission – should be distributed according to skill and effort. The most common metaphor is the ‘even playing field’ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events.
Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the UK, 84 percent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69 percent of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.
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Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt Pink Sherbet Photography / Getty Images.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Avalon Nuovo
JAN BUCHCZIK
![An illustration featuring "The Gerry-Mander" political cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale](https://static.politico.com/dims4/default/4592770/2147483647/resize/1160x%3E/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F2c%2F8b%2Fdce174ee4b5ba358a3200292afab%2Fgerrymandering-qa-illo.jpg "An illustration featuring "The Gerry-Mander" political cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale")
James' World 2 