Category: Other

Organization Guru Marie Kondo’s Tips for Dealing with Your Massive Piles of Unread Books (or What They Call in Japan “Tsundoku”) | Open Culture

To be clear, the chances of me ever clearing out the teetering piles of unread books that litter what used to be my study are approaching zero.

If you possess more will-power this might help.

…Marie Kondo‘s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, [was] first published in Japan in 2011 and in English in 2014. Now people all over the world have read it to learn the simple secrets of Kondo’s “KonMari method” of decluttering — or have given it to friends and relatives they see as badly in need of such a method. Still, all but the most ascetic of us occasionally bend to the hoarder’s instinct in certain areas of life, and it would surely surprise none of us to find out that Open Culture readers have, on occasion, been known to let their bookshelves run over.

Source: Organization Guru Marie Kondo’s Tips for Dealing with Your Massive Piles of Unread Books (or What They Call in Japan “Tsundoku”) | Open Culture

“Tsundoku,” the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the English Language | Open Culture

Guilty as charged.

There are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative and at the same time impossible to fully translate. Yiddish has the word shlimazl, which basically means a perpetually unlucky person. German has the word Backpfeifengesicht, which roughly means a face that is badly in need of a fist. And then there’s the Japanese word tsundoku, which perfectly describes the state of my apartment. It means buying books and letting them pile up unread.

Source: “Tsundoku,” the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the English Language | Open Culture

Watch Footage from the Psychology Experiment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s Obedience Study (1961) | @OpenCulture

Any student wondering why ethics compliance is so strict need only look at one of the most infamous experiments ever undertaken to understand where the issues might arise.

For decades following World War II,  the world was left wondering how the atrocities of the Holocaust could have been perpetrated in the midst of—and, most horrifically, by—a modern and civilized society.  How did people come to engage in a willing and systematic extermination of their neighbors? Psychologists, whose field had grown into a grudgingly respected science by the midpoint of the 20th century, were eager to tackle the question.

In 1961, Yale University’s Stanley Milgram began a series of infamous obedience experiments. While Adolf Eichmann’s trial was underway in Jerusalem (resulting in Hannah Arendt’s five-piece reportage, which became one of The New Yorker magazine’s most dramatic and controversial article series), Milgram began to suspect that human nature was more straightforward than earlier theorists had imagined; he wondered, as he later wrote, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”

Source: Watch Footage from the Psychology Experiment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s Obedience Study (1961) | Open Culture

Merry Christmas, a Good Hogmanay and a Happy and Peaceful New Year

I’m taking a break over the Christmas and New Year holidays.

I hope you have the opportunity to do the same.

Have a great time and I’ll see you in 2017.

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