This Thursday will mark ten months that I’ve been living in France. Many readers have asked me questions about the experience: What is life like for a Canadian living in France? What is it like studying abroad? How is life immersed in a non-English speaking country? Until now, I’ve held back writing a full article, […]
Archives for June 2010
Manageable Awfulness and How to Let Bad Things Happen
“If you want to invent life-saving medicine, you need to accept that at some point, people will die.” A successful life-science entrepreneur told me this during a conversation. At first, I was shocked at the comment. Isn’t the point of creating new drugs or medical procedures to save lives? But the more I thought about […]
Should You Strive to Live Happily or to Live Good?
Should your priority for living be happiness or virtue? Is it better to be a happy person of mediocre character, or noble and melancholic? I believe this is one of the biggest questions you can ask yourself. Not only because it guides so many life decisions, but because it changes your approach to life. The […]
Society’s Attention Deficit – Praise for Deep Thinking in the Era of Shallowness
Could the internet be making us stupider? Cal Newport suggests it might. He shares recent research that shows electronic multitasking results in poorer performance on cognitive tasks. No surprise there: being on Facebook or Twitter won’t help you concentrate. The interesting finding however, was that chronic multitaskers perform significantly worse on tasks even when they […]