Good Reads

Julie Scelfo’s article on “Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection” has some haunting stories and helpful insights on how to avoid the plague of perfectionism. Another book that has helped me fight this plague, which was recommended to me by a student, is Tal Ben-Shahir’s Being Happy: You Don’t Have to Be Perfect to Lead a Richer, Happier Life.

If you struggle with depression or just want a funny, refreshing take on life’s everyday absurdities, read Allie Brosh’s web comic blog, Hyperbole and a Half.

Works Cited:

Ben-Shahar, Tal. Being Happy: You Don’t Have to Be Perfect to Lead a Richer, Happier Life: You Don’t Have to Be Perfect to Lead a Richer, Happier Life. McGraw Hill Professional, 2010.

Brosh, Allie. “Menace.” Hyperbole and a Half. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Aug. 2015.

Good news from a real-life Professor McGonigal, but this one lectures at Stanford about the positive effects of stress. In her book, The Upside of Stress, McGonigal argues that approaching stress as something positive that we can learn from can change the way it affects us physically and mentally.  She says that the “three most protective beliefs about stress are”:

1. to view your body’s stress response as helpful, not debilitating – for example, to view stress as energy you can use;
2. to view yourself as able to handle, and even learn and grow from, the stress in your life; and
3. to view stress as something that everyone deals with, and not something that proves how uniquely screwed up you or your life is. (Parker)

This helpful visualization differentiates between “good stress” and “bad stress”:

As you can see, the difference between good and bad stress isn’t in the nature of the stress itself, but in your response to it. And one way you can change our response to stress is to not be stressed out by it.

McGonigal acknowledges that chronic stress—in which you feel like you have no control over the situation, the stress has no purpose, and you are isolated and in your pain—can be detrimental to your health. And while stress at Davidson may seem chronic and you are not in complete control over all the demands on your time, you do have the power to organize your life, affirm your sense of purpose, connect with others, and embrace stress as a source of energy, courage, and learning.

Check out McGonigal’s TED Talk, this short interview in Stanford News, and this article in Stanford Magazine, which contextualizes her argument in the context of academic research in psychology.

Read Eula Biss on “White Debt” in this week’s New York Times Magazine. For Biss, “whiteness is not an identity but a moral problem.” See how she grapples with it.

Racial bias is in the news lately, and I’ve come across a couple of articles that may interest  you.

In the Stanford Magazine, Sam Scott offers “A Hard Look at How We See Race,” an article on Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt’s research on “subconscious connections in people’s minds between black faces and crime.”

In one experiment, participants were shown subliminal images of black or white faces, and then asked to identify a blurry image. Participants (regardless of their race) who were primed with subliminal images of black faces were able to identify a gun in the blurry image nine frames sooner than those who had been primed with images of white faces. The findings are disturbing, but what makes this article really worth reading is how Eberhardt is using her research to work with police departments and effect social change to reduce the effects of such unconscious biases on actual police practices.

This past Sunday, The New York Times ran a major feature on “The Disproportionate Risks of Driving While Black.” Journalists Sharon LaFraniere and Andrew W. Lehren examined thousands of police records of traffic stops and arrests in Greensboro, N.C., uncovering persistent racial disparities in police conduct. This article is of interest for several reasons: its relevance to our final unit on prisons and mass-incarceration; its focus on North Carolina, the state where you’ve chosen to pursue your college education, and on the city of Greensboro (only an hour away), home of the Woolworth’s counter that was the site of the first sit-ins in 1960, early in the Civil Rights movement; and its effective use of digital media and design (the online version is more compelling than the print version I read on Sunday).

I also managed to track down an editorial on “President Obama’s Department of Injustice,” which I read in the Charlotte Observer months ago, just after Obama commuted the sentences of dozens of federal prisoners. Alec Karakatsanis’s editorial provides upsetting evidence that the injustices Stevenson describes in Just Mercy are still occurring today.