May 11, 2021
Katie Hafner
THE WASHINGTON POST – Every day we tell many small untruths, lies uttered by mutual consent that keep societal interactions civil.
We say “How are you today?” when we don’t really care to know, or “That was a lovely dinner” when the meal tasted terrible. Parents reproach their children for failing to supply a polite answer instead of the real one.
Then there are the lies we tell ourselves. Researchers have found that patients with an optimistic outlook in the face of a terminal medical prognosis will outlive those with a realistic sense of their disease.
“If you think of benevolent deception and optimistic self-deception not as vice and weakness, but as adaptive responses to difficult circumstances,” Shankar Vedantam wrote in his powerful new book,
Breathe easy: Audio files can help ease a listener’s anxiety - ISTOCK.COM×
Comforting or distracting listeners with poetry and more in these trying times
Poetry Unbound seeks to provide its listeners just that through what it describes as a poetry ritual one in which you would listen to an immersive poetry reading by the host, Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama Hosted by journalist Shankar Vedantam and produced by National Public Radio (NPR), the podcast seeks to reveal “unconscious patterns that drive human behaviour” Hosted by journalists Yasmin Amer and Andrea Asuaje,
Kind World, which completed a seven-year run and aired its last episode in July 2020, is a podcast devoted to unsung heroes and acts of kindness
There’s a fascinating tale that runs through the new book by
Hidden Brain host Shankar Vedantam. It’s the true story of the Church of Love a sort of all-female commune based in Moline, Illinois, that corresponded with lonely men across the U.S., persuading them to send thousands of dollars to support a group of virginal yet lusty women attempting to build a retirement paradise called Chonda-Za.
If it sounds too bizarre to be true, well, it was. The women were largely fictitious; the man cashing the checks was a former English teacher, Donald Lowry. At the time the feds swooped in to arrest Lowry on charges of mail fraud, he “owned a fleet of 20 automobiles, including Rolls Royces and Jaguars,” Vedantam writes. “He had a full-time personal mechanic.” His letter-writing enterprise took up an entire office building in downtown Moline.
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