Bee Season!

Guess what happens at 8PM Eastern on ABC this Thursday! No, I'm not going to tell you--I want you to guess. Anyone? Okay, fine: the Scripps National Spelling Bee! Yay! Some intriguing background on these dorky little munchkins:

- This year we welcome 293 spellers— the greatest number in the history of the event.
- The spellers range in age from 9 to 15 years old, but two-thirds are either 13 or 14 years old.
- The spellers' favorite words include Weissnichtwo and humuhumunukunukuapuaa.

The best is the looks on the kids faces when they got words they don't know, like "parfleche" (a rawhide with the hair removed by soaking it in water and lye). They are like "wtf, how am I supposed to know what a parfleche is?" So cute.

For a little background, I suggest watching this video of my personal favorite speller, Rebecca Sealfon.

Grant Study results interesting, good way to kill time at work

This new essay, recently published in the Atlantic, is absolutely fantastic. David Brooks' column in the Times tipped me off to it, and fortunately I don't do shit at work anymore so I had the time to read it.

"What Makes Us Happy?" reports on some of the results of the Grant Study, a 70+ year-old longitudinal survey of nearly 300 former Harvard students and their lives and circumstances. Many of its results are paradoxical. For example: did you know that positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones? Or that most of us can't "tolerate being loved"? Huh. Fancy that!

Anyway, I highly recommend it for anyone who has twenty minutes to kill. Its description of the Grant Study is super-interesting (JFK was one of the participants!), as is its profile of the study's current administrator, George Valliant. Go! Read it!!