Topics:
1. Claims / thesis statements
2. Summaries
3. Images: Argument, Evidence, Story 1: Discuss Morris, Tufte
Required reading / viewing / listening:
E. Morris,
E. Tufte,
Homework due:
Response paper 1
Write two short papers in which you summarize the readings by Morris and Tufte. Each summary should be 250 to 400 words. You should assume your audience has not read either text. The papers will become the basis of work we do in class, and of our discussion of the readings.
In-class assessment:
Quiz 1
Paragraphing, identify audience
Divide the following text into paragraphs:
It is difficult to determine precisely when coffee was introduced to Arabic culture. According to legend, Mohammed was cured of narcolepsy with coffee. There are indications in Arabic medical literature that coffee was used medicinally as early as the tenth century. But in the Islamic world, too, it became a popular beverage relatively late, certainly no earlier than the fifteenth century. Although the dating may be vague, the logic of coffee drinking for Arabic-Islamic civilization is incontestable. As a nonalcoholic, nonintoxicating, indeed even sobering and mentally stimulating drink, it seemed to be tailor-made for a culture that forbade alcohol consumption and gave birth to modern mathematics. Arabic culture is dominated by abstraction more than any other culture in human history. Coffee has rightly been called the wine of Islam. Until the seventeenth century, coffee remained a curiosity for Europeans, mentioned in accounts of journeys to the exotic lands of the Orient. They could not imagine consuming a hot, black, bitter-tasting drink – much less with pleasure. It reminded them too much of hot pitch, which was used in medieval times for battle and torture. The situation changed around the middle of the seventeenth century. Suddenly a whole set of hitherto unknown exotic substances became fashionable. Together with chocolate, tea, and tobacco, coffee made its entrance upon the stage of European luxury culture. It appeared in several different places at once, then spread in a quasi-strategic pattern of encirclement: in the south it surfaced in the Levantine trade centers, Venice and Marseilles; in the north, in the transshipping ports of the new international trade, London and Amsterdam. From these bridgeheads it quickly conquered the hinterlands. Around 1650 coffee was virtually unknown in Europe, at most used as medication. By about 1700 it was firmly established as a beverage, not, of course, for the entire population but certainly among the trend-setting strata of society.
Schivelbusch, W. (1993). Tastes of Paradise: A social history of spices, stimulants, and intoxicants. New York: Vintage.
[Translation of Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vernunft (1980).]
Identify the audience:
Describe the audience of the following texts. Support your claim with specific reasons and examples drawn from the text.
Text 1
Vaillant brings a healthy dose of subtlety to a field that sometimes seems to glide past it. The bookstore shelves are lined with titles that have an almost messianic tone, as in Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. But what does it mean, really, to be happier? For 30 years, Denmark has topped international happiness surveys. But Danes are hardly a sanguine bunch. Ask an American how it’s going, and you will usually hear “Really good.” Ask a Dane, and you will hear “Det kunne være værre (It could be worse).” “Danes have consistently low (and indubitably realistic) expectations for the year to come,” a team of Danish scholars concluded. “Year after year they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark.”
Of course, happiness scientists have come up with all kinds of straightforward, and actionable, findings: that money does little to make us happier once our basic needs are met; that marriage and faith lead to happiness (or it could be that happy people are more likely to be married and spiritual); that temperamental “set points” for happiness—a predisposition to stay at a certain level of happiness—account for a large, but not overwhelming, percentage of our well-being. (Fifty percent, says Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness. Circumstances account for 10 percent, and the other 40 percent is within our control.) But why do countries with the highest self-reports of subjective well-being also yield the most suicides? How is it that children are often found to be a source of “negative affect” (sadness, anger)—yet people identify children as their greatest source of pleasure?
The questions are unresolved, in large part because of method. The psychologist Ed Diener, at the University of Illinois, has helped lay the empirical foundation for positive psychology, drawing most recently on data from the Gallup World Poll, which interviewed a representative sample of 360,000 people from 145 countries. “You can say a lot of general things from these data that you could never say before,” Diener says. “But many of them are relatively shallow. People who go to church report more joy. But if you ask why, we don’t know. George has these small samples—and they’re Harvard men, my goodness, not so generalizable. Yet he has deep data, and he brings so many things together at once.”
Text 2
Do You Want To Be Cool Like Barak Obama?
A Key Happiness Habit is:
Don't hand control of your thoughts, actions or feelings over to outside forces or people who try to hurt or harass you.
Don't Give Them Emotional Control Over You.
Decide How You Are Going To Think, Act and Feel.
Choose Your Mood and Your Attitude.
Emotional Independence, Freedom and Balance are key Happiness Habits.
This does Not mean that you don't get angry or that you don't decide to take decisive corrective action when necessary.
It does mean you weight your options carefully, decide when and how you will act and that you don't automatically react in anger.
Choose the timing, the place and substance of your response.
We all have an Optimal Best Self - a sweet spot or optimal zone where we feel our best, do our best and perform our best. Habitually Happy people try to maintain their optimal Best Self State all of the time. Getting angry and irrational is not part of the process.
Much has been written about Barak Obama’s Cool calm demeanor. His actions and reactions epitomize Emotional Independence. He decides how he will act, react and project himself. He doesn’t let outside forces control his emotions easily.
If you let another person make you angry, you’re giving them control of you, your thoughts, actions, feelings and your well-being. Don’t do it!
The next time someone tries to hook you into an angry response, simply think, I’m not giving them control. It’s that easy.
This does not mean stuffing your feelings or suppressing your emotions. It means not giving them control over you, your attention or your emotions.
Channel Anger To Achieve Positive Goals.
Choose Emotional Independence and Spiritual Freedom. It’s that easy. Decide how you’re going to act, don’t simply react to them. Take command and lead them where you want to go. Make this a Happiness Habit.
Don’t give them control.
It’s a great way to stay cool and happy!
Text 3
An emerging branch of economics has begun to examine the empirical determinants of happiness (for example, Easterlin 2001 and Frey and Stutzer 2002). This paper continues that avenue of research in a different sphere. It focuses on the - still relatively unexplored - links between income, sexual activity and wellbeing.
Human beings are interested in sex. There are also scientific reasons to study it. For example, recent work by Daniel Kahneman, Alan Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwartz and Arthur Stone (Kahneman et al 2003) finds, among a sample of 1000 employed women, that sex is rated retrospectively as the activity that produces the single largest amount of happiness. Commuting to and from work produces the lowest levels of psychological wellbeing. These two activities come top and bottom, respectively, of a list of 19 activities.
In this paper we estimate what may be the first econometric happiness equations in which sexual activity is an independent variable. Like the rest of the recent wellbeing literature, we study the numbers that people report when asked questions about how happy they feel with life. Our data set is a randomly selected group of approximately 16,000 Americans. Although, for the sake of persuasive identification, it would be desirable to have instrumental variables for sexual activity, in this paper we follow the simpler route of providing single-equation estimates with no adjustment for possible endogeneity. Our instinct is that solving the endogeneity problem - working out whether sex causes happiness or causality runs in the reverse direction - will be particularly difficult here. Future work will have to return to this issue.
Easterlin, R.A. (2001). Income and Happiness: Towards a Unified Theory, Economic Journal 111, 465-484.
Frey, B.S. and Stutzer, A. (2002). Happiness and Economics, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Kahneman, D., Krueger, A, Schkade, D., Schwarz, N. and Stone, A. (2003). Measuring the Quality of Experience, Princeton University, working paper.
Text 4
The two cerebral hemispheres play different roles not only in the recognition of facial expressions, but also in the expression of positive and negative emotions. This specialization is apparent in infants (Davidson, 1992). Regions of the left hemisphere appear to be specialized for the processing of such positive emotions as happiness, whereas regions of the right hemisphere are specialized for such negative emotions as fear and sadness. Damage to the left hemisphere tends to produce excessive anger or depression; damage to the right hemisphere is associated with excessive displays of mania and laughing. Even in people without brain damage, those who are clinically depressed have less activation in the left frontal regions than non-depressed people do (Henriques & Davidson, 1991).
Davidson, Richard J. (1992). Anterior cerebral asymmetry and the nature of emotion. Brain and Cognition, 20, 125-151.
Henriques, Jeffrey B., & Davidson, Richard J. (1991). Left frontal hypoactivation in depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100, 535-545.
