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The prestige of museums has never been higher. Every city that wishes to be on the map knows it must build one. No foreign trip feels complete without taking up the guidebook's recommendation to visit one. We regularly hear that museums are our 'new cathedrals', in other words, the most meaningful and prestigious spaces we have.

Nevertheless, there are - behind the scenes - some serious drawbacks to museums:

- the art in some of them is often - privately - seen as the least interesting bit about them.

- the needs that used to drive people to cathedrals aren't really being taken care of in our museums (needs that include the desire for serenity, the longing for community, the wish to transcend the everyday).

- we feel conflicted about the role of shopping in museums: is it respectable, where does it fit in?

- what is the balance between preservation of the old and the habits and appetites of the present?

Museums seem so natural and inevitable, we may be reluctant to ask what they are for. An answer is elusive because they are in truth an uncomfortable and rather novel amalgamation of functions:

- a gigantic filing cabinet for the past

- a community centre

- a place for artistic ecstasy

- somewhere solemn now God is Dead

- works of architecture in themselves

We generally hold museum culture in extremely high regard. But, equally, we tend not to look very closely at why this culture has such prestige. In fact, we are encouraged to think it is unsophisticated, even vulgar, to ask what culture is for. The present 'guardians of culture' are deeply devoted to the idea that art should exist 'for art's sake.' This idea achieved dominance in the late nineteenth century and continues to determine the frame through which we (largely unknowingly) view culture. It dictates that culture should never be appropriated for practical or ideological ends. This is a pity.

The 19th century theory of art for art's sake was meant to release culture from the clutches of three tainted forces - religion, politics and commerce - each of which was deemed to want something rather too urgent and practical from cultural creators. In flight from these forces, critics asserted that culture was to be kept free of any sort of clearly stated 'goal' or 'end'. It should exist in its own sphere and not be asked to 'do' anything much in the world (as religions, political parties and certain pre-modern societies, especially those of Greece and Rome, had explicitly asked it to). On the back of this idea were born all kinds of notions that persist to this day: the veneration of ambiguity and paradox, the horror at being asked what something might be for... Sensible cultural homage is associated with acquiring technical knowledge, with taking advanced qualifications in the humanities, with knowing historical details and with respecting, at least in substantial part, the canon as it is now defined.

Strangely, what we are not generally encouraged to do - and indeed what we might be actively dissuaded from attempting - is to connect up works of culture with the agonies and aspirations of our own lives. It is quickly deemed vulgar, even repugnant, to seek personal solace, encouragement, enlightenment or hope from high culture. We are not, especially if we are serious, meant to view cultural encounters as opportunities for didactic instruction.

In , a novel by Ben Lerner, an American PhD student, used to considering art as material for academic analyses and scholarly seminars, visits Madrid's Prado museum. In one of the quieter rooms, he spots a fellow visitor who moves slowly and looks intently at a range of key works, including Roger van der Weyden's Leaving the Atocha Station Descent from the Cross, Paolo de San Leocadio's Christ the Saviour and Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

What might it be right to do in front of this?

Rogier Van der Weyden, Descent from the Cross (1435-8)

What astonishes the graduate student and eventually the guards of the museum is that in front of each of these masterpieces, the visitor doesn't merely politely look at the caption or the guidebook; he doesn't just note the fine brushstroke and the azure of the skies. He bursts into tears and cries openly at the sorrow and beauty on display, at the contrast between the difficulties of his own life and the spirit of dignity and nobility of the works on the wall. Such an outburst of intense emotion is deeply unusual in a museum (museums may routinely be referred to as our secular cathedrals, but they aren't - as cathedrals once were - intended to be places to reveal one's grief and gratitude). Listening to the man's sobs, the guards at the Prado grow understandably confused and nervous. As the author puts it, they cannot decide:
whether he was the kind of man who would damage a painting, spit on it, tear it from the wall or scratch it with a key - or if he was having a profound experience of art... What is a museum guard to do...? On the one hand, you are a member of a security force charged with protecting priceless materials from the crazed... on the other hand...if your position has any prestige it derives precisely from the belief that [great art] could legitimately move a man to tears... Should the guards ask the man to step into the hall and attempt to ascertain his mental state... or should they risk letting this potential lunatic loose among the treasures of their culture?
The dilemma points with dry humour to the paradox of our contemporary engagement with culture: on the one hand, we insist on culture's importance. On the other, we limit what we are meant to do with culture to a relatively polite, restrained and principally academic relationship, at points frowning on those who might treat it more viscerally and emotionally, as if it might be a sophisticated branch of a notorious category: self-help.

This resistance, however well-meaning, nevertheless misses that the great works of culture were almost invariably created to redeem, console and save the souls of their audiences. They were made, in one way or another, with the idea of changing lives. It is a particular quirk of modern aesthetics to sideline or ignore this powerful underlying ambition, to the point where to shed tears in front of a painting of the death of the son of God may put one at risk of ejection from a national museum.

In a better world, it would be recognised what a historical anomaly the idea of 'art for art's sake' has been, running counter to centuries of historic mainstream thinking about the purpose of art. Almost all the art and culture that is to be found in museums, art galleries and libraries was produced by people who believed that art had a purpose which could be stated thus: it was meant to teach us how to be wise, self-aware, kind and reconciled to the darkest aspects of reality. The anti-utilitarian view is a rejection of more than 2,000 years of philosophising on the practical role of the arts.

The idea of art for art's sake was originally motivated by a noble desire to honour culture, to say how special and important its fields were in a world sullied by meaner, utilitarian aims. Yet, inadvertently, this entrenched view has come to stand in the way of a full engagement with culture, suggesting that its disciplines should not in fact be consequential in the world; that they should not guide our beliefs or shape our habits; that they should not be appreciated for their wisdom or consoling power - for this would be to 'use' them...

A lot of the prestige which culture currently enjoys has been won at the expense of another field of human experience, the status of which has declined in direct relation to the rise in the status of art: religion. From the middle of the 19th century onwards, many people (Matthew Arnold, Nietzsche, Heidegger among them) came to the view that, as religion weakened its hold on society and upon people's inner lives, it would be culture that could step in and perform many of the same roles as the faiths. Culture too could guide, exhort, reassure, console, inspire and censure. It was with this big ambition in mind that a period of vast investment in culture (in museums, in art galleries, in opera houses and libraries) proceeded. Culture would replace scripture. The great institutions of culture - the galleries and the universities - would be the new Cathedrals of Christendom.

In truth, art really can do for us a remarkable number of the very things that religion once did. Culture truly is in a position to replace many of the functions of scripture. Art too has the power to console us, it too can bring meaning and purpose, it too can increase our powers of empathy and generate a sense of community.

But in practice, we tend to pay only lip-service to these ideas. You used to go to the cathedral for some clear reasons: because you wanted to save your soul, because you were looking for comfort, you needed community, you wanted to develop your moral character or you were hoping for consolation and redemption. But if you turned up at a gallery or a university arts faculty with similarly intense, focused concerns, you would be considered very strange, regarded with suspicion and perhaps even declared insane.

However, in a wise and mature society, the therapeutic resources of culture would be taken very seriously. The visual arts, architecture, the humanities, galleries and museums would be deployed to help us cope with our troubles and to flourish, both individually and collectively. Museums would be particularly focused on satisfying a powerful need which churches used to cater for so well: the need for community.

Let's consider the issue of gift shops. Let's imagine you've been around an art exhibition of a favourite artist. Perhaps it was Barbara Hepworth, the mid-20th-century British sculptor, accorded a show by the Tate Gallery in London. On display were some of her greatest works, including 'Two Figures' and 'Pelagos.'

The show has made you intensely receptive to what one might call the vision of life promoted by Hepworth. It's a confused feeling, but now that the show is over (you were there for forty minutes) you'd like to take that spirit back out into the world, you'd like to Hepworth-ify important parts of your daily existence. Hepworth seems to you an exemplar of a dignified British modernism that celebrates intellectual rigour, restrained sensuality, elegance, simplicity and harnessed emotional intensity. You want your surroundings and the tenor of your days to take on some of Hepworth's ideology: you would love your workplace, your railway station, your TV programmes and your relationships to be influenced by her atmosphere (and strangely, it feels normal that the spirit of an artist might spread way beyond particular artworks and be applicable to fields as diverse as architecture and relationships).

It's in this mood and with these covert aspirations that you find your way to the gift shop. It's an extremely busy place. Almost everyone who goes to the show spends a few minutes looking around and the line at the till snakes out to the door. You're excited and ready to spend. This - surely - is the opportunity to Hepworthify your life. So you look around the aisles: there are scholarly monographs (tracing Hepworth's relationship with the St Ives School and with Henry Moore's early etchings), there is a large catalogue, there are some postcards, there is a tea towel and there are pencils and mugs with Hepworth's name on it. The latter seem the most popular items of all.

You want to be receptive to what is on offer but the gift shop seems not to welcome your aspirations. If only there had been other things for sale... Perhaps reproductions of the actual works or guides on how to Hepworth-ify your life... Your desires are rather unclear. All you know is that the gift shop has not lived up to expectations.

This is an important and no way isolated dilemma. The gift shop is quite simply the most important tool for the diffusion and understanding of art in the modern world. Though it appears to be a mere appendage to most museums, the gift shop is central to the project of art institutions. Its job is to ensure that the lessons of the museum - which concern beauty, meaning and the enlargement of the spirit - can endure in the visitor far beyond the actual tour of the premises and be put into use in daily life.

The means deployed, however, are rarely on target. Aside from books, gallery gift shops usually sell postcards and household items with the names of artists on them. Postcards are such important mechanisms because they improve our engagement with art. Officially, our culture sees them as tiny, pale shadows of the far superior originals in the galleries a few metres away. But the encounter we have with the postcard may well be deeper, more perceptive and more valuable to us, because the card allows us to bring our own reactions to it. It feels safe and acceptable to pin it on a wall, throw it away or scribble on the front of it and by being able to behave so casually around it, our responses come alive. We consult our own needs and interests; we take real ownership of the object and because it is permanently available, we keep looking at it at various times. We feel free to be ourselves around it - as so often, and sadly, we do not in the presence of the masterpiece itself.

That said, gift shops will rarely sell us actual reproductions of works; fake, copy, pastiche, forgery. Many of the most bitter insults of the art world are designed to denigrate anything which is not the actual product of the master's hand. We've uncritically absorbed the idea that copies are worthless, deeply embarrassing kitsch. The nightmares of curators and gallery directors are haunted by copies. Hang a reproduction by mistake and your career is over. But why? Why are copies always supposed to be terrible? Even asking this straightforward question is suspect. Sometimes, of course, a copy truly violates the original. It mucks up all the details, it gets proportions weirdly wrong, the colours become garish. But not always. What if it's a really good copy? What if the details are faithful? What if the shapes are harmonious and the colours lovely? A well-made reproduction can carry 99% of the meaning of the original. And maybe that's all that really matters to us.

We've come to think that art belongs in art galleries and thereby condemned ourselves to encountering works at times dictated by museum opening hours and holiday schedules. We hardly ever get enraged in Tate Britain. So we're unlikely ever to have direct need of Whistler's immensely calming vista of fog, water and evening lights when we actually see it in the gallery. So it would be very much better if we could hang a copy of this work in the kitchen or by the bathroom door - places where angst has a tendency to congeal.

Art works have therapeutic power. But usually this passes us by. Not because we are insensitive or unworthy. But for a more basic reason. Their messages are hitting us at the wrong time - at moments when we've no need of them - like adverts for winter coats on the first day of spring. Copying is one much-needed solution to this problem, because copies allow us to locate these important, beneficial images in the places where we can encounter them in our times of need.

In the absence of copies, gift shops will sell us a lot of signed tea towels. They have discovered that people will buy objects heavily decorated with names of artists and their works: so we have Picasso table mats and Hepworth pencils.

Such objects try hard to pay homage to artists. They would like to beautify the world and carry the message of artists deep into our homes, so that the spirit of Hepworth would be alive when we prepared the morning tea and Picasso would be with us as we mopped away the orange juice from the kitchen counter. The ambition is noble, but its method of execution perhaps less so. The gift shop objects do have a faint link to the names they honour. Monet probably liked tea-towels; but it is unlikely that he would have wanted one with his own painting printed on it. The spirit of his best works of art, the things we love in them, may be much more consistent with (for instance) a completely plain and beautifully textured towel. This is more truly a Monet towel than one with his name on it.

The point isn't to surround ourselves with objects which carry the actual identity of the artist and his or her work. It should be to get hold of objects which the artists would have liked, which are in keeping with the spirit of their works - and more broadly to look at the world through their eyes, and therefore to stay sensitive to what they saw in it.

One can imagine a different range of products to sell in the world's gallery gift shops: objects which would be aligned with the values and ideals of artists rather than with their mere identities. The urge to buy something at the end of a museum visit is a serious one, because it involves an attempt to translate a sensibility we've come to know in one area (in carved wood or on canvases showing landscapes) and carry it over into another part of life (keeping the kitchen clean).

This points to the heart of what museums should really be about: giving us tools to extend the range and impact of what we admire in works of art across our whole lives. This is why the gift shop is, in fact, the most important place in the museum - if only its true potential could be grasped and made real.

Let's consider architecture: even very secular people tend to admit that when it comes to architecture, religions have done some very beautiful things. You can be left utterly cold by all the superstitious aspect of religions, and yet still be in awe at the profundity, intricacy and sheer prettiness of many mosques, temples, cathedrals and churches.

However, any nostalgia for these lovely buildings is always cut short by the thought that an end to faith must inevitably mean an end to the possibility of putting up anything like them today.

Yet on examination, it in no way logically follows that an end to our belief in sacred beings must mean an end to an attachment to certain sorts of atmosphere and architecture. In the absence of gods, we still retain a longing for calm, for community, for grandeur, for sweetness, for perspective - all of which can be found and celebrated through architecture.

We still need secular buildings that, like the temples and cathedrals of old, create feelings of awe, gratitude, wonder, mystery and silence; buildings that bring us together for special moments of the year (the passing of seasons) or to mark key moments of our lives (births, marriages, deaths). We need abstracted awe-inspiring sonorous spaces that take us out of the everyday and encourage contemplation, perspective, love and (at times) a pleasing terror.

There have over the last 200 years been a few examples of buildings that have learnt from religion without themselves being religious - buildings that can inspire new generations of patrons and architects.

The tradition of the non-religious 'temple' or 'chapel' begins with the French sociologist August Comte in the 19th century, who invented a secular religion, as he called it 'A religion for humanity' and designed some temples to go with it. He proposed that specially-built large halls would be decorated with portraits of the pantheon of his new religion's secular saints, including Cicero, Pericles, Shakespeare and Goethe, all singled out by the founder for their capacity to inspire and reassure us.

A few of these Comte-inspired temples have been built. There is one in the Marais in Paris.

And three more in Brazil, including this one in Porto Alegre:

In the 20th century, the most notable secular chapel is perhaps Mark Rothko's building in Houston, Texas, a place full of melancholy serenity:

Though nominally a Catholic building, the firm atheist Henri Matisse's chapel in Vence in the South of France deserves to be counted among the great secular temples.

Equally impressive is Peter Zumthor's field chapel near Cologne, Germany.

The most recent, and in many ways the most profound and thought-through addition to the genre has been a building by the artist Grayson Perry, dedicated to thwarted female creativity and potential - and ostensibly focused on the cult of a fictional (but so was Mary...) deity called Julie Cope.

The building has been designed to evoke a tradition of wayside and pilgrimage chapels in the landscape. It is a singular building, appearing as a small, beautifully crafted object amongst the trees and fields.

On a sunny weekend, the building - in north Essex, England - attracts hundreds of 'pilgrims':

They come to pay homage to the 'deity', Julie Cope, who holds out her hands in a gesture of comfort and sustenance:

These exceptional buildings are in fact only the beginning of a movement that could grow ever larger as the secular world becomes more conscious of its needs.

One could also, for example, imagine a building that would take up the traditional role of religious architecture in returning to us a sense of perspective.
- A Building for Perspective
Considering how much of our lives we spend exaggerating our own importance, it would be highly useful to come across an architecture than answers our need for perspective. Architecture can perform a critical function by adjusting our impressions of our physical - and as a consequence also our psychological - size, by playing with dimensions, materials, sounds and sources of illumination. In certain buildings that are vast in scale or hewn out of massive, antique-looking stones; or in others that are dark save for a single shaft of light filtering in from a distant oculus; or silent but for the occasional sound of water dripping from a great height into a deep pool, we may feel that we are being introduced, with unusual and beguiling grace, to a not unpleasant sense of our own insignificance.

Imagine a 'temple' for perspective whose structure would represent the age of the earth, with each centimetre of height equating to one million years. Measuring 46 metres in all, the tower would feature, at its very base, a tiny band of gold only one millimetre thick, standing for mankind's time on earth.
- A Retreat for Thinking
Or imagine a retreat for focusing our thoughts. It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilisation's most important achievements is now under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from some machine that will guarantee us a mesmerising and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to feel and think while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-increasing inability to fall asleep when we should. So we can picture a building for thought would lend structure and legitimacy to moments of solitude. It would be a simple space, offering visitors little beyond a bench or two, a vista and a suggestion that they set to work on unravelling some of the troubling themes that they have been using their normal activity to suppress.

This is only a start: we also need new venues in which to get married, get to know other members of the community, mark deaths and ritualise and lend gravity to key moments of life.

Secular societies should revive and continue the underlying aims of religious architecture: to place us for a time in a thoughtfully-structured, three-dimensional space in order to educate and rebalance our inner selves.

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The prestige of museums has never been higher. Every city that wishes to be on the map knows it must build one. No foreign trip feels complete without taking up the guidebook's recommendation to visit one. We regularly hear that museums are our 'new cathedrals', in other words, the most meaningful and prestigious spaces we have.

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Enjoy the haunting beauty of this set :)

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Enjoy the haunting beauty of this set :)

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Eight odd details hidden in masterpieces - vocabulary.com

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Eight odd details hidden in masterpieces - vocabulary.com

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Eight odd details hidden in masterpieces

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A vocabulary list featuring Eight odd details hidden in masterpieces.

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What do the greatest paintings and sculptures in cultural history - from Girl with a Pearl Earring to Picasso's Guernica, from the Terracotta Army to Edvard Munch's The Scream - have in common? Each is hardwired with an underappreciated, indeed often overlooked, detail that ignites its meaning from deep inside. That, at least, is the premise of my book, A New Way of Seeing: The History of Art in 57 Works, a study that invites readers to reconnect with works that are so familiar we no longer really see them.
This story was originally published in January 2019.
Taking as my starting point the most revered images in all of human history (from Trajan's Column to American Gothic, the Elgin Marbles to Matisse's The Dance), I went looking for what makes great art great - why some works continue to vibrate in popular imagination century after century, while the vast majority of artistic creations slip our consciousness almost as quickly as we encounter them. Combing the surface of these works, I was surprised to discover that each contains a flourish of strangeness which, once spotted, unlocks exciting new readings and changes forever the way we engage with these masterpieces.

As these remarkable details began to reveal themselves, from a ghostly finger fidgeting on Mona Lisa's right hand to a tarot symbol for fortitude hiding in plain sight in one of Frida Kahlo's most mysterious self-portraits, I was reminded of a remark by Charles Baudelaire. "Beauty," the French poet and critic wrote in 1859, "always contains a touch of strangeness, of simple, unpremeditated and unconscious strangeness."

What follows is a brief digest of some of the more extraordinary details - touches of strangeness that invigorate, often subliminally, many of the most recognisable images in art history.

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (1482-5)
A wind-spun spiral of golden hair suspended on the goddess's right shoulder in Sandro Botticelli's Renaissance masterpiece The Birth of Venus whirs like a miniature motor on the vertical axis of the painting, propelling it forward into our imagination. A perfect logarithmic curl, this is no incidental ornament or accident of brushwork. The same spinning vector, observable in the plunge of raptor birds and the twist of nautilus shells, has hypnotised thinkers since antiquity. In the 17th Century, a Swiss mathematician, Jacob Bernoulli, would eventually christen the curl spira mirabilis, or "marvellous spiral". In Botticelli's painting - a work that celebrates timeless elegance - the inscrutable spiral whispers into Venus's right ear, divulging to her the very secrets of truth and beauty.

Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asni è res (1884)
The large painting of Parisians whiling away a lazy lunch hour on the banks of the river Seine, the first work ever exhibited by Seurat, was initially finished in 1884. It was then touched up by the artist years later, after he had begun to perfect his signature technique of applying small distinct dots that cohere in the eye of the observer when seen at a distance. The colour theory that underpins Seurat's more mature pointillist style owes its origin in part to the ideas of a French chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul, who explained how the juxtaposition of hues can generate a persistence of tone in our imagination. In the hazy distance of Seurat's painting, a row of smokestacks rise from a factory that produced candles according to an industrial innovation for which Chevreul was also responsible. These chimneys, which seem more like paintbrushes daubing the work into existence, are a tribute to the thinker without whom Seurat's resplendent vision would not have been possible.

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (1907)
Surely love and passion stand at the furthest extreme from the long white lab coats and microscopic slides of scientific testing. Not according to Gustav Klimt's painting The Kiss. The year he painted his work, Vienna was alive with the language of platelets and blood cells, especially around the University of Vienna where Klimt himself had, years earlier, been invited to create paintings based on medical themes. Karl Landsteiner, a pioneering immunologist at the University (the scientist who first distinguished blood groups) was hard at work attempting to make blood transfusions succeed. Look closer at the curious patterns that throb on the woman's frock in Klimt's painting and one suddenly sees them for what they are: Petri dishes pulsing with cells as if the artist has offered us a scan of her soul. The Kiss is Klimt's luminous biopsy of eternal love.
A New Way of Seeing: The History of Art in 57 Works is out now, published by Thames & Hudson.
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Eight odd details hidden in masterpieces

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What do the greatest paintings and sculptures in cultural history - from Girl with a Pearl Earring to Picasso's Guernica, from the Terracotta Army to Edvard Munch's The Scream - have in common? Each is hardwired with an underappreciated, indeed often overlooked, detail that ignites its meaning from deep inside.

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https://tvo.org/video/programs/the-agenda-with-steve-paikin/alain-de-botton-art-as-therapy

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10. Describing paintings - useful phrases                          (7 November 2017)

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10. Describing paintings - useful phrases                          (7 November 2017)

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Interesting podcasts:)

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NPR's home to showcase all of the podcasts from the NPR family. You can listen to recent episodes of your favorite podcasts and subscribe using your app of choice. Looking for more great listens? Browse our entire catalogue by topic or, on each podcast's page, discover similar podcasts.

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What happens if you cut down all of a city's trees? - Stefan Al

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What happens if you cut down all of a city's trees? - Stefan Al

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What happens if you cut down all of a city's trees? - Stefan Al

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A vocabulary list featuring What happens if you cut down all of a city's trees? - Stefan Al.

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What happens if you cut down all of a city's trees

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What happens if you cut down all of a city's trees

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'God, I'm just so bored.' JeniFoto via Shutterstock

We all respond to boredom in different ways. Some may find a new hobby or interest, others may instead rip open a bag of crisps and binge watch a new Netflix show. Boredom may seem to you an everyday - perhaps even trivial - experience. Surprisingly, however, boredom has undergone quite a metamorphosis over the past couple of centuries.

Well before the word "boredom" cropped up in the English language, one of the earliest mentions of boredom is in a Latin poem by Lucretius (99-55BC), who writes of the boring life of a rich Roman who flees to his country house ... only to be find himself equally bored there.

The first recorded mention of the word "boredom" in the English language seems to be in the British newspaper The Albion in 1829, in the (frankly impenetrable) sentence: "Neither will I follow another precedental mode of boredom, and indulge in a laudatory apostrophe to the destinies which presided over my fashioning."

But the term was popularised by Charles Dickens, who famously used the term in Bleak House (1853) where the aristocrat Lady Dedlock says she has been "bored to death" by, variously, the trying weather, unremarkable musical and theatrical entertainment, and familiar scenery.

In fact, boredom became a popular theme in English Victorian writing, especially in describing the life of the upper class, whose boredom may reflect a privileged social standing. Dickens' character James Harthouse (Hard Times, 1854), for example, seems to cherish perpetual boredom as indicative of his high breeding, declaring nothing but boredom during his life as military dragoon and on his many travels.

The existentialists' boredom

In the second part of the 19th century and during the early 20th century, boredom gained notoriety among existentialist writers. Their view of boredom was often less than flattering, and one that confronted all of humanity, not just the upper class with its presumably empty existence.

The early existentialist Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, for example, wrote: "The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings." This was, according to him, only the beginning of the trouble with boredom. It would eventually lead Adam and Eve to commit their original sin.

Unsurprisingly, Kierkegaard declared boredom to be the root of all evil. Several other existentialists shared this unfavourable view. Jean-Paul Sartre called boredom a "leprosy of the soul", and Friedrich Nietzsche, agreeing with Kierkegaard, remarked that: "The boredom of God on the seventh day of creation would be a subject for a great poet."

National Photo Collection of Israel

Arthur Schopenhauer took the cake when it came to being gloomy about boredom. According to him, the human capacity for boredom was nothing less than direct evidence for life's ultimate lack of meaning. In his fittingly titled essay, Studies on Pessimism, he wrote:

The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy, and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom.

A world of boredom, the existentialists seemed to warn, is a world without purpose.

The science of boredom

The 20th century witnessed the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline. While our understanding of many emotions slowly increased, boredom was surprisingly left alone. What little psychological work on boredom existed was rather speculative, and more often than not excluded empirical data.

These accounts hardly painted a more positive picture of boredom than the existentialists. As recently as 1972, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm blatantly denounced boredom as "perhaps the most important source of aggression and destructiveness today".

During the past few decades, however, the image of boredom has changed once more, and with it has come an appreciation of the hitherto discredited emotion. Development of better measurement tools allowed psychologists to examine boredom with greater accuracy, and experimental methods allowed researchers to induce boredom and examine its actual, rather than presumed, behavioural consequences.

This work reveals that boredom can indeed be problematic, as the existentialists assured us. Those who bore easily are more likely to be depressed and anxious, have a tendency to be aggressive, and perceive life as less meaningfull.

Yet, psychology uncovered also a much brighter side of boredom. Researchers found that boredom encourages a search for meaning in life, propels exploration, and inspires novelty seeking. It shows that boredom is not only a common but also a functional emotion that makes people reconsider what they are currently doing in favour of more rewarding alternatives, for example increasing creativity and prosocial tendencies.

In doing so, it seems that boredom helps to regulate our behaviour and prevents us from getting stuck in unrewarding situations for too long. Rather than merely a malady among the upper classes or an existential peril, boredom seems, instead, to be an important part of the psychological arsenal available to people in the pursuit a fulfilling life.

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Leprosy of the soul? A brief history of boredom

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We all respond to boredom in different ways. Some may find a new hobby or interest, others may instead rip open a bag of crisps and binge watch a new Netflix show. Boredom may seem to you an everyday - perhaps even trivial - experience.

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The Importance of Staring out the Window

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The Importance of Staring out the Window

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Please read the article and use the "exploring vocabulary" handout below.

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We tend to reproach ourselves for staring out of the window. You are supposed to be working, or studying, or ticking off things on your to-do list. It can seem almost the definition of wasted time. It seems to produce nothing, to serve no purpose. We equate it with boredom, distraction, futility. The act of cupping your chin in your hands near a pane of glass and letting your eyes drift in the middle distance does not normally enjoy high prestige. We don't go around saying: 'I had a great day: the high point was staring out of the window'. But maybe in a better society, that's just the sort of thing people would say to one another.

Gustave Caillebotte, Young Man at His Window, 1875: Seeking to bring glamour and higher status to an activity which, for centuries has been condemned and denigrated by moralists, teachers, employers, parents - and our own guilty consciences.

The point of staring out of a window is, paradoxically, not to find out what is going on outside. It is, rather, an exercise in discovering the contents of our own minds. It's easy to imagine we know what we think, what we feel and what's going on in our heads. But we rarely do entirely. There's a huge amount of what makes us who we are that circulates unexplored and unused. Its potential lies untapped. It is shy and doesn't emerge under the pressure of direct questioning. If we do it right, staring out the window offers a way for us to listen out for the quieter suggestions and perspectives of our deeper selves.

Plato suggested a metaphor for the mind: our ideas are like birds fluttering around in the aviary of our brains. But in order for the birds to settle, Plato understood that we needed periods of purpose-free calm. Staring out the window offers such an opportunity. We see the world going on: a patch of weeds is holding its own against the wind; a grey tower block looms through the drizzle. But we don't need to respond; we have no overarching intentions, and so the more tentative parts of ourselves have a chance to be heard, like the sound of church bells in the city once the traffic has died down at night.

Remembering neglected parts of herself

The potential of daydreaming isn't recognised by societies obsessed with productivity. But some of our greatest insights come when we stop trying to be purposeful and instead respect the creative potential of reverie. Window daydreaming is a strategic rebellion against the excessive demands of immediate (but ultimately insignificant) pressures - in favour of the diffuse, but very serious, search for the wisdom of the unexplored deep self.

The Consolations of a Bath

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No One Knows

We start our lives surrounded by people who know a great deal more than we ever could. To a four year old, a very average adult is a miracle of supreme...

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We tend to reproach ourselves for staring out of the window. You are supposed to be working, or studying, or ticking off things on your to-do list. It can seem almost the definition of wasted time. It seems to produce nothing, to serve no purpose. We equate it with boredom, distraction, futility.

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Why this Polish teen set up a prize-winning fake cosmetics shop

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Why this Polish teen set up a prize-winning fake cosmetics shop

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Disturbed by reports of rising domestic violence under coronavirus lockdown, a Polish high school student decided to launch a fake online shop to offer a lifeline to victims trapped in their homes.

Her idea won a European Union prize that came with €10,000 (£8,700; $12,120).

"Firstly, I heard about the increase in domestic violence cases during the pandemic. Then I heard about a French initiative, where people go to the pharmacy and ask for a special mask that lets the pharmacist know they are a victim of domestic violence," Krystyna Paszko explained.

"I thought it was a brilliant idea, so I came up with the idea of selling cosmetics."

In April, Krystyna, who was 17 at the time, decided to launch the fake online shop "Camomiles and Pansies" to sell those cosmetics. The idea is that the victim can hide requests for help from their abuser at home by appearing to be shopping online.

When a victim writes asking to buy a cream, a psychologist responds instead of a salesperson and asks how long the "skin problems" have been going on for, or how the affected skin reacts to alcohol. If someone places an order and leaves an address, it is actually code asking for authorities to visit their home.

After Krystyna openly wrote about her plan on her own Facebook page, she was inundated with questions.

"I thought it would only be for my friends, and friends of friends. I thought I would help maybe one person or two, but the shares on Facebook were big and it became really popular," she said.

With so much interest, Krystyna contacted the Women's Rights Centre, a Polish NGO, asking for assistance. In response it provided psychologists and lawyers to work with the website.

Since its launch, more than 350 people have contacted the website. Most of the victims are young, under 40, and about 10% are male.

"More younger women prefer to write on Facebook than to call on the phone, it's more natural for younger women to use Facebook chat. Most of the men writing to us are teenagers," she said.

Krystyna credits her interest in human rights to her role in the scouts - she leads a Warsaw scout group and created its Facebook page.

"For many years I've been interested in human and women's rights, and because of that I read about the increase in domestic violence and wanted to do this. Before, I had created my scouting page. Scouting taught me how important it is to help others and to be interested in the world around me," she said.

The initiative was one of 23 projects to receive the EU's Civil Solidarity Prize, a one-off contest offering €10,000 to reward civil society organisations tackling the consequences of Covid-19.

The president of the Women's Rights Centre, Urszula Nowakowska, said she was "very impressed" by Krystyna's project. She said official police data does not show a rise in domestic violence cases last year, but calls to her organisation's hotline during the first few months of lockdown rose by about 50% compared with 2019.

In July, Poland's Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro was criticised both at home and abroad when he said Poland should start to prepare to withdraw from the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, because its "ideological" nature threatened the traditional family model.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki subsequently asked Poland's Constitutional Court to decide the issue.

In November, the justice ministry pushed through legal amendments allowing the police to expel perpetrators of abuse from the home.

However, there is still no way to stop them from approaching their victims outside the home, at the workplace or during the school pick-up, Ms Nowakowska said.

Poland introduced a promising multi-agency intervention system called the "Blue Cards Procedure" in 2010, but many have become disillusioned with it, she added.

"What I have observed in the last 15 years is that people are more eager to treat domestic violence cases as family conflicts, rather than a crime. I think this system is contributing a lot to that because it's not effective, it's very bureaucratic," she told the BBC.

She said there are around 70,000 domestic violence cases annually in Poland, of which only between 13-14,000 are treated as crimes.

When Krystyna found out she had won the EU's Civil Solidarity Prize she was pleased that a spotlight was being shone on the problem of abuse. "It makes the public face this problem and makes people think about this," she says.

She was pleased too for her team, who had worked hard to pull off the initiative - and for now they plan to keep it open.

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Why this teen set up a prize-winning fake cosmetics shop

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Disturbed by reports of rising domestic violence under coronavirus lockdown, a Polish high school student decided to launch a fake online shop to offer a lifeline to victims trapped in their homes. Her idea won a European Union prize that came with €10,000 (£8,700; $12,120).

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Please watch this TED talk and complete the Reading/Listening handout below

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

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Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

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Swati Mohan - Mars 2020 Guidance & Controls Operations Lead | People Profile

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Swati Mohan emigrated from India to the United States when she was 1 year old, and was raised in Northern Virginia / Washington DC metro area. She completed her B.S from Cornell University in Mechanic [...]

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Around the middle of the nineteenth century, artists in a rapidly modernising world began to take note of an increasingly popular activity which attracted their aesthetic attention, as much because of its novelty as because of its inherent significance, an activity that was elbowing aside older routines and embedding itself into the structure of every day, shaping the intimate inner world, becoming something one would resort to whenever there was a quiet moment, a newly sacrosanct and solemn process that had, the philosopher Hegel remarked, replaced morning prayer in the lives of all modern citizens: reading the newspaper.

Paul Cezanne, The Artist's Father, Reading "L'Événement", 1866

Marie Cassatt, Reading Le Figaro, 1878

William Merritt Chase, Woman Reading the Newspaper, 1886

L.A. Ring, At the Breakfast Table with the Morning Newspaper, 1898

The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion in newspaper publication and readership. A lot of this was down to technological innovation. Paper that had since the dawn of time been laboriously made from old textiles (hemp, linen and cotton) was, from the late 1840s, produced at a fraction of the cost from fibres extracted from wood pulp. Alongside this, the 1850s saw the development of high speed steam-driven rotary printing presses, followed by stereotype plates from the 1870s, and linotype in 1884. In the thirty years after 1850, the cost of producing a single sheet of newsprint in Europe and America fell by 90%. At the same time, more and more people could read. In Britain in 1800, around 50% of the population had been illiterate, by 1870, it was 22%, by 1900, 3% - figures that were almost identically repeated in France, the United States and Germany. Furthermore, the rapid spread of railways after 1850 meant that modernising countries could now carry newspapers from their capitals and large cities to their provinces in a matter of hours. And in terms of what might be printed, the options were vastly increased by the invention of the electric telegraph in 1837 and the completion of the first transatlantic cable in 1858, which reduced communication times between Europe and North America from 10 days (by ship) to just minutes. To further equip journalists, the telephone was invented in 1876 and the first world's first commercially successful typewriter, the Remington no.2, in 1878.

On the back of such developments emerged the world's first truly mass market newspapers. By 1870 in New York, The Sun, The New York Herald, and The New York Daily News were each reaching 100,000 readers a day. In Germany, the Berliner Morgenpost was selling 400,000 copies daily from 1898 onwards. Britain's Daily Telegraph had a circulation of 350,000 by 1876. And in France in 1890, Le Petit Journal became the world's first newspaper to sell a million copies; within another five years, it was selling two million.

In order to achieve such circulations, newspapers had made one significant breakthrough in their understanding of psychology: that no human can resist tales of another's catastrophes. Fortunately for them, the nineteenth century was an exceptionally calamitous era. The new technologies being introduced were at once hugely powerful and (blessedly) unreliable. On an almost daily basis, as urgent undersea telegraph cables revealed, somewhere in the world, an ammunition dump would blow up, a bridge would collapse or a tall building would founder. Trains were the true godsend. On January 6, 1853, as newspapers down the eastern seaboard of America explained, a train carrying the President-elect Franklin Pierce, his wife Jane and their son Benjamin toppled off an embankment near Andover, Massachusetts - instantly killing the son ('innocent Ben' as the newspapers baptised him). Only a few months later, in Connecticut a train ran over an open drawbridge and fell into the Norwalk River, killing forty-six and severely injuring thirty.

Norwalk River Rail Disaster, 6th March, 1853

In the so-called Great Train Wreck of 1856, two North Pennsylvania Railroad passenger trains collided head-on at Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. Fifty-nine people were killed, two hundred more badly burnt. The conductor of one of the trains committed suicide the same day. The newspapers were transfixed.

Earliest known photographic image depicting a train wreck. Providence and Worcester Railroad near Pawtucket, Rhode Island, August 12, 1853.

There would in subsequent years be a near-limitless procession of broken piston rods, boiler explosions, collisions with horses, collapsed axles and drunken conductors. A further capacity to stun readers over breakfast was achieved through the invention of photography. The earliest photo of a train wreck recorded a head on collision in August 1853 in Valley Falls, Rhode Island; thirteen people were killed and fifty badly injured.

To technological disasters were added a stream of extremely interesting murders. Sunderland-born Mary Ann Cotton poisoned 21 people with an arsenic-filled teapot and was hung in Manchester in 1873. A Kate Webster killed and dismembered her employer Julia Martha in Richmond, South West London, in 1879. A nurse, Amelia Dyer, Victorian England's most prolific child murderer, believed to have killed 400 babies, was hung in Newgate prison in 1896. Even better for the papers, some crimes refused to be easily or quickly solved. A thirteen year old girl, Susie Martin, was abducted in New York in 1894: the headless, armless torso of what one paper called 'the once fair body' was then found three weeks later but it took five years for an itinerant ex-slave to be blamed for the murder - and in the meantime, there were so many questions for the newspapers to speculate on: 'Where are the heads, legs and arms?' implored The New York Post.

Terrible things had of course always occurred in history but never before were so many people exposed with such efficient regularity to the very worst cases - carefully collated from around the world. To read a daily newspaper was willingly to submit to being dipped in a stream of horror. By throwing the emphasis squarely on the most outlandish possibilities, newspapers taught their readers to consider the planet as a dystopian morass, a place where strangers perpetually abducted and dismembered schoolgirls, where babies were at all times being kidnapped in the night, where trains were always falling into swollen icy rivers, where every carer was a paedophile and every government official a crook - a place where it was evidently absurd to trust or hope, to rest or be inspired. While setting itself up as an instrument of enlightenment through which to look more clearly at events, the newspaper ended up obscuring what life is - for the most part - actually like: it helped us to forget that almost everyone is kind, that nearly every train makes it to its destination, that impressive and good things regularly happen in government and that most days are quiet and uneventful. Far from 'informing' us, despite the transoceanic cables, press conferences and foreign bureaux, newspapers helped us to lose touch with the true nature of peoples, technologies and governments - leaving us in our own way less informed than an illiterate medieval farmer who, despite his lack of access to daily bulletins, at least knew how to form a picture of reality from the evidence of his own senses.

An associated risk opened up by newspapers was that one might, under their tutelage, forget how to feel. It might have appeared as though newspapers were helping us to feel rather a lot: outrage, horror, sorrow, pity, empathy. And newspapers certainly claimed, when explaining their higher purpose, that they were engaged in banishing ignorance and prejudice and helping nations to understand one another better. But - despite all the information they contained - these papers had a marked weakness when it came to getting us properly to engage with most of the facts they laid before us. Given the agonies we were reading about, what was ultimately striking was how little of it really touched us. A newspaper might, for example, go to great lengths to inform us that 50,000 people had died in an earthquake, that an orphanage had burnt to the ground killing 200, that the harvest had failed on another continent, that a ship had run aground off Greenland and that someone had killed their extended family with an axe - and our response might simply be to sigh and turn the page. An eerie gap opened up between the dramatic events that were being narrated and the inertia and nonchalance one typically registered on reading of them.

In reality, we are creatures designed for intimate contact, for local lives and personal relationships. For ideas to become powerful in our souls, they need to be anchored in experience and in stories. This is what art has always known - which is why in the hands of a talented storyteller, the account of a child's loss of a favourite toy will elicit a degree of pained emotion far exceeding what we experience when the morning paper informs us of the deaths of 10,000 combatants in a brutal civil war on the other side of the earth.

The newspapers of modernity overlooked that they weren't merely in the business of gathering facts, they also had to help their readers to care about them. In this regard, they forgot to consider the role of art. They overlooked that their chief enemy was not ignorance, but indifference - to which the solution were all the techniques found in the treasury of the literary and visual arts. In 1816, French newspapers reported that a naval frigate, the Méduse, had run aground off the coast of Africa, with the loss of 133 lives. Only a few survivors made it, clinging desperately to a raft for many days. It could have just become one more tiny forgettable item in the vast catalogue of maritime disasters reported on every day. But the great French painter, Gericault, made it live in the imagination of humanity for ever - by spending months thinking about the position of every figure on the doomed raft, by working on facial expressions, by paying attention to the waves and the sky, by editing and compressing, by seeking the universal in the particular. His Raft of the Medusa helped its viewers to feel the range of emotions the story actually contained.

In April 1937, like Gericault many decades before, Pablo Picasso came across a shocking story in a newspaper. Like Gericault, when he came to address the massacre of innocents in the town of Guernica, he allowed us to feel a revulsion, anguish and rage at the insanity of war that we would never have felt if we had just picked up the bare bones of the story in an account of the aerial bombing of a Basque town by the German Luftwaffe's Condor Legion in a column in the International Herald Tribune.

Art may not only get us to feel, it can draw our attention to how much we have forgotten to do so. Andy Warhol understood the extent to which modern media has numbed us to the sufferings of others. But unlike Gericault or Picasso, Warhol took aim at the deadening force of the media itself. When an Air France Boeing 707 crashed on take-off at Orly airport on the 3rd of June 1962 killing all but three on board, Warhol wanted to admit - as the newspapers themselves never would - how little this apparently significant incident would ever in fact really matter, either to readers or news organisations, how soon it would become just another part of the banal spectacle of horror with which modern papers have surrounded us since the early nineteenth century. We might wonder for a moment, take an interest in a severed hand or leg or two and then move on to the business of the day. In his decision to transform that disastrous morning's front page into a sober abstracted silk screen, Warhol made our unnoticed callousness his subject. When asked what made him make the picture, Warhol explained: 'I made it because very time you turn on the radio, they say, '4 million are going to die.' But then when you see the gruesome pictures over and over again, they don't have any effect.' It would be his goal to make the sort of picture that could shake us from our customary apathy, that would not allow us immediately to forget this charred plane as we had so many others before it. It is a tribute to his genius that Air France flight 007, long forgotten by the news organisations that first brought it to prominence, will, like the Gericault's raft and Picasso's screaming mother, live on perpetually in the annals of art.

Andy Warhol, 129 Die in Jet, 1962

Long before there were newspapers in the modern sense, what we would call news was comprised of information sent, usually at huge cost, between royal courts and parts of kingdoms. Letters would arrive informing the king that there was a shortage of grain in the east, rumours of invasion from the south, an unexplained rise in the price of copper from a neighbouring country or some unrest in a village near the mountains.

As newspapers developed, they took on much of this role, continuing to convey information that would be of great importance to anyone trying to run a government, though in a hugely democratic spirit, this was now sent out to everyone: to a sheep farmer in the village of Castlebay in the Outer Hebrides, a wine importer in Garmisch Partenkirchen in Bavaria or a retired soldier in Pincher Creek, Alberta.

A lot of this information, when it reached one's doorstep in the morning, was liable to feel very urgent if not completely alarming: someone in parliament was stealing money from a discretionary fund, there was an oil leak in a natural reserve, a fungus was destroying the harvest, the deficit was spiralling because of mismanagement in the audit office... It was only normal to start to feel deeply exercised; the impulse was to pick up the phone, ask some very tough questions and hunt avidly for solutions.

But then would come a humbling realisation: despite the papers one had been given to read, one was - in fact - only working at the post office or teaching maths to the under eights, managing a bowling alley or looking after an elderly relative. Contrary to what one had imagined, there was actually no one to call, one wasn't expected to come up with any ideas, there wasn't an urgent meeting to discuss matters with the foreign minister. This was the paradoxical state of mind generated in citizens of modern democratic states: to be at once extremely well informed, deeply exercised - and completely powerless.

One response might be rage. We might bang our fists at the image of the politician who hasn't followed our advice around welfare reform for disabled veterans or the secretary of state who hasn't listened to our plans for the prison system. We might write angry letters to the newspapers outlining alternative schemes for the management of the economy or the education of sixteen year old apprentices. While they attempt to prepare dinner, we may tell our loved ones precisely what should be happening with supply chains in the department of agriculture.

What the newspapers don't quite tell us is that the wisest step might also be the most unlikely and taboo-sounding in modern society: not to listen or rather to listen a little less, not to pay attention to every outrage and inefficiency, not to keep delivering speeches to the unresponsive photographs of the treasury officials, not to keep thinking of what should happen next with the electrification of the railway line... These and a thousand other issues like them might be very important no doubt, but - despite the suggestions - not in fact so important to us.

Someone will undoubtedly need to sort out the mess in government, to ask themselves big questions around the economy and to fix the delays to the road building programme but this is not - for a variety of complex reasons - our job right now. Fate has imposed a different set of burdens upon us. Our responsibilities lie elsewhere, in less heralded and prominent places: with a child struggling to cope behind an outwardly gruff manner, with a group of colleagues confused as to their roles, with our own minds that, restless and unfathomed, need to be investigated, interpreted and calmed. The most urgent priority might be not to know - in order that other more important elements closer to home might gain the prominence they deserve.

Then again, our obsession with news is no coincidence. It can be tempting to throw ourselves into its arms, because it is so hard to lead our own lives. The dilemmas in our relationships, the questions around our careers, the unresolved regrets and hurts in our pasts, all these can be so painful and so daunting to consider that it becomes a compulsive pleasure to obliterate ourselves in the news of a furious hurricane ripping a path through the tropics or a harrowing tale of a murder in a foreign town. News becomes the instrument through which we will forget about a life that feels too difficult to progress.

The newspaper is only too keen to welcome us in our confusion. It invites us with warmth to share in the troubles and joys of its revolving cast of characters and incidents. It encourages us to grow extremely knowledgeable about certain issues (why a law had to be passed, how the police intends to set up the event, why the bond market reacted as it did). It is being very cruel. It is pretending that this is our business, that this is what needs to count for us now, but soon enough, the issues will ebb away and we will be left with nothing. The cruise liner whose fate obsessed us, the scandal that was on our mind for nights on end, the little girl we couldn't stop worrying about... these may feel like important pieces of our lives. But in time, we will discover that they had nothing much to do with us at all, we were agonised and excited for nothing - and in the meantime, the sand on the hourglass of our own existence continued to run down silently and remorselessly.

The trouble caused by newspapers comes down to their authority, their ability to squat at the center of societies and persuade us that they possess - thanks to their technology and their manpower, their mastheads and their intrepid reporters - the power to decide what matters and who we are. They will tell us what kinds of countries we are living in and what properly counts. They will be the arbiters of importance, the sifters of events and the righteous judges of humanity's experiences. It is by keeping up with them that we will at last gain an answer to the question we long so much to have answered: what is really going on?

And yet naturally, the story they weave will only ever be one story, and a very partial one at that, about what is actually unfolding. There is so much that they will not notice: the kestrels in the night sky, the undramatic labour of millions, the small random acts of kindness, the minor technological breakthroughs, the disasters that didn't occur because someone remembered at the last moment to put on the brakes and check the pistons, the things that have always been there, like the oak tree and the light of dawn, the inevitability of death and the comfort of a hug.

The newspapers hammer national consciousness into their image. We awake every morning, our minds filled with echoes of dreams, half remembered projects, scattered excitements, fragile impulses - and must then collide against a brutal, unyielding wall of news which seems to say that none of that mattered, nothing of what you are trying to become or have been can in any way count, for we must listen instead to what the president said and what the chairman of the board predicts. And because we are all still somewhere little children who once sat in school assembly and listened to supposedly important teachers telling us in booming voices what is what, we sit in deference before the newspaper's national morning 'assembly.'

It was the dubious achievement of the newspapers of the 19th century to standardise the mind. They did to the varied fruits of our imaginations and intelligences a little of what industrialists like Henry Ford had achieved in manufacturing; they helped to mass produce thoughts; reducing their variety, increasing their spread and stripping them of their local particularities. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert had a special hatred of them. The most repulsive character in his Madame Bovary (1856) is the pharmacist Homais, who is described as spending all his evenings piously reading the paper- and then peppering his conversation with reflections and portentous facts turned out in newspaper offices in Paris and Rouen. In an essay on Flaubert's novel, Milan Kundera remarked that idiocy has always existed, but that for a long time humans had been able to comfort themselves with the hope that it would eventually be banished by knowledge. Yet the rise of newspapers forced a terrifying realisation: that far from knowledge banishing idiocy, it would merely lend it fuel and false confidence. The newspaper gave birth to one of the most unexpected personalities of the modern age: the well-informed idiot.

John Heartfield, Whoever reads bourgeois newspapers becomes blind and deaf: away with the stultifying bandages!, 1930

For the artists of the Dada movement of the early twentieth century, newspapers had pretty much started the First World War: they had spread stupidity and bile, they had coarsened minds and made us readier to accept the futile reasoning of the generals. Which was why so many of Dada's creative figures cut up newspapers and glued them into irrational collages, disassembled their seeming logic and made them at last articulate the preposterous nonsense they had quietly been uttering all along.

Ambrosius Benson, The Magdalen Reading, c. 1525
The founding premise of the news industry is that the new and the important are one: what is important is new and what is new is important. But for most of us, for the length of our lives, this is likely to be profoundly untrue. What has just happened will not - as the newspaper tells us - be the most important thing we need to know. What may really matter for our flourishing has perhaps happened twenty or a thousand years ago; it may have been recorded in a book which has been sitting in library shelves since before the birth of Jesus. Our pressing priority may be to re-read an old work and properly absorb its lessons rather than skim through yet more disconnected contemporary ephemera.

In 1854, two years before Flaubert published Madame Bovary, across the Atlantic, the essayist Henry David Thoreau, a no less committed critic of newspapers, had taken aim at our wholly unjustified excitement about the latest information: 'We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide [granddaughter of George III] has the whooping cough...'

We may not need 'novel' information at all, what we most urgently require is encouragement to make more of all the things which we've theoretically known about for a very long time already - but have so seldom listened to. The news we really need is that which speaks of the imperative to forgive, to be kind, to reflect, to appreciate, to be grateful, to be still and to be kind; these are the true bits of news we should push everything else aside for - the fires, the murders, the crashes and the crises - in order to render them more solid in our minds. Sometimes, and indeed usually, the news might just be the least important and least urgent thing we ever need to know.

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Around the middle of the nineteenth century, artists in a rapidly modernising world began to take note of an increasingly popular activity which attracted their aesthetic attention, as much because of its novelty as because of its inherent significance, an activity that was elbowing aside older routines and embedding itself into the structure of every day, shaping the intimate inner world, becoming something one would resort to whenever there was a quiet moment, a newly sacrosanct and solemn process that had, the philosopher Hegel remarked, replaced morning prayer in the lives of all modern citizens: reading the newspaper.

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We are likely to have grown up thinking that the mainstream media was our friend. The common sense, natural judge of everything that matters and is important and a reliable guide to existence. So why, after spending so long with it, are we generally so overloaded, confused and oddly unfocused on the stuff that really matters?

News organisations claim to be informing us with their bulletins. In fact, more and often than not, they are driving us crazy with needless anxiety and puzzling us with random bits of information we can't make use of.

Plato said that the world wouldn't be right until philosophers were kings and kings philosophers. We'd add to this that it won't be right until philosophers become news journalists and vice versa.

Emotional Technology

It's always exciting to think about what kinds of technology are going to be coming to us in the future. By extrapolating from current trends, we can make some good guesses...

On Switching Off the News

We need to be informed, of course. But, in order to stay sane, we may also need - at points - to forget or at least not to remember with such...

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We are likely to have grown up thinking that the mainstream media was our friend. The common sense, natural judge of everything that matters and is important and a reliable guide to existence. So why, after spending so long with it, are we generally so overloaded, confused and oddly unfocused on the stuff that really matters?

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Norman Rockwell  The problem we all live with, 1964 

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Norman Rockwell  The problem we all live with, 1964 

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Norman Rockwell: A collection of 337 paintings (HD)

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Feed your soul: the 31-day literary diet for January

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Feed your soul: the 31-day literary diet for January

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ur revels now are ended and January looms, with its exhortations to get fit, lose weight, dry out. So here's a radical alternative diet: instead of depriving yourself, how about making it a month of treats - but feeding your brain instead of your face? Our one-a-day calendar will take you into magical realms of poetry and prose, argument and imagination. It will transport you to some places you always wanted to explore, but couldn't find the time, and to others you never knew existed, where you will find strange and wonderful things.

In fact, this calendar very nearly didn't happen because I kept disappearing down rabbit-holes so deep and fascinating that, had I been the white rabbit himself, someone would have had to drag me out by the ears. Some entries - such as John Huston's film of Malcolm Lowry's mescal-fuelled modernist masterpiece Under the Volcano (20 January) - come with the authority of a full year's leisurely burrowing (it is among the BFI's list of 100 great films to watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime, which was a comfort and joy through lockdown, and is handily still being updated).

But others were completely new to me. The fun of an adventure like this is the way that one genre melts into another, sending ripples across time and space. Many entries in the calendar are picked on this basis: as small, easy portals into something wide and various which will reward further investment of time and money. Some are introductions to poets, artists and musicians who do, after all, have livings to make. I'm not just being flippant: if you want to fully understand poet Alice Oswald's relationship with water (28 January), you need to read her book-length, source-to-sea portrait of a river, .

But other entries, such as Glasgow University and BBC Radio Scotland's Robert Burns readings (24 January, naturally), are triumphs of cultural completism which radiate the enthusiasm of everyone involved. But I digress...

A literary calendar for January 2021

1 January

(Poetry, 2 mins)
Angelou published this totemic poem in 1978 and continued to perform it into her 80s. Like a fine wine, it matured over the years, as this glorious late outing demonstrates. Decades of chain smoking are invested in her smoky chuckle, as she asks: "Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise?"

2 January

(Film, 1hr 37 mins)
In these dark days of the year, when the conviviality has worn thin but you're still stuck at home, what's really needed is a spirit-raiser, preferably one that doesn't involve alcohol. Forget all those costume Austens: this 1995 teen comedy is where the novel meets film and has babies - something smart and very much its own thing, which everyone in the family can enjoy.

3 January

(Music, 4 mins)
Has there ever been a sexier song than this one, based on Molly Bloom's soliloquy, from Ulysses? There are two versions, because James Joyce's curmudgeonly estate at first forbade Bush from using his words. When they relented years later, she rerecorded it as Flower of the Mountain with the original text. I know which is my favourite, mrmmm, yes.

4 January

(Drama, 2 mins)
Never has John of Gaunt's speech from Shakespeare's Richard II seemed more powerful than when Croll reminted it in an all-black, female production at the Globe in 2019. It appears here as part of the Monologue Library, a lockdown archive of more than 100 solo turns by top actors. Listen and weep for all those truck drivers massing outside Dover.

5 January

(Poetry, 2 mins)
You don't have to share Old Possum's religious beliefs to appreciate his take on the Epiphany, the festival of the three kings. Others have read it more elegantly, but there's a frigidity to his delivery that shivers those famous opening lines: "A cold coming we had of it, /Just the worst time of the year".

6 January

(Poetry/music (20 mins)
Long before anyone could have imagined being locked down, NPR's concerts were bringing poets and musicians direct from their tiny desks to yours - and never more powerfully than in this 2016 performance by hip-hop hero Williams. Political in the truest sense, it includes a tender tribute to whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

7 January

(Film, under 2 hours)
Talking Pictures TV has been a comfort blanket through the on-off lockdowns, with its stream of forgotten gems. Today at 2pm Tommy Pender plays Tom the chimney sweep, with Billie Whitelaw as Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby, in this all-star 1978 live action-animated adaptation of Charles Kingsley's Victorian classic. As to who voices Jock the Lobster or Cyril the Walrus, you just have to guess.

8 January

(Podcast, 40 mins)
Kristen Roupenian, whose own name-making short story Cat Person went viral after being published in the New Yorker magazine in 2017, reads an unsettling Shirley Jackson story that ran there in 1943 - and explains how a single word tips it into horror. A cult curio from the New Yorker's super-cool fiction podcast series.

9 January

(Radio drama, 1hr 30 mins)
Richard Burton leads the unforgettable 1954 recording of life in the little village of Llareggub, which unfolds like a Chagall painting, with its fishingboatbobbing sea and its houses as blind as moles, where Polly Garter for ever mourns her dead lover, while Mr Pugh dreams up poisons for his living wife.

10 January

(Lyrics, 2 mins each)
If Bob Dylan can win the Nobel prize, Lehrer can surely be counted a poet. The great mathematico-musical humorist recently made all his lyrics and sheet music available to download free of charge until 2024. Altogether now: "Pollution, pollution! You can use the latest toothpaste, And then rinse your mouth with industrial waste..."

11 January

(Short stories, 10 mins each)
A gem of internet arcana from a fin-de-siecle Irish writer who naturalised as Japanese and remains a hero there. Here are corpse-eating spirits and faceless ghosts. The tales inspired a cult 1965 film by Masaki Kobayashi, which has been described as the "Rolls Royce of horror anthology movies". But read him in the original first.

12 January

(Poetry, 1 min)
One of the Irish poet's loveliest poems - published in his 1975 collection, North (Faber), and chosen to sit alongside his Nobel citation - was written for his aunt Mary, "broad-lapped with whitened nails" in her floury apron. Hear the love in his voice at the Poetry Archive.

13 January

(Talk/Book, 12 mins)
In 2013, the novelist gave a speech to students at Syracuse University, which was a love song to kindness - "that luminous part of you that exists beyond personality". Such was its success when it was printed in the New York Times (where you can still read it) that it was published as a standalone pamphlet by Bloomsbury.

Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer

14 January

(Archive Reviews, 10 mins)
From the collected poems of Yeats ("As discouraging as a breakfast of cold porridge"), to Nabokov's Lolita ("dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion"), an irresistible collection of literary misjudgments that should be prescribed reading for anyone wanting to make a quick buck as a critic.

15 January

(Short story, 8 mins)
The cautionary tales of Hector Hugh Munroe - AKA Saki - might not be as well known as those of his contemporary Hilaire Belloc, not least because he wrote in prose. Also, because they're gorgeously twisted, as demonstrated by this piquant story-within-a-story of a smug little girl whose good behaviour medals prove her undoing.

16 January

(Essays, 2 hours+)
Baldwin's twin letters on his Harlem childhood and the evil of racism in US society were published in 1963 (Penguin), and became a rallying cry for the US civil rights movement. This reading by Jesse L Martin is a timely reminder that Baldwin is a hero for all seasons.

17 January

(Conversations, 30 mins each)
This inspiring interdisciplinary daisy-chain of half-hour dialogues commissioned by Artangel ran over 12 hours last September and is now available in individual sections online, with an accompanying reading list. Novelist Naomi Alderman chats with inventor Saul Griffith, composer Brian Eno exchanges urbanities with forensic architect Eyal Weizman. Take your pick.

18 January

(Poetry, 9 mins)
The poet and archivist combined two skill sets into a debut collection that commemorates the death of 13 young black Londoners in the New Cross fire on this day in 1981. Surge (Chatto) was shortlisted for the 2019 TS Eliot prize, for which Bernard gave a reading that is truly haunting. Once heard, never forgotten.

19 January

(Lecture, 1 hour)
As a poet who is passionate about being out and about, it's ironic that Oswald's first lecture as Oxford professor of poetry should take place on YouTube. But here it is - a stimulating and moving meditation on the relationship between water and grief, from Homer describing the tears of Odysseus to Jericho Brown's Riddle, mourning the death of Emmett Till.

20 January

(Film, 2 hours +)
Albert Finney delivers a timely resolve booster for anyone whose dry January is in danger of falling apart, as the alcoholic former British consul trying to "drink himself sober", in a small Mexican town celebrating the Day of the Dead. Jacqueline Bisset stars alongside him in Huston's 1984 adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's "modernist Mexican Ulysses ", which was previously assumed to be one of the great unfilmables.

21 January

(Poetry, 5 mins)
The American winner of the 2020 Nobel prize in literature hasn't published a new poetry collection since 2014 when she won the National Book award for this book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). While publishers scramble to fill the gap (at least four new publications are slated for this year), listen to her "unmistakable poetic voice" at the NBA ceremony.

22 January

(Essay, 2 hours +)
What are the stories that need to be told in the age of catastrophe? In this gripping polemic (University of Chicago), the Indian novelist argues that we can only address the challenge of climate change by uncoupling ourselves from a storytelling tradition rooted in the industrial revolution: ie, we need to reinvent the novel.

23 January

(Poetry, 9 mins)
Until winning the TS Eliot prize in 2019, Robinson was one of the poetry world's best-kept secrets. His prize reading includes a poem that should be adopted as an anthem to health workers in the age of a pandemic: Grace takes its name and subject from the redoubtable Jamaican nurse who saw his prematurely born son through his perilous first days.

24 January

(Poetry, 2 mins each)
Address to a Haggis is the traditional fare for Burns Night - and you can seek it out in this 716-reading archive created by Glasgow University and BBC Radio Scotland - but I've always had a soft spot for the "blethering, blustering, drunken blellum" Tam. All come with celebrity performers and a handy set of notes.

25 January

(Podcast, 56 mins)
Theatre director Ian Rickson devised a revealing format for this podcast series: invite artists to discuss a song, a film and a piece of writing they really love. A basketball documentary about Michael Jordan and the poetry of William Blake are among the choices of a poet who is caught, like their subjects, in mid-air (they were transitioning from Kate to Kae as it was made).

26 January

(Lecture, 1 hour)
The 2018 Nobel prize winner marked her win with a characteristically smart and thought-provoking lecture about the need for a new literature to reflect - and deflect - the cacophony of our "polyphonic age", one that looks for a fourth-person narrator reminiscent of biblical parable or the classical deus ex machina. Read and discuss, in English, Polish or Swedish.

27 January

(Blog/essays, 5 mins each)
The Paris Review 's Eat Your Words blog series, extracting recipes from literature, is a delight. You could try Italo Cavino's sour cherry meringue pie or James Baldwin's oysters with mignonette, but who could resist the chance to taste Lady Chatterley's Lover? Stivers's essays are delicious, too.

28 January

(Letter, 1 min)
Possibly the sweetest letter ever written by a famous author to his fans was penned by the great American humorist months before his death, in response to a request for a school visit by five pupils at a New York school. Read it on Letters of Note.

29 January

(Talk, 30 mins)
Adichie's 2012 TED talk launched an international debate on feminism and took the Nigerian writer to a new level of global celebrity. It's funny and clever. And if you like it, you can go on to to her letter to her friend, Dear Ijeawele, which lists 15 ways to ensure your daughter grows up a feminist.

30 January

(Illustrated essay, 5 mins)
There are such riches in the British Library's Discovering Literature section that it's easy to get lost for days, but for all that John Ruskin declared it "the calamity of modern poetry", Dinah Roe's introduction to this creepy masterpiece (Penguin) is particularly seductive, with letters, facsimiles and Arthur Rackham illustrations to die for.

31 January

(Classes, 12 hours)
There are loads of online writing courses but this OU OpenLearn offering is both good and free. It's 12 hours overall, broken down into sections: character, setting, genre. So if you've worked your way through all the brilliant writing above and fancy having a go yourself, here's a starting point.

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Feed your soul: the 31-day literary diet for January

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ur revels now are ended and January looms, with its exhortations to get fit, lose weight, dry out. So here's a radical alternative diet: instead of depriving yourself, how about making it a month of treats - but feeding your brain instead of your face?

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What makes people happy across the world: happiness in different cultures

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What makes people happy across the world: happiness in different cultures

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When it comes to culture and happiness across the globe, what makes people happy in some countries may surprise or even shock you. And, as Dee Marques discovers, some cultures even believe that pursuing happiness can only be a bad thing.

Happiness: it's easy to think that it's a universal emotion. But is it really? In reality, cross-cultural research suggests the opposite. The relationship between different cultures and happiness is far from simple and can vary enormously from country to country.

In fact, in some parts of the world happiness is not necessarily a desirable state. For example, in Chinese culture, funerals are a happy occasion and preparing for them can generate levels of enthusiasm that would be hard to understand in the West.

In this culture, people go to great lengths to prepare their funeral, choosing the clothes they'll wear, finding matching shoes and jewellery, planning the meals that will be served, etc. From a Western point of view, it would be easy to think they're preparing for their wedding instead!

The Chinese case is just one of many examples that show how happiness in different cultures is interpreted and experienced. In this article we'll take a look at the fascinating concept of happiness from a cross-cultural point of view, since learning more about happiness in different cultures can help us understand better our own pursuit of contentment.

Happiness in different cultures: what makes people happy?

The more we learn about how happiness is understood across cultures, the more we realise that it's never straightforward to find common ground between different cultures and their well-being and joy.

Culture clash: the meaning of happiness in China is different

This subject has drawn the attention of researchers for decades. For example, surveys like Pew's Ladder of Life and The World Values Survey try to measure life satisfaction and well-being at a global level. Year after year, the United Nations' World Happiness Report ranks countries according to their happiness levels and tries to understand what makes people happy.

All these surveys and reports offer interesting insights into the 'ingredients' of happiness across cultures. And while it's important to remember there's no standard recipe, the findings suggest that there are pretty much two ways of understanding and experiencing well-being and happiness: the Western and the non-Western way.

Culture and happiness: East vs West

In Western societies, income and wealth are often considered important factors when it comes to achieving happiness. But does that mean that less well-off people are doomed to be unhappy? Not necessarily.

In fact, some studies show that poor people are actually happier in Eastern countries, possibly because in those cultures happiness is closely associated with factors other than income and material possessions, such as personal relationships. It's also interesting to note how
happiness levels seem to decline as developing countries become wealthier , as is the case in India, where people reported being less happy as their income levels grew.

"While happiness exists in all cultures, its meaning and the way it's experienced vary enormously: what makes people happy in one country and can be different in another."

However, a country's development levels are not the only factor. Take two developed nations, like
the United States and Japan , and you'll still see differences in how happiness is perceived. In the US, freedom and personal achievement are strong factors in the construction of happiness, whereas in Japan the concept is linked to good luck, moderation and social harmony. This suggests that cultural values are important if we want to understand how people in different cultures find happiness.

Among those cultural values,
family ties and social roles are top priorities for happiness in different cultures. Strong human connections and interpersonal relationships are important in places like Switzerland, Iceland and Australia, just as much as they are in East Asian countries or in Latin America .

Moreover, global studies confirm that happiness is built up of different blocks, and that the
five most common "building blocks" (aside from income) are having social support, a healthy life expectancy, freedom, and being surrounded by an environment of trust and generosity.

Defining happiness through language

The variation in how happiness is experienced across different cultures is also evident in language . Words like 'happiness' and 'happy' carry different connotations in Eastern and Western cultures and can't always be directly translated.

Family is key to happiness in many cultures (shutterstock/Monkey Business Images)

For example, Mandarin has multiple words for "happiness" that aren't a perfect equivalent to the English concept, since they can mean anything from "good mood" to "having meaning in life" or "having a good life". In fact, in Mandarin, happiness is also defined as "having a good death", which would be rather unthinkable in English-speaking cultures!

RELATED: Escape the happiness trap (by avoiding the pursuit of happiness!)

The way happiness is defined in different languages also points at how differently it's experienced across cultures. For instance, the Danish concept of "lykke" is translated as "happiness", but has very little to do with the way happiness is experienced in the United States, where it involves a state of celebration.

Similarly, the word for happiness in Hong Kong's Cantonese is linked to low arousal states and its meaning is closer to calm and relaxation rather than to celebration.

What makes people happy: the pursuit of joy

The factors contributing to happiness in different cultures are not the only thing that varies, since people's attitude towards happiness varies too. For most of us, pursuing happiness is a given, and we may make changes to our lives as part of that pursuit. But, in fact, happiness is not universally pursued in such an active way.

For example, people in Eastern cultures like China, Japan and Taiwan don't strive for happiness. In fact, they may actually be
averse to the idea because they believe they'll be faced with misfortune if they do so. This is linked to cultural beliefs , like the idea that opposites go hand-in-hand or that having too much of a good thing will be punished.

"Among those cultural values, family ties and social roles are top priorities for happiness in different cultures."

In other cultures, happiness is associated with luck or chance, so people may see no reason to actively pursue it as a goal. This is the case in Russia, Germany, France and Norway, where perceptions differ from the US concept of happiness, where it's seen as a human right worth pursuing. In other cases, pursuing individual happiness may cause
conflict with other values , like preserving social harmony, so it's less important to chase it.

Culture and happiness: conclusions

Although all this may sound confusing, there's plenty to be learnt from the many shades of meaning taken by happiness in different cultures. While happiness exists in all cultures, its meaning and the way it's experienced vary enormously: what makes people happy in one country and can be different in another.

Indeed, the symbols of happiness in different cultures vary too, and the same goes for how happiness is expressed or perceived. Neither the concept of happiness nor the factors that contribute to it are absolute or universal.

But this isn't a bad thing. Taking a multi-dimensional and cross-cultural approach can make us rethink how we go about finding our personal happiness, challenge our assumptions, and ultimately make the journey towards happiness much more diverse and satisfying. ●

Written by Dee Marques

A social sciences graduate with a keen interest in languages, communication, and personal development strategies. Dee loves exercising, being out in nature, and discovering warm and sunny places where she can escape the winter.

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The standard habit of the mind is to take careful note what's not right in our lives and obsess about all that is missing.

But in a new mood, perhaps after a lot of longing and turmoil, we pause and notice some of what has - remarkably - not gone wrong. The house is looking beautiful at the moment. We're in pretty good health, all things considered. The afternoon sun is deeply reassuring. Sometimes the children are kind. Our partner is - at points - very generous. It's been quite mild lately. Yesterday, we were happy all evening. We're quite enjoying our work at the moment.

Gratitude is a mood that grows with age. It is extremely rare properly to delight in flowers or a quiet evening at home, a cup of tea or a walk in the woods when one is under twenty-two. There are so many larger, grander things to be concerned about: romantic love, career fulfillment and political change.

However, it is rare to be left entirely indifferent by smaller things in time. Gradually, almost all one's earlier, larger aspirations take a hit, perhaps a very large hit. One encounters some of the intractable problems of intimate relationships. One suffers the gap between one's professional hopes and the available realities. One has a chance to observe how slowly and fitfully the world ever alters in a positive direction. One is fully inducted to the extent of human wickedness and folly - and to one's own eccentricity, selfishness and madness.

And so, 'little things' start to seem somewhat different; no longer a petty distraction from a mighty destiny, no longer an insult to ambition, but a genuine pleasure amidst a litany of troubles, an invitation to bracket anxieties and keep self-criticism at bay, a small resting place for hope in a sea of disappointment. We appreciate the slice of toast, the friendly encounter, the long hot bath, the spring morning - and properly keep in mind how much worse it could, and probably will one day, be.

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