Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
-
Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity - An overview of research into the impact of increasing political polarization. It mostly focuses on the role of sorting, the increasing alignment between party and ideology. “The increasingly clear partisan cues have been reinforced by an increasingly diverse set of media sources, many of which are overtly partisan and/or misleading. Partisans are now able to protect themselves from any exposure at all to the arguments and opinions of the other side. Already geographically and culturally isolated, these citizens are also informationally isolated. Americans are not only sorted into homogeneous parties, they have diminishing opportunities even to hear the arguments of their political opponents. The news media allow voters to listen only to the narratives of their own side, causing them to become increasingly consistent in understanding whose team they are on, and which other teams are on their side. Though the audience for this type of media represents a small portion of the American population, Matthew Levendusky (2013) has found that ‘partisan media have multiplier effects that allow a relatively limited medium that speaks to a narrow segment of the market to have an outsize influence on American Politics’.”
-
Runs in the Family - What a crazy story.
-
The Myth of ‘I’m Bad at Math’ - You rarely hear someone say they are bad at reading, why is math is it OK for people to accept that they are bad at math?
-
Why We Procrastinate When We Have Long Deadlines - “Longer deadlines can lead workers to think an assignment is harder than it actually is, which causes them to commit more resources to the work. This, in turn, increases how much they procrastinate and their likelihood of quitting”