Laura Pike Seeley

Lareau contrasts natural growth with “concerted cultivation,” where parents direct the minutiae of a child’s life. That means moms and dads manage enrichment activities and playdates and generally ensure most of a child’s time is occupied with academic, athletic or self-improvement.

The startling findings were that people made better choices when not thinking at all, especially in complex consumer settings.

The researchers argued that this is because our unconscious processes are less constrained than conscious processes, which make huge demands on our cognitive system. Unconscious processes, such as intuition, function in ways

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Nowadays, whenever I feel scared in the face of a decision and yearn for the safety of an optimizing formula, I try to remind myself that there’s another way of feeling safe. It’s not about perfection, about invulnerability, about control. It’s about leaning into the fact that we are imperfect and vulnerable creatures and that even when we’re... See more

I think that the era of rigid zonal segregation is over. No longer can a city be simply divided into a series of discrete places: the place where I work, the place where I live, and the place where I want to spend my leisure time. This simplistic planning notion is about to change. People want to live in closer proximity to their work, and they... See more