The Moral Life of Babies

I loved this article in The New York Times that suggests that we are hard-wired to be fair and cooperative, even in infancy. Those "random acts of kindness" perhaps aren't so random after all...

We're Neither All Orchid nor All Dandelions, so says Dobbs

In an attempt to clarify the seemingly binary categories of "orchid" and "dandelion" temperments, David Dobbs in a conversation with David Shenk (also of The Atlantic) says, "(I)t would be a rare person that was all orchid, so to speak, or all dandelion."

I agree. While the orchid-dandelion metaphor is useful in expressing different levels of sensitivity among children and adults, it fails to capture the wide range of in-between where dandelion-ness makes way for orchid-ness, and vice versa.

I recommend reading Dobbs' and Shenk's lively conversation here.