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Sometime today, in a windowless conference room at a research university, around a dozen professors will settle around a long laminate table with a printed dossier at every chair and a carafe of coffee. The agenda says they are deciding whether a colleague gets promoted. Somewhere around minute forty, a senior professor will raise his hand and offer the room a piece of social media gossip about the candidate. He has not checked it. Nobody else at the table will check it either.

You don’t have to enjoy soccer to realize that the World Cup is a lesson in cultural psychology. Two minutes after the final whistle in Dallas, while half the crowd was still filming itself losing its mind, a cluster of fans in blue Japan jerseys pulled blue garbage bags out of their backpacks and started working their way down the rows, picking cups and wrappers off the concrete seat by seat. No single activist organized it.

Provoked is for playful, intelligent, discerning readers. If you like what I’m doing and want to support this work, join for free or upgrade with benefits. She wakes at 5 a.m. without an alarm, on purpose, as one more self-inflicted punishment for entering the adulting phase.

The diner sat off a two-lane road in La Posta, up in the mountains east of San Diego. It’s the type of place where people spread out a physical version of the daily newspaper while sucking down white mugs of coffee. Tiger Woods slid into a booth with five or six Navy SEALs who spent the day letting him fire their weapons. They walked him through a building with simulations of gun-toting villains and scared civilians. One of the SEALs jumped out of a plane with Tiger strapped in close.

Gory details can be found - here As fewer people read books and long articles, there is a growing preference for short videos. Though I tend to be blirtatious, enjoy my experiment with a new feature called One Minute of Psychological Science. A slight complication emerged while trying to nail the inaugural video in a single recording. It landed at 2 minutes and 59 seconds. Apparently my relationship with the concept of one minute is closer to a cult leader’s misunderstanding of captive audience.

Make sure Provoked issues land in your inbox by subscribing as a free or premium member There are two people at the end of their lives and each is at peace with how things went. One is a monk. He has spent decades in a stone room that smells of cold candle wax, waking at the same hour, sitting the same long stretches, feeling mostly one emotion which he would call contentment. The other is the friend everyone has, the one who has been bitten by something on three continents (looking at you RBD).

A note on the title, for my dead mother and grandma Selma and anyone else worried. I checked on your behalf and tripping balls has little to do with testicles. Those balls are an intensifier, the same one revving inside balls-out and balls to the wall. In origin story I, balls-out is the centrifugal governor on a steam engine, a spinning contraption with two metal balls that fling outward as the thing redlines. Full speed, balls flung horizontal.

There was a deli across the street from our apartment but the problem was the street between. It was sixty feet of road, two lanes wide, and a couple of corners you did not want to be standing on when the nasty looking van slowed down. My twin brother and I weren’t allowed to cross it which put the deli and everything desirable inside it out of reach (I only wish it was out of mind).

On a Monday morning in the mid-1990s, a young woman walked across the Cornell arts quad and slowly came to understand that the skin around her mouth had gone missing. The strip above her upper lip had been worked clean off. The matching patch below her bottom lip, sliding down toward the chin, had received the identical treatment, so that she galloped through her day with raw pink borders framing her face like a circle of poorly cooked shrimp.

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