The Best Cure For Loneliness: A Pill Or A Seagull?
Links On Links: Our Roundup of Thinking, Writing and Data About Relationships
What Is Charisma? And How Can You Get It?
This NYT piece takes a run at defining, and explaining how to achieve the magic of charisma. Some of the advice may or may not be useful. But one of the conclusions is worth considering, and trying: “Aside from being humorous and engaging, charismatic people are able to block out distractions, leaving those who interact with them feeling as if time had stopped and they were all that mattered. They make people feel better about themselves, which leads them to return for future interactions, or to extend existing ones, if only to savor such moments.” It’s been said before, but it’s how you make people feel that counts (even if you can’t quite stop time).
A Critically Acclaimed New York Restaurant, Its Staff Of Teens And Post-Menopausal Women, And The Argument For Doing Things Differently
The Ringer goes on a lovely, long detour from sports and entertainment analysis with a feature on New York restaurant Kopitiam. The Malaysian spot in NYC’s Chinatown, an “energetic yet personal Malaysian all-day cafe that’s an antidote to the boring, scalable restaurants proliferating across New York,” per Eater, is beloved by critics and Instagrammers and, on the surface, emblematic of a neighborhood gentrifying into a nightlife destination. But founder/chef Kyo Pang and partner Moonlynn Tsai have dispensed with standard protocol, not just in the menu, but in staffing and overall mission.
The pair have made a practice of hiring neighborhood people — kids, mainly — and insisting the restaurant be as relevant to Chinatown’s existing community as it is to visitors. Ringer’s Charlotte Goddu writes: “Kopitiam’s waitstaff is roughly half high school students, many of whom had never worked in a restaurant before (or anywhere else, for that matter). The back-of-house staff, conversely, is made up mostly of elderly Malaysian women — Tsai calls them ‘the grandmas.’ Unintentionally, she ended up hiring a staff that functions almost like a family. She and Pang, she says, are like cool aunts or big sisters.”
The restaurant’s success is an argument for the value of community and questioning first principles in business. “You could ask why Tsai would hire a bunch of teenagers with no job experience,” Goddu writes. “But you could also ask why not. …Tsai says that having teenagers working the counter is the right thing for Kopitiam. ‘The vibe we’re going for here is very casual. It’s more about the heart and being kind,’ she explains. ‘I think the staff, being in that age range, may be a little less jaded from the real world. … They’re really excited to be with people and talk to people.’
Read the whole story.
Can A Pill Cure Loneliness? Should It?
As Nick Kroll’s Big Mouth and its hormone monsters have illustrated, our lives are more or less governed by the bewildering dance of chemicals through our endocrine system. The influence of hormones is felt and seen not only during puberty, but throughout adulthood and into old age.
We know that oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin are tied to our best feelings — love and connection. Over the last year, scientists have been studying the impact of the hormone pregnenolone on one of our worst feelings — loneliness. In a trial at the University of Chicago’s Brain Dynamics Lab, researchers are administering the hormone to lonely subjects, with the goal of producing a treatment for a condition that we’ve now recognized as a health hazard, and an epidemic. The trial raises some big, uncomfortable questions around creating pharmacological solutions to normal, and to some degree, beneficial, human conditions. The scientist leading the trial says the intention isn’t to eliminate loneliness per se, but to dial down the overactive fear of interaction that drives a destructive feedback loop in people who are already lonely.
Sharon Kirky considers the study’s implications in this longer look at loneliness in The National Post.
Interspecies Friendship Of The Week: Sometimes All It Takes Is Bits Of Chicken and Some Painkillers
A Scottish woman found an injured seagull in her backyard seven years ago. With some compassion and a bit of improvised medical intervention (lean protein and a touch of medication) she started what became a 7-year-long friendship. ‘I never intended to have a friend like him but he must have trusted me.”
