Intellect Plus
Society
1,109 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 4 of 19.
- A 2010 study found day-to-day happiness stopped rising at about $75,000 a yearTwo Princeton professors followed 1,000 randomly chosen Americans and found that how people rated their lives on a one-to-ten scale kept climbing with income. Their everyday feeli…
- Neurotic people aren't slower on average, just far more erraticNeuroticism, one of the Big Five personality traits, describes how often and how intensely someone feels fear, anger, shame or gloom. Oddly, highly neurotic people match everyone …
- The bestseller that made open marriage famous mostly argued for something elseBefore 1972, sociologists used open marriage to mean simply choosing your own spouse. Then a bestselling book by Nena and George O'Neill, devoted mainly to trust and personal grow…
- The word pansexual was first coined by Freud's critics to mock his theoriesWhen pan-sexualism appeared in print in 1914, it had nothing to do with whom a person loves. Opponents of Sigmund Freud used it to ridicule his supposed belief that the sex instin…
- Psychiatry's list of sexual 'deviations' once put homosexuality at the very topBefore 1973, the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual classed homosexuality as a sexual deviation, first on its list. Its removal that year shows how unstable the …
- Japan invented the word skinship, and Korea's usage put it in the Oxford dictionaryTouch says things words cannot. A hug can trigger oxytocin and cut stress hormones, babies meet the world mainly through their skin, and primates spend up to a fifth of their day …
- America's top kennel club accepted pit bulls in 1935 only by renaming themIn the 1890s the American Kennel Club refused to register pit bull breeders' dogs because of their fighting past. By the 1930s it wanted a distinctly American breed with decades o…
- Everyone alive may share an ancestor who lived only about 2,000 years agoMitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam lived tens of thousands of years apart and far back in prehistory. But a mathematical model by Joseph T. Chang, Douglas Rohde and Steve Ol…
- The founder of Mother's Day spent years fighting the card and flower sellersAnna Jarvis created the American Mother's Day in 1908 as a church service honouring her late mother. Within two decades she was organising boycotts, threatening lawsuits against c…
- Do men really want sex more? It depends on how you measure desireA huge 2022 review of more than 620,000 people found that men report higher sex drives than women on average, yet the two distributions overlapped by 80%. A 2024 review went furth…
- Magneto's creators never thought of him as a villainMagneto debuted in The X-Men 1 in 1963 as a mutant menace attacking a missile base. Yet Stan Lee later said he never saw him as a bad guy, just someone striking back at bigotry, a…
- Has any society truly been ruled by women? It depends who's defining itBy the strict definition, a society where women hold nearly all power over men, most anthropologists say no clearly matriarchal society has ever been documented. But some scholars…
- In matrilineal cultures, a boy's key male relative may be his mother's brotherAmong the Akan of Ghana and Ivory Coast, some 20 million people, property and public office pass through the mother's line. A man is closely bound to his maternal uncle but only l…
- Miletus gave the world its first philosophers and the city grid planOn the Anatolian coast near the mouth of the Maeander, one Greek port produced Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, planted colonies around the Black Sea, and laid out streets in a…
- Before the Canon, Pachelbel was a family friend and teacher to the BachsToday Johann Pachelbel is remembered almost entirely for one piece, the Canon in D. In his own time he was a celebrated organist who taught Johann Sebastian Bach's eldest brother,…
- Joshua Reynolds ran a portrait factory and still made masterpiecesIn 2023, Joshua Reynolds's Portrait of Omai sold for 50 million pounds, more than anyone had ever paid for an eighteenth-century picture. The painter behind it ran a busy London s…
- Khatri merchants carried Punjabi trade from Bengal to Isfahan and AstrakhanAround 1670, a French traveller counted roughly 10,000 Indian merchants and moneylenders in the Persian city of Isfahan, and most of them were Khatris from Punjab. This community …
- How the Philippine House of Representatives grew from an 1898 revolutionary assemblyNo Asian country has a longer run with democratic institutions than the Philippines, and its lower house carries that history. The chamber traces its roots to a 1907 assembly unde…
- From Plato to pet dogs, thinkers have kept asking what binds people togetherGoethe compared lovers to chemicals that cannot help reacting, and Plato's dinner guests argued that love holds the whole universe in balance. Modern psychology is more careful, b…
- American attitudes to interracial marriage flipped within a single lifetimeIn 1958, 94 percent of Americans told Gallup they disapproved of marriage between people of different races. By 2021, 94 percent approved. Between those two polls came a landmark …
- Jo Frost turned the naughty step into a global television formatSix million viewers watched Supernanny in its first British year, as Jo Frost walked into chaotic homes and imposed clear rules, routines and the now famous naughty step. By 2014,…
- Many early colonists paid for the Atlantic crossing with seven years of unpaid labourLong before Ellis Island, huge numbers of young men and women sailed to colonial America as indentured servants. An employer paid the ship's captain for their passage; in return t…
- Homeschooling was the normal way to learn until compulsory school laws arrivedFor most of history children learned at home or as apprentices, and classroom schooling only became the norm in the developed world in the early 19th century. In the 1980s homesch…
- The word tavern and the first British pubs arrived with Roman roadsBritons were brewing ale before the Romans came, but it took the Roman road network to create the first roadside drinking houses, the tabernae, which gave English the word tavern.…
- Nearly three in ten Americans are cut off from a close relativeAn October 2022 YouGov poll found that 29 percent of Americans were estranged from a parent, child, sibling or grandparent. Estrangement is often treated as rare and shameful, so …
- How a remote desert town became the base of America's most notorious polygamist churchOn the morning of July 26, 1953, 102 police officers and National Guard soldiers descended on Short Creek, Arizona, and arrested the entire town, including 236 children. No Americ…
- George Washington willed shares to found a university; they became worthlessGeorge Washington spent his career urging Congress to build a national university in the capital, and when he died in 1799 he left shares in the Potomac Company to fund it. The sh…
- Helicopter parents now follow their children to job interviews and salary talksCollege administrators in the early 2000s noticed parents phoning each morning to wake students for class and complaining to professors about grades. As that generation moved on, …
- Codependency became a household word without ever becoming a diagnosisMillions of people describe themselves as codependent, and a 1986 bestseller made the word famous. Yet codependency has never appeared in the psychiatric manuals, and a 1994 revie…
- Why dowries follow the plough and bride prices follow the hoeWhether a marriage moves wealth from the bride's family or towards it may depend on how the fields are farmed. The anthropologist Jack Goody found dowries clustered in Eurasian so…
- Emperor penguins raise chicks through the Antarctic winter with no nest to findEmperor penguins breed in the harshest conditions any bird faces: air down to minus 40 degrees Celsius and winds up to 144 kilometres per hour. With no fixed nest to return to, ma…
- Marrying within the group can fool a DNA test into seeing closer cousinsConsumer DNA tests estimate kinship by how much genetic material two people share. In communities where people have married within the group for generations, family trees loop bac…
- For over two centuries, the word England in British law quietly included WalesUntil 1746 nobody could be sure whether a law mentioning England also covered Wales. So Parliament passed an act declaring that every past and future reference to England would, b…
- Piaget watched children think alone; Vygotsky insisted they learn alongside adultsAround eight months old, a baby starts lifting the blanket to find a hidden toy. Jean Piaget called that object permanence, one milestone in a ladder of thinking stages. His conte…
- Children's Day began as Rose Day in a Massachusetts church in 1857A pastor in Chelsea, Massachusetts held a special service for the young members of his congregation one June Sunday in 1857 and called it Rose Day. The idea spread and splintered,…
- Colonial Virginia's ministers complained churchgoers dozed, whispered and ogled fashionable womenEarly Anglican clergy in Virginia were not impressed by their flocks. Parishioners slept, gossiped, wandered in and out, and stared out the windows. With too few ministers to go r…
- The French call a stag night the burial of boyhood, and Germans smash platesThe pre-wedding send-off takes wildly different forms. French speakers call it the burial of a boy's life, Swedes once named it Sven's Eve, and in South Africa the groom is not su…
- Bengal cats are part wild leopard cat, which is why some places ban themThe Bengal is the only domestic cat with true rosettes, the ringed spots of a leopard. It inherited them from the Asian leopard cat, a small wild species crossed with house cats. …
- Brigham Young was a Vermont painter and carpenter before he led settlers to UtahBefore he founded Salt Lake City, Brigham Young was a barely schooled carpenter, glazier and house painter in upstate New York. One house he helped paint later belonged to the sta…
- Younger sons founded cadet branches, and some of those branches ended up on thronesUnder primogeniture, the eldest son took the crown, the lands and the income, while younger sons got scraps. Their descendants formed cadet branches, freer to go into trade, the a…
- Catnip evolved to repel insects, and about a third of cats ignore itThe chemical that sends cats rolling and purring is not really aimed at cats. Nepetalactone, the key compound in catnip, most likely evolved to keep plant-eating insects away, and…
- Hawaii was settled centuries later than archaeologists once believedFor decades, researchers thought Polynesian voyagers reached Hawaii anywhere from the 2nd to the 9th century. Then a 2010 study, using more reliable radiocarbon samples, moved the…
- The psychopathic genius is mostly a movie myth, research suggestsFilms love the brilliant, cold-blooded manipulator. Studies of antisocial personality disorder paint a less glamorous picture: the condition is linked to lower overall intelligenc…
- Aromantic people feel little romantic pull, and that says nothing about sexAromanticism describes experiencing little or no romantic attraction, and the word only entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018. It is often confused with asexuality, but th…
- Adultery laws were long about property and inheritance, not heartbreakThe word adultery shares its root idea with adulterate, to corrupt something pure. Old legal writers explained the link bluntly: an unfaithful wife might introduce another man's c…
- Why an American adult at 18 still cannot buy a beer until 21Turning 18 makes most people legal adults, free to sign contracts and control their own affairs. Yet in every US state they must wait until 21 to buy alcohol. The puzzle dissolves…
- Alimony exists because church courts could never truly end a marriageAlimony comes from the Latin for nourishment, the same root as alimentary. Its modern form grew out of English church courts, which could separate a couple but could not dissolve …
- For the Shona of Zimbabwe, a community includes its ancestral spiritsMost definitions of community stop at the living: neighbours, congregations, online forums. The Shona people of Zimbabwe count the ancestral spirits, midzimu, as members too. Acro…
- Want a rough corruption gauge? One study suggests checking ministers' waistlinesMeasuring graft is hard, so one study tried a blunt proxy: body fat. In post-Soviet states, how overweight cabinet ministers were tracked closely with more rigorous corruption mea…
- Your morning coffee may help fell trees on another continentWhere forests fall is not always where their products end up. A 2021 analysis estimated that consumption in G7 countries costs an average of 3.9 trees per person every year, often…
- Ancient Greek doctors' manuals quietly undercut the Spartan legend about disabled babiesThe grim story that Sparta discarded disabled newborns comes from Plutarch, writing some 700 years later and admitting his account was disputable. Greek physicians' own manuals te…
- Discrimination was once a compliment meaning good tasteCalling someone a person of discrimination used to praise their refined judgement. The word, from a Latin root meaning to distinguish, entered English in the early 17th century, a…
- Nations are growing more equal with each other while splitting apart insideGlobalisation has produced a paradox. Gaps between countries peaked in the 1970s, when the world split into rich and poor nations, and have narrowed since, so most people now live…
- Early film studios hid their actors' names to stop them asking for raisesFame feels like a Hollywood invention, yet historian Greg Jenner traces the first true celebrities to the early 1700s. Long before cinema, Lord Byron woke up famous, Liszt drove c…
- Most working children today labour for their parents, not for factoriesThe image of child labour is a Victorian mill or a sweatshop floor. The modern reality looks different: most child workers toil on farms or in informal trades, usually alongside f…
- Clubs and associations build democracy, except when they help dismantle itRobert Putnam argued that bowling leagues, choirs and charities knit the trust democracies run on. Weimar Germany is the awkward counterexample. Its crowded web of grievance-drive…
- In Tokugawa Japan, rich merchants officially ranked beneath the peasants who fed themWhich class sits on top is less natural than it looks. Medieval Europe placed merchants above peasants, while Tokugawa Japan put them explicitly below. Class hierarchies grew elab…
- Why an office clerk and a cleric share the same ancestor wordClerk once meant a person ordained to ministry. In the Middle Ages almost nobody but priests could read or write, so the words for churchmen and for literate record-keepers grew f…
- Charles II tried to shut England's coffee houses and backed down almost immediatelyIn 1675 King Charles II ordered coffee houses suppressed, blaming them for spreading scandalous rumours about his government. The order proved so unpopular it was withdrawn almost…
- The UN's nuclear watchdog began as a failed plan for a nuclear bankIn 1954 the United States proposed an international agency that would take custody of the world's fissile material, a kind of nuclear bank. Moscow refused unless disarmament came …