Plant life! Animal love! Prison workout! Potassium Iodide! Food surplus! Teen sleep! Nuclear disaster! And the key to happiness! It's your Tuesday Science Watch, where we watch science—from within a radiation-proof bubble!
You know what rules about being happy? Besides not ever staying up till three in the morning wondering if it's even morally right to bring a child into the world, at this point? This is what rules about happiness: You live longer! And you're healthier! Yes, a review of more than a hundred studies confirms: Happy people have every right to be smug, the bastards.
The British government is spending nearly $80 million to track 40,000 households over the next 20 years to "Understand Society," as the study is called. The first published findings give us a breakdown of how to be the perfect couple.
The Way We Live Now: spreading fitfully. Moving warily. Gazing wistfully. Charging droopily. It would be an overstatement to say that good times are here; nevertheless, we can safely say that bad times are... somewhere. Here? That wouldn't be good.
In your feel-good Labor Day science column: A new study from Princeton University tells 14.9 million unemployed Americans what they already know—money can buy you happiness! Oh, you don't make $75,000 a year? Just kill yourself then.
It's spring. Which means inevitably that wherever you are, someone will be asking jovially what it is about sunny days that means everyone gets more attractive. We're sick of this conversation. So here's why.
Gretchen Rubin seemed to have it all a few years back. She was a graduate of Yale Law, had established herself as a bestselling author, was happily married to her law school sweetheart, had two beautiful girls, lived on Park Avenue, and also happened to be the daughter-in-law of Robert Rubin, the fantastically wealthy former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs and Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. (Bonus!) And yet she still wasn't happy. So, naturally, Rubin took a year off to clear up her "midlife malaise."
Your best bet for remaining in America and being satisfied with your lot? Don't be an uneducated white woman. Men, non-whites, and the college-educated are all happier than they were in the early 1970s, according to a new study. Americans, though, are hardly the happiest people on the planet: The US ranked 16th on the happy list; Denmark was rated the most cheerful nation and Zimbabwe came in dead last. Guess we'll see you in Copenhagen next week! [LiveScience]
Few real estate brokers did better during the boom times than Paula Del Nunzio, the Brown Harris Stevens mega-agent who unloaded eight-figure townhouses to the likes of hedge funders Phil Falcone, Jim Chanos, and John Paulson and our fave Tblisi-born cabdriver-turned-real estate baron, Tamir Sapir. With New York's real estate market headed off a cliff, it's unlikely that Del Nunzio's record-setting deal—the sale of the Harkness Mansion to financier J. Christopher Flowers in 2006 for $53 million—will be surpassed any time soon. But is Flowers, who reportedly enjoys plays chess against himself, really happier than the rest of us because he gets to set up his chess board in a small corner of a magnificent 22,000-square-foot limestone mansion overlooking Central Park?
Those annoying people who are always smiling and laughing? It turns out that the best option may not be to avoid them: According to researchers from Harvard and the University of California, happiness is genuinely contagious. Weirdly, it's not simply that someone's cheerful mood rubs off on you if you're in their company. The happiness levels of people up to three degrees away in your social network—whom you might not even know—influences your own. So go ahead and start cultivating the charmed and fortunate. Just don't tell any West Coasty types that their New Age babble about good vibes and the transferral of emotional energy might actually be true.
Director Todd Solondz has brilliantly captured the banality, ugliness, sadness, and, ultimately, strange beauty of modern American living in films like Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, and Palindromes. He's weird, but good! But now, we fear, he may just be weird. He's doing a sequel to Happiness, which is about miserable suburbanites who do things like rub semen on walls and rape little boys, and he's casting very erratically. The latest to be enlisted are Charlotte Rampling, the English French film star, and, um, Paris Hilton. Yes the heiress and tabloid magnet blonde lady is joining Rampling, Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle!), Rome actor Ciaran Hinds, and Allison Janney for the film which is "part sequel, part variation" to the 1998 original. I guess it's sort of fitting, given that Hilton herself is banal, ugly, sad, and, ultimately, strangely beautiful. No word yet on who Hilton will be playing, though the production is currently filming in San Juan, Puerto Rico so we hope that maybe she's playing a young tourist who gets sold into white slavery and shipped off somewhere on a boat and she spends most of the time crying but eventually learns to oddly love her captors and then at the end, over a montage of lovely images of sad yet hopeful people, she delivers a haunting closing monologue about the transience of all things.
