All posts tagged: colleague Olga Khazan

What We Do With Our Faces

What We Do With Our Faces

Published by skeptic

Why do Americans smile so much? Marco Goran Romano November 11, 2023, 10:02 AM ET This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. In 2016, my colleague Olga Khazan saw a cultural difference playing out on the faces of those around her. “Here’s something that has always puzzled me, growing up in the U.S. as a child of Russian parents,” she wrote. “Whenever I or my friends were having our photos taken, we were told to say ‘cheese’ and smile. But if my parents also happened to be in the photo, they were stone-faced. So were my Russian relatives, in their vacation photos. My parents’ high-school graduation pictures show them frolicking about in bellbottoms with their young classmates, looking absolutely crestfallen.” Were her Russian relatives simply less happy than her American friends? Not necessarily, it turns out: Research suggests that some societies view casual smiling as …

How corporate jargon can obscure reality

How corporate jargon can obscure reality

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Corporate jargon is grating. It can also both amp up and diminish the drama of corporate life, depending on the agenda of those in charge. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Euphemistic Bubble Wrap “Our office in Monrovia has a guy on the payroll whose job is catching snakes. That’s all he does. He goes to employees’ houses on a regular basis, through the yard, the garden, the hedges, catching snakes.” “What’s he called officially?” “The snake catcher.” “That’s remarkably direct,” I said. “They couldn’t come up with a buzz word for snake, it seems.” This perfect exchange comes from Don DeLillo’s 1982 novel, The Names, and it captures a dynamic I think about often: Jargon is so common in the world of white-collar work that to encounter direct, descriptive language can feel refreshing, even jarring. …

The Psychological Terms We Misuse

The Psychological Terms We Misuse

Published by skeptic

Boundaries, gaslight, attachment style, and other jargon that gets misinterpreted online Everett August 5, 2023, 8:35 AM ET This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. Boundaries. Gaslight. Attachment style. If you spend any time online these days, you’re likely familiar with a whole slew of jargon that, in another era, you might have only discovered in a niche book or in a therapist’s office. These sorts of terms can offer clarifying frameworks for life’s challenges, but as they float around in the ether of our conversations, they’re also prone to misinterpretation. Take the concept of boundaries. In a recent article, my colleague Olga Khazan wrote that the term has joined the annals of “misused psychology jargon”: “When you want someone to do something, throwing in the word boundary can lend the request a patina of therapeutic legitimacy.” As a Washington, D.C-based therapist told her, “I …