All posts tagged: Myth

Mestra review: A brief but rewarding retelling of this lesser-known Greek myth

Mestra review: A brief but rewarding retelling of this lesser-known Greek myth

Published by Daniella Wilson

A star rating of 5 out of 5. Many authors would struggle to pack a punch in just 65 pages. But not Madeline Miller. With her new short story Mestra, she is able to paint a lasting, vivid picture with scant few words. This book retells the Greek mythology of the Thessalian princess who’s gifted with the power of shape-shifting, and uses her abilities to survive her cursed father Erysichthon’s eternal hunger. He is a king in Thessaly who committed a terrible crime of chopping down a sacred grove belonging to the goddess Demeter. As punishment for his recklessness, Demeter cursed him with an insatiable appetite. Upon hearing of Mestra’s new gift, Erysichthon came up with a plan: to sell his daughter to various husbands for food. She would escape by shapeshifting, and the story would begin again. Where retellings have differed is in the ending. While Erysichthon would always end up eating himself, Mestra’s ending was dubious. In Ovid’s telling, she finds stability through her marriage to Autolycus. It’s in this space that Miller …

The Myth of Catharsis and Bottling It Up

The Myth of Catharsis and Bottling It Up

Published by Jenni Sidey

A key concept in the psychoanalytic tradition was catharsis. Breuer and Freud defined this as “the process of reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious awareness and allowing it to be expressed.”[1] Over many subsequent years, this concept appears to have morphed into the popular assumption that it’s “good to emote.” Repression of feeling was thought to keep us locked in mental ill-health, while the expression of feelings could release us into well-being. This general acceptance that eliciting emotion is of itself therapeutic has been challenged in the past few decades among those working to understand trauma (for example, Babette Rothschild’s emphasis on the need to “titrate” the powerful emotional reactions of trauma-sufferers [2]). This insight has not yet spread throughout the whole field of counselling and psychotherapy practice, even though trauma lies at the core of such work. This is illustrated in the following example: Richard had joined a long-standing therapeutic group and was in his second session. He shared something about his experiences in a relationship which triggered another member’s …

The Myth of Perfect Knowledge

The Myth of Perfect Knowledge

Published by Daniella Wilson

The modern world owes a lot to the Enlightenment, the 18th-century intellectual movement that emphasized the power of reason. But the Enlightenment also created a myth: that we can get to know the objective world completely, with total clarity, as if we were looking at it from the outside. This myth is challenged by the Enlightenment’s greatest legacy—modern science. Reality is more complex than we expected. Physics—my trade, and perhaps the most objective among the sciences—questions the possibility of a full description of how things objectively are. An electron can be in a “quantum superposition,” so that to an observer, it doesn’t occupy just one location—and so can you, my reader. This does not mean that you could perceive being dislocated between two positions; as perceived by yourself, you are always in just one place. But an object’s properties may differ depending on who, or what, is looking at them—or may not even be defined at all. Properties are not simple features of things: They are relations between one thing and another. What we call …

The Alpha Fail: Debunking the Myth That Has Misled Men

The Alpha Fail: Debunking the Myth That Has Misled Men

Published by Jenni Sidey

Some ideas cement themselves into popular culture—the American dream, the tortured genius, the midlife crisis… And then there’s the concept of the “alpha male”. Picture a wolf pack: one big, aggressive male at the top fighting off challengers and keeping everyone else in line. It makes for a neat story about power, hierarchy, and masculinity. There’s just one problem. It’s a poor description of how a wolf pack functions. The term “alpha male” was popularised by the biologist David Mech’s (1970) book The Wolf: The Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species. The idea that a dominant and aggressive male leads the wolf pack is compelling. It’s also based on a misunderstanding. The research underpinning the alpha male theory was based largely on wolves held in captivity. In the wild, wolf packs are typically organised into family units led by the parents of pups. As the biologist Marc Bekoff (2024) stresses, leading wolf packs and other groups of canine species isn’t about being highly domineering, aggressive, or violent. To his credit, Mech (1999) acknowledged the …

The White-Collar Myth

The White-Collar Myth

Published by Daniella Wilson

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. A New York City ferry terminal in the late 1860s: Commuters issue forth into Lower Manhattan’s maze of streets. They move in distinct waves through the morning. First come the working-class employees in their flannel shirts, off to jobs in factories and shops for little pay. Then around 7 a.m., the crowd shifts, and the clothing with it. “The shirts of the passengers begin to whiten and raiment to improve,” the New-York Tribune reporter and occasional Atlantic contributor Junius Henri Browne observed. These were the office workers—the “salesmen, accountants, clerks, most of whom are young and seem hopeful.” Unlike the manual laborers before them, these men strode confidently into their days, carried forward by visions of partnerships, financial success, and “princely incomes.” Browne was witnessing the great sartorial and social divide that would define basic American ideas about work and status. Although not a sociologist in any modern sense, he was reckoning with a question …

The myth of genius, and who it intentionally leaves out

The myth of genius, and who it intentionally leaves out

Published by Jenni Sidey

A philosopher who walked away from an elite academic career to spend 3 years washing dishes in a monastery says that intellectual life has nothing to do with degrees.  Zena Hitz argues that the real philosophers are taxi drivers, office clerks, and prisoners: Everyday people who exist outside the cult of academia. This video The myth of genius, and who it intentionally leaves out is featured on Big Think. Source link

A Long-Standing Theory of Childbirth Is a Myth

A Long-Standing Theory of Childbirth Is a Myth

Published by Daniella Wilson

As billions of people can attest, giving birth is hard for humans. Our infants have an exceptionally large head for their body size and yet have to squeeze through a very narrow pelvis. Appendages can get stuck; bones can fracture. At worst, the consequences can be lethal for mothers or babies. Until recently, many researchers believed that our species weathered that particular hardship alone: Other primates, they supposed, didn’t need to strike the same compromise between super-brains and walking upright, and so could birth babies with relative ease. But new evidence has started to challenge the notion that human childbirth is uniquely dangerous. A new paper published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution offers one of the most compelling cases to date against that assumption—showing that other primates, too, must push their babies through some seriously restricted spaces, contributing to infant-death rates that can exceed 34 percent. Humans have long put ourselves on an evolutionary pedestal—“We always think we are special,” Nicole Webb, an evolutionary biologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, …

Effortlessness Is a Myth

Effortlessness Is a Myth

Published by Jenni Sidey

When Roger Federer gave the commencement address on a rainy Sunday at Dartmouth in 2024, he said something the graduates did not expect from a man whose tennis game was so smooth people frequently called it “effortless.” He hated that word. “Effortlessness is a myth,” he told them. He had won almost 80 percent of the 1,526 singles matches he played — but across all of them, he had won only 54 percent of the individual points. One of the greatest athletes who ever lived lost nearly half of every point he ever played. What he had built was a psychological skill: the capacity to lose a point, release it, and walk to the next one with a quiet mind. To fail at the highest possible rate and stay regulated enough to keep going. It is the work of building a self that can tolerate failure. I think about this a great deal, because we are quietly building the opposite. The conversation about young people and technology has narrowed to a worry: What are screens …

Fact or myth? Ticks can drop out of trees like paratroopers.

Fact or myth? Ticks can drop out of trees like paratroopers.

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. The official start of summer is days away, and after a particularly long and cold winter in parts of the United States, many are ready to enjoy the outdoors again without risking frostbite. Warm weather comes with another type of bite, however. One that comes with an unwanted guest attached to your body. Along with mosquitos and flies, ticks are among our most disliked insects. However, their infamy comes with a lot of myths, and with tick season in full swing, it’s important to straighten out a few misconceptions.  False: Ticks can fly If you’ve heard that ticks can fly and/or jump, you’ll be relieved to know that they can’t. In fact, their legs are pretty unimpressive appendages, according to Escher Cattle, an …

Sex, austerity and mugs of vodka: how the Greek myth Iphigenia became a Welsh-language film sensation

Sex, austerity and mugs of vodka: how the Greek myth Iphigenia became a Welsh-language film sensation

Published by Sam Flores

The one-woman play Iphigenia in Splott was first performed in 2015. Eleven years on, Gary Owen’s reworking of Greek tragedy, transplanted to working-class Splott in Cardiff, has earned its place as a modern classic. It reimagines the mythological heroine Iphigenia as Effie, a young woman filling her days drinking vodka out of a mug in her dressing gown. The play is about poverty and social inequality, closures and cuts, services scraped to the bone by austerity. Its most recent five-star Guardian review in 2022 advised: “Everyone should see this.” One person who did was Leisa Gwenllian, a final-year drama student from north Wales. “I was on the front row with my mate,” says Gwenllian, 24, drinking mint tea in a London hotel. “I can remember thinking: wow! A Welsh woman with a strong Cardiff accent on the stage at the Lyric [in Hammersmith, London], that’s what it’s all about.” At the Oxford School of Drama, Gwenllian was mainly studying the classics alongside people with different accents and backgrounds from her own. “To see yourself on …