Word: allenate
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...brains aren't particularly up to the task. Go back thousands of years and think about the simpler times of human existence. "We had a few friends; we had to be scared of a few animals. A trillion didn't come up very often," says Temple University mathematician John Allen Paulos, whose book Innumeracy addresses the topic. "There is a sense that when numbers are too big or too small, the brain just shuts off," says Colin Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at the California Institute of Technology. "People either don't think about it at all or there...
...become more sensitized to other kinds of desperation? In a world so uncertain, maybe it's natural to lose one's emotional skin. It's too soon to tell if that's the case, but BPD does have at least one thing in common with the recession. As Dr. Allen Frances, a former chair of the Duke psychiatry department, has written, "Everyone talks about [BPD], but it usually seems that no one knows quite what to do about...
...Carrey comedy, and Seven Pounds, the Smith drama, could have emerged from the same screenwriting class. Premise: An ordinary man who's lost his wife has become remote from his family and friends. To resolve his ennui, he determines to become a do-gooder - Carrey's Carl Allen by answering in the affirmative to every vagrant request, Smith's Ben Thomas by choosing seven strangers whose lives he can drastically improve - and in the process he finds a new woman to give him hope or assuage his guilt...
...couldn't summarize Yes Man better than Carrey did on The Tonight Show on Tuesday, when he purported to fall asleep and offered this précis between snores: "Carl Allen is a guy who doesn't engage in life. Then he decides to say yes to everything, no matter how silly or deranged it is. Critics are calling it a panacea for our dark times we're living in." In a little swipe at the competition, Carrey said of Yes Man, "It's the only movie this weekend where nobody dies...
...again, not knowing what evil awaited them. Calling them or any defenseless people "passive victims" - even to refute such a notion - is ignorant, rude and insulting. It would have been more accurate and thoughtful to have said that some Jews found a way to fight back, and did. Richard Allen Cohen, CHICAGO...