Word: lerner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
EAST HADDAM, Conn. — In 1958, lyricist Alan Jay Lerner ’40 suggested to composer Frederick Loewe that they turn T.H. White’s novel about King Arthur, The Once and Future King, into a musical. “You must be crazy,” Loewe replied, “That king was a cuckold.” (A “cuckhold” is a fogeyish term for an adulteress’s husband.) Arthur had lost his wife, Guenevere, to his best friend, Lancelot. “Who the hell cares...
More people than he thought. Last weekend, a revival of Lerner and Loewe’s musical, “Camelot,” opened at the Goodspeed Opera House. Although the production is only in preview season, it is already a delight...
Anger, by contrast, usually makes people more willing to take risks. Harvard public-policy professor Jennifer Lerner has shown this in a series of papers. She and her colleagues gave random groups of people a classic risk test in which they were asked how they would respond to a disease outbreak expected to kill 600. The subjects were told that if program A were adopted, 200 people would be saved and 400 would die, and that if program B were adopted, there would be a one-third probability that all 600 would live and a two-thirds probability that...
...grand success. Of course, some people take on too much risk: the day trader who loses his house; the hedge funder who turns an investor's life savings into dust overnight. But right now policymakers should not be afraid of stoking our anger--and therefore our risk-taking. As Lerner has written, anger is associated with a desire to "change a situation for the better...
...scared Fear is the enemy of action. Lerner and Keltner showed the corrosive effects of fear in a 2001 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Those who scored high on measures of fear, they found, were consistently less willing to take risks during games and more likely to predict their lives would turn out badly. The fearful are far more pessimistic, and it's a short journey from pessimism to withdrawal...