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...accounts difficult to know; he struggled with depression and appeared more comfortable around men than women. But Tripp, who worked with Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s and died in 2003 two weeks after turning in his manuscript, sniffs out sexuality in the most innocuous exchanges, such as an 1841 letter from Lincoln to Speed after the latter moved to Kentucky. "It begins without a single personal item," Tripp recounts, "but drones on in a 1,575-word account of a local murder trial. Hard to find anything less personal than that, yet it is precisely this kind of impersonal recounting...
Rules governing the agency aren't just murky. In the darkest corners, few even know what they are. While refusing to talk specifics, ex-CIA officials insist they obeyed the letter of the law. "We were not a bunch of cowboys," says James Pavitt, the recently retired Deputy Director of Operations. But the military will sometimes transfer high-value captives to the CIA for handling. And the CIA, in turn, has been known to outsource some of its most difficult cases to countries where laws are no impediment to torturers. Handing someone over to a nation where torture is common...
Another happiness booster, say positive psychologists, is performing acts of altruism or kindness--visiting a nursing home, helping a friend's child with homework, mowing a neighbor's lawn, writing a letter to a grandparent. Doing five kind acts a week, especially all in a single day, gave a measurable boost to Lyubomirsky's subjects...
...Internet. The single most effective way to turbocharge your joy, he says, is to make a "gratitude visit." That means writing a testimonial thanking a teacher, pastor or grandparent--anyone to whom you owe a debt of gratitude--and then visiting that person to read him or her the letter of appreciation. "The remarkable thing," says Seligman, "is that people who do this just once are measurably happier and less depressed a month later. But it's gone by three months." Less powerful but more lasting, he says, is an exercise he calls three blessings--taking time each...
...transitional" figure. Ratzinger, 77, may fill that bill. His doctrinaire ways have been tempered of late by a deft and more pragmatic approach to issues such as rising Western secularism and Islamic fundamentalism. During the recent U.S. controversy about giving Communion to pro-choice candidates, Ratzinger authored a careful letter to American bishops reasserting the Vatican's antiabortion stance without dragging the Holy See into election-year theatrics. "There was a stigma," said the Vatican official of Ratzinger. "He rises above that...