Word: self
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...Indeed, billion-dollar industries revolve around our indefatigable obsession with celebrities. And now new scientific research has found that celebri-crushes are not only common but maybe even healthy: a study published Sept. 10 suggests that the act of celebrity worship may be a boon to some people's self-esteem...
Shira Gabriel, a psychologist at the University at Buffalo, conducted a series of three studies on celebrity worship, focusing specifically on how admiration from afar may affect the admirer's self-esteem. "It was seven or eight years ago during the Michael Jackson trial," she says, "and I was fascinated by the people who were obsessed with him, who flew to the trial and made banners. I thought, What would bring somebody to do something like that?" One possible reason, which Gabriel decided to explore, was the vicarious pleasure that regular people get from following the lives of famous people...
...Sartre would infamously declare, “There is total freedom of criticism in the U.S.S.R.” It is not difficult to understand, then, why an appalled and battered public found inspiration in Solzhenitsyn’s courageous if artless novels; many even recoiled from the labyrinthine self-indulgences of more “profound” writers.One problem with this moralistic praise for Solzhenitsyn is that it is ephemeral. His books, because they are topical artifacts of a vanished epoch, will probably be relegated to what Trotsky dubbed “the dustbin of history...
...Your preternatural confidence has always been an asset. As Gordon Brown vacillates, you appear determined and assured. But in power, you will no longer be viewed just in counterpoint but also in isolation. Don't be surprised if your clarity of purpose begins to read as haughtiness, your self-belief as arrogance...
Much of Cameron's strength derives from self-belief: not the fragile veneer of assurance acquired or affected by most politicians but a deep-down certainty that protects him from dark nights of the soul. "There's no massive thing I've done [where] I lie awake thinking I wish I'd never done that," he says. From a stable, loving family, sent to a school that instills a sense of entitlement in even its dullest pupils, Cameron seems never to have doubted that he was destined for great things. "He came to Oxford equipped with a much more complete...