The World Breaks Everyone

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929

Monica Lewinsky, TED Speech

Monica Lewinsky and the Shame Game, The New Yorker

The Hiltons, A Family Dynasty

In the end, what matters is the relationships we would have had: with ourselves and others, especially family members.

Every father could be nicer to his children. Because every child looks for love and approval from her/his father in one way or another.

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope.”

“Hilton began to understand that a staff of contented employees usually resulted in a thriving business.”

“Find your own particular talent; Be big; Be honest; Live with enthusiasm; Don’t let your possessions possess you; Don’t worry about your problems; Look up to people when you can–down to no one; Don’t cling to the past; Assume your full share of responsibility in the world and, finally, Pray consistently and constantly.”

“We have so much correspondence from him to people saying, ‘You helped me when times were tough, now I would like to help you. Would you like a job? Or would you like to buy stock in the company? What can I do to repay you for helping me?'”

“Because he had so stubbornly refused to default on his many bills, he found his reputation greatly enhanced among creditors and future backers.”

“He would find a way, especially when there seemed to be no way.”

“The essence of Communism is the death of the individual and the burial of his remains in a collective mass.”

“Sometimes it would be nice if he would just see the best in me, instead of the worst”

“The secret of her long marriage, was ‘I accept him for who he is, and he does the same for me.'”

“Personality and character are important. It’s not just the deal that matters, it’s the people in it. In fact, the best of deals fall apart because the people in them have a deficit of character.”

‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry–Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929

The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty by J. Randy Taraborrelli

Music Heals: Remember the Music

Verse 1:
Follow my hands
I teach you how to play
I’ll be patient with you
Someone who is patient with me
Ahh

Bridge:
There always be chance that you could hit the wrong note
Everybody could laugh and make you think you won’t grow
You don’t ever give up, it’s not the end of the world

Chorus:
You live and you learn
Even when you think that times get hard
Temporary high
All you gotta do is make that call
I’ll be there
Don’t be scared
You don’t got to lose it
Remember the music (2x)

Verse 2:
In the past it’s been hard as hell
You don’t know know how much pain I felt
But everybody got a story to tell
Sometimes you got to face the music and play by yourself

Bridge:
But There always be chance that you could hit the wrong note
Everyone could laugh and they don’t wanna hear no more
You don’t ever give up
It’s not the end of the world

Chorus:
You live and you learn
Even when you think times get hard
Temporary high
All you gotta do is make that call
I’ll be there
Don’t be scared
You don’t got to lose it
Remember the music

Remember
It’s the answer
Don’t you ever forget the music
No

Chorus:
You live and you learn
Even when you think times are hard
It’s temporary high
All you gotta do is make that call
I’ll be there
Don’t be scared
You don’t have to lose it
Remember the music

Psychology of The Eldest Child

‘Empire’ Star Trai Byers On Andre’s ‘New Path’ With Jennifer Hudson And Rhonda’s Betrayal

Andre’s anger has been building throughout the season. As the eldest and most qualified son, he thought he was a shoo-in for becoming Lucious’ successor in the company, but when it became clear his father had a different vision for Empire, he started to break down. Many “Empire” fans didn’t realize how serious Andre’s bipolar disorder was until that harrowing scene in the recording studio when Andre held a gun up to his head — and pulled the trigger.

That beautifully tragic moment was a collaboration between Byers and co-creator Danny Strong, who wrote and directed the episode. Up until that scene, Byers said Andre’s character was still under question. “Is he the guy that we love to hate or do we just hate him?” he said.

“The moment it really sunk in for me is when we shot the scene in the studio and I had the gun to my head,” Byers added. “I asked Danny [Strong] — because they don’t let you do this kind of stuff on primetime television — if Andre could pull the trigger. I needed to pull that trigger; we needed to show that Andre was way past his limits. And given what was happening with his disorder and his family and feeling left out, he needed to not be a coward about this and pull that trigger. And Danny went with it with me, and thank god Fox allowed it, because it really helped set up Andre’s breakdown.”

Byers also credits his co-star Henson for inspiring him to push his boundaries and go outside of his comfort zone. “It’s because of her and her fearlessness that we collectively feel the freedom to be fearless as well, and that certainly played a role in the elevator scene,” he said.

The elevator scene was yet another example of how powerful “Empire” can be when it hits the brakes every once in a while. The heartbreaking moment found three Lyon boys trapped in a elevator together and lead to one of the season’s most memorable moments.

“In order for me to pay homage to Andre and really do justice to him, I disassociated myself from them that day,” Byers told MTV News of filming that particular scene. “I basically didn’t talk to them until we started filming. Fortunately for me, I’m working with Jussie Smollett and Bryshere Grey, and they’re at the top of their game in this elevator scene. It’s all about the love. It just came together in a magical way.”

It also made viewers realize the depth of Andre’s sadness. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of sympathy and empathy that Andre gets now from a group of people who hated him three weeks ago,” he said. “It’s almost like the public forgot him just like his family forgot him. It’s a good lesson for people to pay attention. Things aren’t always what they seem.”

Why Do We Dream?

To Ease Painful Memories, Study Hints by Christine Dell’Amore

Dreaming may act like a type of overnight therapy, taking the edge off painful memories, a new study says.

In a recent experiment, brain scans of people who viewed emotionally provocative pictures and then went to sleep showed that the part of the brain that handles emotions powered down during rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep—the stage in which dreams occur.

What’s more, the subjects reported that the images had less of an emotional charge the morning after. This suggests that REM sleep may help us work through difficult events in our lives, the researchers say.

Why we sleep is still unknown, and even more elusive is the relationship between sleep and our emotional well-being, said study leader Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

(Read about the mysteries of why we sleep in National Geographic magazine.)

There’s already anecdotal evidence for sleep’s therapeutic benefits—such as the oft-repeated adage that a person will go to bed and feel better in the morning, Walker said.

And clinical data show that psychiatric mood disorders, from anxiety to post-traumatic stress disorder, can lead to sleep abnormalities.

“Despite that suggested interplay, we’ve understood remarkably little about the basic brain science that may underlie a relationship between our emotional lives and our sleeping lives,” he said.

As his new research now suggests, “it’s not time that heals all wounds—it’s REM sleep.”

Sleeping on It Helps

For the experiment, Walker and colleagues divided 34 healthy young volunteers into two groups. People in each group viewed and rated their reactions to 150 images shown at 12-hour intervals while an MRI scanner measured brain activity.

The pictures, which have been used in hundreds of studies, ranged from bland objects—i.e., a kettle on a counter top—to gory pictures of people maimed in accidents, Walker said.

One group viewed the pictures in the morning and again in the evening without sleeping in between. The other group saw the same images before a full night of sleep and again the next morning.
The volunteers who slept between viewings reported a much milder emotional reaction to the images after the second viewing.

(See “Dreams Make You Smarter, More Creative, Studies Suggest.”)

MRI scans performed during REM sleep revealed that brain activity fell in the amygdala—the emotion-processing part of the brain—possibly allowing the more rational prefrontal cortex to soften the images’ impact. (See an interactive brain map.)

In addition, recordings of the subjects’ electrical brain activity during sleep made with electroencephalograms showed a decrease in the levels of brain chemicals linked to stress.

When people experience an emotional event, stress chemicals are released to flag and prioritize that event, essentially reminding the brain to work through it during sleep, according to Walker, whose study appeared November 23 in the journal Current Biology.

“Somewhere between the initial event and the later point of recollecting, the brain has performed an elegant trick of divorcing emotions from memory, so it’s no longer itself emotional,” Walker said.

“That’s what we mean by overnight therapy.”

(Take National Geographic magazine’s sleep quiz.)

Dreaming Not an Emotional Cure-All?

But sleep expert David Kuhlmann said the team may have “overstepped its bounds slightly on the conclusions.”

For instance, dreaming is not a cure-all for emotional stress, said Kuhlmann, medical director for sleep medicine at Bothwell Regional Health Center in Sedalia, Missouri.

Though dreaming “helps improve the ability to handle stressful situations,” it’s unlikely that REM sleep will make bad memories totally dissipate, he said.

However, he said “it certainly is an interesting finding in this limited subject size in an artificial environment.”

Both experts agreed that sleep is often ignored in the medical profession, even as research has been revealing its multiple health benefits.

(Related: “Naps Clear Brain’s Inbox, Improve Learning.”)

And study leader Walker noted that the latest work is “yet another reminder that sleep is not a state where our brain is dormant and not doing anything.”

Instead research is showing that sleep has many important functions, “and one of those benefits is to help us maintain our emotional and mental health.”

Lack of Sleep Causes

Sleep is not a waste of time. Lack of sleep causes bad things such as poor judgement, increased impulsiveness, poor memory. Morning persons are not necessary more successful, no evidence. Sleep is key to both mental and physical healthiness. Sleep disruption can cause or worsen mental illnesses.

“Sleep is God. Go worship.” — Jim Butcher, Death Masks

Why Doctors Give in on Vaccines

The Medical Surrender of Vaccines

Even in an era defined by profound technological advances, the practice of medicine remains an art as well a science—a fact that often frustrates both physicians and their patients. For many conditions, solutions are not simple and there are rarely easy answers. There are exceptions, of course; perhaps the most notable among them has been the success of vaccines.

Until recently, in the United States and other wealthy countries, diseases such as measles, pertussis and rotavirus—which kill hundreds of thousands of infants in the developing world each year—had virtually disappeared. Both measles and pertussis are now back, largely because increasing numbers of children remain unvaccinated. Vaccines are the most powerful public-health tool that pediatricians possess. Unfortunately, there are people (a minority, but a dangerous one) who just don’t care.

Many of these people don’t approve of the vaccine schedule set out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they seek to spread the shots over a longer time period than the one recommended. This has presented American pediatricians with a stark new challenge to their Hippocratic Oaths. Which does more harm: delaying scheduled vaccines and reducing their effectiveness, or refusing to delay and running the risk that parents will simply not vaccinate their children at all?

It’s a terrible choice, forced almost wholly by the notion (which is demonstrably untrue) that if a child receives “too many vaccines too soon” it could overwhelm his or her immune system. A study published this week in the journal Pediatrics provides the best proof yet that a large majority of doctors agree to the delays. Ninety-three per cent of those surveyed for the study reported that they had been asked, at least once, to delay vaccines. The physicians acquiesce in overwhelming numbers—two thirds said they do so at least occasionally—even though most of them don’t want to, and even though they are aware that data clearly show that such delays put their patients (and those around them) at increased risk.

Nobody can dispute that the number of vaccines has grown significantly. A hundred years ago, children received a single vaccine: smallpox. By 1962, that number had grown to five (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, and the M.M.R.). Today, the C.D.C. advises that children be vaccinated for fourteen diseases before age six, on a recommended schedule that usually includes twenty-nine shots, sometimes several at once. Vaccines worry parents, in part because of of an old, unfounded, and ultimately discredited theory that children who receive measles vaccines develop autism at higher rates than other children. (They don’t, as has been demonstrated in dozens of studies carried out throughout the world.)

That baseless concern, publicized by activists such as Jenny McCarthy, morphed into a movement to spread out the timing of vaccines in order to protect children from a possible shock to their immune systems. But there simply is no such threat. Because progress in molecular biology has made it possible to create vaccines with fewer antigens, children’s systems are now exposed to far less of a burden than was the case in the past. The smallpox vaccine, for example, contained two hundred proteins—all separate molecules. All together, the vaccines that children routinely receive today contain fewer than a hundred and fifty.

The number of bacteria that live on the nose of a newborn child or on the surface of his or her throat is in the trillions. “Those bacteria have between 2,000 and 6,000 immunological components and consequently our body makes grams of antibody to combat these bacteria,” Paul Offit, the chief of the infectious-diseases division at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has written. “The number of immunological challenges contained in vaccines is not figuratively, it is literally a drop in the ocean of what you encounter every day.” Offit has long been one of the nation’s most prominent proponents of vaccines—and he has long been vilified for his stance.

Pediatricians spend, on average, less than twenty minutes with each patient—often far less—and they usually have to cover a lot of ground. Finding the time for a lengthy discussion of vaccine safety is never easy. Moreover, at least one recent study suggests that certain efforts to correct false impressions about the dangers of vaccines actually make people less likely to get vaccinated. It appears, again for no good scientific reason, that simply knowing more about vaccines convinces many people to avoid them.

The days when patients stood by placidly as doctors told them what to do are over, and good riddance to them. We are far more capable of assembling information and deciding what is best for us or for our children than we ever have been. And we certainly have the energy to devote to our fear of disease. (Anyone who watched as the nation displayed hysteria over “our” Ebola epidemic, in which two people in a nation of three hundred and thirty million died, saw that.)

But the medical profession’s widespread surrender on vaccines is deeply troubling. And it all but guarantees that preventable illnesses will continue to harm people and put children’s lives in danger. An Internet connection doesn’t make us all experts, and it doesn’t make it easier to distinguish between useful data and lies. That’s why trained physicians and nurses are more essential today than they have ever been. Unfortunately, that is not a truth universally acknowledged—even by doctors.

The Key to Success? Grit

Be Nice To Be Hired

The richest CEO in private equity just wants to hire nice people

Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman may be aggressive when it comes to business, but, he says, he’s really a nice guy — and he likes his employees to be too.

“I don’t like people who are not nice,” he said at a leadership event on Tuesday, CNN Money reported.

And Schwarzman, who is the richest man in private equity, is quick to turn down candidates who lack the right personality traits — namely, niceness — when hiring for his star private-equity firm, Blackstone Group.

“They can be very, very smart, but they are the kind of person you wouldn’t want to spend time with or expose your people to,” he reportedly said.

That’s more important to him than, say, an MBA degree.

Schwarzman pointed to some of his executives who do not hold MBAs, such as Jon Gray, who runs the real-estate division.

“Jon’s got a gift. Obviously an MBA wouldn’t have improved it too much,” CNN Money quoted him as saying.