Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi Explains Why the Source of Happiness Lies in Creativity and Flow, Not Money

Speaking at the TED Conference, famed psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks what’s the source of happiness? And his answer comes down to this: Beyond a certain point (and it’s not very far), money doesn’t affect happiness too much. Rather, as his research shows, we tend to be most happy when we get immersed, almost lost in, being creative and performing at our best. It’s an ecstatic state that he calls “flow.” The video runs about 19 minutes, and is well worth your time. Some book titles worth checking out include: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience or Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life.

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Here it goes, and it’s added to our YouTube playlist.

From Washington to Lincoln – The Geography of US Presidential Elections

We have now posted Lecture 2 of our ongoing course, The Geography of US Presidential Elections, presented by Stanford’s Continuing Studies program. You can download it via TunesU here (in high res) or you can watch it embedded below. This week, Professor Martin Lewis takes you through America’s early formative elections, starting with Washington and Jefferson’s electoral victories and moving through the transformative Civil War. To watch the first lecture, click here. And to ask Professor Lewis questions about the second lecture, just click here. And keep in mind, this is all free. For more free courses, check out our big collection here.

 

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Ninth Circuit Judge on The Dating Game Way Back When

The name Alex Kozinski probably won’t mean much to many of you. But if you’re a lawyer, or a Supreme Court watcher, you’ll know that he’s the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (a really prestigious position). Rather recently, he’s been associated with a highly visible pornography scandal related to one of his cases, and now this. A video documenting his appearance long ago on The Dating Game, a wonderful piece of Americana. And the best part is that he beat Squiggy from the other slice of Americana, Laverne & Shirley. Oh, the endless wealth of YouTube:

Harold Pinter’s “The Dumb Waiter” Animated

and condensed…

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Paul Krugman On The Financial Crisis And the Coming Recession

How does the new winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics think the US government should manage the big looming recession? And does the New Deal offer a model for confronting this new jam? Have a listen: iTunesRss FeedMP3.

Free Tech How-To Books

Thanks to BoingBoing, you can get free access (for 30 days) to three popular tech manuals:

• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
• Learning Perl
• Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML

Get details here

Electing a US President in Plain English

We’re less than two weeks away (finally, at long last) from the next US presidential election, and that means that it’s a good time to decipher America’s convoluted electoral system. So here’s a piece from The Common Craft Show, which does it in a fairly creative way:

 

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