How to Be Happier in 5 Research-Proven Steps, According to Popular Yale Professor Laurie Santos

Nature doesn’t care if you’re happy, but Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos does.

As Dr. Santos points out during the above appearance on The Well, the goals of natural selection have been achieved as long as humans survive and reproduce, but most of us crave something more to consider life worth living.

With depression rising to near epidemic levels on college campuses and elsewhere, it’s worth taking a look at our ingrained behavior, and maybe making some modifications to boost our happiness levels.

Psychology and the Good Life, Dr. Santos’ massive twice weekly lecture class that actively tackles ways of edging closer to happiness, is the most popular course in Yale’s more than 300-year history.

Do we detect some resistance?

Positive psychology – or the science of happiness – is a pretty crowded field lately, and the overwhelming demand created by great throngs of people longing to feel better has attracted a fair number of grifters willing to impart their proven methodologies to anyone enrolling in their paid online courses.

By contrast, Dr. Santos not only has that Yale pedigree, she also cites other respected academics such as the University of Chicago’s Nicholas Epley, a social cognition specialist who believes undersociality, or a lack of face-to-face engagement, is making people miserable, and Harvard’s Dan Gilbert and the University of Virginia’s Timothy Wilson, who co-authored a paper on “miswanting“, or the tendency to inaccurately predict what will truly result in satisfaction and happiness.

Yale undergrad Mickey Rose, who took Psychology and the Good Life in the spring of 2022 to fulfill a social science credit, told the Yale Daily News that her favorite part of the class was that “everything was cited, everything had a credible source and study to back it up:”

I’m a STEM major and it’s kind of my overall personality type to question claims that I find not very believable. Obviously the class made a lot of claims about money, grades, happiness, that are counterintuitive to most people and to Yale students especially.

With Psychology and the Good Life now available to the public for free on Coursera, even skeptics might consider giving Dr. Santos’ recommended “re-wirement practices” a peek, though be forewarned, you should be prepared to put them into practice before making pronouncements as to their efficacy.

It’s all pretty straightforward stuff, starting with “use your phone to actually be a phone”, meaning call a friend or family member to set up an in person get together rather than scrolling through endless social media feeds.

Other common sense adjustments include looking beyond yourself to help by volunteering, resolving to adopt a glass-is-half-full type attitude, cultivating mindfulness, making daily entries in a gratitude journal, and becoming less sedentary.

(You might also give Dr. Santos’ Happiness Lab podcast a go…)

Things to guard against are measuring your own happiness against the perceived happiness of others and “impact bias” – overestimating the duration and intensity of happiness that is the expected result of some hotly anticipated event, acquisition or change in social standing.

Below Dr. Santos gives a tour of the Good Life Center, an on-campus space that stressed out, socially anxious students can visit to get help putting some of those re-wirement practices into play.

Sign up for Coursera’s 10-week Science of Well-Being course here.

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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

The Making of Modern Ukraine: A Free Online Course from Yale University, Featuring 23 Lectures

Back in September, we mentioned that Yale historian Timothy Snyder had started teaching a course, The Making of Modern Ukraine, and putting the lectures online. With the fall semester now over, you can watch 23 lectures on YouTube. All of the lectures appear above, or on this playlist. Key questions explored by the course include:

What brought about the Ukrainian nation?  Ukraine must have existed as a society and polity on 23 February 2022, else Ukrainians would not have collectively resisted Russian invasion the next day.  Why has the existence of Ukraine occasioned such controversy?  In what ways are Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding dependent upon experiences in Ukraine?  Just how and when did a modern Ukrainian nation emerge?  Just how for that matter does any modern nation emerge?  And why some nations and not others?  What is the balance between structure and agency in history?  Can nations be chosen, and does it matter?  Can the choices of individuals influence the rise of much larger social organizations?  If so, how?  Ukraine was the country most touched by Soviet and Nazi terror: what can we learn about those systems, then, from Ukraine?  Is the post-colonial, multilingual Ukrainian nation a holdover from the past, or does it hold some promise for the future?

A syllabus for the course can be found on Snyder’s Substack.

The Making of Modern Ukraine will be added to our collection of Free Online History Courses, a subset of our meta collection: 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities

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Introduction to Ancient Greek History: A Free Online Course by Yale Historian Donald Kagan (RIP)

Earlier this month, Yale historian Donald Kagan passed away at age 89 in Washington D.C. In their obituary, The New York Times writes:

Professor Kagan was considered among the country’s leading historians. His four-volume account of the Peloponnesian War, from 431 B.C. to 404 B.C., was hailed by the critic George Steiner as “the foremost work of history produced in North America in the 20th century.”

He was equally renowned for his classroom style, in which he peppered nuanced readings of ancient texts with references to his beloved New York Yankees and inventive, sometimes comic exercises in class participation, like having students form a hoplite phalanx to demonstrate how Greek soldiers marched into combat.

If you never sat in Kagan’s classroom, you can still experience his teaching style online. Recorded in 2007, Kagan’s course Introduction to Ancient Greek History traces “the development of Greek civilization as manifested in political, intellectual, and creative achievements from the Bronze Age to the end of the classical period.” You can watch the 24 video lectures above, or find them on YouTube. The lectures also appear on iTunes in audio and video. Find the texts used in the course below. More information about the course, including the syllabus, can be found on this Yale website.

Introduction to Ancient Greek History will be added to our collection of Free Online History courses, a subset of our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600: A Free Online Course from Yale University

From Yale University comes an unfortunately timely course, Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600Recorded before the outbreak of COVID-19, the 25 lecture course, presented by historian Frank Snowden, covers the following ground:

This course consists of an international analysis of the impact of epidemic diseases on western society and culture from the bubonic plague to HIV/AIDS and the recent experience of SARS and swine flu. Leading themes include: infectious disease and its impact on society; the development of public health measures; the role of medical ethics; the genre of plague literature; the social reactions of mass hysteria and violence; the rise of the germ theory of disease; the development of tropical medicine; a comparison of the social, cultural, and historical impact of major infectious diseases; and the issue of emerging and re-emerging diseases.

You can watch the lectures on YouTube above, or on iTunes (VideoAudio). You can also read Snowden’s related book: Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present.

If you want to hear what Snowden has to say about COVID-19, we have two interviews below.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: Epidemics in History

How Will COVID-19 Change the World? Historian Frank Snowden on Epidemics From the Black Death to Now

Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600 will be added to our list of Free Online History courses, a subset of our metacollection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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A Free Online Course from Yale University Explains How the World Lapsed into the Politics of Fear & Resentment

“How did we get from the huge euphoria that followed the fall of communism in the early 1990s to our present politics of fear and resentment, and what are the prospects going forward?” These questions and more get answered in Yale’s free course, “Power and Politics in Today’s World.”  Taught by Professor of Political Science Ian Shapiro, the course “provides an examination of political dynamics and institutions over this past tumultuous quarter century, and the implications of these changes for what comes next. Among the topics covered are the decline of trade unions and the enlarged role of business as political forces, changing attitudes towards parties and other political institutions amidst the growth of inequality and middle-class insecurity, the emergence of new forms of authoritarianism, and the character and durability of the unipolar international order that replaced the Cold War.”

You can watch the lectures on Youtube, or stream them all above. The syllabus and reading list can be found here.

“Power and Politics in Today’s World” will be added to our meta collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Take Free Courses on African-American History from Yale and Stanford: From Emancipation, to the Civil Rights Movement, and Beyond

Take Free Online Courses on African-American History from Yale and Stanford: From Emancipation, to the Civil Rights Movement, and Beyond

As every American knows, February is Black History Month. And as every American also knows — if the events of 2020 haven’t warped their sense of time too badly — is isn’t February right now. But thanks to online learning technology, we all have the freedom to study any subject we want, as much as we want, whenever we want, irrespective of the time of year. Sources of internet-based education have proliferated in the 21st century, but long-respected institutions of higher learning have also got in on the action. Yale University, for example, has produced the online course African American History: Emancipation to the Present, whose 25 lectures by history professor Jonathan Holloway you can watch on YouTube, or at Yale’s web site. The first lecture appears above.

Originally recorded in the spring of 2010, Holloway’s course examines “the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present,” involving such chapters of history as “the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction” and “African Americans’ urbanization experiences.”

It also includes lectures on the “thought and leadership of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X” — all writers and thinkers Open Culture readers will have encountered before, but a course like African American History: Emancipation to the Present offers the opportunity to consider their lives and work in clearer context and greater detail.

Black history has deeper roots in some parts of the United States than others. But that doesn’t mean the universities of the west have nothing to offer in this department: take, for example, Stanford University’s African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle, taught by the historian (and editor of MLK’s papers) Clayborne Carson. Available to watch on YouTube and iTunes (or right above), its 18 lectures deliver an introduction to “African-American history, with particular emphasis on the political thought and protest movements of the period after 1930, focusing on selected individuals who have shaped and been shaped by modern African-American struggles for freedom and justice.” Taken together, these online courses offer you more than enough material to hold your own Black History Month right now.

Note: Clay Carson’s course can also be taken as a MOOC on edX. Enroll now in American Prophet: The Inner Life and Global Vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. And find the courses listed above in our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Photographs Documenting the Great Depression

dorothea lange

During the Great Depression, The Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) hired photographers to travel across America to document the poverty that gripped the nation, hoping to build support for New Deal programs being championed by F.D.R.’s administration.

Legendary photographers like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein took part in what amounted to the largest photography project ever sponsored by the federal government. All told, 170,000 photographs were taken, then catalogued back in Washington DC. The Library of Congress became their eventual resting place.

walker evans

We first mentioned this historic project back in 2012, when the New York Public Library put a relatively small sampling of these images online. But now we have bigger news.

Yale University has launched Photogrammar, a sophisticated web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing these 170,000 historic photographs.

arthur rothstein

The Photogrammar platform gives you the ability to search through the images by photographer. Do a search for Dorothea Lange’s photographs, and you get over 3200 images, including the now iconic photograph at the bottom of this post.

Photogrammar also offers a handy interactive map that lets you gather geographical information about 90,000 photographs in the collection.

And then there’s a section called Photogrammar Labs where innovative visualization techniques and data experiments will gradually shed new light on the image archive.

According to Yale, the Photogrammar project was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Directed by Laura Wexler, the project was undertaken by Yale’’s Public Humanities Program and its Photographic Memory Workshop.

rothstein 3
Top image: A migrant agricultural worker in Marysville migrant camp, trying to figure out his year’s earnings. Taken in California in 1935 by Dorothea Lange.

Second image: Allie Mae Burroughs, wife of cotton sharecropper. Photo taken in Hale County, Alabama in 1935 by Walker Evans.

Third image: Wife and children of sharecropper in Washington County, Arkansas. By Arthur Rothstein. 1935.

Fourth image: Wife of Negro sharecropper, Lee County, Mississippi. Again taken by Arthur Rothstein in 1935.

Bottom image: Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Taken by Dorothea Lange in Nipomo, California, 1936.

lange bottom

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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

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Watch a 4000-Year Old Babylonian Recipe for Stew, Found on a Cuneiform Tablet, Get Cooked by Researchers from Yale & Harvard

Walk like an Egyptian, but eat like an ancient Babylonian.

While cookbooks containing Mesopotamian fare do exist, to be really authentic, take your recipes from a clay tablet, densely inscribed in cuneiform.

Sadly, there are only four of them, and they reside in a display case at Yale. (Understandable given that they’re over 4000 years old.)

When Agnete Lassen, associate curator of Yale’s Babylonian Collection, and colleague Chelsea Alene Graham, a digital imaging specialist, were invited to participate in a culinary event hosted by New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, they wisely chose to travel with a 3D-printed facsimile of one of the precious tablets.

T’would have been a shame to knock the original off the counter while reaching for a bunch of leeks.

While other presenters prepared such delicacies as Fish Sauces at the Roman Table, Buddhist vegetarian dishes from the Song Dynasty, and a post-modern squid-ink spin on Medieval Blancmange, the Yale team joined chef Nawal Nasrallah and a crew from Harvard to recreate three one-pot dishes detailed on one of the ancient artifacts.

Judging by the above video, the clear winner was Tuh’i, a beet and lamb stew which Lassen describes as a “proto-borscht.”

The vegetarian Unwinding Stew’s name proved unnecessarily vexing, while the milk-based Broth of Lamb was unappetizing to the eye (as well as the palate, according to Graham). Perhaps they should have substituted animal blood—another favorite Babylonian thickener.

As one of Lassen’s predecessors, Professor William W. Hallo, told The New York Times in 1988, it’s unlikely the average Mesopotamian would have had the opportunity to tuck into any of these dishes. The vast quantities of speciality ingredients and the elaborate instructions suggest a festive meal for the elite.

In addition to the dishes served at NYU’s Appetite for the Past conference, the tablets include recipes for stag, gazelle, kid, mutton, squab, and a bird that’s referred to as “tarru.”

Next time, perhaps.

And not to quibble with the Bulldogs, but the BBC reports that researchers from the University of Wales Institute are claiming a pudding made from nettles, ground barley, and water is actually the world’s oldest recipe, clocking in at 6000 BC. (Serve it with roast hedgehog and fish gut sauce…)

While the Yale team has yet to share its recipes in a language other than cuneiform, The Silk Road Gourmet has a good guide to various Mesopotamian spices and staples.

via Kottke/Yale

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Thursday June 28 for another monthly installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.