"Hidden Brain" podcaster Shankar Vedantam told a BYU audience Tuesday that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. walked the talk of Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in their nonviolence movements, winning allies by loving and understanding their oppressors.
Elders Jeffrey R. Holland and D. Todd Christofferson and authors Shankar Vedantam, James Fallows and Amy Chua headline the upcoming BYU devotional and forums list released Friday.
KUOW - The power of self-deception: Why and how our brains deceive us kuow.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kuow.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
May 11, 2021
Katie Hafner
THE WASHINGTON POST – Every day we tell many small untruths, lies uttered by mutual consent that keep societal interactions civil.
We say “How are you today?” when we don’t really care to know, or “That was a lovely dinner” when the meal tasted terrible. Parents reproach their children for failing to supply a polite answer instead of the real one.
Then there are the lies we tell ourselves. Researchers have found that patients with an optimistic outlook in the face of a terminal medical prognosis will outlive those with a realistic sense of their disease.
“If you think of benevolent deception and optimistic self-deception not as vice and weakness, but as adaptive responses to difficult circumstances,” Shankar Vedantam wrote in his powerful new book,
There’s a fascinating tale that runs through the new book by
Hidden Brain host Shankar Vedantam. It’s the true story of the Church of Love a sort of all-female commune based in Moline, Illinois, that corresponded with lonely men across the U.S., persuading them to send thousands of dollars to support a group of virginal yet lusty women attempting to build a retirement paradise called Chonda-Za.
If it sounds too bizarre to be true, well, it was. The women were largely fictitious; the man cashing the checks was a former English teacher, Donald Lowry. At the time the feds swooped in to arrest Lowry on charges of mail fraud, he “owned a fleet of 20 automobiles, including Rolls Royces and Jaguars,” Vedantam writes. “He had a full-time personal mechanic.” His letter-writing enterprise took up an entire office building in downtown Moline.