“The problem with all the great songs,” my son said recently, “is that they are all sad.”
“No they aren’t,” I replied. “What about ‘That pretty girl just farted, I think’?” He gave me a withering look. We both knew he was right.
This is the uneven geometry of human emotions: the negatives tend to be much more powerful than the positive. Misery always lasts longer – and digs in deeper – than joy. Mistakes linger while triumphs are fleeting.
And yes, bad news is more gripping than good. The big question is why. Any thoughts?
There is a silver lining: this week we learned that, apparently, pop songs are getting sadder than they used to be. By my son’s reckoning, that must mean music is getting better.
Back to the journalism. This week we gave you:
• The possibility of far earlier cancer diagnosis. Two-minute read
• The quest to save culture from the barbarians of the Levant. One-minute read
• The video games where you do almost nothing. 90-second read
• Sesame Street comes to refugee camps in the Middle East. Three-minute read
And we also invited you to tell us about a local community project that works. Get in touch!
Lucky numbers
About 44% of new cars sold in Norway in January were electric. A good example for Britain, which set a new goal of 2035 for the discontinuation of new petrol and diesel car sales. India plans to double renewable energy capacity in just two years to 175 GW by 2022.
Finland has meanwhile announced plans to give fathers the same parental leave as mothers: 164 days.
What we liked
Back to music, and a new study that pinpoints why high-tempo tunes are the best tracks to exercise to.
We also like the idea of Chaucer in an app …
What we heard
Peter Ward wrote in from Peru:
I’m involved in rural Peru working with secondary students to re-value their intangible cultural traditions using innovative technologies, such as virtual reality and augmented reality. Students first select examples of local intangible culture which are in danger of being lost or reduced to superficial shows for tourists, such as traditional dances and festivals. Then they develop investigative projects using project-based learning around questions such as: “How and why has the tradition changed?” and “Why do people participate?”. Finally, they develop apps to summarise their investigations and share their investigations back to their communities. The project shows the power of using new innovative technologies to promote respect and re-valuing of traditional cultures in a country with poor education outcomes, and where culture is all too often reduced to nothing more than a product to sell to tourists.
Sounds remarkable Peter – good luck.
Betsey Westendorf, meanwhile, returned to the theme of happiness that we raised a couple of weeks ago:
If you define happiness as laughing all day long, then it’s not as important as the items you mentioned. To me those items create happiness. There’s no better sense of physical wellbeing than the day after a bad headache, and discovering a way to help your body not create headaches from tension to consumption is even happier. Accomplishing goals make many of us happy. Feeling safe even when scary things are happening is possible and can be learned. So we have a lot of power over our happiness, and it has little to do with the circumstances
Where was the Upside?
At the awards for the Green Stories competition, a series of prizes for new writing that incorporates green solutions into novels and drama. Academic research has shown that this kind of storytelling is more likely to inspire green behaviour than catastrophic tales of climate change.
Winners included The Woman who Planted Coral by Sophia Jones & Gideon Simeloff and What on Earth by Susan Cope.
