BOREDOM

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 454-454
Author(s):  

Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid and brooding. Examples abound... Television, the one-eyed beast blamed for scourges ranging from immorality to declining college-admission test scores, has probably helped bring home boredom to America. It has done so by offering us a splendidly wrongheaded view of how one goes about living the good life... Boredom, at the very least, helps breed some of America's uglier social trends. The rate of teenage suicide has more than tripled in the United States since 1955, and psychiatrists across the country lay part of the blame to boredom born of unrealistic expectations and frustration. Divorce condemns nearly half of all marriages, and marriage counselors report boredom as a major cause. Drug and alcohol abuse—which has increased more rapidly in the past decade among middle and upper-class teenagers than among the less wealthy—is caused, in part, by the need to kill time.

Author(s):  
Chris Myers Asch ◽  
George Derek Musgrove

The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow. —LANGSTON HUGHES, “History,” 1934 The original Busboys and Poets sits at the corner of Fourteenth and V Streets NW, just a block north of the epicenter of the 1968 riots. A combination restaurant, bookstore, lounge, and theater, Busboys took its name from Langston Hughes, the one-time busboy at D.C.’s Wardman Hotel who gained international renown as a poet (albeit one who denounced the snobbery of D.C.’s black upper class). After it opened in 2005, it became an immediate commercial and cultural success, attracting young, hip Washingtonians who swarmed the surrounding Shaw neighborhood in the twenty-first century....


2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
TONY SHAW ◽  
TRICIA JENKINS

Film has been an integral part of the propaganda war fought between the United States and North Korea over the past decade. The international controversy surrounding the Hollywood comedy The Interview in 2014 vividly demonstrated this and, in the process, drew attention to hidden dimensions of the US state security–entertainment complex in the early twenty-first century. Using the emails leaked courtesy of the Sony hack of late 2014, this article explores the Interview affair in detail, on the one hand revealing the close links between Sony executives and US foreign-policy advisers and on the other explaining the difficulties studios face when trying to balance commercial and political imperatives in a global market.


1993 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-114
Author(s):  
Jaime Suchlicki

The deepening economic crisis in Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet empire, an aging leadership and revolution, and mild overtures from Fidel Castro toward the United States have, together, served to encourage those US observers who believe that the time for rapprochement with Cuba has come. In this line of reasoning, closer relations with Cuba, particularly in the economic field, will both moderate Castro's penchant for revolution and lead, eventually, to the advent of perestroika on that troubled island.In the past, Castro has pursued a dual strategy in dealing with the United States. On the one hand, Havana has made rhetorical overtures designed to reduce tensions between the two countries.


1978 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Laurence Senelick

“As a jester among jesters,” Jack Point commends himself to a would-be mountebank in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeoman of the Guard, “I will teach thee all my original songs, my self-constructed riddles, my own ingenious paradoxes; nay more, I will reveal to thee the source whence I get them.” The “source” in this case is a tome entitled The Merry Jestes of Hugh Ambrose, a compendium of asthmatic wheezes, Gilbert's thrust at not only Elizabethan jestbooks but their Victorian counterparts. At times it must have seemed as if printing had been invented only to enable aspiring comedians to plunder the wit of the past from cheap chapbooks, like the one that gave Joe Miller to the vernacular. In the United States, dissemination of these storehouses of “gags” began as early as 1789, and by the 1860s they were a staple of the bookstalls; the intended market for them was either the laugh-loving churchgoer who wouldn't be caught dead in a theatre, or the parlor entertainer, the “clown of private life,” ready to make unwilling interlocutors of his nearest and dearest. In the 1870s, however, publishers aimed at the professional; Henry J. Wehman's 25¢ paperback Budget of Jokes was meant to fill a need of the evergrowing number of variety performers.


Politik ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Exner-Pirot ◽  
Robert W. Murray

Traditional theories of International Relations have thus far failed to explain the unusual degree of cooperation seen in the Arctic between Russia on the one hand, and the seven Western Arctic states led by the United States on the other.  Rather than witnessing a devolution into competition and conflict over strategic shipping routes and hydrocarbon resources, regional Arctic institutions have continued to grow in strength and number in the past several years, and transnational ties have deepened. This has prompted some observers to describe the Arctic as ‘exceptional’ – somehow immune to or isolated from global political competition.This paper argues that the Arctic regional order is exceptional insofar as Arctic states and those states with involvement in the region have worked to negotiate an order and balance of power predicated on norms such as cooperation and multilateralism. The establishment of an Arctic international society has seen great powers and smaller powers come together to form an order aimed at promoting norms and institutions not seen elsewhere in the world. By using an English School approach to understand the Arctic, we contend that Arctic international society has been deliberately negotiated in a way that promotes cooperation between Arctic states. However this order can be disrupted if Arctic international society does not take conscious steps to maintain a strong institutional framework that protects Arctic internationalism.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 85 (6) ◽  
pp. 1119-1120
Author(s):  

In 1984 the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Children and Television issued a statement1 that cautioned pediatricians and parents about the potential for television to promote violent and/or aggressive behavior and obesity. The influence of television on early sexual activity, drug and alcohol use and abuse, school performance, and perpetuation of ethnic stereotypes was also stressed. Advances in our understanding of the effects of television on children have prompted this update of the Academy's policy. In 1989 the average child in the United States still spent more time watching television than performing any other activity except sleeping. According to recent Nielsen data,2 children aged 2 to 5 years view approximately 25 hours of television per week, children aged 6 to 11 years watch more than 22 hours per week, and adolescents 12 to 17 years watch 23 hours of television per week. Although the amount of commercial television viewed by children has declined since 1980, the most recent estimates of television viewing do not include the use of video cassette recorders. Therefore, the amount of time that children in our country spend in front of the television set has probably not decreased significantly in the past 8 years. Television's influence on children is a function of the length of time they spend watching and the cumulative effect of what they see. By the time today's child reaches age 70, he or she will have spent approximately 7 years watching television.3 Therefore, television may displace more active experience of the world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Severin Mangold ◽  
Toralf Zschau

Over the past decade, tiny houses and the lifestyle they promote have become a world-wide phenomenon, with the trend especially impactful in the United States. Given their broad appeal and increasing prominence within popular culture, it is surprising how little research exists on them. To help to better understand what motivates people to adopt this lifestyle, this paper presents insights from an exploratory study in the United States and offers the first contours of a new conceptual framework. Situating the lifestyle within the larger economic and cultural forces of our times, it argues that going “tiny” is seen by tiny house enthusiasts as a practical roadmap to the Good Life: A simpler life characterized by more security, autonomy, relationships, and meaningful experiences. The paper ends with a brief discussion of broader implications and directions for future research.


2001 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 343-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Stewart

Objectives: The issue of substance use and the problems resulting from that use has become a major concern in the United States. The past decade has seen several new trends in substance use by college students and an increase in the effort to try and determine factors that may ameliorate the problem. Spirituality is one possible factor that may have some role in the phenomenon. Some research has been conducted on the relationship of spirituality to substance use but the results are mostly descriptive and concerned with religiosity rather than spirituality. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between a student's spiritual and religious beliefs and the impact of those beliefs on the decision to use substances. Method: A sample of 337 university students was surveyed using the CORE Alcohol and Drug Survey and several supplemental questions. Results: In general, spirituality had a moderate buffering effect upon the decision to use alcohol and marijuana. This general protective effect exists for both alcohol use and binge drinking but dissipated as the students reached upper-class levels. Conclusion: Spirituality may play a significant role in the decision of college students to use substances. Further research should focus on this important factor. Also, implementation of spiritual aspects into university prevention and treatment programs may help boost efficacy rates.


1974 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-250
Author(s):  
David Robertson

In the October 1973 issue of this Journal, John Orbell and Brent Rutherford published an article which sought to test the central thesis of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Although I shall try to show that as a piece of research it was fatally flawed, the authors deserve acclaim for their boldness, and for showing the way back to serious comparative government research in the Aristotelian manner. To test the basic principles of constitutions against the claims made for them is so obviously worthwhile that it is inexplicable and sad that their article stands virtually alone. In part its rarity reflects the unspoken assumption in modern political science that, after the behavioural revolution, anyone taking constitutions seriously was bound to be returning to the discredited legalism of the past. This overreaction has had its worst excess in political theory, for we seem all to have forgotten that political theory used to be an attempt to devise constitutional frameworks within which human nature would be led to produce the good life. As a theorist I hope we will return to that, and as an empirical researcher I hope we take up Orbell and Rutherford's lead and start to test such general constitutional claims. There are plenty of examples to go on with, starting perhaps with the claim that the United States Constitution is apt to ‘establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty’.


2003 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 585-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard N. Gardner

Relations between the United States and most other countries, including major U.S. allies, have been severely strained during the past year by divergent opinions about the rules of international law governing the use of armed force. On the one side, the Bush administration has unveiled a new strategic doctrine asserting the right to use force preemptively against any country or terrorist group that could potentially threaten U.S. security. On the other side, most UN members have rejected the Bush doctrine as inconsistent with the traditional view that armed force can only be used when authorized by the Security Council or in self-defense against an armed attack. I will argue that neither the new Bush doctrine nor the strict interpretation of the “jurisprudes” represents good law or good policy. The new strategic environment, marked by suicidal terrorists and the spread of mass destruction weapons, requires a different approach.


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