Humour

Ripped from today’s headlines.

Giving a speech? Here’s how to tell a good joke

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Credit: PeopleImages
Silence is an effective tool when telling a good joke in a speech

Hasan Minhaj did not exactly knock them dead at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 29. He was shouty, some of his jokes were clunkers and he delivered many of them waytooquickly. But he nailed one, by applying one of the first rules of public speaking: slow down. He set the … Read More

I’m Stressed, You’re Stressed, We’re Fine

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Want to deal with stress? Find someone else stressed. Together, you can both be not stressed. Or calm, the dictionary tells us. A study published in Social Psychological & Personality Science found that commiserating with a similarly stressed person (that is, someone facing the same stressor) can reduce the stress … Read More

How Twitter Shapes Public Opinion

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Twitter may be a lair of narcissists and trolls, but it’s become something of a bellwether, for better or for worse. The question is, how? Researchers in China investigated the question in a study published in the awesomely-named Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science. Basically, the researchers harvested a … Read More

The Shared Delusions of Liberals & Conservatives

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When it comes to political positions, it appears that we’re all a bit delusional. More to the point, liberals tend to underestimate the amount of agreement amongst those who share their political position, whilst conservatives tend to overestimate how much other conservatives agree with each other. A study published in … Read More

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