Category: thought fodder

observations thought fodder

Article on Frisson Raises More Questions

By Mary Warner | by Mary Warner

I found an article from Smithsonian.com that discusses frisson, that delightful feeling of chills that overcomes you when listening to stirring music. I experience frisson all the time with music. Apparently not everyone does. (Dang, that would stink!) According to the article, “The researchers found that the brains of individuals who occasionally feel a chill while listening to music were wired differently than the control subjects. They had more nerve fibers connecting the auditory cortex, the…

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thought fodder

In Defense of Compassionate Men – A #MeToo Story

By Mary Warner | by Mary Warner

I belong to the flood of women in the world that have a #MeToo story. In a continuum from sexism to sexual harassment to rape and other forms of violence, I think we’d be hard-pressed to find a woman anywhere who hasn’t got a #MeToo story. And when you include sexist policies baked into the governance of many cultures, we’re all affected to varying degrees. Because sexual harassment is so pervasive, it seems easy to…

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observations thought fodder

One Source of Our Blindess

By Mary Warner | by Mary Warner

“Nonprofit With Balls” is a blog that’s all that and a bag of chips (with some unicorns thrown in for good measure). Its posts, written by Vu Le (pronounced “voo lay” – because I know how to read an About page), offer a typically irreverent, but uncomfortably honest look at the nonprofit world. Vu’s humor makes the uncomfieness easier to bear. (And, frankly, darn it, we do-gooders are not the dour types that we are…

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design ideas observations reading thought fodder

Feeling a Tad More Eco-Friendly

By Mary Warner | by Mary Warner

I’m reading a book called “What We Leave Behind” by Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay. It is depressing as hell. It explains how people are murdering the earth, which we absolutely are, but hasn’t offered any solutions thus far. I’m only part-way through the book and am hoping there will be some concrete suggestions that help me feel as though I can do something. Being left in a hopeless morass by a book is no…

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Letters to Legislators thought fodder writing

Letters to Legislators: Disable the Mute Button

By Mary Warner | by Mary Warner

When I was a kid, my mom used to laugh at me for yelling at the TV whenever I saw injustice playing out on shows. Yes, most of these shows were fiction, but I simply couldn’t stand the unfairness. One of my kindred spirits, a woman who could not tolerate injustice, is Eleanor Roosevelt. She died before I was born, but we share the same birthday, October 11, and I wrote a research paper on…

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