Chart of the Day: The Media Loves Michelle Obama

It seems cruel to pit the two kindly first ladies against each other in such a gross popularity contest, but HighBeam Research has done just that, finding out what we all knew anyway: The media is way more into Michelle Obama than it was into Laura Bush.

HighBeam is a subscription-based search engine for media references, purporting to add 50,000 articles a day to a database of over 80 million documents from 6,500 publications. The company counted up media mentions for each first lady from her husband's first Election Day to Oct. 20 roughly three years later: Bush from Nov. 7, 2000 to Oct. 20, 2003 and Obama from Nov. 4, 2008 to Oct. 20, 2011.

Obama was mentioned 29,634 times, more than three times Bush's 8,707.

There are a couple possible explanations for Obama's media dominance beyond pure popularity. One is that Obama launched her high-profile "Let's Move" campaign to fight childhood obesity, generating lots of media hits through an alliance with the unbelievably popular Beyonce. Another is that media has proliferated since 2000, with online content booming between George W. Bush's election and Barack Obama's.

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How Islam Created Europe
- Robert D. Kaplan
In late antiquity, the religion split the Mediterranean world in two. Now it is remaking the Continent.

Europe was essentially defined by Islam. And Islam is redefining it now.

For centuries in early and middle antiquity, Europe meant the world surrounding the Mediterranean, or Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”), as the Romans famously called it. It included North Africa. Indeed, early in the fifth century A.D., when Saint Augustine lived in what is today Algeria, North Africa was as much a center of Christianity as Italy or Greece. But the swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves, with the “Middle Sea” a hard border between them rather than a unifying force. Since then, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed, “all European history has been a great emigration toward the North.”

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The Economics of Tidying Up
- Bourree Lam
Months after publication, Japanese home-organization guru Marie Kondo's book about de-cluttering has reached peak interest. Behavioral science may explain the appeal.

“In this book, I have summed up how to put your space in order in a way that will change your life forever.”

This is the ambitious first sentence of Marie Kondo’s best-selling manifesto, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Direct and devoid of clutter, this sentence rings true to her philosophy. Unlike most self-help books, there are no extraneous words, no pandering—the lack of “wink wink” gesturing reads as an appealing, authentic statement.

Though Kondo’s book was published in English in October of last year, a search on Google Trends still puts interest in her near an all-time high. (A search for her name in Japanese produces a similar result, though her book was originally published in 2010.) If Google searches are any indication, interest in tidying is also at an all-time high, and some of this interest must be attributed to the rise in Kondo’s method—which is to hold onto only items that “bring joy.” Following the purge, Kondo provides clear directions for how to store all your belongings in a way that makes them easily accessible and hard to mess up. A good number of journalists swear by her methods, and effusive referrals of “She changed my life” abound. During Kondo’s AMA on Reddit, one superfan asked her how to teach her method to children under 10.

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How Wealth in Childhood Shapes Personality Later in Life
- Jessi Streib
The dynamics of inter-class marriages reveal that money predictably influences the way one goes on to think about with work, emotions, and parenting.

Cinderella marries Prince Charming. Aladdin weds Princess Jasmine. In 50 Shades of Grey, Ana falls for Christian. From bedtime stories to films, we are exposed to a repeated idea: that love, or at least lust, crosses class lines. In fiction, cross-class relationships either end in marriage and happily-ever-after, or else in dissolution and even death. But what happens in real life?

Last year, I set out to answer this question by interviewing college-educated men and women who had married partners from different class backgrounds, for my book The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages. Not surprisingly, their relationships had little in common with the romances we see in the movies. Class had shaped each spouse so much that the people I interviewed had more in common with strangers.

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Confirmation: Another Teachable Moment in American History
- Sophie Gilbert
25 years after Anita Hill testified to the Senate Justice Committee that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, entertainment seems to be reckoning with injustice.

In this current moment of political debauchery—of name calling and journalist shoving and gun engraving and violence inciting—it’s worth remembering the last time that the national imagination was unwillingly drawn to the penis size of a candidate for one of the most powerful jobs in the land.

In 1991, while Donald Trump was filing for the first of his four corporate bankruptcies, Anita Hill was testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was her boss at two different government agencies. The vestiges of the hearing remain woven into the cultural fabric—the infamous Coke can, Long Dong Silver, Thomas’s stony silence in the 25 years he’s been on the court—but it’s easy to forget what an extraordinary spectacle it was at the time. Just as FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson recently used a decades-old trial to reckon with a traumatic chapter in America’s history, HBO’s new dramatization of the hearing, Confirmation, casts a harsh light on a historical moment that feels almost more relevant than ever.

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Ruven Afanador

The Obama Doctrine
- Jeffrey Goldberg
The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.

Friday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a thundering speech given on Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerry’s uncharacteristically Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

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Edmon de Haro

Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think
- Robert H. Frank
When people see themselves as self-made, they tend to be less generous and public-spirited.

I’m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying motionless on the court.

He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained to do. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless with no pulse. Very shortly, an ambulance showed up.

Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than five miles away. How did this one arrive so quickly? By happenstance, just before I collapsed, ambulances had been dispatched to two separate auto accidents close to the tennis center. Since one of them involved no serious injuries, an ambulance was able to peel off and travel just a few hundred yards to me. EMTs put electric paddles on my chest and rushed me to our local hospital. There, I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to a larger hospital in Pennsylvania, where I was placed on ice overnight.

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John Steinbeck on Falling in Love: A 1958 Letter
- Maria Popova
The Nobel Prize Winner and author of 'The Grapes of Wrath' on the importance of waiting for love

Nobel laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968) might be best-known as the author of East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men, but he was also a prolific letter-writer. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters constructs an alternative biography of the iconic author through some 850 of his most thoughtful, witty, honest, opinionated, vulnerable, and revealing letters to family, friends, his editor, and a circle of equally well-known and influential public figures.

Among his correspondence is this beautiful response to his eldest son Thom's 1958 letter, in which the teenage boy confesses to have fallen desperately in love with a girl named Susan while at boarding school. Steinbeck's words of wisdom—tender, optimistic, timeless, infinitely sagacious—should be etched onto the heart and mind of every living, breathing human being.

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How to Build a Happier Brain
- Julie Beck
A neuropsychological approach to happiness, by meeting core needs (safety, satisfaction, and connection) and training neurons to overcome a negativity bias

There is a motif, in fiction and in life, of people having wonderful things happen to them, but still ending up unhappy. We can adapt to anything, it seems—you can get your dream job, marry a wonderful human, finally get 1 million dollars or Twitter followers—eventually we acclimate and find new things to complain about.

If you want to look at it on a micro level, take an average day. You go to work; make some money; eat some food; interact with friends, family or co-workers; go home; and watch some TV. Nothing particularly bad happens, but you still can’t shake a feeling of stress, or worry, or inadequacy, or loneliness.

According to Dr. Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist, a member of U.C. Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center's advisory board, and author of the book Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence, our brains are naturally wired to focus on the negative, which can make us feel stressed and unhappy even though there are a lot of positive things in our lives. True, life can be hard, and legitimately terrible sometimes. Hanson’s book (a sort of self-help manual grounded in research on learning and brain structure) doesn’t suggest that we avoid dwelling on negative experiences altogether—that would be impossible. Instead, he advocates training our brains to appreciate positive experiences when we do have them, by taking the time to focus on them and install them in the brain.

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The Hell After ISIS
- Anand Gopal
Even as the militant group loses ground in Iraq, many Sunnis say they have no hope for peace. One family’s story shows why.

Falah Sabar heard a knock at the door. It was just before midnight in western Baghdad last April and Falah was already in bed, so he sent his son Wissam to answer. Standing in the doorway was a tall young man in jeans who neither shook Wissam’s hand nor offered a greeting. “We don’t want you here,” he said. “Your family should be gone by noon tomorrow.” For weeks, Wissam, who was 23, had been expecting something like this, as he’d noticed a dark mood taking hold of the neighborhood. He went to get his father, but when they returned, the stranger was gone.

Falah is tall and broad-shouldered, with salt-and-pepper hair. At 48, he was the patriarch of a brood of sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. He sat down with Wissam to talk things through. They had been in Baghdad for just three months, but that was long enough for the abiding principle of refugee life to imprint itself on Falah’s psyche: Avoid trouble. When Wissam had managed to find a job at a construction firm, Falah had told him to be courteous, not to mix with strangers, and not to ask too many questions. If providence had granted them a new life in this unfamiliar city, it could snatch that life away just as easily.

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What Caused the Great Crime Decline in the U.S.?
- Matt Ford
After decades of soaring levels of homicides and drug violence, the country’s crime rate plunged dramatically over the last 25 years. What happened?

A&Q is a special series that inverts the classic Q&A, taking some of the most frequently posed solutions to pressing matters of policy and exploring their complexity.

In the early 1990s, U.S. crime rates had been on a steep upward climb since the Lyndon B. Johnson presidency. The crack-cocaine epidemic in the mid-1980s added fuel to the fire, and handgun-related homicides more than doubled between 1985 and 1990. That year, murders peaked in New York City with 2,245 killings. Politicians embraced tough-on-crime platforms and enacted harshly punitive policies. Experts warned the worst could be yet to come.

Then crime rates went down. And then they kept going down.

By decade’s end, the homicide rate plunged 42 percent nationwide. Violent crime decreased by one-third. What turned into a precipitous decline started later in some areas and took longer in others. But it happened everywhere: in each region of the country, in cities large and small, in rural and urban areas alike. In the Northeast, which reaped the largest benefits, the homicide rate was halved. Murders plummeted by 75 percent in New York City alone as the city entered the new millennium.

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The Best 71-Second Animation You'll Watch Today
- Chris Heller
A rock monster tries to save a village from destruction.

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The Dog Photographer
- Jaclyn Skurie
Meet @TheDogist, a man with a viral Instagram account of puppy pictures.

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Are All Mental Illnesses Related?
- Caitlin Cadieux and Nicolas Pollock
Depression, anxiety, overeating, addiction, and all other mental disorders share a common mechanism.

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