Sunday morning roundup Part I

It's very understandable to want revenge.

Closure "remains evasive" for Brazilian torture survivors, including the country's President. Meanwhile, the family of Peru's president is compared to the Addams Family.

Some of Washington's economic success can be attributed to the rent-seeking behavior of lobbyists and contractors, but the highly educated population is much more of a factor.

Oliver Burkeman makes excellent points and does so with humor, but I find myself saying, "yes, but..." to his dismissal of positive thinking. I don't know about Tony Robbins--I can only agree the technique in question is absurd--but few proponents of positive thinking also advocate dismissing the negative; they actually advocate doing exactly what Mr. Burkeman describes: acknowledging it non-judgmentally, but not focusing on it. I'm less concerned about exclusively positive thinkers than I am about the other extreme. Ironically, my mother is nominally a big proponent of all that--positive thinking, visualization, etc. And that's all great if you practice it: how many Olympic medal winners have recently talked about envisioning themselves winning? But I think back to when we were in China, in the Shenong Stream off the Yangtze River, surrounded by phenomenal beauty in every direction. All my mother could do was fume about how the woman sitting in front of her in the small rowboat had a huge head, and so she ruined mom's whole view. Um, there was beauty everywhere. "But I shouldn't have to turn my head!" Okay, fine, focus on how this whole experience is ruined for you--that's your right if you choose to exercise it. Your right doesn't extend to infringing, through your constant negativity, on my right to focus on the surrounding beauty, so please be quiet. All I'm saying is, in every experience, we have a choice of what to focus on. It doesn't mean dismissing the bad; it just means keeping your head above water by focusing on what's going right. Another example, from over a decade ago: Jay and I were hiking in the Blue Hills when a spry elderly man passed us going in the other direction. Jay sighed, said that guy must be at least 80 years old and he's in better shape than he is. I said, why don't you think of it as, I hope I'm in as good shape as he is when I'm that age; I have many years to get there. Just throwing that option out there.

Moving on to the quirks of autocorrect. I didn't appreciate the problem until I got a smartphone. Which, for example, rendered "Hedda Gabler" as "cheddar cobbler."

Sometimes it's wise to rename a company.