Saturday roundup

The Dalai Lama has threatened to not reincarnate.

The upside of capitalism.

Don't turn your kids into little assholes by over-praising them.

Persistence can be appropriate if it's respectful, but know when to back off. And look at the resistance that women get when they enforce boundaries.

Man attacks pregnant woman after holding the door for her.

Disease isn't a problem, if you're the disease agent.

We all hate waiting in line.

I love this piece on failure:

The real truth, though, is that most of our mistakes cannot really be said to have such obvious redemptive power. Most of the time, we simply lose time. We retrace our steps. We let friends fall away; we hurt our families. We do idiotic things in our work. We make mistakes from which we learn and, more often, mistakes from which we fail to learn. Aware of our errors, but frequently unable to do better, we hang our heads.

The writer Kathryn Schulz has suggested that acknowledging the distinctive essence of failure rather than straining to invest it with positive utility actually allows us to experience a greater range of emotions and see more texture and color in the world. Just as understanding the night as merely a period that gives birth to day would cause us to miss so much of its particular charm, so seeing failure only as an element of success causes us to dismiss at least half of the human experience. Failure, she says, can feed imagination, as we construct ideas of what might have happened if we hadn’t made mistakes. It gives rise to black humor. It can make us less arrogant, more empathetic.

OMG the Zoolander sequel!