How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus

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href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/education/" class="rubric" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'rubric',r' ',@href">Education</a> <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Coddling of the American Mind</h1> <p class="dek" itemprop="description"><span><span>In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health. </span></span></p> </div> </div> <figure class="lead-img "> <div class="img-wrapper"> <picture class="img"> <img itemprop="image" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401im_/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/2015/07/24/WEL_Haidt_PC_Kid_FNL_WEBCrop/1920.jpg?1438197190"/> </picture> </div> <figcaption> <span class="credit">Andrew B. 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A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for <i>The New Yorker</i> about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word <i>violate</i> (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in <i>The Chronicle of Higher Education </i>describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'399356'">article</a> in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector1" targeting-pos="boxinjector1" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-2"><p>Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. <i>Microaggressions</i> are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. <i>Trigger warnings</i> are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s <i>Things Fall Apart</i> describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s <i>The Great Gatsby</i> portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.</p> <p>Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”</p> <aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore"><span>According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided.</span></aside><p>This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”</p> </section><div class="ad-boxright-wrapper" data-pos="boxright"><gpt-ad id="boxright1" targeting-pos="boxright1" class="ad ad-boxright" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 600]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-3"><p>The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse <i>vindictive protectiveness</i>. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.</p> <p>We have been studying this development for a while now, with rising alarm. (Greg Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends free speech and academic freedom on campus, and has advocated for students and faculty involved in many of the incidents this article describes; Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who studies the American culture wars. The stories of how we each came to this subject can be read <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/greg-lukianoffs-story/399359/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'399356'">here</a>.) The dangers that these trends pose to scholarship and to the quality of American universities are significant; we could write a whole essay detailing them. But in this essay we focus on a different question: What are the effects of this new protectiveness <i>on the students themselves</i>? Does it benefit the people it is supposed to help? What exactly are students learning when they spend four years or more in a community that polices unintentional slights, places warning labels on works of classic literature, and in many other ways conveys the sense that words can be forms of violence that require strict control by campus authorities, who are expected to act as both protectors and prosecutors?</p> </section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector2" targeting-pos="boxinjector2" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-4"><p>There’s a saying common in education circles: Don’t teach students <i>what</i> to think; teach them <i>how</i> to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.</p> <p>But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.</p> <h3 class="smallcaps">How Did We <b>Get Here?</b></h3> <p>It’s difficult to know exactly why vindictive protectiveness has burst forth so powerfully in the past few years. The phenomenon may be related to recent changes in the interpretation of federal antidiscrimination statutes (about which more later). But the answer probably involves generational shifts as well. Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But “free range” childhood became less common in the 1980s. The surge in crime from the ’60s through the early ’90s made Baby Boomer parents more protective than their own parents had been. Stories of abducted children appeared more frequently in the news, and in 1984, images of them began showing up on milk cartons. In response, many parents pulled in the reins and worked harder to keep their children safe.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxright-wrapper" data-pos="boxright"><gpt-ad id="boxright2" targeting-pos="boxright2" class="ad ad-boxright" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 600]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-5"><p>The flight to safety also happened at school. Dangerous play structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, many schools cracked down on bullying, implementing “zero tolerance” policies. In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.</p> <p>These same children grew up in a culture that was (and still is) becoming more politically polarized. Republicans and Democrats have never particularly liked each other, but survey data going back to the 1970s show that on average, their mutual dislike used to be surprisingly mild. Negative feelings have grown steadily stronger, however, particularly since the early 2000s. Political scientists call this process “affective partisan polarization,” and it is a very serious problem for any democracy. As each side increasingly demonizes the other, compromise becomes more difficult. A recent study shows that implicit or unconscious biases are now at least as strong across political parties as they are across races.</p> <p>So it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past. This hostility, and the self-righteousness fueled by strong partisan emotions, can be expected to add force to any moral crusade. A principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds.” Part of what we do when we make moral judgments is express allegiance to a team. But that can interfere with our ability to think critically. Acknowledging that the other side’s viewpoint has any merit is risky—your teammates may see you as a traitor.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector3" targeting-pos="boxinjector3" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-6"><p>Social media makes it extraordinarily easy to join crusades, express solidarity and outrage, and shun traitors. Facebook was founded in 2004, and since 2006 it has allowed children as young as 13 to join. This means that the first wave of students who spent all their teen years using Facebook reached college in 2011, and graduated from college only this year.</p> <div style="text-align:center"> <figure style="display: inline-block;max-width: 630.0px; width: 100%;"><picture style="position:relative; width:100%; height:0; overflow:hidden; padding-bottom:81.2698412698%;"><img alt="" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/07/WEL_Haidt_PC_Books_FNLcrop/c939be5b4.jpg" class="lazyload" style="position:absolute; width:100%; height:100%; top:0; left:0; border:0;"></picture><figcaption class="credit">Andrew B. Myers</figcaption></figure></div> <p>These first true “social-media natives” may be different from members of previous generations in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts. We find much to like about these trends; young people today are engaged with one another, with news stories, and with prosocial endeavors to a greater degree than when the dominant technology was television. But social media has also fundamentally shifted the balance of power in relationships between students and faculty; the latter increasingly fear what students might do to their reputations and careers by stirring up online mobs against them.</p> <p>We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.</p> <h3 class="smallcaps"><span>The Thinking Cure</span></h3> <p>For millennia, philosophers have understood that we don’t see life as it is; we see a version distorted by our hopes, fears, and other attachments. The Buddha said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.” Marcus Aurelius said, “Life itself is but what you deem it.” The quest for wisdom in many traditions begins with this insight. Early Buddhists and the Stoics, for example, developed practices for reducing attachments, thinking more clearly, and finding release from the emotional torments of normal mental life.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxright-wrapper" data-pos="boxright"><gpt-ad id="boxright3" targeting-pos="boxright3" class="ad ad-boxright" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 600]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-7"><p>Cognitive behavioral therapy is a modern embodiment of this ancient wisdom. It is the most extensively studied nonpharmaceutical treatment of mental illness, and is used widely to treat depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and addiction. It can even be of help to schizophrenics. No other form of psychotherapy has been shown to work for a broader range of problems. Studies have generally found that it is as effective as antidepressant drugs (such as Prozac) in the treatment of anxiety and depression. The therapy is relatively quick and easy to learn; after a few months of training, many patients can do it on their own. Unlike drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy keeps working long after treatment is stopped, because it teaches thinking skills that people can continue to use.</p> <p>The goal is to minimize distorted thinking and see the world more accurately. You start by learning the names of the dozen or so most common cognitive distortions (such as overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning; see the list <a href="#Cognitive%20Disorders" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'399356'">at the bottom of this article</a>). Each time you notice yourself falling prey to one of them, you name it, describe the facts of the situation, consider alternative interpretations, and then choose an interpretation of events more in line with those facts. Your emotions follow your new interpretation. In time, this process becomes automatic. When people improve their mental hygiene in this way—when they free themselves from the repetitive irrational thoughts that had previously filled so much of their consciousness—they become less depressed, anxious, and angry.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector4" targeting-pos="boxinjector4" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-8"><p>The parallel to formal education is clear: cognitive behavioral therapy teaches good critical-thinking skills, the sort that educators have striven for so long to impart. By almost any definition, critical thinking requires grounding one’s beliefs in evidence rather than in emotion or desire, and learning how to search for and evaluate evidence that might contradict one’s initial hypothesis. But does campus life today foster critical thinking? Or does it coax students to think in more-distorted ways?</p> <p>Let’s look at recent trends in higher education in light of the distortions that cognitive behavioral therapy identifies. We will draw the names and descriptions of these distortions from David D. Burns’s popular book <i>Feeling Good</i>, as well as from the second edition of <i>Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders</i>, by Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn.</p> <h3 class="smallcaps"><span>Higher Education’s Embrace of “Emotional Reasoning”</span></h3> <p>Burns defines <i>emotional reasoning</i> as assuming “that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’ ” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as letting “your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.” But, of course, subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong. Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxright-wrapper" data-pos="boxright"><gpt-ad id="boxright4" targeting-pos="boxright4" class="ad ad-boxright" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 600]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-9"><p>Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.</p> <p>There have always been some people who believe they have a right not to be offended. Yet throughout American history—from the Victorian era to the free-speech activism of the 1960s and ’70s—radicals have pushed boundaries and mocked prevailing sensibilities. Sometime in the 1980s, however, college campuses began to focus on preventing offensive speech, especially speech that might be hurtful to women or minority groups. The sentiment underpinning this goal was laudable, but it quickly produced some absurd results.</p> <aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore"><span>What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection?</span></aside><p>Among the most famous early examples was the so-called water-buffalo incident at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1993, the university charged an Israeli-born student with racial harassment after he yelled “Shut up, you water buffalo!” to a crowd of black sorority women that was making noise at night outside his dorm-room window. Many scholars and pundits at the time could not see how the term <i>water buffalo</i> (a rough translation of a Hebrew insult for a thoughtless or rowdy person) was a racial slur against African Americans, and as a result, the case became international news.</p> <p>Claims of a right not to be offended have continued to arise since then, and universities have continued to privilege them. In a particularly egregious 2008 case, for instance, Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis found a white student guilty of racial harassment for reading a book titled <i>Notre Dame vs. the Klan</i>. The book honored student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan when it marched on Notre Dame in 1924. Nonetheless, the picture of a Klan rally on the book’s cover offended at least one of the student’s co-workers (he was a janitor as well as a student), and that was enough for a guilty finding by the university’s Affirmative Action Office.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector5" targeting-pos="boxinjector5" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-10"><p>These examples may seem extreme, but the reasoning behind them has become more commonplace on campus in recent years. Last year, at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an event called Hump Day, which would have allowed people to pet a camel, was abruptly canceled. Students had created a Facebook group where they protested the event for animal cruelty, for being a waste of money, and for being insensitive to people from the Middle East. The inspiration for the camel had almost certainly come from a popular TV commercial in which a camel saunters around an office on a Wednesday, celebrating “hump day”; it was devoid of any reference to Middle Eastern peoples. Nevertheless, the group organizing the event announced on its Facebook page that the event would be canceled because the “program [was] dividing people and would make for an uncomfortable and possibly unsafe environment.”</p> <p>Because there is a broad ban in academic circles on “blaming the victim,” it is generally considered unacceptable to question the reasonableness (let alone the sincerity) of someone’s emotional state, particularly if those emotions are linked to one’s group identity. The thin argument “I’m offended” becomes an unbeatable trump card. This leads to what Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor at this magazine, calls the “offendedness sweepstakes,” in which opposing parties use claims of offense as cudgels. In the process, the bar for what we consider unacceptable speech is lowered further and further.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxright-wrapper" data-pos="boxright"><gpt-ad id="boxright5" targeting-pos="boxright5" class="ad ad-boxright" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 600]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-11"><p>Since 2013, new pressure from the federal government has reinforced this trend. Federal antidiscrimination statutes regulate on-campus harassment and unequal treatment based on sex, race, religion, and national origin. Until recently, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights acknowledged that speech must be “objectively offensive” before it could be deemed actionable as sexual harassment—it would have to pass the “reasonable person” test. To be prohibited, the office wrote in 2003, allegedly harassing speech would have to go “beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive.”</p> <p>But in 2013, the Departments of Justice and Education greatly broadened the definition of sexual harassment to include verbal conduct that is simply “unwelcome.” Out of fear of federal investigations, universities are now applying that standard—defining unwelcome speech as harassment—not just to sex, but to race, religion, and veteran status as well. Everyone is supposed to rely upon his or her own subjective feelings to decide whether a comment by a professor or a fellow student is unwelcome, and therefore grounds for a harassment claim. Emotional reasoning is now accepted as evidence.</p> <p>If our universities are teaching students that their emotions can be used effectively as weapons—or at least as evidence in administrative proceedings—then they are teaching students to nurture a kind of hypersensitivity that will lead them into countless drawn-out conflicts in college and beyond. Schools may be training students in thinking styles that will damage their careers and friendships, along with their mental health.</p> <h3 class="smallcaps"><span>Fortune-Telling and Trigger Warnings</span></h3> <p>Burns defines <i>fortune-telling</i> as “anticipat[ing] that things will turn out badly” and feeling “convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as “predict[ing] the future negatively” or seeing potential danger in an everyday situation. The recent spread of demands for trigger warnings on reading assignments with provocative content is an example of fortune-telling.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector6" targeting-pos="boxinjector6" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-12"><p>The idea that words (or smells or any sensory input) can trigger searing memories of past trauma—and intense fear that it may be repeated—has been around at least since World War I, when psychiatrists began treating soldiers for what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. But explicit trigger warnings are believed to have originated much more recently, on message boards in the early days of the Internet. Trigger warnings became particularly prevalent in self-help and feminist forums, where they allowed readers who had suffered from traumatic events like sexual assault to avoid graphic content that might trigger flashbacks or panic attacks. Search-engine trends indicate that the phrase broke into mainstream use online around 2011, spiked in 2014, and reached an all-time high in 2015. The use of trigger warnings on campus appears to have followed a similar trajectory; seemingly overnight, students at universities across the country have begun demanding that their professors issue warnings before covering material that might evoke a negative emotional response.</p> <p>In 2013, a task force composed of administrators, students, recent alumni, and one faculty member at Oberlin College, in Ohio, released an online resource guide for faculty (subsequently retracted in the face of faculty pushback) that included a list of topics warranting trigger warnings. These topics included classism and privilege, among many others. The task force recommended that materials that might trigger negative reactions among students be avoided altogether unless they “contribute directly” to course goals, and suggested that works that were “too important to avoid” be made optional.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxright-wrapper" data-pos="boxright"><gpt-ad id="boxright6" targeting-pos="boxright6" class="ad ad-boxright" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 600]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-13"><p>It’s hard to imagine how novels illustrating classism and privilege could provoke or reactivate the kind of terror that is typically implicated in PTSD. Rather, trigger warnings are sometimes demanded for a long list of ideas and attitudes that some students find politically offensive, in the name of preventing other students from being harmed. This is an example of what psychologists call “motivated reasoning”—we spontaneously generate arguments for conclusions we want to support. Once <i>you</i> find something hateful, it is easy to argue that exposure to the hateful thing could traumatize some <i>other</i> people. You believe that you know how others will react, and that their reaction could be devastating. Preventing that devastation becomes a moral obligation for the whole community. Books for which students have called publicly for trigger warnings within the past couple of years include Virginia Woolf’s <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> (at Rutgers, for “suicidal inclinations”) and Ovid’s <i>Metamorphoses</i> (at Columbia, for sexual assault).</p> <p>Jeannie Suk’s <i>New Yorker</i> essay described the difficulties of teaching rape law in the age of trigger warnings. Some students, she wrote, have pressured their professors to avoid teaching the subject in order to protect themselves and their classmates from potential distress. Suk compares this to trying to teach “a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood.”</p> </section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector7" targeting-pos="boxinjector7" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-14"><p>However, there is a deeper problem with trigger warnings. According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided. A person who is trapped in an elevator during a power outage may panic and think she is going to die. That frightening experience can change neural connections in her amygdala, leading to an elevator phobia. If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you should help her avoid elevators.</p> <p>But if you want to help her return to normalcy, you should take your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her through a process known as exposure therapy. You might start by asking the woman to merely look at an elevator from a distance—standing in a building lobby, perhaps—until her apprehension begins to subside. If nothing bad happens while she’s standing in the lobby—if the fear is not “reinforced”—then she will begin to learn a new association: elevators are not dangerous. (This reduction in fear during exposure is called habituation.) Then, on subsequent days, you might ask her to get closer, and on later days to push the call button, and eventually to step in and go up one floor. This is how the amygdala can get rewired again to associate a previously feared situation with safety or normalcy.</p> <p>Students who call for trigger warnings may be correct that some of their peers are harboring memories of trauma that could be reactivated by course readings. But they are wrong to try to prevent such reactivations. Students with PTSD should of course get treatment, but they should not try to avoid normal life, with its many opportunities for habituation. Classroom discussions are safe places to be exposed to incidental reminders of trauma (such as the word <i>violate</i>). A discussion of violence is unlikely to be followed by actual violence, so it is a good way to help students change the associations that are causing them discomfort. And they’d better get their habituation done in college, because the world beyond college will be far less willing to accommodate requests for trigger warnings and opt-outs.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxright-wrapper" data-pos="boxright"><gpt-ad id="boxright7" targeting-pos="boxright7" class="ad ad-boxright" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 600]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-15"><p>The expansive use of trigger warnings may also foster unhealthy mental habits in the vastly larger group of students who do not suffer from PTSD or other anxiety disorders. People acquire their fears not just from their own past experiences, but from social learning as well. If everyone around you acts as though something is dangerous—elevators, certain neighborhoods, novels depicting racism—then you are at risk of acquiring that fear too. The psychiatrist Sarah Roff pointed this out last year in an online article for <i>The Chronicle of Higher Education</i>. “One of my biggest concerns about trigger warnings,” Roff wrote, “is that they will apply not just to those who have experienced trauma, but to all students, creating an atmosphere in which they are encouraged to believe that there is something dangerous or damaging about discussing difficult aspects of our history.”</p> <aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore"><span>The new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion or debate.</span></aside><p>In an article published last year by <i>Inside Higher Ed</i>, seven humanities professors wrote that the trigger-warning movement was “already having a chilling effect on [their] teaching and pedagogy.” They reported their colleagues’ receiving “phone calls from deans and other administrators investigating student complaints that they have included ‘triggering’ material in their courses, with or without warnings.” A trigger warning, they wrote, “serves as a guarantee that students will not experience unexpected discomfort and implies that if they do, a contract has been broken.” When students come to<i> expect</i> trigger warnings for any material that makes them uncomfortable, the easiest way for faculty to stay out of trouble is to avoid material that might upset the most sensitive student in the class.</p> <h3 class="smallcaps"><span>Magnification, Labeling, and </span>Microaggressions</h3> <p>Burns defines <i>magnification</i> as “exaggerat[ing] the importance of things,” and Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define <i>labeling</i> as “assign[ing] global negative traits to yourself and others.” The recent collegiate trend of uncovering allegedly racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise discriminatory microaggressions doesn’t <i>incidentally</i> teach students to focus on small or accidental slights. Its <i>purpose</i> is to get students to focus on them and then relabel the people who have made such remarks as aggressors.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector8" targeting-pos="boxinjector8" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-16"><p>The term <i>microaggression</i> originated in the 1970s and referred to subtle, often unconscious racist affronts. The definition has expanded in recent years to include anything that can be perceived as discriminatory on virtually any basis. For example, in 2013, a student group at UCLA staged a sit-in during a class taught by Val Rust, an education professor. The group read a letter aloud expressing their concerns about the campus’s hostility toward students of color. Although Rust was not explicitly named, the group quite clearly criticized his teaching as microaggressive. In the course of correcting his students’ grammar and spelling, Rust had noted that a student had wrongly capitalized the first letter of the word <i>indigenous</i>. Lowercasing the capital <i>I</i> was an insult to the student and her ideology, the group claimed.</p> <p>Even joking about microaggressions can be seen as an aggression, warranting punishment. Last fall, Omar Mahmood, a student at the University of Michigan, wrote a satirical column for a conservative student publication, <i>The Michigan Review</i>, poking fun at what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive microaggressions in just about anything. Mahmood was also employed at the campus newspaper, <i>The Michigan Daily</i>. <i>The Daily</i>’s editors said that the way Mahmood had “satirically mocked the experiences of fellow Daily contributors and minority communities on campus … created a conflict of interest.” <i>The Daily</i> terminated Mahmood after he described the incident to two Web sites, The College Fix and The Daily Caller. A group of women later vandalized Mahmood’s doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.” When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxright-wrapper" data-pos="boxright"><gpt-ad id="boxright8" targeting-pos="boxright8" class="ad ad-boxright" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 600]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-17"><p>In March, the student government at Ithaca College, in upstate New York, went so far as to propose the creation of an anonymous microaggression-reporting system. Student sponsors envisioned some form of disciplinary action against “oppressors” engaged in belittling speech. One of the sponsors of the program said that while “not … every instance will require trial or some kind of harsh punishment,” she wanted the program to be “record-keeping but with impact.”</p> <p>Surely people make subtle or thinly veiled racist or sexist remarks on college campuses, and it is right for students to raise questions and initiate discussions about such cases. But the increased focus on microaggressions coupled with the endorsement of emotional reasoning is a formula for a constant state of outrage, even toward well-meaning speakers trying to engage in genuine discussion.</p> <p>What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin in the years just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection and enter the workforce? Would they not be better prepared to flourish if we taught them to question their own emotional reactions, and to give people the benefit of the doubt?</p> <h3 class="smallcaps">Teaching Students to Catastrophize and Have Zero Tolerance</h3> <p>Burns defines <i>catastrophizing</i> as a kind of magnification that turns “commonplace negative events into nightmarish monsters.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as believing “that what has happened or will happen” is “so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it.” Requests for trigger warnings involve catastrophizing, but this way of thinking colors other areas of campus thought as well.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector9" targeting-pos="boxinjector9" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-18"><p>Catastrophizing rhetoric about physical danger is employed by campus administrators more commonly than you might think—sometimes, it seems, with cynical ends in mind. For instance, last year administrators at Bergen Community College, in New Jersey, suspended Francis Schmidt, a professor, after he posted a picture of his daughter on his Google+ account. The photo showed her in a yoga pose, wearing a T-shirt that read <span class="smallcaps">I will take what is mine with fire & blood</span>, a quote from the HBO show <i>Game of Thrones</i>. Schmidt had filed a grievance against the school about two months earlier after being passed over for a sabbatical. The quote was interpreted as a threat by a campus administrator, who received a notification after Schmidt posted the picture; it had been sent, automatically, to a whole group of contacts. According to Schmidt, a Bergen security official present at a subsequent meeting between administrators and Schmidt thought the word <i>fire</i> could refer to AK-47s.</p> <p>Then there is the eight-year legal saga at Valdosta State University, in Georgia, where a student was expelled for protesting the construction of a parking garage by posting an allegedly “threatening” collage on Facebook. The collage described the proposed structure as a “memorial” parking garage—a joke referring to a claim by the university president that the garage would be part of his legacy. The president interpreted the collage as a threat against his life.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxright-wrapper" data-pos="boxright"><gpt-ad id="boxright9" targeting-pos="boxright9" class="ad ad-boxright" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 600]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-19"><p>It should be no surprise that students are exhibiting similar sensitivity. At the University of Central Florida in 2013, for example, Hyung-il Jung, an accounting instructor, was suspended after a student reported that Jung had made a threatening comment during a review session. Jung explained to the <i>Orlando Sentinel</i> that the material he was reviewing was difficult, and he’d noticed the pained look on students’ faces, so he made a joke. “It looks like you guys are being slowly suffocated by these questions,” he recalled saying. “Am I on a killing spree or what?”</p> <p>After the student reported Jung’s comment, a group of nearly 20 others e-mailed the UCF administration explaining that the comment had clearly been made in jest. Nevertheless, UCF suspended Jung from all university duties and demanded that he obtain written certification from a mental-health professional that he was “not a threat to [himself] or to the university community” before he would be allowed to return to campus.</p> <p>All of these actions teach a common lesson: smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.</p> <h3 class="smallcaps"><span>Mental Filtering and Disinvitation Season </span></h3> <p>As Burns defines it, <i>mental filtering</i> is “pick[ing] out a negative detail in any situation and dwell[ing] on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn refer to this as “negative filtering,” which they define as “focus[ing] almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notic[ing] the positives.” When applied to campus life, mental filtering allows for simpleminded demonization.</p> </section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector10" targeting-pos="boxinjector10" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-20"><p>Students and faculty members in large numbers modeled this cognitive distortion during 2014’s “disinvitation season.” That’s the time of year—usually early spring—when commencement speakers are announced and when students and professors demand that some of those speakers be disinvited because of things they have said or done. According to data compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, since 2000, at least 240 campaigns have been launched at U.S. universities to prevent public figures from appearing at campus events; most of them have occurred since 2009.</p> <p>Consider two of the most prominent disinvitation targets of 2014: former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde. Rice was the first black female secretary of state; Lagarde was the first woman to become finance minister of a G8 country and the first female head of the IMF. Both speakers could have been seen as highly successful role models for female students, and Rice for minority students as well. But the critics, in effect, discounted any possibility of something positive coming from those speeches.</p> <p>Members of an academic community should of course be free to raise questions about Rice’s role in the Iraq War or to look skeptically at the IMF’s policies. But should dislike of <i>part </i>of a person’s record disqualify her altogether from sharing her perspectives?</p> </section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector11" targeting-pos="boxinjector11" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-21"><p>If campus culture conveys the idea that visitors must be pure, with résumés that never offend generally left-leaning campus sensibilities, then higher education will have taken a further step toward intellectual homogeneity and the creation of an environment in which students rarely encounter diverse viewpoints. And universities will have reinforced the belief that it’s okay to filter out the positive. If students graduate believing that they can learn nothing from people they dislike or from those with whom they disagree, we will have done them a great intellectual disservice.</p> <h3 class="smallcaps"><span>What Can We Do Now?</span></h3> <p>Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for the students. They are bad for the workplace, which will be mired in unending litigation if student expectations of safety are carried forward. And they are bad for American democracy, which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship. When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as willfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.</p> <p>Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control. One of the great truths taught by Buddhism (and Stoicism, Hinduism, and many other traditions) is that you can never achieve happiness by making the world conform to your desires. But you can master your desires and habits of thought. This, of course, is the goal of cognitive behavioral therapy. With this in mind, here are some steps that might help reverse the tide of bad thinking on campus.</p> <p>The biggest single step in the right direction does not involve faculty or university administrators, but rather the federal government, which should release universities from their fear of unreasonable investigation and sanctions by the Department of Education. Congress should define peer-on-peer harassment according to the Supreme Court’s definition in the 1999 case <i>Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education</i>. The <i>Davis</i> standard holds that a single comment or thoughtless remark by a student does not equal harassment; harassment requires a pattern of objectively offensive behavior by one student that interferes with another student’s access to education. Establishing the <i>Davis</i> standard would help eliminate universities’ impulse to police their students’ speech so carefully.</p> <p>Universities themselves should try to raise consciousness about the need to balance freedom of speech with the need to make all students feel welcome. Talking openly about such conflicting but important values is just the sort of challenging exercise that any diverse but tolerant community must learn to do. Restrictive speech codes should be abandoned.</p> <p>Universities should also officially and strongly discourage trigger warnings. They should endorse the American Association of University Professors’ report on these warnings, which notes, “The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.” Professors should be free to use trigger warnings if they choose to do so, but by explicitly discouraging the practice, universities would help fortify the faculty against student requests for such warnings.</p> <p>Finally, universities should rethink the skills and values they most want to impart to their incoming students. At present, many freshman-orientation programs try to raise student sensitivity to a nearly impossible level. Teaching students to avoid giving unintentional offense is a worthy goal, especially when the students come from many different cultural backgrounds. But students should also be taught how to live in a world full of potential offenses. Why not teach incoming students how to practice cognitive behavioral therapy? Given high and rising rates of mental illness, this simple step would be among the most humane and supportive things a university could do. The cost and time commitment could be kept low: a few group training sessions could be supplemented by Web sites or apps. But the outcome could pay dividends in many ways. For example, a shared vocabulary about reasoning, common distortions, and the appropriate use of evidence to draw conclusions would facilitate critical thinking and real debate. It would also tone down the perpetual state of outrage that seems to engulf some colleges these days, allowing students’ minds to open more widely to new ideas and new people. A greater commitment to formal, public debate on campus—and to the assembly of a more politically diverse faculty—would further serve that goal.</p> <p>Thomas Jefferson, upon founding the University of Virginia, said:</p> <blockquote>This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.</blockquote> <p>We believe that this is still—and will always be—the best attitude for American universities. Faculty, administrators, students, and the federal government all have a role to play in restoring universities to their historic mission.<a id="Cognitive Disorders" name="Cognitive%20Disorders" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'399356'"></a></p> <hr><h3>Common Cognitive Distortions</h3> <p class="letter-response"><em>A partial list from Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn’s </em>Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders<em> (2012).</em></p> <p><b>1. Mind reading.</b> You assume that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”</p> <p><b>2. Fortune-telling.</b> You predict the future negatively: things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,” or “I won’t get the job.”</p> <p><b>3. Catastrophizing.</b>You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.”</p> <p><b>4. Labeling.</b> You assign global negative traits to yourself and others. “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”</p> <p><b>5. Discounting positives.</b> You claim that the positive things you or others do are trivial. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”</p> <p><b>6. Negative filtering.</b> You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”</p> <p><b>7. Overgeneralizing.</b> You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”</p> <p><b>8. Dichotomous thinking.</b> You view events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”</p> <p><b>9. Blaming.</b> You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, and you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”</p> <p><b>10. What if?</b> You keep asking a series of questions about “what if” something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. “Yeah, but what if I get anxious?,” or “What if I can’t catch my breath?”</p> <p><b>11. Emotional reasoning.</b> You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”</p> <p><b>12. Inability to disconfirm.</b> You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought <i>I’m unlovable</i><i>,</i> you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently, your thought cannot be refuted. “That’s not the real issue. There are deeper problems. There are other factors.”</p> </section> </div> <div class="article-tools fluid-container"> <ul class="article-links"> <li class="continue-reading"> <a href="#">Continue Reading</a> </li> <li><a href="#disqus_thread">Jump to Comments</a></li> <li class="authors-about"> <a href="#about-the-authors" data-omni-click="inherit">About the Authors</a> </li> </ul> <ul class="social-icons round color"> <li> <div class="share-count facebook"></div> <a href="#" class="social-icon facebook" data-share="facebook" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'fb',r' ',r'399356 '"></a></li> <li> <div class="share-count twitter"></div> <a href="#" class="social-icon twitter" data-share="twitter" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'tw',r' ',r'399356 '"></a></li> <li class="hide-mobile"><a href="#" class="social-icon linkedin" data-share="linkedin" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'lnkd',r' ',r'399356 '"></a></li> <li><a href="#" class="social-icon pocket" data-share="pocket" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'pckt',r' ',r'399356 '"></a></li> <li class="show-mobile"><a href="#" class="social-icon whatsapp" data-share="whatsapp" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'whts',r' ',r'399356 '"></a></li> <li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/mailto:/?subject=The%20Coddling%20of%20the%20American%20Mind&body=In%20the%20name%20of%20emotional%20well-being%2C%20college%20students%20are%20increasingly%20demanding%20protection%20from%20words%20and%20ideas%20they%20don%E2%80%99t%20like.%20Here%E2%80%99s%20why%20that%E2%80%99s%20disastrous%20for%20education%E2%80%94and%20mental%20health.%20%0A%0ARead More:%0Ahttp%3A//www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/" class="social-icon email" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'email',r' ',r'399356 '"></a></li> <li class="hide-mobile"><a href="#" class="social-icon print" data-share="print" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'print',r' ',r'399356 '"></a></li> <li><a href="#disqus_thread" class="social-icon comments" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'disq',r' ',r'399356 '"></a></li> </ul> <div class="article-after"> <div class="ad-article-wrapper-bottom"> <gpt-ad id="ad-boxbottom" targeting-pos="boxbottom" class="ad ad-boxbottom" lazy-load="1.5"> <gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[680, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 450]]"></gpt-sizeset> <gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[]"></gpt-sizeset> </gpt-ad> </div> <div class="module module-related" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'related',r' ',@href"> <h2 class="module-label"> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/education/" data-omni-click="inherit">Education</a> </h2> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/new-orleans-education-decade/403558/" data-omni-click="inherit"> <figure> <img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401im_/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2015/09/RTX1P627/thumb_wide_300.jpg"> </figure> <h2 class="hed">What a Decade Has Done for New Orleans鈥檚 Schools </h2> </a> <p class="dek has-dek"> “I’m amazed not by the growth in test scores, but rather by how many people are talking about the state of public education in the city.” </p> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/emmanuel-felton/" title="Emmanuel Felton">Emmanuel Felton</a></li> <li class="date"> <time datetime="2015-09-04"> Sep 4, 2015 </time> </li> <li class="comments"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/new-orleans-education-decade/403558/#disqus_thread" data-disqus-identifier="mt403558" data-disqus-format="{}"></a></li> </ul> </div> <div id="about-the-authors" class="module module-authors"> <h2 class="module-label">About the Authors</h2> <ul class="authors"> <li class="author without-headshot"> <div class="bio"> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/greg-lukianoff/" class="author-link">Greg Lukianoff</a> is the president  and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the author of <em><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://www.amazon.com/Unlearning-Liberty-Campus-Censorship-American/dp/1594037302/">Unlearning Liberty</a>.</em> </div> </li> <li class="author without-headshot"> <div class="bio"> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/jonathan-haidt/" class="author-link">Jonathan Haidt</a> is a social psychologist and Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at the NYU-Stern School of Business. His most recent book is <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://www.powells.com/biblio/74-9780307377906-0"><em>The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion</em></a>. </div> <ul class="links"> <li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=JonHaidt" class="twitter">Twitter</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> </div> </div> </div> </article> <div id="taboola-container"> <div id="taboola-bottom-main-column"></div> <script type="text/javascript"> window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({mode:'thumbnails-a', container:'taboola-bottom-main-column', placement:'Bottom Main Column'}); </script> </div> <div id="article-most-popular" class="most-popular-container fluid-container" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,@href"> <div class="most-popular-header"> <h2>Most Popular</h2> <div class="presented-by" data-enable-if-ad="ad-logo"> Presented by <gpt-ad id="ad-logo" targeting-pos="logo" class="ad ad-logo"> <gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[88, 31], [120, 60]]"></gpt-sizeset> </gpt-ad> </div> </div> <div class="most-popular-list"> <ul class="most-popular"> <li class="most-popular-article "> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'399356.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/2015/07/WEL_Haidt_PC_Kid_FNL_WEBCrop/hero_wide_640.jpg?1438197190" class="lazyload"> <figcaption class="credit">Andrew B. Myers / The Atlantic</figcaption> </figure> <h3 class="hed">The Coddling of the American Mind</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/greg-lukianoff/" title="Greg Lukianoff">Greg Lukianoff</a> and <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/jonathan-haidt/" title="Jonathan Haidt">Jonathan Haidt</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content "> <p class="dek"><span><span>In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health. </span></span></p> <div class="excerpt"> <p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps"><b>S</b>omething strange is </span>happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for <i>The New Yorker</i> about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word <i>violate</i> (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in <i>The Chronicle of Higher Education </i>describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/">article</a> in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.</p>  </div> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Continue Reading </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article "> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'375762.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2014/08/homepage_03/hero_wide_640.jpg?1430154145" class="lazyload"> <figcaption class="credit">Kenneth Jarecke</figcaption> </figure> <h3 class="hed">The War Photo No One Would Publish</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/torie-rose-deghett/" title="Torie Rose DeGhett">Torie Rose DeGhett</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content "> <p class="dek">When Kenneth Jarecke photographed an Iraqi man burned alive, he thought it would change the way Americans saw the Gulf War. But the media wouldn’t run the picture.</p> <div class="excerpt"> <p>The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body, turning him to dusty ash and blackened bone. In a photograph taken soon afterward, the soldier’s hand reaches out of the shattered windshield, which frames his face and chest. The colors and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes.</p>  <p>On February 28, 1991, Kenneth Jarecke stood in front of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow soldiers, and photographed him. At one point, before he died this dramatic mid-retreat death, the soldier had had a name. He’d fought in Saddam Hussein’s army and had a rank and an assignment and a unit. He might have been devoted to the dictator who sent him to occupy Kuwait and fight the Americans. Or he might have been an unlucky young man with no prospects, recruited off the streets of Baghdad.</p>  </div> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Continue Reading </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article "> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/mommy-bloggers-money/402535/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'402535.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2015/08/2684043162_bba892e0f7_o/hero_wide_640.jpg?1440698797" class="lazyload"> <figcaption class="credit">Josh Hallett / Flickr</figcaption> </figure> <h3 class="hed">Can Mommy Bloggers Still Make a Living?</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/olga-khazan/" title="Olga Khazan">Olga Khazan</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content "> <p class="dek">Heather Armstrong’s <em>Dooce</em> once drew millions of readers. Her blog’s semi-retirement speaks to the challenges of earning money as an individual blogger today.</p> <div class="excerpt"> <p>The success story of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://dooce.com/">Dooce.com</a> was once blogger lore, told and re-told in playgroups and Meetups—anywhere hyper-verbal people with Wordpress accounts gathered. “It happened for that Dooce lady,” they would say. “It could happen for your blog, too.”</p>  <p>Dooce has its origin in the late 1990s, when a young lapsed Mormon named Heather Armstrong taught herself HTML code and moved to Los Angeles. She got a job in web design and began blogging about her life on her personal site, Dooce.com.</p>  <p>The site’s name evolved out of her friends’ AOL Instant-Messenger slang for dude, or its more incredulous cousin, "doooood!” About a year later, Armstrong was fired for writing about her co-workers on the site—an experience that, for a good portion of the ‘aughts, came known as “getting <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dooced">dooced</a>.” She eloped with her now ex-husband, Jon, moved to Salt Lake City, and eventually started blogging full time again.</p>  </div> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/mommy-bloggers-money/402535/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Continue Reading </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article "> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/2016-election/384828/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'384828.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2015/09/AP_193120642860/hero_wide_640.jpg?1441230522" class="lazyload"> <figcaption class="credit">David Goldman / AP</figcaption> </figure> <h3 class="hed">The 2016 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-a-graham/" title="David A. Graham">David A. Graham</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content "> <p class="dek">It’s not just Trump: With Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina on the rise, Republicans are loving outsiders and shunning politicians.</p> <div class="excerpt"> <p>For the first time in a long time, Donald Trump isn’t the most interesting story in the 2016 presidential race. That's partly because his dominance in the Republican polls, while still surprising, is no longer novel and increasingly well explored and explained, but it’s also partly because what’s going on with the rest of the GOP field is far more interesting.</p>  <p>It’s a topsy-turvy world. Take Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina to start. Carson’s campaign has been up and down, with occasional turbulence on his staff. But despite foolish reporters <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/what-happened-to-ben-carson/399794/">writing him off</a>, Carson has been on fire since the first GOP debate on August 6. According to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html"><em>RealClearPolitics</em>’ average of national polls</a>, he’s now running a solid second, behind Trump. In Iowa, he’s <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/252319-poll-trump-carson-tied-for-lead-in-iowa">tied</a> or <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://gravismarketing.com/polling-and-market-research/current-iowa-polling-2/?utm_source=Copy%20of%20Copy%20of%20Iowa%20Poll2&utm_campaign=Recent%20Iowa%20Poll..&utm_medium=email">just a hair behind</a> the man with the hair. Meanwhile, his <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b1b258d789224c5bb31ead500cad58a5/ben-carson-campaign-reaping-cash-he-rises-gop-polls">fundraising remains strong</a>.</p>  </div> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/2016-election/384828/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Continue Reading </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article "> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'384980.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/2015/02/ISIS_Web_feature2/hero_wide_640.jpg?1429715843" class="lazyload"> <figcaption class="credit">AP/The Atlantic</figcaption> </figure> <h3 class="hed">What ISIS Really Wants</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/graeme-wood/" title="Graeme Wood">Graeme Wood</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content "> <p class="dek">The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.</p> <div class="excerpt"> <p class="dropcap"><span class="caps"><span class="smallcaps">What is the Islamic State</span>? </span></p>  <p>Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, <i>The New York Times</i> published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.</p>  </div> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Continue Reading </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article "> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/jk-rowling-harry-potter-fanfiction-george-lucas-star-wars/403669/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'403669.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2015/09/hp/hero_wide_640.jpg?1441299681" class="lazyload"> <figcaption class="credit">Warner Bros.</figcaption> </figure> <h3 class="hed">Harry Potter and the Never-Ending Story</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-sims/" title="David Sims">David Sims</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content "> <p class="dek">In continuing to tinker with the universe she built eight years after it ended, J.K. Rowling might be falling into the same trap as Star Wars’s George Lucas.</p> <div class="excerpt"> <p>September 1st, 2015 marked a curious footnote in <em>Harry Potter </em>marginalia: According to the series’s <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Dating_conventions">elaborate timeline</a>, rarely referenced in the books themselves, it was the day James S. Potter, Harry’s eldest son, started school at Hogwarts. It’s not an event directly written about in the books, nor one of particular importance, but their creator, J.K. Rowling, dutifully <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/638778021663666176">took to Twitter</a> to announce what amounts to footnote details: that James was sorted into House Gryffindor, just like his father, to the disappointment of Teddy Lupin, Harry’s godson, apparently a Hufflepuff.</p>   <p>It’s not earth-shattering information that Harry’s kid would end up in the same house his father was in, and the <em>Harry Potter</em> series’s insistence on sorting all of its characters into four broad personality quadrants largely based on their family names has always struggled to stand up to scrutiny. Still, Rowling’s tweet prompted <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://www.salon.com/2015/09/02/j_k_rowlings_harry_potter_trivia_tweets_changing_the_role_of_author_140_characters_at_a_time/">much garment-rending</a> among the books’ devoted fans. Can a tweet really amount to a piece of canonical information for a book? There isn’t much harm in Rowling providing these little embellishments years after her books were published, but even idle tinkering can be a dangerous path to take, with the obvious example being the insistent tweaks wrought by George Lucas on his <em>Star Wars </em>series.</p>  </div> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/jk-rowling-harry-potter-fanfiction-george-lucas-star-wars/403669/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Continue Reading </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article "> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/rubble-palmyra-syria-isis/403921/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'403921.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2015/09/Syria/hero_wide_640.jpg?1441390560" class="lazyload"> <figcaption class="credit">SANA / AP</figcaption> </figure> <h3 class="hed">The Rubble of Palmyra</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/leon-wieseltier/" title="Leon Wieseltier">Leon Wieseltier</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content "> <p class="dek">ISIS did not merely blast apart old stones—it attacked the very foundations of pluralistic society.</p> <div class="excerpt"> <p>If the ruined ruins of Palmyra could speak, they would marvel at our shock. After all, they have been sacked before. In their mute and shattered eloquence, they spoke for centuries not only about the cultures that built them but also about the cultures that destroyed them—about the fragility of civilization itself, even when it is incarnated in stone. No designation of sanctity, by God or by UNESCO, suffices to protect the past. The past is helpless. Instead these ruins, all ruins, have had the effect of lifting the past out of history and into time. They carry the spectator away from facts and toward reveries.</p>  <p>In the 18th century, after the publication in London of <em>The Ruins of Palmyra</em>, a pioneering volume of etchings by Robert Wood, who had traveled to the Syrian desert with the rather colorful James Dawkins, a fellow antiquarian and politician, the desolation of Palmyra became a recurring symbol for ephemerality and the vanity of all human endeavors. “It is the natural and common fate of cities,” Wood dryly remarked in one of the essays in his book, “to have their memory longer preserved than their ruins.” Wood’s beautiful and meticulous prints served as inspirations for paintings, and it was in response to one of those paintings that Diderot wrote some famous pages in his great <em>Salons of 1767</em>: “The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures. ... Wherever I cast my glance, the objects surrounding me announce death and compel my resignation to what awaits me. What is my ephemeral existence in comparison with that of a rock being worn down, of a valley being formed, of a forest that’s dying, of these deteriorating masses suspended above my head? I see the marble of tombs crumble into powder and I don’t want to die!”</p> </div> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/rubble-palmyra-syria-isis/403921/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Continue Reading </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article "> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-junk-food-can-end-obesity/309396/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'309396.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/2013/06/05/0713-WEL-Freedman-bar/hero_wide_640.jpg?1429716827" class="lazyload"> <figcaption class="credit">Dan Saelinger</figcaption> </figure> <h3 class="hed">How Junk Food Can End Obesity</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-h-freedman/" title="David H. Freedman">David H. Freedman</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content "> <p class="dek">Demonizing processed food may be dooming many to obesity and disease. Could embracing the drive-thru make us all healthier?</p> <div class="excerpt"> <p> <span class="smallcaps">Late last year, </span>in a small health-food eatery called Cafe Sprouts in Oberlin, Ohio, I had what may well have been the most wholesome beverage of my life. The friendly server patiently guided me to an apple-blueberry-kale-carrot smoothie-juice combination, which she spent the next several minutes preparing, mostly by shepherding farm-fresh produce into machinery. The result was tasty, but at 300 calories (by my rough calculation) in a 16-ounce cup, it was more than my diet could regularly absorb without consequences, nor was I about to make a habit of $9 shakes, healthy or not.</p> <p> Inspired by the experience nonetheless, I tried again two months later at L.A.’s Real Food Daily, a popular vegan restaurant near Hollywood. I was initially wary of a low-calorie juice made almost entirely from green vegetables, but the server assured me it was a popular treat. I like to brag that I can eat anything, and I scarf down all sorts of raw vegetables like candy, but I could stomach only about a third of this oddly foamy, bitter concoction. It smelled like lawn clippings and tasted like liquid celery. It goes for $7.95, and I waited 10 minutes for it.</p> </div> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-junk-food-can-end-obesity/309396/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Continue Reading </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article "> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/countries-difficult-visas-travel/403267/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'403267.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2015/09/Somalia/hero_wide_640.jpg?1441144979" class="lazyload"> <figcaption class="credit">AMISOM Public Information / Flickr</figcaption> </figure> <h3 class="hed">The Hardest Places in the World to Visit</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/albert-podell/" title="Albert Podell">Albert Podell</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content "> <p class="dek">I traveled to every country on earth. In some cases, the adventure started before I could get there.<br/> </p> <div class="excerpt"> <p>Last summer, my Royal Air Maroc flight from Casablanca landed at Malabo International Airport in Equatorial Guinea, and I completed a 50-year mission: I had officially, and legally, visited every recognized country on earth.</p>  <p>This means 196 countries: the 193 members of the United Nations, plus Taiwan, Vatican City, and Kosovo, which are not members but are, to varying degrees, recognized as independent countries by other international actors.</p>   <p>In five decades of traveling, I’ve crossed countries by rickshaw, pedicab, bus, car, minivan, and bush taxi; a handful by train (Italy, Switzerland, Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, and Greece); two by riverboat (Gabon and Germany); Norway by coastal steamer; Gambia and the Amazonian parts of Peru and Ecuador by motorized canoe; and half of Burma by motor scooter. I rode completely around Jamaica on a motorcycle and Nauru on a bicycle. I’ve also crossed three small countries on foot (Vatican City, San Marino, and Liechtenstein), and parts of others by horse, camel, elephant, llama, and donkey. I confess that I have not visited every one of the 7,107 islands in the Philippine archipelago or most of the more than 17,000 islands constituting Indonesia, but I’ve made my share of risky voyages on the rickety inter-island rustbuckets you read about in the back pages of the <i>Times</i> under headlines like “Ship Sinks in Sulu Sea, 400 Presumed Lost.”</p>  </div> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/countries-difficult-visas-travel/403267/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Continue Reading </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article "> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/nicki-minaj-miley-cyrus-and-the-vmas-tone-policing-palooza/402913/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'402913.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2015/08/RTX1QC78/hero_wide_640.jpg?1441021985" class="lazyload"> <figcaption class="credit">Mario Anzuoni / Reuters</figcaption> </figure> <h3 class="hed">Nicki Minaj, Miley Cyrus, and the VMAs: A Tone-Policing Palooza</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/spencer-kornhaber/" title="Spencer Kornhaber">Spencer Kornhaber</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content "> <p class="dek">Though it wasn’t pretty, Minaj was really teaching a lesson in civility.</p> <div class="excerpt"> <p>Nicki Minaj didn’t, in the end, say much to Miley Cyrus at all. If you only read the comments that lit up the Internet at last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, you might think she was kidding, or got cut off, when she “called out” the former Disney star who was hosting: “And now, back to this bitch that had a lot to say about me the other day in the press. Miley, what’s good?”</p>   <p>But to really understand the moment, you need to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://www.mtv.com/videos/?id=1737439">watch the tape.</a></p>  <p>To summarize: When Minaj’s “Anaconda” won the award for Best Hip-Hop Video, she took to the stage in a slow shuffle, shook her booty with presenter Rebel Wilson, and then gave an acceptance speech in which she switched vocal personas as amusingly as she does in her best raps—street-preacher-like when telling women “don’t you be out here depending on these little snotty-nosed boys”; sweetness and light when thanking her fans and pastor. Then a wave of nausea seemed to come over her, and she turned her gaze toward Cyrus. To me, the look on her face, not the words that she said, was the news of the night:</p>  </div> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/nicki-minaj-miley-cyrus-and-the-vmas-tone-policing-palooza/402913/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Continue Reading </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article most-popular-video"> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/402247/give-me-sex-jesus/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'402247.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/video/img/2015/08/Screen_Shot_2015_08_27_at_10.47.08_AM_2-1/still.jpg?1440691923" class="lazyload"> </figure> <h3 class="hed">'Jesus, Don't Let Me Die Before I've Had Sex'</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/nadine-ajaka/" title="Nadine Ajaka">Nadine Ajaka</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content without-excerpt"> <p class="dek">An excerpt from a new documentary explores the fraught relationship between Evangelical Christians and sex.</p> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/402247/give-me-sex-jesus/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Watch Video </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article most-popular-video"> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/401099/melanoma-mela-no-more/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'401099.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/video/img/2015/08/THUMB_8/still.jpg?1439469123" class="lazyload"> </figure> <h3 class="hed">The Importance of Being Naked</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/nicolas-pollock/" title="Nicolas Pollock">Nicolas Pollock</a>, <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/kasia-cieplak-mayr-von-baldegg/" title="Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg">Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg</a>, <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/sam-price-waldman/" title="Sam Price-Waldman">Sam Price-Waldman</a>, and <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/james-hamblin/" title="James Hamblin">James Hamblin</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content without-excerpt"> <p class="dek">Why aren't more people doing basic skin-cancer screening?</p> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/401099/melanoma-mela-no-more/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Watch Video </a> </li> <li class="most-popular-article most-popular-video"> <a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/400241/vanlife/" class="article-link" data-omni-click="r'.',r' ',d,r'mostpop',$li,r'400241.'"> <figure class="lead-img"> <img data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905053401/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/video/img/2015/08/vanlife1/still.png?1438641968" class="lazyload"> </figure> <h3 class="hed">The Wanderlust of #Vanlife</h3> </a> <ul class="metadata"> <li class="byline"><a href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/author/sam-price-waldman/" title="Sam Price-Waldman">Sam Price-Waldman</a></li> </ul> <div class="article-content without-excerpt"> <p class="dek">How an Instagram hashtag inspired a movement</p> </div> <a class="read-more" href="/web/20150905053401/http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/400241/vanlife/" data-omni-click="inherit"> Watch Video </a> </li> </ul> </div> </div> <div id="article-comments"> <div id="disqus_thread"> <a href="#disqus_thread" class="show-comments" data-omni-click="r'article',r'comments ',d,r'related',r' ',r''">Show Comments</a> </div> </div> <div id="janrain-screens" class="profile-screens"></div> <footer id="site-footer" 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