Last Week’s Links

What’s Your Type? The Myers-Briggs Test and the Rise of the Personality Quiz

Myers-Briggs offers a model for self-revelation that has endured for decades, thrilling boomers and delighting millennials even as it has perpetually disgusted frustrated psychologists. It helped spawn a booming industry of personality assessments, one that uses the internet and algorithms to hopscotch far beyond the original, hand-scored tests. It inspires an ardent fandom that borders on spiritual, and yet its primary use is decidedly tethered to the material world, as a way to shuffle workers into places where they won’t complain. Its paradoxical appeal, as a woo-woo tool to know the soul and as a convenient, prefab employee sorter for corporations, is both absurd and a little poetic.

This article looks at the new book The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre, which details the origin and persistence of the Myers-Briggs Test.

What Personality Tests Really Deliver

This article also looks at the new book The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre, with an emphasis on the conclusion that personality tests are more self-help than science.

SOLVING THE HIDDEN DISEASE THAT’S AS BAD AS 15 CIGARETTES A DAY

That disease would be loneliness:

Experts agree that we’re facing a loneliness epidemic, one that has profound consequences for our physical health, our longevity and our overall well-being. But where others emphasize the scale and seriousness of this looming crisis, Murthy offers an encouraging message: Yes, loneliness is a pervasive problem worldwide, but there is a simple and actionable solution.

What We Know About Art and the Mind

There are many studies about how we process tonal music and figurative painting, but philosophers are just beginning to understand how our brains react to more abstract work.

The Best Apps for Every Type of Journaling

Usually, when we think about journaling, the old fashioned method of pen and paper comes to mind. But of course, there’s a digital version of every activity now, and there are a ton of great apps and software out there designed to keep your memories in a single place. There are nearly endless options to choose from, so we’ve rounded up the best that are currently available, depending on how you want to use them and what your goals are.

The recommendations here are good, but several links to articles about journal writing make this article even better.

© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown