Researchers generally regard so-called moral guilt, in the right amount, to be a good thing: A child who claims responsibility for knocking over a tower and tries to rebuild it is engaging in behavior that’s not only reparative but also prosocial.
Best of
A collection of favorites.
Kate’s Still Here (Esquire.com, Winner of Hearst Magazines’ 2017 Editorial Excellence Awards)
Deloy Oberlin didn’t know how much time his wife had left, but he knew he wanted to spend their final days together fulfilling her last wish.
She thought she was Irish, until a DNA test opened a 100-year-old mystery (The Washington Post, Longreads Best of 2017)
If the information Alice Collins Plebuch was seeing on her computer screen was correct, it posed a fundamental mystery about her very identity. It meant one of her parents wasn’t who he or she was supposed to be — and, by extension, neither was she. We are only just beginning to grapple with what it means to cheaply and easily uncover our genetic heritage.
Introducing the Urban Super-Raccoon — Nimble, Quick and Getting Smarter Every Day (Slate)
The animals have adjusted remarkably well to living alongside human beings—perhaps because when they live with us, they seem to learn from us.