Чтение: задания 12 — 18

In some heavily multilingual areas of the world, most people learn a lingua franca - a regional trade language in addition to their mother tongue. But when someone proposes English or French say, as a trade language, objections inevitably arise. These languages are notoriously difficult to learn with strange spellings and numerous grammatical rules and exceptions. But more importantly, they’re loaded with historical and cultural baggage. The only hope for a truly universal language would seem to he an artificial one a language that is designed to be free from cultural biases and easy to learn This was precisely the goal of Esperanto.

L. L. Zarnenhof grew up in the late 1800s in Warsaw, which was a part of Russia at that time. While still in high school he set out to design a universal artificial language that would facilitate communication within his linguistically diverse community. By the time he finished this side project ten years later, Zamenhof was a practicing ophthalmologist. In 1887, Zamenhof published the first guide in RUssian to the new language, which he called “Lingvo Internacia”, meaning “international language''. Zamenhоf wrote the textbook under the pseudonym “Esperanto,” meaning ''a person who is hoping'' in Lingvo Internacia. Fans of the language decided that “Esperanto” had a nicer ring to it, and they soon adopted it as the informal name of the language.

Esperantо was designed to be both easy to learn and culturally neutral. According to some sources, an English speaker can learn Esperanto up to five times faster than Spanish. For starters, Esperanto uses strictly phonetic spelling - a given letter always makes exactly the same sound. Second, the structure оf Esperanto is very simple, with only sixteen basic grammatical rules that need to be learned - and no exceptions to the rules such as irregular verbs. And third, Esperanto has a very small core vocabulary, new words are constructed by combining words and adding prefixes and suffixes.

The vocabulary of Esperanto will have a familiar ring to anyone who knows a European language, as roots were borrowed from French, German, and Spanish, among other languages. For examples: ''bona'' means ''good'' ; ''porko'' means “pig”; “filo” means “son”; “hundo” means “dog.” One could argue that this selection represents not so much cultural neutrality as Euro-neutrality, but this hasn’t prevented Esperanto from becoming popular in China and some other parts of Asia.

For all its merits, Esperanto has not reached the level of acceptance its creator foresaw more than a century ago. There may be as many as two million people who speak Esperanto with at least a moderate level of proficiency, but probably no more than a few hundred who learned Esperanto at home as their first language and no known speakers over the age of three or so who speak only Esperanto. Ironically, the cultural neutrality that is touted as such a benefit of the language also serves to limit its growth, because languages tend to spread with the cultures that gave rise to them. Alas, unless or until the number of Esperanto speakers reaches a larger critical mass, it will be of little value as a trade language, and without a clear value, it will be difficult to convince people to learn it.

For the first ten years of my life my father was in the RAF (Royal Air Force). This meant that he was frequently posted to different air bases around the UK and I, as frequently, changed schools. One year we moved no fewer than three times and each time I tried, in vain, to settle and make friends. For a young child this frequency of change can only have a detrimental effect and I still have school reports stating that I was "lazy" and a "dreamer".

When I reached ten, my worried parents decided I needed a personal tutor. She turned out to be a kindly and patient old lady who presented me with a large, black book of tests. She made me complete it as a home task and I scored about 20 out of 100. At out next meeting, on a Saturday morning, she went through it with me item by item, until I completely understood each task. She then made me retake the test and of course I got almost every question correct. Then we again moved house!

In our new town I took and failed the 11 plus exam (my excuse was that I was still only ten!) and my prospects looked dim. I was destined to go to the local comprehensive which had a reputation for being quite rough. But also nearby was an ancient public school, set in a castle. This was a place for rich kids only — apart from every year they gave 2 free places to the highest performing local boys (it was a boys only school) in their entrance exam.

My crazy parents decided I should enter the exam. I had as much chance of succeeding as going to the moon — or so I thought. But when I sat down to take the test, a rather familiar black book of 100 tests was placed on the desk!

I did the test and kept quiet and the next term, as a terror struck 11 year old in an ill fitting suit, I arrived for my first day at "the castle".

Clearly I was going to have problems in this new, intensely academic environment and I did. There were 31 boys in my class and in every subject, despite my best efforts, I finished in the bottom 5 in every test, exam and report.

We were then streamed into "sets" for each subject and I ended up being taught with boys closer to my own ability. I worked really hard and at the end of my third year there, I won my first form prize. I was top of the bottom class! But I was really motivated and in time got "promoted" to higher "sets". I worked really hard and won prizes every year until I left after A Levels. My grades were all A's — the highest you can get - and I was offered a place to study at a prestigious university.

So when a certain old Lady presented me with a large black book full of tests, you could say it was my lucky break. Although I would argue that if you work really hard and keep your wits about you — then you begin to make your own luck.

The family meal time is one of the most valuable routines to establish in the life of a family. Research has proved that children who eat at least one meal a week with their families benefit greatly in terms of social skills and acceptance of shared responsibilities. They learn simply and directly through their own experience, the importance of family interaction find the value of close friendship, support and loyalty

In theory and with practice, a shared meal can be the setting for peaceful conversation and allow each family member the opportunity to talk about his/her day, and possibly to discuss any problems or issues. Successful family meal times are primarily about talking and communication. In the modern age of 24 hour TV, computer games and computer social networking sites — the fact is that it is often easier to eat alone rather than together. Furthermore, if parents fail to establish these routines whilst their children are young it is very hard to implement them when the kids become teenagers. But it is not impossible. There are various strategies available for promoting shared family meals.

It is of first importance that every family member should be made to understand the possible benefits; namely that our lives really can be better in general if we make the effort to communicate more effectively. Next step — a weekly meal together can be set as a realistic first goal. The meal should be quite a tasty and popular one as an inducement to keep the kids away from computers and TV sets!

It is important that shared meals should not be the setting for trying to deal with family disputes. There will always be arguments from time to time — even in the happiest and closest families. But these should be kept away from the dinner table if possible. Parents are encouraged to set the tone by example. Light hearted banter, stories about the day and a joke or two can help set the tone. They can also help by being attentive listeners and appropriate responders. Successes should be marked by congratulation and bad news supported with commiseration. Quieter family members should be encouraged by asking what their opinion is on something, rather than about what they did or failed to do. It makes them feel more important and valued. Sometimes a good start can help a simple family meal go on to be a really enjoyable or even memorable experience.

The next stage in building this routine can be to introduce more days. In our experience the best place to start is Sunday lunch. The second might be to establish Wednesday nights as family meal time. Of course the most important thing is flexibility. This and a bit of effort are required to set up helpful routines but the pay back can be immense for a family.

Dinnertime family routines, especially if established early on, have all kinds of other potential benefits. For example children can be encouraged to prepare one course (possibly on an agreed rota): they might even be encouraged to compete to produce maybe an exceptional soup or a truly sensational desert! This can be good fun.

Once established, family meal routines are also great for developing good table manners and "work" habits. Children can learn to set the table, help with clearing up and generally build good patterns of co-operation with their parents, friends and the people they meet with in daily life.

“Buy land — they aren’t making it any more,” quipped Mark Twain. It’s a maxim that would certainly serve you well in a game of Monopoly, the bestselling board game that has taught generations of children to buy up property, stack it with hotels, and charge fellow players sky-high rents for the privilege of accidentally landing there.

The game’s little-known inventor, Elizabeth Magie, would no doubt have made herself go directly to jail if she’d lived to know just how influential today’s twisted version of her game has turned out to be. Why? Because it encourages its players to celebrate exactly the opposite values to those she intended to champion. Bom in 1866, Magie was an outspoken rebel against the norms and politics of her times. She was unmarried into her 40s, independent and proud of it, and made her point with a publicity stunt. Her aim, she told shocked readers, was to highlight the subordinate position of women in society. “We are not machines,” she said. “Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.”

In addition to confronting gender politics, Magie decided to take on the capitalist system of property ownership — this time not through a publicity stunt but in the form of a board game. The inspiration began with a book that her father, the anti-monopolist politician James Magie, had handed to her. In the pages of Henry George’s classic, Progress and Poverty (1879), she encountered his conviction that “the equal right of all men to use the land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air — it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence.” Determined to prove the merit of George’s proposal, Magie invented and in 1904 patented what she called the Landlord’s Game. Laid out on the board as a circuit (which was a novelty at the time), it was populated with streets and landmarks for sale. The key innovation of her game, however, lay in the two sets of rules that she wrote for playing it. Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property, and the game was won when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there — and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner.

The purpose of the dual sets of rules, said Magie, was for players to experience a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences” and hence to understand how different approaches to property ownership can lead to vastly different social outcomes. “It might well have been called ‘The Game of Life’, ‘remarked Magie’, “as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seems to have, for example, the accumulation of wealth.”

The game was soon a hit among Left-wing intellectuals, on college campuses including the Wharton School, Harvard and Columbia, and also among Quaker communities, some of which modified the rules and redrew the board with street names from Atlantic City. Among the players of this Quaker adaptation was an unemployed man called Charles Darrow, who later sold such a modified version to the games company Parker Brothers as his own.

Once the game’s true origins came to light, Parker Brothers bought up Magie’s patent, but then re-launched the board game simply as Monopoly, and provided the eager public with just one set of rules: those that celebrate the triumph of one over all. Worse, they marketed it along with the claim that the game’s inventor was Darrow, who they said had dreamed it up in the 1930s, sold it to Parker Brothers, and become a millionaire. It was a rags-to-riches fabrication that ironically exemplified Monopoly’s implicit values: chase wealth and crush your opponents if you want to come out on top.

So next time someone invites you to join a game of Monopoly, here’s a thought. As you set out piles for the Chance and Community Chest cards, establish a third pile for Land-Value Tax, to which every property owner must contribute each time they charge rent to a fellow player. How high should that land tax be? And how should the resulting tax receipts be distributed? Such questions will no doubt lead to fiery debate around the Monopoly board — but then that is exactly what Magie had always hoped for.

Llandudno is truly a fine and handsome place, built on a generously proportioned bay and lined along its broad front with a huddle of prim but gracious nineteenth-century hotels that reminded me in the fading light of a lineup of Victorian nannies. Llandudno was purpose-built as a resort in the mid-1800s, and it cultivates a nice old-fashioned air. I don’t suppose that Lewis Carroll, who famously strolled this front with little Alice Liddell in the 1860s, would notice a great deal of change today.

To my consternation, the town was packed with weekending pensioners. Buses from all over were parked along the side streets, every hotel I called at was full, and in every dining room I could see crowds – veritable oceans – of nodding white heads spooning soup and conversing happily. Goodness knows what had brought them to the Welsh seaside at this bleak time of year.

Farther on along the front there stood a clutch of guesthouses, large and virtually indistinguishable, and a few of them had vacancy signs in their windows. I had eight or ten to choose from, which always puts me in a mild fret because I have an unerring instinct for choosing badly. My wife can survey a row of guesthouses and instantly identify the one run by a white-haired widow with a fondness for children, and sparkling bathroom facilities, whereas I can generally count on choosing the one run by a guy with a grasping manner, and the sort of cough that makes you wonder where he puts the phlegm. Such, I felt, would be the case tonight.

All the guesthouses had boards out front listing their many amenities – COLOUR TV, HOSPITALITY TRAYS, FULL CENTRAL HEATING, and the coyly euphemistic EN SUITE ALL ROOMS, meaning private bathrooms. One place offered satellite TV and a trouser press, and another boasted CURRENT FIRE CERTIFICATE – something I had never thought to look for in a B&B. All this heightened my sense of unease and doom. How could I possibly choose intelligently among such a variety of options?

I selected a place that looked reasonable enough from the outside – its board promised a color TV and coffee making facilities, about all I require these days for a Saturday night – but from the moment I set foot in the door I knew it was a bad choice. I was about to turn and flee when the owner emerged from a back room and stopped my retreat with an unenthusiastic “Yes?” A short conversation revealed that a single room with breakfast was for £19.50. It was entirely out of the question that I would stay the night in such a dismal place at such an exorbitant price, so I said, “That sounds fine,” and signed in. Well, it’s so hard to say no.

My room was everything I expected it to be – cold and cheerless with laminated furniture, grubbily matted carpet, and those mysterious ceiling stains that bring to mind a neglected corpse in the room above. There was a tray of coffee things but the cups were disgusting, and the spoon was stuck to the tray. The bathroom, faintly illuminated by a distant light activated by a length of string, had curling floor tiles and years of accumulated dirt packed into every corner. I peered at the yellowy tile around the bath and sink and realized what the landlord did with his phlegm. A bath was out of the question, so I threw some cold water on my face, dried it with a towel that had the texture of shredded wheat, and gladly took my leave.

Graduation is less than a month away. While I cannot wait to throw my hat up into the air and officially check off Went to College on my to-do list, there is one thing that has been staring me down that I absolutely dread. Entering the workforce.

I believed that with my shiny new degree and my references on my CV, I would be able to start working at the lower end of companies I spent four years preparing myself for. Instead, in all job postings that I find I see this requirement: “3+ years of experience in related field.”

Speaking from personal experience, I believed that my extracurricular activities at the university prepared me for the jobs I was applying for, but that rejection letter keeps showing up in my inbox. From the comments I have received about my application, they all ask for more experience in the field, although an entry-level job is a job that “requires minimal professional work experience”.

Well, I did not have an internship or a job history in the field. I spent my time on campus – at least until COVID-19 forced me to be home for a year-and-a-half – participating in clubs and magazines. I completely forgot about internships. Now, while I would like to believe I could dismantle the idea of needing three years of experience for an entry-level job, I am just one person. So, instead, I am out here telling you to find internships as soon as possible in your field of interest.

Internships are not just for the school year. There are many internships thathappen during the summer. There are also remote internships so you do not have to keep yourself geographically limited. Unpaid internships are one of the most helpful things to set you apart from others. There are some that do pay – I’ve seen some that pay $15 an hour, which is crazy in my eyes – which is considered a blessing, but at some point, the only thing available is an unpaid internship.

Our university has an entire webpage devoted to internships and how to get them. A free account for an internship network is created for each student upon admission to the university. You can research employers, apply for jobs and internships, begin the internship registration process and participate in on-campus mock interviews. There are multiple people to support you. Schedule an appointment with a career coach – for help in finding or developing an internship opportunity that is right for you. During the school year, you can also meet with a peer advisor for a CV or cover letter review. Visit with your academic advisor or departmental internship coordinator to find out about academic internship courses or opportunities offered through your major department.

Don’t forget about networking with family, friends, and campus contacts. Let others know the types of opportunities you are looking for and share your CV with them. Finally, attend a career fair or a networking event. These are great networking opportunities!

I am not here to be gentle with you. Sometimes the internship work is gruelling for no pay, but in the end, it is worth the payoff when trying to get a higher paying job in the workforce. There is no such thing as an entry-level job because many of them are still asking for years of experience, despite being on the low-end of the corporate food chain. While they will still teach you the basics of their working environment, most companies want to have someone who already knows their way around and can throw themselves into the work without much of a fuss.

In the end, that internship is going to save you in the long run. Take it from someone who did not do an internship and is now paying the price.

The public school in town served a number of purposes. Education, of course, was one. It offered a curriculum in general education, manual education, and preparatory education for college. Its music and sports programs provided entertainment to the school and its patrons. And the school served as an agency of social cohesion, bringing the community together in a common effort in which everyone took pride.

The sports program was the center of gravity of extra-curricular activities. The school fielded junior and senior varsity teams in football, basketball and track. Any young man with enough coordination to walk and chew gum at the same time could find a place on one of those teams. In addition, sports generated a need for pep rallies, cheerleaders, a band, homecoming activities, parades and floats, a homecoming queen and maids of honor, and a sports banquet. It also mobilized parents to support the activities with time and money.

There were any number of clubs a student might join. Some were related to academics, like the Latin Club, the Spanish Club, and the Science Club. Others brought together students interested in a profession, like the Future Farmers of America, the Future Homemakers of America, the Future Teachers of America, and the Pre-Med Club. Still others were focused on service. The Intra-Mural Council, made up of girls (who had been neglected in the regular sports program), organized tournaments in a variety of sports for girls. The Library Club worked to improve library holdings and equipment. The Pep Club organized homecoming activities, parades and athletic banquets.

The Student Council, including representatives from each class, was elected by the student body after a heated political campaign with banners and speeches. It represented student interests to the administration and the school board. It approved student clubs that were formed, helped resolve discipline problems, and played a role in setting codes of conduct and dress. For the most part, it was a docile body that approved the policies of the administration.

The Journalism Club published a monthly newspaper of school news and opinion. It was financed by selling ads to business men in the community.

Another group planned and published the school Yearbook, which was a pictorial record of the student body, the year's activities, sports, and achievements. The Yearbook staff sponsored a beauty contest, pictured outstanding students selected by the faculty, and a Who's Who of popular and talented students selected by the student body.

Churches in town, of which there were many, sponsored their own activities for youth; and the community sponsored a recreation center, called Teen Town, for chaperoned Saturday night dances each week. Community and school leaders seemed determined to keep the youth of the town busy and out of trouble. In a small Southern town in the Bible Belt where very few students had access to a car, which had been voted dry and in which no alcohol was sold, they succeeded marvelously well.

The most deadly weather-related disasters aren’t necessarily caused by floods, droughts or hurricanes. They can be caused by heat waves, like the sweltering blanket that’s taken over 2,500 lives in India in recent weeks.

Temperatures broke 118 degrees in the parts of the country. The death toll is still being tallied, and many heat-related deaths will be recognized only after the fact. Yet it’s already the deadliest heat wave to hit India since at least 1998 and, by some accounts, the fourth or fifth deadliest worldwide since 1900.

These heat waves will only become more common as the planet continues to warm. They don’t just affect tropical, developing countries; they’re a threat throughout the world. The July 1995 heat wave in the Midwest caused over 700 deaths in Chicago. The August 2003 heat wave in western Europe led to about 45,000 deaths. The July-August 2010 heat wave in western Russia killed about 54,000 people.

But as anyone who’s spent a summer in the eastern United States knows, it’s not just the heat; it’s also the humidity. Together, they can be lethal, even if the heat doesn’t seem quite so extreme.

Scientists measure the combination using a metric known as wet-bulb temperature. It’s called that because it can be measured with a thermometer wrapped in a wet cloth, distinguishing it from the commonly reported drybulb temperature, measured in open air. Wet-bulb temperature can also be calculated from relative humidity, surface pressure and air temperature. It’s essentially a measure of how well you can cool your skin by sweating, which is how humans stay alive in the worst heat. But high humidity can defeat that cooling system; it makes the heat that much more dangerous.

The wet-bulb temperature is not typically reported. While dangerous levels depend on a person’s activity level and clothing, wet-bulb temperature offers a stark measure of risk in a warming world that will experience more extreme combinations of both heat and humidity. Temperature and wet-bulb temperature are not in a one-to-one relationship; both higher temperatures and higher humidities increase wet-bulb temperature. For instance, during the Chicago heat wave, on July 13, 1995, the maximum wet-bulb temperature of 85 degrees occurred at noon when the temperature was 99 degrees. But when it hit 106 degrees at 5 p.m., the wet-bulb temperature was 83 degrees. The former was more dangerous.

A human’s core temperature is about 98.6 degrees, but the skin temperature of the trunk is about 4 to 9 degrees colder, depending on how warm it is and how active a person is. But sweating, which helps keep the core body temperature constant, becomes increasingly ineffective in increasingly humid air, and it can never cool the skin to below the wet-bulb temperature.

A person who is physically active at a wet-bulb temperature of 80 degrees will have trouble maintaining a constant core temperature and risks overheating. A sedentary person who is naked and in the shade will run into the same problem at a wet-bulb temperature of 92 degrees. A wet- bulb temperature of 95 degrees is lethal after about six hours.

In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, the highest wet-bulb temperatures of the latest heat wave have peaked around 86 degrees — levels approaching the worst of the 1995 Midwest heat wave, which set records in the United States for humid heat.

Heat waves are the natural disasters easiest to tie to climate change. Statistical analyses and climate modeling indicate that the 2010 Russian heat wave was about five times more likely to have occurred in 2010 than it would have been in the cooler 1960s. An analysis conducted after the 2003 European heat wave concluded that it was twice as likely as it would have been before the Industrial Revolution. A recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the 1.5 degrees of global warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution had quadrupled the probability of moderate heat extremes.

Whilst travelling in 2001, I had my first but definitely not last go at snowboarding. Rhona and I went to the Cardona ski resort, a couple of hours from Queenstown in New Zealand. We had been staying in Queenstown for a couple of weeks and had tried a couple of the local ski resorts. They had been so popular, that there was almost no room to stay. The problem for me with this was that with so many people moving around me, my eyes were constantly re-focusing. This meant that I couldn't see a thing! As I had never snowboarded before, we decided that it was going to be a problem. A guy at one of the local ski rental shops recommended that we should try Cardona.

On arrival I went straight to the Ski Patrol and explained my situation. They suggested that I should wear a vest, that they supplied, with the words 'BLIND SKIER' on the front and back on top of my jacket. They told me that this was more for the benefit of the other skiers around me. I must admit, I wasn't very keen to do this, but thought I would give it a try. 

Once onto the slopes, I put my vest on and began to practise my limited skills. Because I have done some other board sports, i. e. skateboarding, surfing, etc., it wasn't too hard to learn the basics. Once I was comfortable with this, I headed off for the ski lift and the big slopes. As I stood in the queue I could hear people talking about that 'poor blind guy'. This niggled me a bit, but I decided to try to ignore it. At the top of the lift I stepped off and strapped my feet onto the board.

As we headed off I could hear more people talking about the vest. I was starting to get paranoid. Then as I gathered speed and Rhona would shout directions, I realized that the people who saw the vest were getting out of my way. Fantastic! This was better than a white stick in a crowd. We picked up speed turning left, then right, hitting a few bumps, but mainly going really well. I even managed to control the snowboard. Well, sort of control it. Before I knew it, we had zipped down a long straight slope and had come to the end of the run. The adrenaline was buzzing and I was 'high as a kite'. What a feeling. I got back on the ski lift and headed back up. This time I was going to do the run solo!

I had memorized the slope from my first run and felt very confident. As I came off the lift, I rushed to get started. Again, I could hear people talking about me, but now it didn't matter. The vest was a definite benefit for the novice snowboarder! I took the first stage at a steady pace, looking for my first left bend. No problems there. I found that easy enough. I was now looking for my fast approaching right bend. I missed this one completely and ended up in the safety netting at the edge of the run.

At this point, I decided I was not the world's best snowboarder and would have to take things a little slower. As the day progressed, so did my skills. I had a great time. Even taking 'air' on quite a few occasions. However this was not deliberate! I was now very wary about that bend I had missed , so I started to take it a bit earlier. Unfortunately, this meant that I would leap about 2 metres into the air. And what was more surprising than being airborne, was the fact that on half a dozen occasions, (out of about 30), I landed on my feet and carried on downhill. The rest of the time I fell on my bottom. I heard some people comment on how brave 'that blind guy' was. Little did they know it was lack of skill rather than bravery.

We boarded at Cardona for two days and had a fantastic time. Because it is a bit of a drive away from most of the tourist places, it is not as busy as the other ski resorts. It is mostly visited by the locals and I think that says something. If you get the chance, I would definitely recommend Cardona. I would also like to thank the Ski Patrol for that great suggestion. Without the vest, I am sure there could have been some crashes, caused by me. But with the vest, everyone just got out of the way. However, I think that if I was to get a vest for myself, it would probably read 'BLIND&DAFT'.

Robb Wilier is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California. Berkeley. He recently co-authored a paper called The Virtues of Gossip: Reputational Information Sharing as Prosocial Behaviour, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. His research has proved that some kinds of gossip are altruistic and beneficial to society. No matter how fundamental his research is, many people find it difficult to accept such an opinion.

Research has been going on for several years about the ways in which fears for reputation encourage people to behave. This led to get interested in gossip because gossip involves spreading reputational information about people in groups. More specifically, the authors were interested in an apparent tension between the bad reputation gossiping and gossipers have, but how there’s a lot of ways gossip has useful social functions.

In the first study, they attached participants to heart-rate monitors and monitored their emotional reactions to events they observed in the lab. One thing they observed was people doing economic exercises based on trust. The researchers arranged so they would observe someone behaving in unthrustworthy way repeatedly; then the participants would have a chance to warn someone else they thought would have to interact with that person next.

People very readly warned the next person, passing on socially useful information to them. But what was more interesting was the emotional register of the behaviour. As people saw a person behave in an untrustworthy way, they became frustrated and their heart rate increased. But when they had the opportunity to pass a warning on, that reduced or eliminated their frustration and also tempered their increased heart rate. It is prosocial gossip that involves warning other people about untrustworthy others. It is pretty common, onerous people are more likely to engage in it and they report doing so out of a need to help others. It is very different from malicious gossip, which might be driven by a desire to spoil another s reputation or advance oneself.

So why does gossip have such a bad reputation? This research has just sharpened that question. Why would it be that gossip, which we need to function socially in order to keep people behaving a bit better than they might otherwise, has a negative reputation? It could be that we don’t need gossip to have a positive reputation for people to do it. Even the people who pass judgment on gossipers are gossiping as they do so. It may be that socially we’re wired to gossip. Evolutionary theorists have argued that language evolved in part to facilitate gossip, so we’ve developed these social norms against excessive or malicious gossip to keep the system from getting out of hand. News in a lot of ways is dignified gossip. A broad definition of gossip would include the news. I wonder how many journalists would agree with or share such interpretation of news and their role in a society?

It s very important that we discriminate between different kinds of gossip and the people who do it. The kind where you warn people about untrustworthy others is valid, so we shouldn’t feel bad about that.