A Simple Trick for Tripling People's Charitable Donations→

Offered a choice of donating 150 euros to one poor woman or 450 euros to three, research participants frugally chose the lower option 2-to-1. But they became much more generous and chose the 450-euro option 2-to-1 if they were also offered a choice of donating 500 euros to benefit just two women, say Enrico Rubaltelli and Sergio Agnoli of the University of Padova in Italy. In the second scenario, choosing the 450-euro donation was the most popular option because it allowed participants to help the highest number of people without giving away the highest amount of money. Charitable organizations should take heed, the authors say.

Source: The Emotional Cost of Charitable Donations

This inspires me to completely reconsider how the arts organization I collaborate with do fund raising.

Why We Love Beautiful Things→

For more than 2,000 years, philosophers, mathematicians and artists have marveled at the unique properties of the “golden rectangle”: subtract a square from a golden rectangle, and what remains is another golden rectangle, and so on and so on — an infinite spiral. These so-called magical proportions (about 5 by 8) are common in the shapes of books, television sets and credit cards, and they provide the underlying structure for some of the most beloved designs in history: the facades of the Parthenon and Notre Dame, the face of the “Mona Lisa,” the Stradivarius violin and the original iPod.

Experiments going back to the 19th century repeatedly show that people invariably prefer images in these proportions, but no one has known why.

Then, in 2009, a Duke University professor demonstrated that our eyes can scan an image fastest when its shape is a golden rectangle. For instance, it’s the ideal layout of a paragraph of text, the one most conducive to reading and retention. This simple shape speeds up our ability to perceive the world, and without realizing it, we employ it wherever we can.

Lance Hosey, author of The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design, exploring the beauty of the golden ratio and fractals in The New York Times.

Why Sci-Fi Author William Gibson Loves Japan→

William Gibson, the author responsible for popularizing the term "cyberspace," explains why Japan is the country closest to the future: 

The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line. The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adaptors, and the sort of fiction I write behoves me to pay serious heed to that. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese. They've been doing it for more than a century now, and they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if only in terms of what we used to call 'future shock' (but which is now simply the one constant in all our lives).

How Can We Alleviate The Feeling Of Running Out Of Time? Experience Awe

Melanie Rudd, a final-year PhD candidate at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, explains how experiencing moments of awe expands our perception of time and alleviates feelings of "time famine." Read the research (PDF.)

This is another reason why the arts are so important. Art is one of the few things that can inspire you to willingly change how you look at the world, including how you perceive time. 

Tony Kushner: Does Theater Still Matter?

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner makes a strong case for theater's role in modern society.