Watch Them Whip: A Decade of Viral Dance Moves

The New Yorker: Dancers from around the country perform the most popular dance moves, from the Dougie to the Quan.
 

The Surprising Habits Of Original Thinkers

How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies "originals": thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this TED talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals — including embracing failure. "The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they're the ones who try the most," Grant says. "You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones."

How Alfred Hitchcock Blocks A Scene

Pop and Philosophy

The School of Life: Pop music and philosophy would seem, at first glance, to have little to say to one another. But in fact the latter has a lot to learn from the former.

The Superior Social Skills of Bilinguals

Katherine Kinzler for The New York Times:

BEING bilingual has some obvious advantages. Learning more than one language enables new conversations and new experiences. But in recent years, psychology researchers have demonstrated some less obvious advantages of bilingualism, too. For instance, bilingual children may enjoy certain cognitive benefits, such as improved executive function — which is critical for problem solving and other mentally demanding activities.

Now, two new studies demonstrate that multilingual exposure improves not only children’s cognitive skills but also their social abilities.

One study from my developmental psychology lab — conducted in collaboration with the psychologists Boaz Keysar, Zoe Liberman and Samantha Fan at the University of Chicago, and published last year in the journal Psychological Science — shows that multilingual children can be better at communication than monolingual children.