She really knows her stuff,” wrote one student, who was grateful for the slides she created to help students visualize concepts. “I found that precepts provided exactly the interaction and reinforcement that I needed to better understand the material. Jessica brought energy and animation (quite literally) to material that was previously just words on a slide, and I appreciate all of the effort she put in to help us learn.” Jeewon Yoo

And one final note: however you decide to manage this relationship, try not to see it as simply your problem. It’s considerate of your husband not to want to upset his family – but you’re his family too. Your wellbeing needs to count in the inventory of feelings worth protecting. One way to get some emotional distance from people’s irritating choices is to see them as the upshots of slightly more sympathetic procedures. For instance, it sounds like your mother-in-law has a lot of identity wrapped up with her feelings about her own childhood. If you think of her returning to that well-worn topic as deliberately making a selfish and draining choice, of course it makes you angry. If you think of her as just enacting a habit, borne of feelings she hasn’t processed, the red-hot frustration might mellow to predictable disappointment. Reframing people’s annoying choices helps make them feel a little more bad weather – annoying and taxing, yes, but not personal or insulting.Eleanor says: When someone becomes your in-law, you get thrust into quite an intimate relationship. They’re in your house, your family, your parenting, your holidays, your life decisions, your emotional moments – but you didn’t get to test drive your compatibility in handling those things together.

Fintan O’Toole, Visiting Leonard Milberg ’53 Professor of Irish Letters, praised the way Yoo “communicated with confidence, charm and clarity. He engaged with the students in a way that was always lively, warm, and encouraging, but also challenging and stimulating.” Let’s jump over to COVID and restrictions, the impact these are having on our lives, our interactions, how we work and so on. What do you hope we learn or gain from this experience? The text comprises interviews after a researcher/journalist fashion, with relevant context and the ideas of a number of philosophers sprinkled around , provoking thought about how people become who they are, perhaps even change who they are (depending on definition), what they accept and reject and how that comes about.This leads into a strong critique of the commonly held idea that rational, evidence-based discussion is the best way to change people's minds. And sometimes we don’t need to have every painful piece of proof. You don’t need to tell your vegetarian friend what you learned about how abattoirs work, you don’t need to tell an abuse survivor the next five bad things their abuser did. If someone already knows the conclusion, sometimes you can spare them the upsetting details. I bought a robot vacuum cleaner and I like to follow him around and tell him he’s missed a spot. Amazing. Let’s get to know you better. What is a standard day in your life?

Truthfully I think the most we can hope for is a greater appreciation for the profound fragility of the things that normally keep us functioning. Our friendships, entertainment, ways of being in the world, all so easily threatened by simply not being able to leave the house very much. I have found that very humbling, and very difficult. I hope also we can learn to be a little more compassionate with ourselves about the fact that we are all creatures who need to live and will one day die. Before Covid, it was very easy to see each other and ourselves as our jobs, or athletic achievements, or how we’re measuring up to a set of criteria about how our lives “should” be going. Seeing everybody’s houses and children and needs via Zoom will I hope let us be compassionate about the fact that we all have them, and there’s no shame in taking care of them. We’ve all had a guilty pleasure of sorts during the pandemic. Can you share with us yours? The point here (which can be readinl seen in what passes for political debates across much of the Western world) is that not only is this presumption incorrect, it's not particularly helpful. At TEC, we firmly believe ethics is a team sport. It’s a conversation about how we should act, live, treat others and be treated in return. It’s not that you got the decision “right”, just that once you’ve made it, you can finally cease looking at life with evaluative eyes, and live it instead. I obviously misunderstood. I thought I was invited to dinner, but it turned out to be a late afternoon tea. Instead of a 3 course dinner I was given a cup of tea and a plate of Tim Tams.Inspiring, moving and perceptive,Stop Being Reasonable is a mind-changing exploration of the murky place where philosophy and real life meet. Students were grateful to Hommel for his proactive assistance and well-organized material. One called him “the most helpful, patient and understanding preceptor I've had. He did not just give answers — he worked to make sure everyone understood the topics on a fundamental level. It would have been a much more difficult — and much less pleasant — class without him.” Hannah McLaughlin In telling your wife about the diagnosis, I would, however, make serious effort to help steel her for the possibility of more insults in the future. There are care workers and support groups who can help her deal with the concept-mashed, ragged insults she might have to hear. Keeping this in mind might help you feel what you’re feeling, without reproach. You’re not just being mean, or taking an irrational dislike of a perfectly pleasant person. You’re feeling that this relationship isn’t strong enough for the tests it’s being put through – and in a way, why would it be?

Stop Being Reasonable. It’s a series of true stories about how we change our minds in high-stakes moments and how rarely that measures up to our ideal of rationality. Each chapter features interviews I conducted with someone about a moment in their life that they changed their mind in a really drastic way: a man who left a cult, a woman who questioned her own memory of being abused, a man who changed his mind about his entire personality after appearing on reality TV, someone who learned their family wasn’t really their family, and so on. Each story highlights a sometimes-maligned strategy for reasoning that many of us turn out to use all the time, especially when it really matters: believing other people, trusting our gut, thinking emotionally, and so on. The book is a plea for a more capacious ideal of rationality, such that these things ‘count’ as rational thinking as well as the emotionless first-principles reasoning we usually associate with that term. Let’s finish up close to home. What does ethics mean to you? A third-year Ph.D. student in politics, William Wen was recognized for his work as a preceptor in “Introduction to Quantitative Social Science.” “He was always enthusiastic, warm and effortlessly professional with the students and with me,” said Marc Ratkovic, an assistant professor of politics.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

The second thing you’d get from reflecting on why you want this is a more productive conversation with your wife. She might have legitimate objections to the particulars here (if it’s actually motorcycling, the risks; if it’s a sex thing, monogamy). And she might be entitled to hold on to them. But if you can tell her what you want to feel, whether it’s excited or invigorated or like your own person again, it’s a lot harder to just say “nope”.