Roundup: Alain de Botton’s Week at the Airport; LSD art; Useful YouTube Channels for Teachers;

Alain de Botton: A Week at the Airport

For one week, writer Alain de Botton worked from his desk in the middle of Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport, and wrote a book about it, called A Week at the Airport.

LIFE magazine on “LSD Art,” 1966

From the LIFE magazine September 9, 1966 cover story about psychedelic art:

Advertiser:
Mideast Youth Sites
Additional credits:
Video made by: Eric Epstein
Written, Researched & Voiced by: Esra’a Al Shafei
Original Music: http://skeletonsuit.com/
Hand-drawn Animation: Jaron Eugene Newton
CG Elements: Zach Shukan

VIA

Orhan Pamuk receives the Norman Mailer Lifetime Achievement Award

Learning, Playing, Designing: Video Games in School

Most education has been fashioned around the reasonable-sounding objective of equipping students with tools to solve problems. This is one facet of what some educators call the “eat your broccoli” approach to education — ?Sit still and learn this; it will come in handy later,” parents and teachers repeat to their children and students. Unfortunately, it turns out that too many students resist sitting still and learning things that have no immediate use to them, but which adults insist are necessary. What would happen if you inverted that strategy? What would happen if you presented students with problems that they are particularly interested in solving right now, but which require them to learn about tools that will also be useful to them in other ways later? Game designer and professor Katie Salen would say that what I’m describing is the motivation that drives so many young people to spend many hours playing video games. As she said to me in a recent video interview, “Games do really really well because they create a need to know in kids. In a game you have to learn to do something because you’ve been presented with a complex problem you don’t know how to solve.”<!–break–>

“Religion and mental health”: a special issue of Transcultural Psychiatry

The latest issue of Transcultural Psychiatry is devoted to ?Religion and Mental Health.?  Here are the titles and abstracts:

Simon Dein, Judeo-Christian Religious Experience and Psychopathology: The Legacy of William James

This article examines the relationship between Judeo-Christian religious experience and psychopathology. It builds on William James?s Varieties of Religious Experience and more specifically his discussions of self, agency and the subliminal. Contemporary research on Christian conversion, mysticism, and its relationship to psychosis and mental health and healing are discussed. Future themes for research are proposed.