Weight Training May Help to Ease or Prevent Depression

Benefits essentially were the same whether people went to the gym twice a week or five times a week.

.. resistance exercise often substantially reduces people’s gloom, no matter how melancholy they feel at first, or how often — or seldom — they actually get to the gym and lift.

.. being physically fit substantially reduces the risk that someone will develop clinical depression. Other studies and reviews have found that exercise also can reduce symptoms of depression in people who have been given diagnoses of the condition.

.. One 2017 analysis of past research had found that strength training can help people feel less anxious and nervous.

.. Perhaps most interesting, the amount of weight training did not seem to matter. The benefits essentially were the same, whether people went to the gym twice a week or five times a week and whether they were completing lots of repetitions of each exercise or only a few.
.. And people did not need to pack on mass or might to reduce their depression. More strength after the experiment did not correlate with less depression, the researchers found.
.. weight training and aerobic exercise have similar impacts on depression, the authors of the new review conclude.

Both types of exercise reduced symptoms, and to about the same extent.

Anxiety Box

Sometimes, on his way to work, a feeling of pressure begins thumping in Paul Ford’s chest. His breaths shorten. They speed up. And sometimes, in those moments of extreme anxiety, Paul’s phone talks to him. It tells him everything that’s wrong with him.

How Viktor Orban Bends Hungarian Society to His Will

Billboards. TV campaigns. Radio programs. The anti-immigrant government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban uses different levers to influence public opinion, particularly on the subject of the European refugee crisis.

Even school textbooks.

On page 155 of the latest 8th-grade history textbook, students are told that Mr. Orban thinks refugees are a threat to Hungary — and then encouraged to believe he is right. “It can be problematic,” the book concludes, “for different cultures to coexist.”

.. the far-right leader’s message is now woven into the school curriculum.

.. His party’s appointees or supporters dominate many artistic institutionsand universities. A growing number of plays and exhibitions have had nationalist or anti-Western undertones. Religious groups and nongovernment organizations critical of Fidesz have seen funding dry up.

.. promoting a narrative of Hungarian victimhood and ethnocentrism.

.. For many far-right populists on both sides of the Atlantic, the Hungarian leader is revered.

“He’s a hero,” Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former strategist, said this month, while touring Europe. He described Mr. Orban as “the most significant guy on the scene right now.”

.. he met with Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who created the Stanford Prison Experiment, the controversial 1971 study of authoritarianism, which explored how ordinary people would respond when placed in positions of power.

.. how Mr. Orban has attempted to influence the civil arena through like-minded culture warriors.

.. biggest beneficiaries tended to be groups with religious and nationalist

.. since an elected government represents the will of the people — and since civil society should strive to fulfill the people’s will — then civil society exists to carry out a ruling party’s manifesto, rather than to challenge it.

.. the government sent an opinion survey to every Hungarian household that claimed Mr. Soros was leading a project — named the Soros Plan — to force Hungary to admit thousands of migrants, dismantle its border fences, and in the process “diminish the importance of the language and culture of European countries.” It was demonstrably false.

.. During the 1980s, Mr. Orban was a young liberal activist who studied civil society at Oxford University

.. “I would like,” Mr. Illes recalled Mr. Orban telling him, “to destroy all NGOs in this country.”

.. “Most theaters,” she said, “have a socially unengaged message,”

.. “It’s important for us to emphasize our identity because we could lose it in a few moments,” Mr. Dorner said in an interview, citing anxiety about immigration by “the Africans, the Middle Easterners.”

.. the academy ignored and even condemned critics of Mr. Orban such as Gyorgy Konrad, a renowned author. Instead, it awarded monthly stipends in perpetuity to artists like Gyozo Somogyi, best known for depicting Hungarian military heroes

.. When the University of Debrecen awarded an honorary doctorate last August to Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president and an ally of Mr. Orban, four academic departments protested the decision.

.. Yet in response, the university leadership launched an investigation into their dissent.

.. Officially, the loss of each department’s financial autonomy has been presented as a cost-saving measure.

.. the real aim was to curb the academic autonomy of each department.

.. money was nevertheless found to sustain two entirely new academic institutions.

.. The first — Professor Patyi’s National University for Public Service — was set up to train civil servants, policemen and soldiers

.. The second, a think tank called Veritas, has a more demonstrably political aim. Its main mission is to provide revisionist interpretations of 20th-century Hungarian history — including the reign of Miklos Horthy, the autocrat who led Hungary before and during the Second World War.

.. He described the deportation of Jews under Horthy in 1941 as a mere “police action against aliens.”

..  the new preamble to the Hungarian Constitution — a controversial text which implies that Hungarian nationality is exclusively Christian, even though Hungary has a substantial Jewish minority.

The Carpenter Vs. The Gardener: Two Models Of Modern Parenting

Parents these days are stressed. So are their kids.

The root of this anxiety, one scholar says, is the way we understand the relationship between parents and children. Alison Gopnik, a psychology and philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks parents—especially middle-class parents—view their children as entities they can mold into a specific image.

“The idea is that if you just do the right things, get the right skills, read the right books, you’re going to be able to shape your child into a particular kind of adult,” she says.

It’s a view that’s gained popularity in the last few decades, along with the term “parenting” — which is itself a relatively new idea.

“It’s only around the 1970s in America that the word first begins to really take off,” she says.

.. In her latest book, The Gardener and the CarpenterAlison lays out this science and an alternative way to think about the relationship between parents and children.