Latest news with #Gopnik
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
6 Impressive Things Newborns Can Naturally Do That You May Not Know About
Babies can often pull off some pretty astonishing stuff—like sensing emotions and understanding math—according to several studies. Parents can harness their newborn's innate inclinations by following expert-led strategies and creating tailored a great mind in your house, and it belongs to the family member wearing the diaper and sucking on their toes. While it may seem surprising, many studies have proven that newborns have impressive abilities beyond what adults might even believe they're capable of. Sure, babies have long had a reputation as little sponges, soaking up information from the world around them. But that's only part of the story. Researchers are discovering that your little one possesses a formidable skill set and, in some cases, can pull off astonishing feats. Here are six of your baby's abilities that we think are anything but infantile. Infants are sensitive to emotions. "By the time newborns are just a few months old, they recognize the difference between a happy expression and a sad one," says Alison Gopnik, PhD, author of The Philosophical Baby. Around their first birthday, a child can even sense how other people feel. But your child isn't just aware of your feelings—they actively care about them. A study tested infant sensitivity to the distress of others by having babies as young as 5 months old watch two video clips. One clip depicted a square figure being greeted by a friendly circular figure, while the other showed a square figure being bullied by a circular figure. When offered the choice between the two square figures presented on a tray, the vast majority of babies chose the figure that had shown distress. The researchers concluded that the babies were showing an empathetic preference toward the bullied figure. Tap into their talent: Make the most out of your baby's abilities by displaying your feelings openly. Whether you're gently patting the dog or enthusiastically greeting a neighbor, remember that your child is watching. "What you say to babies is less important than how you say it," says Dr. Gopnik. But don't expect to fool your child by saying "Yum!" as you strain to put spinach to your lips—babies can often tell when you're faking it. Infants often move their hands a lot in an effort to communicate. So, it's only natural to teach them sign language—plus, the benefits are huge: "Signing enables a baby to tell you what they're seeing and hearing—a plane overhead, a dog barking outside," says Linda Acredolo, PhD, coauthor of Baby Signs. The process of learning to sign creates pathways in the brain that help your child pick up any language more easily later in life, notes Fosca Shackleton White, director of the Montessori Academy of Chicago. Plus, babies who use sign language before speaking learn to talk earlier, score higher on intelligence tests, develop a larger vocabulary, and display more self-confidence compared to their non-signing peers. Tap into their talent: Give your child's communication skills a head start by introducing signing as soon as they're born. Start with by teaching them the basics like these five signs: "eat," "drink," "wet," "sleep," and "more." Use them whenever you say the corresponding word out loud, then slowly expand their vocabulary over time. Research shows that most babies have a basic sense of subtraction. One study tested this by having 6-to-9-month-olds watch a puppet show with two characters. Researchers then removed one puppet and closed the curtain; when it reopened, the same puppet remained. Then they repeated the experiment and changed the ending: two puppets appeared when the curtain reopened. The babies' prolonged stares indicated they understood that two minus one doesn't equal two. Babies also seem capable of solving problems using scientific logic. In another study, 8-month-olds were shown two boxes: One had lots of red balls and a few white ones; the other box had mostly white balls and only a few red. Researchers pulled five balls from each box (one red and four white in each case), showed them to the kids, and then let them peek into the boxes. The result: The children stared longer at the box containing mostly red balls, recognizing that the mostly white balls that came out of it was a statistical mismatch. "That's very sophisticated reasoning for a baby," says Dr. Gopnik. Tap into their talent: Research shows that your baby learns math and science best through daily exploration. Provide toys like building blocks, boxes with lids, or bowls that encourage creativity, try discovery games such as hiding and revealing an object, and encourage your baby to remain observant. Your infant possesses the innate ability to learn a second language. That's great news: Studies show that being multilingual encourages flexible thinking, enhances memory, and boosts a child's concentration. Traditionally, experts have suggested holding off until age 3 to introduce a second language. But a 2017 study found that even infants can distinguish between words in different languages. The study reported that by 20 months, bilingual babies can accurately and efficiently process two different languages. Tap Their Talent: If you or your spouse speaks a second language, use it around your child regularly. Experts believe a child needs to be exposed to a language at least 10–25% of the time to be considered bilingual, though this doesn't dictate how well they'll use the language in everyday speech. Even if you know only English, see whether a caregiver, a close friend, or a relative can speak another language with them. Don't waste your money on a foreign-language program, though—the best way for your child to learn a second language is by hearing people around them use it. Within their first few months, your infant will already recognize your face—which is useful since they depend on you for everything. When they're around 5 to 8 months old, they'll be able to differentiate between familiar people and strangers. A child's ability to pinpoint facial features may start to wane around 9 months. But some experts believe it doesn't have to. "Continued exposure to faces from diverse ethnic groups may extend the ability into adulthood," says Olivier Pascalis, PhD, a researcher at Université Pierre Mendès France. Tap Their Talent: If your own social circle doesn't provide broad enough exposure, try flipping through books (Baby Faces by Margaret Miller is a good choice) or cutting out images of varied cultures from catalogs and magazines. Helping maintain this skill will encourage your baby to become more accepting of others as they grow. Your baby was born with a natural inclination to music. In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, researchers assert that 'the capability of detecting beat in rhythmic sound sequences is already functional at birth." This means that newborns can anticipate rhythmic patterns in sounds, so if they're hearing a song like "The Wheels on the Bus" they can anticipate the repetitive sound "round and round" makes. Additionally, studies show that babies often respond to this rhythm by moving their arms and body. While it might seem like it's just a cute reaction, it's actually your baby learning to recognize rhythm. Tap into their talent: Rock infants to the beat while singing a song. Scientists think this is a crucial way babies learn about rhythm. It also helps to expose your child to a wide range of musical genres. If you're listening to your favorite song, sing along and look into your baby's eyes. "A child responds to music most when they're sharing the experience," observes Miriam Flaherty-Willis, senior director of education at the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts. Use rhythm to help them learn other things too. For example, you can make up your own lyrics or melody that will teach your child how to identify different body parts. Read the original article on Parents
Japan Times
31-03-2025
- General
- Japan Times
Can the Jesus of history support the Christ of faith?
The latest issue of The New Yorker includes an essay by Adam Gopnik, "We're Still Not Done With Jesus,' on the scholarly debates about the origins of Christianity. In the piece, Gopnik positions himself as a nuanced balancer between two serious schools (though he tilts toward the first): a school that holds that the early Christians mythologized and invented, but on the basis of some set of true events; and a school that treats the historical core of Christian faith as illusory and inaccessible and the books of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John as pure literary-mystical inventions. Entirely absent is any meaningful treatment of the arguments for taking the Gospels seriously as what they claim to be: eyewitness accounts, or syntheses of eyewitness accounts, with a straightforward claim to basic historical credibility. This absence is not exactly surprising to a longtime reader of Gopnik's work. But I will admit that I had been hoping — wishcasting? — that we were finally moving past a cultural landscape in which the only interpretations of Christian origins offered to inquiring readers of secular publications were those bent, as Gopnik puts it, on "rehabilitating aspects of Christianity on terms that a secular scholar can respect,' while taking for granted that "nothing happened quite as related.' To be clear, I would not expect a non-Christian writer to simply embrace the thesis that events in the New Testament did mostly happen as related. But readers who look at the headline of Gopnik's essay and its implicit questions — We aren't done with Jesus? Why aren't we? — deserve a fuller answer than you can get from just considering the range of perspectives he presents. They deserve an explanation of how the persistence of Christianity is connected not just to the Gospel story's moral or mythopoetic power, but to the enduring plausibility of its historical claims even in the face of so many determined debunking efforts. To illustrate this point, I'm going to offer a response to just one passage in Gopnik's essay. Here he glosses a theory from the religion scholar Elaine Pagels that tries to explain how, if the Gospel accounts are later mythologizations, the early Christians might have moved from an initial spiritual belief in Jesus' continuing presence in their lives to the frankly supernatural claim about a literal resurrection. Pagels, rightly but audaciously, likens the evolving belief in Jesus' Resurrection to that of the followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in our own time. During his life, many devotees of the Brooklyn rebbe believed he was the Messiah, a conviction that he encouraged without ever explicitly confirming — much like the Jesus of the Gospels. After Schneerson's death, in 1994, only a small portion of believers insisted that he remained physically alive, but others continued to experience him as an enduring presence, a guide still available for inner light and intercession, as Jesus was for Paul. In times of catastrophe, such beliefs tend to harden into certainty. If the Lubavitcher community had been struck by something on the scale of the Judeans' loss of the Temple and their enslavement, what are now marginal, hallucinatory visions of the rebbe would almost certainly take on a more declarative, redemptive form. "Long live the Rebbe, King Moshiach forever!' — the Lubavitcher slogan seen on New York street corners — is, in essence, no different from "Christ is risen.' Both trace the same arc from comforting spiritual presence to asserted physical reality. So this is a framework that casts the catastrophe of the Jewish-Roman war that began in the year 66 as the crucial instigator of Christian belief in Jesus' literal resurrection from the dead. I don't want to say that this is an impossible framework to maintain, since scholarly debates about the proper interpretation of ancient texts are never-ending. But it's a very peculiar one if you just follow the consensus of secular scholarship, which does tend to date the Gospels to a period after the catastrophe, but assumes that Paul's letters to the early communities of Christians (the letters that secular scholars consider genuine, at least) predate the wars of the 60s, the destruction of the temple and everything that this theory casts as instigating the shift from the spiritual to the literal in Christian faith. In Paul, as in the Gospels, you don't have Jesus portrayed as a source of "inner light' who is glimpsed after his death through "marginal, hallucinatory visions.' No: You already have Christianity in a recognizable form, a missionary faith that preaches a messiah crucified and raised on the third day, with the same kind of specific claims about Jesus' appearances after death that are featured in the Gospel accounts, the same kind of specific witnesses invoked. You can argue about whether this early Christianity's understanding of Jesus' identity — is he God himself or a human being raised to supernatural kingship? — is identical to later Christian orthodoxy, as you can argue over a variety of other questions about Paul's personal beliefs. But the idea of Christianity as a religion that only becomes obsessed with the risen Christ after the trauma of the mid-60s is a highly implausible supposition, unmoored from what we actually know about the most influential pre-60s Christian preaching. And what practicing Christians typically believe about the origins of their faith — that "Christ is risen!' was essential from the start — seems much more likely to be true. This isn't a heterodox argument or Christian special pleading; I'm just following the conventional scholarly consensus about how to date the various New Testament books. But now I will go a little ways into heterodoxy: Every consensus contains within it minority reports, and I think the minority reports on the dating of the Gospels — which place them, like Paul's letters, closer to Jesus' life and death — have a lot going for them, in ways that would also make something like Gopnik's theory of Christian origins impossible. One key example: The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, which carry the story of Jesus' followers forward after his alleged resurrection, seem to have the same author, and the consensus position is that this Luke-Acts author was working after the destruction of the temple, sometime in the 70s, if not much later. But there is also another theory, by no means just confined to scholars with conservative theological commitments, which holds that Luke-Acts was probably completed by the early 60s or late 50s, much closer in time to Paul's actual journey, and crucially before the major events of that decade — not just before the Jewish-Roman war but before Paul's own martyrdom, the death or execution of other crucial figures in the early church and the first Roman persecutions of Christianity. The strongest support for a later dating is that the Gospel of Luke includes passages in which Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple, which themselves seem to adapt passages from the Gospel of Mark. To credit an earlier dating is to potentially credit Jesus with a supernatural gift of prophecy, which secular scholarship is not inclined to do. But against that reading you have to set the deep strangeness of the Luke-Acts author, supposedly writing decades after his main character's martyrdom and a massive, epochal trauma in the life of Christianity, Judaism and the Roman Empire, deciding to just cut his story off in the early 60s with Paul still alive and preaching in Rome, with no clear indicator in the text of what was coming next, both his death and the subsequent political-religious upheavals. Instead, the larger narrative told about Paul's ministry seems rhetorically tailored for the landscape that existed before the Jewish revolt and Neronian persecution: a world with an influential Jewish community spread throughout the empire, in which Christians were trying to justify their own message and mission to the Gentiles in terms familiar to Judaism while simultaneously seeking the friendship of Roman authorities, whose persecution they didn't yet have reason to fear. To the extent that Acts reads propagandistically in any way, its propaganda seems aimed at a landscape that existed while Paul was traveling and preaching and that vanished soon thereafter. Which means that there is a very straightforward reading of Luke-Acts that explains why it doesn't include Paul's martyrdom or any reckoning with everything that followed. It's because those things hadn't happened yet, the books were completed by the early 60s at the latest — and as such provide further evidence that a fully supernaturalist Christianity, Gospel narratives and all, was off and running before the traumas of war, persecution and exile intervened. This is a gloss on a complex debate that doesn't address all the possible counterarguments. But I offer it because it's just one example of why so many Christian believers who engage seriously with their religion's origins don't feel as if the reasonable and historically minded person is required to choose between Gopnik's two disenchanted options. They think that the best evidence, the most serious reading of history, still makes the original interpretation as plausible as ever and the mystery not disenchanted but intact. Ross Douthat has been a opinion columnist for The New York Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of 'The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.' © 2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times © 2025 The New York Times Company
New York Times
28-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Can the Jesus of History Support the Christ of Faith?
The latest issue of The New Yorker includes an essay by Adam Gopnik, 'We're Still Not Done With Jesus,' on the scholarly debates about the origins of Christianity. In the piece, Gopnik positions himself as a nuanced balancer between two serious schools (though he tilts toward the first): a school that holds that the early Christians mythologized and invented, but on the basis of some set of true events; and a school that treats the historical core of Christian faith as illusory and inaccessible and the books of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John as pure literary-mystical inventions. Entirely absent is any meaningful treatment of the arguments for taking the Gospels seriously as what they claim to be: eyewitness accounts, or syntheses of eyewitness accounts, with a straightforward claim to basic historical credibility. This absence is not exactly surprising to a longtime reader of Gopnik's work. But I will admit that I had been hoping — wishcasting? — that we were finally moving past a cultural landscape in which the only interpretations of Christian origins offered to inquiring readers of secular publications were those bent, as Gopnik puts it, on 'rehabilitating aspects of Christianity on terms that a secular scholar can respect,' while taking for granted that 'nothing happened quite as related.' To be clear, I would not expect a non-Christian writer to simply embrace the thesis that events in the New Testament did mostly happen as related. But readers who look at the headline of Gopnik's essay and its implicit questions — We aren't done with Jesus? Why aren't we? — deserve a fuller answer than you can get from just considering the range of perspectives he presents. They deserve an explanation of how the persistence of Christianity is connected not just to the Gospel story's moral or mythopoetic power, but to the enduring plausibility of its historical claims even in the face of so many determined debunking efforts. To illustrate this point, I'm going to offer a response to just one passage in Gopnik's essay. Here he glosses a theory from the religion scholar Elaine Pagels that tries to explain how, if the Gospel accounts are later mythologizations, the early Christians might have moved from an initial spiritual belief in Jesus' continuing presence in their lives to the frankly supernatural claim about a literal resurrection: Pagels, rightly but audaciously, likens the evolving belief in Jesus' Resurrection to that of the followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in our own time. During his life, many devotees of the Brooklyn rebbe believed he was the Messiah, a conviction that he encouraged without ever explicitly confirming — much like the Jesus of the Gospels. After Schneerson's death, in 1994, only a small portion of believers insisted that he remained physically alive, but others continued to experience him as an enduring presence, a guide still available for inner light and intercession, as Jesus was for Paul. In times of catastrophe, such beliefs tend to harden into certainty. If the Lubavitcher community had been struck by something on the scale of the Judeans' loss of the Temple and their enslavement, what are now marginal, hallucinatory visions of the rebbe would almost certainly take on a more declarative, redemptive form. 'Long live the Rebbe, King Moshiach forever!' — the Lubavitcher slogan seen on New York street corners — is, in essence, no different from 'Christ is risen.' Both trace the same arc from comforting spiritual presence to asserted physical reality. So this is a framework that casts the catastrophe of the Jewish-Roman war that began in the year 66 as the crucial instigator of Christian belief in Jesus' literal resurrection from the dead. I don't want to say that this is an impossible framework to maintain, since scholarly debates about the proper interpretation of ancient texts are never-ending. But it's a very peculiar one if you just follow the consensus of secular scholarship, which does tend to date the Gospels to a period after the catastrophe, but assumes that Paul's letters to the early communities of Christians (the letters that secular scholars consider genuine, at least) predate the wars of the 60s, the destruction of the temple, and everything that this theory casts as instigating the shift from the spiritual to the literal in Christian faith. In Paul, as in the Gospels, you don't have Jesus portrayed as a source of 'inner light' who is glimpsed after his death through 'marginal, hallucinatory visions.' No: You already have Christianity in a recognizable form, a missionary faith that preaches a messiah crucified and raised on the third day, with the same kind of specific claims about Jesus' appearances after death that are featured in the Gospel accounts, the same kind of specific witnesses invoked. You can argue about whether this early Christianity's understanding of Jesus' identity — is he God himself or a human being raised to supernatural kingship? — is identical to later Christian orthodoxy, as you can argue over a variety of other questions about Paul's personal beliefs. But the idea of Christianity as a religion that only becomes obsessed with the risen Christ after the trauma of the mid-60s is a highly implausible supposition, unmoored from what we actually know about the most influential pre-60s Christian preaching. And what practicing Christians typically believe about the origins of their faith — that 'Christ is risen!' was essential from the start — seems much more likely to be true. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
19-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
A Vivid, Engrossing Biography of an Art-World Contrarian
Albert C. Barnes, among the first major American collectors of modern art, barrels onto the page in Blake Gopnik's vivid, engrossing biography in a behemoth, chauffeur-driven, seven-seater, indigo Packard. Through a carpeted passenger door steps 'an ox of a man,' in greatcoat and fedora, with 'the look of an aging vice cop — someone who hit first and asked questions later.' Voracious and vituperative, Barnes was a character of wild contradictions — a 'tyrannical egalitarian,' a 'patriarchal feminist,' a 'Gilded Age progressive.' Co-inventor of a gonorrhea antiseptic used to prevent blindness in newborns, he amassed more than 4,000 pieces of art and objects, and set up a personal foundation dedicated to using the collection to teach 'plain people' (not the intellectuals and philistine Philadelphia elites he disdained) how to learn to see. Seventy-five years after his death, hundreds of thousands of people, plain and otherwise, pilgrimage annually to the Barnes Foundation to marvel at and puzzle over his 'ensembles' — unorthodox arrangements of Impressionist and modernist masterpieces and minorpieces, African art, classical sculpture, Native American ceramics, old keyhole plates, colonial hinges and other ironmongery, all interspersed with a superabundance of Renoir nudes of the sort Mary Cassatt once called 'enormously fat red women with very small heads.' Less well known are the picaresque details of Barnes's life, of which Gopnik, a longtime art critic and a biographer of Andy Warhol, makes delectable use. There's the brainy boy's escape from an impoverished childhood on the margins of a notorious Philadelphia slum; the factory where, in the segregated, early-20th-century city, his racially mixed workers were allowed to spend two hours a day in optional seminars on the likes of William James and Bertrand Russell; his foray into conducting psychoanalysis; his bulldozing, bridge-burning and 'sheer lust for battle'; and his death in 1951 at age 79 in a collision with a 10-ton truck. He was, as Thomas Hart Benton put it, 'friendly, kindly, hospitable' and 'a ruthless, underhanded son of a bitch.' Ezra Pound described him as living in 'a state of high-tension hysteria, at war with mankind.' A rare friendship Barnes did not sabotage was with John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher whose progressive educational theories influenced Barnes's experiment in using art to improve society and human nature. If the role of a classroom teacher was to create experiences from which children would learn by doing, as Dewey believed, then perhaps art could become an instructional tool in what Gopnik calls 'the 'educational' task of changing America.' Barnes had discovered early what he called 'the ineffable joy of the immediate moment' from religious ecstasies witnessed at Methodist camp meetings as a child. Later, he experienced a similar rush from art. But he was a man of science, trained in pharmacology and chemistry. His lifelong challenge, Gopnik writes, 'was to reconcile the demands that reason made on his judgment and the claims aesthetics had on his feelings.' Those early camp meetings also informed Barnes's attitude toward racial issues. He'd become addicted, he would say, to the company of Black Philadelphians. He employed them and paid them well. He called spirituals 'America's only great music'; he championed African art. But Gopnik, citing the work of the scholar Alison Boyd, says Barnes's enthusiasm toward Black culture also tended to be nostalgic and simplistic. His interest in modernism did not spring fully formed from his rationalist's head. It took two years of coaching by William Glackens, a high school friend and a founder of the Ashcan School of painters, to open Barnes's mind to the avant-garde. On an early shopping expedition to Paris on Barnes's behalf, Glackens shipped back 33 paintings, including Barnes's first Picasso, his first Cézanne and one of the first van Goghs to reach the United States. Later, the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume became Barnes's principal adviser. Without him, 'the Barnes Foundation would be a very different place,' according to Gopnik, who detects in Barnes himself a certain 'blindness to the cutting edge.' Barnes, a serial exaggerator, later denied the roles played by Glackens and Guillaume. He 'even pretended to have discovered modernism before Le Corbusier, one of its founding creators.' Barnes's brilliance has occasionally been overshadowed by his interpersonal ineptitude, Gopnik suggests. Similarly, the glories of his collection have eclipsed his thinking and writing as a reformer. Gopnik covers it all, in exquisite balance, concluding that Barnes's 'gifts to posterity, as a collector and thinker, pretty clearly outweigh his own lifetime's faults.' In the 13 years since the foundation was relocated to Philadelphia from its original home on a quiet street in suburban Merion — over the ferocious objections of Barnesians who saw the move as a capitulation to Philadelphia's elites — 2.5 million people have seen Barnes's beloved collection, its ensembles rehung precisely as he left them. Which is to say, far more people than would have seen the collection in Merion. Would Barnes still object? Gopnik wonders. 'Knowing Barnes — yes.'
