Bourbon purple sweet potatoes

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A long-time favorite recipe for Thanksgiving is bourbon sweet potatoes, and this year I’m making them with purple sweet potatoes (because nutrition). What you see above is the conclusion of step 1: potatoes roasted, peeled, and mashed with butter, bourbon, and a little salt, then put into a Pyrex baking dish for the trip to The Niece’s house. There I’ll dot the surface with butter, sprinkle it with chopped walnuts, and put the dish into a 350ºF oven for 20 minutes. 

I used Stokes Purple® potatoes because that’s what I found, but there are other sweet potatoes with purple flesh — Purple Majesty, All Blue, Magic Molly, Okinawan Sweet Potato, and others.

How to Make, and Keep, Friends in Adulthood

Catherine Pearson writes in the NY Times (no paywall):

In July, Marisa Franco went on a solo vacation to Mexico. But by the time she flew back to Washington, D.C., 10 days later, she’d formed an entirely new group of friends.

As a psychologist who studies friendship, Dr. Franco has a leg up on most of us when it comes to forging connections, and she leaned heavily on the strategies she learned researching her new book, “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends.”

Dr. Franco assumed, for instance, that people would like her. And she reminded herself that people in transition — like those who’ve recently moved, gone through a breakup or who are traveling — tend to be more open to making new friends.

Buoyed by that knowledge, she struck up a conversation with a fellow traveler at a cafe whom she overheard speaking English. Dr. Franco invited him to a get-together for people looking to practice speaking Spanish that she had heard about on Meetup.com.

“At the language event, I met someone else, made the same assumptions, and we exchanged numbers,” she recalled. “I invited them to a lucha libre wrestling match, and they came. This is to say: People are actually really open to friendship.”

Even so, Dr. Franco knows that making friends in adulthood does not always feel so simple or easy, and that may be one reason why friendship is in decline. In 1990, only 3 percent of Americans said they had no close friends; in 2021, nearly 12 percent said the same. The United States is in the grips of a loneliness crisis that predates the Covid pandemic.

Dr. Franco’s book acknowledges those headwinds, while also offering practical advice for making new friends and deepening existing relationships. She spoke to The New York Times about some simple best practices to keep in mind.

Questions and answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Much of your work centers on changing our scripts around friendship. What are some misconceptions you’d like to see disappear?

One is that platonic love is somehow less important or meaningful than romantic love. We have this idea that people who have friendship at the center of their relationships are unhappy or unfulfilled. It’s something I used to believe myself: I thought romantic love was the only love that would make me whole. I wrote “Platonic” because I wanted to level that hierarchy a little bit.

Another misconception is that . . .

Continue reading. (no paywall)

Lego origami

Help in describing your feelings

Start at the center and move out to achieve finer gradations of description.

Ronnie O’Sullivan’s Sensational Title Winning Century in the Hong Kong Masters 2022 Final

The hallmarks of good therapy

Like many things, therapy can be good or bad, and one wants to avoid bad therapy. (Terminating a relationship with a therapist is — or should be — straightforward: “This isn’t working for me, so I’m going to discontinue the sessions.”) What you should be looking for is described in an excellent post at GoodTherapy.org, which begins:

There are many models and types of therapy to choose from. We believe there are a handful of common denominators present in all forms of healthy, ethical therapy. These elements are described here:

NONPATHOLOGIZING

Viewing a person as greater than his or her problems is the hallmark of nonpathologizing therapy. It does not mean problems do not exist; rather, it means one does not view the problems as the whole person. Working nonpathologically requires a shift in both the understanding and the approach to pathology.

Here is the understanding: Most of the issues people go to therapy for are not organic disorders—they are not hardware problems, they are software problems. These issues are the result of the person’s psyche doing the best it can to deal with life experiences—to adapt, survive, and prevent the person from ever getting hurt again. Certainly, there are some “disorders” that are purely organic in etiology (meaning a hardware problem that is genetic, biochemical, or neurological), such as some forms and instances of psychotic and mood disorders. However, the nonorganic problems people bring to therapy, which are often labeled as disorders, are actually very organized, orderly, and systemic psychological reactions. Thus, the word disorder is simply inadequate and misleading. Adding insult to injury, being labeled with a disorder can provoke shame and inadequacy and make some people feel worse. Read more about the GoodTherapy.org position on the concept of disorder, here.

Here is the approach: Treatment of a software problem requires curiosity and compassion in order to undo the orderly and organized response to suffering. Treatment of a software problem does NOT warrant psychological amputation—this is what the medical model does to pathology. When a therapist joins a client in getting rid of a symptom instead of exploring its depths, the therapist is overlooking the client’s opportunity to heal. We do justice to a person’s true nature when we remember that behind the layers of protection, no matter how self-destructive or hurtful to others an individual has been, there is a loveable and vulnerable person at the very core. What about sociopathy?

EMPOWERING

Therapists who empower the people they work with in therapy maintain the belief that people have the capacity for change and are equipped with the inner resources to change, even if they never do. Therapy is based on the belief that people can heal if they want to and if they are able to contribute to their own growth what is sufficient and necessary.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency, especially in medical model treatment environments, to view people as fundamentally flawed. When a therapist views a person as flawed or incapable of change, the person is more likely to feel and become flawed. When the therapist is able to see beyond a person’s wounds and defenses, he or she is more likely to discover his or her true nature. Some people may not be able to overcome their obstacles and heal in this lifetime, but the therapist should not become an additional barrier.

COLLABORATIVE

The spirit of collaborative therapy is summarized in the words of Albert Schweitzer who wrote, . . .

Continue reading.

The site has articles on many types of therapy, including one that I personally found to be both interesting and helpful: psychosynthesis. In the list of books I find myself repeatedly recommending, you’ll find Pierro Ferrucci’s book What We May Be, an introduction to (and workbook in) psychosynthesis.

Consensus search engine

Consensus is a new (still in beta) search engine that extracts, aggregates and distills findings from 200 million peer-reviewed scientific research papers to answer your questions. Very cool. My test search was “lutein and brain” and I got this result.