IIHENRY

SO WHAT DO WE DO?

I can only answer this personally, in an incomplete way, with an appeal to my little network: resist in whatever way you can. My own career shift was prompted, in part, by a recognition of the power of popular art. Toni Morrison said it best: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.

Why does this matter? Isn’t the whole idea of the law just to challenge Roe v. Wade in the US national court system?

The public health rationale is self-evident. Even those claiming moral opposition must concede that if the abortion is to happen anyway, it’s preferable that it happens under safe conditions. We have good data on this from numerous countries. As for international human rights law and treaties, these can be considered (at minimum) persuasive authority should the US Supreme Court end up hearing one of these cases.

What is the flow state?

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi—who I’ll refer to as MC because (a) damn and (b) it makes me feel like he’s a 90s hip hop artist into positive psychology--is a giant in this field. He defined the “flow experience,” which is a state in which a person engages in an activity and is fully immersed in it, feeling energized, involved, capable, and absorbed by it.

How ‘bout some neuroscience?

In his Ted Talk, MC suggests that a person’s mind can attend to only a certain amount of information at a time: about "110 bits of information per second.” Just decoding speech takes about 60 bits of information per second—which is why we are really bad at understanding two simultaneous conversations.

What are the benefits of accessing a flow state in daily life?

Though causality is notoriously tricky to prove in positive psychology, there is strong empirical evidence that time spent in a flow state makes us considerably more happy and successful.