Health

Punching a pillow won't help your anger, but this surprisingly does

154 studies. 10,189 people. One very inconvenient verdict on how we handle a bad mood.

You know the scene. Someone gets so furious they start hurling plates, punching walls, and chucking a television out the window, then, suddenly, they feel better. Anger has a way of taking over a whole room, and it is such a tidy fantasy that entire businesses, those pay-by-the-hour rage rooms, exist to sell you relief by the smash*. The logic feels airtight: let the pressure out, and the anger goes with it.

A sweeping new analysis says that logic is exactly backward. Researchers combed through 154 studies covering 10,189 people of every age, culture, and temperament, and found that venting does almost nothing to cool you down, while some versions of it leave you angrier than when you started. As one author put it, there is not a shred of scientific evidence to support catharsis theory. 

So if breaking things and sprinting it out are both a bust, what actually works? The answer is almost annoyingly quiet, and it looks nothing like the movies. In Ryan Reed's rundown of the research, the real fix has less to do with unleashing the storm and more to do with lowering the thermostat on it.

* - I can attest to how fun these rooms are, though! If you find one, try it. I had a blast!

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And what did we LEEAAAARRNNNN!!!!

I’m hooked on the World Cup, and I know from a previous poll that I’m in the minority here at GOOD. But now that the games are taking place and the USA is in the hunt, have you come around?

• I still couldn't care less. I just can't be bothered. (48.5%)

• I'm warming to it. It seems fun. (21.2%)

• I'm a convert! The rivalry, the drama, the goodwill! Love it. (23.5%)

• I've been a die-hard from the jump. Ask me about the offside rule. (6.8%)

I mean, the needle has certainly moved! Reader J. Darnell is a convert. “My ancestors are from Scotland and when the tartan army invaded Boston it was a hilariously GOOD TIME.🥰” Reader Davisoct, on the other hand, spoke for the plurality. “World Cup of what? 😂”

Well-being

The wrong-train rule and 6 other life hacks from people who’ve lived it

Some advice does not announce itself as wisdom. It just sits quietly in the back of your mind until the day you need it.

“If you get on the wrong train, get off at the nearest station. The longer it takes you to get off, the more expensive the return trip will be.” Thanks, Grandma. I’ll remember that next time I’m on a train. Except she wasn’t talking about trains. And the line hits different a year later, when you’re in the middle of an argument, a bad job, a doomed relationship.

Mark Wales gathers seven pieces of hard-earned advice that have a way of showing up right on time. There are lessons for regret, conflict, kindness, temptation and that tiny, dangerous moment before you say the thing you cannot unsay.

Media

The real reason malls are dying has nothing to do with Amazon

Blame a boring accounting decision, not your Prime membership.

Every eulogy for the American mall names the same killer: Amazon. Cheap, endless, open at 2 a.m. in your pajamas. Case closed, right? Not quite. Malls were emptying out long before one-click shipping got good, back when shopping malls still ruled the social scene. The real culprit has been hiding in the tax code since the Eisenhower administration.

In this story by Amy Lamare, the trail runs back to 1954, when Congress quietly changed how developers could write off a new building. The tweak sounds boring. The effect was not. As Malcolm Gladwell put it in his history of the mall, "Suddenly it was possible to make much more money investing in things like shopping centers than buying stocks." Money poured in, and developers threw up malls as fast as the concrete could cure.

It was a recipe for disaster. That same tax break gave owners zero reason to ever fix the places up. Why renovate when the building quietly prints tax-free money for 40 years, no matter what? So a whole generation of malls was left to age out, one dead food court at a time, until the failure of malls became a national landscape of empty parking lots. What we actually lost wasn't the shopping. It was the third space, the jobs, the one spot where a suburban teenager could just exist in public.

On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted to sever ties with Great Britain. Twelve colonies said yes, New York sat on its hands (its delegates were still waiting on instructions from home), and just like that, the United States chose to exist. The famous parchment everyone pictures, the Declaration of Independence, was still being wordsmithed. The vote, the true point of no return, happened on the 2nd.

John Adams was so sure of the date's weight that he wrote home predicting July 2 would become the great American festival, marked forever after with parades, bonfires, and illuminations. He nailed the party and missed the day by exactly 48 hours. Congress approved the final wording of the Declaration on July 4, that date got stamped across the top, and that was the one history chose to remember.

So as the country marks its 250th this year, spare a thought for the 2nd, the day independence was truly decided, quietly out-celebrated by its more famous little brother.

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