The Secret to Happiness? Feeling Loved By Others→

A happiness researcher and a relationship expert teamed up to write about how we can all feel more loved. They argue it’s the key to happiness.

By Maggie Penman, writing in the Washington Post (February 12, 2026)

You say love is essential for our survival as a species. Why is that?

Harry Reis: If you look at humans from birth, what are your chances of surviving if you don’t have someone to care for you? You have no chance at all. Humans have a very long period of requiring that others take care of them. It turns out this is true not just for infants and children; this is true for adults, as well. We humans do much better when we’re embedded in a social network, when we feel like we belong, when we feel like we’re connected to other people. When we’re isolated and lonely, our work suffers, our mental health suffers, we even know that people die earlier when they don’t have this sense of belonging.

Sonja Lyubomirsky: A lonely moment is a moment when you’re not feeling loved. It’s like an evolutionary signal that something needs to be repaired, that your social bonds are not as strong as they need to be. And it’s a really important signal. In the past we might’ve died if we were lonely. And today it almost feels like you’re dying when you’re not feeling loved, when you’re feeling lonely.

Read the rest of the article

A New Antidote for Youth Loneliness: Sharing Data About the Kindness of Others→

It turns out that we routinely underestimate the friendliness of the people around us.

By Jamil Zaki and Rui Pei, writing in the Wall Street Journal (November 21, 2025)

MAR HERNÁNDEZ

The college years once ranked among the happiest times of most people’s lives, but that’s changed. Young adults face an escalating mental health crisis, fueled in part by loneliness. In 2023, 19% of young adults reported having no one they could count on, compared to less than 14% in 2006. When explaining this trend, it’s tempting to turn to stereotypes: phone-addled, self-obsessed kids these days have forgotten how to connect.  

A new study from our lab tells a different story. We surveyed thousands of students at Stanford University, where we both work, and discovered two different schools. The first Stanford was made of real students, who defy tidy put-downs of “kids these days.” Undergraduates were near the top of the scale in empathy. Ninety-five percent said they would help peers who were feeling down, and nearly 90% wanted to befriend students they didn’t know. The second Stanford was a colder, pricklier place that lived inside students’ minds. Students vastly underestimated how empathic, kind and friendly their average peer was. 

This “empathy perception gap” didn’t stay in students’ heads. Undergraduates who thought the least of their peers also asked the least of them. They were less likely to strike up conversations with classmates or confide in dormmates. This, in turn, predicted loneliness, isolation and unhappiness. 

Read the rest of the article

Announcing the 2025–2026 Critical Engagements Theme: Bowling Alone

The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences has announced that the 2025–2026 Critical Engagements theme is “Bowling Alone.” Twenty-five years after the publication of Robert Putnam’s book of the same name, we’ll explore how community, loneliness, civic life, and our neighborhoods have continued to witness dramatic changes. →Details, events, and resources

Runoff, warmer temperatures threaten Detroit area creeks, rivers (Detroit News)→

Storm runoff can pose challenges for waterways like Paint Creek, which is known for being clear and cold. Runoff can disrupt a waterway's habitat by carrying sediment into the water. Hernz Laguerre, Jr., The Detroit News

Carol Thompson:

As climate change fuels storms and brings warmer average temperatures to the Midwest, it also is ushering in a challenging era for Michigan rivers and the fish and bugs that live in them.

Read More (subcription required)

$1B in federal funding for Great Lakes will clean up 9 areas in Michigan by 2030 (Detroit News)→

Detroit News File Photo

Melissa Nann and Burke Riley Beggin:

$1 billion for the federal Great Lakes restoration program from the bipartisan infrastructure bill will speed the cleanup of nine damaged areas in Michigan to completion by 2030, officials said.

The Michigan areas to be cleaned up, including the Detroit, Rouge and St. Clair rivers and River Raisin, are among 25 in the lakes region designated as "areas of concern" by the Environmental Protection Agency due to damage caused by industrial pollution and development.

President Joe Biden is expected to announce the new funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative during a trip Thursday to Lorain, Ohio.

Read more

Great Lakes Scientists to Study ‘The Changing Face of Winter’ (CMU News)→

MODIS satellite image of the Great Lakes showing maximum ice extent on March 4, 2009. Image credit: NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory

Nearly all scientific sampling of the Great Lakes is done between May and October, when the lakes are free of ice and the water is warmer.

But this month, scientists from more than a dozen U.S. and Canadian institutions, including Central Michigan University, will brave the elements to sample all five Great Lakes and Lake St. Clair in a first-of-its-kind coordinated campaign called the Winter Grab.

Teams will drill through ice to collect water samples, measure light levels at various depths and net tiny zooplankton as part of a broader effort to better understand the changing face of winter on the Great Lakes, where climate warming is increasing winter air temperatures, decreasing ice-cover extent and changing precipitation patterns.

The specific goal of the Winter Grab is to help fill key wintertime knowledge gaps about ice properties, water movement, nutrient concentrations and lake biology. The event is funded in part by the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan, a partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Scientists have studied the Great Lakes extensively, but surprisingly, we know very little about what takes place during the winter,” said Don Uzarski, director of the CMU Institute for Great Lakes Research. …

Read more

Spring 2022 Events Updates

We’ve updated our events pages with lots of new films, talks, and other activities on the theme of Deep Waters. Please see the events page for details and watch this space for more. We’ll be updating the site regularly with new events and links — including, in the not-too-distant future, details on next year’s theme and some of the events we have planned.

Droughts and the Southwest

This is one of many stories this summer about the brutal drought in the Southwestern United States. As water levels rise in the Great Lakes, rivers, aquifers, and irrigation canals are running dry in the West.

Big Water Creates Big Impact

Anticipating next year’s CE theme, “Deep Waters,” please see this call for submissions from CMU Libraries, in collaboration with the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Libraries:

Submissions accepted March 22 through May 31, 2021

People of all ages may submit works of art or research that depicts the impact of recent big water events on the people who live in Michigan. This virtual exhibition will launch in September 2021.

Learn more and submit an application at library.cmich.edu/BigWaterExhibition.

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This exhibition is co-sponsored by Central Michigan University Libraries and the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Libraries and is made possible by a grant from the American Library Association.

Storytelling Is Universal

“Habia una vez…,” “Mukashi Mukashi…,” “Es war einmal…” “Once upon a time…”

Whatever the language, when you read those words—or when they are read to you—you know that what you are about to experience is probably going to be an entertaining adventure. There might be magical creatures. Or maybe a team of heroes facing trials and tribulations. The story might be scary or it might be lighthearted. And chances are, there is a moral lesson cloaked within that fanciful story ensuring that the audience is left with something a little more meaningful than a simple moment of entertainment.

For humans, storytelling is universal. From the Epic of Gilgamesh inscribed on clay tablets millennia ago to the binge-worthy streaming shows pouring through telecommunications lines, “humans need stories,” as an article on the BBC put it. We learn from stories. We escape with stories. We experience events and emotions through stories. We empathize with others because of stories. And for children, we grow and develop, hopefully into humane and mature citizens, thanks to stories.

From Albania to Zimbabwe, children’s books delight youth around the globe. Books for youth are not only about the words that make up the story, the pictures are important, too. Frequently, a beautiful illustration worthy of being hung in a gallery accompanies a fantastic narrative or the silly rhyme. The value of the book for the young, impressionable audience goes beyond artistry, word craft, and entertainment. We pass along virtues and lessons through stories. On every continent, in scores of languages, we find children’s stories about dealing with loss or managing our anger. We find stories about protecting the environment and being inquisitive. There are stories about respecting others, sharing, being kind to one another, and not becoming overconfident. And, of course, there are stories about facing challenges and overcoming setbacks.

When children’s books from around the world are brought together in all of their different languages and forms, we find that the books have a value the goes beyond the lesson of virtue at the heart of any one tale. Taken in sum, we learn about our shared humanity. We learn, for instance, that a contemporary story from Japan and another from the US both feature a young girl around eight years old as the protagonist. In each story, the young girl accomplishes some very big goals. Both stories show the audience what it takes to succeed. From there, we can dig deeper to explore the nuance of the virtues being passed along. In one story, the young girl celebrates her perseverance and grit, exclaiming, “I did it!”. In the other story, the young girl recounts the many people she met along her path to success who offered help or taught her something. Either story on its own is a worthwhile bedtime read for any child, offering up valuable lessons about the recipe for success. For a more mature audience, looking at the stories side-by-side, we learn something about the details of the values our societies seek to pass on to our youth.**

There is one final value that over 1,500 books in languages other than English – like the collection found in the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University – offer us. The books themselves are a delightful catalyst to connect speakers of different languages who can read these books. In a place like Mt. Pleasant, there are native speakers and language-learning students from all over the globe. Dozens of languages are spoken by the thousands of members of the CMU community. With this special collection, the Clarke creates an opportunity to bring everyone together through stories and celebrate the diversity of languages found in a Midwestern college town.

2021 is the sixth year that the Clarke Historical Library has invited members of the CMU community to read a children’s book. In the six events, volunteers have read books in approximately 35 languages. This year, because we cannot gather and listen to readers in an in-person program, we have asked our gracious volunteer readers to create recordings of their readings. Anyone can view these recordings, which include images of the text and the illustrations from each book, on the Clarke Historical Library’s website. With a Spanish story about protecting the trees or a Japanese story about a king who wants an egg omelet, there is no better way to discover what stories mean to all of us around the world.

**By the way, if you didn’t guess, the American story carried the message of individualism. This example is from a lecture by Susan Stan, a former professor of English at CMU, in 2016.

Art Spiegelman (February 18)→

Art Spiegelman

Join us for a virtual conversation with author and illustrator Art Spiegelman, who created the Pulitzer Prize winning Holocaust narrative Maus, portraying Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The book weaves Spiegelman's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into a retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. The book offers an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma. 

Art Spiegelman will share images from Maus and discuss how they relate to today’s context at home and around the world. Following the presentation, audience members are invited to participate in a Q&A session with the author. 

Orange Shirt Day

Every child matters. And Orange Shirt Day, a movement that started in Canada to recognize the attrocities carried out against generations of children in boarding schools across Canada, affirms this each year.

The Saginaw Chippewa are recognizing this day as a commemoration of human rights violations that took place locally here in Mount Pleasant and across the United States.

You can read more about Orange Shirt Day here.

These T-SHIRTS are from Northern Ontario School of Medicine’s Orange Shirt Project.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls at Ziibiwing Center

Our first featured event for Critical Engagements is the virtual opening of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls exhibition at the Ziibiwing Center on September 25, 2020. Information is below.

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

2020. It’s been a year like no other, and we’re not yet done with it.

2020. It’s shorthand for a dense tale of human tragedy—death, murders, racial injustice, floods, fires, hurricanes—that many living today have not experienced. We heard our parents’ or grandparents’ tales of wars and devastations and we studied them, too. But this year, we have lived them.

2020 is the year in which we realized that we are very much still human, that we are of our bodies.

Critical Engagements’ focus this year could only be on being human in the ways we have been this year. Below is our revised description for the year ahead.

Be well. Keep well.

***

This year’s pandemic, economic chaos, and natural disasters have all underscored how fleeting those basic things that make us human can be: bodies, identities and abilities, languages, families, communities — even our dreams and beliefs have been upended. And with George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, we had yet another devastating reminder of the ongoing ways in which we have seen and defined each other as less than human. 

While this year’s theme can lead us in many directions, we will emphasize in particular the dignities and rights essential to human beings. How do race, gender, sexual preference, and other identities relate to basic human rights across history and today? We will also explore questions around definitions of humanity and language, technology, and sciences because they contribute to our understanding of those identities and rights. While we don’t have all the answers, we know that they are as critical as they are complicated. Please join us as we engage the resources of our university and community to work on a question that matters so very much.

Key Issues and Problems

• Human identities: gender, race, sexual preference and others

• Rights, human rights, animal rights

• Hominids, human origins, biological anthropology

• Language, linguistics, linguistic anthropology

• Medical and psychological definitions of life, death, consciousness, personhood

• Philosophical and religious accounts of life, death, consciousness, personhood

• Artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness

• Robots, robot ethics, robot rights, robot definitions; the future of work in a world of robots

• What does it mean to be humane?

A Pop-Up Course on Pandemics: A New Venture for Critical Engagements and the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences→

She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees. (225) 

 —Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

In spring 2020, our dial turned a lot more than one or two degrees. We may or may not have been watching the COVID-19 virus as it spread from Wuhan, Teheran, and Milan, but it arrived here in Michigan with an unceremonious blow. We went from a seemingly normal early March at our school, work, and social lives to shelter-at-home orders with only those closest to us. The people, places, rhythms, and things we’d grown accustomed to in our daily lives vanished almost instantly. 

Here in Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued the full “Stay Home, Stay Safe” orders for March 24, but Central Michigan University had already told students not to return from spring break for face-to-face classes by March 11. It was clear to everyone—students, faculty, and staff—that this would be a semester like no other we’d experienced.

However, by March 13, a pop-up course on the emerging pandemic, Dr. Marcy Taylor’s brainchild, was in the works. She and I rapidly assembled a crack team of lecturers from every college at Central Michigan University for a four-week, one-credit course within the Critical Engagements initiative. It ran from April 6 until May 3, 2020. Faculty with expertise in biomedicine, economics, education, history, public health, literature, medical anthropology, and public policy offered four weeks of lectures, discussions, readings, and other materials to put COVID-19 and other pandemics in context with world history and culture. And we all did this as we lived (and worked and studied) through an unimaginably challenging period.

Indeed, COVID-19 is the kind of problem that many in the twenty-first century have never confronted. On March 31st, 2020, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized that the world is undergoing “the greatest test that we have faced together” since the end of World War II. “A successful response and recovery,” he continued, “will require international cooperation and partnerships at every level -- governments taking action in lock step with communities; private sector engagement to find pathways out of this crisis. Partnerships based on solidarity will be the cornerstone for progress.”

This is just the type of cooperative approach that made this course unique, and unusually important. Equipped with multiple insights into the wicked problem of a global pandemic, students from across the university (including medical students about ready to head out to their residencies) learned how to think and respond more critically and effectively while living through an extraordinary moment. Students wrote reflective response journals as they moved through the weeks’ lectures and readings, all culminating in these final blog entries featured here. 

And what they wrote was fascinating and insightful. Some students pondered the role of technology and cultural values; others wondered about their own political stances as the coronavirus challenged core beliefs and practices. Many contemplated the role of misinformation during a pandemic. Students and future teachers wrote about education at all levels in the wake of COVID-19 and in helping to solve pandemics in the future. And doctors heading out to practice clearly were deliberating about their weighty role as public health and preparedness advocates. 

We offer them all here for you to read, a sort of microhistory of the novel coronavirus’s impact on Central Michigan University students during the spring 2020 semester. They are snapshots of an ephemeral moment on our campus, providing valuable insights to an indelible period in the history of the world. 

*The student entries have been edited for grammar and style, but not content. The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) and Critical Engagements (CE) value the power of publishing student writing. However, CLASS and CE make no guarantees about the accuracy or reliability of the information. The views expressed in the blog entries are solely those of the student authors.

Artists Fighting Fake News

Critical Engagements posts in recent weeks have mentioned the misinformation (and outright hoodwinking) that is part and parcel of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are countless people fighting this “infodemic” from medical professionals to policy makers and from journalists to a frozen meat company. Now, we can add artists to the list of professions entering the fight against fake news.

As artnet News reports, three nonprofits are paying freelance artists in a variety of media to design art that can “improve public communication and news delivery surrounding COVID-19.” Read more about the Artists Against the #Infodemic initiative on artnet News.

Starving The Watchdogs: Who Foots The Bill When Newspapers Disappear? (NPR's Hidden Brain)→

Shankar Vedantam and NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast:

The value of local newspapers can hardly be overstated right now. We read our local papers to track the spread of COVID-19 in our states, and the availability of ICU beds at nearby hospitals. We read to get a sense of how nearby businesses are faring, and what nursing homes are doing to keep residents safe. More of us are reading more news all the time. But at the same time that readership is soaring, advertising revenue—which keeps newspapers financially afloat—is plummeting. As a result, a number of newspapers across the country are laying off workers, even shuttering. …

Whereas most of us treat newspapers like consumer products, new research from Paul Gao, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy suggests that they might be more like police departments. Gao, Lee, and Murphy looked at how newspaper closures might affect the cost of borrowing in local governments. What they found is a price tag that may give many taxpayers sticker shock.

This week on Hidden Brain, we look at an unusual case of what economists refer to as a free-rider problem. And we ask, who bears the cost when nobody wants to pay?

PBS: "Dangerous Global Flood of Misinformation Surrounding COVID-19"

On April 28, the PBS NewsHour ran a segment about the “infodemic” related to the COVID-19 pandemic The jam-packed segment covers everything about the “infodemic” from quack remedies to conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus, and from the psychology at play in “fake news” going viral to, fortunately, the work people are doing to debunk the “fake news.” And of course, there are plenty of synonyms for “fake news” mentioned throughout — misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, falsehoods, wild claims, bogus claims, myths, and more.

The full transcript can be found on the PBS NewsHour site.

Witch Hunts: Seventeenth Century Fake News

In a three-and-a-half minute clip on the PBS site, you can learn about “fake news” in terms of of witch hunts. Did you know there was a “Witchfinder General” in England and he was responsible for the deaths of over 200 innocent people in the 1600s? He wrote a book that offered advice on finding witches and dispensing with them. His work and the work of others contributed to a misinformation movement that resulted in the executions of 40,000 innocent people, mostly women.

In the PBS program, Networld, historian Niall Ferguson explores the spread of social movements and information across the world’s networks - from the Reformation spreading because of the European printing revolution to the spread of information across the internet via social media networks that is ubiquitous in 2020. Among the many facets of the study of the spread of information is the viral spread of misinformation. To watch all three episodes of the Networld series, login to PBS with the PBS passport.

Who Can You Trust with Information During a Pandemic?

As the Wall Street Journal** noted, who would ever expect a frozen food brand to be the voice of rational, level-headed information about a pandemic? Last week, frozen food brand Steak-Umm, which makes thinly sliced frozen beef for cheese-steak sandwiches, received quite a bit of praise for a Twitter thread putting out some incredibly useful advice for consuming information during the current public health emergency. The tips, which sound like something that one of the Critical Engagements guests could have said, were posted on April 6. Here are some of the highlights from the Twitter thread.

“[Tweet #1]friendly reminder in times of uncertainty and misinformation: anecdotes are not data. (good) data is carefully measured and collected information based on a range of subject-dependent factors, including, but not limited to, controlled variables, meta-analysis, and randomization […Tweet #2] outliers attempting to counter global consensus around this pandemic with amateur reporting or unverified sourcing are not collecting data. breaking news stories that only relay initial findings of an event are not collecting data. we have to be careful in our media consumption.”

“[Tweet #5] breaking news and storytelling will always be spun with interpretive bias from different media perspectives, but data is a science that can't be replaced by one-off anecdotes. try to remember this to avoid fear-based sensationalism or conspiracy theories taking over your mind.”

And the piéce de résistance:

“[Tweet 7"]we're a frozen meat brand posting ads inevitably made to misdirect people and generate sales, so this is peak irony, but hey we live in a society so please make informed decisions to the best of your ability and don't let anecdotes dictate your worldview ok.”

Fake news is not only about the source of the information -- experts can spout untruths and frozen food brands can offer sound advice. Fake news is about you, the consumer. So, at the risk of playing up an obvious pun, think carefully about the nutritional value of the information you are ingesting.

**Did you know, the CMU Libraries provides all CMU faculty, students, and staff with on-line access to the Wall Street Journal? Click here for more information.