MIMI SUHAILA

Is love at first sight a good indicator for the future?

Monday, February 27, 2017
BY: AARON BEN-ZEEV Ph-D



“This is going to sound crazy, but... from the moment I first set eyes on you I haven't been able to stop thinking about you.” Leigh Fallon, Carrier of the Mark

"As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on." Steve Jobs

Love at first sight is not easy to explain. Some people even deny that it is possible claiming it is merely sexual attraction. Indeed, how can we fall profoundly in love after one quick glance? How can such a glance make us believe that we want to spend the rest of our life in the arms of a stranger we have just seen for the first time?

Should we follow our heart and seriously pursue love at first sight? We usually should, as such love is a genuine expression of our response. Love at first sight is a matter of the heart, and as Steve Jobs said, "you'll know when you find it." And perhaps "it just gets better and better as the years roll on." The issue is, however, more complex.

“If you believe in love at first sight, you will never stop looking.” Closer (2004; directed by Mike Nichols)

The relationship between love at first sight and the quality and the profundity of a subsequent relationship is mainly influenced by two opposing factors: (a) the initial positive impression has positive impact upon the quality of the relationship, and (b) the brevity of time in which the partner is selected prevents the agent from identifying a significant personality similarity, which is vital for future relationship quality.

Research has demonstrated that initial evaluations have significant influence on long-term relationships. The positive evaluations present in love at first sight therefore have a positive impact upon the relationship. In this sense, if love at first sight develops into a long-term relationship, that relationship has a greater chance of achieving better quality. The importance of first impressions is illustrated in the well-known advertisement for hair shampoo, which declares that "You will never have a second chance to make a good first impression."


While positive first impressions increase the chances of long-term profound love, the superficial manner of choosing the partner in love at first sight may have a negative impact upon the subsequent loving relationship. The fact that the beloved was a complete stranger to you gives rise to the possibility that you do not have much in common. The love may be intense, but not profound. Indeed, studies have found that partners who fell in love at first sight, in comparison to partners who got involved more gradually, entered into intimate relationships more quickly after they met and had mates with less similar personalities,especially with regard to levels of extraversion, emotional stability and autonomy This, however, did not necessarily lead to a low relationship quality, as the positive impact of the first impression can compensate for the superficial manner of choosing the partner (Barelds & Barelds-Dijkstra, 2007; Sunnafrank & Ramirez, 2004).

“The only true love is love at first sight; second sight dispels it.” Israel Zangwill

“Whoever loves, loves at first sight.” William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
NORAZRINA NORDIN

Quotes About Being Strong & The Strength Of The Human Will

Monday, February 27, 2017
being-strong
 In some cases, being strong is simply about being able to persevere through extreme adversity. It can be something horrific like the tragic loss of a loved one, or something difficult and trying like getting laid off. It can also be emotional trauma, like recovering from a divorce or a tough break up. 
These experiences leave us feeling weak and hopeless. But that’s no reason to stay down for long. No matter what you’re going through in life, other people just like you have gone through the same or worse and come out stronger on the other side. It’s times like these you need to be strong and never give up.
FARHIRA FARUDIN

The Importance of Music to Girls

Monday, February 27, 2017
BY BRODIE LANCASTER



Earlier this year, in Belfast, Ireland, Miley Cyrus did a cover of the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”. This performance was immediately all over my Facebook news feed. Friends of mine, and rock critics that I follow, were calling it “offensive” and “sacrilegious.” One commenter on Rolling Stone’s website summed up their reaction thusly: “She can be a cracked-out, attention-whoring clown all she wants. That does NOT entitle this brat to mess with other people’s music.”

A month earlier, Lorde was hand-picked by Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic to join them in a rendition of “All Apologies” in honor of Nirvana’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (with Kim Gordon on bass!)

I thought this was a pretty badass tribute, but it seems I was in the minority. Christ Schulz’s reaction in the New Zealand Herald was typical: “Kurt would have hated that,” he opined. And it wasn’t just rockist old dudes who objected: Iggy Azalea apparently objected too, saying, “I think when you’re doing a tribute to someone that’s dead, generally it should be the person’s peer. Lorde is not Kurt Cobain’s peer. […] I just don’t think it’s appropriate.”

OK, what is going on here? Nirvana, in their heyday, were never known for their loyalty to the Church of Rock, that questionable institution made up of music industry people, critics, and fans who worship guitar-driven, mostly male bands for their apparent “purity,” while dismissing pop music as superficial, unimportant fluff. Kurt Cobain was just 18 when Nirvana formed and was an outspoken feminist—I’m sure he would have loved the idea of a 17-year-old girl covering his band’s poppiest hit. And Miley’s version of “There Is a Light” is arguably darker and mopier, even, than the Smiths’ (again, one of their poppiest-sounding songs).

But the wave of hate that follows any attempt by a pop artist to cover a song by a (usually male) rock band, with a (usually male) rock fan base, is, by now, both totally predicable and deeply depressing. And the reason is as obvious as it is sad and banal: plain old sexism.

I’m not saying that Miley and Lorde are being targeted for this kind of criticism for their gender. Last year, when One Direction released “One Way or Another (Teenage Kicks),” a combination Blondie/Undertones cover they recorded for charity, the Guardian’s Adam Boult was prompted to start a list of songs that “must never be covered.” Never mind that 1D’s medley got a seal of approval from Blondie’s Debbie Harry herself; Mr. Boult said it was an “abomination” that somehow “tarnished” the original versions. So it’s not about the gender of the artist doing the cover—it’s about the gender (and age) of their fans. Think about it: Young, poppy acts, have largely young, female fan bases. I believe the reason rockist dudes feel so dang uncomfortable watching these artists cover songs by bands they love is that it points out that they might have something in common with fans of Miley, Lorde, 1D, etc. They might actually have something in common with teenage girls. And what could be worse than that?

Here’s what I want to tell these people: You could do a lot worse than sharing a teenage girl’s taste in music. The pantheon of acts who couldn’t have gotten famous without the support of teenage girls includes a lot of people and bands you probably respect a lot: Michael Jackson. Elvis Presley. The fricking BEATLES. When Nirvana were around, most of their fans weren’t 50-year-old rock critics; they were kids.

Here is something your hero Kurt Cobain once wrote, with his own hands: “I like the comfort in knowing that women are the only future in rock and roll.” Now tell me he wouldn’t have “approved” of Lorde, Kim Gordon, St. Vincent, and Joan Jett covering his band’s songs.

The thing is, I get it. I understand what it feels like to love a band with your entire soul and then discover that a significant number of the people who feel the same way you do about them are people you have nothing else in common with. People you don’t even like. At this taste-crisis juncture, you have two choices: You can get angry, and distance yourself from those fans and everything they stand for; or you can realize that the people you thought you hated are not as different from you as you once thought, and you can feel a new space for them grow in your heart. The choice is yours!

Responding to the backlash following Lorde’s Hall of Fame performance, the music writer Lachlan Kanoniuk wrote:

Kurt Cobain loved pop music, and didn’t give a fuck if it was cool or not. […] I see it often in the comments section: Rockists, usually male, usually 30, 40-something. They’re passionate about music (which is fantastic), but scared, seemingly threatened by artists (female, young, or black) that challenge their pre-conceived, archaic rock homogeneity. It’s an attitude of fear and exclusivity, the kind that Kurt despised.”

This defensive barrier constructed around certain rock acts doesn’t do anybody any favors. Isn’t it actually great if a new generation of musical performers and music lovers connects with something in the back catalogs of Blondie, the Undertones, Nirvana, or the Smiths? Does it really matter how they got there? Whether it was a dusty vinyl LP ferreted out from the depths of one of the world’s last remaining brick-and-mortar indie music stores, or a One Direction cover, something introduced these new fans to this old but new-to-them music, and isn’t that cool, no matter what?

My first exposure to the Ramones, a band whose music provided the soundtrack to my teenage and young-adult years, was the teen soap The OC. I saw the band’s posters in Seth Cohen’s bedroom and read an interview with Mischa Barton where she raved about them, which led me to buy a “best of” anthology. That led me to seek out, find, and adore music by other punk bands, which created a rock-solid, foundational love in my heart.

My punk-music fandom is no less valid because I wasn’t alive to see them play at CBGBs in the ’80s. Music, whether it’s rock or pop or rap or nu-wave or dolewave or whatever, was meant to last for ages. All ages. If you love music as much as I do, let people like me discover it our own way. You would have wanted the same when you were young.

This post is originally published in Rookie Magazine. Posted here by Farhira Farudin for educational purposes only.
ELLYSHA ZURAIMI

If You Want To Be More Successful, Change Your Reading Habit In This Way💗

Sunday, February 26, 2017
BY: ERICA WAGNER (copied by ELLYSHA ZURAIMI for educational purpose)






I know you’re probably thinking, “Here’s another article trying to tell me how I can be more successful.” I get it, but just hear me out. We all can gain more knowledge by reading books, that’s a given. They can be helpful when trying to improve your life, but they also help you develop insights, ideas, and a clearer understanding that makes you stand out from others. But you can’t read just anything. You have to read what everyone else isn’t. You have to think in ways that others do not.Be weary of the bestsellers.

If you think the way they think, you’ll remain average.

This is a huge problem in our world today, and it doesn’t just necessarily have to do with the books we read. It’s extremely competitive out there and being average just isn’t an option. There is always going to be someone smarter than you. You can play the game of life all you want but being average won’t get you a win. As time goes on, the bar for what is considered average will get much higher. You have to think outside the box to get to the top. Take a look at Bill Gates. Simply put, this man thinks in ways that most others don’t. That’s how he has reached such a high level of success.

To get where you want to be, you need to break the barrier in your mind from thinking like the average person. Getting outside the boundaries of your head will open new options. You may discover ways you haven’t thought of to get you where you want to be. Starting today, make the choice to be different. You can do it!
ELLYSHA ZURAIMI

Life Hacks That Make Life Easier 💗

Sunday, February 26, 2017
Want to learn some quick and easy life hacks that are easy to do, low cost and saves you time? You’re in luck. We have collected these practical life hacks into this one big list that is easy to digest because they’re all images! By tweaking little things, it can make your life much easier. Enjoy!

















ELLYSHA ZURAIMI

Positive Psychology: The Benefits Of Living Positively 💗

Sunday, February 26, 2017
BY: JOANNA FISHMAN

Positive psychology often is passed off as pop psychology or New Age-y by those who haven’t actually looked into it.




The actual theory behind positive psychology was defined in 1998 by Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and looks at all aspects of a person’s psychology. It does not discount traditional psychology, nor supersede it. Rather than viewing psychology purely as a treatment for the malign, however, it looks at the positive. Positive psychology is a recognized form of therapy and is offered by some counselors and psychologists.

Psychology has always been interested in where people’s lives have gone wrong, and what has resulted because of it.  Illnesses such as depression are well-documented and patterns of depressive behavior well-known. However, until recently, what makes people happy and how they achieve inner happiness and well-being has been a mystery.

Practitioners of positive psychology study people whose lives are positive and try to learn from them, in order to help others achieve this state of happiness.  It is a scientific study and not remotely hippie-ish, despite its connotations.

Among the other health benefits listed above, positive thinkers have a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease. They tend to have lower blood pressure than those who do not engage in positive thinking. The health benefits extend to the emotional side, too. Optimists will have better physical and psychological well-being, and better skills for coping with stress and hardship.

It is important to remember that simply having a positive mindset won’t actually stop bad things from happening. But it does give you the tools to better deal with bad situations. Sometimes your coping skills come down to nothing more than refusing to give in to your negative side and your fears. For some people, positive thinking comes quite naturally. For others, seeking professional help is necessary to get them on the right track.


FARHIRA FARUDIN

There is no ‘post’ traumatic stress in Gaza because the trauma is continuous

Saturday, February 25, 2017
BY JOHN SOOS

The chokehold on Gaza moved into its tenth year in 2016. The suffering born of a decade of human rights violations, poverty and three full-scale military assaults creates a psychological toll on the population which is inestimable. Homelessness, multiple deaths within families, severe injuries, and the ever-present threat of renewed Israeli bombardment create a psychological climate of ongoing continuous, collective trauma.

Post traumatic stress disorder, as a clinical term, barely touches the enormity of the disabling psychological distress that permeates the reality of daily life here. There is nothing “post” about a continual, unrelenting, multifaceted catastrophe. There is also no “disorder” in the sense that there is an intrapsychic disease requiring individualized treatment. The abnormality is the unabated war crimes that inflict suffering on the imprisoned, helpless civilian population. The rest of the world, moreover is turning it’s back on this political violence and is thus enabling the trauma-inducing occupation and blockade to continue.

Mental health professionals in Gaza are strained beyond capacity. Of the nearly two million residents of the 360 km2 area Gaza Strip, there isn’t a single person here who has not experienced multiple traumas. Continuous grief, nightmares, disabling anxiety and hopelessness color everyone’s daily life. The therapists charged with healing these injuries are themselves victims of living in this traumatogenic environment. Their burden is thus two-fold: the trauma they share with their clients is compounded by repeat exposure to their clients’ own clinical material. 

As a clinical psychologist from Vancouver, I joined the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility delegation in Gaza to address the vicarious, secondary trauma that mental health professionals struggle with. In one workshop of ten therapists, four had their homes demolished and three spoke of having family members killed in last summer’s massacre. Overlay on top of this traumatic loss, the painful events their clients unfold all day, and the magnitude of the psychologists’ burden is clarified.

The aim of our training seminar was to introduce burnout prevention skills and the relevant literature on trauma and psychological resilience. Cognitive behavior therapy, behavioral self-care, self hypnosis, journal-writing and peer supervision for ongoing social support were among the therapeutic skills reviewed. In an attempt to keep the material culturally relevant and subjectively meaningful, a relaxation script was created in Arabic language for each participant using personally generated healing imagery. The visualization was then recorded by each therapist onto their mobile phones to be available as their tailor-made “portable” stress management strategy. Moreover, as the political and the clinical are interwoven, we expanded the idea of “to exist is to resist” to include “resistance is resilience”. Resisting oppression was conceptualized as adaptive coping in that it is a psychologically healthy way to counter hopelessness and promote resilience in face of adversity – both for the psychologist and for the client. The inverse is also true. Practicing self-care promotes resilience, which is an act of resistance. (“I will maintain my psychological health in spite your efforts to annihilate my self and culture”.)

It didn’t take long for a trusting environment to be established and for people to share details of their own experiences of trauma. We worked with this material as a way to model the therapeutic value of peer support, to learn new clinical skills, and to help cognitively integrate and in turn release some of the accumulated emotional pain that comes with living and working here. We plan to continue working together via Skype.

I learned much from my Palestinian mental health colleagues and am grateful for having met this extraordinary group. May the time come soon when the source of this trauma is ended and we can begin to truly speak of healing post traumatic injuries.

This post is originally published on Mondoweiss. Posted here by Farhira Farudin for educational purposes only.
FARHIRA FARUDIN

How I Learned To Be OK With Feeling Sad

Friday, February 24, 2017
BY MAC MCLELLAND



The first time I didn’t feel sad about feeling sad was on Sept. 17, 2013. I was in my therapist’s office. More specifically, I was lying on a table, faceup, in my therapist’s office. Maybe it sounds simple, but it was a trick I’d spent years practicing and trying to learn.

I do not mean that I take sadness lightly. Four and a half years ago, after a work-related immersion in sexual violence, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Subsequently, I was diagnosed with comorbid major depressive disorder. Comorbid to all that, I was diagnosed as alcoholic and suicidal. More than $20,000 worth of treatment later, I am no longer those things, but, as an evaluating psychiatrist put it in a report last year, I have “chronic,” “recurring,” “residual psychiatric symptoms” serious enough that she ruled me permanently disabled. I’ve been an emotional gal since always — “She has a lot of feelings,” my best grad-school friend would chuckle by way of explanation when I got worked up about some topic or other in front of strangers — and my emotions now are enormous. Frustration over a failed attempt to buy a sold-out rug online ends in so much yelling and foot-stomping that my neighbors complain. The intensity of a pop song lands like a blunt punch to my chest and explodes any grief nestling there; the very day I’m writing this, Nicki Minaj made me cry in my car.

Sincerely: I do not take sadness lightly. But after a lot of retraining, I do take it wholly, life-alteringly differently than I was raised to, and than almost anyone else I know. Now, sometimes when I’m not sad and I think about sadness, that thought is accompanied by this startling one: I miss it.

Pre-therapy, this is the only thing I was ever taught, implicitly and explicitly, about sadness: It is bad.

You do not want it. If you’ve got it, you should definitely try to get rid of it, fast as possible. Whatever you do, don’t subject other people to it, because they do not like that.

Sadness can be legitimately problematic, absolutely. If your sadness comes from seemingly no place or even an obvious place but keeps you from participating in life or enjoying anything and refuses to abate no matter how long you go on letting it express itself, you of course can’t keep living like that. But culturally, we aren’t allowed to be sad even for a little while. Even when it’s perfectly sensible. Even when, sometimes, we need it.

This is reflected in our entertainment. Watching Bridesmaids, I shake my head over how Melissa McCarthy slaps Kristen Wiig around and tells her to stop being sad, though she has recently lost her job, her savings, her home, and her best friend. (Miraculously, this solves Kristen Wiig’s attitude problem.) In the third episode of MasterChef Junior’s second season, judge Joe Bastianich tells a contestant who has ruined her shepherd’s pie and possibly her dream of winning, the biggest dream she’s had up to this point in her life, “When things are as bad as they can be, you gotta pull it together. Wipe your tears.”

The contestant has been crying for mere seconds. She is 8 years old.

What does it say about our relationship to sadness that Joan Didion — who we can all agree is a pretty smart, educated, and worldly cookie — had to write an entire book about trying to learn how to grieve? This ethos was fine for me when mostly nothing bad happened and if it did, the accompanying sadness didn’t linger for too long. But post-trauma, it turned out to be a massive impediment to my recovery.

I had a lot of symptoms. They all alarmed me, but equally so the most straightforward one: sadness. Sometimes I cried from uncontrollable, overwhelming, life-swallowing sadness. And all the time, the sadness and crying itself freaked me the fuck out. I would start crying, and then immediately hate myself. Why was I crying? Why couldn’t I get this sadness to go away? What was wrong with me?

I got into therapy. I’d gone before, casually and occasionally, for support with some huge changes — a new city and new job and fresh divorce years earlier. Now, it was a therapy emergency. I considered myself decently good at self-care in general, but sure, I let it slip when I got too busy, when work was too demanding, when there were things I had to do that I knew I was getting too burned out to but did anyway. But taking care of myself was not optional anymore. As a matter of survival, I had to make as much room for it as it needed.

And so, I started intensive treatment — during which my therapist had to spend incalculable amounts of time trying to convince me that it was OK to be sad. The alarm I experienced over my sadness was another terrible feeling on top of my already terrible symptoms. The energy I spent panicking that I was sad could have been better spent on coping with the sadness. It was true that I — like many people, people with clinically depressed, never-ending, or life-threatening sadness — needed a lot more assistance than just a big philosophical hug, but if I could accept sadness, my therapist kept suggesting, I would be able to experience it (long and hard as that may go on) and then it could pass. The alternative — being sad, plus condemning yourself for being sad — only heightens the suffering. And, likely, the time it lasts.

“Sadness is a legitimate emotion,” my therapist would say. “There is an acceptance you can get to with it where it’s just a sensation, and without judgment, that sensation can be exquisite.”

“LIES,” I responded to this sometimes. Sometimes I called her a hippie. Nobody accepts sadness. Everybody knows that crying girls are silly and weak. Hysterical, and overdramatic.

But as much as I didn’t — I couldn’t! — really believe her, I still really wanted to learn how to do that.

I can’t explain, in a tight little essay, how I finally did it. It would take an entire book for me to describe how I got even most of the way there. I can sum up that it took three years to the DAY after the events that started my symptoms, and that it cost a lot of money, and time, and time off, which cost more money, and was so painful that the very memory of how painful it was sometimes makes me need to go lie down in my bed. I can point out that most people are not given the opportunity to go through this process, even if they desperately want to. Unfortunately, healing is a luxury in our society, not a right; so many who could benefit from treatment simply can’t.

And I can tell you about the moment, that September. It was sunny and in the 60s. I was in my therapist’s office in San Francisco, which had fairly bare walls, industrial carpet, and windows that let the light in. I was lying on a massage therapist’s table, because that was normal in my somatic therapy; the treatment addressed the physicality of one’s symptoms, the places and ways trauma lived in one’s body (last year, a hero of my therapist’s, the very brilliant Bessel van der Kolk, released a book about this called The Body Keeps the Score), which was often explored with eyes closed, lying down. The first umpteen number of times I got on the table and was prompted to breathe, to feel into where my tensions and disconnections were, I resisted the falling apart this awareness and reconnecting could lead to. I feared starting to cry and never stopping. I feared never being able to put myself back together, ever, sometimes metaphorically but sometimes literally writhing and kicking and screaming with my resistance to just relaxing. Feeling. To be clear: Sadness was far from my only issue. But by Sept. 17, 2013 (around which point my insurance tallied it had so far given my therapist $18,000), I was taking feeling it in much better stride.

“How do you feel?” my therapist asked.

“Sad,” I said. I was extra sad that day because I was in the middle of a no-fault eviction, and it was turning out not to be practical or affordable to stay in the Bay Area, where I’d lived for a long time. “I feel sad because we have to move.” I cried as I talked about this. I loved California. “I have to grieve a state.”

I cried harder. “It’s a bummer.”

My therapist was very calm. “That is a bummer,” she agreed in soothing tones. She told me to open my eyes and when I did, asked me what sensation I noticed. Instantly, I pictured a kid lying in a yard.

That’s me right now, I thought. A kid lying in a yard, feeling sad — but not feeling sad about feeling sad. It was what it was. It was fine. It was a peace. Me, or a kid, being just what she was: alive.

“I’m not bummed out about feeling bummed out,” I said.

The significance of this moment was clear to us both. My therapist was speechless for a second. Then she smiled — we were often smiling, because we joked through even the hardest and ugliest moments together — and said, “People pay a lot of money for that, Mac.”

“They should!”

They shouldn’t have to. I hadn’t panicked over being sad every time it had happened in my life, say over a breakup, but I had never had that level of acceptance of it, peace-spreading, unrushed, cell-deep, certainly not as an adult. And as a person with PTSD, I had completely lost any trust in my own emotions, fearing them constantly, sadness included — or perhaps especially, as it was the most persistent. Now, I was finally embracing it.

Which is how I could come to be in a position to miss it. The interestingness of it. The difference of it from other emotions. I remembered the sensations of it: the weight. The way it slowed things down and took the space of everything else up. It was exquisite, objectively but also as evidence that I could feel, that I was open and not shut down, capable of having a whole gamut of emotions rush in, and maybe overwhelm, but move through and move me. Not everyone can. Or does. I am occasionally jealous of people whose emotions come more softly, or quietly, or less often. I assume they have more time and energy, with those not being taken up by sensitivity that makes even the widely considered “good” emotions like joy feel like they’re making their heart explode. But for the most part, I’m not. Some people are born, and then they live, and then they die, one of my doctors told me once, in an effort to comfort. You, you die and are reborn sometimes 10 times in one day. Lucky.

The next time I felt sadness after I missed it, I was reminded why it was so hard to feel it all the time. Oh yeah, I remembered. It hurt. It was difficult to work. To cook, to eat, to play. To take care of others. Exquisite it may have been, but painful, and not invigorating, and quite tiring. Still I trusted that I needed it at that time, that it was expressing something necessary. I didn’t hate or judge it. I did not feel silly or weak. They say it takes a big man to cry, and I think — unfortunately, given our collective feelings about sadness — that’s true. But it takes a bigger woman still, to feel the strength of a sob, without apology or shame. With pride. I’m the biggest I’ve ever been, the way I let my emotions run, sadness included: the way it cleanses me, tears washing my face, resolving me to continue to feel with abandon.

This post is originally published on Buzzfeed. Posted here by Farhira Farudin for educational purposes only.
MIMI SUHAILA

Why You Should Travel Solo At Least Once

Friday, February 24, 2017
BY MICHAEL ANN CONNELLY




Though it may sound like something you’d find inside a fortune cookie, sometimes the best travel companion you can have is yourself. As a travel editor, I spend a lot of time on the road, often by myself, and I’ve learned that solo travel is easier than you might think, totally liberating, and completely rewarding in a way few other experiences in life can match. Like many travelers, I used to never go anywhere alone, but after a few eye-opening, life-changing experiences, I’m hooked on solo travel—and I’m not the only one.

In recent years, interest in traveling alone has skyrocketed, and those in the travel industry all over the world have come up with ways to cater to this growing segment. If you’ve ever wanted to travel alone but been too afraid, if it’s something you did once and vowed never to do again, if you absolutely hate the idea of going somewhere without someone you know, now’s the time to reconsider. Think of it this way: You have a limited amount of time and money to spend on travel, so why not customize it to your individual preferences so that you can maximize your satisfaction? If that’s not enough to convince you, here are ten reasons why you should consider solo travel.
1. IT MAKES TRIP PLANNING EASIER

We all have bucket lists of places we want to travel to in our lifetime, but all too often we hold ourselves back from experiences because we have no one to share them with. Everyone has different schedules, budgets, and traveling interests, so waiting around for the right time or the right person to join you for a train trip to Niagara Falls, gourmet dining in Lyon, or backpacking around Southeast Asia is a waste. When you travel alone, only your needs matter, and you can plan something at the last minute if you desire.


So go ahead and take a day trip to a nearby town or a month-long jaunt across Europe—this is your life to live and you deserve to have the travel experiences you want. I'm not suggesting you go on every vacation alone, but it would be a shame to skip local and far-flung destinations just because you don't feel like going by yourself.

2. YOU'LL GET TO ENJOY "ME TIME"

In our ever-connected world filled with digital distractions, it can be a challenge to take the time that’s necessary to recharge one’s battery. Fortunately, solo travel offers the time and space that’s necessary for valuable alone time. Even if you’re not the type of person who goes off the grid when traveling, being alone on the road will give you the opportunity to reflect on life and enjoy your own company. Some people have an innate aversion to doing things individually, but giving yourself alone time, especially for an extended period, is a gift that you will eventually learn to relish.

What’s more, you’ll learn a lot about yourself in a way that’s simply impossible when you’re in the midst of your normal daily routine. I often surprise myself by the new interests I develop when I’m traveling or the way I interact with strangers differently than I would when I’m home. I’m also able to look at my life with some distance and think about my future goals with a fresh set of eyes. Often when I’m on the road alone, I’ll have vivid dreams about issues that are affecting me, and these can lead to meaningful solutions. Everyone should have the opportunity to check in with himself or herself from time to time, and solo travel offers the perfect conditions for introspection.


3. YOU'RE THE MASTER OF YOUR ITINERARY

If you’ve ever planned a vacation with another person or a group of people, you know that picking the dates alone can be a hassle, and that’s just the beginning. Where will you stay? What will you eat? Who’s planning the itinerary? Is everyone onboard with this plan? What if you can’t do everything that you want to do? Simply put, planning a trip with anyone else is an exercise in compromise and negotiation.

Instead, why not make the most of your time and money by planning the getaway of your dreams without any interference? Whether you want to spend three days on a beach doing absolutely nothing or visit ten museums in one weekend, there’s no one to stand in your way when you’re traveling alone. You can sleep as little or as much as you want, eat what your heart desires, and indulge yourself with whatever makes you happy. Traveling is supposed to be relaxing, and it’s never more so than when you are your own trip planner. You don’t even have to plan if you don’t want to—be spontaneous if that’s your thing. The whole point is getting what you want out of a vacation.

4. YOU'LL MAKE NEW FRIENDS (IF YOU WANT)

Without a doubt, one of the biggest deterrents from solo travel is the fear of feeling lonely. The truth, however, is that you’ll never feel this way if you make the right choices. For meals, find restaurants where you can dine at the bar and interact with the bartender or skip restaurants altogether and stick to street food or groceries. Want to meet some locals? Research lively cafes or bars that appeal to your tastes; if you’re in a foreign country, try to find spots that are popular with expats. Sign up for cooking classes or museum tours to meet people with similar interests.


If you are overseas, speaking the local tongue will be a great help in interacting with strangers. But keep in mind that English is as close to a universal language as we’ve got, so you’re already in good shape. Also bear in mind that being a solo traveler automatically makes you an interesting person with a story to tell anyone you meet, so capitalize on that. Of course, if you're not looking to build your social network, being a solo traveler allows you to be as antisocial as you want to be. It's all about knowing what works for you.




5. YOUR EXPERIENCES WILL BE MORE MEANINGFUL


Obviously there are many benefits to traveling with friends or loved ones, but other people can often serve as distractions from the destination you’re visiting. Whether you make a new international friend or discover your favorite new museum, the experiences you have when traveling alone tend to feel more profound, and those memories tend to last longer.

When you travel with someone else, the trip is more about your shared experiences, which can be a great thing in some cases, but not always. If a vacation is about having a great time with someone you know, by all means go forth, but if you’re really looking to connect with a place and its people, consider going there alone.


6. IT WILL BOOST YOUR CONFIDENCE


I still feel a bit nervous when I’m kicking off a solo trip, but in the end, nothing makes me feel more confident or capable than conquering the world on my own. Successfully ordering a meal in botched German, picking up the latest British slang, chatting up locals at a farmers’ market in Vermont, making new friends in Hong Kong, navigating the idiosyncrasies of train systems all over the world—these are some of the rewards I’ve gained from my solo adventures. It’s nice to have someone to rely on, but it’s particularly satisfying when that someone is you.

The more you travel alone, the more likely you are to feel the same way, like you can tackle any challenge with aplomb. No English menu at a Bangkok restaurant? Not a problem. Transit strike in France? No sweat. Stuck overnight at O’Hare? You can deal with that. Of course, the more confident you feel when traveling alone, the more confident you’ll feel at home. Whenever one of life’s little challenges emerge, you can simply remind yourself of all that you've handled on your own all over the world—it’ll put your problems in perspective.



7. IT WILL MAKE YOU A BETTER TRAVELER

Traveling alone makes you a better observer of people and places around you, which in turn has the power to make you more compassionate and a better person overall. Being an outsider, however slight or extreme, automatically changes the way you interact with others, and these changes are positive when it comes to travel. In addition to making you kinder and more patient, solo travel increases your curiosity about your surroundings, and chances are you’ll learn a lot about others simply by paying more attention than you would if you were with a travel companion.

Being alone also affords you the time to properly document and reflect on your travels. If you want to spend an afternoon photographing your favorite neighborhood in Montréal, you can do that. If you want to spend thirty minutes every night writing about what you ate that day, you’ll have time for that. In the future, these travel mementos will be just as valuable as the trips.


8. YOU CAN STAY WITHIN YOUR BUDGET


Money is always a pressure point when it comes to travel, and everyone has different spending habits and attitudes. So it’s much easier to figure out your budget for a trip and plan accordingly. Even if you have shared finances with a spouse or travel with someone in the same tax bracket, the two of you may have completely different ideas of how much to spend on a hotel, for example.

And you yourself may spend differently from one trip to another. For instance, if you want to embark on a Michelin-starred gastronomic adventure in Tokyo, you may be willing to settle for less posh accommodations than you would choose if you were, say, spending a long weekend on the beach in Tulum. It’s simply much easier to create your own budget and stick to it rather than overspending because you travel with someone with expensive taste.


9. YOU'LL FEEL MORE SATISFIED IN THE END


I’m willing to bet that everyone who has ever traveled with at least one other person has experienced some level of disappointment on vacation. Perhaps you got into a fight in Beijing because you couldn't find a certain restaurant, it was late, you were both hungry, and you had already been traveling for a week and a half and that’s a lot of time to spend with anyone. Or maybe you were a little annoyed to discover, in Berlin, that your boyfriend’s study of German did not actually make him useful at communicating in the language. No matter how big or small, problems can and do arise when people travel together.

When you travel alone, the stakes are lower because you only have to worry about keeping yourself happy. Are you going to feel bitter because you slept in one morning? Highly unlikely. Will you hold a grudge because you spent too much time at a museum? Nope. Will you feel like you’re wasting time if you just want to sit in a café for a few hours? Not a chance. When you make yourself the sole arbiter of what to do on vacation, you remove the risk of disappointment and you keep things drama-free, which is a good way to keep your trip feeling both relaxing and satisfying.


10. YOU'LL FIND THE ANSWER TO AN IMPORTANT QUESTION


If you’ve never traveled alone because your first thought is, “What would I even do with myself?” I implore you to plan a solo trip immediately. In addition to everything I’ve mentioned above, you will daydream, you will read, you will have exciting adventures, you will encounter funny things to tell your friends about, you will sleep well, you will eat new things, you will discover new neighborhoods, you will want to learn new languages, you will think about your next trip, you will talk to strangers, you will take risks, you will buy new clothes, you will learn about history and culture, you will go to concerts, you will stroll through parks, you will explore cities by bike, you will think about moving, and so much more. In fact, there’s so much you can do when you travel alone that you’ll wonder how you ever managed to travel with someone else in the past.





Posted by Michael Alan Connelly on Fodor's Travel. posted here by Mimi Suhaila for educational purposes only.
ELLYSHA ZURAIMI

3 Secret Signs Of Hidden Depression 💗

Friday, February 24, 2017
BY JOHN M. GROHOL

Lots of people walk through life trying to hide their depression. Some people with hidden depression can conceal their depression like pros, masking their symptoms and putting on a “happy face” for most others.





People with concealed depression or hidden depression often don’t want to acknowledge the severity of their depressive feelings. They believe that if they just continue living their life, the depression will just go away on its own. In a few cases, this may work. But for most folks, it just drags out the feelings of sadness and loneliness.

Dealing with the black dog of depression through concealing one’s true feelings is the way many of us were brought up — we don’t talk about our feelings and we don’t burden others with our troubles. But if a friend or family member is going through something like this — trying to hide or mask their depression — these signs might help you discover what they’re trying to keep concealed.




3 Signs of Concealed Depression

1. They have unusual sleep, eating or drinking habits that differ from their normal ones.

When a person seems to have changed the way they sleep or eat in significant ways, that’s often a sign that something is wrong. Sleep is the foundation of both good health and mental health. When a person can’t sleep (or sleeps for far too long) every day, that may be a sign of hidden depression.

Others turn to food or alcohol to try and quash their feelings. Overeating can help someone who is depressed feel full, which in turn helps them feel less emotionally empty inside. Drinking may be used to help cover up the feelings of sadness and loneliness that often accompany depression. Sometimes a person will go in the other direction too — losing all interest in food or drinking, because they see no point in it, or it brings them no joy.

2. They wear a forced “happy face” and are always making excuses.

We’ve all seen someone who seems like they are trying to force happiness. It’s a mask we all wear from time to time. But in most cases, the mask wears thin the longer you spend time with the person who’s wearing it. That’s why lots of people with hidden depression try not to spend any more time with others than they absolutely have to. They seem to always have a quick and ready excuse for not being able to hang out, go to dinner, or see you.

It’s hard to see behind the mask of happiness that people with hidden depression wear. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of it in a moment of honesty, or when there’s a conversation lull.

3. They may talk more philosophically than normal.


When you do finally catch up with a person with masked depression, you may find the conversation turning to philosophical topics they don’t normally talk much about. These might include the meaning of life, or what their life has amounted to so far. They may even open up enough to acknowledge occasional thoughts of wanting to hurt themselves or even thoughts of death. They may talk about finding happiness or a better path in the journey of life.
ELLYSHA ZURAIMI

The Making Of A Happy Mind 💗

Friday, February 24, 2017


BY LOUAI RAHAL

The mind, just like any other entity in nature, follows some specific laws. The mastery of these laws can be immensely helpful in improving mental health and generating happiness.





Long before the discipline of psychology was established, philosophers started providing answers to the question of how to reach happiness. Tested by science, some their claims have been refuted, while others were confirmed, and such as the following statement made by Epictetus in The Art of Living:

Cocaine was given only when rat A pressed a lever. In order to receive cocaine, rat B had to wait for rat A to press the lever: rat B was helpless, rat A was in control. And as expected, it was found that rat an experienced more pleasure from cocaine than rat B. The experimenters knew this by measuring the amount of dopamine released in the brains of the two rats. Rat A had more dopamine released in the pleasure centers of his brain. It is known that the more dopamine is released in the brain’s pleasure centers, the more pleasure we feel.

Control could therefore be one of the keys to happiness; it makes the pleasurable more pleasurable, and the stressful less stressful.

Feeling in control is an experience that we all pursue. However, this feeling is pursued through different means, some of which are problematic. Many individuals resort to harmful and sadistic practices in order to feel in control. They mistakenly believe that control means control over others and power means the ability to harm others.


Science has proven that control and power can be reached through prosocial practices such as altruism and kindness. The next blog entry will discuss the benefits of these practices on mental health.
FARHIRA FARUDIN

From Hunger

Thursday, February 23, 2017
BY SARAH GERARD

In September 2007, at the age of 22, I jumped from a moving freight train and landed on my face. The train had originated in Worcester, Mass., and was headed west toward Buffalo, but the path leading up to that event had begun six months before, in Long Island, where I was double-majoring in English and secondary education at Hofstra University, interning at a high school, taking two extra classes and dating a guy who liked to self-medicate. Bulimia and anorexia had reduced me to a skeletal 92 pounds, and I’d developed an addiction to diet pills that filled my small off-campus apartment with plastic bottles and bubble-wrapped packages hidden in drawers and crevices where my roommate wouldn’t find them. Every flat surface was home to a stack of celebrity gossip magazines full of articles about beach bodies and diets.

I had a few friends, but they seldom visited me. I rarely slept and would spend long nights anxiously staring into the vacuum of my living room, feeling the walls breathe around me, smoking cigarette after cigarette, searching for the peaceful center of my hunger. The day I finally hit bottom, my mentor at the high school found me crying in the supply closet of the teacher’s lounge with bits of tear-soaked tissue all over my face. I hadn’t slept in days, and had just finished throwing up a lunch of edamame beans and Red Bull. As was my ritual, I followed this purge with two Hydroxycut pills to “burn off” whatever remained in my stomach.

I told my mentor that I had just been given a diagnosis of a thyroid disease, hoping, though he never asked, that it would explain why I was so skinny. I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he gave me permission to leave for the day. I called my father in Florida from the parking lot, crying hysterically, my mouth tasting of metal and stomach acid. Two weeks later, I checked into an inpatient rehab facility in Tampa, where I would spend the next 60 days trying to learn how to eat properly and how to speak candidly about my feelings.

It did not work — at least not right away. Two months after my release, I was still not abstinent. I’d stopped attending my 12-step meetings for “philosophical” reasons and began hanging around with a girl I’d roomed with in treatment who was worse off than I was. I wasn’t starving myself, but we had started shoplifting, and went back to drinking and smoking weed — generally causing trouble all over town. A photograph from that period shows us together at a water park in Tampa. She is much taller and heavier than I am, and I remember thinking when the picture was taken that, standing next to her in a swimsuit, I must have looked so small. I am visibly sucking in my stomach, playing it off as comical, but looking back, I know it wasn’t.

Soon I knew I needed to flee — the self-medicating boyfriend, the life I was living in Florida, everything. I had to be where no one could see or find me.

An old friend introduced me to her cousin — let’s call him Michael — who had issues of his own and was looking to leave town. Desperate to escape, we decided to leave together. Some friends of his had just returned from months of hopping freight trains. Their stories sounded exciting, liberating, exactly what we needed. They told us the nearest hub for freight traffic was Savannah, Ga. From there, we could catch a train north, and then another one west. We could go anywhere we wanted to without documentation. We could live the way we wanted to, free of any rules. We packed our bags with compasses, pocket knives, duct tape, lighter fluid: everything we thought we’d need to survive as members of the squatter punk subculture. Two weeks later, we were on an Amtrak train to Savannah.

Michael and I were out on the road from July to September. I cut off my hair and my sleeves, rubbed holes in my jeans, sewed patches onto my shirts, refused to shower, and gave myself a road name – Ema. But even while hitchhiking and hopping freight trains, my motivation was image-centric: I was more concerned with looking the part of the hobo than being one, and anxious not to be exposed as a fake.

Sitting next to the Allegheny River one night in the rain with a group of hobo kids, one told me I looked like a model. It was meant as an insult, but I took it as a compliment; I was prettier than all the dirty hobos in the gravel pit that night! I dyed my hair purple in the river with another girl and three days later bleached it blonde in New York City in the apartment of a friend who made us shower twice before letting us sleep in his bed. We took a bus to Massachusetts and caught our last train ride out in the middle of the night.

Hunger on a freight train is not the hunger of the anorexic. You know that no one is looking. It is the difference between wanting food and needing it. Michael and I rode on a car with no roof and two narrow strips of sheet metal for a floor. We could see the tracks racing by underneath us. Rain soaked through our clothes and our packs. We ran out of food soon after we left and had no fresh water, and hid beneath the semi truck that shared our car. Pulling into Buffalo some time after dawn, we knew we had to get off. We waited for the train to slow down, but didn’t wait long enough.

My last memory is of the gravel rushing toward me. I woke seven hours later to Michael feeding me ice chips on a gurney in the Buffalo hospital. I was starving, but I wasn’t allowed to eat because my stomach had to be empty when they stitched me back together. I could stick my tongue through a hole where my tooth was knocked out, and my upper lip was split to my nose; my lower lip down to my chin. My left eye was swollen shut, the eggshell-thin bone behind it cracked, causing me to see double for months. It would be days until I could eat solid food again, and I knew then, asking for more ice, that I would never be beautiful like I wanted to be. Like I had striven to be. Like I didn’t want to want to be.

My parents paid for both my stay in rehab and the multiple rounds of surgery I would need to recover. They have never asked me to pay them back, but they did ask me to save a picture they took of me in the hospital, with over 150 stitches running down the middle of my swollen face and inside my mouth, to serve as a reminder of what I shouldn’t choose to live with anymore.

After the accident I returned to Florida a bruised and battered mess, moved back into my old bedroom, and began the slow process of finding a job with little idea of where I should be looking. I knew that I wanted to help people, but I didn’t know what I could offer another person considering the state I was in. Who was I to lead anyone? Finally, I came across an ad in the newspaper seeking temporary in-home support for adults with mental retardation. I applied, and got it. A few weeks later, Michael’s mother suggested that I apply for an assistant teaching position at the school where she worked, in a classroom for third and fourth graders with emotional and behavioral disabilities. Surely, I was qualified. I applied, and got that job, too. I worked seven days a week, five of them at the school. Meanwhile, Michael and I looked for apartments.

Days in the classroom were trying. Half of the students in the school were legally homeless, and it wasn’t unusual for a kid to come to class without basic necessities: notebooks, glasses, paper, even backpacks. While I thought it would be easier to work with younger students, I didn’t anticipate how badly behaved this class would be. The students made frequent jokes about my scar, lied about the rules, threw daily temper tantrums that resulted in overturned furniture, fought with each other and ran away. Because I was new, they tested me relentlessly. I’d leave work exhausted, and on Fridays, drive straight to my other job to work through the weekend. During this period, I drank Red Bull like water. I knew that the Red Bull was part of my addiction, but it was the only thing that kept me awake through the day. I still had relapses, but I was determined to reach a point where I could maintain my abstinence.

Despite all this, for the first time in years, I was happy. I felt, finally, like I belonged somewhere. When I wasn’t working, I was trying to write a novel.

I had decided to be a writer.

Every photograph is a memento mori, an acknowledgment of what Susan Sontag called “time’s relentless melt.” A class picture from that year shows me standing next to a pretty white teacher with a small group of black and Hispanic third and fourth graders, my head turned in such a way that, I had figured out, hid the more awkward angles of my face caused by the scar and the underlying tissue. Around this time, an oral surgeon told me that, if I kept throwing up my food, he would refuse to perform the several rounds of surgery I needed to replace the bone I had shattered in my upper jaw, and the gum that had started to recede around it, which was needed to anchor the implant that would replace the tooth I had lost.

At the risk of stating the too obvious, an eating disorder is inherently narcissistic. As if looking at a photograph, one has to enjoy climbing outside of herself to see herself as she believes others see her, then commit to fixing what’s imperfect. Without the admiration of others, her pain loses purpose; while rooted in the delusion of control, her addiction is exposed as something very much out of control; obsessive; devoid of reason or justification. The students in my classroom didn’t notice when I was hungry, didn’t care when I was tired, cared even less that I was thin. The disabled adults with whom I lived on the weekends, if they could even talk, would tell me that I was pretty no matter how I looked, because to them, I was.

Gradually, what remained of my eating disorder stopped working the way I wanted it to; it began to feel silly. Like a waste of time that, since the train accident, suddenly seemed all too precious. When I was working seven days a week, my eating disorder began to feel like a third job that I didn’t have the energy to perform. Meanwhile, I had found goals that were far more important than being thin.

After a year of living together in an apartment infested with termites where hobo friends came to sleep on our couch and share stories about their ramblings — where I had written what I thought was a novel about what little I knew about train hopping — Michael and I broke up. He was going back on the road, but I had experienced enough hardship and would not be joining him. In the year and a half that had passed since the accident, I came to realize that traveling, to me, had been a form of running away from myself. I couldn’t decide which road to take, so I didn’t decide and, instead, just took any. I wasn’t ready to do the work I needed to be a whole person, and there had been nothing in Florida to keep me there – no life to speak of, at that time.

But I had since learned that becoming whole was a gradual process, and that finding something to keep me there was my own responsibility. I still wasn’t completely abstinent; I had starved myself for several days before cheating on Michael with our neighbor, a fact I’m not proud of. But I was closer than I had been in years, and would continue to get better. I was going to be a writer, and writing was more important than being beautiful.

Rather, I found, being beautiful was writing.

This post is originally published in The New York Times. Posted here by Farhira Farudin for educational purposes only.
FARHIRA FARUDIN

How Does the Electoral College Work?

Wednesday, February 22, 2017
BY JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH


What is the Electoral College?

The Electoral College is a group of people that elects the president and the vice president of the United States. (The word “college” in this case simply refers to an organized body of people engaged in a common task.)
As voters head to the polls on Tuesday, they will not vote for the presidential candidates directly, in a popular vote. Instead, they will vote to elect specific people, known as “electors” to the college. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes based on its population.
The electors are appointed by the political parties in each state, so if you vote for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday, and Mr. Trump ends up winning the popular vote in your state, then electors that the Republican Party has chosen will cast votes for him in their state capitals in December.
The electors are asked to cast their votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. This year, that’s Dec. 19.
But most people don’t pay attention to that because, technically, it’s the election of the electors that matters. And on Election Day, we’re electing the electors who elect the president. Got it?

How many electoral votes does it take to win the presidency?

It takes at least 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. There are 538 electoral votes in all.
In 2008, CNN projected Barack Obama as the winner of the presidential election after the then-senator skyrocketed from 220 electoral votes to 297 votes after results from some Western states, including California, came in.


Has an elector ever ‘gone rogue’ or broken his or her promise? Would that be legal?

Yes, this has happened many times. There’s even an insulting name for an elector who does so: a “faithless elector.”
But faithless electors have never affected the final result of any presidential election. And there haven’t been many in modern times; the last time was in 2004, when an anonymous elector in Minnesota cast his vote for John Edwards instead of the Democratic candidate, John Kerry. (Other electors thought that this might have been an honest mistake.)
More than a dozen states do not have laws on the books to punish faithless electors, meaning that an elector could legally change his or her mind and defy the popular vote. But according to the federal archives: “Electors generally hold a leadership position in their party or were chosen to recognize years of loyal service to the party. Throughout our history as a nation, more than 99 percent of electors have voted as pledged.”

Do electoral votes have a direct impact on Senate or congressional elections?

They do not.

How many electoral votes does each state have?

Every state gets at least three electoral votes, because a state’s number of electors is identical to the total number of its senators and representatives in Congress. Seven states have the minimum three electors.
Washington, D.C., also has three electoral votes, thanks to the 23rd Amendment, which gave the nation’s capital as many electors as the state with the fewest electoral votes.
California has the most electoral votes, with 55. Texas is next, with 38. New York and Florida have 29 apiece.
Here’s a map with the numbers.

Do all of a state’s electoral votes go to one candidate?

In every state except two, the party that wins the popular vote gets to send all of its electors to the state capital in December.
In the nonconforming Maine and Nebraska, two electoral votes are apportioned to the winner of the popular vote, and the rest of the votes are given to the winner of the popular votes in each of the states’ congressional districts. (Maine has two congressional districts and Nebraska has three.)

Has anyone ever won the electoral vote while losing the popular vote?

Yes, this has happened four times. (At this point, people who were tuned in for the 2000 election are sneering at this explainer.)
In 2000, Al Gore was found to have won the popular vote by more than half a million votes, despite having lost to George W. Bush in an election that was sealed by a Supreme Court decision.
Andrew Jackson won the popular vote in 1824, but eventually lost the election to John Quincy Adams. In 1876, Samuel Tilden had more popular support than Rutherford B. Hayes, but lost the electoral vote. And Grover Cleveland lost the 1888 election to Benjamin Harrison despite winning the popular vote.

This article is originally published in The New York Times. Posted here by Farhira Farudin for educational purposes only.