Latest news with #LennonMcCartney
Times
03-07-2025
- Health
- Times
As the Beatles said, maybe all you do need is love
Perhaps more so than any other band the Beatles devoted much of their wordsmithery to questions of close affection. 'All you need is love,' was one Lennon-McCartney recommendation. 'Love me do' was their first such plea on vinyl, and the Fab Four's epitaph was famously 'the love you take is equal to the love you make'. For some, the lyrics summed up the band's message of peace and harmony; for others, they were hippy dippy smush. Now it turns out that Liverpool's finest may have had a point. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have been tracking 52 individuals for a month, quizzing them six times every day via their smartphones on whether they had expressed amore, or had received some in return. In this context, the researchers interpreted 'love' broadly: spending time with someone close, gift giving, or expressing affection through words. The conclusion was one Messrs Lennon and McCartney would welcome: when people expressed love to others, they tended to feel more loved in return. However, the study found the reverse was not necessarily true: receiving affection from others did not automatically make people more generous with their love. The researchers admit they expected a two-way relationship: 'It was somewhat surprising to find that increases in feelings of being loved didn't increase expressions of love over time.' Their conclusion is that some individuals are better at receiving affection than giving it. • Why small acts of affection may be the key to feeling more loved yourself The power of love goes deeper than self-fulfilment. Participants in the study reported other psychological benefits. Those who felt more loved scored better on average when it came to mental health and feelings of loneliness. Such studies should always be treated with caution, given their observational nature. But at its heart is a timeless truth: saying 'I love you' costs nothing but can mean everything.
Irish Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
‘Maybe Elon Musk is quite gullible. He seems to fall for a lot of conspiracy theories'
Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci via the songwriting chemistry of Lennon and McCartney to the Florida launch pad of Elon Musk's SpaceX , Helen Lewis's new book, The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers, sets out to unravel the mystery of what we mean when we call someone a genius and asks whether the modern idea of genius as a class of special people is distorting our view of the world. There's a sense throughout the book that these people are modern versions of saints, that they're performing something sacred in our increasingly secular world. It is a really compelling argument, made by historian Darrin McMahon in his Divine Fury: A History of Genius, that during the Enlightenment, when people became more rationalist, less religious, we still craved this sense of the divine. The idea that miracles happen in the world. Where you might once have thought that a miracle was attributable to the Virgin Mary, now the miracle is: how did Van Gogh's paintings happen? How did someone have this moment of inspiration where they came up with this scientific breakthrough? There is this deep hunger within all of us for the world not to be mundane, for there to be things that are still extraordinary within it. Even the phrase 'gifted', which people sometimes use about children and young people. Gifted by whom and for what purpose? READ MORE In classical times, you were possessed by 'a genius'. The muse of poetry or whatever spoke through you. I think that was a much more healthy way to think about it. The argument in the book really is about this category of special people and what that does to us and to them. It's much healthier to say I've done something extraordinary rather than I'm an extraordinary person and everything I do is probably going to be brilliant. That's the bit that tends to lead people astray. You look in the book at the story of how Shakespeare became the figure that he is now. Part of that is these enablers who made sure the folios weren't destroyed and forgotten. And then there's a fascinating process of mythmaking, which is about Englishness and Britishness in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It's a classic story for your purposes, isn't it? Because there is something extraordinary going on in those plays, but then there's a whole other process that involves lots of people. That's the bit I wanted to try to unpick. There's a bad version of this book that is falsely egalitarian and implies that there is no such thing as extraordinary achievement. You're hard-pressed to look at the plays of Shakespeare and think that. So, yeah, I'm not trying to argue that great achievement doesn't exist, but I think which achievements we choose to praise and flag up often has a political dimension to it too, which is worth exploring. Helen Lewis, author of The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers Then there's another element added to the mix, which is the idea of the artist as mad, bad and dangerous to know. The outsider who burns brightly and sputters out early. I find that really interesting because it isn't at all the idea of the artist that you have before then, If you take someone like a Rembrandt, he was painting portraits of rich Dutch people. There was no sense that in order to market himself, he needed to be wasting away in a cupboard somewhere. It's only when you get to the Romantics that we get so into the idea that great art has this terrible cost to people. Susan Sontag wrote about tuberculosis being part of that story. Tuberculosis, which spiked as people moved into cities, has a lot of symptoms that are quite similar to all the things that people used to say about Romantic poets. And that's hard to separate out from the rise of capitalism. The idea that artists don't rely on patronage any more. They now compete in the marketplace. My brutal conclusion about a lot of the way that we talk about genius is that it's really a kind of a branding exercise. The idea that the life itself is the work of art. One of the things that's really interesting is the hunger for people who achieve things to have had interesting biographies and the slight sense of disappointment when they don't, as if we feel like we've been cheated. The book is also very much about science and also about pseudoscience – when science gets too big for its boots. Someone like Francis Galton, who used to be very famous but has been airbrushed out of history by embarrassed institutions. He was an incredible 19th-century polymath, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin from the same very talented family. He came to be interested in the idea of genius. He was grappling with the new ideas of evolution and natural selection and selective breeding. And that gets him to eugenics, which is the idea that you can 'improve a population' by only letting the smart people have babies. From that, you get this scientific discipline of eugenics that has absolutely no human empathy behind it. And it was really widely accepted. I used to work for the New Statesman magazine, which was founded by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who were Fabian socialists. But part of the paternalism of their socialism was they were interested in the eugenics movement. I wrote in my last book, Difficult Women, about Marie Stopes, the great contraceptive pioneer, who was also madly interested, until the [19]30s, it was a respectable scientific endeavour. Because people hadn't yet had the vivid proof about what happened when this ideology was put into practice. The book is a very odd book. It pings about from Renaissance Florence to eugenics to The Beatles. When you put them all together, you begin to realise that we have these very deep ideas about human worth and that we're always fighting over them. [ Difficult Women book review: Whirlwind tour of feminism Opens in new window ] One of the other themes is that just because somebody is good at something, it doesn't mean they're necessarily good at anything else. But that seems to be a common fallacy. Yes, the book ends with Elon Musk, who I think is a great demonstration of this. It's hard for people on the left to acknowledge that he did have great success in business because of personal qualities. He's not purely a lucky idiot who wandered into his success with Tesla and SpaceX. However, the last six months have shown that he isn't good at everything. If I may say something controversial, maybe he also is quite gullible. He seems to fall for a lot of conspiracy theories. What it comes back to is humility. Just because you've had great success in one area, you should still be humble about all the other areas. Humility doesn't seem to come with most of these characters. There's a really interesting question about whether or not there are certain personality traits that make you more predisposed to either be a genius or get called a genius. A certain level of narcissism, because you're okay with people looking at you and bigging you up and you accept the attention and you thrive in it. You can take two people of absolutely equal achievements and the bigger narcissist will probably get called a genius more. You quote someone saying that in this world there are actors and there are movie stars. I think that there are these people who have those magnetic qualities to them. But yeah, it's really hard to separate it out, isn't it? You can't be a genius on your own. It's not an intrinsic quality to you. It's something that gets conferred on you by other people. There's a right-wing, left-wing element to this. On the one hand an emphasis on collaboration and community. And on the other, on the primacy of individual agency and the individual casting off the bonds of the little people all around him. Because of copyright, because of the patent system, because of people wanting to make money, it becomes winner takes all. Alexander Graham Bell becomes the inventor of the telephone, even though it was much more collaborative than that. You're a writer with t he Atlantic magazine and often cover politics. Some of these themes feed into what's happening right now, such as the assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). I have my own reservations about some aspects of DEI, but the crudeness of that assault uses language about excellence being damped down by it. Is there a resurgence of the genius myth happening right now? Definitely. One of the things I argue in the book is that every age has its own different template of genius, which tells you a lot about that society. Our current one is the tech superman, these brilliant start-up founders who have an insight that no one else does. And you are right, they are often guys who think that they're just special people. But to go back to Elon Musk, both Tesla and SpaceX had significant public investment. SpaceX, at its lowest point, got a Nasa contract that assured its future. So, yeah, the dynamism of the private sector contributed enormously to its success, but taxpayers' money was ultimately also part of the story of what allowed it to thrive. It's really tempting for people to believe that they made it all on their own, whereas what you usually need is talent, plus luck, plus society that lets you achieve stuff. [ Elon Musk sees humanity's purpose as a facilitator of superintelligent AI. That should worry us Opens in new window ] As you point out, there are millions of people who never got that opportunity. Like you, I have reservations about some of the way that that DEI has ended up being implemented. Things like the implicit bias test don't really seem to predict very well who is actually racist in real life. But go back and look at someone as brilliant a scientist as George Washington Carver, who was black and therefore never got to go to school. Or the fact that Jewish people were excluded from lots of the Ivy Leagues. The exclusion of women from the professions for a huge amount of history. The number of bright working-class kids who never got the opportunities they deserved. So for all that we are now in this period of backlash, I think you have to say that the small efforts that we've made towards allowing more people to realise their potential come against this background of a huge amount through human history of wasted talent. I'm thinking about all the children who died in war or starved to death. There's a quote from Stephen Jay Gould about people who got very into preserving bits of Einstein's brain. He said he was less interested in the exact form of Einstein's brain than in the people who were just as brilliant but who died working in sweatshops or cotton fields. The Genius Myth is published by Penguin This is an edited extract from an episode of the Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan podcast Is there any such thing as a political genius? With Helen Lewis Listen | 39:17
Irish Times
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Brian Wilson: Death of towering figure closes a chapter in music history
The death of a towering figure such as The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson marks the closing of a chapter in the history of music and is another reminder that rock's golden generation is passing into the twilight right before our eyes. As the tortured visionary behind The Beach Boys , Wilson helped shape the world in which we live today – providing the soundtrack to everyday life via timeless pop masterpieces such as Good Vibrations, Wouldn't It Be Nice and California Girls. Long before Wilson's mental health struggles derailed his career in the mid-1960s and decades before his recent decline in health, these songs were already eternal – their brilliantly vulnerable melodies and heartfelt lyrics destined to live forever. Along with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and a handful of others, Wilson provided the soundtrack to the past 70 years of shared human existence. With his passing, something has been lost – and yet, there is comfort in knowing his music will be with us in perpetuity. He was also a cautionary tale – a gentle soul ill-suited to the demands of the music industry and ultimately derailed by its vices. Desperate to compete with The Beatles, he turned to LSD as a creative tool. This disastrous relationship would push Wilson over the brink and spiralling off into galaxies from which he never quite returned. READ MORE That he was a pop savant was beyond dispute – driven by his rivalry with Lennon and McCartney, The Beach Boys' single Good Vibrations and the 1966 album Pet Sounds confirmed pop music as an art form. He was also instrumental in the creation of the concept album, with records such as Surf's Up – a weird, difficult piece about environmental decay and the collapse of America as relevant today as when The Beach Boys released it in 1971. Famously, Wilson couldn't surf. The songwriter behind Surfin' Safari and Surfing USA preferred the quiet reclusiveness of the recording studio to the teeming beaches of his native Inglewood, California, where he grew up with his brothers and future Beach Boys bandmates Dennis and Carl (their cousin, Mike Love, would join them as the group's vocalist). Wilson's songs conjured with the cliche of California as a sun-kissed paradise. But there were always shadows amid the light. Stardom would ultimately prove too much for a contemplative individual who never quite got over his abusive relationship with his father, Murry, for many years The Beach Boys' manager. 'People say I'm a genius – it's a compliment,' he told me in 2014. 'Having that [pressure] on me gave me the goose. It goosed me to want to make something really special. As soon as we finished Good Vibrations I knew we would have the number one record in the nation. In the end it went to number three – well that's close to number one. I was happy. There isn't a [note] on that record I would change.' [ The Beach Boys: 'It would be the right time to come back together, while we still have our voices' Opens in new window ] During that conversation, he came across as thoughtful and introspective – though he took issue with the idea that he was perpetually melancholy. It was more that the spotlight was not for him. 'People say I'm a sad person,' said Wilson. 'Well, the songs are sad. Pet Sounds is a sad album. Caroline, No that is a very sad song. Generally, I would consider myself a mellow individual. I like playing to crowds of three or four thousand. I'm not like Paul McCartney, who can play to 20,000 people. I'm not that sort of person.'
