Sunday - BBC Radio Four

I was on this morning's programme telling the truth about lying ... perhaps. You can listen again here for one week: it's the first item in the programme.

Beyond the blame game

"One of humankind's most distinctive and potent capacities is its ability to ask why. But one of its most frequently observed weaknesses is to give the wrong kind of answer. Fortunately, the most egregious of these have something in common, which more and more people are recognising..."

New post at Guardian Comment is Free

Where happiness lies

"The choice is not between being positive or negative. The issue is whether we start with the facts or with our attitudes. What positive psychology gets right is that when we confront reality, we always have some control over how we then respond to it, and that a lot of misery is avoidable if we try to make the best rather than the worst of things. In practice, however, this sensible advice often degenerates into an excessive optimism, in which reality is whatever we think it to be. But you can’t make the best of a bad situation if you pretend it’s really just a good one in disguise."

Review of four happiness-related books in this weekend's FT

The miserable results of our quest for happiness

"Our pursuit of happiness is leading us to judge the great intellectual and spiritual traditions of the past according to only one measure: do they increase happiness and reduce misery? That which passes the test is plundered and that which fails is left behind. The result is that wisdom is hollowed out and replaced with a soft centre of caramelised contentment."

Article in today's Telegraph

Our 'ethical' shopping habit

"It's easy to poke fun at the obviously useless, because not even people who buy such things believe they're really useful. Motorised ice-cream cones and USB chameleons are simply meant to be fun, and if we think the worst excesses of modern capitalism are to create cheap sources of entertainment, then we are very sad puritans indeed. More interesting is how the cunning machinations of capitalism create products that people believe are useful, virtuous and ethical, but which are really useless, wasteful and even morally questionable. And I think I can find many such products simply by walking into my local health-food shop."

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State of joy: Why your country needs you to be happy

"Over the last decade, it has become common to complain that governments, particularly in the west, have been too narrowly focused on the pursuit of rising GDP at the expense of other social goods. People have looked wistfully to Bhutan, where, since 1972, official government policy has been to prioritise instead the "Gross National Happiness". Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it. For now that both government and opposition have embraced the happiness agenda, sceptical voices are warning that this marks a disturbing intrusion of the state into the private lives of citizens, and that, far from being benign, attempts to regulate the subjective states of citizens could have sinister implications. Well-being, once absent from political discourse, has become a contested issue at the very heart of it."

Article in today's Independent

Newsnight - BBC One

I popped up as a talking head on yesterday's programme talking about something which is very deep: snow. I think they could have selected more interesting snippets of the interview, but maybe I am wrong to thing there were any. You can watch again here until next Tuesday.

Observer recommends microphilosophy

The Observer magazine has recommended me/microphilosophy in a feature called 30 ways to a better life. It's the third item on this page. Microphilosophy is an umbrella for various projects of mine which are intended to be of the small and stimulating variety, including twitter, films and podcasts.

What is the meaning of life?

"In our imagination, the meaning of life is too big or deep to ever be fathomed. Thousands of years of religion have led us to expect that it must involve something beyond this world, or at least some mystical, elusive secret. So when we are told that it’s basically about creating a life that is worth living, it’s almost impossible not to think: 'Is that it? Surely there must be more to it than that?' There isn’t, for reasons that can be explained in simple terms by people who are not octogenarian sages to people for whom lighting a scented candle is the closest they’ve come to transcendental meditation."

Article in today's Sunday Herald (Fourth article on page)