MAP Strategic Wealth Advisors

1. Overindulging in food can make people happy, especially if they do it with loved ones. The long-term effects of overindulging, such as weight gain, may not be as detrimental to happiness as commonly believed.
2. While the health effects of overeating habitually are not up for debate, Brooks argues that fitness influencers and the dieting industry make us believe that any overeating is a cardinal sin. It is not!
3. A study of 23,000 Dutch citizens found that moderately overweight people were just as happy and satisfied with their lives as people with a normal weight.
4. Brooks suggests that rather than worrying about weight gain, people should focus on the pleasure and enjoyment that comes from eating and socializing with loved ones during the holiday season.
5. Brooks offers three final tips for enjoying festive dining– and avoiding negative physical or emotional effects when it comes to holiday overeating:
   • Confine the feast to the day of the celebration: Eat heartily on the day, but don’t overindulge in leftovers.
   • Remember to pause and be grateful: be mindful of not just the food, but the atmosphere and loved ones nearby. It will create a stronger lasting memory than any meal might on its own.
   • Don’t beat yourself up: Feeling guilty won’t help you recover, and will only make your holiday that much less enjoyable. Enjoy the holiday as much as you can and be ready to revert to better habits in the days that follow.

This is an article detailing seven books that “investigate what our society values and what it’s built on, driving us to the monumental, the sublime, the quintessentially human.” They are:

1. Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death by Nick Lane: This book is an exploration of the genesis of life on earth. Lane focuses on millions of years of evolution and the planet’s twists and turns—the Great Oxidation Event, the Cambrian explosion—while profiling visionary scientists. He beautifully lays out the sheer improbability of our biosphere, explains why life may be so rare in our universe, and considers death as a process, not simply as an instantaneous end.
2. David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptorby Michael Brenson: This biography of the versatile 20th Century American sculptor David Smith provides a fascinating look at the mind and profile of a legendary artist, but also explores the tensions between abstraction and representation– while richly conveying the backdrop of 20th Century political and cultural change that took place during Smith’s career.
3. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty: Looking to the past to explain modern capitalism, this surprise bestseller investigates the forces that cause and intensify economic stratification. Calling on historical events and thinkers of the 20th Century, Piketty credits capitalism with improving efficiency– while creating economic divides that push the bounds of morality.
4. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed: This is a meticulously researched look at the relationship between founding father Thomas Jefferson and a family he enslaved, the Hemingses. Gordon-Reed, a law professor and historian, unspools this saga in her magisterial Pulitzer Prize–winning exploration of this relationship. This incredible, galling story shows that Jefferson’s life is inextricable from the Hemingses– just as America’s history is inextricable from slavery.
5. Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them, by Dan Bouk – This is a cultural history about how we collect and process info about our population, and how we might learn from it. Written by an accomplished data analyst, the book shows that the explosion of cities and suburbs poses challenges to our frail—and, in some cases, outdated—political institutions. As sweeping demographic change has escalated in recent decades—a surge in immigration and a sorting of the parties between cities and suburbs for Democrats and rural counties for Republicans—so too have disputed elections and the threat of gridlock. This searching, textured inquiry illuminates how much simple population figures can teach us.
6. Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet, by Jennifer Homans: This 2010 history charts the arc of ballet from its origins in Renaissance Italian and French courts to the dawn of the 21st century. It takes the time to insightfully look at the way ballet as an art form has intersected with political ideas over the past 500 years. Overall, this book is not just a cultural history of the art of ballet, it becomes a prism through which to contemplate the human physique and human capability as a whole.
7. The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, by Siddhartha Mukherjee: Mukherjee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist whose new book is an expansive study of the cell– the common denominator of all life– and its dizzying range of types and functions. Cells are anything but simple structures, he argues; rather, they’re sinuous ecosystems, and they come together at a dazzling scale in the body. Understanding the cell is the key to an age of personalized medicine, Mukherjee argues: Are we ready to embrace it?