Sunday Soup: Gift Advice, Chocolate Choices, Quitting the Holidays and Murdle
We're back with more tantalizing tidbits for you and your brain. These are the articles, streaming ideas, and books that caught our attention this week.
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Complementing Saturday’s collection of TheStreet Pro Portfolio signals, we have a piping hot bowl of Sunday Soup today that moves beyond the world of investing and stocks to include notables and quotables that caught our eyes this week.
If you have a recommendation you’d like to share, feel free to share it in the Comments section below!
Articles 📰
The Virtuous Circle of a Happy Personality
“Thanks to such studies, we can also break down life satisfaction into three components and see how different personality traits affect our happiness in various ways. For example, relationship satisfaction (with an intimate partner) is best predicted by high agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness, and low neuroticism. Meanwhile, high conscientiousness best predicts work satisfaction, while agreeableness and extroversion are associated with highest social satisfaction. Very conscientious people tend to have good marriages and jobs; very agreeable people tend to have plenty of good friends.”
You Want That Gift to Arrive Today? This Is What It Takes.
“Retailers, which have long competed on price or quality, are now in an all-out race for same-day deliveries. Why? Few people truly need the service; if you are desperate for diapers or a special pasta-making attachment, you’ll go to the store. But companies have found that, once acquired, the taste for speedy delivery makes customers both loyal and willing to spend more money.”
Returning a Gift? Here Are Major Retailers' Holiday Return Policies
“The gift-giving season will come to an end and that means you'll probably have at least one present you don't need. And that means it's important to know what the big retailers' return policies are in case you need to make a return.”
What If You Just Skipped the Holidays?
“For years, ahead of family holiday gatherings, Alicia Dudley would wake up anxious. Since she’d gotten married, her relatives and her husband’s had wanted them at multiple different celebrations for each occasion. Bundling up her small child and toting him about was a pain. Dudley, a creative director in Virginia, couldn’t believe that on her rare, precious days off, she was doing what she always did: running around. Eventually, she made a simple but major decision—she quit the holidays. And now, when she texts friends around this time of year, asking how they’re holding up, she remembers why she made this choice.”
Why Not Tell Someone They Look Great Today?
“Mood-lifting aside, there are other benefits to striking up conversations about someone’s personal style. “Perhaps it is in this age where Instagram or every website browser is trying to sell you things you already own,” said the sommelier Victoria James. “But I lean now more heavily toward personal recommendations.”
Milk Chocolate or Dark? The Answer Could Affect Your Risk of Diabetes.
“A large new study suggests there might be good reason to indulge in chocolate this holiday season: It found that people who regularly ate chocolate had a lower likelihood of developing Type 2 diabetes. But the findings came with an important caveat. It was only…”
This Carcinogen Keeps Cropping Up in Personal Care Products
“Benzene seems to have cropped up everywhere in recent years. First, it was hand sanitizers with “unacceptable levels” of the carcinogen. Then there were recalls of antifungal foot sprays and alarming reports of tainted deodorants, dry shampoos and sunscreens.”
What We’re Streaming 📺📲
Acquired - Mars Inc: The Chocolate Story
Morgan Stanley - Could Private-Label Products Transform Retail?
The Reading List 📖📚
Because we are in the midst of the holiday season and there may be a few folks you’re not quite sure what to get, here’s some help in the form of books published by TheStreet Pro contributors.
Doug Kass – Doug Kass on the Market: A Life on TheStreet
And if you know someone who is a fan of Wordle, you may want to check out this book series:
“G. T. Karber, the creator of the popular online daily mystery game Murdle, presents the first collection of 100 original murder mystery logic puzzles―a perfect gift for armchair detectives and puzzlers to hone their minds and solve a series of crimes.”
