Never Let Them See You Sweat

NYT Week in Review
By KATE ZERNIKE

The economy jolts and stumbles, wars slog on in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the horrors of a new terrorist attack blanket the news and draw frayed attention yet again to our precarious alliances in the world. The watchword for the holidays is subdued; certainly not much inspires celebration.

Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that to lead us in crisis, Americans elected a man repeatedly recognized for his uncommon calmness. More than ever, we crave stability, a steady hand, the reassuring face on television.

We even elevate such equilibrium to the superhuman: calm, as applied to No Drama Obama, often comes linked to the modifier “preternatural.”

But the calm temperament is not so superhuman, nor is it entirely the gift of the chosen few. It can be cultivated, even as the world cleaves around us.

So how do we get there without a steady diet of beta blockers and Xanax? Calm, per se, doesn’t appear in the taxonomy of those who study personality and temperament. People we might colloquially describe as calm are classified as low on the scale of neuroticism — a scale everyone is measured on, to a greater or lesser degree.

(More here.)