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1 " Let us now take a moment to reflect on the plight of the Starbucks barista, that patient indulger of obsessive-compulsive customer requests, that tireless dispenser of forced smiles, that hapless victim of a never-ending parade of indignities. Any brave soul who dons the green apron must endure annoyances that would crush the rest of us - or at least send us into a cup-throwing, syrup-spraying rage. "
― Taylor Clark , Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture
2 " But the raw sex appeal of the star coffee-fixers notwithstanding, it's hard to imagine a less entertaining spectator sport than a barista competition. "
3 " Where else but a coffee-house could you pay a couple dollars for a drink, then fritter away four hours splayed across a couch, reading a book? "
4 " In one Starbucks, I spotted a young Frenchman wearing blue Converse sneakers, baggy Levi's jeans, and a red T-shirt with a giant Abercrombie & Fitch logo splashed across the front. As I watched him wash down his cheesecake with gulps of venti hot chocolate, I had to wonder: can't they revoke your French citizenship for this sort of thing? "
5 " Indeed, thinking of the coffeehouse as a haven for intellectual discourse is difficult when the one in question operates thousands of clones, wants to sell you the latest Coldplay album, and serves five-dollar milkshakes for adults. "
6 " Take the common Buddhist practice of “noting,” for example: practitioners learn to label their worries and feelings with a simple tag like “thinking” or “anger,” taking note of them mindfully without engaging them directly. In a 2007 study, the UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman showed thirty volunteers fear-provoking images and then asked them to note their feelings (“I feel afraid”) as he monitored their brain activity. Upon seeing the unpleasant images, the subjects’ amygdalae lit up at first, but the labeling process soon sparked activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, damping activity in the amygdala. Lieberman believes this mindful noting—the simple act of putting our feelings into words—helps the brain disambiguate our emotions and provide a level of detachment from them. “One of the ways labeling is useful is in talking with other people,” he told me. “If you can get someone to talk about their feelings, it’ll end up being beneficial to them in ways they may not realize.” (Writing about how we feel in a journal serves the same purpose; it helps us sort out emotions, like anxiety, on a deeper subconscious level.) "
― Taylor Clark , Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear and Cool
7 " In tense moments, explains the clinical psychologist Rod Martin, the purpose of pranks like Venanzi’s isn’t merely to elicit a chuckle; joking actually reformats your perception of a stressor. “Humor is about playing with ideas and concepts,” said Martin, who teaches at the University of Western Ontario. “So whenever we see something as funny, we’re looking at it from a different perspective. When people are trapped in a stressful situation and feeling overwhelmed, they’re stuck in one way of thinking: This is terrible. I’ve got to get out of here. But if you can take a humorous perspective, then by definition you’re looking at it differently—you’re breaking out of that rigid mind-set. "
8 " Terrified executives saw that they had a simple choice: convince consumers that your brand stands for Something Important - and thus that buying your merchandise is not just crass materialism, but something closer to an artistic statement - or fall into a price-cutting bloodbath with the generics. "
