POLLYANNA WAS NOT A POLLYANNA
POLLYANNA GETS A bad rap. Even Mary Pickford, the silent movie star who bought the rights to the 1913 bestseller about an uber-optimistic orphan, was said to detest the girl and story. That’s according to John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister, whose new book, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We (Penguin Press), highlights the million ways our brains—and the media—focus on the bad and discount the good.
