Liz Langley Columns

Put your favorite song on. Go on. I can wait. Open your iTunes or equivalent and pull up the playlist that brightens your whole demeanor the moment you see it. What’s on it? Bach? Stevie Wonder? Cole Porter? Katy Perry? Whatever your choice, it’s commonly understood that a tune can change our mood more quickly than a shot of tequila or the clouds covering the sun. The music we love can make us feel lighter, happier, more energetic, more motivated, distanced from the drudgery of the day. It’s feels a little like the giddiness of love. Actually, it’s a lot like the giddiness of love. Researchers at Montreal’s McGill University found that music stimulates the release of dopamine and can cause “euphoria and craving” and the dopamine-producing areas of the brains were the ones that lit up when people undergoing brain scans saw photos of their beloved, chronicled in the now-famous work of Dr. Helen Fisher and her team in “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.” So love and music involve high levels of the same chemical, making it no surprise t...

Just a few weeks ago, in an interview commemorating his 70th birthday, a journalist from New Scientist magazine asked Professor Stephen Hawking what he thinks during the day. “Women,” Hawking said. “They’re a complete mystery.” One of the greatest minds of our time admitting to total bafflement by the opposite sex is less a revelation than a verification of what most of us already know: the heart and the brain are seldom, if ever, on speaking terms. How often have you said “What was I thinking?” after a bad romance… as though you weren’t there but instead hired a temp to get it up and running and by then it was really out of your hands. “The heart has reasons that reason cannot know,” Blaise Pascal said, and Woody Allen (who would paraphrase that as “The heart has its reasons,”) wrapped the whole thing up neatly in Annie Hall with “Intellectuals prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what’s going on but on the other hand the body does not lie…” We’ve become smart enough to unclog, transplant and maintain our hearts but once they’re b...

Nothing pisses me off as much as positive thinking. I have to admit, though, that every once in awhile, when everything seems at it’s darkest, when you feel as though God has punk’d you something fierce, you can still find a scrap of good in is an otherwise squalid situation. For example, I recently had to give up my cable TV because I’m so poor I make the Little Match Girl look like Leona Helmsley. How I miss it! I pine away as though that idiot box were filled with people I knew who had died — everyone on HLN, my “Fashion Police,” and every robot, alien and human creature on Futurama. I miss them more than people I’ve actually met. I try watching on my laptop when the jones gets bad enough, but as a rule I end up with the empty feeling you get when you have sex with someone to get over someone else and it works for about a minute and then makes you even more keenly aware of what you’ve lost. Then I heard a story on NPR (at least the radio still works) about the money campaigners planned to spend on TV advertising in pre-primary Iowa and, from the botto...

Everyone hates dating. Sincerely. Who says “Oh, I love sitting across from a relative stranger while we silently appraise each other like potential runners-up at the Westminster Dog Show?” Malcolm Gladwell told us in “Blink,” that rapid cognition allows us to make most of our decisions in about two seconds. That, I believe, is true of our romantic assessments and I never understood my girlfriends who would go on dates, feel no sexual frisson and then, inexplicably, try again. Why? For the same reason they used to run a bell rope into a coffin in the 19th century — in case the thing isn’t quite dead? My dim views on the subject of romantic job interviewing darkened further last week when the story of 1615 word email made it’s way around the web: an investment banker named “Mike” went out on a date with a woman named “Lauren;” a date he thought was terrific but she thought was “horrific.” The International Business Times said Michael was calling Lauren “incessantly.” The Australian Telegraph gave Lauren’s brief backstory verbatim: 'Friend couldn’t make it...