"A big fallacy is that we can give people self-esteem by praising them lavishly. Instead, our praise can end up harming them by putting them in a fixed mindset. My research shows that praising people’s intelligence or talent, rather than giving them self-esteem, makes them vulnerable to a loss of confidence when things go wrong."

"I feel that people who act like adolescents—they are the interesting people. Everything about being an adolescent, well, almost everything about it anyway, is the interesting thing about being a person. You feel you’re on a process of discovery towards something."

Available only by mail order from a tiny Kentucky label, Hasil Adkins’ final album was released this February, almost a year after he died in his West Virginia home at the age of sixty-seven. To anyone familiar with the haze of lore surrounding ‘the Haze’ (as he was known to fans), the most remarkable of these benign facts is probably that Adkins managed to make it to the other side of fifty. If half the stories are true, Adkins used up all nine lives decades ago.

“Live people can’t compete with dead ones. Ask anybody.”
True or not, it’s a message that somebody’s been whispering in the ears of Hollywood studio executives for years. Ghost romances are everywhere, dating back even earlier than 1947’s charming, Oscar-nominated The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and perhaps peaking—at least at the box office and the Academy Awards—in 1990, with Ghost itself.

If some film characters are haunted by lost lovers and dead husbands, others remain plagued by childhood scars. Confronting family legacies—particularly parental failings—has been a theme of great literature from the Greeks to Jonathan Franzen, and filmmakers have also tapped into its rich potential for conflict and character development.