No backflips for mag’s ‘joy’ issue

New York puts on a happy face to tout “the most popular course at Yale” — Psychology and the Good Life — but the Cliffs Notes that pass for the cover story make for their own kind of depression.

Culture editor Adam Sternbergh’s distillation of Professor Laurie Santos’ 21-lecture course is mostly common sense dressed up as academic acumen. Basically, we learn that Santos teaches that 50 percent of happiness is determined by genes and 10 percent by circumstance.

That makes us responsible for 40 percent of our happiness. Yet, aside from meditating and keeping a “gratitude journal,” the article has little to say about how to attain it.

The notion that money can’t buy happiness isn’t entirely convincing. Santos cites Nobel Prize-winning economists who claim a person’s sense of well-being rises with income up to $75,000 — beyond which “there’s no observable increase in happiness with higher income.” No word on whether any of those economists have been giving away their excess income. Speaking of ‘joy,’ the New

Yorker’s summer fiction issue focuses on children and parenting, and reminds us that stories about other children and other parents aren’t always riveting.

Rivka Galchen addresses her 4year-old daughter’s fascination with death in a piece that drags on until reaching one of those from-themouths-of-babes endings: “Mama, let’s not chat about this anymore.”

Rachel Kushner credits her motorcycle-riding dad with the “fictitious cool” so pronounced in the 1964 flick “The Leather Boys” — until a more mature sense of family history upends a long-term memory “that was wrong for a few reasons, not the least of which, as he has reminded me, was that his motorcycle had a sidecar, for his family.”

Editor David Remnick provides a postscript for the late Philip Roth, who he says was “funnier, more spontaneous” than his rivals in American fiction, which strikes us as funny given how many pages Roth admitted to tossing any given day.