Group items tagged

And leaders are never just leaders, they are always leaders of a particular social group – a nation, a political party, a religion

leadership is a group process: and, more specifically, it is the cultivation of a “we” relationship between leaders and followers.

Effective leadership, then, is not about what separates the leader from others. It is about what brings the leader together with group members and allows him or her to represent them

n effective leader is one who is seen to be one of us, to work for us and to achieve the things we value. That isn’t about being ordinary or typical. It is about being prototypical – of representing the values and the qualities that make our group distinctive.

In addition, effective leaders are not passive. They actively craft the group narrative and their own personal narrative to make the two mesh: they are skilled entrepreneurs of identity.

Hence, no given set of qualities will guarantee effective leadership, for these will change according to the identity of the group.

the performative politics of populism can backfire by making one unrepresentative as the groupings change. In the midst of a pandemic where the widest possible compliance to restrictive measures is necessary, the nation and its communities must be unified and inclusive. The inherently divisive categories of populism are no longer tenable.

Moreover, we need competent governance to get us through, rather than insurgent incompetence to get our votes. In this global crisis, our blundering prime minister is no longer of the group, nor for the group, and certainly not achieving what the group needs.

Messenger RNA is a powerful, if fickle, component of life’s building blocks — a workhorse of the cell that is also truly just a messenger, unstable and prone to degrade.

. In 1990,

That same year, a team at the University of Wisconsin startled the scientific world with a paper that showed it was possible to inject a snippet of messenger RNA into mice and turn their muscle cells into factories, creating proteins on demand.

If custom-designed RNA snippets could be used to turn cells into bespoke protein factories, messenger RNA could become a powerful medical tool. It could encode fragments of virus to teach the immune system to defend against pathogens. It could also create whole proteins that are missing or damaged in people with devastating genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.

In 2005, the pair discovered a way to modify RNA, chemically tweaking one of the letters of its code, so it didn’t trigger an inflammatory response. Deborah Fuller, a scientist who works on RNA and DNA vaccines at the University of Washington, said that work deserves a Nobel Prize.

messenger RNA posed a bigger challenge than other targets.“It’s tougher — it’s a much bigger molecule, it’s much more unstable,”

Unlike fields that were sparked by a single powerful insight, Sahin said that the recent success of messenger RNA vaccines is a story of countless improvements that turned an alluring biological idea into a beneficial technology.

“This is a field which benefited from hundreds of inventions,” said Sahin, who noted that when he started BioNTech in 2008, he cautioned investors that the technology would not yield a product for at least a decade. He kept his word: Until the coronavirus sped things along, BioNTech projected the launch of its first commercial project in 2023.

“It’s new to you,” Fuller said. “But for basic researchers, it’s been long enough. . . . Even before covid, everyone was talking: RNA, RNA, RNA.”

All vaccines are based on the same underlying idea: training the immune system to block a virus. Old-fashioned vaccines do this work by injecting dead or weakened viruses

ewer vaccines use distinctive bits of the virus, such as proteins on their surface, to teach the lesson. The latest genetic techniques, like messenger RNA, don’t take as long to develop because those virus bits don’t have to be generated in a lab. Instead, the vaccine delivers a genetic code that instructs cells to build those characteristic proteins themselves.

They wanted the immune system to learn to recognize the thumb tack spike, so McLellan tasked a scientist in his laboratory with identifying genetic mutations that could anchor the protein into the right configuration. It was a painstaking process for Nianshuang Wang, who now works at a biotechnology company, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. After trying hundreds of genetic mutations, he found two that worked. Five journals rejected the finding, questioning its significance, before it was published in 2017.

That infection opened Graham’s eyes to an opportunity. HKU1 was merely a nuisance, as opposed to a deadly pneumonia; that meant it would be easier to work with in the lab, since researchers wouldn’t have to don layers of protective gear and work in a pressurized laboratory.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome had emerged in 2003. Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) broke out in 2012. It seemed clear to Graham and Jason McLellan, a structural biologist now at the University of Texas at Austin, that new coronaviruses were jumping into people on a 10-year-clock and it might be time to brace for the next one.

Last winter, when Graham heard rumblings of a new coronavirus in China, he brought the team back together. Once its genome was shared online by Chinese scientists, the laboratories in Texas and Maryland designed a vaccine, utilizing the stabilizing mutations and the knowledge they had gained from years of basic research — a weekend project thanks to the dividends of all that past work.

Graham needed a technology that could deliver it into the body — and had already been working with Moderna, using its messenger RNA technology to create a vaccine against a different bat virus, Nipah, as a dress rehearsal for a real pandemic. Moderna and NIH set the Nipah project aside and decided to go forward with a coronavirus vaccine.

On Jan. 13, Moderna’s Moore came into work and found her team already busy translating the stabilized spike protein into their platform. The company could start making the vaccine almost right away because of its experience manufacturing experimental cancer vaccines, which involves taking tumor samples and developing personalized vaccines in 45 days.

At BioNTech, Sahin said that even in the early design phases of its vaccine candidates, he incorporated the slight genetic changes designed in Graham’s lab that would make the spike look more like the real thing. At least two other companies would incorporate that same spike.

If all goes well with regulators, the coronavirus vaccines have the makings of a pharmaceutical industry fairy tale. The world faced an unparalleled threat, and companies leaped into the fight. Pfizer plowed $2 billion into the effort. Massive infusions of government cash helped remove the financial risks for Moderna.

But the world will also owe their existence to many scientists outside those companies, in government and academia who pursued ideas they thought were important even when the world doubted them

Some of those scientists will receive remuneration, since their inventions are licensed and integrated into the products that could save the world.

As executives become billionaires, many scientists think it is fair to earn money from their inventions that can help them do more important work. But McLellan’s laboratory at the University of Texas is proud to have licensed an even more potent version of their spike protein, royalty-free, to be incorporated into a vaccine for low and middle income countries.

“They’re using the technology that [Kariko] and I developed,” he said. “We feel like it’s our vaccine, and we are incredibly excited — at how well it’s going, and how it’s going to be used to get rid of this pandemic.”

“People hear about [vaccine progress] and think someone just thought about it that night. The amount of work — it’s really a beautiful story of fundamental basic research,” Fauci said. “It was chancy, in the sense that [the vaccine technology] was new. We were aware there would be pushback. The proof in the pudding is a spectacular success.”

The Vaccine Research Center, where Graham is deputy director, was the brainchild of Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It was created in 1997 to bring together scientists and physicians from different disciplines to defeat diseases, with a heavy focus on HIV.

the pandemic wasn’t a sudden eureka moment — it was a catalyst that helped ignite lines of research that had been moving forward for years, far outside the spotlight of a global crisis.

I don’t know if that sounds too complicated. But the point is, it’s not just giving up domination. It’s giving up this sense of separateness in favor of a sense of kinship. And those people who do often wonder how they failed to see how much continuity there is in the more-than-human world with the human world.

to go from terror into being and into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social and economic and cultural things. If the experiment is sacred, how can we possibly justify our food systems, for instance?

when I first went to the Smokies and hiked up into the old growth in the Southern Appalachians, it was like somebody threw a switch. There was some odd filter that had just been removed, and the world sounded different and smelled different.

richard powersYeah. In human exceptionalism, we may be completely aware of evolutionary continuity. We may understand that we have a literal kinship with the rest of creation, that all life on Earth employs the same genetic code, that there is a very small core of core genes and core proteins that is shared across all the kingdoms and phyla of life. But conceptually, we still have this demented idea that somehow consciousness creates a sanctity and a separation that almost nullifies the continuous elements of evolution and biology that we’ve come to understand.

if we want to begin this process of rehabilitation and transformation of consciousness that we are going to need in order to become part of the living Earth, it is going to be other kinds of minds that give us that clarity and strength and diversity and alternative way of thinking that could free us from this stranglehold of thought that looks only to the maximizing return on investment in very leverageable ways.

richard powersIt amazed me to get to the end of the first draft of “Bewilderment” and to realize how much Buddhism was in the book, from the simplest things.

I think there is nothing more science inflected than being out in the living world and the more-than-human world and trying to understand what’s happening.

And of course, we can combine this with what we were talking about earlier with death. If we see all of evolution as somehow leading up to us, all of human, cultural evolution leading up to neoliberalism and here we are just busily trying to accumulate and make meaning for ourselves, death becomes the enemy.

And you’re making the point in different ways throughout the book that it is the minds we think of as unusual, that we would diagnose as having some kind of problem or dysfunction that are, in some cases, are the only ones responding to the moment in the most common sense way it deserves. It is almost everybody else’s brain that has been broken.

it isn’t surprising. If you think of the characteristics of this dominant culture that we’ve been talking about — the fixation on control, the fixation on mastery, the fixation on management and accumulation and the resistance of decay — it isn’t surprising that that culture is also threatened by difference and divergence. It seeks out old, stable hierarchies — clear hierarchies — of control, and anything that’s not quite exploitable or leverageable in the way that the normal is terrifying and threatening.

And the more I looked for it, the more it pervaded the book.

ezra kleinI’ve heard you say that it has changed the way you measure a good day. Can you tell me about that?richard powersThat’s true.I suppose when I was still enthralled to commodity-mediated individualist market-driven human exceptionalism — we need a single word for this

And since moving to the Smokies and since publishing “The Overstory,” my days have been entirely inverted. I wake up, I go to the window, and I look outside. Or I step out onto the deck — if I haven’t been sleeping on the deck, which I try to do as much as I can in the course of the year — and see what’s in the air, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what’s happening out there now at 1,700 feet or 4,000 feet or 5,000 feet.

let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It’s Dr. Suzanne Simard, and the book is “Finding the Mother Tree.” Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what’s happening underground at the root level in a forest.

it was a moving moment for me, as an easterner, to stand up there and to say, this is what an eastern forest looks like. This is what a healthy, fully-functioning forest looks like. And I’m 56 years old, and I’d never seen it.

the other topics of that culture tend to circle back around these sorts of trends, human fascinations, ways of magnifying our throw weight and our ability and removing the last constraints to our desires and, in particular, to eliminate the single greatest enemy of meaning in the culture of the technological sublime that is, itself, such a strong instance of the culture of human separatism and commodity-mediated individualist capitalism— that is to say, the removal of death.

Why is it that we have known about the crisis of species extinction for at least half a century and longer? And I mean the lay public, not just scientists. But why has this been general knowledge for a long time without public will demanding some kind of action or change

And when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdependence. And you know, it’s a little bit like scales falling off your eyes. When you do turn that corner, all of the sources of anxiety that are so present and so deeply internalized become much more identifiable. And my own sense of hope and fear gets a much larger frame of reference to operate in.

I think, for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees, I shared — without really understanding this as a kind of concession or a kind of subscription — I did share this cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing that we do for ourselves and by ourselves and that our kind of general sense of the discoveries of the 19th and 20th century have left us feeling a bit unsponsored and adrift beyond the accident of human existence.

The largest single influence on any human being’s mode of thought is other human beings. So if you are surrounded by lots of terrified but wishful-thinking people who want to believe that somehow the cavalry is going to come at the last minute and that we don’t really have to look inwards and change our belief in where meaning comes from, that we will somehow be able to get over the finish line with all our stuff and that we’ll avert this disaster, as we have other kinds of disasters in the past.

I think what was happening to me at that time, as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with.

And I think I was right along with that sense that somehow we are a thing apart. We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily. It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another.

I can’t really be out for more than two or three miles before my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to keep it all in my head long enough to get it down on paper.

for my journey, the way to characterize this transition is from being fascinated with technologies of mastery and control and what they’re doing to us as human beings, how they’re changing what the capacities and affordances of humanity are and how we narrate ourselves, to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation, of those sciences that increase our sense of kinship and being one of many, many neighbors.

And that’s an almost impossible persuasion to rouse yourself from if you don’t have allies. And I think the one hopeful thing about the present is the number of people trying to challenge that consensual understanding and break away into a new way of looking at human standing is growing.

And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless.

And I just head out. I head out based on what the day has to offer. And to have that come first has really changed not only how I write, but what I’ve been writing. And I think it really shows in “Bewilderment.” It’s a totally different kind of book from my previous 12.

the marvelous thing about the work, which continues to get more sophisticated and continues to turn up newer and newer astonishments, is that there was odd kind of reciprocal interdependence and cooperation across the species barrier, that Douglas firs and birches were actually involved in these sharing back and forth of essential nutrients. And that’s a whole new way of looking at forest.

she began to see that the forests were actually wired up in very complex and identifiable ways and that there was an enormous system of resource sharing going on underground, that trees were sharing not only sugars and the hydrocarbons necessary for survival, but also secondary metabolites. And these were being passed back and forth, both symbiotically between the trees and the fungi, but also across the network to other trees so that there were actually trees in wired up, fungally-connected forests where large, dominant, healthy trees were subsidizing, as it were, trees that were injured or not in favorable positions or damaged in some way or just failing to thrive.

so when I was still pretty much a card-carrying member of that culture, I had this sense that to become a better person and to get ahead and to really make more of myself, I had to be as productive as possible. And that meant waking up every morning and getting 1,000 words that I was proud of. And it’s interesting that I would even settle on a quantitative target. That’s very typical for that kind of mindset that I’m talking about — 1,000 words and then you’re free, and then you can do what you want with the day.

there will be a threshold, as there have been for these other great social transformations that we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades where somehow it goes from an outsider position to absolutely mainstream and common sense.

I am persuaded by those scholars who have showed the degree to which the concept of nature is itself an artificial construction that’s born of cultures of human separatism. I believe that everything that life does is part of the living enterprise, and that includes the construction of cities. And there is no question at all the warning that you just gave about nostalgia creating a false binary between the built world and the true natural world is itself a form of cultural isolation.

Religion is a technology to discipline, to discipline certain parts of the human impulse. A lot of the book revolves around the decoded neurofeedback machine, which is a very real literalization of a technology, of changing the way we think

one of the things I think that we have to take seriously is that we have created technologies to supercharge some parts of our natural impulse, the capitalism I think should be understood as a technology to supercharge the growth impulse, and it creates some wonders out of that and some horrors out of that.

richard powersSure. I base my machine on existing technology. Decoded neurofeedback is a kind of nascent field of exploration. You can read about it; it’s been publishing results for a decade. I first came across it in 2013. It involves using fMRI to record the brain activity of a human being who is learning a process, interacting with an object or engaged in a certain emotional state. That neural activity is recorded and stored as a data structure. A second subsequent human being is then also scanned in real time and fed kinds of feedback based on their own internal neural activity as determined by a kind of software analysis of their fMRI data structures.

And they are queued little by little to approximate, to learn how to approximate, the recorded states of the original subject. When I first read about this, I did get a little bit of a revelation. I did feel my skin pucker and think, if pushed far enough, this would be something like a telepathy conduit. It would be a first big step in answering that age-old question of what does it feel like to be something other than we are

in the book I simply take that basic concept and extend it, juke it up a little bit, blur the line between what the reader might think is possible right now and what they might wonder about, and maybe even introduce possibilities for this empathetic transference

ezra kleinOne thing I loved about the role this played in the book is that it’s highlighting its inverse. So a reader might look at this and say, wow, wouldn’t that be cool if we had a machine that could in real time change how we think and change our neural pathways and change our mental state in a particular direction? But of course, all of society is that machine,

Robin and Theo are in an airport. And you’ve got TVs everywhere playing the news which is to say playing a constant loop of outrage, and disaster, and calamity. And Robbie, who’s going through these neural feedback sessions during this period, turns to his dad and says, “Dad, you know how the training’s rewiring my brain? This is what is rewiring everybody else.”

ezra kleinI think Marshall McLuhan knew it all. I really do. Not exactly what it would look like, but his view and Postman’s view that we are creating a digital global nervous system is a way they put it, it was exactly right. A nervous system, it was such the exact right metaphor.

the great insight of McLuhan, to me, what now gets called the medium is the message is this idea that the way media acts upon us is not in the content it delivers. The point of Twitter is not the link that you click or even the tweet that you read; it is that the nature and structure of the Twitter system itself begins to act on your system, and you become more like it.If you watch a lot of TV, you become more like TV. If you watch a lot of Twitter, you become more like Twitter, Facebook more like Facebook. Your identities become more important to you — that the content is distraction from the medium, and the medium changes you

it is happening to all of us in ways that at least we are not engaging in intentionally, not at that level of how do we want to be transformed.

richard powersI believe that the digital neural system is now so comprehensive that the idea that you could escape it somewhere, certainly not in the Smokies, even more remotely, I think, becomes more and more laughable. Yeah, and to build on this idea of the medium being the message, not the way in which we become more like the forms and affordances of the medium is that we begin to expect that those affordances, the method in which those media are used, the physiological dependencies and castes of behavior and thought that are required to operate them and interact with them are actual — that they’re real somehow, and that we just take them into human nature and say no, this is what we’ve always wanted and we’ve simply been able to become more like our true selves.

Well, the warpage in our sense of time, the warpage in our sense of place, are profound. The ways in which digital feedback and the affordances of social media and all the rest have changed our expectations with regard to what we need to concentrate on, what we need to learn for ourselves, are changing profoundly.

If you look far enough back, you can find Socrates expressing great anxiety and suspicion about the ways in which writing is going to transform the human brain and human expectation. He was worried that somehow it was going to ruin our memories. Well, it did up to a point — nothing like the way the digital technologies have ruined our memories.

my tradition is Jewish, the Sabbath is a technology, is a technology to create a different relationship between the human being, and time, and growth, and productive society than you would have without the Sabbath which is framed in terms of godliness but is also a way of creating separation from the other impulses of the weak.

Governments are a technology, monogamy is a technology, a religiously driven technology, but now one that is culturally driven. And these things do good and they do bad. I’m not making an argument for any one of them in particular. But the idea that we would need to invent something wholly new to come up with a way to change the way human beings act is ridiculous

My view of the story of this era is that capitalism was one of many forces, and it has become, in many societies, functionally the only one that it was in relationship with religion, it was in relationship with more rooted communities.

it has become not just an economic system but a belief system, and it’s a little bit untrammeled. I’m not an anti-capitalist person, but I believe it needs countervailing forces. And my basic view is that it doesn’t have them anymore.

the book does introduce this kind of fable, this kind of thought experiment about the way the affordances that a new and slightly stronger technology of empathy might deflect. First of all, the story of a little boy and then the story of his father who’s scrambling to be a responsible single parent. And then, beyond that, the community of people who hear about this boy and become fascinated with him as a narrative, which again ripples outward through these digital technologies in ways that can’t be controlled or whose consequences can be foreseen.

I’ve talked about it before is something I’ve said is that I think a push against, functionally, materialism and want is an important weight in our society that we need. And when people say it is the way we’ll deal with climate change in the three to five year time frame, I become much more skeptical because to the point of things like the technology you have in the book with neural feedback, I do think one of the questions you have to ask is, socially and culturally, how do you move people’s minds so you can then move their politics?

You’re going to need something, it seems to me, outside of politics, that changes humans’ sense of themselves more fundamentally. And that takes a minute at the scale of billions.

richard powersWell, you are correct. And I don’t think it’s giving away any great reveal in the book to say that a reader who gets far enough into the story probably has this moment of recursive awareness where they, he or she comes to understand that what Robin is doing in this gradual training on the cast of mind of some other person is precisely what they’re doing in the act of reading the novel “Bewilderment” — by living this act of active empathy for these two characters, they are undergoing their own kind of neurofeedback.

The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable it is to feel a kind of spiritual awe. And that certainly makes it easier to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don’t think those are incommensurable or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think to invoke one last time that Buddhist precept of interbeing, I think there is a kind of interbeing between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment and the desire to have a spiritual affinity and shared fate with the world out there. They’re really the same project.

richard powersWell, sure. If we turn back to the new forestry again and researchers like Suzanne Simard who were showing the literal interconnectivity across species boundaries and the cooperation of resource sharing between different species in a forest, that is rigorous science, rigorous reproducible science. And it does participate in that central principle of practice, or collection of practices, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish and ego and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction.

I’ve begun to see people beginning to build out of the humbling sciences a worldview that seems quite spiritual. And as you’re somebody who seems to me to have done that and it has changed your life, would you reflect on that a bit?

So much of the book is about the possibility of life beyond Earth. Tell me a bit about the role that’s playing. Why did you make the possibility of alien life in the way it might look and feel and evolve and act so central in a book about protecting and cherishing life here?

richard powersI’m glad that we’re slipping this in at the end because yes this framing of the book around this question of are we alone or does the universe want life it’s really important. Theo, Robin’s father, is an astrobiologist.

Imagine that everything happens just right so that every square inch of this place is colonized by new forms of experiments, new kinds of life. And the father trying to entertain his son with the story of this remarkable place in the sun just stopping him and saying, Dad, come on, that’s asking too much. Get real, that’s science fiction. That’s the vision that I had when I finished the book, an absolutely limitless sense of just how lucky we’ve had it here.

one thing I kept thinking about that didn’t make it into the final book but exists as a kind of parallel story in my own head is the father and son on some very distant planet in some very distant star, many light years from here, playing that same game. And the father saying, OK, now imagine a world that’s just the right size, and it has plate tectonics, and it has water, and it has a nearby moon to stabilize its rotation, and it has incredible security and safety from asteroids because of other large planets in the solar system.

they make this journey across the universe through all kinds of incubators, all kinds of petri dishes for life and the possibilities of life. And rather than answer the question — so where is everybody? — it keeps deferring the question, it keeps making that question more subtle and stranger

For the purposes of the book, Robin, who desperately believes in the sanctity of life beyond himself, begs his father for these nighttime, bedtime stories, and Theo gives him easy travel to other planets. Father and son going to a new planet based on the kinds of planets that Theo’s science is turning up and asking this question, what would life look like if it was able to get started here?

The state law, referred to as HB 20, makes it illegal for large social networks like Facebook and Twitter to "block, ban, remove, de-platform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression."

HB 20 does carve out exemptions, including those that allow social networks to remove content that "directly incites criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group" based on certain characteristics, or that "is unlawful expression."

We need to fix social networks by removing toxic content. This month's appeals court ruling does the exact opposite and could even deal a fatal blow to social media as we know it. The only thing worse than not fixing the social platforms we have now would be to see them be subject to a constant slew of lawsuits or devolve into platforms that become bastions of hate speech and misinformation. Let's hope Congress doesn't let us down.

traditionally “masculine” virtues are not exclusively male. Women who successfully model these attributes are all around us

Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—” is one of the purest distillations of restraint as a traditional manly virtue. It begins with the words “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The entire work speaks of the necessity of calmness and courage.

Stoicism carried to excess can become a dangerous form of emotional repression, a stifling of necessary feelings. But the fact that the kind of patience and perseverance that marks stoicism can be taken too far is not to say that we should shun it. In times of conflict and crisis, it is the calm man or woman who can see clearly.

If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media — especially Twitter these days — or listening to right-wing news outlets, you’ll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.

Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.

But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness

Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.

Jonah Goldberg wrote an important piece cataloging the sheer pettiness of the young online right. “Everywhere I look these days,” he wrote, “I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks.” As Jonah noted, there are those who now believe it shows “courage and strength to be coarse or bigoted.”

Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.

American men are in desperate need of virtuous purpose.

I reject the idea that traditional masculinity, properly understood, is, “on the whole, harmful.” I recognize that it can be abused, but it is good to confront life with a sense of proportion, with calm courage and conviction.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received reflects that wisdom. Early in my legal career, a retired federal judge read a brief that I’d drafted and admonished me to “write with regret, not outrage.”

Husband your anger, he told me. Have patience. Gain perspective. So then, when something truly is terrible, your outrage will mean something. It was the legal admonition against crying wolf.

“I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the effects on the people in turn change the classifications,” he wrote in “Making Up People

His work in the philosophy of science was groundbreaking: He departed from the preoccupation with questions that had long concerned philosophers. Arguing that science was just as much about intervention as it was about representation, be helped bring experimentation to center stage.

Regarding one such question — whether unseen phenomena like quarks and electrons were real or merely the theoretical constructs of physicists — he argued for reality in the case of phenomena that figured in experiments, citing as an example an experiment at Stanford that involved spraying electrons and positrons into a ball of niobium to detect electric charges. “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote, “if you can spray them, they’re real.”

His book “The Emergence of Probability” (1975), which is said to have inspired hundreds of books by other scholars, examined how concepts of statistical probability have evolved over time, shaping the way we understand not just arcane fields like quantum physics but also everyday life.

“I was trying to understand what happened a few hundred years ago that made it possible for our world to be dominated by probabilities,” he said in a 2012 interview with the journal Public Culture. “We now live in a universe of chance, and everything we do — health, sports, sex, molecules, the climate — takes place within a discourse of probabilities.”

Whatever the subject, whatever the audience, one idea that pervades all his work is that “science is a human enterprise,” Ragnar Fjelland and Roger Strand of the University of Bergen in Norway wrote when Professor Hacking won the Holberg Prize. “It is always created in a historical situation, and to understand why present science is as it is, it is not sufficient to know that it is ‘true,’ or confirmed. We have to know the historical context of its emergence.”

Hacking often argued that as the human sciences have evolved, they have created categories of people, and that people have subsequently defined themselves as falling into those categories. Thus does human reality become socially constructed.

In 2000, he became the first Anglophone to win a permanent position at the Collège de France, where he held the chair in the philosophy and history of scientific concepts until he retired in 2006.

“I call this the ‘looping effect,’” he added. “Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before.”

In “Why Race Still Matters,” a 2005 article in the journal Daedalus, he explored how anthropologists developed racial categories by extrapolating from superficial physical characteristics, with lasting effects — including racial oppression. “Classification and judgment are seldom separable,” he wrote. “Racial classification is evaluation.”

Similarly, he once wrote, in the field of mental health the word “normal” “uses a power as old as Aristotle to bridge the fact/value distinction, whispering in your ear that what is normal is also right.”

In his influential writings about autism, Professor Hacking charted the evolution of the diagnosis and its profound effects on those diagnosed, which in turn broadened the definition to include a greater number of people.

Encouraging children with autism to think of themselves that way “can separate the child from ‘normalcy’ in a way that is not appropriate,” he told Public Culture. “By all means encourage the oddities. By no means criticize the oddities.”

His emphasis on historical context also illuminated what he called transient mental illnesses, which appear to be so confined 0cto their time 0c 0cthat they can vanish when times change.

“hysterical fugue” was a short-lived epidemic of compulsive wandering that emerged in Europe in the 1880s, largely among middle-class men who had become transfixed by stories of exotic locales and the lure of trave

His intellectual tendencies were unmistakable from an early age. “When he was 3 or 4 years old, he would sit and read the dictionary,” Jane Hacking said. “His parents were completely baffled.”

He wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, if the whole universe was governed by nonlocality — if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”“That’s what you should be writing about,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’”

“The curriculum covers topics from causal modeling and probability to game theory and cognitive science,” read a website promising teens a summer of Rationalist learning. “How can we understand our own reasoning, behavior, and emotions? How can we think more clearly and better achieve our goals?”

Some lived in group houses. Some practiced polyamory. “They are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson, a University of Texas professor who has stayed in one of the group houses.

For Kelsey Piper, who embraced these ideas in high school, around 2010, the movement was about learning “how to do good in a world that changes very rapidly.”

Yes, the community thought about A.I., she said, but it also thought about reducing the price of health care and slowing the spread of disease.

Slate Star Codex, which sprung up in 2013, helped her develop a “calibrated trust” in the medical system. Many people she knew, she said, felt duped by psychiatrists, for example, who they felt weren’t clear about the costs and benefits of certain treatment.

That was not the Rationalist way.

“There is something really appealing about somebody explaining where a lot of those ideas are coming from and what a lot of the questions are,” she said.

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab backed by a billion dollars from Microsoft. He was effusive in his praise of the blog.It was, he said, essential reading among “the people inventing the future” in the tech industry.

Mr. Altman, who had risen to prominence as the president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, moved on to other subjects before hanging up. But he called back. He wanted to talk about an essay that appeared on the blog in 2014.The essay was a critique of what Mr. Siskind, writing as Scott Alexander, described as “the Blue Tribe.” In his telling, these were the people at the liberal end of the political spectrum whose characteristics included “supporting gay rights” and “getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots.”

But as the man behind Slate Star Codex saw it, there was one group the Blue Tribe could not tolerate: anyone who did not agree with the Blue Tribe. “Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?” he wrote.

Mr. Altman thought the essay nailed a big problem: In the face of the “internet mob” that guarded against sexism and racism, entrepreneurs had less room to explore new ideas. Many of their ideas, such as intelligence augmentation and genetic engineering, ran afoul of the Blue Tribe.

Mr. Siskind was not a member of the Blue Tribe. He was not a voice from the conservative Red Tribe (“opposing gay marriage,” “getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies”). He identified with something called the Grey Tribe — as did many in Silicon Valley.

The Grey Tribe was characterized by libertarian beliefs, atheism, “vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up,” and “reading lots of blogs,” he wrote. Most significantly, it believed in absolute free speech.

The essay on these tribes, Mr. Altman told me, was an inflection point for Silicon Valley. “It was a moment that people talked about a lot, lot, lot,” he said.

And in some ways, two of the world’s prominent A.I. labs — organizations that are tackling some of the tech industry’s most ambitious and potentially powerful projects — grew out of the Rationalist movement.

In 2005, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, befriended Mr. Yudkowsky and gave money to MIRI. In 2010, at Mr. Thiel’s San Francisco townhouse, Mr. Yudkowsky introduced him to a pair of young researchers named Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis. That fall, with an investment from Mr. Thiel’s firm, the two created an A.I. lab called DeepMind.

Like the Rationalists, they believed that A.I could end up turning against humanity, and because they held this belief, they felt they were among the only ones who were prepared to build it in a safe way.

In 2014, Google bought DeepMind for $650 million. The next year, Elon Musk — who also worried A.I. could destroy the world and met his partner, Grimes, because they shared an interest in a Rationalist thought experiment — founded OpenAI as a DeepMind competitor. Both labs hired from the Rationalist community.

Mr. Aaronson, the University of Texas professor, was turned off by the more rigid and contrarian beliefs of the Rationalists, but he is one of the blog’s biggest champions and deeply admired that it didn’t avoid live-wire topics.

“It must have taken incredible guts for Scott to express his thoughts, misgivings and questions about some major ideological pillars of the modern world so openly, even if protected by a quasi-pseudonym,” he said

In late June of last year, not long after talking to Mr. Altman, the OpenAI chief executive, I approached the writer known as Scott Alexander, hoping to get his views on the Rationalist way and its effect on Silicon Valley. That was when the blog vanished.

The issue, it was clear to me, was that I told him I could not guarantee him the anonymity he’d been writing with. In fact, his real name was easy to find because people had shared it online for years and he had used it on a piece he’d written for a scientific journal. I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind.

More than 7,500 people signed a petition urging The Times not to publish his name, including many prominent figures in the tech industry. “Putting his full name in The Times,” the petitioners said, “would meaningfully damage public discourse, by discouraging private citizens from sharing their thoughts in blog form.” On the internet, many in Silicon Valley believe, everyone has the right not only to say what they want but to say it anonymously.

I spoke with Manoel Horta Ribeiro, a computer science researcher who explores social networks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He was worried that Slate Star Codex, like other communities, was allowing extremist views to trickle into the influential tech world. “A community like this gives voice to fringe groups,” he said. “It gives a platform to people who hold more extreme views.”

I assured her my goal was to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness. But she felt that discussing both critics and supporters could be unfair. What I needed to do, she said, was somehow prove statistically which side was right.

When I asked Mr. Altman if the conversation on sites like Slate Star Codex could push people toward toxic beliefs, he said he held “some empathy” for these concerns. But, he added, “people need a forum to debate ideas.”

In August, Mr. Siskind restored his old blog posts to the internet. And two weeks ago, he relaunched his blog on Substack, a company with ties to both Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. He gave the blog a new title: Astral Codex Ten. He hinted that Substack paid him $250,000 for a year on the platform. And he indicated the company would give him all the protection he needed.

That allows quantum computers to make many calculations in one pass, while digital ones have to perform each calculation separately. By speeding up computation, quantum computers could potentially solve big, complex problems in fields like chemistry and materials science that are out of reach today.

When Google researchers made their supremacy claim in 2019, they said their quantum computer performed a calculation in 3 minutes 20 seconds that would take about 10,000 years on a state-of-the-art conventional supercomputer.

The IBM researchers in the new study performed a different task, one that interests physicists. They used a quantum processor with 127 qubits to simulate the behavior of 127 atom-scale bar magnets — tiny enough to be governed by the spooky rules of quantum mechanics — in a magnetic field. That is a simple system known as the Ising model, which is often used to study magnetism.

This problem is too complex for a precise answer to be calculated even on the largest, fastest supercomputers.

On the quantum computer, the calculation took less than a thousandth of a second to complete. Each quantum calculation was unreliable — fluctuations of quantum noise inevitably intrude and induce errors — but each calculation was quick, so it could be performed repeatedly.

Indeed, for many of the calculations, additional noise was deliberately added, making the answers even more unreliable. But by varying the amount of noise, the researchers could tease out the specific characteristics of the noise and its effects at each step of the calculation.“We can amplify the noise very precisely, and then we can rerun that same circuit,” said Abhinav Kandala, the manager of quantum capabilities and demonstrations at IBM Quantum and an author of the Nature paper. “And once we have results of these different noise levels, we can extrapolate back to what the result would have been in the absence of noise.”In essence, the researchers were able to subtract the effects of noise from the unreliable quantum calculations, a process they call error mitigation.

Altogether, the computer performed the calculation 600,000 times, converging on an answer for the overall magnetization produced by the 127 bar magnets.

Although an Ising model with 127 bar magnets is too big, with far too many possible configurations, to fit in a conventional computer, classical algorithms can produce approximate answers, a technique similar to how compression in JPEG images throws away less crucial data to reduce the size of the file while preserving most of the image’s details

Certain configurations of the Ising model can be solved exactly, and both the classical and quantum algorithms agreed on the simpler examples. For more complex but solvable instances, the quantum and classical algorithms produced different answers, and it was the quantum one that was correct.

Thus, for other cases where the quantum and classical calculations diverged and no exact solutions are known, “there is reason to believe that the quantum result is more accurate,”

Mr. Anand is currently trying to add a version of error mitigation for the classical algorithm, and it is possible that could match or surpass the performance of the quantum calculations.

In the long run, quantum scientists expect that a different approach, error correction, will be able to detect and correct calculation mistakes, and that will open the door for quantum computers to speed ahead for many uses.

Error correction is already used in conventional computers and data transmission to fix garbles. But for quantum computers, error correction is likely years away, requiring better processors able to process many more qubits

“This is one of the simplest natural science problems that exists,” Dr. Gambetta said. “So it’s a good one to start with. But now the question is, how do you generalize it and go to more interesting natural science problems?”

Those might include figuring out the properties of exotic materials, accelerating drug discovery and modeling fusion reactions.

What the research has found is that the brains of trans people are unique: neither female nor male, exactly, but something distinct.

But what does that mean, a male brain, or a female brain, or even a transgender one?

It’s a fraught topic, because brains are a collection of characteristics, rather than a binary classification of either/or

yet scientists continue to study the brain in hopes of understanding whether a sense of the gendered self can, at least in part, be the result of neurology

Well, not entirely. Because not every person with a Y chromosome is male, and not every person with a double X is female. The world is full of people with other combinations: XXY (or Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX (or Trisomy X), XXXY, and so on. There’s even something called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a condition that keeps the brains of people with a Y from absorbing the information in that chromosome. Most of these people develop as female, and may not even know about their condition until puberty — or even later.

t there’s a problem with using neurology as an argument for trans acceptance — it suggests that, on some level, there is something wrong with transgender people, that we are who we are as a result of a sickness or a biological hiccup.

trying to open people’s hearts by saying “Check out my brain!” can do more harm than good, because this line of argument delegitimizes the experiences of many trans folks. It suggests that there’s only one way to be trans — to feel trapped in the wrong body, to go through transition, and to wind up, when all is said and done, on the opposite-gender pole. It suggests that the quest trans people go on can only be considered successful if it ends with fitting into the very society that rejected us in the first place.

All the science tells us, in the end, is that a biological male — or female — is not any one thing, but a collection of possibilities.

No one who embarks upon a life as a trans person in this country is doing so out of caprice, or a whim, or a delusion. We are living these wondrous and perilous lives for one reason only — because our hearts demand it.

what we need now is not new legislation to make things harder. What we need now is understanding, not cruelty. What we need now is not hatred, but love.

the important thing is not that they feel like a woman, or a man, or something else. What matters most is the plaintive desire, to be free to feel the way I feel.

The researchers used facial-recognition software to map out specific points on a person’s face, then applied machine-learning algorithms to the facial points to obtain empirical measures for three key face impressions—trustworthiness, dominance and attractiveness.  

They examined the association of these impressions with the accuracy of analysts’ quarterly forecasts, drawn from the Institutional Brokers Estimate System

Analyst accuracy was determined by comparing each analyst’s prediction error—the difference between their prediction and the actual earnings—with that of all analysts for that same company and quarter.

For an average stock valued at $100, Prof. Teoh says, analysts ranked as looking most trustworthy were 25 cents more accurate in earnings-per-share forecasts than the analysts who were ranked as looking least trustworthy

Similarly, most-dominant-looking analysts were 52 cents more accurate in their EPS forecast than least-dominant-looking analysts.

The relation between a dominant face and accuracy, meanwhile, was significant before and after the regulation was enacted, the analysts say. This suggests that dominant-looking male analysts are always able to obtain information,

While forecasts of female analysts regardless of facial characteristics were on average more accurate than those of their male counterparts, the forecasts of women who were seen as more-dominant-looking were significantly less accurate than their male counterparts.  

Says Prof. Todorov: “Women who look dominant are more likely to be viewed negatively because it goes against the cultural stereotype.

In short, a complex and evolving system — whether that’s a flock of gold finches or a nebula or the English language — will produce ever more diverse and intricately detailed states and configurations of itself.

Some of these more diverse and intricate configurations, the scientists write, are shed and forgotten over time. The configurations that persist are ones that find some utility or novel function in a process akin to natural selection, but a selection process driven by the passing-on of information rather than just the sowing of biological genes

Have they finally glimpsed, I wonder, the connectedness and symbiotic co-evolution of their own scientific ideas with those of the world’s writers

Have they learned to describe in their own quantifying language that cradle from which both our disciplines have emerged and the firmament on which they both stand — the hearing and telling of stories in order to exist?

Have they quantified the quality of all existent matter, living and not: that all things inherit a story in data to tell, and that our stories are told by the very forms we take to tell them? 

“Is there a universal basis for selection? Is there a more quantitative formalism underlying this conjectured conceptual equivalence—a formalism rooted in the transfer of information?,” they ask of the world’s disparate phenomena. “The answer to both questions is yes.”

Yes. They’ve glimpsed it, whether they know it or not. Sing to me, O Muse, of functional information and its complex diversity.

The principle of complexity evolving at its own pace when left to its own devices, independent of time but certainly in a dance with it, is nothing new. Not in science, nor in its closest humanities kin, science and nature writing. Give things time and nourishing environs, protect them from your own intrusions and — living organisms or not — they will produce abundant enlacement of forms.

This is how poetry was born from the same larynxes and phalanges that tendered nuclear equations: We featherless bipeds gave language our time and delighted attendance until its forms were so multivariate that they overflowed with inevitable utility.

In her Pulitzer-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” nature writer Annie Dillard explains plainly that evolution is the vehicle of such intricacy in the natural world, as much as it is in our own thoughts and actions. 

“The stability of simple forms is the sturdy base from which more complex, stable forms might arise, forming in turn more complex forms,” she explains, drawing on the undercap frills of mushrooms and filament-fine filtering tubes inside human kidneys to illustrate her point. 

“Utility to the creature is evolution’s only aesthetic consideration. Form follows function in the created world, so far as I know, and the creature that functions, however bizarre, survives to perpetuate its form,” writes Dillard.

“Of the multiplicity of forms, I know nothing. Except that, apparently, anything goes. This holds for forms of behavior as well as design — the mantis munching her mate, the frog wintering in mud.” 

She notes that, of all forms of life we’ve ever known to exist, only about 10% are still alive. What extravagant multiplicity. 

“Intricacy is that which is given from the beginning, the birthright, and in the intricacy is the hardiness of complexity that ensures against the failures of all life,” Dillard writes. “The wonder is — given the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning texture of time — the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous.”

“This paper, and the reason why I'm so proud of it, is because it really represents a connection between science and the philosophy of science that perhaps offers a new lens into why we see everything that we see in the universe,” lead scientist Michael Wong told Motherboard in a recent interview. 

Wong is an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science. In his team’s paper, that bridge toward scientific philosophy is not only preceded by a long history of literary creativity but directly theorizes about the creative act itself.  

“The creation of art and music may seem to have very little to do with the maintenance of society, but their origins may stem from the need to transmit information and create bonds among communities, and to this day, they enrich life in innumerable ways,” Wong’s team writes.  

“Perhaps, like eddies swirling off of a primary flow field, selection pressures for ancillary functions can become so distant from the core functions of their host systems that they can effectively be treated as independently evolving systems,” the authors add, pointing toward the elaborate mating dance culture observed in birds of paradise.

“Perhaps it will be humanity’s ability to learn, invent, and adopt new collective modes of being that will lead to its long-term persistence as a planetary phenomenon. In light of these considerations, we suspect that the general principles of selection and function discussed here may also apply to the evolution of symbolic and social systems.”

The Mekhilta teaches that all Ten Commandments were pronounced in a single utterance. Similarly, the Maharsha says the Torah’s 613 mitzvoth are only perceived as a plurality because we’re time-bound humans, even though they together form a singular truth which is indivisible from He who expressed it. 

Or, as the Mishna would have it, “the creations were all made in generic form, and they gradually expanded.” 

Like swirling eddies off of a primary flow field.

“O Lord, how manifold are thy works!,” cried out David in his psalm. “In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.” 

In all things, then — from poetic inventions, to rare biodiverse ecosystems, to the charted history of our interstellar equations — it is best if we conserve our world’s intellectual and physical diversity, for both the study and testimony of its immeasurable multiplicity.

Because, whether wittingly or not, science is singing the tune of the humanities. And whether expressed in algebraic logic or ancient Greek hymn, its chorus is the same throughout the universe: Be fruitful and multiply. 

Both intricate configurations of art and matter arise and fade according to their shared characteristic, long-known by students of the humanities: each have been graced with enough time to attend to the necessary affairs of their most enduring pleasures. 

we lack practical knowledge about how to give one another the attention we crave

Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.

If I can shine positive attention on others, I can help them to blossom. If I see potential in others, they may come to see potential in themselves. True understanding is one of the most generous gifts any of us can give to another.

I see the results, too, in the epidemic of invisibility I encounter as a journalist. I often find myself interviewing people who tell me they feel unseen and disrespected

I’ve been working on a book called “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” I wanted it to be a practical book — so that I would learn these skills myself, and also, I hope, teach people how to understand others, how to make them feel respected, valued and understood.

I wanted to learn these skills for utilitarian reasons

If I’m going to work with someone, I don’t just want to see his superficial technical abilities. I want to understand him more deeply — to know whether he is calm in a crisis, comfortable with uncertainty or generous to colleagues.

I wanted to learn these skills for moral reasons

Many of the most productive researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with an electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. Nyquist really listened to their challenges, got inside their heads, brought out the best in them. Nyquist, too, was an illuminator.

Finally, I wanted to learn these skills for reasons of national survival

We evolved to live with small bands of people like ourselves. Now we live in wonderfully diverse societies, but our social skills are inadequate for the divisions that exist. We live in a brutalizing time.

In any collection of humans, there are diminishers and there are illuminators. Diminishers are so into themselves, they make others feel insignificant

They stereotype and label. If they learn one thing about you, they proceed to make a series of assumptions about who you must be.

Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people.

hey have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know how to ask the right questions at the right times — so that they can see things, at least a bit, from another’s point of view. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, respected, lit up.

A biographer of the novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “To speak with him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to offer people that kind of hospitality.

social clumsiness I encounter too frequently. I’ll be leaving a party or some gathering and I’ll realize: That whole time, nobody asked me a single question. I estimate that only 30 percent of the people in the world are good question askers. The rest are nice people, but they just don’t ask. I think it’s because they haven’t been taught to and so don’t display basic curiosity about others.

Many years ago, patent lawyers at Bell Labs were trying to figure out why some employees were much more productive than others.

Illuminators are a joy to be around

The gift of attention.

Each of us has a characteristic way of showing up in the world. A person who radiates warmth will bring out the glowing sides of the people he meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: It creates, brings aspects of things into being.”

When Jimmy sees a person — any person — he is seeing a creature with infinite value and dignity, made in the image of God. He is seeing someone so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person.

Accompaniment.

Accompaniment is an other-centered way of being with people during the normal routines of life.

If we are going to accompany someone well, we need to abandon the efficiency mind-set. We need to take our time and simply delight in another person’s way of being

I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.” These are the sorts of people who are just great company, who turn conversation into a form of play and encourage you to be yourself. It’s a great talent, to be lingerable.

Other times, a good accompanist does nothing more than practice the art of presence, just being there.

The art of conversation.

If you tell me something important and then I paraphrase it back to you, what psychologists call “looping,” we can correct any misimpressions that may exist between us.

Be a loud listener. When another person is talking, you want to be listening so actively you’re burning calories.

He’s continually responding to my comments with encouraging affirmations, with “amen,” “aha” and “yes!” I love talking to that guy.

I no longer ask people: What do you think about that? Instead, I ask: How did you come to believe that? That gets them talking about the people and experiences that shaped their values.

Storify whenever possible

People are much more revealing and personal when they are telling stories.

Do the looping, especially with adolescents

If you want to know how the people around you see the world, you have to ask them. Here are a few tips I’ve collected from experts on how to become a better conversationalist:

Turn your partner into a narrator

People don’t go into enough detail when they tell you a story. If you ask specific follow-up questions — Was your boss screaming or irritated when she said that to you? What was her tone of voice? — then they will revisit the moment in a more concrete way and tell a richer story

If somebody tells you he is having trouble with his teenager, don’t turn around and say: “I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my own Susan.” You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself.

Don’t be a topper

Big questions.

The quality of your conversations will depend on the quality of your questions

As adults, we get more inhibited with our questions, if we even ask them at all. I’ve learned we’re generally too cautious. People are dying to tell you their stories. Very often, no one has ever asked about them.

So when I first meet people, I tend to ask them where they grew up. People are at their best when talking about their childhoods. Or I ask where they got their names. That gets them talking about their families and ethnic backgrounds.

After you’ve established trust with a person, it’s great to ask 30,000-foot questions, ones that lift people out of their daily vantage points and help them see themselves from above.

These are questions like: What crossroads are you at? Most people are in the middle of some life transition; this question encourages them to step back and describe theirs

I’ve learned it’s best to resist this temptation. My first job in any conversation across difference or inequality is to stand in other people’s standpoint and fully understand how the world looks to them. I’ve found it’s best to ask other people three separate times and in three different ways about what they have just said. “I want to understand as much as possible. What am I missing here?”

Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in? And: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Or: If you died today, what would you regret not doing?

“What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?

“What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?”

“What is the gift you currently hold in exile?,” meaning, what talent are you not using

“Why you?” Why was it you who started that business? Why was it you who ran for school board? She wants to understand why a person felt the call of responsibility. She wants to understand motivation.

“How do your ancestors show up in your life?” But it led to a great conversation in which each of us talked about how we’d been formed by our family heritages and cultures. I’ve come to think of questioning as a moral practice. When you’re asking good questions, you’re adopting a posture of humility, and you’re honoring the other person.

Stand in their standpoint

I used to feel the temptation to get defensive, to say: “You don’t know everything I’m dealing with. You don’t know that I’m one of the good guys here.”

If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is the chapter about?

every conversation takes place on two levels

The official conversation is represented by the words we are saying on whatever topic we are talking about. The actual conversations occur amid the ebb and flow of emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment I am showing you respect or disrespect, making you feel a little safer or a little more threatened.

If we let fear and a sense of threat build our conversation, then very quickly our motivations will deteriorate

If, on the other hand, I show persistent curiosity about your viewpoint, I show respect. And as the authors of “Crucial Conversations” observe, in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices it, and when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.

the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch argued that the essential moral skill is being considerate to others in the complex circumstances of everyday life. Morality is about how we interact with each other minute by minute.

I used to think the wise person was a lofty sage who doled out life-altering advice in the manner of Yoda or Dumbledore or Solomon. But now I think the wise person’s essential gift is tender receptivity.

The illuminators offer the privilege of witness. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations and episodes we tell and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life — intimacy versus independence, control versus freedom — and understand that our current selves are just where we are right now on our long continuum of growth.

The really good confidants — the people we go to when we are troubled — are more like coaches than philosopher kings.

They take in your story, accept it, but prod you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale.

They’re not here to fix you; they are here simply to help you edit your story so that it’s more honest and accurate. They’re here to call you by name, as beloved

They see who you are becoming before you do and provide you with a reputation you can then go live into.

there has been a comprehensive shift in my posture. I think I’m more approachable, vulnerable. I know more about human psychology than I used to. I have a long way to go, but I’m evidence that people can change, sometimes dramatically, even in middle and older age.

onic constipation, a functional bowel disorder, affects approximately 14% of adults worldwide [1]. Slow transit constipation (STC) is the major cause of chronic constipation which is characterized by markedly prolonged colonic transit time as a result of the colonic motility function disorde

Usually, patients with STC suffer from a common sense of abdominal pain, nausea, depression and sickness, which seriously influence their social ability and health-related quality of life [4–6

Current clinical treatments include cathartics, prokinetics and aggressive surgery which can increase bowel movement frequency to a certain degree.

However, pharmacological interventions is prone to drug dependency and relapse after drug withdrawal [3]

Surgical treatments such as subtotal colectomy and total colectomy in STC patients may adversely affect the quality of life due to the risk of postoperative diarrhea or incontinence, and result in a heavy healthcare burden

The enteric nervous system (ENS), located in the intestinal wall, regulates various functions including contraction of intestine, homeostasis and blood flow [10]. As the ‘second brain’, the ENS contains large amounts of neurons working independently from the central nervous system [11]. Researches have identified that STCs are mostly caused by disorders of the relevant nerves, especially the ENS [12,13].

McCallum et al. [35] found that gastric electrical stimulation in combination with pharmacological treatment could also enhance emptying in patients with gastroparesis. Especially, gastric electrical stimulation has been approved as a clinical therapy method for gastroparesis and obesity in European and American countries [36].

we employed pulse train stimulation and implanted electrodes at the proximal colon in dogs.

After CES treatment, we observed the colonic transit time of the sham treatment group was longer than that of CES treatment and control groups, and electrical stimulation significantly enhanced the colonic electromyogram (EMG) signal.

histopathology and TEM analysis showed increased ganglia and synaptic vesicles existing in the colon myenteric plexus of the CES treatment group as compared with that of the sham CES group

Our results suggested that CES might reduce the degeneration of the myenteric plexus neurons, thereby contributing to the therapeutic effect on STC beagles.

the defecating frequency and the feces characteristics of STC beagles returned to normal after CES treatment. The result indicated that CES could improve the symptoms of STC.

The colonic EMG signal was strongly promoted by CES

Especially, the colonic EMG signal of the beagles with STC was remarkably enhanced by CES (Figure 3), indicating that CES could not only improve the colonic content emptying, but also enhance the EMG signal to promote colonic motility.

Colonic electrical stimulation (CES), a valuable alternative for the treatment of STC, was reported to improve the colon motility by adjusting the bioelectrical activity in animal models or patients with STC [17]. However, little report focuses on the underlying nervous mechanism to normalize the delayed colonic emptying and relieve symptoms. We hypothesized that CES may also repair the disorders of the relevant nerves and then improve the colonic motility.

The first study regarding the CES to modulate colonic motility was performed by Hughes et al. [37]. Since then, many researchers employed short-pulse CES in canine descending colon or pig cecum [20,21,38]. Researchers also applied long-pulse CES to stimulate the colon of human or animals [39]

Recently, studies showed that the prokinetic effect of pulse train CES is better than that of short-pulse CES or long-pulse CES [25]

Our study indicated that CES could enhance the colonic motility, and then accelerate the colonic content emptying. Thereafter, we investigated the underlying mechanism and presumed that CES might improve the STC symptom through the repairment of the ENS.

The neuropathy in ENS is considered to be responsible for various kinds of disordered motility including STC and the related pathophysiologic symptoms [40]. In agreement with this view, our study discovered the decreased number of ganglia in the myenteric plexus, as well as the destruction of the enteric nerve axon terminals and synaptic vesicles in the sham CES group beagles

The present study proves that CES with pulse trains has curative effects on the colonic motility and content emptying in STC beagles. The up-regulation of intestinal nerve related proteins such as SYP, PGP9.5, CAD and S-100B in the colonic myenteric plexus suggests that CES might reduce the degeneration of the myenteric plexus neurons, thereby producing the therapeutic effect on STC beagles. Further investigation for the underlying mechanism of nerve regeneration is necessary to better understand how CES promotes the recovery of delayed colonic motility induced by STC.

Just like midlife, quarterlife can bring its own crisis — trying to separate from your parents or caregivers and forge a sense of self is a struggle. But the generation entering adulthood now faces novel, sometimes debilitating, challenges.

Many find themselves so mired in day-to-day monetary concerns, from the relentless crush of student debt to the swelling costs of everything, that they feel unable to consider what they want for themselves long term

“We’ve been constrained by this myth that you graduate from college and you start your life,” she said. Without the social script previous generations followed — graduate college, marry, raise a family — Ms. Byock said her young clients often flailed around in a state of extended adolescence.

nearly one-third of Gen Z adults are living with their parents or other relatives and plan to stay there.

Many young people today struggle to afford college or decide not to attend, and the “existential crisis” that used to hit after graduation descends earlier and earlier

Ms. Byock said to pay attention to what you’re naturally curious about, and not to dismiss your interests as stupid or futile.

Experts said those entering adulthood need clear guidance for how to make it out of the muddle. Here are their top pieces of advice on how to navigate a quarterlife crisis today.

She recommends scheduling reminders to check in with yourself, roughly every three months, to examine where you are in your life and whether you feel stuck or dissatisfied

From there, she said, you can start to identify aspects of your life that you want to change.

“Start to give your own inner life the respect that it’s due,”

But quarterlife is about becoming a whole person, Ms. Byock said, and both groups need to absorb each other’s characteristics to balance themselves out

However, there is a difference between self-interest and self-indulgence, Ms. Byock said. Investigating and interrogating who you are takes work. “It’s not just about choosing your labels and being done,” she said.

Be patient.

Quarterlifers may feel pressure to race through each step of their lives, Ms. Byock said, craving the sense of achievement that comes with completing a task.

But learning to listen to oneself is a lifelong process.

Instead of searching for quick fixes, she said, young adults should think about longer-term goals: starting therapy that stretches beyond a handful of sessions, building healthy nutrition and exercise habits, working toward self-reliance.

“I know that seems sort of absurdly large and huge in scope,” she said. “But it’s allowing ourselves to meander and move through life, versus just ‘Check the boxes and get it right.’”

take stock of your day-to-day life and notice where things are missing. She groups quarterlifers into two categories: “stability types” and “meaning types.”

“Stability types” are seen by others as solid and stable. They prioritize a sense of security, succeed in their careers and may pursue building a family.

“But there’s a sense of emptiness and a sense of faking it,” she said. “They think this couldn’t possibly be all that life is about.”

On the other end of the spectrum, there are “meaning types” who are typically artists; they have intense creative passions but have a hard time dealing with day-to-day tasks

“These are folks for whom doing what society expects of you is so overwhelming and so discordant with their own sense of self that they seem to constantly be floundering,” she said. “They can’t quite figure it out.”

That paralysis is often exacerbated by mounting climate anxiety and the slog of a multiyear pandemic that has left many young people mourning family and friends, or smaller losses like a conventional college experience or the traditions of starting a first job.

Stability types need to think about how to give their lives a sense of passion and purpose. And meaning types need to find security, perhaps by starting with a consistent routine that can both anchor and unlock creativity.

perhaps the prototypical inspiration for staying calm in chaos: Yoda. The Jedi master is “one of the few images we have of what feeling quiet amid extreme pain and apocalypse can look like,

Even when there seems to be little stability externally, she said, quarterlifers can try to create their own steadiness.

establishing habits that help you ground yourself as a young adult is critical because transitional periods make us more susceptible to burnout

He suggests building a practical tool kit of self-care practices, like regularly taking stock of what you’re grateful for, taking controlled breaths and maintaining healthy nutrition and exercise routines. “These are techniques that can help you find clarity,”

Don’t be afraid to make a big change.

It’s important to identify what aspects of your life you have the power to alter, Dr. Brown said. “You can’t change an annoying boss,” he said, “but you might be able to plan a career change.”

That’s easier said than done, he acknowledged, and young adults should weigh the risks of continuing to live in their status quo — staying in their hometown, or lingering in a career that doesn’t excite them — with the potential benefits of trying something new.

quarterlife is typically “the freest stage of the whole life span,

Young adults may have an easier time moving to a new city or starting a new job than their older counterparts would.

Know when to call your parents — and when to call on yourself.

Quarterlife is about the journey from dependence to independence, Ms. Byock said — learning to rely on ourselves, after, for some, growing up in a culture of helicopter parenting and hands-on family dynamics.

there are ways your relationship with your parents can evolve, helping you carve out more independence

That can involve talking about family history and past memories or asking questions about your parents’ upbringing

“You’re transitioning the relationship from one of hierarchy to one of friendship,” she said. “It isn’t just about moving away or getting physical distance.”

Every quarterlifer typically has a moment when they know they need to step away from their parents and to face obstacles on their own

That doesn’t mean you can’t, or shouldn’t, still depend on your parents in moments of crisis, she said. “I don’t think it’s just about never needing one’s parents again,” she said. “But it’s about doing the subtle work within oneself to know: This is a time I need to stand on my own.”

The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year.

Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could put new A.I. technology in phones and homes all over the world.

Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products,

Google has been doing A.I. research for years. Its DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best A.I. research centers in the world, and the company has been a pioneer with A.I. projects, such as self-driving cars and the so-called large language models that are used in the development of chatbots. In recent years, Google has used large language models to improve the quality of its search results, but held off on fully adopting A.I. because it has been prone to generating false and biased statements.

Now the priority is winning control of the industry’s next big thing. Last month, Google released its own chatbot, Bard, but the technology received mixed reviews.

The system would learn what users want to know based on what they’re searching when they begin using it. And it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information. It would also be more conversational — a bit like chatting with a helpful person.

Magi would keep ads in the mix of search results. Search queries that could lead to a financial transaction, such as buying shoes or booking a flight, for example, would still feature ads on their results pages.

Last week, Google invited some employees to test Magi’s features, and it has encouraged them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to judge its ability to hold a conversation. Google is expected to release the tools to the public next month and add more features in the fall, according to the planning document.

The company plans to initially release the features to a maximum of one million people. That number should progressively increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.

Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot

A tool called GIFI would use A.I. to generate images in Google Image results.

Tivoli Tutor, would teach users a new language through open-ended A.I. text conversations.

Yet another product, Searchalong, would let users ask a chatbot questions while surfing the web through Google’s Chrome browser. People might ask the chatbot for activities near an Airbnb rental, for example, and the A.I. would scan the page and the rest of the internet for a response.

“If we are the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new characteristic of search engines, we want to make sure that we’re in this race as well,”