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If Windows or something like it becomes the operating system not just for my desktop but for my world, how much will I actually have to venture out into it? I can have holographic conferences with my colleagues, virtually ski the KT-22 runs at Squaw Valley in California during my downtime and ask my virtual assistant to run my day, my house and my life. After all, I already talk to my phone and it talks back to me. We are BFFs, even though only one of us is actually human.

“A writer must be as objective as a chemist,” Anton Chekhov wrote in 1887. “He must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dung heaps play a very reasonable part in a landscape.”

At the turn of the century, psychology was a field quite unlike what it is now. The theoretical musings of William James were the norm (a wry commenter once noted that William James was the writer, and his brother Henry, the psychologist)

Freud was a breed of psychologist that hardly exists anymore: someone who saw the world as both writer and psychologist, and for whom there was no conflict between the two. That boundary melding allowed him to posit the existence of cognitive mechanisms that wouldn’t be empirically proved for decades,

Freud got it brilliantly right and brilliantly wrong. The rightness is as good a justification as any of the benefits, the necessity even, of knowing how to look through the eyes of a writer. The wrongness is part of the reason that the distinction between writing and experimental psychology has grown far more rigid than it was a century ago.

the signs people associate with liars often have little empirical evidence to support them. Therein lies the psychologist’s distinct role and her necessity. As a writer, you look in order to describe, but you remain free to use that description however you see fit. As a psychologist, you look to describe, yes, but also to verify.

Without verification, we can’t always trust what we see — or rather, what we think we see.

The desire for the world to be what it ought to be and not what it is permeates experimental psychology as much as writing, though. There’s experimental bias and the problem known in the field as “demand characteristics” — when researchers end up finding what they want to find by cuing participants to act a certain way.

IN 1932, when he was in his 70s, Freud gave a series of lectures on psychoanalysis. In his final talk, “A Philosophy of Life,” he focused on clarifying an important caveat to his research: His followers should not be confused by the seemingly internal, and thus possibly subjective, nature of his work. “There is no other source of knowledge of the universe but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations,” he said.

That is what both the psychologist and the writer should strive for: a self-knowledge that allows you to look in order to discover, without agenda, without preconception, without knowing or caring if what you’re seeing is wrong or right in your scheme of the world. It’s harder than it sounds. For one thing, you have to possess the self-knowledge that will allow you to admit when you’re wrong.

Even with the best intentions, objectivity can prove a difficult companion. I left psychology behind because I found its structural demands overly hampering. I couldn’t just pursue interesting lines of inquiry; I had to devise a set of experiments, see how feasible they were, both technically and financially, consider how they would reflect on my career. That meant that most new inquiries never happened — in a sense, it meant that objectivity was more an ideal than a reality. Each study was selected for a reason other than intrinsic interest.

We were led to wonder whether a broken robot can break a child.

Kids are central to the sociable-robot project, because its agenda is to make people more comfortable with robots in roles normally reserved for humans, and robotics companies know that children are vulnerable consumers who can bring the whole family along.

In October, Mattel scrapped plans for Aristotle — a kind of Alexa for the nursery, designed to accompany children as they progress from lullabies and bedtime stories through high school homework — after lawmakers and child advocacy groups argued that the data the device collected about children could be misused by Mattel, marketers, hackers and other third parties. I was part of that campaign: There is something deeply unsettling about encouraging children to confide in machines that are in turn sharing their conversations with countless others.

Recently, I opened my MIT mail and found a “call for subjects” for a study involving sociable robots that will engage children in conversation to “elicit empathy.” What will these children be empathizing with, exactly? Empathy is a capacity that allows us to put ourselves in the place of others, to know what they are feeling. Robots, however, have no emotions to share

What they can do is push our buttons. When they make eye contact and gesture toward us, they predispose us to view them as thinking and caring. They are designed to be cute, to provoke a nurturing response. And when it comes to sociable AI, nurturance is the killer app: We nurture what we love, and we love what we nurture. If a computational object or robot asks for our help, asks us to teach it or tend to it, we attach. That is our human vulnerability.

digital companions don’t understand our emotional lives. They present themselves as empathy machines, but they are missing the essential equipment: They have not known the arc of a life. They have not been born; they don’t know pain, or mortality, or fear. Simulated thinking may be thinking, but simulated feeling is never feeling, and simulated love is never love.

Breazeal’s position is this: People have relationships with many classes of things. They have relationships with children and with adults, with animals and with machines. People, even very little people, are good at this. Now, we are going to add robots to the list of things with which we can have relationships. More powerful than with pets. Less powerful than with people. We’ll figure it out.

The nature of the attachments to dolls and sociable machines is different. When children play with dolls, they project thoughts and emotions onto them. A girl who has broken her mother’s crystal will put her Barbies into detention and use them to work on her feelings of guilt. The dolls take the role she needs them to take.

Sociable machines, by contrast, have their own agenda. Playing with robots is not about the psychology of projection but the psychology of engagement. Children try to meet the robot’s needs, to understand the robot’s unique nature and wants. There is an attempt to build a mutual relationship.

Some people might consider that a good thing: encouraging children to think beyond their own needs and goals. Except the whole commercial program is an exercise in emotional deception.

when we offer these robots as pretend friends to our children, it’s not so clear they can wink with us. We embark on an experiment in which our children are the human subjects.

it is hard to imagine what those “right types” of ties might be. These robots can’t be in a two-way relationship with a child. They are machines whose art is to put children in a position of pretend empathy. And if we put our children in that position, we shouldn’t expect them to understand what empathy is. If we give them pretend relationships, we shouldn’t expect them to learn how real relationships — messy relationships — work. On the contrary. They will learn something superficial and inauthentic, but mistake it for real connection.

In the process, we can forget what is most central to our humanity: truly understanding each other.

For so long, we dreamed of artificial intelligence offering us not only instrumental help but the simple salvations of conversation and care. But now that our fantasy is becoming reality, it is time to confront the emotional downside of living with the robots of our dreams.

‘Listen, I have all this vaccine. And people are afraid to get it here,’” Ms. Platten recalled. “‘If you have any friends, or there’s anyone you know who wants a vaccine, please have them call me.’”

“The result has been a mini boom of visitors on an island whose tourism economy, like most others, has been brutalized by the pandemic.”

“Nowhere else in the U.S. can you actually just walk in and get the vaccine, anybody over 16,” Mr. Bryan said on Monday. On March 1, the islands also opened two federally supported community vaccination centers on St. Thomas and St. Croix.

“On the public health side, it’s a plus,” she said. “On the equity side, I don’t see it as significant issue.”

As a 15-year-old, I was condemned to long-term solitary confinement in the Florida prison system, which ultimately lasted for 18 consecutive years

From age 15 to 33.

For 18 years I didn’t have a window in my room to distract myself from the intensity of my confinement

I wasn’t permitted to talk to my fellow prisoners or even to myself. I didn’t have healthy, nutritious food; I was given just enough to not die

These circumstances made me think about how I ended up in solitary confinement.

United Nations standards on the treatment of prisoners prohibits solitary confinement for more than 15 days, declaring it “cruel, inhuman or degrading.”

For this I was arrested and charged as an adult with armed robbery and attempted murder.

My court-appointed lawyer advised me to plead guilty, telling me that the maximum sentence would be 15 years. So I did. But my sentence wasn’t 15 years — it was life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

But a year and a half later, at age 15, I was put back into solitary confinement after being written up for a few minor infractions.

Florida has different levels of solitary confinement; I spent the majority of that time in one of the most restrictive

I was finally released from prison in 2016 thanks to my lawyer, Bryan Stevenson

Researchers have long concluded that solitary confinement causes post-traumatic stress disorder and impairs prisoners’ ability to adjust to society long after they leave their cell.

In the summer of 1990, shortly after finishing seventh grade, I was directed by a few older kids to commit a robbery. During the botched attempt, I shot a woman. She suffered serious injuries to her jaw and mouth but survived. It was reckless and foolish on my part, the act of a 13-year-old in crisis, and I’m simply grateful no one died.

More aggressive change is needed in state prison systems

In 2016, the Obama administration banned juvenile solitary confinement in federal prisons, and a handful of states have advanced similar reforms for both children and adults.

Yet the practice, even for minors, is still common in the United States, and efforts to end it have been spotty

Because solitary confinement is hidden from public view and the broader prison population, egregious abuses are left unchecked

I watched a corrections officer spray a blind prisoner in the face with chemicals simply because he was standing by the door of his cell as a female nurse walked by. The prisoner later told me that to justify the spraying, the officer claimed the prisoner masturbated in front of the nurse.

I also witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television

On occasion, I purposely overdosed on Tylenol so that I could spend a night in the hospital. For even one night, it was worth the pain.

Another time, I was told I’d be switching dorms, and I politely asked to remain where I was because a guard in the new area had been overly aggressive with me. In response, four or five officers handcuffed me, picked me up by my feet and shoulders, and marched with me to my new dorm — using my head to ram the four steel doors on the way there.

The punishments were wholly disproportionate to the infractions. Before I knew it, months in solitary bled into years, years into almost two decades.

As a child, I survived these conditions by conjuring up stories of what I’d do when I was finally released. My mind was the only place I found freedom from my reality

the only place I could play basketball with my brother or video games with my friends, and eat my mother’s warm cherry pie on the porch.

No child should have to use their imagination this way — to survive.

It is difficult to know the exact number of children in solitary confinement today. The Liman Center at Yale Law School estimated that 61,000 Americans (adults and children) were in solitary confinement in the fall of 2017

No matter the count, I witnessed too many people lose their minds while isolated. They’d involuntarily cross a line and simply never return to sanity. Perhaps they didn’t want to. Staying in their mind was the better, safer, more humane option.

Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, yet prisons continue to practice it.

When it comes to children, elimination is the only moral option. And if ending solitary confinement for adults isn’t politically viable, public officials should at least limit the length of confinement to 15 days or fewer, in compliance with the U.N. standards

As I try to reintegrate into society, small things often awaken painful memories from solitary. Sometimes relationships feel constraining. It’s difficult to maintain the attention span required for a rigid 9-to-5 job. At first, crossing the street and seeing cars and bikes racing toward me felt terrifying.

I will face PTSD and challenges big and small for the rest of my life because of what I was subjected to.

And some things I never will — most of all, that this country can treat human beings, especially children, as cruelly as I was treated.

Sadly, solitary confinement for juveniles is still permissible in many states. But we have the power to change that — to ensure that the harrowing injustice I suffered as a young boy never happens to another child in America.

Trained at the prestigious Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Danijela Stajnfeld had, by the age of 26 in 2011, won two major theater prizes

The following year, she abruptly and mysteriously dropped from public view. It wasn’t until last summer that she publicly revealed why.

In her documentary, “Hold Me Right,” about victims and perpetrators of sexual assault, Stajnfeld said that she too had been sexually assaulted eight years earlier by a powerful Serbian man, which had prompted her move to the United States.

“I thought no one remembered me, I didn’t keep in touch with anyone in Serbia,” she said in an interview.

Stajnfeld’s face was suddenly all over the Serbian press again. Television and online commentators praised her for speaking out or savaged her for not disclosing the man’s name.

She said she did not identify the man because she wanted the film to focus on survivors and healing, rather than singling out a perpetrator

Critics questioned her motives. “Sick!” read one headline. “Actress made up the rape to advertise her film.”

While the country has taken steps to advance the cause of women’s rights in recent years — in 2013 it ratified a human rights convention addressing gender-based violence — in Serbia, as in the surrounding region, sexual harassment and assaults are still only rarely reported, and victim shaming abounds.

A longer version, he said, would reveal the broader context, that they were merely improvising dialogue, and that she was possibly claiming he assaulted her to gain publicity for her film.

In January, several other Serbian actresses came out publicly with allegations that they had been raped, and a MeToo-like movement roared to life in this region where the culture of calling out abusers had yet to gain a foothold.

Using the hashtag #NisiSama, which means “You are not alone,” and on the Facebook page Nisam Trazila, or “I didn’t ask for it,” which has 40,000 followers, supporters urged that victims of sexual harassment be believed and perpetrators be held to account.

Last week Stajnfeld, who lives in New York, flew to Serbia, met with the police and prosecutors and identified the man who she said assaulted her as Branislav Lecic.

Only weeks ago, he had spoken out against sexual assault.

“When a woman says no, that’s the end of it. I don’t understand that someone can’t control their urges,” he told one Serbian newspaper.

“I have never had sexual contact with her. Everything else would be a lie!” Lecic wrote in a WhatsApp message.

But Stajnfeld provided prosecutors and members of the media with an audio recording of her confronting him in a Belgrade restaurant in December 2016

Lecic said what happened ought to “feel like an honor, not to put you in jeopardy.” “Who do you think I am?” he continued. “As if I don’t respect who I am.”

In the recording, Lecic also pushed back on Stajnfeld’s assertion that if she says no, she means no. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said, later adding, “Life is unpredictable, like a game.”

“After opening up, it was so liberating; I thought the narrative was in my hands,” Stajnfeld said. “But it caused even more unsafety and ridiculous dehumanization.”

“Maybe she was expecting something more, maybe it’s because nothing happened that she wants revenge, and maybe she wants to build her story through me,” he wrote. “Bad marketing is also marketing.”

When they began rehearsing the play, Stajnfeld said she viewed Lecic as a mentor and a friend, until he began propositioning her to have sex. Then, one day, in his dressing room, she said he abruptly shoved his hand up her dress. Stajnfeld said she pulled away and fled, stunned, but opted not to tell the director because she was worried she wouldn’t be believed, and that it could hurt her career. Lecic denied any sexual encounter took place.

“In that moment, I was so tortured,” she continued. “He was asking me to do stuff for him. I wanted to do anything for this torture to stop. I couldn’t move my arms, my mouth, I couldn’t stop crying,” she said.

“For the sake of justice, for the sake of my healing, for the sake of other victims in the region, I’m speaking out now,

After the premiere of Stajnfeld’s film last summer, media commentators said she should be ashamed, that she had slept with a man to get a role, that she should name him or else be prosecuted, that she dishonored women who had really been raped, and that she looked too happy in a recent televised interview to have been a victim.

“Danijela’s case gave wings to other women, actresses, to talk about what happened to them,” said Dragana Grncarski, a former model and public figure. “Coming out in the open, they prevent things like that from happening to other women.”

Cornflowers are always the first to bloom in the pollinator meadow of Marsha P. Johnson State Park, a welcome sign to bees and people that things are beginning to thaw.

If New York City has a warm spring, the cornflowers may open up by late April, eventually followed by orange frills of butterfly milkweed, purple spindly bee balm and yolk-yellow, black-eyed Susans that also inhabit the meadow — hardy species that can weather the salty spray that confronts life on the waterfront.

Not all of these flowers are native to New York, or even North America, but they have sustained themselves long enough to become naturalized

These species pose little threat to native wildlife, unlike more domineering introduced species such as mugwort, an herb with an intrepid rhizome system.

A wildflower can refer to any flowering plant that was not cultivated, intentionally planted or given human aid, yet it still managed to grow and bloom.

This is one of several definitions offered by the plant ecologist Donald J. Leopold in Andrew Garn’s new photo book “Wildflowers of New York City,” and one that feels particularly suited to the city and its many transplants.

Scarlet bee balm.

Ms. Lopez, who grew up on the Upper West Side near a sooty smokestack, has always longed for more green spaces in the city.

In February of 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo renamed the park after the activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the central figures of the Stonewall riots and a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with the activist Sylvia Rivera. Ms. Johnson, who died in 1992 of undetermined causes, would have turned 75 in August 2020.

Mr. Garn did not intend for “Wildflowers of New York City” to be a traditional field guide for identifying flowers. Rather, his reverent portraits invite us to delight in the beauty of flowers that we more often encounter in a sidewalk crack than in a bouquet.

Marsha P. Johnson, a central figure of the Stonewall riots and a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries

Ms. Johnson was known for wearing crowns of fresh flowers that she would arrange from leftover blooms and discarded daffodils from the flower district in Manhattan, where she often slept.

In one photo, Ms. Johnson wears a crown of roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, frilly tulips, statice and baby’s breath.

Although cumulous clusters of baby’s breath are now a staple of floral arrangements, the species is a wildflower native to central and Eastern Europe.

Ms. Lopez and STARR have criticized a proposal for a new $70 million beach scheduled to be built on Gansevoort Peninsula, near waterfronts where Ms. Rivera once lived and Ms. Johnson died. In its place, she suggests a memorial garden for Ms. Johnson, Ms. Rivera and other transgender people

“We will never feed enough people, we will never plant enough flowers, never be good enough to honor Sylvia and Marsha,” Ms. Lopez said. “They cared too much, even when no one cared for them.”

“I have candles lit always for Marsha and Sylvia, but I’m praying especially hard now that we get a plan that includes lots of flowers,” said Mariah Lopez, the executive director of Strategic Trans Alliance for Radical Reform, or STARR, an advocacy group.

Her dream of the park includes a range of verdant and functional spaces: a paved area where people can vogue and hold rallies, a flower garden in tribute to Ms. Johnson, a greenhouse and an apiary for bees.

Tansy.

The redesign of the park will add a new fence around the meadow, as well as interpretive signs about the pollinators who depend on its wildflowers. “What would happen if there were no bees in the world?”

“We have to protect them. That’s what the function of this sweet little meadow is.”

Between Aug. 1 and the Super Bowl in early February, the N.F.L. administered almost one million tests to players and staff.

Many other organizations have sought safety in mass testing.

When the coronavirus closed down the country last spring, many colleges and universities sought her advice on how to safely reopen.

Now, a new analysis suggests that schools, businesses and other organizations that want to keep themselves safe should think beyond strictly themselves.

By dedicating a substantial proportion of their tests to people in the surrounding community, institutions could reduce the number of Covid-19 cases among their members by as much as 25 percent, researchers report in a new paper, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal.

“It’s natural in an outbreak for people to become self-serving, self-focused,”

“If you’ve been in enough outbreaks you just understand that testing in a box doesn’t makes sense. These things are communicable, and they’re coming in from the community.”

“really profound implications, especially if others can replicate it,” said David O’Connor

“We want to start using more sophisticated modeling and probably economic theory to inform what an optimal testing program would look like.”

Dr. Sabeti is an epidemic veteran, part of teams that responded to an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and a mumps outbreak in the Boston area a few years later.

The University of Illinois is testing its students, faculty and staff twice a week and has conducted more than 1.6 million tests since July.

At a time when testing resources were in short supply, many of these institutions were proposing intensive, expensive testing regimens focused entirely on their own members

‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”

‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”

Using real-world data from C.M.U., the researchers created a baseline scenario in which 1 percent of people at the school, and 6 percent of those in the surrounding county, were infected by the coronavirus, and the university was testing 12 percent of its members every day.

Under these conditions, the researchers found, if the university used all of its tests on its own members, it would have roughly 200 Covid-19 cases after 40 days

The researchers then tweaked the model’s parameters in various ways: What if the virus were more prevalent? What if students and staff did not report all their contacts? What if they were better about mask-wearing and social distancing? What if the university deployed more tests, or fewer?

Unsurprisingly, the more testing the university did, and the more information it had about its members’ close contacts, the fewer Covid-19 cases there were

But in virtually every scenario, sharing at least some tests with the broader community led to fewer cases than hoarding them.

Some universities are beginning to adopt this outlook.

“A virus does not respect geographic boundaries,” Dr. Pollock said. “It is ludicrous to think that you can get control of an acute infectious respiratory disease like Covid-19, in a city like Davis that hosts a very large university, without coordinated public health measures that connect both the university and the community.”

There are barriers to the more altruistic approach, including internal political pressure to use testing resources in house and concerns about legal liability.

the researchers hope that their model convinces at least some institutions to rethink their strategy, not only during this epidemic but also in future ones.

“An outbreak is an opportunity to buy a lot of community good will, or to burn a lot of community good will,” Dr. Sabeti said. “We could have spent an entire year building up that relationship between organizations and institutions and their communities. And we would have done all that hard work together, as opposed to everybody turning inward.”

“My definition of addiction is a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit,”

Mr. Szymanczyk was speaking in the context of smoking. But a fascinating new book by Michael Moss, an investigative journalist and best-selling author, argues that the tobacco executive’s definition of addiction could apply to our relationship with another group of products that Philip Morris sold and manufactured for decades: highly processed foods.

In his new book, “Hooked,” Mr. Moss explores the science behind addiction and builds a case that food companies have painstakingly engineered processed foods to hijack the reward circuitry in our brains, causing us to overeat and helping to fuel a global epidemic of obesity and chronic disease.

Mr. Moss suggests that processed foods like cheeseburgers, potato chips and ice cream are not only addictive, but that they can be even more addictive than alcohol, tobacco and drugs.

In another cynical move, Mr. Moss writes, food companies beginning in the late 1970s started buying a slew of popular diet companies, allowing them to profit off our attempts to lose the weight we gained from eating their products.

Heinz, the processed food giant, bought Weight Watchers in 1978 for $72 million. Unilever, which sells Klondike bars and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, paid $2.3 billion for SlimFast in 2000. Nestle, which makes chocolate bars and Hot Pockets, purchased Jenny Craig in 2006 for $600 million. And in 2010 the private equity firm that owns Cinnabon and Carvel ice cream purchased Atkins Nutritionals, the company that sells low-carb bars, shakes and snacks. Most of these diet brands were later sold to other parent companies.

“The food industry blocked us in the courts from filing lawsuits claiming addiction; they started controlling the science in problematic ways, and they took control of the diet industry,”

“I’ve been crawling through the underbelly of the processed food industry for 10 years and I continue to be stunned by the depths of the deviousness of their strategy to not just tap into our basic instincts, but to exploit our attempts to gain control of our habits.”

The book explained how companies formulate junk foods to achieve a “bliss point” that makes them irresistible and market those products using tactics borrowed from the tobacco industry.

In the 1980s, Philip Morris acquired Kraft and General Foods, making it the largest manufacturer of processed foods in the country, with products like Kool-Aid, Cocoa Pebbles, Capri Sun and Oreo cookies.

“I had tried to avoid the word addiction when I was writing ‘Salt Sugar Fat,’” he said. “I thought it was totally ludicrous. How anyone could compare Twinkies to crack cocaine was beyond me.”

Witness

But as he dug into the science that shows how processed foods affect the brain, he was swayed

One crucial element that influences the addictive nature of a substance and whether or not we consume it compulsively is how quickly it excites the brain.

The faster it hits our reward circuitry, the stronger its impact.

That is why smoking crack cocaine is more powerful than ingesting cocaine through the nose, and smoking cigarettes produces greater feelings of reward than wearing a nicotine patch

: Smoking reduces the time it takes for drugs to hit the brain.

But no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods, Mr. Moss writes. “The smoke from cigarettes takes 10 seconds to stir the brain, but a touch of sugar on the tongue will do so in a little more than a half second, or six hundred milliseconds, to be precise,

This puts the term “fast food” in a new light. “Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain,” he added.

Mr. Moss explains that even people in the tobacco industry took note of the powerful lure of processed foods.

In “Hooked,” Michael Moss explores how no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods.

As litigation against tobacco companies gained ground in the 1990s, one of the industry’s defenses was that cigarettes were no more addictive than Twinkies.

It may have been on to something.

“Smoking was given an 8.5, nearly on par with heroin,” Mr. Moss writes. “But overeating, at 7.3, was not far behind, scoring higher than beer, tranquilizers and sleeping pills.

But processed foods are not tobacco, and many people, including some experts, dismiss the notion that they are addictive. Mr. Moss suggests that this reluctance is in part a result of misconceptions about what addiction entails.

For one, a substance does not have to hook everyone for it to be addictive.

Studies show that most people who drink or use cocaine do not become dependent

Nor does everyone who smokes or uses painkillers become addicted.

Mr. Moss said that people who struggle with processed food can try simple strategies to conquer routine cravings, like going for a walk, calling a friend or snacking on healthy alternatives like a handful of nuts. But for some people, more extreme measures may be necessary.

“It depends where you are on the spectrum,” he said. “I know people who can’t touch a grain of sugar without losing control. They would drive to the supermarket and by the time they got home their car would be littered with empty wrappers. For them, complete abstention is the solution.”

“Individuals with obesity were impacted the most — and that’s what we were afraid of,”

“We were feeding the soul more than feeding the stomach,”

“We were making sure to eat things that made us feel better — not just nutritional items.

Now a global survey conducted earlier this year confirms what Mr. Loy and many others experienced firsthand: The coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns led to dramatic changes in health behaviors, prompting people around the world to cut back on physical activity and eat more junk foods.

While they tended to experience improvements in some aspects of their diets, such as cooking at home more and eating out less, they were also the most likely to report struggling with their weight and mental health.

With months to go before a vaccine becomes widely available and we can safely resume our pre-pandemic routines, now might be a good time to assess the healthy habits we may have let slip and to find new ways to be proactive about our physical and mental health.

The researchers found that the decline in healthy behaviors during the pandemic and widespread lockdowns was fairly common regardless of geography.

Alone

But that all changed when the pandemic struck. During the lockdowns, when he was stuck at home, his anxiety levels went up. He stopped exercising and started stress eating. Gone were the hummus and vegetables; instead, he snacked on cookies, sweets and Lay’s potato chips. He ate more fried foods and ordered takeout from local restaurants.

“They not only started off with higher anxiety levels before the pandemic, but they also had the largest increase in anxiety levels throughout the pandemic.”

The pandemic disrupted everyday life, isolated people from friends and family, and spawned an economic crisis, with tens of millions of people losing jobs or finding their incomes sharply reduced.

despite snacking on more junk foods, many people showed an increase in their “healthy eating scores,” a measure of their overall diet quality, which includes things like eating more fruits and fewer fried foods.

The researchers said that the overall improvements in diet appeared to be driven by the fact that the lockdowns prompted people to cook, bake and prepare more food at home.

Other recent surveys have also shown a sharp rise in home cooking and baking this year, with many people saying they are discovering new ingredients and looking for ways to make healthier foods.

But social isolation can take a toll on mental wellness, and that was evident in the findings.

About 20 percent said that their symptoms, such as experiencing dread and not being able to control or stop their worrying, were severe enough to interfere with their daily activities.

Dr. Flanagan said it was perhaps not surprising that people tended to engage in less healthful habits during the pandemic, as so many aspects of health are intertwined.

Stress can lead to poor sleep, which can cause people to exercise less, consume more junk foods, and then gain weight, and so on.

But she said she hoped that the findings might inspire people to take steps to be more proactive about their health, such as seeking out mental health specialists, prioritizing sleep and finding ways to exercise at home and cook more, in the event of future lockdowns.

“Being aware is really the No. 1 thing here.”

But that blessed feeling evaporated in June of 2019, when I lost my daughter, Frankie, to suicide, three weeks before her high school graduation

Ever since that day, I have thought of little else except how I could help the next struggling teenager, the next Frankie.

Several days after her passing, we opened our home up to our community, including Frankie’s very large group of teenage friends

“What strength Frankie had. It must have taken enormous energy for her to do what she did each day.”

That was Frankie. She had the strength to engage in school and in theater, despite her anxiety and depression. She had an ability to connect — emotionally, profoundly — with others, even when she was struggling herself

“empathy personified, with quite the fabulous earring collection.”

Whether that strength came from her home or somewhere else, or both, Frankie just had a way of drawing out warmth wherever she went.

Just as my parents couldn’t predict in the 1980s what seatbelt safety would look like now, I am not sure what suicide prevention should look like in the future.

Suicidal thinking, whether it is the result of mental illness, stress, trauma or loss, is actually far more common and difficult to see than many of us realize

A June 2020 Centers for Disease Control survey found that one in four 18- to 24-year-olds reported that they had seriously thought about taking their lives in the past 30 days; prepandemic estimates found that just under one in five high schoolers had seriously considered suicide, and just under one in 10 had made at least one suicide attempt during the previous year.

Despite 50 years of research, predicting death by suicide is still nearly impossible

Like others who have lost a child to suicide, I have spent countless hours going over relentless “what ifs.”

Maybe what we need are seatbelts for suicide.

“Click it or Ticket” was born in part out of a concern in the 1980s about teenagers dying in car accidents. Just as with suicides today, adults couldn’t predict who would get into a car accident, and one of the best solutions we had — seatbelts — was used routinely, in some estimates, by only 15 percent of the population. Indeed, as children, my siblings and I used to make a game of rolling around in the back of our car, seatbelts ignored.

Three decades later, our world is unlike anything I could have imagined as a child. Putting on a seatbelt is the first lesson of driver’s education; cars get inspected annually for working seatbelts; car companies embed those annoying beeping sounds to remind you to buckle your seatbelt

But like many who struggle with suicidal thinking, she kept her own pain camouflaged for a long time, perhaps for too long.

Most of us (estimates range as high as 91 percent) now wear a seatbelt.

But I imagine a world in which every health worker, school professional, employer and religious leader can recognize the signs of suicidal thinking and know how to ask about it, respond to it and offer resources to someone who is struggling

When I told Frankie’s orthodontist about her suicide, his response surprised me: “We really don’t come across that in our practice.” Even though orthodontists don’t ask about it, they see children during their early teenage years, when suicidal thinking often begins to emerge. Can you imagine a world in which signs for the prevention hotline and text line are posted for kids to see as they get their braces adjusted?

What if the annual teenage pediatric checkup involved a discussion of one-at-a-time pill packaging and boxes to lock up lethal medications, the way there is a discussion of baby-proofing homes when children start to crawl? What if pediatricians handed each adolescent a card with the prevention hotline on it (or better yet, if companies preprogrammed that number into cellphones) and the pediatrician talked through what happens when a teenager calls? What if doctors coached parents on how to ask their teenager, “Are you thinking about suicide?”

What if we required and funded every school to put in place one of the existing programs that train teachers and other school professionals to be a resource for struggling students?

I recognize that despite progress identifying effective programs to combat suicidal thinking, their success rate and simplicity does not compare with what we see with seatbelts. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more.

Part of doing more also includes making the world more just and caring. To give one example, state-level same-sex-marriage policies that were in place before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationally have been linked to reductions in suicide attempts among adolescents, especially among sexual minorities.

Just as safer highways and car models make seatbelts more effective, asking about and responding to suicidal thinking is only one part of a solution that also includes attention to societal injustices.

I understand, of course, that asking about suicidal thinking is scary. But if it is scary for you to ask about it, it is even scarier for the teenager who is thinking about it.

I will never forget sitting with Frankie in the waiting room in the pediatric psychiatric wing on the night I brought her to the inpatient unit, three months before she took her life

“You know, I am so glad you finally know.” I could hear the relief in her voice. I just nodded, understandingly, but it broke my heart that she held on to such a painful secret for so long.

I find myself inspired by Frankie’s teenage friends, who cared deeply for her and now support one another after her passing.

On good days, she would sit on the worn couch in that office, snuggle in a pile of teenagers and discuss plays, schoolwork and their lives.

And in that corner space, she would text a friend to help her get to class or, after she had opened up about her struggles, encourage others to open up as well.

The fall after Frankie left us, some students decided to remake that hidden corner, dotting the walls with colored Post-it notes. Scrawled on a pink Post-it were the words “you matter”; a yellow one read “it gets better”; an orange one shared a cellphone number to call for help. Tiny Post-it squares had transformed the corner into a space to comfort, heal and support the next struggling teenager.

I don’t know if a seatbelt approach would have saved Frankie. And I understand that all the details of such an approach aren’t fully worked out here. But I don’t want us to lose any more children because we weren’t brave enough to take on something that scares us, something we don’t fully understand, something that is much more prevalent than many of us realize.

If 17- and 18-year-olds who’ve lost a friend have the strength to imagine a world dotted with healing, then the least we can do as adults is design and build the structure to support them

some paid as little as half as much as the M.T.A. employees who did the same work before the pandemic began, and many without access to health insurance.

a labor force that has been desperate for work at a time when hundreds of thousands have lost jobs in cleaning, construction and restaurants.

she had worked for nearly three months without a place to eat lunch or access to the station bathroom.

Contractors are required to supply proper personal protective equipment, or P.P.E., and cleaning materials to their employees, officials said.

were alarmed by workers’ accounts.

Their accounts paint a picture of dismal working conditions, and highlight their unequal treatment compared with transit cleaners, who are paid up to $30 an hour and enjoy health insurance and other benefits, uniforms and MetroCards to swipe themselves into the system.

A worker named Juan described chasing down purse-snatchers and running to help co-workers threatened by homeless people who had commandeered their brooms and mops.

“Many people were getting paid minimum wage or just a dollar or two more,” Mr. Tecaxco said. “The conditions were terrible.”

When inspectors came, she said, no one said a word. “Truthfully, we were all afraid.”

Ms. Muñoz said she was fired in November without explanation. As the sole provider for her four children and parents in Puebla, Mexico, she pleaded to keep her job.

That odd feeling in the pit of your stomach will help you to consider the situation carefully and be cautious about your next step.

It’s more often a friend than a foe, one that will help you notice when things are on the wrong track.

psychologists agree that anxiety becomes a problem if its alarm makes no sense — either going off for no reason or blaring when a chime would do.

Feeling a little tense before a big game is appropriate and may even improve your performance. Having a panic attack on the sidelines means your anxiety has gone too far.

At the physical level, the amygdala, a primitive structure in the brain, detects a threat and sends the heart and lungs into overdrive getting your body ready to fight or flee that threat.

Though it can sound like a daffy approach to managing tension, breathing deeply and slowly activates a powerful part of the nervous system responsible for resetting the body to its pre-anxiety state.

Am I overestimating the severity of the problem I’m facing? Am I underestimating my power to manage it?

It’s human nature to want to repeat any behavior that leads to feelings of pleasure or comfort, but every boost of avoidance-related relief increases the likelihood that you’ll want to continue to avoid what you fear.

For example, the realities of in-person school are sure to be more manageable than the harrowing scenarios your imagination can create.

Knowing what’s true about anxiety — and not — will make it easier to navigate the uncertain times ahead.

“herd immunity might be hard to achieve without children being vaccinated,” Dr. Erbelding said.

Each dose will be assessed first in children 5 through 11 years of age, then in children ages 2 through 4 years, and finally in the youngest group, six months to 2 years.

“It sounds like a good plan, and it’s exciting that another Covid-19 vaccine is moving forward with trials in children,”

More than 3.3 million children have tested positive for the virus, at least 13,000 have been hospitalized and at least 260 have died,

Other vaccines have helped to control many horrific childhood diseases that can cause long-term complications,

Any side effects are likely to appear soon after the shot, within the first week and certainly within the first few weeks, experts have said.

there’s a higher degree of confidence now in giving this vaccine to kids.”

The more transparent you can be, the better.”

Airlines and technology companies have been working on developing technology to do so, but New York's is the first pass being made widely available to residents.

The idea is similar to mobile airline boarding passes: they can be printed or stored on smartphones, and participating businesses and venues can use a companion app to confirm patrons' health status.

rather than boost the economy and encourage vaccination, efforts like the Excelsior Pass could wind up further spread of variants. It's also still not clear that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus to people who have not been vaccinated.

Some worry that the passes might encourage fraud and increase the spread of the virus by people who claim to be vaccinated or COVID-19 negative but aren't.

Even if the doctors couldn’t pin down what was going on with me, I was so alarmed by my symptoms and the doctors’ gravest guesses that I felt anxious about whether or not I would have a future.

What was certain is that I was shrinking. Rapidly, uncontrollably.

My clothes hung loose at the waist and sloughed off my shoulders as if they belonged to a stranger, so I bought a stranger’s dress. Kate Spade, $348 retail.

I found it for $50 at an online designer consignment store while on hold with the hospital; a nurse was checking on the results of my bone marrow biopsy.

Online shopping was the sort of thing one might do if she were on hold with her cable company, not awaiting a possible blood cancer diagnosis.

I filled my cart with a cobalt dress, a blush silk blouse, a slinky skirt.

On paper, the doctors said, it looked like it could be lymphoma. The symptoms were classic: fever, night sweats, weight loss.

A biopsy of my enlarged lymph node showed it to be benign.

Two weeks earlier, a doctor had taken a surgical drill to my hip and hollowed out my bones with a syringe fit for a large horse. “Painful” was a deficient descriptor.

“I just don’t know what else to do,” my doctor said.

I sat still while my insides turned over. A cold sweat crept across my face. I closed my eyes, shook my head and returned to my shopping cart. I was not going to dwell.

No — I was going to shop. I was going to shop until I could think of nothing else. I punched in my credit card number and bought the Kate Spade.

Then I rushed to my closet, threw open the double doors and began rifling through Target impulse buys and ill-fitting hand-me-down

we’ll have to keep looking

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do illness anymore. I could only do this.

I spun around in it, watching the hem rise and fall. Something about it made me feel less like a haggard patient and more like the kind of woman who went to cocktail parties dripping with perfume and family money.

Over the next few months, I made it my mission to build a new wardrobe from scratch. The process demanded every moment of my free time, every spare thought

We both knew it was impractical. The clothes were expensive and high maintenance, most of them over-the-top fancy for my modest life in nonprofit communications.

But they felt vital. I told myself I was overdue for some frivolity, that I deserved to treat myself.

For my next doctor’s appointment, I picked out a Valentino pencil skirt that fit snugly against my new, withered body.

I hurled the clothes into boxes and garbage bags. They smelled like the hospital, all burned coffee and antiseptic. I didn’t want them. I didn’t even want to look at them. I wanted silk. I wanted velvet.

“Can I see you again in six weeks? We can repeat blood work then and come up with a timeline for scans. Does that sound like an OK plan?”

“Just that I live here,” I said, gesturing at my body. “I have to live here.”

That night I ran my fingers through my hair, and a clump of blond strands fell loose into my palm. “It’s just stress,” I told my cat. I brushed my hands together, letting my hair fall into the trash, and returned to my shopping list.

Each one had lived a life before me. Now I held onto them in the dim light of my bedroom like tangible hope.

We’re forced to find hope in what we used to mock: God, the afterlife, miracles, hemp oil. Healing, by any means. Healing, against all odds.

After every appointment, after every failed attempt to name my illness, I would prop myself in bed, choose new dresses and think of all the places I would wear them.

The clothes promised me something the doctors, as they continue to search for a diagnosis, still can’t: an uncomplicated future. And I promised a future to the clothes.

This was their life after life. And they deserved that, didn’t they?

Maybe not, according to an admonitory new study of the molecular effects of high-intensity interval training

suggesting that the benefits of extremely vigorous exercise may depend on just how much we do.

for example, that intense bursts of exercise increase the number of mitochondria in our muscle cells, and more mitochondria are thought to contribute to better cellular and metabolic health.

HIIT also may have unexpected downsides. In a study I wrote about in January, people who worked out with HIIT routines three times a week for six weeks did not improve their blood pressure or body fat as much as people who exercised far more moderately five times a week.

by being sedentary for four days each week, the intense exercisers in the study may have undermined the otherwise potent effects of their HIIT sessions.

These volunteers visited the researchers’ lab for tests of their current fitness and metabolic health, including blood-sugar levels over the course of a day.

Then they compared how people’s bodies had changed week over week.

At first, the findings were encouraging. By the end of week two, the riders were pedaling harder and appeared to be getting fitter, with better daily blood-sugar control and more total mitochondria in their muscle cells.

But something began to go wrong during week three. The volunteers’ ability to generate power while cycling flattened, and their subsequent muscle biopsies showed sputtering mitochondria, each of which was now producing only about 60 percent as much energy as during the previous week. The riders’ blood-sugar control also slipped, with se

The researchers are not sure precisely what changes within their volunteers’ bodies and muscles precipitated the negative results in week three.

Even so, the findings strongly suggest that anyone interested in high-intensity interval training start small, Mr. Flockhart says. Train a few times a week and on the remaining days, maybe take a walk.

“Structural racism is an unfortunate term,” said Dr. Livingston, who is white. “Personally, I think taking racism out of the conversation will help

Many people like myself are offended by the implication that we are somehow racist.”

The podcast was promoted with a tweet from the journal that said, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?”

The response to both was swift and angry, prompting the journal to take down the podcast and delete the tweet.

Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA,

The A.M.A.’s email to employees promised that the investigation would probe “

Dr. Livingston later resigned.

“It’s not just that this podcast is problematic — it’s that there is a long and documented history of institutional racism at JAMA,”

“That podcast should never have happened,”

The fact that podcast was conceived of, recorded and posted was unconscionable.”

“I think it caused an incalculable amount of pain and trauma to Black physicians and patients,” she said. “And I think it’s going to take a long time for the journal to heal that pain.

“staff and leadership are overwhelmingly white and economically privileged,” and he committed to reviewing its editorial process.

“We are instituting changes that will address and prevent such failures from happening again.”

how the podcast and associated tweet were developed, reviewed, and ultimately published,” and said that the association had engaged independent investigators to ensure objectivity.

The email did not offer a date for conclusion of the investigation.

The trial’s first participants, a pair of 9-year-old twin girls, were immunized at Duke University in North Carolina on Wednesday.

Immunizing children will help schools to reopen as well as help to end the pandemic, said Dr. Emily Erbelding, an infectious diseases physician at the National Institutes of Health who oversees testing of Covid-19 vaccines in special populations.

An estimated 80 percent of the population may need to be vaccinated for the United States to reach herd immunity, the threshold at which the coronavirus runs out of people to infect.

“we were encouraged by the data from the 12 to 15 group,

Scientists will test three doses of the Pfizer vaccine — 10, 20 and 30 micrograms — in 144 children. Each dose will be assessed first in children 5 through 11 years of age, then in children ages 2 through 4 years, and finally in the youngest group, six months to 2 years.

After determining the most effective dose, the company will test the vaccine in 4,500 children

“It sounds like a good plan, and it’s exciting that another Covid-19 vaccine is moving forward with trials in children,”

Children represent 13 percent of all reported cases in the United States.

More than 3.3 million children have tested positive for the virus, at least 13,000 have been hospitalized and at least 260 have died

“We don’t know what the long-term effects of Covid infection are going to be,” Dr. Maldonado said.

Other vaccines have helped to control many horrific childhood diseases that can cause long-term complications, she added: “For some of us who’ve seen that, we don’t want to go back to those days.”

“So there’s a higher degree of confidence now in giving this vaccine to kids.”

“The more transparent you can be, the better.”