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Everyone—even the most privileged among us—has circumstances they would like to change in their life.

How might you improve the situation? Your answer might be, “I should move, get a new job, and meet new people.” In other words, you should change the outside world to make it better for you.

Between the conditions around you and your response to them is a space. In this space, you have freedom. You can choose to try remodeling the world, or you can start by changing your reaction to it.

You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.

Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are

Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.

If heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning. Yet here we are

Humans have shown remarkable resilience and adaptation—at least until modern times, when half of society lost its cool over climate change.

it’s alarmist stories about bad weather that are fueling mental derangements worthy of the DSM-5—not the warm summer air itself.

Andy Clark admits it’s strange that he took up “predictive processing,” an ambitious leading theory of how the brain works. A philosopher of mind at the University of Sussex, he has devoted his career to how thinking doesn’t occur just between the ears—that it flows through our bodies, tools, and environments. “The external world is functioning as part of our cognitive machinery

But 15 years ago, he realized that had to come back to the center of the system: the brain. And he found that predictive processing provided the essential links among the brain, body, and world.

There’s a traditional view that goes back at least to Descartes that perception was about the imprinting of the outside world onto the sense organs. In 20th-century artificial intelligence and neuroscience, vision was a feed-forward process in which you took in pixel-level information, refined it into a two and a half–dimensional sketch, and then refined that into a full world model.

This year, workers at Amazon, Starbucks and other major corporations are winning a wave of union elections, often in the face of long odds and employer resistance. These wins are showing it's possible for determined groups of workers to break through powerful employers' use of union-busting tactics, ranging from alleged retaliatory firings to alleged surveillance and forced attendance at anti-union "captive audience meetings." But workers should not have to confront so many obstacles to exercising a guaranteed legal right to unionize and bargain for improvements in their work lives and livelihoods.

For decades, wage suppression, growing income inequality and persistent racial and gender wage gaps have characterized the US labor market.

But now, as workers are pointing the way to better workplaces and a more equitable economy, employers and policymakers need to pay attention. Policymakers must better protect workers' union rights, and employers must start respecting workers' right to participate in union elections without interference or coercion.

“Demographics are destiny.”It is a phrase, often attributed to the French philosopher Auguste Comte, that suggests much of the future is preordained by the very simple trend lines of populations. Want to understand how the power dynamic between the United States and China will change over the next 20 years? An economist would tell you to look at the demographics of both countries. (China’s economy is likely to overtake the U.S. economy by 2028, but remain smaller on a per capita basis.)

Predicting the future may be a fool’s errand. But using demographic data to assess the opportunities and challenges of the next two decades is something that business and political leaders don’t do enough. We’re all too swept up in the here and now, the next quarter and the next year.

More people around the world had more disposable income and increasingly chose to live closer to cities with greater access to airports. That, married with the human condition that people like to be around other people, makes forecasting certain elements of the future almost mathematical.

The term “vagus nerve” is actually shorthand for thousands of fibers. They are organized into two bundles that run from the brain stem down through each side of the neck and into the torso, branching outward to touch our internal organs, said Dr. Kevin J. Tracey, a neurosurgeon and president of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell Health’s research center in New York.

Scientists first began examining the vagus nerve in the late 1800s to investigate whether stimulating it could be a potential treatment for epilepsy. They later discovered that a side effect of activating the nerve was an improvement in mood. Today, researchers are examining how the nerve can affect psychiatric disorders, among other conditions.

Researchers are now recruiting patients for the largest clinical trial to date examining to what degree vagus nerve stimulation may help patients with depression who have been unable to find relief with other treatments.

We can talk about three different interactions when we investigate the complex relationships between language and thinking. First, the existence of language as a cognitive process affects the system of thinking. Second, thinking comes before language, and the learning of a language interacts with the conceptual process that is formed before language use. Third, each language spoken may affect the system of thinking. Here we will discuss these three interactions under these subsections: “thinking without language,” “thinking before language,” and “thinking with language.”

Babies can categorize objects and actions, understand the cause and effect relationship between events, and see the goals in a movement. Recent studies on action representation and spatial concepts have shown that babies’ universal and language-general action representation productively changes with the learning of the mother tongue. For example, languages use prepositions to express the relationship between objects, i.e., in, on, under. However, languages also vary how they use these relations. One of the most significant studies suggests that babies can differentiate between concepts expressed with prepositions such as containment (in) and support (on). The Korean language specifies the nature of these containment and support relationships using the tightness of the relationship between objects: tight or loose. For example, a pencil in a pencil-size box represents a tight relationship, while a pencil in a big basket represents a loose relationship.

In the late 1800s, anthropologist Franz Boas laid the foundations of cultural relativity. According to this point of view, individuals see and perceive the world within the boundaries of their cultures. The role of anthropology is to investigate how people are conditioned by their culture and how they interact with the world in different ways. To understand such mechanisms, it suggests, implications in culture and language should be studied. The reflection of this view in the relationship between language and thought is the linguistic determinism hypothesis advanced by Eric Safir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. This hypothesis suggests that thought emerges only with the effect of language and concepts that are believed to exist even in infancy fade away due to the language learned.

When an internal group proposed the conditions under which Facebook should step in and take down speech from political actors, Zuckerberg discarded its work. He said he’d address the issue himself over a weekend. His “solution”? Facebook would not touch speech by any politician, under any circumstances — a fraught decision under the simplistic surface, as Haugen points out. After all, who gets to count as a politician? The municipal dogcatcher?

t was also Zuckerberg, she says, who refused to make a small change that would have made the content in people’s feeds less incendiary — possibly because doing so would have caused a key metric to decline.

When the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz began to break the stories that Haugen helped him document, the most damning one concerned Facebook’s horrifyingly disingenuous response to a congressional inquiry asking if the company had any research showing that its products were dangerous to teens. Facebook said it wasn’t aware of any consensus indicating how much screen time was too much. What Facebook did have was a pile of research showing that kids were being harmed by its products. Allow a clever company a convenient deflection, and you get something awfully close to a lie.

Schools and parenting guides instruct children in how to cultivate empathy, as do workplace culture and wellness programs. You could fill entire bookshelves with guides to finding, embracing and sharing empathy. Few books or lesson plans extol sympathy’s virtues.

“Sympathy focuses on offering support from a distance,” a therapist explains on LinkedIn, whereas empathy “goes beyond sympathy by actively immersing oneself in another person’s emotions and attempting to comprehend their point of view.”

In use since the 16th century, when the Greek “syn-” (“with”) combined with pathos (experience, misfortune, emotion, condition) to mean “having common feelings,” sympathy preceded empathy by a good four centuries

February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch in healthy volunteers

The latest participant in the double-blind trial, a man named Brendan, had filled out a standard questionnaire at the end. Strangely, at the very bottom of the form, Brendan had written in bold letters: "This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do."

They googled Brendan's name, and up popped a disturbing revelation: until just a couple of months before, Brendan had been the leader of the US Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a notorious white nationalist group rebranded in 2019 as the American Identity Movement. Two months earlier, activists at Chicago Antifascist Action had exposed Brendan's identity, and he had lost his job.

Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief.

The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.

Among the most serious accusations in the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.

IMAGINE a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.

as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.

Until then, farmers will struggle to reliably predict new seasonal patterns and regularly plant the wrong crops. Early signs of major drought will go unrecognized, so costly irrigation will be built in the wrong places. Disruptive societal impacts will be widespread.

Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”

That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption

“We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.”

This poor posture can lead not only to back and neck issues but psychological ones as well, including lower self-esteem and mood, decreased assertiveness and productivity, and an increased tendency to recall negative things

Intense device usage can exhaust your eyes and cause eye strain, according to the Mayo Clinic, and can lead to symptoms such as headaches, difficulty concentrating, and watery, dry, itchy, burning, sore, or tired eyes. Overuse can also cause blurred or double vision and increased sensitivity to light.

Using your devices too much before bedtime can lead to insomnia.

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.

Social media has weakened all three.

gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.