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I Survived 18 Years in Solitary Confinement

Mr. Manuel is an author, activist and poet. When he was 14 years old, he was sentenced to life in prison with no parole and spent 18 years in solitary confinement.

Imagine living alone in a room the size of a freight elevator for almost two decades.

The Pandemic and the Future City

Lessons from Alexander Hamilton and the book trade.

In 1957 Isaac Asimov published “The Naked Sun,” a science-fiction novel about a society in which people live on isolated estates, their needs provided by robots and they interact only by video

A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update.

The revised response still emphasizes transmission in close contact but now says it may be via aerosols — smaller respiratory particles that can float — as well as droplets. It also adds a reason the virus can also be transmitted “in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings,” saying this is because “aerosols remain suspended in the air or travel farther than 1 meter.”

on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also updated its guidance on Covid-19, clearly saying that inhalation of these smaller particles is a key way the virus is transmitted, even at close range, and put it on top of its list of how the disease spreads.

Soya’s fame illustrated a simple truth: that social media is less a reflection of who we are, and more a performance of who we want to be.

It also seemed to herald a darker future where our fundamental senses of reality are under siege: The AI that allows anyone to fabricate a face can also be used to harass women with “deepfake” pornography, invent fraudulent LinkedIn personas and digitally impersonate political enemies.

As the photos began receiving hundreds of likes, Soya’s personality and style began to come through. She was relentlessly upbeat. She never sneered or bickered or trolled. She explored small towns, savored scenic vistas, celebrated roadside restaurants’ simple meals.

In February-March 1616, the Catholic Church issued a prohibition against the Copernican theory of the earth’s motion.

This led later (1633) to the Inquisition trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) as a suspected heretic, which generated a controversy that continues to our day.

In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This book elaborated the (geokinetic and heliocentric) idea that the earth rotates daily on its own axis and revolves yearly around the sun

Reasons vary, but there are some common arguments made by anti-maskers. Below, Abrams, Trunzo and other experts share seven of the most common reasons people refuse to wear a mask. “So much is uncertain right now. It makes me feel in control to choose to go out without a mask.”

“When faced with uncertain situations over which we have no control, we tend to exercise it wherever we can, so we feel safe,” he said

If the need for control is the driving force for someone not wearing a mask, empathizing with their feelings of uncertainty can sometimes convince them to put one on,

Pareidolia can be considered a subcategory of apophenia. Pareidolia is a word that’s used for seeing patterns in random objects which includes, hearing, seeing and experiencing something that actually doesn’t exist in the sense your mind has perceived it.

Auditory pareidolia makes us vulnerable to suggestion.

for example: faces in an old abandoned property through the dusty broken windows looks like 20 faces staring at you, trees resembling the devil, the virgin Mary’s face on toast, etc.

Exercise broadly improves our memories and thinking skills, according to a wealth of science. The evidence supporting similar benefits from so-called brain training has been much iffier, however, with most people performing better only on the specific types of games or tasks practiced in the program.

Most of us are blissfully unaware of the complexity of our brain’s memory systems. Memories come in many different types, including detailed recollections of faces and objects and how they differ from similar faces and objects, as well as separate memories about where and when we last saw those things. These remembrances are created and stored throughout the hippocampus, our brain’s primary memory center.

In general, the young people who had exercised, whether they also brain trained or not, were then more physically fit than those in the control group. They also, for the most part, performed better on memory tests. And those improvements spanned different types of memory, including the ability to rapidly differentiate among pictures of objects that looked similar, a skill not practiced in the brain-training group.

The coronavirus continues to spread worldwide, with over 200,000 confirmed cases and at least 8,000 dead. In the United States, there have been at least 8,000 cases and more than 100 deaths, according to a New York Times database.

Most important: Do not panic. With a clear head and some simple tips, you can help reduce your risk, prepare your family and do your part to protect others.

That might be hard to follow, especially for those who can’t work from home. Also, if you’re young, your personal risk is most likely low. The majority of those who contract coronavirus do not become seriously ill, and it might just feel as if you have the flu. But keeping a stiff upper lip is not only foolhardy, but will endanger those around you.

Benoit Monin, assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University, showed college students 80 photos of faces, then asked them which ones they recognized from among the 40 they'd seen in an earlier session. The more attractive the photo (as rated by another group of students) the more likely it was to be recognized—regardless of whether the face had been seen before.

"The face's attractiveness actually changes your perception of your past," in this case, the perception of whether you've seen the face before. The shortcut may lead to errors, but it may also help us manage our busy lives, says Monin. "We tend to like familiar things, so it makes perfect sense that over time we would use liking as a clue to familiarity."

In what he calls the "warm-glow heuristic," people consider their affinity for a specific person or place as an indicator of familiarity. As with other mental shortcuts, people resort to this heuristic when they lack enough data on which to base their decisions.

I am ever more perplexed by why we make students learn to write the classic five-paragraph essay but have so much less interest in developing their spoken argument skills.

As much as I love writing, I wonder if there is something arbitrary in the idea that education must focus more on the written than the spoken word.

Back in the day, people would clear their throat and deliver. They weren’t winging it. They would plan their remarks, without writing them out word for word. They knew their topic and, from that, they spoke.

The experience of young users on Meta’s Instagram—where Bejar had spent the previous two years working as a consultant—was especially acute. In a subsequent email to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, one statistic stood out: One in eight users under the age of 16 said they had experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days.

For Bejar, that finding was hardly a surprise. His daughter and her friends had been receiving unsolicited penis pictures and other forms of harassment on the platform since the age of 14, he wrote, and Meta’s systems generally ignored their reports—or responded by saying that the harassment didn’t violate platform rules.

“I asked her why boys keep doing that,” Bejar wrote to Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants. “She said if the only thing that happens is they get blocked, why wouldn’t they?”

Satya Doyle Byock, a 39-year-old therapist, noticed a shift in tone over the past few years in the young people who streamed into her office: frenetic, frazzled clients in their late teens, 20s and 30s. They were unnerved and unmoored, constantly feeling like something was wrong with them.

“Crippling anxiety, depression, anguish, and disorientation are effectively the norm,”

her new book, “Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood.” The book uses anecdotes from Ms. Byock’s practice to outline obstacles faced by today’s young adults — roughly between the ages of 16 and 36 — and how to deal with them.

Osama bin Laden had forced us to admit that, while the U.S. may legally separate church and state, it cannot do so intellectually. Beneath even the most ostensibly faithless of our institutions and our polemicists lie crouching religious lions, ready to devour the infidels who set themselves in opposition to the theology of the free market and the messianic march of democracy

As our political system depends on a shaky separation between religion and politics that has become increasingly unstable, scholars are sensing the deep disillusionment afoot and trying to chart a way out.

At its best, Religion for Atheists is a chronicle of the smoldering heap that liberal capitalism has made of the social rhythms that used to serve as a buffer between humans and the random cruelty of the universe. Christian and Jewish traditions, Botton argues, reinforced the ideas that people are morally deficient, that disappointment and suffering are normative, and that death is inevitable. The abandonment of those realities for the delusions of the self-made individual, the fantasy superman who can bend reality to his will if he works hard enough and is positive enough, leaves little mystery to why we are perpetually stressed out, overworked, and unsatisfied.

The same statistical revolution that changed baseball has now entered American politics, and no one has been more successful in popularizing a statistical approach to political analysis than New York Times blogger Nate Silver, who of course cut his teeth as a young sabermetrician. And on Nov. 6, after having faced a torrent of criticism from old-school political pundits -- Washington's rough equivalent of statistically illiterate tobacco chewing baseball scouts -- the results of the presidential election vindicated Silver's approach, which correctly predicted the electoral outcome in all 50 states.

Today, there are several dozen ongoing, public projects that aim to in one way or another forecast the kinds of things foreign policymakers desperately want to be able to predict: various forms of state failure, famines, mass atrocities, coups d'état, interstate and civil war, and ethnic and religious conflict. So while U.S. elections might occupy the front page of the New York Times, the ability to predict instances of extreme violence and upheaval represent the holy grail of statistical forecasting -- and researchers are now getting close to doing just that.

In 2010 scholars from the Political Instability Task Force published a report that demonstrated the ability to correctly predict onsets of instability two years in advance in 18 of 21 instances (about 85%)

. In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice, the psychologist Barry Schwartz indicts a society that “sanctifies freedom of choice so profoundly that the benefits of infinite options seem self-evident.” On the contrary, he argues, “a large array of options may diminish the attractiveness of what people actually choose, the reason being that thinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one.”

Psychologists who study relationships say that three ingredients generally determine the strength of commitment: overall satisfaction with the relationship; the investment one has put into it (time and effort, shared experiences and emotions, etc.); and the quality of perceived alternatives. Two of the three—satisfaction and quality of alternatives—could be directly affected by the larger mating pool that the Internet offers.

as the range of options grows larger, mate-seekers are liable to become “cognitively overwhelmed,” and deal with the overload by adopting lazy comparison strategies and examining fewer cues. As a result, they are more likely to make careless decisions than they would be if they had fewer options,

he essence of Team Obama's reelection strategy was to capitalize on their man's strength with what National Journal's Ron Brownstein calls "the coalition of the ascendant" has long been clear. Back in May, I wrote a cover story for the magazine laying out Chicago's plan to focus laser-like on four key voting blocs: African-Americans, Hispanics, college-educated white women, and voters of all ethnicities aged 18-29. At bottom, their theory of the case was that, despite the fragility of the recovery and the doubts that many voters had about Obama's capacity to put America firmly back on the road to prosperity, the deft and aggressive exploitation of coalition politics (along with the ruthless disqualification of Romney as a credible occupant of the Oval Office) could secure the president a second term. That in 2012, in other words, demographics would trump economics.

A quick glance at the exit polls confirms the extent to which the coalition of the ascendant is responsible for that performance. Contrary to the assumptions of the Romney campaign, the electorate that turned out on Tuesday was more diverse than 2008's, not less. Nationally, the share of the vote comprised by whites fell from 74 to 72 percent, while the black vote held steady at 13 and rose among Hispanics from 9 to 10, among Asians from 2.5 to 3 percent, among women from 53 to 54 percent, and among young voters from 18 to 19 percent. Obama's share of each of those blocs was overwhelming: 93 percent of African-Americans, 71 percent of Latinos, 73 percent of Asians, 55 percent of the ladies, and 60 percent of the kids. T

the challenges facing the Republican Party are far greater and far graver; indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that they are existential. Before Election Day, there were some in GOP yakkety-yakosphere who were warming up to pin the blame for Romney's impending defeat on Hurricane Sandy, a dubious proposition rendered utterly absurd by what happened yesterday. Not only was the problem not Sandy — it wasn't even simply Romney. True, the weaknesses of the Republican nominee were manifold and glaring, but they had nothing to do with the party's having squandered its chance to take back control of the Senate by pissing away two eminently winnable seats (in Missouri and Indiana) by dint of having nominated abject cretins (Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock). Or with the passage, for the first time, of ballot initiatives in two states (Maine and Maryland) legalizing same-sex marriage, and the legalizing of marijuana in two others (Colorado and Washington).

THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform

We’re the real culprits. When it comes to elevating one perspective above all others and herding people into culturally and ideologically inflexible tribes, nothing that Facebook does to us comes close to what we do to ourselves.

I’m talking about how we use social media in particular and the Internet in general — and how we let them use us. They’re not so much agents as accomplices, new tools for ancient impulses, part of “a long sequence of technological innovations that enable us to do what we want

In an environment where it is expected -- and sometimes even seems trendy -- to not get enough sleep, it has been hard to remain steadfast with my habits.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute recommends 7-8 hours of sleep per night for adults, with some variation from person to person. Insufficient sleep is associated with numerous chronic conditions including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and depression.

getting sufficient sleep is not a luxury -- it is a necessity -- and should be thought of as a 'vital sign' of good health."