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The way people post on Twitter is different from the way people post on LinkedIn which is different than how people post Facebook which is different from the way people post on Instagram, no matter how much Facebook keeps telling you to cross-post your IG stories

Some people whose job relies on onlineness (like me) have to refine their voices, their ways of being, across several platforms. But most normal people have found their lane — the medium that fits their message — and have stuck with it.

People post where they feel public speech “belongs.”

Playfulness is what makes us human. Doing pointless, purposeless things, just for fun. Doing things for the sheer devilment of it. Being silly for the sake of being silly. Larking around. Taking pleasure in activities that do not advantage us and have nothing to do with our survival. These are the highest signs of intelligence. It is when a creature, having met and surmounted all the practical needs that face him, decides to dance that we know we are in the presence of a human. It is when a creature, having successfully performed all necessary functions, starts to play the fool, just for the hell of it, that we know he is not a robot.

All at once, it was clear. The bush people, lounging about after dark in their family shelter, perhaps around a fire – basically just hanging out – had been amusing themselves doing a bit of rock art. And perhaps with some leftover red paste, a few of the younger ones had had a competition to see who could jump highest and make their fingermarks highest up the overhang. This was not even art. It called for no particular skill. It was just mucking about. And yet, for all the careful beauty of their pictures, for all the recognition of their lives from the vantage point of my life that was sparked in me by the appreciation of their artwork, it was not what was skilful that brought me closest to them. It was what was playful. It was their jumping and daubing finger-blobs competition that brought them to me, suddenly, as fellow humans across all those thousands of years. It tingled my spine.

An age is coming when machines will be able to do everything. “Ah,” you say, “but they will not be conscious.” But how will we know a machine is not conscious – how do we know another human being is conscious? There is only one way. When it starts to play. In playfulness lies the highest expression of the human spirit.

Back in 1647, Christmas was banned in the kingdoms of England (which at the time included Wales), Scotland and Ireland and it didn’t work out very well. Following a total ban on everything festive, from decorations to gatherings, rebellions broke out across the country. While some activity took the form of hanging holly in defiance, other action was far more radical and went on to have historical consequences.

The protestant reformation had restructured churches across the British Isles, and holy days, Christmas included, were abolished. The usual festivities during the 12 days of Christmas (December 25 to January 5) were deemed unacceptable.

Christmas Day, however, didn’t pass quietly. People across England, Scotland and Ireland flouted the rules.

Most parents concluded that the only way to keep their children safe was to keep them at home.

“I was focused on their mental health,” Ms. Patel said. “I wanted something light and interesting to them where they would learn but not with a lot of rule following.”

Camp, he said, is “more kinetic and experiential,” adding that “kids have more time to be with their friends.”

I grew up among Christian evangelicals and I recognize the cadences of missionary zeal when I hear them. TED, with its airy promises, sounds a lot like a secular religion

understanding the parallel structures is useful for conversations about faith — and how susceptible we humans remain.

The TED style, with its promise of progress, is as manipulative as the orthodoxies it is intended to upset.

To that point, I’d been reading the book the way I usually read books, which is to say in five- or 10-minute snatches before bed.

I’d been reading the wrong way. John Gardner, the literary critic, wrote that the job of the novelist is to create a “vivid and continuous dream” for the reader, but I’d somehow developed a case of readerly sleep apnea.

This style of reading had, I realized, shunted me into a vicious circle. I was reading less because I was enjoying it less, which made reading even less enjoyable, which inclined me to read even less.

For people who get anxious when there is a change in environment, just arriving at an airport can signal a perceived threat to the brain

And a mix of psychological factors related to the plane’s altitude and a perceived loss of control can cause a person to break down emotionally once in the air, DeLuca says.

“When you’re dehydrated, it’s not just the body that’s lacking in resources,” De Luca says. “Everything is affected”—including behavior and the brain. “Some people have difficulty self-regulating their emotions.”

As you look for your motivation, it helps to think of it falling into two categories, said Stefano Di Domenico, a motivation researcher

First, there’s controlled motivation, when you feel you’re being ruled by outside forces like end-of-year bonuses and deadlines — or inner carrots and sticks, like guilt or people-pleasing.

Often when people say they’ve lost motivation, “what they really mean,” Dr. Di Domenico said, “is ‘I’m doing this because I have to, not because I want to.’”

By Jaron LanierMr. Lanier is a computer scientist and an author of several books on technology’s impact on people.

I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot.

When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.

“We think that things are not good unless we’re obsessed about them,” he continued. “If you’re only mildly interested in your partner, that’s not as hot as being obsessed about somebody. Being blandly detached and mild seems like a failure.”

Contrary to our claims of obsession, Professor Davis believes that “the generation now is very low key — the emotions are flat — compared to movies from the ’50s, when people look sentimental.”

the etymology for “obsess” dates back to the turn of the 16th century (though “obsessed” itself wasn’t used until the mid-19th century) and is related to the devil. “ ‘Possession’ meant the devil occupied your soul and you had no awareness. If you were ‘obsessed,’ it meant the devil occupied your body but you were aware.” The meaning, then, has changed from something people “are forced to do but want to stop, to something they want to do and get pleasure from,” he said.

“The word ‘date’ should almost be stricken from the dictionary,” Ms. Silver said. “Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret.”

Raised in the age of so-called “hookup culture,” millennials — who are reaching an age where they are starting to think about settling down — are subverting the rules of courtship.

Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.

If you saw the film "Argo," no, you didn't miss this development, which is recounted in Mendez's book about the real-life operation. It wasn't there because director Ben Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio replaced it with an even more dramatic scenario, involving canceled flight reservations, suspicious Iranian officials who call the Hollywood office of the fake film crew (a call answered just in time), and finally a heart-pounding chase on the tarmac just as the plane's wheels lift off, seconds from catastrophe.

they've caught some flak for the liberties they took in the name of entertainment.

And they aren't alone - two other high-profile best-picture nominees this year, Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" and Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," have also been criticized for different sorts of factual issues.

Recreational readers tend to have higher academic achievement and greater economic success, and even display more civic-mindedness.

eading now competes for children’s time with many other alluring activities, including television, social media, and video games. Most leisure time is now spent in front of a screen.

n some cases, parents must also sign this log before their child turns it in to the teacher.

No matter how much I pay attention to the sunk cost fallacy, I still naturally gravitate towards it.

The reason we can’t ignore the cost, even though it’s already been paid, is that we wired to feel loss far more strongly than gain.

They asked subjects to assume they had spent $100 on a ticket for a ski trip in Michigan, but soon after found a better ski trip in Wisconsin for $50 and bought a ticket for this trip too. They then asked the people in the study to imagine they learned the two trips overlapped and the tickets couldn’t be refunded or resold. Which one do you think they chose, the $100 good vacation, or the $50 great one? Over half of the people in the study went with the more expensive trip. It may not have promised to be as fun, but the loss seemed greater.

President Bashar al-Assad’s main pitch to his people is that they are safer in the territory he controls, a far cry from the bombs and hunger on the rebels’ half of the storied and strategic city.This is what the government wanted international journalists to see when it invited a group into the country this week after years of keeping most out. But when I stepped off the bus, I found a war zone.

Dr. Mazen Rahmoun, a city health official in a neat brown suit, moved gingerly through the chaos with the preternaturally calm stare of a man long ago traumatized into numbness.

Instead, they are trying to break the siege, with Qaeda-linked groups and those backed by the United States working together — the opposite of what Russia has demanded.

You're sitting in eight lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. You're more than ready to get home, but you notice, to your great dismay, that all of the other lanes seem to be moving. You change lanes. But once you do, the cars in your new lane come to a dead halt. At a standstill, you notice every lane on the highway (including the one you just left) is moving -- except yours.

whatever can go wrong will go wrong.

After all, we expect that things should work out in our favor. But when things go badly, we look for reasons.

“Really” I was fine, I told her. But what if I hadn’t been? Would I have wanted to launch into a description of bad medical news at what was supposed to be a fun event? Would I have wanted even to be reminded of a bout with cancer?

False optimism devalued what was going on in my body. People were insensitive not from a lack of compassion but from not knowing what is really helpful.

What he and those he’s counseled have found to be most helpful were not words but actions

“I will buy one only if it has the potential to be the best. I’m not interested in having a nine.”

A friend asked me later whether Trump wasn’t “in on the joke” of his public persona, and I said that, as far as I could tell, the Trump we were used to seeing on television was the honest-to-god authentic Trump: a ten-year-old boy who, for unknown reasons, had been given a real airplane and a billion dollars. In other words, a fun guy to hang around with.

He was upset that I hadn’t written that he’d shot 71—a very good golf score, one stroke under par.

The proliferation of fake and hyperpartisan news that has flooded into Americans’ laptops and living rooms has prompted a national soul-searching, with liberals across the country asking how a nation of millions could be marching to such a suspect drumbeat.

In interviews, people said they felt more empowered, more attached to their own side and less inclined to listen to the other. Polarization is fun, like cheering a goal for the home team.

The wider problem is fake news has the effect of getting people not to believe real things.

I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever possible, I have met them in person, to truly grasp the emotional toll at the other end of our screens. The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow — deeply confused and traumatized.

Read literally, she said that white people don’t get AIDS, but it seems doubtful many interpreted it that way. More likely it was her apparently gleeful flaunting of her privilege that angered people. But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors. Sacco, like Stone, had been yanked violently out of the context of her small social circle. Right?

“To me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make,” she said. “I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal.” (She would later write me an email to elaborate on this point. “Unfortunately, I am not a character on ‘South Park’ or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform,” she wrote. “To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS or piss off the world or ruin my life. Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble.”)