What perhaps Trump didn't realize was that he was playing right into Biden's hands. His efforts seem to prove an important point for Biden

Democrats got the message Trump was sending and nominated Biden.

Trump was impeached a second time after an insurrection that he incited last week over outrage of the 2020 election results.

During the transition period, Biden has been actively planning his presidency and not spending too much time publicly worrying about Trump's false claims of voter fraud.

Trump it seems, couldn't stand not to be the center of attention, which is unusual for an outgoing president.

Trump got about 70% of the news mentions.

The end result of all of this is that Biden goes into his administration this week with the vast majority of voters approving of Biden's handling of the transition.

Trump's political career seemed to be impermeable. That was until Trump ran into President-elect Joe Biden.

Biden proved to be Trump's kryptonite and helped himself tremendously by doing something very simple: allowing Trump to be Trump.

I’m not losing my son to this.”

are watching their children slide down an increasingly slippery path into an all-consuming digital life.

There

“There will be a period of epic withdrawal,”

that children’s brains, well through adolescence, are considered “plastic,” meaning they can adapt and shift to changing circumstances.

elling parents not to feel guilty about allowing more screen time, given the stark challenges of lockdowns. Now, she said, she’d have given different advice if she had known how long children would end up stuck at home.

I probably would have encouraged families to turn off Wi-Fi except during school hours so kids don’t feel tempted every moment, night and day,”

nine months of 2020, an increase of 82 percent over the year before.

In the United States, for instance, children spent, on average, 97

minutes a day on YouTube in March and April, up from 57 minutes in February, and nearly double the use a year prior

“The Covid Effect.”

What concerns researchers, at a minimum, is that the use of devices is a poor substitute for activities known to be central to health, social and physical development, including physical play and other interactions that help children learn how to confront challenging social situations.

Dr. Briasouli said. Some days, she said, she watches her son sit with three devices, alternating play among them.

These are the tools of their lives,” he said. “Everything they will do, they will do through one of these electronic devices, socialization included.”

“he laughs and has some social interaction with his buddies,”

said he believed that adults and children alike could, with disciplined time away from devices, learn to disconnect. But doing so has become complicated by the fact that the devices now are at once vessels for school, social life, gaming and other activities central to life.

Dr. Radesky said that the mingling of all of these functions not only gives children a chance to multitask, it also allows young people to “escape” from any uncomfortable moment they may face.

Instead, he hangs out online with his old frie

I’ve failed you as a father,”

confirm the central role of the damaged region — the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate social emotions, like compassion.

The new study seals the case by demonstrating that a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline.

people with the injury will even endorse suffocating an infant if that would save more lives.

at least two systems working when we make moral judgments,

There’s an emotional system that depends on this specific part of the brain

system that performs more utilitarian cost-benefit analyses

Jurors have reduced sentences based on brain-imaging results, and experts say that any evidence of damage to this ventromedial area could sway judgments of moral competency in some cases.

The new study focused on six patients who had suffered very specific damage to the ventromedial area from an aneurysm or a tumor

can be lucid, easygoing, talkative and intelligent, but blind to subtle social cues, making them socially awkward.

the ventromedial cortex

They strongly favored flipping the switch, just as group of people without injuries did.

All three groups also strongly rejected doing harm to others in situations that were not a matter of trading one certain death for another.

some of the same moral instincts

a large difference in the participants’ decisions emerged when there was no switch to flip

taking direct action to kill or harm someone (pushing him in front of the runaway boxcar, for example) and serving a greater good.

were about twice as likely as the other participants to say they would push someone in front of the train (if that was the only option)

The ventromedial area is a primitive part of the cortex that appears to have evolved to help humans and other mammals navigate social interactions

The area has connections to deeper, unconscious regions like the brain stem,

The ventromedial area integrates these signals with others from the cortex, including emotional memories, to help generate familiar social reactions.

This tension between cost-benefit calculations and instinctive emotion in part reflects the brain’s continuing adjustment to the vast social changes that have occurred since the ventromedial area first took shape

transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists are reporting today.

this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others' lives.

the parts mediating emotion (the limbic system

there's endless cross-talk between the two regions

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," hopefully convincing it not to do something idiotic. But it turns out that the limbic system influences the cortex as well.

lamenting how we'd be so much better off in our decision-making if our emotions played no role

of the limbic system to talk to the cortex and you get what we'd almost universally view as bad decisions.

unrecognizably utilitarian; they have no emotional conflict in choosing to advocate sacrificing the life of a stranger (or, equally so, a loved one) in order to save five others

the balancing act between cognition and emotion is pretty complex.

(and become more at risk for stress-related diseases)

we lack control, predictability, outlets for our frustrations, or social support

"We just don't know yet." And in this time, when we need social support the most, the crucially important catchphrase has become "social distancing."

he most rational decision-making part of your cortex is the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), while the most frothing-at-the-mouth emotional part of your limbic system is arguably the amygdala, a region central to fear, anxiety and aggression.

class of stress hormones causes the PFC to become sluggish, less capable of sending a "let's not do something hasty" signal to the amygdala

Extensive research has explored the consequences of this skewed neurobiology, showing that stress distorts our decisions in consistent ways

up having tunnel vision when it comes to making choices and it becomes harder to consider extraneous factors that may actually not be extraneous, or harder to factor future consequences into present considerations.

We fall back into a usual solution, and instead of trying something different when it doesn't work, the pull is to stick with the usual,

. And our decision-making narrows in another sense, in that we contract our circle of who counts as "us," and who merits empathy and consideration. Our moral decisions become more egoistic

the attackers started randomly shooting at people in a busy district packed with cafes and restaurants near Vienna's main synagogue, Seitenstettengasse Temple.

keep the population safe

said in a tweet that it was unclear whether the synagogue was a target, but that it was closed at the time of the shooting.

Kurz said the Austrian army has been deployed to help protect buildings and properties. "We are currently going through difficult times in our republic.

ther leaders have shared statements expressing their shock and sorrow, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

entral Vienna on Monday evening, killing at least one person and injuring 15, including a police officer, according to Austrian authorities.

Authorities are urging the public to stay inside while the other gunmen -- it is unclear how many there are in total -- remain at large.

60 percent of people who primarily get their news from social media had minimal knowledge of current political events, according to the study, compared with 23 percent who primarily get their news directly from news websites or apps

18- to 29-year-olds, 48 percent get most of their political news from social media sites

are breeding a generation of the misinformed — a situation that has only grown more dire at a time when the president spreads falsehoods about public health and the election.

while false information flows unimpeded through Facebook groups, user posts and advertisements.

The company says it will limit political advertising in the week before Election Day — but with huge numbers of mail-in ballots already being sent in around the country, that will amount to too little, too late.

“I don’t think there is any question at this point voters will be more informed by seeking out news brands they trust rather than spending their time on social media where it’s less than clear,”

Twitter sometimes forces users to first click through a warning that a tweet violates its rules on election integrity,

The problem with such posts is that they are widely spread, echoed and believed — and that happens far more quickly than moderators can react with a warning label.

Mr. Trump that falsely claimed the seasonal flu is responsible for more deaths than coronavirus

here are many positives to social media, of course — particularly as millions of Americans struggle to stay connected during the coronavirus pandemic.

available more reliably elsewhere, from your local board of elections website and from good government groups

People believe them.

Social media is a cesspool

however, aren’t taking the threat of spreading misinformation seriously enough ahead of the election.

Stay off social media at least until you’ve voted.

“Happiness is hard to know. It’s hard to measure,”

“We don’t have a lot of great data about how people are doing.”

to parse our national mental health through the prism of our online life.

that stockpile of information towered as high as it does now, in the summer of 2020

, Twitter reported a 34 percent increase in daily average user growth.

has gathered a random 10 percent of all public tweets, every day, across a dozen languages.

Twitter included “terrorist,” “violence” and “racist.” This was about a week after George Floyd was killed, near the start of the protests that would last all summe

the pandemic, the Hedonometer’s sadness readings have set multiple records. This year, “there was a full month — and we never see this — there was a full month of days that the Hedonometer was reading sadder than the Boston Marathon day,”

“These digital traces are markers that we’re not aware of, but they leave marks that tell us the degree to which you are avoiding things, the degree to which you are connected to people,”

one of the challenges of this line of research is that language itself is always evolving — and algorithms are notoriously bad at discerning context.

they were able to help predict which ones might develop postpartum depression, based on their posts before the birth of their babies.

Using data from social media for the study of mental health also helps address the WEIRD problem:

psychology research is often exclusively composed of subjects who are Western, Educated, and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries.

We’re now able to look at a much more diverse variety of mental health experiences.”

but also anxiety, depression, stress and suicidal thoughts. Unsurprisingly, she found that all these levels were significantly higher than during the same months of 2019.

is really a representative place to check the state of the general population’s mental health.

argues that in the rush to embrace data, many researchers ignore the distorting effects of the platforms themselves.

emotionally invested in the content we are presented with, coaxed toward remaining in a certain mental state.

The closest we get to looking at national mental health otherwise is through surveys like the one Gallup performs

the lowest rates of life satisfaction this year in over a decade, including during the 2008 recession

I have never been more exhausted at the end of the day than I am now,” said Michael Garfinkle, a psychoanalyst in New York.

There are so many contenders to consider: was it Thursday, March 12, the day after Tom Hanks announced he was sick and the N.B.A. announced it was canceled? Was it Monday, June 1, the day peaceful protesters were tear gassed so that President Trump could comfortably stroll to his Bible-wielding photo op?

with most polls indicating that it’s anyone’s guess who will carry Florida

held rallies in nearby Tampa on Thursday that underlined the polar-opposite realities each candidate now inhabits:

a conservative who said he had blocked Fox News on social media for being “too mainstream,”

“felt that it would be a good learning experience, so she could learn about some history and politics firsthand.”

Does he have a locker-room mentality?

“Yeah, sure, but I’m not hiring him to be nice.”

once overshadowed by Clearwater’s beach-retirement hub — has been transformed by recent years that have brought a mix of gentrification and progressive politics.

get-out-the-vote rally in honor of Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and voting rights champion who died over the summer

One in five Black Floridians is thought to have a felony conviction and could be unable to vote because of it.

“I’m not encouraging anyone to break the law, but today is a day for some ‘good trouble,’” she added, using one of Mr. Lewis’s signature phrases from his civil rights struggles

Mr. Overcast sighed. He said that living in the same county as the Church of Scientology’s headquarters had taught him how to tolerate almost any point of view, even that of the neighbor, who he suspected had stolen the Trump sign from his lawn.Mr. Overcast said his home security system had filmed the culprit making off with it. But rather than confront the neighbor, Mr. Overcast just bought another sign.“But with this one I tied 90 pounds of fishing line on it and tied it to a tree in my yard,” he said.

Billy Overcast — “spelled like the weather,” said Mr. Overcast, pointing up, however, to a typically clear day with one hand, a “Trump 2020” flag in the other.

Clearwater

The Confederate flag also bothered him, he told his fellow Jeep enthusiasts, as did the systemic racism

decorated with red, white and blue balloons; an American flag; a Black Lives Matter flag; another flag with an L.G.B.T. rainbow he found on Amazon; and lots of Biden-Harris campaign paraphernalia.

St. Petersburg and conservative Clearwater, the vacation hub and base of the Church of Scientology.

in the swing state that crowned past presidents by small margins, much in this country is riding o

n the all-important question of who flies what flag on which Jeep.

Pinellas County, about three-quarters of which is white, includes a good number of older retirees and suburban women

favor Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee.

256,000 are registered as Democrats

252,000 as Republicans.

a swing county in a swing state

Donald J. Trump narrowly triumphed here by roughly 6,000 votes, out of about half a million cast

But postelection observers said her appeals to middle-class voters in Pinellas County didn’t resonate as well as Mr. Obama’s had.