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hey are young, apparently unaffiliated with any political or terror group and brimming with fury over Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories

Palestinians participating in the uprising are largely apolitical youths who post videos, photos and commentary “showing the larger picture of occupation, which is a violent experience which all Palestinians believe it is legitimate to resist,”

collective experience

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides,” he said Saturday.

It is important when you consider the situation of a man whose face has been crushed by a boot to wonder if any damage might have been done to the boot.

At what point can we stop giving people the benefit of the doubt? “Gotta Hear Both Sides” is carved over the entrance to Hell. How long must we continue to hear from idiots who are wrong? I don’t want to hear debate unless there is something legitimately to be debated, and people’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not among those things. They are self-evident, or used to seem so.

Is it helpful, or journalistically ethical, to explore the worst-case scenarios of climate change, however unlikely they are? How much should a writer contextualize scary possibilities with information about how probable those outcomes are, however speculative those probabilities may be?

I also believe very firmly in the set of propositions that animated the project from the start:

that the public does not appreciate the scale of climate risk

Five years ago, at my therapist’s urging, I kept track of every panic attack that washed over me: my record for a single day was 132. Soon I was diagnosed with agoraphobia and panic disorder, which is essentially a preoccupation with recurring panic attacks

it was a grey, mass-market paperback called “Hope and Help for Your Nerves,” with a front-cover blurb from Ann Landers, that became my talisman

Face. Accept. Float. Let time pass. That’s the recipe that Dr. Claire Weekes, the Australian clinician and relatively underrecognized pioneer of modern anxiety treatment, established in a series of books

In a classic experiment in 1972, researchers asked people to estimate the likelihood that various positive and negative outcomes might result from President Richard Nixon’s upcoming trips to China and Russia that year. We now call those visits “historic” because they thawed decades of hostility between the U.S. and the communist powers. In advance, no one knew whether the trips would accomplish anything.

About two weeks after Nixon’s visits, 71% of people recalled putting better odds on his success than they had at the time. Four months on, 81% remembered being more sure Nixon would succeed than they had said beforehand.

One week after the verdict in the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson, 58% of people in a study recalled predicting he would be found not guilty; a year afterward, 68% remembered saying he would be acquitted. In fact, only 48% of them had said so before the verdict.

It’s probably more accurate to call breakfast the most dangerous meal of the day. Not only because of the sugar in so many breakfast cereals, but also because the refined grains they’re made of are virtually the same thing, once they reach your bloodstream.

All the cereal, whole grain or not, is processed in a way to give it indefinite shelf life. As the nutritious parts of our food are what goes bad on the shelf, just about every processed-grain product on the shelf is nutritionally barren.

it may not even just be cereal that’s had such a huge impact on American health. “Maybe the problem,” Sukol said, “is the huge quantity of nutritionally bankrupt foods that are supposed to stand in for breakfast.”

Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.

Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities

Our emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future behavior

NLG (natural language generation) may be too powerful for its own good. This technology can generate huge varieties of natural-language textual content in vast quantities at top speed.

Today’s most sophisticated NLG algorithms learn the intricacies of human speech by training complex statistical models on huge corpora of human-written texts

The algorithm can generate samples of news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans. It can also generate a complete essay purely on the basis of a single starting sentence, a few words, or even a prompt

The Kind Workers at King Soopers Who Helped a Confused College Kid

A University of Colorado Boulder graduate recalls two victims of the shooting who helped a grocery shopping novice.

To the Editor:In the fall of 2016 I had just moved into my first apartment and was about to start my sophomore year at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This is the fog of late pandemic, and it is brutal. In the spring, we joked about the Before Times, but they were still within reach, easily accessible in our shorter-term memories. In the summer and fall, with restrictions loosening and temperatures rising, we were able to replicate some of what life used to be like, at least in an adulterated form: outdoor drinks, a day at the beach. But now, in the cold, dark, featureless middle of our pandemic winter, we can neither remember what life was like before nor imagine what it’ll be like after.

The sunniest optimist would point out that all this forgetting is evidence of the resilience of our species. Humans forget a great deal of what happens to us, and we tend to do it pretty quickly—after the first 24 hours or so. “Our brains are very good at learning different things and forgetting the things that are not a priority,” Tina Franklin, a neuroscientist at Georgia Tech, told me. As the pandemic has taught us new habits and made old ones obsolete, our brains have essentially put actions like taking the bus and going to restaurants in deep storage, and placed social distancing and coughing into our elbows near the front of the closet. When our habits change back, presumably so will our recall.

The share of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, or both roughly quadrupled from June 2019 to December 2020, according to a Census Bureau study released late last year. What’s more, we simply don’t know the long-term effects of collective, sustained grief. Longitudinal studies of survivors of Chernobyl, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina show elevated rates of mental-health problems, in some cases lasting for more than a decade

Local media in Myanmar say security forces killed at least 114 civilians in 40 cities and towns on Saturday, in what appears to be the deadliest day of protests since the coup last month.

coup leader Gen. Min Aung Hlaing continued to justify the coup by accusing the government of deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi of failing to investigate the military's accusations of voter fraud in the November general election — which saw Suu Kyi's party win in a landslide.

The deaths of 114 protesters on Saturday comes in addition to the 328 killed by the junta since the coup, according to figures released Friday by the activist group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners

But there is a lesson, psychologists and public health experts say, in the near-terror that the virus induces, even as serious threats like the flu receive little more than a shrug. It illustrates the unconscious biases in how human beings think about risk, as well as the impulses that often guide our responses — sometimes with serious consequences.

When you encounter a potential risk, your brain does a quick search for past experiences with it. If it can easily pull up multiple alarming memories, then your brain concludes the danger is high. But it often fails to assess whether those memories are truly representative.

Risks that we take on voluntarily, or that at least feel voluntary, are often seen as less dangerous than they really are. One study found that people will raise their threshold for the amount of danger they are willing to take on by a factor of one thousand if they see the risk as voluntary.

We are, I believe, witnessing something new in American politics. Last year, looking at claims that we can cut taxes, avoid cuts to any popular program and still balance the budget, I observed that Republicans seemed to have lost interest in the war on terror and shifted focus to the war on arithmetic. But now the G.O.P. has moved on to an even bigger project: the war on logic.

First of all, says the analysis, the true cost of reform includes the cost of the “doc fix.”

in 1997 Congress enacted a formula to determine Medicare payments to physicians. The formula was, however, flawed; it would lead to payments so low that doctors would stop accepting Medicare patients. Instead of changing the formula, however, Congress has consistently enacted one-year fixes.

Furthermore, a big chunk of Fox's base audience was demoralized by Trump's loss in November and disheartened by the pro-Trump riot last week. Fox's average viewership levels are about 20% lower than they were before the election, even though overall TV news viewership is elevated due to the current combination of crises.

But for the conservative media ecosystem, just what should be affirmed has suddenly become an existential question."

"Tristan Harris famously said that social networks are about 'affirmation, not information'

After pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to overthrow the country’s democratic elections last Wednesday, many researchers, activists and journalists covering the American far right were disturbed but not necessarily surprised. 

The question is what far-right extremists will do next ― and what the country will do to stop them.

You’ve been tracking the far right for decades and recently wrote about how Wednesday’s riot was a culmination of where this movement had been heading for a while.

In the wake of his second impeachment at the hands of the House on Wednesday, Trump told people around him to stop paying Giuliani's legal fees.

"Trump has been blaming his longtime personal attorney and many others for the predicament he now finds himself in

but has been left out of most conversations thus far."

When it comes to making decisions that involve risks, we humans can be irrational in quite systematic ways

when the emotions we feel aren’t correctly calibrated for the threat or when we’re making judgments in domains where we have little knowledge or relevant information, our feelings become more likely to lead us astray.

when Professors Tversky and Kahneman framed the question differently, such that the first option would ensure that only 400 people would die and the second option offered a 33 percent chance that nobody would perish and a 67 percent chance that all 600 would die, people’s preferences reversed. Seventy-eight percent now favored the second option.

We assume that progress is the natural order of things. Problems are meant to be solved. History is an upward curve of well-being. But what if all this is a fantasy

our most powerful disruptions shared one characteristic: They were not widely foreseen

This was true of the terrorism of 9/11; the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and the parallel Great Recession; and now the coronavirus pandemic

"We are still in battle against the would-be terrorists,

"We assume there are several heavily armed perpetrators."

But experts who study nightmares say this is a pretty typical bad-dream scenario. “There’s often some threat of death or injury or annihilation, and you’re trying to escape,”

In some instances, a bad dream’s setting or events may be innocent, but the emotions the dreamer feels are ones of terror, disgust or distress, he explains.

“For people who have significant nightmare problems, it’s also common is for these individuals to actively try to avoid sleep in order to avoid having nightmares,” he says. “When they do have [a nightmare], they often don’t sleep for the rest of the night.”