Nestled between hotels and conference centres, a short walk from the Las Vegas strip, is a giant, wide-eyed emoji. Sometimes it is an enormous, hyperrealistic eyeball, a basketball or a whorl of flames. The Sphere, a remarkable new concert venue, is 366 feet (110 metres) tall and 516 wide; an LED screen spanning almost 600,000 square feet covers the exterior. Inside, enveloping the 17,500 seats, is another vast, ultra-high-resolution screen. This pleasuredome offers an experience unlike any other. It also raises questions about the future of live entertainment.
The high-tech arena was opened in September by U2, who remain in residence until March. The Irish band has a history of innovative concert design as well as corporate ventures, including a long partnership with Apple. Perhaps just as important, U2 is loved by middle-aged rock fans, who form the bulk of concertgoers in America and might shell out for a ticket. (Prices start at $140 and go up to $1,500.)
From one angle, the Sphere represents a major development in an existing trend of the arts becoming more immersive. Exhibitions that turn the paintings of Monet or Van Gogh into interactive, room-encompassing installations have proliferated in recent years, as have immersive theatre productions. Virtual-reality technology has improved significantly.
From another angle, it is part of the evolution of the modern rock concert, which since the 1960s has combined light and sound to transport fans into another dimension. At a show your correspondent attended at the Sphere in October, there were moments when the experience was transcendent. (There is a quiet room, filled with bean bags, for the over-stimulated.) Yet viewers still took their eyes off the big screen to reach for the smaller ones in their pockets. At times the band seemed like an expensive soundtrack to the bright lights.
Is this the future of the concert? In the short term, no. The sheer cost of the Sphere—$2.3bn—means that the model cannot be easily reproduced. Its ostentation is also a barrier: Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, recently vetoed a sister Sphere in the city, calling it “bulky, unduly dominant and incongruous”. Sphere Entertainment Company, the owner, hopes to build other iterations and is in “serious” talks for an arena in Abu Dhabi. But negotiations regarding Spheres in Saudi Arabia and South Korea have stalled. Some artists and promoters are said to be wary of developing shows that cannot be taken on tour to other, standard arenas and of letting the venue outshine the music. For now, at least, what happens in Vegas is staying there.
As we wend our way from toddlerhood to older adulthood, we have a desire to be useful. It's a fundamental aspect of human experience that evolves as we traverse different stages of life. From toddler years, when little ones eagerly mimic their parents in an effort to be helpful, to the later years, when adults find fulfillment in providing for their families or contributing to their communities, the need to feel useful runs deep.
Toddlers are not merely playing make-believe when they attempt to assist parents with chores or activities; they seek validation and purpose through usefulness. The drive to feel useful is vital for their development, fostering confidence and autonomy as they grow. During adolescence, the urge for usefulness can surface through academic accomplishments or extracurricular activities, indicating their adolescent's value and significance to themselves and others.
Adults find meaning and fulfillment in being of service to others. Young adulthood is fraught with the quest for identity and purpose. Feeling useful and needed helps young adults navigate this pivotal phase, anchoring them as they explore their place in the world (Fuligni, 2021). Middle age is a time when adults need their usefulness to be reflected in generative or outward-focused activities, such as caregiving, volunteering, or mentoring others.
For some individuals, retirement can bring about loss of a sense of purpose and onset of feeling useless. The importance of engaging in activities that provide a sense of usefulness and fulfillment is key to maintaining well-being. Whether pursuing personal projects driven by intrinsic motivation, such as a hobby, or engaging in mentorship, finding avenues to contribute and feel useful can imbue life with purpose.
Three Takeaways:
Designed in 1859 by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, an architect, and felled by the devastating fire of 2019, the new flèche remains hidden behind dense scaffolding. But five years after the world watched aghast as the gothic cathedral roof was devoured by flames, the project to rebuild Notre Dame is, astonishingly, on schedule. The cathedral doors are due to reopen in December. (Visitors for the Olympics, which Paris will host starting in late July, must wait to glimpse inside.)
The rebuilding of Notre Dame is one of the most complex and ambitious reconstruction projects that France has ever undertaken on a historic monument. Fire engulfed the entire wooden latticework that made up the medieval roof, before melting its lead casing and toppling the spire. The cathedral’s nave, choir and transepts were mostly untouched by flames, thanks to the craftsmanship of the 12th- and 13th-century stonemasons. So were the 8,000-tube great organ and stained-glass windows.
When a grave-looking President Emmanuel Macron stood outside Notre Dame on the night of the fire, he described it as “the epicentre of our lives”. The cathedral would be rebuilt, he vowed, within five years. That the project is on track is also partly due to the commanding style of General Jean-Louis Georgelin, who ran it like a military operation until his death last August. A light management team, freed from bureaucratic excess has helped, too. Gifts from rich French industrialists—the Arnault, Bettencourt and Pinault families—as well as 340,000 smaller individual donations from around the world amounted to €846m ($921m). Unlike the usual French grands projects, this one is costing the public purse almost nothing.
The craftsmen working on the project are specialist artisans, drawn from dozens of small firms from around France. Rather than contract the rebuilding to one company, over 140 separate tenders were put out, in order to support traditional craftsmanship. The demands were unusually high: a decision was taken to restore the cathedral to its former splendour while remaining faithful both to its original designs and the construction techniques of the time.
Inevitably some modernists decry the project’s conservatism. After the fire, various architects lobbied for an audacious contemporary flourish: a plate-glass spire or roof planted with vegetation. Notre Dame, after all, is an architectural hybrid, the product of different centuries, ransacked during the wars of religion and looted during the revolution.Today a public debate pits those who contest the authenticity of reconstruction against those who argue that authenticity is guaranteed by respect for the original, with its irregularities as well as its durability. “This is not a monument like any other, and deserves not being distorted,” says Mr Jost: “We are restoring a cathedral that is 860 years old so that it can last for at least another 860 years.”
Adding fluoride, a common mineral, to drinking water lessens tooth decay in children and adults by 25%. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls fluoridation, which began in 1946 in the United States and is decided by local water districts, one of 10 “great public health achievements” of the 20th century. But from the getgo, some activist groups worried about potential harm. And over the past few decades, studies of laboratory animals and of communities where drinking water naturally contains fluoride have hinted that high levels might affect brain development.
The current case has put the spotlight on an unpublished assessment by the federal government’s National Toxicology Program (NTP). It reported “moderate confidence” that drinking water containing fluoride at levels at least twice as high as those recommended by the federal government is associated with lower IQ in children. The Fluoride Action Network (FAN) and other groups argue that such data indicate EPA should be regulating fluoride under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).
During opening arguments on 31 January, the attorney for the plaintiffs, Michael Connett, highlighted babies fed formula made with tap water as a “critical vulnerable group being exposed to the highest dose of fluoride of any age group in the population. That is a major cause for concern.” He argued that if EPA was aware of a different compound that posed a similar potential threat to newborns, the agency wouldn’t hesitate to regulate it. “I don’t think we need to speculate about what EPA would do with that scenario,” he said.
EPA and others argue there is little strong evidence that the current recommended concentration of fluoride in drinking water— 0.7 milligrams per liter—poses a threat. (That level is set to avoid discoloration of teeth in children.) “The dose makes the poison,” said Paul Caintic, a Department of Justice attorney. “Given the current state of science, the court cannot conclude that community water fluoridation presents an unreasonable risk.”
The fluoride lawsuit is the first to reach trial under a 2016 TSCA provision allowing citizens to ask a court to assess a chemical’s risk. FAN turned to that strategy after EPA said its request that the agency ban fluoridation lacked a “scientifically defensible basis.”
Handwriting notes in class might seem like an anachronism as smartphones and other digital technology subsume every aspect of learning across schools and universities. But a steady stream of research continues to suggest that taking notes the traditional way—with pen and paper or even stylus and tablet—is still the best way to learn, especially for young children. And now scientists are finally zeroing in on why.
The new research, by Audrey van der Meer and Ruud van der Weel at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), builds on a foundational 2014 study. That work suggested that people taking notes by computer were typing without thinking, says van der Meer, a professor of neuropsychology at NTNU. “It’s very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying,” she says. “It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.”
But when taking notes by hand, it’s often impossible to write everything down; students have to actively pay attention to the incoming information and process it—prioritize it, consolidate it and try to relate it to things they’ve learned before. This conscious action of building onto existing knowledge can make it easier to stay engaged and grasp new concepts.
Sophia Vinci-Booher, an assistant professor of educational neuroscience at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the new study, says its findings are exciting and consistent with past research. “You can see that in tasks that really lock the motor and sensory systems together, such as in handwriting, there’s this really clear tie between this motor action being accomplished and the visual and conceptual recognition being created,” she says. “As you’re drawing a letter or writing a word, you’re taking this perceptual understanding of something and using your motor system to create it.”
That creation is then fed back into the visual system, where it’s processed again—strengthening the connection between an action and the images or words associated with it. It’s similar to imagining something and then creating it: when you materialize something from your imagination (by writing it, drawing it or building it), this reinforces the imagined concept and helps it stick in your memory.
Let’s assume, however, that your livelihood does not rely on spreading misery. Much more likely is that it will be in your interest, if you have a complaining habit, to break it. The people you care about will be happier too. Here are four, research-based ways to quit complaining.
Judge less, observe more. Complaining is a fundamentally egotistical act—subjecting something about the world to your judgment. This is completely natural, of course, because we are all walking receivers of outside stimuli. However, as I have previously written, you can also decide to turn down the sensitivity of the receiver by trying to observe more about the outside world without judgment. Tomorrow, try to reframe what were today’s minor irritations as simple events. For example, instead of bitching about someone who cuts you off in traffic, simply observe that the person is obviously in a hurry. Be more of a play-by-play announcer of the game of your life, and less of a color commentator or pundit.
Consider the underlying problem. If you have a habit of complaining, you could find it worthwhile to dig into why you’re so often going over your dissatisfaction threshold. We’ve established that grumbling probably makes you unhappier, but the causality can run in the other direction: Constant complaining—being hypercritical about everything—can be a symptom of depression. For my own part, I’ve noticed that when something big is disturbing me, I also get impatient about all the little things I don’t like. Perhaps if you deal with what is really bothering you, you’ll find that the weather and politics aren’t really worth complaining about.
Be a Stoic. Most people think that to be a stoic means keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of misery, but that is a misunderstanding of capital-s Stoic philosophy. In fact, the Stoics, such as Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, managed their feelings about life’s trials through reason. In his Meditations, Marcus wrote this advice to himself: “If it be in thy power, redress what is amiss; if it be not, to what end is it to complain? For nothing should be done but to some certain end.” So when you are about to complain, subject your complaint to the Stoic test: Can you do something about the situation? If not, then complaining won’t help. If you can, then get on with that (and don’t waste time complaining).
Avoid the grumblers. One reason you complain a lot might be that you keep negative company, online or in person. Curate your personal life to the extent that you can, and turn off the complaint machines in your media—the querulous celebrities on X, the crabby pundits on television, and the whinging columnists in print. Remember, your misery is their business model.
The layoffs have shifted the narrative that long defined working at Google — that it was more of a tinker’ community than a workaday office, where creativity and thinking out of the box was encouraged. That it was a fun, different kind of place to work. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said more than a year ago that the company would cull 12,000 jobs, or 6 percent of the work force, describing it as “a difficult decision to set us up for the future.”
Those cuts have trickled into this year in what Mr. Pichai said could be much smaller, rolling layoffs throughout the year. Since early January, the company has cut more than a thousand jobs, affecting its ad sales division, YouTube and employees working on the company’s voice-operated assistant.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has said it is trying to shed expenses to pay for its growing investment in artificial intelligence. And Google is trying to reduce layers of bureaucracy so that employees can focus on the biggest company priorities, said Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokeswoman. The company added that it was not conducting a companywide layoff, and that reorganizations were part of the normal course of business.
Employees say the workplace mood has turned glum. While Google has shifted into overdrive to develop artificial intelligence products and keep pace with competitors like Microsoft and the start-up OpenAI, some of the humans that build the company’s technology feel less important.
Google’s layoffs have been smaller than those at some other big tech companies like Meta. And as a percentage of the company’s total work force, they are far smaller than recent cuts at companies like Xerox and the livestreaming platform Twitch. Google’s full-time work force was 182,502 at the end of 2023, just 4 percent smaller than at the end of 2022. On Tuesday, the company said it had a $20.7 billion profit in the last quarter of 2023, up 52 percent from a year earlier. But Google’s job cuts have accompanied broader changes in how the company operated as it reshuffled work groups and removed management layers. Workers complain that reorganization has been chaotically carried out and poorly communicated.
Whenever you’re actively performing a task—say, lifting weights at the gym or taking a hard exam—the parts of your brain required to carry it out become “active” when neurons step up their electrical activity. But is your brain active even when you’re zoning out on the couch?
The answer, researchers have found, is yes. Over the past two decades they’ve defined what’s known as the default mode network, a collection of seemingly unrelated areas of the brain that activate when you’re not doing much at all. Its discovery has offered insights into how the brain functions outside of well-defined tasks and has also prompted research into the role of brain networks—not just brain regions—in managing our internal experience.
Researchers called these areas “task negative.” When they were first identified, Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, suspected that these task-negative areas play an important role in the resting mind. “This raised the question of ‘What’s baseline brain activity?’” Raichle recalled. In an experiment, he asked people in scanners to close their eyes and simply let their minds wander while he measured their brain activity.
He found that during rest, when we turn mentally inward, task-negative areas use more energy than the rest of the brain. In a 2001 paper, he dubbed this activity “a default mode of brain function.” Two years later, after generating higher-resolution data, a team from the Stanford University School of Medicine discovered that this task-negative activity defines a coherent network of interacting brain regions, which they called the default mode network.
According to research, the effects of the default mode network include mind wandering, remembering past experiences, thinking about others’ mental states, envisioning the future, and processing language. While this may seem like a grab bag of unrelated aspects of cognition, Vinod Menon, the director of the Stanford Cognitive & Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, recently theorized that all of these functions may be helpful in constructing an internal narrative. In his view, the default mode network helps you think about who you are in relation to others, recall your past experiences, and then wrap up all of that into a coherent self-narrative.
One of the most robust findings in happiness research is the link between income, wealth, and life satisfaction. The more money someone has, the more satisfied they tend to be. The richer a country, the happier its citizens. But as scientists are now learning, some buck this broad trend. People — often indigenous — who live in small, isolated communities tend to be as satisfied with their lives as people living in the wealthiest countries. Finding out why could benefit us all.
It was this aim that inspired new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain and McGill University in Canada traveled across the world to survey close to 3,000 members of 19 poor, small-scale societies located in 18 different countries. They visited Kumbungu in Ghana, Laprak in Nepal, Vavatenina in Madagascar, and Lonquimay in Chilé, among many other remote places. The scientific trek was primarily for a grander project concerning climate change, but the researchers also assessed subjects’ life satisfaction.
“The average reported life satisfaction among our 19 surveyed small-scale societies is 6.8 out of 10, even though most of the sites have estimated annual monetary incomes of less than US $1,000 per person,” the researchers reported. Life satisfaction values this high are typically only seen in countries where GDP per capita exceeds $40,000 per year.
So what explains this leap to a higher level of happiness? Western anthropologists who’ve visited small-scale communities have generally found that these people derive a great deal of satisfaction from simple activities such as listening to music, going for a walk, or just relaxing. Relationships with friends and family as well as socializing also bring lots of joy. Community members also tend to greatly value spending time in nature. Copious studies show that being outside in pristine, natural habitats boosts mood, health, and overall well-being.
An obvious potential reason why simple joys such as social interaction and experiencing nature play an outsized role in driving life satisfaction in small-scale communities is that many of these societies aren’t heavily monetized. In prior research, members of the same Barcelona and McGill team visited other small societies and compared their collective well-being. They found that in communities where money played a larger role, reported drivers of happiness shifted: People went from enjoying experiential activities in contact with nature to instead prioritizing social and economic factors. Money brought happiness rather than life’s simple pleasures.
With its bright colors, easy-to-learn rules and familiar music, the video game Tetris has endured as a pop culture icon over the past 40 years. Many people, like me, have been playing the game for decades, and it has evolved to adapt to new technologies like game systems, phones and tablets. But until last December nobody had been able to beat it.
But there’s far more to Tetris than the elusive promise of winning. The game, in which players must manipulate blocks of different shapes as they slide down a screen, is based on a fundamental element of geometry, called dynamic spatial reasoning, which is taught by mathematics educators like me and used by architects, engineers and animators, among others. As players employ these geometric skills to progress in Tetris, playing the game both tests and improves a player’s dynamic spatial reasoning.
Manipulating the game pieces gives the player an exercise in dynamic spatial reasoning. Spatial reasoning is the ability to visualize geometric figures and how they will move in space. So, dynamic spatial reasoning is the ability to visualize actively moving figures. The Tetris player must quickly decide where the falling game piece will best fit and then move it there. This movement involves both translation, or moving a shape right and left, and rotation, or twirling the shape in increments of 90 degrees on its axis.
Spatial visualization is a key component of a mathematics discipline called transformational geometry, which is usually first taught in middle school. In a typical transformational geometry exercise, students might be asked to represent a figure by its x and y coordinates on a coordinate graph and then identify the transformations, such as translation and rotations, necessary to move it from one position to another while keeping the piece the same shape and size.
While it may seem simple, transformational geometry is the foundation for several advanced topics in mathematics. Architects and engineers both use transformations to draw up blueprints, which represent the real world in scale drawings. Animators and computer graphic designers use concepts of transformations as well. Animation involves representing a figure’s coordinates in a matrix array and then creating a sequence to change its position, which moves it across the screen. While animators today use computer programs that automatically move figures around, they are all based on this kind of transformation.
The internet has long been clogged with advertising, but something different is happening today. Gone are the days of simple banner ads; even the sponsored Instagram posts invading my feed have started to feel quaint. Now nothing is safe from brands trying to sell us stuff. Open the Uber app mid-ride to check your ETA, and you might first have to wait out a 90-second video. Search for healthy snack in the grocery-delivery app Instacart, and perhaps you’ll see a screen-clogging ad for That’s It bars made of 100 percent fruit. Hotel chains, airlines, pharmacies, and basically every other kind of business are also cashing in on online ads. The end result is an internet adpocalypse that has become impossible to escape.
A big part of why the internet has become an adpocalypse is that this kind of targeted advertising is no longer reserved for the tech giants. In recent years, diet apps, fitness apps, period-tracking apps, transportation apps, dating apps, food-delivery apps, and basically every other kind of app realized they have valuable personal information that we, by agreeing to their terms and conditions, have allowed them to access. Now they’re monetizing it. “You might be noticing more ads because the ads are more aware of who you are,” Christian Juhl, the CEO of the media-and-advertising-strategy company GroupM, told me.
Big Tech companies have warped the environment in less obvious ways as well. Some ads are not really ads at all. Third-party sellers pay Amazon’s advertising fees to appear higher in the platform’s search results and earn labels such as “highly rated.” If they neglect to pay, they’ll get buried; given Amazon’s control of online commerce, some reportedly can’t afford to leave the platform either. In suing Amazon for anti-competitive behavior last year, the Federal Trade Commission suggested that advertised products are 46 times more likely to get clicks than unadvertised ones.
Apple offers similar paid placements in its App Store, earning billions from the endeavor each year. Google Search now often returns a list topped by sponsored links, which is partly why using it feels like “rifling through junk mail, dodging scams and generic mailers,” as The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote last year. On many big sites, users no longer see results based on relevancy or reputation, but instead have to parse a cluttered mass of only the websites and retailers that can afford to be there.
Despite all of these frustrations, the adpocalypse shows no signs of abating. Google is poised to follow Apple's lead and prevent websites from tracking users' activity across the internet, a change that is “among the biggest in the history of the $600 billion-a-year online-ad industry,” according to The Wall Street Journal's Miles Kruppa and Patience Haggin. To be online is to dodge pop-ups and pre-rolls while getting swindled into purchasing falsely recommended products, even as users hand over additional personal information that allows advertisers to find them—faster, better, and all the more invasively the next time. As with most things in modern life, this is Big Tech’s world, and we are just living in it.
What do you want to accomplish from better managing your time? “Getting everything done” is not a valid goal, as it is unlikely and is too general or vague (new tasks would creep in as you made strides toward your goal). Be as specific and realistic as possible. Your answer points to what you should prioritize, as it indicates what is most important to you. Keep your now-articulated priority at the top of your consciousness, with reminders in as many ways and places as possible. As you start each day, ask yourself, “If I could only work on one thing today, what should it be?”
Thinking you will squeeze something in when you have time is a good way to ensure it doesn’t happen. Schedule your time with specific blocks devoted to specific tasks, in order of your priorities. Guard against interruptions and allowing yourself to run late getting to a specific schedule block. This is where implementation intentions come in. Psychologists define these as if/when-then statements or rules we make for ourselves. Anticipate what distractions or competing demands may interfere with carrying out your schedule and create implementation intentions so that you automatically know how to respond if they should occur.
Every hour of the day is not equal with regard to your energy level and ability to focus. For most people, the peak time is in the mid-afternoon, although there is some variability across individuals. Determine your window for peak performance and ensure that you schedule your most important tasks during that time. This slot in your schedule is best used for tasks that require deep thought, concentration, and perhaps creativity. Guard this time from distractions such as notifications on your phone or computer, and save routine tasks such as answering email messages for off-peak times.
What is your relationship to busyness? That’s an odd question, and your immediate response may be, “I hate being too busy.” Fair enough. And at the same time being extremely busy may become a habit in the sense that it is somewhat comfortable because it is the norm. Plus, being very busy may be a sign of being valued, as so many people rely on you or entrust you with responsibilities. What is your relationship to imperfection and incompletion? Although not ideal, is it acceptable that some tasks will be completed at the “good enough” level despite your ability to do better if you had more time? Unfortunately, these tendencies add to your time management burden. Learning to be ok with “cutting corners” when it is acceptable to do so is a worthwhile goal.
We humans tend to be mind readers; not that we have the ability but rather that we tend to automatically make assumptions about what other people mean with their words and actions. When it comes to agreeing to particular tasks, it’s easy to assume that you and the other person are thinking the same thing. After all, the words used were simple and seemingly clear, and you both agreed. Still, misunderstandings are common, and even minor ones may cost you time. Try to be as explicit as possible when making or receiving a request, discussing such details as the extent of what is actually needed, and by when. It’s also important to be clear on deadlines. The time to negotiate them is up front, avoiding unnecessary pressure and disappointment associated with a missed deadline.
One of the primary motivators of human behavior is avoiding regret. Before the legendary behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky formalized prospect theory and loss aversion, they believed that regret avoidance was at the root of the human behaviors they were studying. However, they learned that there are behaviors that regret avoidance could not explain and were led to a broader picture.
I have two dice—one red, one white—and two identical cups. I secretly place one die under each cup (no trickery), mix them up, and ask you to select the cup with the red die. You did not see me put the dice under the cups, so you have absolutely no information on which to base your decision. If you make the right choice, I give you $5. If not, you gain nothing. Let’s say you pick the cup on the right. I slide it toward you but don’t let you look underneath. I then ask you if you want to switch to the cup on the left, to change your choice. Would you switch? The majority of people do not; about 90 percent do not switch, according to studies. Why is that? The odds of being right are 50-50, so why not switch?
Experimenters point to two reasons. First is the endowment effect, which posits that once you perceive ownership of an item, it subtly becomes yours—and it becomes more valuable to you than an equivalent item you do not own. Once you select a cup, it subtly becomes yours—and it becomes more valuable to you than the other cup. Moving the cup so that it is in front of you amplifies this effect, as the cup is moved into your personal space.
The second reason is that, psychologically, one of the drivers of our actions is our effort to minimize regret. If we make a choice and it turns out to be wrong, we feel bad. But what if we make a choice, switch, and then find out our first decision was actually correct? We feel worse. We know this about ourselves, and so, when presented with the option to switch away from our cup, it is not very enticing to do so.
When I was in school and taking multiple choice exams, the advice was always to “stick with your first instinct” rather than to change to a different answer. I am now convinced that this advice does not give you a better chance at getting the correct answer—but it does make people feel better than if they get it wrong and find out their original choice was correct. I would much prefer getting it wrong with my first guess than changing away from the right answer!
All of the three kings of private equity—Apollo, Blackstone and KKR—have bought insurers or taken minority stakes in them in exchange for managing their assets. Smaller firms are following suit. The insurers are not portfolio investments, destined to be sold for a profit. Instead they are prized for their vast balance-sheets, which are a new source of funding.
Judged by the fundamentals, the strategy makes sense. Insurance firms invest over long periods to fund payouts, including annuities sold to pensioners. They have traditionally bought lots of government and corporate bonds that are traded on public markets. Firms like Apollo can instead knowledgeably move their portfolios into the higher-yielding private investments in which they specialise. A higher rate of return should mean a better deal for customers. And because insurers’ liabilities stretch years into the future, the finance they provide is patient. In banking, long-term loans are funded with lots of instantly accessible deposits; with private assets and insurance, the duration of the assets matches the duration of the liabilities.
Yet the strategy brings risks—and not just to the firms. Pension promises matter to society. Implicitly or explicitly, the taxpayer backstops insurance to some degree, and regulators enforce minimum capital requirements so that insurers can withstand losses. Yet judging the safety-buffers of a firm stuffed with illiquid private assets is hard, because its losses are not apparent from movements in financial markets. And in a crisis insurance policyholders may sometimes flee as they seek to get out some of their money even if that entails a financial penalty. Last year an Italian insurer suffered just such a bank-run-like meltdown.
Making things harder is the complexity of the tie-ups, which involve labyrinthine interlinkages between different bits of firms’ balance-sheets. Much reinsurance activity takes place in Bermuda, an offshore hub where there is more than a whiff of regulatory arbitrage. Yet compared with the zealots who police the global banking system, insurance regulators are docile.
As private assets become more important, that must change. Regulators should co-operate internationally to ensure that the safety-buffers are adequate. High standards of transparency and capital need to be enforced by suitably heavyweight bodies. The goal should not be to crush a new business model, but to make it safer. Financial innovation often brings new benefits even as it creates new ways to blow up the system. Regulators would be making a mistake to ignore either edge of the sword.
A Muslim colleague of mine said she was appalled to see so much indifference to the atrocities and innocent lives lost in Gaza and Israel. How could anyone just go on as if nothing had happened? A common conclusion is that people just don’t care. But inaction isn’t always caused by apathy. It can also be the product of empathy. More specifically, it can be the result of what psychologists call empathic distress: hurting for others while feeling unable to help.
Empathic distress explains why many people have checked out in the wake of these tragedies. The small gestures they could make seem like an exercise in futility. Giving to charity feels like a drop in the ocean. Posting on social media is poking a hornet’s nest. Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent.
The symptoms of empathic distress were originally diagnosed in health care, with nurses and doctors who appeared to become insensitive to the pain of their patients. Early researchers labeled it compassion fatigue and described it as the cost of caring. The theory was that seeing so much suffering is a form of vicarious trauma that depletes us until we no longer have enough energy to care.
But when two neuroscientists, Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer, reviewed the evidence, they discovered that “compassion fatigue” is a misnomer. Caring itself is not costly. What drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it. In times of sustained anguish, empathy is a recipe for more distress, and in some cases even depression. What we need instead is compassion. Although they’re often used interchangeably, empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.” Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”
That’s a big difference. “Empathy is biased,” the psychologist Paul Bloom writes. It’s something we usually reserve for our own group, and in that sense, it can even be “a powerful force for war and atrocity.” Another difference is that empathy makes us ache. Neuroscientists can see it in brain scans. Dr. Klimecki, Dr. Singer and their colleagues trained people to empathize by trying to feel other people’s pain. When the participants saw someone suffering, it activated a neural network that would light up if they themselves were in pain. It hurt. And when people can’t help, they escape the pain by withdrawing.
Everywhere you look, stockmarkets are breaking records. If the boom has a home, it is America. A hundred dollars invested in the S&P 500 on January 1st 2010 is now worth $600 (or $430 at 2010’s prices). However you measure them, American returns have outclassed those elsewhere. Almost 60% of Americans now report owning stocks, the most since reliable data began to be collected in the late 1980s. Many of them, as well as many professional investors, have a question. Is the stockmarket surge sustainable—or the prelude to a correction?
For as long as stockmarkets have existed there have been those predicting an imminent crash. But today, in addition to the usual doomsaying, a chorus of academics and market researchers argues that it will be tough for American firms to deliver the long-term growth required to reproduce extraordinary recent stockmarket returns. Michael Smolyansky of the Federal Reserve has written about the “end of an era”, and warned of “significantly lower profit growth and stock returns in the future”. Goldman Sachs, a bank, has suggested the “tailwinds of the last 30 years are unlikely to provide much boost in the coming years.” Jordan Brooks of AQR Capital Management, a quantitative hedge fund, has concluded that “a repeat of the past decade’s equity market performance would require a heroic set of assumptions.”
That is, in part, because valuations are already at eye-popping levels. The most closely followed measure of them was devised by Robert Shiller of Yale University. It compares prices with inflation-adjusted earnings over the previous decade—a long enough period to smooth out the economic cycle. The resulting cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio, or CAPE, has never been higher than 44.2, a record reached in 1999, during the dotcom bubble. The previous peak was in 1929, when the CAPE hit 31.5. It now stands at 34.3.
Yet much of this strong performance is, in a sense, a mirage. Politicians have reduced the tax burden facing corporations. From 1989 to 2019 the effective corporation-tax rate on American firms dropped by three-fifths. Since companies were giving less money to the state, corporate profits rose, leaving them with more money to pass on to shareholders. Meanwhile, over the same period borrowing became cheaper. From 1989 until 2019 the average interest rate facing American corporations fell by two-thirds.
Mirroring Mr Smolyansky, we find that in America the difference in profit growth between the 1962-1989 period and the 1989-2019 period is “entirely due to the decline in interest and corporate-tax rates”. Extending this analysis to the rich world as a whole, we find similar trends. The surge in net profits is really an artefact of lower taxes and interest bills. Measures of underlying profits have grown less impressively. Now companies face a serious problem. The decades-long slide in interest rates has reversed. Risk-free interest rates across the rich world are about twice as high as they were in 2019. There is no guarantee that they will fall back to those lows—let alone decline fairly steadily, as they tended to in the decades before the pandemic.
I offer to pay you $200 in one year if you give me $190 today. Good deal or bad deal? It's the kind of math problem you might encounter in real life, as opposed to, say, whether the cosecant of a 30-degree angle is 1 or 2. You can imagine students perking up and paying attention when they realize that they need to know algebra to avoid being cheated on a loan. Math and personal finance make a perfect fit. Students grasp concepts such as exponential growth and regression to the mean much better when they see how those subjects apply to their daily financial lives.
A survey in 2022 funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found that 61 percent of parents of students said math education should be “relevant to the real world” but that only 21 percent said it was. The drive for relevance goes beyond K-12 education. Some of America’s top universities are incorporating personal finance into their curriculums.
Harvard has a personal finance course in the economics department that’s taught by John Campbell, a past president of the American Finance Association. “Traditionally personal finance was regarded as a very sort of hands-on skill that you might teach to people who were going to a technical high school,” he told me. “There is, I would say, a modern movement to reconceive of personal finance as a subject with actually a lot more intellectual content.”
In most high schools, personal finance classes are light on math, and math classes are light on personal finance. The FiCycle curriculum has plenty of each. “The personal finance component is incredibly motivating for our high school students,” Philip Dituri, the director of education at Financial Life Cycle Education, who has a doctorate in math education, told me.
There is a national standard for personal finance education that was put together by the Council for Economic Education and the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy. It emphasizes how to manage one’s finances. FiCycle focuses more on the underlying concepts. It’s about “how and why individuals and households transfer consumption over time,” Financial Life Cycle Education says.
In a world of music streaming services, access to almost any song is just a few clicks away. Yet, the live gig lives on. People still fill sweaty basements, muddy fields and gilded concert halls to hear their favourite musicians play. And now neuroscientists might know why: live music engages the brain’s emotion centres more than its recorded counterpart.
Concerts are immersive social experiences in which people listen to and feel the music together through crescendos, key changes and drops. They are also dynamic—artists can adapt their playing according to the crowd’s reaction.
It was this last difference that led neuroscientists, based at the Universities of Zurich and Oslo, to study the brain responses of people listening to music. In the “live” experiment, participants lay in an MRI scanner listening to the music through earphones, while a pianist was positioned outside the room. The pianist was shown the participant’s real-time brain activity as a form of feedback. In the recorded condition, participants listened to pre-recorded versions of the same tunes.
The scientists were interested in how live music affected the areas of the brain that process emotions. In the live condition pianists were instructed to try and modulate their playing in order to drive the activity in one of these regions known as the amygdala, an almond-shaped area deep inside the brain.
The results, just published in the journal PNAS, showed that live music had far more emotional impact. Whether the music was happy or sad, listening to the pianist playing in a dynamic way generated more activity in both the amygdala and other parts of the brain’s emotion processing network. The researchers also found that participants’ brain activity tracked the acoustic features of the music, like tempo and pitch, far more closely when it was played live.
The majority of New Year’s resolutions are abandoned after three months. Though well-intentioned, healthy habits are difficult to stick with because they require some degree of effort and willpower. Mustering any energy and discipline to exercise, journal or meditate can feel insurmountable when you are depleted at the end of a workday. In addition, healthy habits do not yield immediate benefits. You will not experience the euphoria of a runner’s high a few minutes into your jog. Nor will you discover a profound sense of inner peace after your first meditation session. Eating that avocado will not dramatically improve your physical health. On the contrary, you are more likely to experience some initial discomfort while pushing your body and mind through unfamiliar territory.
It is human nature to pursue the path of least resistance, especially when you are tired. If you do not intentionally and consistently hone healthy habits, you will automatically fall for unhealthy ones. Problematic behaviors such as alcohol and substance use, junk food and excessive screen time will fill the void because they require minimal effort to have an immediate impact on your emotional state. Their mind-numbing properties instantly quell feelings of irritability, sadness or anxiety pent-up from the day.
Here are several tips to help your healthy habits stick. Say goodbye to perfection. We often have a hard time sticking with new habits because we set the bar at unrealistic expectations. As high-achievers, we expect a workout to last an entire hour and include a circuit of workouts. Anything less does not count as exercise in our minds. The truth is that some exercise is better than none. Even a 15-minute walk, a few sets of calisthenics or some light stretching is better than zero physical activity. Don’t let perfectionism get in the way of making progress.
Find your "why". Delaying instant gratification is hard if it is not connected with a higher purpose. You are more likely to stick with a new behavior if it is attached to something important to you. Keep it light. It is hard to stick with a new habit if it is too painful. As an example, many people struggle to keep up with an exercise program because it is too strenuous. The idea of showing up day after day for more muscle soreness can be discouraging. The same holds true when starting any routine such as writing or reading. Trying to accomplish too much too fast takes the joy out of the experience.Try to keep your new habit light. Instead of focusing on results, focus on enjoying the new behavior. This makes it more likely you will look forward to it.
Give yourself some grace. Building a new habit can take months. Be patient and realistic with yourself. Practice self-compassion when you experience shortcomings along the way. Beating yourself up leads to emotional pain that makes it more likely you fall for old vices.
All you need to know about Liz Truss offering lessons on how to be popular is that one of her signature policies is to raise the state pension age to 68. Such is its vote-winning potential that the plan was ditched by Rishi Sunak’s administration as soon as the electoral consequences became clear. The trouble is not that people are living longer, but that they are living longer with ill health. As it stands, the pension age will rise to 67 in April 2026. At the same time, there has been a sustained rise in people out of work because of sickness.
In Greek mythology, Cassandra had the gift of prophecy, but was cursed so no one listened to her. Those making the case that people should have to wait until they are 71 to retire might feel aggrieved that they are being similarly dismissed while speaking the truth. But that fails to understand the hardship, alienation and anguish currently being experienced by the working-age population.
The Institute for Public Policy Research found, astonishingly, that just 9% of men and 16% of women born today can expect to reach state retirement age in good health. The poor not only die sooner, they also spend more of their lives with a long-term condition or disability. This is an avoidable, unfair difference with the rich that should be morally unacceptable.
By raising age limits, it means another year on working-age benefits rather than the relatively more generous state pension. Analysis by the Health Foundation suggests that people living in some of the most deprived areas in Scotland, the north-east, the east Midlands and Yorkshire and the Humber would be the most disadvantaged by the upward drift in pensionable age.
If the argument is that more and more of us will live longer lives, but are not saving enough to enable us to consume after retirement, then the answer is to allow more people to have the money to put aside. Revitalising the NHS is key to strengthening the UK economy. But there needs to be a wider system rethink about employment conditions, pay and the dignity of work – not just blindly raising age limits with little care about inequality.
The myth that we use only 10 per cent of our brains has been comprehensively debunked. Perhaps it persists because it is so appealing to believe that you could become a genius simply by learning to engage the dormant 90 per cent. In reality, no part of your brain is surplus to requirements, and it is always switched on, even when you are asleep or not thinking about much at all.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that your brain burns the same amount of energy while daydreaming as it does when you are concentrating. We have all experienced that feeling of mental exhaustion after focusing on a tricky problem. Detailed thinking certainly feels like hard work, but is it? The answer is a touch more subtle than you might suspect.
Intriguingly, when it comes to energy use, the brain doesn’t distinguish between tasks that we traditionally regard as “hard” and those that come more naturally. This was first demonstrated in the 1950s in a study showing that the brain’s level of metabolic activity is remarkably constant, regardless of whether we are concentrating on mental arithmetic or letting our mind wander. “Daydreaming takes up neural energy too,” says Lavie.
Your brain allocates resources to its different parts depending on the mental activity being carried out. But there is a trade-off. “When the demand of a mentally challenging task increases, you see increased metabolism in the neurons that are responsible for the task,” says Lavie. At the same time, you see corresponding decreases in other brain areas. For instance, in a study published in November, Lavie and her colleagues measured energy use in the brain region responsible for daydreaming and found that it decreased when volunteers carried out a problem-solving task that required focused attention.
So thinking hard does burn more energy in the brain region involved, but this is offset by energy savings in other parts of the brain. However, the amounts of energy involved are minuscule. For example, a self-control task, such as keeping your hand in icy water for as long as you can, “burns up 1 calorie of glucose”, says McNay. However, although this is a tiny amount of fuel, your brain doesn’t see it that way. “It worries about an imbalance of supply over demand,” he says. If the brain detects local drainage of glucose – the sugar that fuels the brain – it perceives it as something bad, says McNay. This is what gives rise to the feeling of being exhausted after prolonged focus.
Genes are quite remarkable things. But in the last few decades, the power that we have ascribed to them has gotten a little out of hand. This has led to the rise of biological (or genetic) determinism. This is the idea that our biological makeup (as opposed to culture, environment, or personal decisions) is the dominant determinant of our behavior.
One of the critical things we often get wrong when we talk about this subject is this: Genes do not code for traits. They certainly don’t code for behavioral traits (such as kindness). But in the overwhelming majority of cases, genes don’t even code for physical traits (such as hair color). Some of our misconceptions about this come from grade school lessons in Mendelian genetics. You might remember learning about Gregor Mendel’s pea plants and the concepts of dominant and recessive traits.
But, as we have come to find out, traits that are inherited in a simple Mendelian fashion are the exception, not the rule. In humans, they are incredibly rare. Human examples of Mendelian inheritance come from diseases (sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, and Huntington’s disease, to name just a few), not normal physiology. In humans, normal traits that follow a Mendelian inheritance pattern seem to be absent. Even traits that we once thought were inherited in this simple pattern, such as eye color, are now understood to be much more complex.
As our understanding of genetics has deepened, the support for genetic determinism has eroded. We have come to recognize that genes don’t really act as agents in themselves. They are regulated (turned on or off) by things called transcription factors. In turn, these transcription factors — and here’s the death knell for genetic determinism — are regulated by the environment. As the neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky has put it, “It’s not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment.” What does Sapolsky mean by the “environment”? It can be the environment inside the cell, just outside the cell, or in the world outside the body.
Most scientists assume that genes have some influence on our traits — both behavioral and physical — but the way this happens is extraordinarily complex and very indirect. There are very few examples in humans where a known genetic variation has quantitatively been linked to a behavioral response. Even when we do find, these estimates are very imprecise. Genes do indeed shape and influence our behavior, but they don’t determine it. In other words, there is no gene for selfishness or aggression; likewise, there is no gene for kindness or cooperation. Clearly genes play some role in our behavior. But the reality of human psychology is increasingly seen to be worlds away from a sort of genetic behavioral determinism.
Cocoa prices have climbed to record highs, and market participants don’t expect any near-term relief. Prices have skyrocketed as the world’s biggest producers in West Africa grapple with drought and disease as well as structural problems that could linger for years to come. Futures traded in New York averaged well below $3,500 a metric ton every year from the 1980s until 2023. On Feb. 22 cocoa futures surpassed $6,000 a ton for the first time, and the market worries they could still have further to run.
So far, companies have been passing on higher costs to consumers. But no one needs chocolate to live, and every price hike risks sales. Consumers are most likely to cut spending on chocolate and candy if inflation continues, behind only alcohol and makeup, according to a survey from September by consumer intelligence company NIQ.
Facing limited room for additional price hikes, companies are shrinking packages, using automation to trim production costs and promoting products with less cocoa or other starring flavors. Cocoa butter, produced when beans are ground, is a key ingredient in chocolate. An average milk chocolate bar contains about 20% cocoa butter. But some food manufacturers are finding ways to replace some of the cocoa butter in their products with cheaper substitutes such as palm oil.
Chocolate makers typically use the futures market to hedge risk, buying cocoa futures eight to nine months out as protection. Because of higher prices, some manufacturers let that protection slip to as low as six months at the end of last year in hopes that prices would come down. But cocoa kept on rising, forcing them to reenter the market; they’re still protected for only about seven or seven and a half months, says commodities broker Marex Group. Analysts at Morgan Stanley recently downgraded Hershey stock to underweight and noted that “the runup in cocoa that started in mid-2023 is likely to catch up with the company in 2025.”
High prices are encouraging companies to continue diversifying beyond chocolate. “Everyone is trying to become more of a holistic candy player,” says Nik Modi, co-head of global consumer and retail research at RBC Capital Markets. “Everyone is starting to really think hard about how to be bigger in that space because they see what’s happening with chocolate, which is the category that’s really been under pressure.”
Anthropologist Daniel Miller has observed that an alien visiting Earth might well suppose that four-wheeled creatures run the planet. These rulers, he notes, are “served by a host of slaves who walk on legs and spend their whole lives serving them.” He meant this as a joke, but the punch line comes at the expense of American car culture. In the U.S., the costs of car dependency keep growing, far above the $12,000-per-year average expense of owning a new one.
Coast-to-coast, the cars and trucks we drive cause about 16 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. They cause significant air pollution, worsening asthma and heart disease rates, and contribute to a nationwide epidemic of obesity. About 69 percent of car trips in the U.S. are two miles or less. Motor vehicle collisions are a leading cause of death in people ages one to 44, the most bitter part of the mayhem accompanying some six million reported accidents per year. Since 2010 the number of pedestrians killed by cars has increased 77 percent, to about 7,500 a year, a growing fraction of all traffic deaths.
America's car culture—glamorized in advertisements, enforced by zoning laws and enabled by taxpayer subsidies—is a choice that now comes at too high a cost, both for ourselves and for the environment. After a century of its central place in our lives, we need to rethink our world into one not hitched to the automobile.
We can start by reforming zoning laws to eliminate low-density and single-family residential home restrictions in new developments and to add flexibility for stores and enough homes to support them. Sidewalks and bike trails should receive the same priority as roads in our cities and close-in suburbs, instead of being afterthoughts. Unreasonable demands by mayors and employers that the masses get back behind the wheel and return to offices (where we are, in fact, less productive) need to stop. The average American commute is nearly 28 minutes of uncompensated labor each way. Let's make our cities less car-dependent instead.
Thinking more ambitiously, we can provide discounts to bicyclists who take the train, free taxis to twice-a-week commuters, incentives for e-bikes and other financial breaks to eschew second cars and the congestion they cause. Behind plans like New York's congestion pricing is another reality—car parking is too cheap across much of the country, where variable on-street parking pricing can reset plans from hopping in the car during peak periods to taking the subway or the bus instead.
In a perspective article published in Nature this week, social scientists say that AI systems pose a further risk: that researchers envision such tools as possessed of superhuman abilities when it comes to objectivity, productivity and understanding complex concepts. The authors argue that this put researchers in danger of overlooking the tools’ limitations, such as the potential to narrow the focus of science or to lure users into thinking they understand a concept better than they actually do.
Messeri and Crockett examined around 100 peer-reviewed papers, preprints, conference proceedings and books. From these, they put together a picture of the ways in which scientists see AI systems as enhancing human capabilities. In one ‘vision’, which they call AI as Oracle, researchers see AI tools as able to tirelessly read and digest scientific papers, and so survey the scientific literature more exhaustively than people can. In both Oracle and another vision, called AI as Arbiter, systems are perceived as evaluating scientific findings more objectively than do people, because they are less likely to cherry-pick the literature to support a desired hypothesis or to show favouritism in peer review. In a third vision, AI as Quant, AI tools seem to surpass the limits of the human mind in analysing vast and complex data sets. In the fourth, AI as Surrogate, AI tools simulate data that are too difficult or complex to obtain.
Informed by anthropology and cognitive science, Messeri and Crockett predict risks that arise from these visions. One is the illusion of explanatory depth, in which people relying on another person — or, in this case, an algorithm — for knowledge have a tendency to mistake that knowledge for their own and think their understanding is deeper than it actually is.
Another risk is that research becomes skewed towards studying the kinds of thing that AI systems can test — the researchers call this the illusion of exploratory breadth. For example, in social science, the vision of AI as Surrogate could encourage experiments involving human behaviours that can be simulated by an AI — and discourage those on behaviours that cannot, such as anything that requires being embodied physically.
There’s also the illusion of objectivity, in which researchers see AI systems as representing all possible viewpoints or not having a viewpoint. In fact, these tools reflect only the viewpoints found in the data they have been trained on, and are known to adopt the biases found in those data. “There’s a risk that we forget that there are certain questions we just can’t answer about human beings using AI tools,” says Crockett. The illusion of objectivity is particularly worrying given the benefits of including diverse viewpoints in research.
I have studied the sociology of manners for years, and it turns out that manners really do maketh humanity. While many other species engage in cooperative activities, our capacity to share and divide labour among strangers is a “remarkable and uniquely human” phenomenon, writes evolutionary economist Paul Seabright. The ability to place our trust in strangers became possible around 10,000 years ago through the development of shared norms designed to encourage prosocial behaviour and discourage deviance. This is when we moved from isolated groups of hunter-gatherers into complex societies built on mutual cooperation.
However, words like “civility” and “respect” can be a double-edged sword. In Europe, the concept of civility goes back to Erasmus of Rotterdam’s 1530 treatise De Civilitate Morum Puerilium. A training guide for young noblemen, it encouraged readers to be considerate of the needs of others, offering advice such as to not spit on the floor or stick dirty hands in food. In that sense, manners can be a significant force for good.
But manners have also been used to set up status hierarchies. The word “etiquette” derives from the 1600s, when King Louis XIV of France used estiquettes (small cards) around Versailles to advise visitors on the codified rules of behaviour expected in court. Rather than encouraging consideration, manners were a tool for discerning who belonged in certain social spaces. Historians have since studied the use of “racial etiquette” for regulating behaviour. From Asia to the Americas, colonial oppressors often forced Indigenous communities into humiliating performances of deference.
In the 1930s, Norbert Elias published his sociological epic The Civilizing Process. Pointing out that calls for civility and propriety are often most forceful at times of moral conflict, Elias warned of the dangers of confusing manners with morality. A Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, he had seen how easy it can be to mistake the appearance of civilised propriety for actual ethical decency. According to Elias, the Third Reich deliberately utilised displays of dapper uniforms and cultivated mannerisms as cover for acts of unimaginable brutality.
In calling for civility again today, then, we need to heed Elias's warning and pay attention to when a facade of mannerly propriety is used to bring about immoral ends – injustice, violence and ecocide all rendered tolerable so long as everyone speaks calmly and behaves decorously . With so much at stake in 2024, we need to reject the appearance of respectability in favour of building a genuinely respectful world in which everyone has an equal chance to thrive.
When your alarm goes off in the early morning, it’s tempting to hit the snooze button and curl back up under the warm covers for a few more minutes of slumber. This repeated postponing of the buzzer is often thought of as a bad habit—one that creates not only a lazy start to a day but also a fragmented sleep pattern that’s detrimental to health. But recent research is contradicting this notion.
A recent study in the Journal of Sleep Research found that people who regularly pressed the snooze button lost only about six minutes of sleep per night—and it didn’t affect their morning sleepiness or mood. Plus, tests showed that 30 minutes of snoozing improved or did not affect cognition compared with people who woke up the first time their alarm went off. This adds to research in 2022 that also found chronic snoozers generally felt no sleepier than nonsnoozers.
Snoozing does shorten sleep, Sundelin says, but she maintains that it’s not as bad as scientists once thought. Past research suggested that the extra minutes snoozers get don’t really help them feel more rested—and repeatedly waking up and trying to sleep again has been thought to prevent the restorative stages of sleep, including rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. “If you disturb someone's sleep, it's not good-quality sleep, and they often feel tired afterward—but this [idea] is based on a whole night of sleep fragmentation,” explains Sundelin, who adds that most theories about snoozing are “inferred from what we know about sleep in general.”
Sundelin found that snoozing the alarm for half an hour benefited chronic snoozers—people who delay the alarm two or more times a week and almost always fall back asleep between alarms. Thirty-one such chronic snoozers who were observed in the study slept well throughout the night and showed signs of fragmented sleep only in the last 30 minutes before getting up, which is typically around the time when people first hit the snooze button. This fragmented sleep “didn’t have a big enough impact to make them tired” throughout the rest of the day, Sundelin says.
Sundelin’s research also suggests that snoozing might help people shake off morning drowsiness by easing the transition from deep sleep to a lighter stage. A good night’s rest typically involves four to six sleep cycles, each made up of four stages. Light sleep happens in the first two stages of nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. This is when muscles start to relax, and brain activity slows, along with breathing and heart rate—but a person can still be easily woken. As the night goes on, people progressively reach deeper stages. It gets harder to wake up during the third and final stage of NREM sleep and the first stage of REM sleep. A person who receives a phone call during these stages, for example, might be less likely to hear it or remember answering.
Children who are suspended from school in England even for short periods see their GCSE results suffer, according to research that highlights the need for early interventions to reduce suspensions. Pupils who had been suspended were found to be lagging a year behind their peers and on average were unable to achieve a standard pass in GCSE maths and English. The research also found a strong overlap between children being suspended and those diagnosed with special needs and mental health issues, while children who were repeatedly absent were also more likely to be suspended.
“While suspensions are sometimes necessary, supporting pupils who are struggling to engage in mainstream education must continue to be a priority for whoever is in government. We should aim for lower exclusion levels not simply for the sake of it but because it would be a sign of a more effective education system for pupils and teachers alike.”
The study by the Education Policy Institute tracked one year group of more than 550,000 state school pupils in England from the start of secondary school until sitting GCSEs. After adjusting for each pupil’s characteristics, including their previous academic record and whether they received free school meals, the negative effects of suspensions diminished but results remained significantly lower than their peers’.
The likelihood of a child having special educational needs or disabilities increased in line with the number of times they were suspended, the researchers found. Pupils suspended 10 times were almost three times as likely to have special educational needs as pupils who were suspended only once. Social, emotional or mental health issues were the most common issues among suspended pupils.
The report concluded: “Given that suspended pupils are more likely to experience poor outcomes, schools should proactively identify those at risk of suspension and plan early intervention to reduce the need for suspension.” Whiteman said: “As this report points out, suspensions themselves do not necessarily cause worse grades – the picture is far more complex, with suspension rates and lower GCSE grades being driven by a range of complex and common causes.
For decades linguists have argued over how children learn language. Some think that babies are born as “blank slates” who pick up language simply from experience—hearing, seeing and playing with the world. Others argue that experience is not enough and that babies’ brains must be hardwired to make acquiring language easy.
AI models such as GPT-4 have done little to settle the debate. The way these models learn language—by trawling through reams of text data from millions of web pages—is vastly different to the experiences of babbling babies.
A team of scientists at New York University examined the question by training an AI model on the experiences of a single infant. Between the ages of six and 25 months, a toddler called Sam wore a head-mounted camera for an hour a week—around 1% of his waking hours. The camera recorded everything he saw and heard while he played with toys, enjoyed days at the park and interacted with his pet cats. The recordings and transcribed audio were fed into an AI, which was set up to know that images and words that appeared at the same time were related, but was otherwise left to make sense of the mess of colours and speech that Sam experienced.
Despite the limited training data, the AI was able to pick out objects and learn the matching words. The researchers tested the model by asking it to identify objects that Sam had seen before, such as a chair from his home or one of his toy balls. Given a list of four options the model picked the correct word 62% of the time, far above the chance level of 25%. To the researchers’ surprise, the model could also identify chairs and balls that Sam had never seen. The AI learnt at least 40 different words, but it was far from matching Sam’s vocabulary and language abilities by the end of the experiment.
The researchers, published recently in the journal Science, argue that, to match words to objects, learning from experience may well be enough. Sceptics, however, doubt that the AI would be able to learn abstract nouns or verbs, and question how similar the learning processes really are. The mystery of language acquisition lives on.
Blue denim is dyed with indigo – a compound once extracted from plants but usually synthesised today. Harmful chemicals such as sodium dithionite are needed to make indigo soluble in water so that it can be used for dyeing. These chemicals produce toxic fumes that can harm the health of textile workers, and also lead to toxic pollution in waste water. Now, Ditte Hededam Welner at the Technical University of Denmark and her colleagues have developed a new process that instead uses a natural precursor to indigo called indican.
“Indican is also a natural product, so it’s not anything artificial or weird,” says Hededam Welner. “But the good thing about it is that it is soluble, so you can just basically dip your textile in it, which you cannot do with indigo. That’s why it became such an appealing solution to this because you can simply omit so many of the harsh chemicals.”
There is one key disadvantage, though: indican is colourless, so the compound must be converted into indigo after it has been applied to a material. One way to do this is just to leave it in sunlight for several hours. The team found two methods that could instead provide the faster and more repeatable results demanded by modern manufacturing: one using enzymes from plants and one using electrical lights.
Using light is a more straightforward process that cuts the environmental impact of dyeing compared with using indigo by 73 per cent when assessed on a European Commission metric that takes into account carbon dioxide emissions, land use, water consumption and ozone depletion. Using enzymes led to an even greater reduction of 92 per cent.
Hededam Welner says that with further research, the process could be made cheaper and more efficient, but there are major obstacles ahead – not least of which is establishing a supply chain for the 80,000 tonnes of indican that would be needed to produce the 4 billion pairs of jeans manufactured each year.
Nearly half of US parents provide some kind of financial support to their adult children, who are grappling with higher food and living costs than they did, a new study has found. The study – conducted by Savings.com – found that young, working-class Americans were not substantially benefiting from the recovery of the country’s economy, as “evidenced by high employment, falling inflation, and economic growth”. That has forced many of them to continue to rely on their parents to help cover costs of living.
The average age of adults receiving financial help from their parents – sometimes at the risk of the parents’ retirement security – was 22, according to the study. And while parents surveyed in the study on average said their adult children should become financially independent by 25, many were supporting those children beyond that milestone.
Of parents providing support, 21% were helping millennials (age 28-43) or members of gen X (age 44-59). Millennials and gen X adult children were on average given between $907 and $960 each month by their parents. Gen Z adults (between 18 and 27) were getting more help from their mothers and fathers, averaging about $1,515 monthly.
Notably, many adults from gen Z still have college and university expenses. The most common expenses parents covered for adults across those three generations were groceries, food, cellphone bills, rent, mortgages, tuition and health insurance. With soaring costs of food, housing and other living expenses, more adults are either choosing or being forced to still live in their parents’ home, the survey determined. And the future outlook of the cost to live in the US remains bleak.
Working parents were found to contribute “2.4 times more to support adult children than they do to their retirement accounts each month”, according to the Savings.com study. The average amount a parent gives to their adult child each month is $1,384 – more than twice what the average working parent contributed to their own retirement savings monthly, which on average was $609.