Most Popular Editorials: $620 for an HIV diagnosis: Russians buy their way out of military service on Telegram

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$620 for an HIV diagnosis: Russians buy their way out of military service on Telegram On Monday, Dima and his friends each paid a minivan driver $170 for a perilous, nearly 250-mile journey from a Russian city close to the border to Tbilisi. It’s estimated that as many as 10,000 Russians are crossing the Georgia border every day — just one stream in a massive exodus out of Russia over the last two weeks. More than 260,000 people have fled the country since the announcement of the partial mobilization.Telegram is now home to a cottage industry of services designed to help reservists like Dima avoid military service, offering everything from transportation to falsified HIV and hepatitis diagnoses, and other forged documents, sometimes sold in exchange for bitcoins. These groups have also become a place where people hawk services ranging from $34,100 flight tickets out of Russia to currency exchange, accommodation, job opportunities, and even permanent residency in popular destinations such as Kazakhstan.  Continued here

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How to Get Empathetic Marketing Right Empathetic marketing reached an intense crossroads in 2020, when the pandemic prompted many brands to respond to collective grief — some with success, and many coming off as utterly tone-deaf. That doesn’t mean that brands need to shy away from channeling empathy in their marketing, however; authenticity and genuine connection are more important than ever. To this end, the author recommends three strategies for brand to forge genuine customer connections: 1) Keep one ear to the ground, 2) give customers the power of choice, and 3) set the tone with visuals. Continued here

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Ensuring Your Products Aren't Used for Discrimination Discrimination is both a societal and a business issue. And, the extent to which discrimination is allowed to affect a company is a decision that is made by business leaders. Fortunately, there is a growing toolkit for leaders who want to create a more inclusive company — and society. Here, the authors lay out four steps every leader should take to work toward this goal. Continued here

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Project Leaders Will Make or Break Your Sustainability Goals Sustainability transformation is on every CEO’s agenda, but many organizations lack a sense of urgency in their implementation and are struggling to meet these ambitious and complex goals. Bringing the sustainable future into our grasp will rely upon the successful execution of thousands of well-conceived projects. CEOs should empower a new kind of sustainability-focused project manager to push organizational transformation forward. Project leaders should begin by embedding sustainability elements into every project, using four key practices outlined in this article. Finally, they should use the Project Canvas, a project management tool, to ensure that sustainability remains embedded throughout each project’s life cycle. Organizations that build these capabilities today will be best positioned to rethink and remake their businesses as triple-bottom-line goals continue to be a top priority in the years ahead. Continued here

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An end to doomerism "The issue is that people mistake optimism for 'blind optimism' - the blinkered faith that things will always get better."Pessimism sounds smart. Optimism sounds dumb. It's no wonder, then, that pessimistic messages hit the headlines, and optimistic ones hardly get a middle-page snippet. It's why doomsday thinkers get respect and accolades. They're the smart ones that can see what the rest of us can't. They're the ones that speak truth to power.I've fallen into this trap myself. I saw cynicism in other people and mistook it for intelligence. To look smart, I tried to do the same. I went through a period of playing life like a game of whack-a-mole. Any idea - promising or not - had to be smashed out of sight. It was doomed to fail.There is an "optimism stigma" that is pervasive throughout society. It's why I often feel embarrassed to admit that I'm an optimist. It knocks me down in people's expectations.But the world desperately needs more optimism to make progress, so I should stop being so shy about it. Continued here

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How the War in Ukraine Might End Hein Goemans grew up in Amsterdam in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, surrounded by stories and memories of the Second World War. His father was Jewish and had hidden “under the floorboards,” as he put it, during the Nazi occupation. When Goemans came to the United States to study international relations, he recalled being asked in one class about his most formative personal experience of international relations. He said that it was the Second World War. The other students objected that this wasn’t personal enough. But it was very personal for Goemans. He recalled attending a commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Amsterdam by Canadian forces, in May of 1985. Many of the Canadian soldiers who took part in the liberation were still alive, and they re-created the arrival of Canadian troops to liberate the city. Goemans remembers thinking that the people of Amsterdam would be too blasé to attend the commemoration, and being moved that he was wrong. “The entire city was packed with people by the roadside,” he told me recently. “I was really surprised at how deeply it was felt.”Goemans, who now teaches political science at the University of Rochester, wrote his dissertation on war-termination theory—that is, the study of how wars end. A great deal of work, Goemans learned, had been done on how wars start, but very little on how they might conclude. There were, perhaps, historical reasons for this oversight: the nuclear armament of the United States and the Soviet Union meant that a war between them could end human civilization; not just some dying, but the death of everything. The study of war during the Cold War thus gave rise to a rich vocabulary about deterrence: direct deterrence, extended deterrence, deterrence by punishment, deterrence by denial. But the Cold War ended, and wars kept happening. Goemans saw an opportunity for an intellectual intervention. Continued here

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Asking one simple question can entirely change how you feel | Psyche Ideas The pursuit of happiness is many people’s primary goal in life, and a subject that’s occupied countless philosophers and psychologists over the millennia. It is usually painted as an effortful and difficult aim to accomplish, especially in trying times. Indeed, it’s through their promises to help us reach a happier place that many self-help gurus pay for their mansions on the beach. However, taking the first step to being happier could be a lot simpler than many people realise.Logic dictates that happiness relies, at least in part, on a person’s ability to regulate their emotions. After all, emotion regulation is the process of trying to change one’s current emotions to reach a more desired emotional state. For example, I hate crying at sad movies, so whenever I feel the sadness creeping up, I usually crack a joke to ward it off. Many of the emotion-regulation strategies people commonly use might be familiar to you, such as doing fun things, talking with a friend, and trying to think about the situation differently. Continued here

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I Changed Everything. Now What? It was time for a change. Long past time. In late 2019, I was ten years into single mothering, cobbling together an income from part-time freelance gigs and living in a home that wasn’t mine. I’d been tired of it by the end of year one, but over the nine that followed, inertia set in. I decided my 40th birthday would change that. In a rare act of superstition, I made an actual wish, the earnest and closed-eyed kind, face hovering over a dozen small flames on a grocery-store sheet cake. I wished for my life to change. Radically. Dramatically. Make it nearly unfamiliar, I implored the God of Blown Candles. Make me new.I had spent much of my life drifting until I hit dead ends. Staying in the relationship I started at 21 until I realized it wouldn’t survive the positive pregnancy test I took at 29. Moving into my nana’s spare bedroom and sharing the small space with my daughter and my mother for the next eight years. Convincing myself that staying there was the most viable option for me to provide safe housing and trusted child care on the unreliable income I earned as an adjunct instructor and writer. Though I’d once dreamed of a sustainable life as an artist, two rocky decades of adulthood had made me pragmatic to a fault. Continued here

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The Last, Painful Days of Anthony Bourdain After Anthony Bourdain took his own life in a French hotel room in 2018, his close friends, family and the people who for decades had helped him become an international TV star closed ranks against the swarm of media inquiries and stayed largely silent, especially about his final days.That silence continued until 2021, when many in his inner circle were interviewed for the documentary "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain" and for "Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography." The two works showed a more complex side of Mr. Bourdain, who had become increasingly conflicted about his success and had in his last two years made his relationship with the Italian actor Asia Argento his primary focus. But neither directly addressed how very messy his life had become in the months that led up to the night he hanged himself at age 61. Continued here

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Here's What Has Happened in Iran Since the Death of Mahsa Amini At least 66 deaths reportedly took placeon Sept. 30 in Zahedan, now called “Bloody Friday,” according to Amnesty International. Security forces in Zahedan, the capital of the Sistan and Baluchestan province, and home to some of the highest death counts since protests began, initiated a brutal crackdown where they deployed live ammunition, metal pellets and teargas on protesters, worshippers and bystanders after Friday prayers outside the city’s main mosque.Her family disputes this account, and Shakarami’s mother spoke out in a video to Radio Farda that the injuries she saw on her daughter’s body were very different from what authorities described. BBC reports that Shakarami’s mother said a forensic report indicated that Shakarami was killed by blunt force trauma to the head and a death certificate obtained by BBC stated that she suffered “multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object.” Continued here

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Why is a Japanese cartoon a hero for Spanish footballers? “It has been aired more often overseas than in Japan, so I think that the players of the Iniesta generation, as well as the members of the current generation, were influenced by the animation when they were children. I heard that when the World Cup or Euro starts, Captain Tsubasa starts re-airing in Europe so I think this cyclical exposure has been crucial to its popularity,” he told Al Jazeera. Continued here

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Carry on screaming: why letting it all out, especially for women, can make you calmer and happier One afternoon in early lockdown I led my two small children into the garden and told them to scream. “Go on,” I said, setting a timer. “Scream as loud as you want. I’ll join you.” We’d been in the house, socially distanced for more than a month by then. The children’s routine had been completely disrupted and they were confused and restless; my husband and I were managing full-time jobs along with full-time childcare. I was juggling grief, trauma, housework, childcare, writing. I was tired of keeping all the stress bubbling inside and weary of telling the children to stop being noisy. I was also conscious of how, even in the most gender-equitable households, parents are more likely to ask girls to be quiet than boys. What if we released it all at once? What if we just let it all out?The children looked at each other, confused, wondering whether I was being sarcastic. But then they started. It came less easily for me. After decades of telling myself that screaming was unseemly, I could only really do a feeble imitation of someone letting out a scream. I felt tongue-tied, too conscious of how I looked or what I sounded like, what the neighbours might think of me. “Are you all OK?” one asked with a nervous laugh from over the fence. Continued here

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Why you should make friends with people from different generations While loneliness can strike at many points throughout our lives, there are times when it is especially acute. Big transitions like leaving university, changing jobs or moving cities can make us feel isolated and socially excluded from the people around us.It can be difficult to meet people without the built-in social network of student housing or a graduate scheme. According to researchers, people between the ages of 16-24, and young people who rent are particularly at risk of experiencing loneliness, isolation and depression.When making friends, we usually look for people of similar ages, assuming they will share our worldview and life experiences. But this is not always a reliable indicator for forming friendships.Connections are made with like-minded people, regardless of age. Intergenerational friendships, formed between two or more people from different age groups, are one antidote to loneliness that can also help fight ageism in society. Continued here

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I did 30 supermans a day for a week — here’s what happened to my body The name is a good indication of what this exercise involves. Lie down on your front, stretch out your arms and legs, and imagine you are Superman flying through the air with the greatest of ease. Picture the beloved Christopher Reeve incarnation, as the special effects restrictions in the late 1970s ensured we could see him in full flight. In the recent films, Henry Cavill just moves too darned fast, but that’s CGI for you. You will not need a cape for this exercise.This is a surprisingly wide-ranging exercise. Let’s start with the back: The erector spinae muscles are located on either side of the backbone and run from the base of your skull to your hips. These large muscles straighten and strengthen the back, and help with rotation. It was in the lower section of these muscles where I felt the immediate impact. But I also noticed that the superman exercise worked parts of my trapezius muscles, which extend from the neck, across the shoulders, and down the back, forming a triangular shape. One of their many functions is aiding good posture (opens in new tab), which aligns with one of the roles of the erector spinae muscles — this is great move for overall back strength, increasingly important at a time when we spend so much of our waking hours sitting at desks, in the car or on the couch, a lack of activity that means many of us suffer from chronic back pain (opens in new tab).  Continued here

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Against the Fun Fact Nothing is less fun than a fun fact. The mandate to share one about yourself, typically posed as an icebreaker in schools, offices, and other formal settings, is deeply constraining. The form demands a tidbit that’s honest without being overly revealing, interesting but never indecent, unique but not weird. Within such parameters, it’s virtually impossible not to come off as either hopelessly boring or a complete fool. And the stakes for striking the right balance are high, given that the fact someone shares may very well be the most personal information their co-workers (or fellow students or teammates) ever learn about them.The goals of such an exercise may be noble, aiming to let group members get to know one another in a more human way before they have to work or study together. But rather than putting people at ease, too often these prompts only create more discomfort. Work and school are already stressful, and the pressure to make a good impression is high. When it’s required, fun just isn’t that fun anymore. Continued here

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Bridgerton's Charithra Chandran on her travel style and relationship with India Condé Nast Traveller India's annual Destination Wedding Guide is back, showcasing the latest trends and most glamorous destination weddings of the year, from a glamorous socialite-studded affair at the V&A museum in London to a fun-filled fiesta in Mexico. The ‘revenge destination wedding’ is here, with nuptials becoming more elaborate than ever, and personalisation and customisation going to a new level. Every last detail matters. And the bride is at the centre of it all – bringing her own personality and eccentricities to the show.Cover star Charithra Chandran, star of Netflix’s hit show Bridgerton, is at the centre of her own story too – a modern, multicultural woman who moves easily between worlds without feeling the need to compromise herself. On a sunny day in London, just before she started shooting, she arrived punctually at The Lanesborough Hotel in Knightsbridge, ready to play bride. Dressed in Manish Malhotra’s Khaab-Mijwan 2022 collection and wearing exquisite jewellery from Cartier, Boucheron, Dior Joaillerie and Jessica McCormack, she’s accompanied by her own bride squad through the festivities. We spoke to Charithra about her cover shoot, Bollywood and more.  Continued here

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UN slavery estimate raises question: Are 50 million people really enslaved today? The report, released Sept. 12, 2022, by the U.N.‘s International Labor Organization, the International Organization for Migration and the human rights group the Walk Free Foundation, revealed that 28 million people are in forced labor and another 22 million in forced marriage. Forced labor includes exploitation in domestic work, agriculture and manufacturing. It also includes state-imposed forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation. Poverty is a powerful driver for forced labor around the globe, particularly in India, East Asia and West Africa. The U.N.’s latest estimate of 50 million has grown substantially since its last estimate in 2017, when it reported 40 million persons were enslaved. What explains how the global estimate increased by 10 million over five years? Does that mean we will see an annual increase of 2 million slaves each year moving forward? Continued here

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Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp: Saving the soles of lives lost | DW | 02.10.2022 Pinsker's own parents were among the more than one million people murdered there. Of those, some 230,000 were children, including his six younger siblings. His family, which also included two older brothers, arrived at the camp from their village in Transylvania, after traveling crammed into crude train carriages with no food or water for five days. Gesturing tearfully to the shoes piled up behind glass, Pinsker wonders aloud, "perhaps here are their shoes; perhaps here are the shoes of my mother, of my sisters."Flanking Pinsker at the launch event were fellow survivor Bogdan Barnikowski, along with representatives from the International March of the Living, an educational foundation which honors those killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, the Auschwitz Memorial  and the Neishlos Foundation, a charitable organization. Together they aim to restore 8,000 shoes from children killed at Auschwitz. The project is called "Soul to Sole"and is seeking funding from the public as well, with donations large and small. Continued here

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The Value and Science Behind Positive Reinforcement - StartUp Mindset Positive reinforcement is operant conditioning that introduces a positive or strengthening stimulus following desired behavior, encouraging repetition. For example, giving a child a treat if they clean their room and keep it clean will encourage them to keep it clean in the future. It is also a common training technique in the training of animals, like giving a dog a treat when they perform tricks. But how does this add value to you and your business?When executed well, positive reinforcement can have an amazing impact. It is most effective when it takes place immediately after a behavior and with enthusiasm. It is also essential to be consistent and offered frequently. So, what kinds of reinforcement are there? Continued here

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Be Grateful More Often Although I didn’t move to the United States until I was an adult, every year I look forward to one of the most American of holidays: Thanksgiving. Turkey, pumpkin pie, long hours of cooking and relaxing with family and friends make the day a particularly fun one. I also look forward to Thanksgiving for another important reason: it is a day that reminds us of the importance of expressing gratitude. Continued here

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The Future of Performance Reviews Hated by bosses and subordinates alike, traditional performance appraisals have been abandoned by more than a third of U.S. companies. The annual review’s biggest limitation, the authors argue, is its emphasis on holding employees accountable for what they did last year, at the expense of improving performance now and in the future. That’s why many organizations are moving to more-frequent, development-focused conversations between managers and employees.The authors explain how performance management has evolved over the decades and why current thinking has shifted: (1) Today’s tight labor market creates pressure to keep employees happy and groom them for advancement. (2) The rapidly changing business environment requires agility, which argues for regular check-ins with employees. (3) Prioritizing improvement over accountability promotes teamwork. Continued here

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John Lennon on Creativity “I carry my thoughts about with me for a long time, sometimes a very long time, before I set them down,” Beethoven, having revolutionized music with his stubborn devotion to making unexampled sound, told a young composer in reflecting on the role of incubation in his creative process. Two centuries after his death, psychology — a science not even a glimmer on the horizon of humanity’s imagination in Beethoven’s lifetime — confirmed this intuitive practice, demonstrating that incubation precedes illumination in the five stages of the creative process. Beethoven lived before the Age of Celebrity, before this awful contortion of art that bamboozled us into confusing visibility with merit and grandiosity with genius. Amid such confusion, that inner incubus of creativity — invisible to the outside world, impervious to public appraisal — is all the more vital, for it is also what enables artists to create rather than cater, to go on making works of truth and beauty answering only to their inner voice and accountable only to their own artistic integrity, rather than producing sellable commodities that fit snugly into some existing market of tastes and expectations. Continued here

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Making computer chips act more like brain cells Like real neurons — but unlike conventional computer chips — these new devices can send and receive both chemical and electrical signals. “Your brain works with chemicals, with neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. Our materials are able to interact electrochemically with them,” says Alberto Salleo, a materials scientist at Stanford University who wrote about the potential for organic neuromorphic devices in the 2021 Annual Review of Materials Research.The brain does things differently. An individual neuron receives signals from many other neurons, and all these signals together add up to affect the electrical state of the receiving neuron. In effect, each neuron serves as both a calculating device — integrating the value of all the signals it has received — and a memory device: storing the value of all of those combined signals as an infinitely variable analog value, rather than the zero-or-one of digital computers. Continued here

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Regenerative design: meet the creatives taking a rooting interest in learning from nature It seems a radical idea, but as the climate crisis deepens, ‘sustainable design’ and ‘doing less harm’ are not enough to avert catastrophe – we have to find ways to replenish ecosystems while meeting our own needs. ‘Humans need to return to a state where they are co-evolving with nature,’ says architect and biomimicry expert Michael Pawlyn. ‘If we carry on believing that it is something to be plundered for resources, it will be our undoing.’Pawlyn is one of the architects leading the charge for a shift towards ‘regenerative design’, which ‘supports the flourishing of all life, for all time,’ as he puts it in his new book Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency, co-written by Sarah Ichioka. While sustainable design focuses on mitigating problems, regenerative design is about restoring the damage wreaked by human hands, nurturing biodiversity and taking carbon out of the atmosphere while we produce homes, infrastructure, furniture and food. ‘We’ve got to get to a point where we integrate all our activities into the web of life that surrounds us, overcoming our separation from nature,’ adds Pawlyn. Continued here

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A Universal Cancer Treatment? Himanshu Brahmbhatt was staring at the results of a clinical trial that looked too good to be true. A co-founder and CEO of EnGeneIC, a biopharmaceutical company, Brahmbhatt was running a small trial that was testing a fundamentally different approach to fighting cancer. Patients in the group had grim prospects. They had exhausted all other options. With nothing left to lose and not expecting any miracles, they enrolled in the trial. They wanted to give it one more chance. Now their scans showed their tumors had stopped progressing. Even more remarkable was they didn’t have the same type of tumors. They had malignancies affecting different organs—lungs, bladders, colons, pancreases—and yet, they uniformly did well.The results may have appeared miraculous, but they were anything but. They stemmed from fundamental research into cell division that forms the basis of the EnGeneIC process. A longtime advisor to the company, Bruce Stillman, professor of biochemistry and president and CEO of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has been studying the process of DNA replication, which plays a key role in cell division and cancer progression. Continued here

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How to enjoy running | Psyche Guides If your body allows for it, there are few activities more liberating than going for a run. The experience can be meditative, even hypnotic, as you bound along rhythmically. Scenery passes by at a clip – quicker and more exciting than when walking, but not so fast that you can’t take it all in. And it’s a gift you can take with you anywhere. From central London to the Austrian Alps, whether on a work trip or a family holiday, I’ve donned my trainers, enjoying the wind in my hair and that satisfying, sweaty, endorphin-laced buzz at the end.‘I never regret a run,’ says Mariska van Sprundel, a running instructor and the author of the book Running Smart (2021). ‘Sometimes you don’t feel like going for a run because the weather is bad or because you’re just tired from work. But I never come home thinking: “Oh, man, I wish I hadn’t gone.” It’s always refreshing, and it always helps me put my worries in perspective.’ Continued here

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The ‘End’ of COVID Is Still Far Worse Than We Imagined When is the pandemic “over”? In the early days of 2020, we envisioned it ending with the novel coronavirus going away entirely. When this became impossible, we hoped instead for elimination: If enough people got vaccinated, herd immunity might largely stop the virus from spreading. When this too became impossible, we accepted that the virus would still circulate but imagined that it could become, optimistically, like one of the four coronaviruses that cause common colds or, pessimistically, like something more severe, akin to the flu.This shifting of goal posts is, in part, a reckoning with the biological reality of COVID. The virus that came out of Wuhan, China, in 2019 was already so good at spreading—including from people without symptoms—that eradication probably never stood a chance once COVID took off internationally. “I don’t think that was ever really practically possible,” says Stephen Morse, an epidemiologist at Columbia. In time, it also became clear that immunity to COVID is simply not durable enough for elimination through herd immunity. The virus evolves too rapidly, and our own immunity to COVID infection fades too quickly—as it does with other respiratory viruses—even as immunity against severe disease tends to persist. (The elderly who mount weaker immune responses remain the most vulnerable: 88 percent of COVID deaths so far in September have been in people over 65.) With a public weary of pandemic measures and a government reluctant to push them, the situation seems unlikely to improve anytime soon. Trevor Bedford, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, estimates that COVID will continue to exact a death toll of 100,000 Americans a year in the near future. This too is approximately three times that of a typical flu year. Continued here

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How to get over a breakup — no matter which side of it you’re on A person’s emotional reaction following a breakup is contingent on a number of factors, says licensed marriage and family therapist Kiaundra Jackson. For many people, processing heartbreak is similar to the grief brought on by the death of a loved one. A person’s age, relationship experience, and maturity also influence how hard a breakup hits. “If you are a little bit younger or less mature or haven’t had as many relationships, you might not know how to navigate that process in the most healthy manner,” Jackson says. “But once you’re a little bit older, a little bit more mature, you’ve been through relationships and breakups before, you know your strengths and weaknesses. You know what you need to do to navigate that and help yourself feel better.”The post-breakup emotional fallout is also dependent on whether you were the one on the receiving end. In these situations, the grief is multifaceted, says Amy Chan, the founder and chief “heart hacker” of Renew Breakup Bootcamp: Not only are you losing a person in your life, but you’re grappling with a shifting sense of identity without your ex, mourning the future you once imagined, and, if cheating or another form of betrayal was involved, the sting of infidelity. Continued here

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Better Call Brad: Hollywood’s Secret Problem Solver Speaks Not long ago, Brad Herman, the right-hand man to hush-hush Hollywood, invited a longtime client, legendary Motown songwriter Eddie Holland, to a private visit with another client, The Supremes’ Cindy Birdsong, who since September 2021 has resided in a Los Angeles-area care facility after two strokes that have left her unable to walk or speak. Herman, who says he’s been granted power of attorney over the singer, had worked with Birdsong’s family members to extricate her from a previous living arrangement.“Eddie puts his hand behind her head, very delicately, sweetly, saying, ‘Cindy, I’m really happy to see you,’ then he just sat there real close and sang in her ear: ‘Baby Love,’ ‘Love Child,’ ‘Someday We’ll Be Together,’ ” Herman recalls, eyes tearing, rolling up a shirtsleeve to show a forearm prickling in memory: goose bumps. “Every­one who has a public face has drama. I help.” Continued here

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How Angola’s amputee soccer team inspired a nation Of the 15 players on the team, 12 are amputees as a result of a landmine, accident or injury; two have congenital malformations; and one has a paralyzed leg caused by polio. They play with crutches, which propel them as they glide across the field. For the past four years, they have held the title as the best team on the planet. Now, they are competing at the 2022 Amputee Football World Cup in Istanbul, Turkey, which runs through October 9 and features 24 teams. Other countries with players wounded in armed conflict, such as Iraq, Liberia, and Colombia, also are competing in Istanbul. The sport is played with seven players on each team (compared to 11 per side in regulation soccer). Six players are on a field about half the size of a regulation pitch, and one serves as goalkeeper. Field players may have two hands though only one foot, while goalkeepers may have two legs but only one arm, according to the official rules of the World Amputee Football Federation. (Read about the origins of soccer.) Continued here

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Why Adults Still Dream About School I have a recurring dream. Actually, I have a few—one is about dismembering a body (I’d rather not get into it), but the more pertinent one is about college. It’s the end of the semester, and I suddenly realize that there is a class I forgot to attend, ever, and now I have to sit for the final exam. I wake up panicked, my GPA in peril. How could I have done this? Why do I so consistently self-sabota—oh. Then I remember I haven’t been in college in more than a decade.Someone with intimate knowledge of my academic career might point out that this nightmare scenario is not that far removed from my actual collegiate experience, and that at certain times in my life, it did not take the magic of slumber to find me completely unprepared for a final. And, well … regardless of what may or may not be true of my personal scholastic rigor, I suspect the school-stress dream is quite a common one. Even among nerds. Continued here

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The capitalist transformations of the countryside | Aeon Essays Sometimes, what is most common is most remarkable. For those of us living in a city or suburb, a typical day starts with rising from (cotton) sheets, hopping under the shower for a quick wash with (palm oil-based) soaps, dressing in (cotton) shirts and pants, drinking a hot beverage (coffee or tea) and then eating a (sugary) cereal or jam, perhaps followed by a (soy-fed) processed meat sandwich, wrapped in (fossil-fuel-based) plastic.What describes an unremarkable day in the lives of hundreds of millions of the world’s urbanites, a day you have experienced year in and year out without much thought, is actually a miracle produced not least by the stunning expansion of commodity frontiers over the past 600 years. Almost all the products that made your morning come from places far from your home. The cotton, most likely, was grown in China, and the palm oil in Indonesia or Malaysia; the coffee was perhaps harvested in Guatemala, the tea in India, the sugar in Australia, and the soy in Brazil, while the oil might have been pumped out of the sand in Saudi Arabia. Continued here

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5 sustainable Indian brands that use conscious and quality ingredients As consumers' choices grow conscious, sustainable beauty brands in India continue to increase. Relying primarily on quality ingredients that are sourced responsibly, mindful, and slow beauty trends are solidifying their hard-earned place in the Indian beauty industry. Brands that place the interests of the earth at their core are promoting the concept of slow beauty. Slow beauty, like slow fashion, relies on investing in products that have been crafted using sustainable measures and consciously sourced quality ingredients. Not only does it encourage us to slow down the way we consume, but it also, quite literally, encourages us to slow down, take some time away from the fast-paced world, and care for our body and wellness.Over the past few years, with the innovation of many new beauty products, it is not uncommon to see 10-step or even 12-step skincare routines that overwhelm consumers. However, a more mindful approach to beauty - slower and simpler regimes, can work best for your skin. These sustainable approaches range from scientifically curated skin solutions to Ayurvedic rituals. Slow and sustainable beauty brands prioritise the planet and the makers, along with their consumers– creating a sort of win-win situation for all involved and helping you look fabulous with minimal (if any) damage caused to resources! Continued here

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At 45,500 Years Old, This Ancient Cave Painting Tells Us About Early Humans Just across the valley, Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, could glimpse the Leang Tedongnge cave. The team traveled to see it after hearing reports from Basran Burhan, an Indonesian archaeologist. Aubert, who studies ancient cave art, had previously studied what were possibly the world’s oldest-known manmade examples from as long as 44,000 years ago — but, as he would later learn, the art here at Leang Tedongnge would date back even further.   This revelation was surprising because researchers have previously found most ancient cave art in Europe. Sites like France’s 30,000-year old Chauvet Cave are famous for their overlapping horses, groups of rhinos and other bunches of animals. In recent years, Aubert and other archeologists have turned back the clock on the beginnings of human art, with a number of high profile discoveries in Indonesia within recent decades.   Continued here

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Why does Earth have continents? There is still a lot unknown about the formation of our continents. We're pretty sure that no other planet has the silica-rich continental masses that Earth possesses. Mars might have a little bit of what geologists call "evolved" rocks (in other words, more silica than basalt). Venus could have a little bit as well. The Moon has anorthosite highlands that are a bit like continents except they formed from lighter minerals floating in a primordial magma ocean ... that and those highlands are mostly all the same stuff.No planet has the complex melange of volcanic rocks, sediment, metamorphic rocks and cooled magma that are Earth's continents. The current theory, based on the ages of tiny zircon crystals found in Australia, is that our continents may have started forming over 4 billion years ago. However, whether they all formed quickly to close to their current size or have been slowly growing over time is an open question. Continued here