Most Popular Editorials: Vegans need to stop exaggerating the health benefits of a plant-based diet

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Vegans need to stop exaggerating the health benefits of a plant-based diet On the internet, you’ll find extreme dieters of all types, and many of them will swear to you that theirs is the only healthy way for a human to eat. At one end of the spectrum, there’s Jordan Peterson with his carnivore diet, consisting of nothing but beef, salt and water. At the other, “frugivore” diets pushed by YouTubers and their ilk are not just vegan and raw but almost entirely made up of fresh fruit. And then, of course, we have the classic and unapologetically restrictive weight loss programs like the cabbage soup diet, the Master Cleanse (aka the lemonade diet), and the currently trendy Mono Diet, where you eat only one food. Continued here

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This is why no one wants to be a middle manager anymore Employee morale isn’t great these days. Job satisfaction is low. Burnout rates are high. Workers are feeling overwhelmed and undervalued. But if you look closely, it’s not the lowest-ranking employees reporting the greatest levels of stress and anxiety. Nor is it the leaders tasked with running companies during an unprecedented period of workplace transformation. It’s the poor souls stuck in the middle. Continued here

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The Best Foods to Eat for Better Gut Health, According to Nutritionists The gut microbiome is considered one of the most important aspects of good health and well-being — it helps digest the foods you eat to provide the body energy and absorbs nutrients to maintain whole body health. Ongoing research even suggests that the state of the gut microbiome is related to the development of chronic illnesses. Metabolic disease, gastrointestinal disorders, certain cancers and even brain health and immunity may be influenced by gut health. Continued here

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A Hole in the Head, by Zachary Siegel On a bright summer day in July 2021, James Fisher rested nervously, with a newly shaved head, in a hospital bed surrounded by blinding white lights and surgeons shuffling about in blue scrubs. He was being prepped for an experimental brain surgery at West Virginia University’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, a hulking research facility that overlooks the rolling peaks and cliffs of coal country around Morgantown. The hours-long procedure required impeccable precision, “down to the millimeter,” Fisher’s neurosurgeon, Ali Rezai, told me. Continued here

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How We Humans Created the Universe Do you understand how lucky you are to be learning this kind of vital information directly from me, an actual galaxy? You’d probably be just as nonplussed if it were that almost-dwarf Larry writing this, though I guarantee you wouldn’t find Larry’s explanations nearly as entertaining. My telling you this story—my story—is a gift. It’s like if you learned about…oh, what’s something you humans admire? It’s like Beyoncé taking time out of her “busy” schedule to personally give you singing lessons. Even that falls short, though—she’s not supervising a hundred billion stars. Continued here

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How to Wake Up Smiling: 5 Daily Habits That Made Me a More Positive Person - Tiny Buddha I think of this as my "emotional hygeine routine," a series of simple habits that have helped me wake up smiling in the morning again. Continued here

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The Hidden Micro-Stresses Ruling Your Life—and How to Stop Them Such day-to-day annoyances happen to us all, and might seem innocuous. But experts say "micro-stressors" are a big problem. Events that disrupt our lives and routines, and feel beyond our control, can make us feel powerless and drained - especially if our lives are already highly demanding. Research shows daily low-level stress can add up to feelings of anxiety and depression, and impact our heart health and immunity. Continued here

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How to Investigate Your Next New York Apartment Like a Reporter Apartment hunting in New York City is a special kind of hell. Friends warned me before I moved here five years ago, sharing stories of cockroaches and sketchy real estate brokers, of paying $2,000 per month to live next to an early morning parade of garbage trucks. So when I landed my first apartment — with hardwood floors, a short commute and an in-unit washer/dryer for less than $1,850 a month — I thought I’d found a unicorn. Continued here

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How the Huge New US Climate Bill Will Save You Money Today President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, a massive bill that represents the biggest investment in climate action in US history. It puts nearly $400 billion toward promoting domestic production of clean energy technology and generally retrofitting America to survive climate change. If all goes to plan, the act would slash US emissions by 40 percent by the year 2030. Continued here

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Understand BLOOM, the Largest Open-Access AI, and Run It on Your Local Computer BLOOM is an open-access multilingual language model that contains 176 billion parameters and was trained for 3.5 months on 384 A100–80GB GPUs. A BLOOM checkpoint takes 330 GB of disk space, so it seems unfeasible to run this model on a desktop computer. However, you just need enough disk space, at least 16GB of RAM, and some patience (you don’t even need a GPU), to run this model on your computer. Continued here

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Solving the rock-hard problem of nuclear waste disposal Even if all nuclear power plants were shut down today, there’s a mountain of radioactive waste waiting to be disposed of. Yet only Finland has an approved solution for nuclear waste disposal, while projects in the US, UK, and Germany have failed for decades, and progress is also slow in other countries. With growing calls to extend the life of existing nuclear power stations and build new ones, that mountain of radioactive waste sitting in temporary, vulnerable, and expensive storage will keep growing. Continued here

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Sunken Villages Are Emerging From Dried-Up Reservoirs During Europe's Heatwave This is a problem being felt across Europe. It is now possible to walk across parts of the River Loire in France, and a cargo ship was stranded on Wednesday on the River Rhine in Germany, blocking nautical traffic as the drought dried up a main trade passage in Europe’s biggest nation.   Continued here

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Sources: CFP mulls breaking football out of NCAA Multiple sources told ESPN that the board of managers briefly discussed the possibility of restructuring how college football is governed, with the idea presented of major college football potentially being governed outside of the NCAA. The most logical place for the sport to be run outside of the NCAA would be under the auspices of the CFP, which was discussed on the call. The CFP currently oversees the sport's postseason playoff and has contractual ties to other marquee postseason bowl games. Continued here

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Dick Vermeil's Hall of Fame coaching career was fueled by a fire that nearly burned him The same unending ambition that propelled Vermeil also thrust him dangerously close to a breakdown. Continued here

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'It's so alien' folk collective Heilung on world's oldest song About 300,000 years ago (give or take a few millennia), the human larynx dropped downwards, an evolutionary advance as vital in separating us from the apes as the development of opposable thumbs and a large cerebral cortex. It meant that our throats got larger, which enabled us to extend the sounds we could make beyond animalistic hooting and howling. Suddenly, we could talk. We could develop a vocabulary. We could sing. Continued here

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The Truth About Cast Iron Pans: 7 Myths That Need To Go Away Are cast iron skillets nonstick? Can you wash cast iron with soap? Should you use metal utensils on cast iron? And more quandaries, explained. Continued here

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How to make one whole chicken stretch to five meals Everyone loves a roast chicken, BUT too often it’s reserved just for Sunday. These five recipes show how, with a little ingenuity, you can make a single bird last the working week. There’s a traybake, salad, a burrito, pasties and a curry – all serve four people and all come from one chicken. If that’s not frugal cooking, we don’t know what is. Continued here

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Move Over, Oprah. Video Game Book Clubs Have Arrived When video games were just abstract concepts on university computers, book clubs were already popular. When Toad told Mario the princess was in another castle, introducing video game narrative to millions of living rooms, readers were already comparing notes on Jane Eyre. So, it's only natural that as video games became more narratively ambitious, they'd take this familiar page from the literary world. Video game book clubs. So move over, Oprah—you've got competition. Continued here

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The Fate of Video Game Preservation Is in Your Hands “Games today are just the latest incarnation of a long tradition chipping away at different genres, forms, and approaches to the development of interactive media,” says Doug Brown, director of the Games Academy at Falmouth University. “A tradition whose analogue gaming roots extend back further than most literature.” Continued here

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Want to Raise Successful Kids? Neuroscience Says Teach Them This Crucial Brain Habit Bottom line upfront, according to their results: Teach your kids not to get as tired as you are. Continued here

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Trump Steamrolls His Way Past Accountability. The Mar-a-Lago Search Might Be Different. At 9 a.m. on Monday, August 8, FBI agents in unmarked cars and clothing executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, the residence and private club of former president Donald Trump. The press had not been alerted, and there was no news coverage. But hours after the agents left with about a dozen boxes said to contain highly sensitive classified government documents, Donald Trump himself made the stunning announcement. Continued here

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Ousted Republican reflects on Trump, democracy and America: 'The place has lost its mind' Last month he lost his bid to stay in the Arizona legislature in a primary contest in which his opponent was endorsed by Donald Trump. The rival, David Farnsworth, made an unusual pitch to voters: the 2020 presidential election had not only been stolen from Trump, he said, it was satanically snatched by the "devil himself". Continued here

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Some Travelers Are Getting Paid to Give Up Their Plane Seats For some, the decision is a no-brainer. Eight travelers onboard an overbooked Delta flight from Grand Rapids, Mich. to Minneapolis, Minn. walked away $10,000 richer after they were asked to give up their seats in late June. Some may call these travelers lucky—or opportunistic—but compensation for overbooking is actually a common practice. Travelers at New York’s LaGuardia Airport were offered up to $3,000 this summer to deplane their flight to West Palm Beach, Fla., and it’s being reported at airports all across the world. Continued here

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Apartment interior design: outstanding spaces around the globe Creating the perfect apartment interior design is a unique task. Fitting contemporary designs within the existing bones of historical buildings, or transforming a blank canvas into a dream home takes precision, flexibility and flair. Architects around the globe are taking a turn at composing the perfect interior with striking results. Here we explore some powerful examples, travelling from Los Angeles to London, Paris, Taipei, Athens, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv and beyond.  Continued here

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Could learning algebra in my 60s make me smarter? New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson struggled with maths at school, finding inspiration in literature instead. But aged 65, in the hope of unlocking a new part of his brain, he decided to put the limits of his intelligence to the test Continued here

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Why the Most Successful Leaders Don't Care About Being Liked There's nothing wrong with wanting to be liked at work. According to Tim Sanders, author of The Likeability Factor: How to Boost Your L-Factor and Achieve Your Life's Dreams when your colleagues, direct reports and bosses like you, you have a better chance of getting promoted, being assigned special projects that interest you, having people go above and beyond for you, getting timely responses and feedback, and having the kind of social capital that you draw on to get what you want and need from others. Continued here

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How Recessions Drive Innovation in Fashion In a country where the economy seems to be hurtling toward a recession (unless it's not), you might expect everything from housing costs to consumer behavior to be affected. And you might imagine that, in times of relative privation, spending time and attention and money on fashion would be one of the first expenses to be cut. But based on years of research on financial trends and spending habits, there’s a lot of evidence that suggests the most striking fashion trends are born from economic downturns. Continued here

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Donald Trump and the Sweepstakes Scammers It was nighttime in Atlantic City. A man with a tight Afro and a broken ankle hobbled on crutches toward the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino. On the covered driveway, bathed in neon light, sat a Cadillac Allanté convertible—the grand prize in Trump’s 1987 Drive-In Dreamstakes. The contest had been designed by Charles (Chuck) Seidman, a gregarious, boundlessly enthusiastic pitchman who called his business C.B.S.—short for C. B. Seidman Marketing Group—in the hope that the television station would sue him, giving him free publicity. Continued here

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7 Tasks Every Leader Must Master If you're seeking to be a better leader and create a high-performing organization, there are certain tasks you cannot ignore. As a leader, you're not only responsible for guiding your team members to success, you're also responsible for team morale, development, conflict resolution, office culture, along with many other duties. Continued here

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How to Be the 'Personality Hire' at Your Next Job You know the token “funny one” at your workplace? Well, those coworkers are self-aware, and they’re speaking out. It’s called being a “personality hire,” and the term is trending on TikTok from those claiming that their charisma landed them their job, rather than the qualifications on their resume. Continued here

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This 40-Year-Old Dad Used a Simple Hack to Lose 20% Body Fat I always thought I was in pretty okay shape. I would intermittently go to the gym, sometimes getting into fad workouts—my waist was at 31 inches and I figured I was doing fine. One day my daughter said to me, “I love you, papa, and you’re squishy!” I realized I had the infamous “dad bod.” Continued here

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5 Exercises To Strengthen Your Erector Spinae Muscles | Well+Good The erector spinae are a group of rope-like muscles that run up and down the sides of your spine. They’re largely responsible for stabilizing the back and allowing us to freely rotate, bend, and extend. According to Deidre Douglas, EdD, a Les Mills US presenter and instructor, it’s this column of muscles that plays such a vital role in good posture. Continued here

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How to Stay Cool in a World That's Heating Up Extreme heat is fast becoming a fact of life thanks to climate change. The kind of record-smashing heat waves that have scorched Europe, North America, South Asia, and China this summer are only expected to become more common as the century progresses. Read on to learn more about how the climate crisis is making heat waves more intense and more frequent, and what individuals and communities can do to mitigate and adapt to the dangers of extreme heat. Continued here

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Does DNA Prove These Wild Horses Came From a Spanish Shipwreck? If you know, you know—horse girls, I’m looking at you. For everyone else: This beloved 1947 children’s novel tells the story of Misty the pony, born on the beaches of an uninhabited barrier island. The story is fictional, but the setting is real. A band of wild horses still roams that island today, eating seagrass and largely ignoring tourists who come for selfies with a real-life version of Misty. Continued here

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Kahlil Gibran on Befriending Time I have been thinking about time lately, as I watch the seasons turn and wait for a seemingly endless season of the heart to set; I have been thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin's lovely "Hymn to Time" and its kaleidoscopic view of time as stardust scattered in "the radiance of each bright galaxy" and the "eyes beholding radiance," time as a portal that "makes room for going and coming home," time as a womb in which "begins all ending"; I have been thinking about Seneca, who thousands of seasons ago insisted in his Stoic's key to living with presence that "nothing is ours, except time." Continued here

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Can't Overcome the Navy SEAL 40 Percent Rule? Even if you think you're exhausted, cranking out another five seconds is (relatively) nothing. The endurance test is a different beast. Stuck on a bike, hamster-wheeling away, heart pounding and legs screaming, and not knowing how long all that pain will last? That's physically and mentally draining, a combination that makes it much harder to keep pushing past what you perceive as your limit.  Continued here

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Why the housing market is about to crash The existence of the 50-year mortgage shows lenders are desperate. Continued here

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Here's what Aristotle thought it meant to be truly wealthy With things, the idea of a telos becomes much easier: a boat is to be sailed, a book is to be read, and a beer is to be drunk. It might be that a telos changes from time to time (I might throw my book at you and so make it a weapon). Still, the object is defined by its purpose. This is how Aristotle understood things, and it’s also why he so hated money. Continued here

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'It's a modern-day Facebook' – how BeReal became Gen Z's favourite app "Instagram, please stop trying to be TikTok." App users including Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner shared this plea last month when Instagram trialled changes that flooded users' feeds with short-form videos called "reels" and content uploaded by strangers. They were reacting to Instagram's attempt to wrest Gen Z eyeballs away from TikTok by mimicking some of the app's signature features. Continued here

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The murky legal waters of catfishing: An expert explains why it's so hard to catch and cook an internet scammer Though morally dubious, a lot of catfishing is technically legal. Continued here

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Serena Williams is retiring a tennis legend. These charts prove it. Serena Williams is pretty much the game, set, match queen of the tennis world. Continued here

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A flash of genius | Boris Starling | The Critic Magazine This summer sees the 50th anniversary of one of the most extraordinary debuts in cricket history. It was the second Test of the 1972 Ashes, and Bob Massie was limbering up to bowl for Australia. Three years before, he had been rejected by Northamptonshire while playing for Kilmarnock, not exactly a hotbed of willow and leather. Now he was about to tear England apart. Continued here

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The Lost Art of Striking a Pose With Your TV Set In midcentury America, the machine itself became a character. Continued here

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An Oral History of Tim Curry's Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism Is it the sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is it Wadsworth the butler who butles in Clue, is it Stephen King’s sewer clown in It? Or is this—seriously, this short, ridiculous cutscene from Red Alert 3—the defining performance of Tim Curry’s long career? Continued here

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The Chef Who Turned Fine Dining Into Fanfiction The first time I went to a Game of Thrones dinner at the restaurant Elizabeth, the room was decked out in banners bearing ancestral sigils, while dozens of vinyl figurines were stuffed into every possible gap and onto every ledge. It was April 2017, a seventh season of the show would air in a couple of months, and a friend had come to Chicago to attend this dinner with me, not because we loved Game of Thrones — neither of us had watched for years at that point — but because the idea of a fannish dinner was exciting. Continued here

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A pizza topping that divides the world The man popularly credited with giving the world the ham and pineapple pizza was neither Hawaiian, nor in fact Italian. Sam Panopoulos was a Greek immigrant to Canada who ran a restaurant with his brothers in the city of Chatham, Ontario. Panopoulos had recently visited Naples – the birthplace of pizza – and was inspired to start adding the Italian staple to the restaurant's usual line-up of burgers and pancakes. But what to put on it? Continued here

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We may never fully know how video games affect our well-being But researchers have pinpointed the data might help to provide more clues. Continued here

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The Great Consolidation of the Video Game Industry Amid an ongoing spree of mergers and acquisitions, fewer companies own more of the gaming industry than ever before. But what does consolidation mean for workers, players, and the medium itself? Continued here

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The Fierce Debate Over How to Feed Your Baby Before giving birth, I had many convictions about the kind of mother I would be – convictions that later fell apart, one by one. My motherhood journey has been more about unlearning; getting rid of the cumbersome baggage of who I dreamed of being and coming to terms with what I could actually do. Continued here

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Keep an eye on your student's mental health this back-to-school season NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. Continued here

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End Times in Aspen Here in Aspen, the air is thin, the snow is perfect, and money is everywhere. This is a singular American town in many respects. Among them is this: Aspen had, until very recently, two legitimate daily newspapers, The Aspen Times and the Aspen Daily News. At a moment when local newspapers face manifold threats to their existence and more and more American cities become news deserts, Aspen was the opposite: a news geyser. The town’s corps of reporters covers small-town tropes like high-school musicals and the Fourth of July parade. But Aspen’s journalists are also the watchdogs and chroniclers of one of the richest towns in America and a site of extreme economic inequality, the exemplar of the phenomenon that academics call “super-gentrification,” where—as the locals often say—“the billionaires are forcing out the millionaires.” Continued here

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Should Former Presidents Get Special Legal Treatment? Last week, the F.B.I. searched the Florida home of former President Donald Trump and removed twenty-seven boxes of material that he had taken from the White House. A number of the boxes contained classified information. Trump has said that the raid was part of a political witch hunt and suggested that agents may have planted material; a number of fellow-Republicans have followed his lead, and attacked the F.B.I. But even some Trump opponents are concerned about the implications of an indictment—the possible political backlash and whether the precedent would encourage future Administrations to investigate their predecessors. The New York Times columnist David Brooks, for instance, worried that arresting Trump could lead to “a complete democratic breakdown.” In the Washington Post, George Will warned that “the punctilious enforcement of every law, no matter how complex the social context, is zombie governance by people spouting bromides to avoid making complex judgments.” These fears prompt the question of whether the Department of Justice should have a higher bar for prosecuting former Presidents than it does for other citizens. Continued here

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The Radical Roots of Bikesharing In 1967, a newly elected representative of the Amsterdam City Council named Luud Schimmelpenninck presented the city with a novel proposal: Why didn't the city help to solve its traffic congestion problems by creating a fleet of bikes that were entirely free to use? At that time, the Dutch capital's streets had become clogged with cars, with frequent pedestrian deaths and injuries. Would it not be better, Schimmelpenninck suggested, to make cycling so cheap and easy that cars disappeared? Continued here

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Travel Checklist: 19 Things to Prep and Pack Before Your Next Vacation As you're putting together your packing list, here are the pre-travel pro tips you need to travel smart. Continued here

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Are the People Who Take Vacations the Ones Who Get Promoted? Too many people limit their happiness and success by assuming that taking time off from work will send a negative message to their manager and slow their career advancement. But new research says that the exact opposite is true. Taking a vacation can actually increase the likelihood of getting a raise or a promotion. Continued here

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You’re Delegating. It’s Not Working. Here’s Why. Many managers know the supposed benefits of delegation: It offers the opportunity to develop employees, while removing tasks from your never-ending to-do list. But many individuals find themselves frustrated that handing over a tasks or project doesn’t work. They discover the work isn’t done right or on time — or worse, they end up spending even more time fixing the problems than if they’d done it all themselves. Continued here

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Visualizing the $100 Trillion Dollar World Economy in One Chart The smallest economy in the world measured in the IMF rankings is Tuvalu at $66 million. Most of the bottom 50 are considered low- to middle-income and emerging/developing countries. According to the World Bank, in developing countries, the level of per capita income in 2022 will be about 5% below the pre-pandemic trends. Continued here

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'Company loyalty will make you poor': Early retiree credits his $1 million net worth to these 7 'unpopular opinions' Self-made millionaire Steve Adcock retired early in his mid-30s. He got rich the old-fashioned way, by working a 9-to-5 and saving and investing wisely. He also attributes his financial success to seven unpopular life and money rules. Continued here

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'Quiet quitting' is TikTok's answer to grind culture, but it's not what you think Before the pandemic, 31-year-old digital strategist Jürgen* loved his job. He had a good team around him whom he considered friends, and the work he was doing was stimulating and manageable. "For a long time, I was genuinely excited to go to work every day," he says. "I was working for a company I was passionate about, on projects I thought were interesting, and with people I enjoyed working with." But, when Coronavirus and its resulting lockdowns hit, he found himself "working 15+ hours every day, due to cuts that were made across the company." Continued here