Most Popular Editorials: The "End" of COVID Is Still Far Worse Than We Imagined

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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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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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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

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India tourism: How 'revenge travel' saved the industry More than two years after the Covid pandemic halted travel, India's tourism and hospitality industry is now cautiously hopeful. Freelance journalist Rubina A Khan on what's driving the optimism. Tourism constituted almost 3% of India's GDP and generated around 100 million jobs in 2019. But the sector was severely hit in India - like in other countries - when the pandemic struck. Only 2.74 million foreign tourists visited India in 2020 compared with 10.93 million the year before, official data shows. While the number of foreign visitors is still nowhere close to pre-pandemic levels, travel company operators and hotel industry executives say an upsurge in domestic tourists is making them more upbeat. Continued here

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The Indian Guru Who Brought Eastern Spirituality to the West One morning in September 1893, a 30-year-old Indian man sat on a curb on Chicago’s Dearborn Street wearing an orange turban and a rumpled scarlet robe. He had come to the United States to speak at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, part of the famous World Columbian Exposition. The trouble was, he hadn’t actually been invited. Now he was spending nights in a boxcar and days wandering around a foreign city. Unknown in America, the young Hindu man, named Vivekananda, was a revered spiritual teacher back home. By the time he left Chicago, he had accomplished his mission: to present Indian culture as broader, deeper and more sophisticated than anyone in the U.S. realized.Every American and European who dabbles in meditation or yoga today owes something to Vivekananda. Before his arrival in Chicago, no Indian guru had enjoyed a global platform quite like a world’s fair. Americans largely saw India as an exotic corner of the British Empire, filled with tigers and idol worshippers. The Parliament of the World’s Religions was meant to be a showcase for Protestantism, particularly mainline groups like Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and Episcopalians. Continued here

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The origin story of a slogan, ‘the personal is political’ | Psyche Ideas One of the many slogans to come out of the culture war in the 1960s, ‘the personal is political’ best defines our own. The past six years of British and American politics have essentially been a fight about how valid and/or noble that sentiment is – how central a place personal feeling and identity should have in the way policy is made, and the way progress is defined. To understand the disagreements about race, sex and gender that divide the West now, we could do worse than go back to where the sentiment began – with second-wave feminists at the end of the 1960s, and with a set of serious ideas that have been cheapened and weaponised at both ends of the political spectrum today.Before adorning placards (let alone Twitter pages), ‘the personal is political’ had its roots in specific sociological and political analysis. First in print as the title of a 1970 essay by the New York radical feminist Carol Hanisch, it was – according to the movement’s most recognisable figurehead, Gloria Steinem – so ubiquitous that to uncover its origins would be like trying to work out where the term ‘Second World War’ came from. To the young countercultural women who used it, it meant a new way of thinking about injustice – one that would finally treat day-to-day personal suffering with the seriousness it deserved. Fresh out of college, the Civil Rights movement and the bohemian environs of Greenwich Village, San Francisco and Venice Beach, the new generation of feminists posited feelings endured by women as second-class citizens not only as evidence of systemic ills, but as the starting point for theories that might cure them. Continued here

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How to Control Your Emotions During a Difficult Conversation When you’re in the middle of a conflict, it’s common to automatically enter into a “fight or flight” mentality. But it’s possible to interrupt this response and clear a path towards entering into a more productive discussion. Start by taking a deep breath and focusing on your body. Repeat a mantra to yourself such as “This isn’t about me,” “This will pass,” or “This is about the business.” And try to distance yourself from the negative emotion you’re feeling by labeling it: “He is so wrong about that and it’s making me mad becomes I’m having the thought that my coworker is wrong, and I’m feeling anger.” And don’t forget the value of taking a break. The more time you give yourself to process your emotions, the less intense they are likely to be. Continued here

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5 Ways Smart People Sabotage Their Success Raw intelligence is undoubtedly a huge asset, but it isn’t everything. And sometimes, when intellectually gifted people don’t achieve as much as they’d like to, it’s because they’re subtly undermining themselves. Five things smart people tend to struggle with: Smart people sometimes devalue other skills, like relationship building, and over-concentrate on intellect. Teamwork can be frustrating. Smart people often attach a lot of their self-esteem to being smart, which can decrease their resilience and lead to avoidance. They can get bored easily. And smart people sometimes see in-depth thinking and reflection as the solution to every problem. Learning to overcome these habits could be just the thing that gets your career unstuck. Continued here

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The Solution to the Global Food Crisis Isn’t More Food There’s plenty to go around, but it’s going to the wrong places. Continued here

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How Your Phone Can Help You Set Better Habits We often blame tech for our worst habits, like distraction or bad spelling. But our phones, computers and gadgets can just as easily help us build good habits — if we understand how habits work and the right technology to use. It can even help us break bad habits if we use our devices to create new ones to replace those we want to eliminate. As Charles Duhigg points out in The Power of Habit, a habit “loop” is made up of three pieces: the cue or trigger (whatever prompts you to engage in your habit), the routine (the habit itself), and the reward (the payoff that rewards and reinforces your habit.) You can use your devices — along with the apps they offer — to help you with each of these components. Continued here

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Autofocus: The Productivity System That Treats Your To-Do List Like a River In one of the emails Oliver Burkeman, author of Time Management for Mortals, sent out to his subscribers, he talked about how we typically treat our to-do lists like buckets that we need to empty every day.  Continued here

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'It feels like fresh air to my ears': can brown noise really help you concentrate? There's a new buzz on TikTok - well, not a buzz exactly. It's more of a hum, maybe waves crashing, a purring fan or steady, heavy rain. To me, it sounds like an empty aeroplane, cruising peacefully at altitude. It's brown noise, a close cousin of the better-known white noise, and TikTok users, particularly the platform's ADHD community, are all over it: there are 85.3m views for the #brownnoise hashtag. Continued here

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Alone at the Edge of the World - The Atavist Magazine Susie Goodall wanted to circumnavigate the globe in her sailboat without stopping. She didn’t bargain for what everyone else wanted. Continued here

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Why Therapy Is Broken An hour a week in a shrink’s office is increasingly treated as a prerequisite for a healthy, happy life. There, we imagine, friends learn new coping skills and enemies realize the errors of their ways. Everyone is “healed.” Therapy has been marketed as a panacea for all kinds of issues, from fixing a bad personality to ending racism. Refusing to seek treatment becomes a red flag, while fluency in “therapy-speak” is all but mandatory. Professional help has even infiltrated our leisure hours: Reality TV shows like Couples Therapy, podcasts from This Is Dating to Where Should We Begin?, and “therapy in a box” card games, some actually designed by psychoanalysts, abound. Continued here

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Want to Change a Habit? How I Stopped Drinking Over 100 Ounces of Diet Soda a Day (for 40 Years and Started Drinking Water Instead) We are what we do, and habits underlie most of our behaviors -- so much so that at least one study shows we tend to mistake the reasons for doing certain things, attributing a cause and effect explanation for our actions. Continued here

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A Psychologist Offers 3 Strategies To Stop A Gaslighter In Their Tracks If you find yourself asking these questions, you may be the victim of gaslighting. Gaslighting is a manipulative tactic used by people to gain control in relationships. By causing someone to question their sense of judgment and reality, gaslighting undermines victims’ sense of agency and righteousness. Continued here

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How Being Kind at Work (to Others and Yourself) Can Combat Burnout Work burnout can take many forms: a general lack of enthusiasm for your work, cynicism about your co-workers, or the general fatigue associated with showing up every day to a job that has overworked you to the point of exhaustion. Depending on how bad the situation is, solutions can range from leaving the company altogether to finding ways to establish firmer boundaries between work and home. Before making a drastic change, though, a few small changes might have a bigger impact than you’d expect: As research is showing, small acts of compassion to yourself or your co-workers can actually help reduce feelings of burnout. Continued here

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How did the patriarchy start -- and will evolution get rid of it? Not all human societies throughout history have been patriarchal. Continued here

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If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything At a recent conference on belief and unbelief hosted by the journal Salmagundi, the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson confessed to knowing some good people who are atheists, but lamented that she has yet to hear “the good Atheist position articulated.” She explained, “I cannot engage with an atheism that does not express itself.” Continued here

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Inside the lucrative world of pet influencers Like so many other pet owners, Charles Lever gave his dog a voice. He adopted an American pit bull terrier named Tatum in 2016 and started narrating Tatum’s inner monologue as the pair went on adventures together. What was he thinking as he explored the backyard, or dug his holes, or chased his tail? In Lever's imagination, Tatum's voice is nasally and high in the throat — it brings to mind Jamie Kennedy, or one of Snow White's seven dwarves. He recorded videos of Tatum, added in his annotation, and Snapchatted the results to the rest of his family. These were the humble beginnings of one of the most famous dogs in the world. Continued here

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5 Best Stretches to Get Rid of Sciatica Hip and Lower Back Pain If you’ve ever suffered from sciatica, you have probably tried just about anything to rid yourself of symptoms. In this article, I will provide an overview of sciatica and outline some of the best exercises to address this debilitating condition. Continued here

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How our eyes can change colour throughout our lives The first pictures of the new-born baby that flashed up on our family chat showed a charming, surprised-looking face with wide, slate-grey eyes – similar in shape to his father's brown eyes, but closer in colour to his mother's green. By his second birthday, however, the pictures revealed he had become a happy toddler with eyes the same dark brown shade as his father's, with all trace of the dark grey of those early photographs gone. Continued here

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Want to Raise Inspired Kids? A Navy SEAL Commander Says Teach Them These 10 Things A few years ago, a retired Navy SEAL commander named Bill McRaven gave the graduation speech at the University of Texas. Parents listened, and his words went viral--exactly the kind of advice that I include in my free ebook, How to Raise Successful Kids (7th Edition), which you can download here. Continued here