Regarding the NATO spokesperson’s response, former California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore put it into sharp perspective:
Our condolences to the people of #Iran for the death of President Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian, and others who perished in the helicopter crash.
Our condolences to the people of Germany for the death of Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, President of Interpol, and Director of the Reich Security Main Office Heydrich, who perished in the car crash.
A Live Conversation with Esther Perel and Trevor Noah: Where Should We Begin? | SXSW 2024
If You Read a Lot of Fiction, Scientists Have Very Good News About Your Brain Futurism: “It’s a big day for bookworms: scientists studying how reading fiction affects your brain say the news is very good. In an interview with PsyPost, Lena Wimmer, a postdoctoral researcher at Germany’s Maximilian University, explained that she and her colleagues wanted to lay the groundwork for quantitative studies about fiction’s effect on thinking — and found, to their delight, that reading it is better for you than some detractors suggest.
“Over the last decades, scholars from several disciplines have claimed far-reaching benefits — but also potential disadvantages — of reading fiction for cognition in the real world,” she told the website. “I wanted to get an objective, quantitative overview of the relevant empirical evidence in order to decide whether any of these assumptions is supported by empirical studies.” To figure out how reading fiction affects the brain, Wimmer and her co-researchers conducted two meta-analyses. The first, as the German psychological researchers explain in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, looked into the results of a study that measured cognitive function for people who read various types of fiction. The other took data from a longitudinal study that correlated lifelong fiction readership with cognitive outcomes ranging from abstract thinking and reasoning skills to the ability to empathize with others. In the first meta-analysis, which included data from 70 studies and more than 11,000 participants, the researchers found that reading fiction had a small but “statistically significant” positive effect on subjects’ cognition. In particular, the people in that cohort who read more fiction seemed to better empathize with others and understand the way they thought, PsyPostexplains…”
Decode ingredient lists like a pro inCIDecoder is a tool to help you to understand ingredient lists at a press of a button. Not just giving you some numbers or colorings (though we do that too, if you are in a hurry, but having science-based and easy-to-understand explanations about more and more ingredients, so that you can truly understand ingredient lists, kinda like a cosmetic chemist does. The site is definitely a work in progress. If you see any errors or missing info, please do use our report error buttons or send us an email at hello@incidecoder.com and we will do our best to continuously improve. If you want to test what INCIDecoder does, head to our Decode INCI page. We can analyze ingredient lists even from a photo.”
Craig Mod – scroll down the page to this section – Digital Reading in 2024 – “A long time ago, in a universe far, far away, I used to write about / really care about digital reading. A whole chapter of my life / career pivoted around digital reading and books, what could be, and I travelled the world (?!) talking about this stuff. I lectured at Yale for nine years about this stuff! (“Margins”!!) But I haven’t really talked about reading on a screen in a long time. Mainly because: It’s been boring / depressing. Not much has happened. Patents and monopolies chopped the feet off digital books. Well, I’m happy to report that I think — I THINK — something is once again maybe — just maybe — happening:
But before we get into why and how and why now, a little background might be instructive:
I love reading. (Perhaps you do, too!) Now, there are many forms of “reading,” and you can spend your whole day doing “reading” and not actually do the kind of reading we love. The kind we love is focused, challenging, sustained, with a pen in hand, making note of new turns of phrase and peculiar, precise words, and feeling our brains get ever-so-slightly reconfigured by the text.
The kind of reading we love requires a piece of text be worked over so many times that the author probably never wants to see it again. The kind of text that has been squeezed through a dozen gates of betterness and its darlings have been serial killed and it has benefited from the acute eye of a shrewd editor…
Once you hold a Palma, you realize that for most situations it’s an ideal reading container. On the train? In line? In the waiting room at the doctor’s office? I’ve carried my Palma with me every day for the past three or so months with the goal of reaching for it rather than my iPhone.
I call it the Gentle Librarian. Soft screen, clean interface, no SIM card and so mostly no internet (it loads up with new articles while at home on Wi-Fi; I can always tether to my phone to update or add something new to read on the go), a refresh rate that is plausible enough on which to watch movies (!! hypnotizing, actually, like watching a magic trick, like what Victorians may have imagined “computer screens” to look like) but not really responsive enough to seduce you into installing social media apps. There’s a lot of friction in this little bugger, and it turns out a bit of friction is a good friend of the kind of reading we love…”
MATTHEW SCHMITZ: The New Midlife Crisis.
Works of popular art have begun to document the new crisis. Barbie, the 2023 blockbuster directed by Greta Gerwig, is a modern Pinocchio story. Initially, Barbie is a deathless, sexless being—unconcerned with men or children, immune to thoughts of mortality. No mere doll, she is the model career woman. “She has her own money, her own house, her own car, her own career. Because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything.” She is living Betty Friedan’s dream. But when Barbie becomes human, she must come to terms with biological realities. The film ends with her visit to an ob-gyn. In real life, the visits are to IVF clinics.
Men have much more time on their clocks, a fact that allows millennial males now entering middle age to defer any deliberation about what they want out of life. Instead of a second adolescence, they seem determined to enjoy perpetual adolescence. (Is it any wonder that female millennial professionals are desperate when they wake up at age thirty-five and realize they want a husband?) But how long can men defer the reckoning? The Worst Person in the World, a 2021 film by the Norwegian director Joachim Trier, offers an answer. It features a man who suddenly learns he has cancer. He is the paragon of creative-class success, an underground comic-book artist whose most famous creation has been turned into a movie. But he never managed to have the children he wanted. He lost the woman he loved. All he has left are his collections of comic books and records.
Baby Boomers got married, owned homes, and had kids. The price was conformity. No doubt it could be stultifying. But for most people, the crisis was mild. You could waste money on a sports car and still have grandchildren someday. That was true even if your affairs led to a messy divorce. What of my generation?
They threw the baby out with the bathwater.
