SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " Feel " 2,275 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
‘Am I losing my mind?’: the science behind why psychedelic trips can feel like you’re going insane
Neuroscientist Michal Dubrovinsky studies challenging psychedelic experiences and the moment people fear they are losing control, while exploring how psilocybin may affect brain flexibility and movement learning
Parents' dilemma in spacing out kids: Childcare costs vs. fertility
A 3- or 4- year age gap between kids can help parents cut back on childcare costs. But as millennials have kids later, they're feeling time pressure.
The science behind the feeling that childhood summers never end
Curiosity, emotion and paying attention shape our perception of time. This is why time flies as we grow older
Nancy Cartwright, philosopher: ‘People distrust science because they feel the system has abandoned them’
The thinker reflects on evidence-based science and advocates for combining methods to put research to good use in economics or public health
I don’t think the foldable iPhone stands a chance against the Galaxy Z Fold 8
Apple appears so mired in problems that getting ahead of Samsung feels impossible.
Grand Theft Auto 2 Legacy Review – Revisiting the Retro-Futuristic Sequel in 2026
Grand Theft Auto 2 boasts a number of noticeable technical improvements over the original and feels far better to play, but I'm glad its odd and unrecognisable setting was a one-time experiment.
Commute: How to feel about Mark Mitchell
The Morning Commute for Friday, August 15th, 2026.
'The Game Feels Super Smooth': Wolverine Will Run at 60fps with Ray Tracing on Base PS5
Insomniac wizardry
‘We’re seeing lots of people who feel dizzy’: how heatwaves are taking a toll on people’s health and the NHS
Doctors and nurses describe rise in fall injuries and other heat-related problems on top of stifling working conditions
Could Christmas 2026 Be The Greatest Day In American Sports History
"Christmas 2026 feels different. It's not just one game or one moment. It's an entire day built around sports." The post Could Christmas 2026 Be The Greatest Day In American Sports History appeared first on Barrett Media.
Businesses feel the strain as the deadline for Trump's 50% Canadian tariff approaches
If President Trump's threatened 50% tariffs go through later this month, construction businesses that rely on materials imported from Canada are among those that will suffer.
Broncos place offensive lineman on season-ending injured reserve
"I feel bad for him and where he was at," Broncos coach Sean Payton said after center Michael Deiter suffered a season-ending quad injury.
Octavia Spencer Talks Giving 'Visibility' to Missing Indigenous Women
The narrator and executive producer of the ID series talks about the "duty" she feels to amplify the stories of missing and murdered native women and the current efforts toward seeking justice.
Business Briefs: Aug. 14, 2026
Greenfield Cooperative Bank to host networking workshop in Northampton GREENFIELD — Greenfield Cooperative Bank will host “Building Your Business Community: Networking That Feels Authentic,” featuring Colleen DelVecchio from Maxady. The interactive conversation with DelVecchio will help local small business owners learn how to build relationships that lead to referrals, collaborations, new opportunities and lasting support. The workshop […]
10 Shows Like 'Lanterns' You Should Watch Next
Is the grounded 'Lanterns' going to end up feeling like a fresh take on sci-fi superheroes? Or like wasted potential? These other shows succeeded by spinning their genres in unexpected directions, and may offer some clues.
Sunflower Health Plan Maintains Strong Member Satisfaction Ratings in Annual LTSS Survey
Independent survey finds nearly 98% of respondents are satisfied with the care they receive from Sunflower and 99% report feeling safe with those who support them. LENEXA, Kan., Aug. 13, 2026...
It’s not just a gut feeling: Foodborne illness outbreaks are especially bad this summer
Federal data suggests that this is a particularly bad summer for foodborne illness outbreaks in the US.
Vast majority of sports parents feel the benefits of youth sports outweigh the drawbacks
Findings from a new Associated Press/Ipsos poll of parents of K-12 children enrolled in organized sports
Jayden Daniels feels ‘profoundly disrespected’ by LSU
Washington Commanders star quarterback Jayden Daniels emerged as a legitimate superstar with the LSU Tigers, blossoming into the eventual No. 1 overall pick and a Heisman Trophy winner. However, there now seems to be a major rift between Daniels and the program. The superstar quarterback is now reportedly refusing to allow LSU to use his…
John Cena shares his unique take on WB shelving ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: ‘My answer’s not the common one’
‘Coyote vs. Acme’ star John Cena looks back on the live-action and animated comedy’s bumpy road to the big screen, telling EW he has no hard feelings about the movie initially being shelved as a tax write-off.
Report: Nate Wiggins avoided structural damage in Tuesday's injury
Ravens head coach Jesse Minter said there was optimism that cornerback Nate Wiggins avoided a serious injury after Wiggins was carted off at Tuesday's practice and further testing reportedly supported that feeling.
Ozempic may have revealed the brain’s hidden “craving center”
Ozempic-like drugs appear to weaken more than hunger—they may also reduce cravings for alcohol and other addictive substances. Scientists are increasingly tracing this effect to the lateral septum, a brain region that helps connect memories and surroundings with rewarding experiences. Packed with GLP-1 receptors, it may act as a crucial control point between thinking about a reward and feeling compelled to pursue it. The discovery could open new approaches to treating addiction as well as obesity.
Hollywood goes quiet as stars rethink speaking out on politics
As the midterm elections are heating up, more and more Hollywood stars say they’re putting a freeze on speaking out about politics, perhaps feeling burned by the 2024 White House race. …
Council Bluffs coaches monitor heat during fall sports practices
With temperatures feeling near 100 degrees, fall sports practices are underway across the area, and coaches are adjusting schedules and protocols to keep players safe.
Lane Kiffin Feeling ‘Magnitude’ of LSU Job Entering Crucial Season
As the new college football season gets going soon, all eyes will be on the LSU Tigers and head coach Lane Kiffin.After a controversial exit from Ole Miss last year, Kiffin’s new role with the Tigers has been discussed more than ever. There is more pressure on Kiffin entering this season than he’s ever faced […] The post Lane Kiffin Feeling ‘Magnitude’ of LSU Job Entering Crucial Season appeared first on HEAVY.
What Makes a Great Mobile Entertainment App in 2026?
Not long ago, mobile entertainment meant scrolling, tapping, and moving on. Something quick to fill a gap. That rhythm feels distant now. The best apps in 2026 don’t wait for attention; they meet it halfway, shaping themselves around how people actually use their phones. Open one, and it already seems to know what you’re there […]
Feeling sick? Some Minnesotans are asking AI what to do
Patients are turning to AI chatbots for help diagnosing symptoms and navigating the health care system—even as questions about accuracy and privacy persist.
Intertidal: Bioluminescence is science, but still feels like magic
In the long days of summer, there is so much light that darkness holds a special magic. One of my favorite things to do on summer evenings is to be out in the darkness. And some of the most magical things about summer's darkness are the unexpected lights.
🎾 Y! Sports AM: Wanna feel old?
The Canadian Open is experiencing a youth movement, the likes of which we've never seen.
‘Extremely confident in myself:' Can Jake Elliott rebound from 2 dismal seasons?
Jake Elliott feels confident entering the season despite struggling from long range the past two years.
I Just Had My Mind Blown By A Car Museum In The Middle Of Nowhere Built By A Scrap-Metal Magnate
Having lived in Detroit, LA, and Bavaria, and having a brother who lives in Hong Kong, I’ve been lucky enough to see some of the greatest car museums/collections this world has to offer. This past weekend, while on vacation with my family in Iowa, I saw one that surprised me and that I feel compelled […]
Someone Made a Terrific Deal in the Peacock/YouTube Premium Partnership…But Who?
(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) I hope everyone around the world suffering from record heat waves is doing okay. The temperature is already up in Southern California, but obviously not nearly as bad as parts of Europe. With a super El Nińo coming this year, I worry it will get even worse. Yes, we know what’s causing this heat—it’s the carbon, duh—but we really aren’t making enough progress. I’m not “environmental strategy guy”, but if I were, I’d have some ideas of what I’d try. Honestly, for years I’ve been intrigued by the work of the folks at MEER—whose plan, super simply, is to put up mirrors to reflect heat (while continuing the important work of decarbonization)—but I’m frustrated this idea hasn’t made more progress. (Other geo-engineering groups seem to get better press.) With heat like this—cancelling events, hurting economies and, most importantly, killing people—it seems like the time to push solutions! The “mirrors on the ground” solution has barely been tried.1 While entertainment companies may not “feel the heat”, lots of outdoors/experiential industries—concerts, theme parks and so on—will. Even movie theaters could benefit, since mirrors could help lower AC costs, which I imagine is not an insignificant expense, especially in the hotter areas of the country. So I do think the entertainment industry should prioritize this issue. Anyways, let’s get back into the entertainment strategy. I was about to write, “Hey, this week we don’t have any mergers and entertainment news to dive into,” but that’s not really true, since we had more updates on Paramount-Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. But the big story of the week involves a streamer and a Big Tech platform bundling their respective streamers. So I’ll write about the updates on Paramount buying Warner Bros., Versant making some moves, and a whole lot more. But we start with a surprising deal: Peacock licensing their content to YouTube Premium. Let’s dive in! Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - Peacock’s Pricey Premium Partnership The story of the week is Comcast’s2 NBC-Universal’s Peacock making a deal with Google’s YouTube’s YouTube Premium subscription product to embed their content. And I’ll say this up front: Someone made a terrific deal. The question is who. And I’ll be honest: I don’t know. Let me explain why, including why this deal exists, the pros and cons for each side, the biggest unknown, and what that says about the streaming wars. Customers Love Bundles (But YouTube Has Its Own Issues) We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… Why customers love bundles… But why I’m worried about YouTube’s integration... How Peacock is trading scale for control… And the reason they likely made this deal... The odd budget math for this deal... Whether or not I think the Paramount-Skydance/WBD deal is more likely after the latest settlement... Versant making moves and why that’s good for Hollywood… Another distributor going out of business… ...and a whole lot more! ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
Brad Pitt no longer sober, talks feeling 'suicidal' amid family drama
Brad Pitt opened up about his mental health journey amid his legal troubles with ex-wife Angelina Jolie in a new interview with Esquire.
Ex-NFL kicker Jay Feely explains his decision to enter politics
Jay Feeley says he always toyed with the idea of entering politics during a more than decade-long career as a placekicker in the NFL and a subsequent stint i…
Balint unopposed in primary, says more political diversity needed
The Vermont primary elections are Tuesday and Rep. Becca Balint feels more diversity is needed in political positions
I deleted Instagram. Freedom from rage-bait feels great.
Content on X and Instagram is designed to manipulate, to make me harshly judge anyone who doesn't agree with what I believe to be right and true.
Why Your Brain Feels Broken All the Time (And What Science Says You Can Do About It)
It’s not just a lack of willpower—new research shows modern life creates an evolutionary mismatch that wrecks our focus, and here is how to fix it.
'A different feel around Wolves'
Wolves fan writer Dazzling Dave delves into why supporters can feel optimistic about this season.
Trent McDuffie on joining the Rams: “It feels like home”
The new leader in L.A.’s secondary is fitting right in with his new team.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she’s freezing her eggs
The Democratic congresswoman, 36, said she made the decision to undergo the fertility procedure to “feel more in control of my life.”
Greensburg’s Ian Kintigh claims 2 International Sport Kickboxing Association world titles
Ian Kintigh has gone from feeling pain from the slightest touch to kicking through boards. After finishing second in the world two consecutive years, Kintigh broke through in 2026, taking home two International Sport Kickboxing Association world championship titles in July at Disney’s Coronado Springs in Orlando. More than 9,000
Miles McBride Opens Up About Feeling of Knicks’ Championship
Miles McBride is still in awe of the fact that he's a champion.
7 Best Tech Gadgets of August 2026
August arrives with a lineup that feels genuinely considered. Not every gadget this month is chasing a headline spec or fighting for shelf space. Some of the most interesting things landing right now are smaller, quieter, and more honest about what they actually do — a folding mouse that disappears into a shirt pocket, a
Fringe review: Too-long ‘In the Moonlight’ falls short on murder-mystery entertainment
With no arguments at the trial — just dancing — and a confusing plot, an audience vote feels arbitrary and pointless.
The Rear-Seat Entertainment On A Jeep Grand Wagoneer Costs More Than iPads For The Whole Family
Jeep feels justified in charging extra for re-seat entertainment on its costly Grand Wagoneer. Families may have a better opportunity to consider.
The Top 10 New Cars We’re Most Excited for This Year (So Far)
Feeling left out of the loop in terms of new car reveals, announcements and launches this year? Don't worry, we got you covered.
Loneliness may damage health in ways isolation does not: New study
You can spend every day surrounded by other people and still feel lonely. You can also spend long periods alone without finding the experience distressing.
On Sugar Ray, Pavement and \'90s music nostalgia in 2026 [Unscripted]
Nostalgia, and our relationship with it, is a funny thing. It’s a potent drug that makes the hazy feel distinct and something clear seem warped. I recently saw two bands
Nitecore’s latest power bank is the lightest and most compact yet
The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.
Physiotherapist lifts martial arts world title
Becky Sheppard says the win feels "surreal" as she now awaits ankle surgery for an ongoing injury.
California May Fine Content Creators Who Don't Disclose They Were Paid to Post About Politics
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Weeks before voting ended in California's primary for governor, Los Angeles-based influencer Shaka Smith took to Instagram to tell his more than 700,000 followers whom he was voting for and why. “Healthcare shouldn't bankrupt you, housing should not feel impossible,
The burnout crisis among cardiac CT specialists is getting worse
Six in 10 cardiovascular imagers report feelings of burnout, and many of them are thinking about leaving the field altogether.
The Business of Selling People Their Family’s Lost Photos
This online niche sometimes feels like a scam. Is it?
Building a better politics after Wisconsin’s messy primary
Immigrant rights, labor and progressive groups are working to get out the vote and to organize people who feel overrun so they can lead
How Memphis voters feel now after Tennessee split up its majority-Black district
Memphis voters say they’re frustrated with what they felt was a bald move by the Republican-controlled Legislature to eliminate Tennessee’s only Democratic representative in Congress and dilute the will of the majority-Black city.
Vanderbilt Health physical therapist bound for Nationals after winning four medals at Tennessee Senior Olympics
Vanderbilt Health physical therapist Grant Schlisner, PT, DPT, Cert. MDT, won four medals in the recent Tennessee Senior Olympics, which qualifies him to compete in the national Senior Olympics, set for July 2027 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Senior Olympians are athletes 50 years or older who compete in regional events for an opportunity to move to state events, and eventually to the Nationals. Schlisner’s medals were in the javelin, discus and softball throw (gold) and shot put (bronze). Schlisner, who is based at Vanderbilt Health One Hundred Oaks, grew up in the Chattanooga area in a family that valued physical fitness and playing sports, and he says, with considerable understatement, “The whole family is quite athletic.” Grant Schlisner (R) with brother Bret and sister Sue, all of whom won medals in the Tennessee State Senior Olympics. (photo courtesy Grant Schlisner) His brother Bret also competed in the Senior Olympics. So did his sister Sue. (His other sister Tammy did not compete, but, Schlisner said, “We’re still going to work on her.”) And their father, who now lives in South Dakota, competed in that state’s Senior Olympics in the category for athletes aged 84 to 89. Schlisner was a high school athlete in several sports, including stints as a baseball pitcher and a football quarterback. Since he was already playing positions in other sports in which he was throwing things, he was also recruited to the school’s track and field team, which is where he gained experience in the events that were his ticket to the 2027 Nationals. The medals are a reward for the hard work of training and preparation, but Schlisner said the real reward is the fitness that the medals represent. Schlisner competes in one of his medal-winning events, the shot put. (photo courtesy Grant Schlisner) “[Preparing for competition] got me working out to train for these events. I added more extensive weight training to promote injury prevention and building flexibility and strength have made me feel better overall.” He also said that, in addition to the physical rewards, he enjoys the camaraderie of the other athletes and a feeling of accomplishment. “It’s great to be able to have a goal,” he said. “If you aim low, you’ll hit it. This is aiming high. I want to bring home a medal in the Nationals.” His physical therapy patients, especially those who may be discouraged or need a little extra motivation, also benefit from his example. “I can connect with patients and say, ‘I’m 57 with previous injuries, and I’ve been doing these events, and you can get back to your ‘sport’ as well, whether that is chasing grandkids or participating in a competitive activity,’” he said. And being around the other Senior Olympians, especially in the older age groups, is motivating for him, as well. “One competitor was 90 years old,” he said. “She’s not just sitting around. That was super motivating and cool to see. I don’t want to be a lump on the couch at 90.”
Why truckers always seem to be on the phone while they drive
Social media is linked to feelings of isolation, but less so for truckers. They benefit from long phone calls and connections on apps like FaceTime and WhatsApp.
Sonny Gray feeling more like himself with Red Sox and matches career high
Sonny Gray and the surging Boston Red Sox are on quite a roll together.
What an Abdul El-Sayed win means for Muslim voters
The mayor of Dearborn, a majority-Arab American city in Michigan, says his community feels hope, once again.
Science Explains Why Working Out with Friends Feels Easier
Your workout buddies change how you experience fatigue—and in the process, your friendships grow stronger.
Best of - Arts, Entertainment & Recreation
Best Night Club and Best Place to Shake Your BootyThe BasementLots of night clubs are cool. But walking into The Basement and taking a seat with a swanky cocktail or mocktail, surrounded by polished wood and good lighting, makes you feel a little cooler, too. Which might contribute to one’s confidence at booty shaking. The […]
Disagreement doesn’t have to mean disrespect
By Vincent Atchity These days, it doesn’t take long to feel overwhelmed by politics. Turn on the news, scroll through social media or read the comments on almost any political post and you’ll find anger, outrage and personal attacks. For many of us, it’s becoming harder and harder to escape. At the same time, Colorado […]
Weekly Entertainment Report: Live music and lively arts, Aug. 6-9
"One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain." — Bob Marley
Dundalk businesses feeling impacts of back-to-back water main breaks
Celebrating Small Business: Harvard Place Shopping Center
For most of her life, Jessi Midstokke hated gyms. She wasn’t athletic, and most fitness studios made her feel like she didn’t belong.
The Ocarina of Time and Star Fox Remakes Feel Like Overly Safe Bets From a Typically Bold Company – Has Nintendo Lost Its Creative Spark?
The Switch 2 is an iterative update console. The Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Star Fox remakes are safe bets with generic art styles. The Mario movies are by-the-numbers. Is Nintendo losing its soul?
Former Penn State Star Gets Important Injury Outlook for Packers
It feels like many are forgetting that the Green Bay Packers were one of the best teams in the NFL last season and lost Micah Parsons throughout part of the year. Parsons, the former Penn State standout, unfortunately went down with a tough ACL injury.
Sitting up straight may improve your mood and decision-making
A simple change in posture may subtly affect how people feel and make decisions. Participants who sat upright reported greater feelings of pride and took more successful risks in a virtual balloon game than those who hunched over. Most did not realize researchers had influenced their posture, helping rule out the possibility that they were merely responding to expectations. The results suggest workplace ergonomics could influence more than physical comfort.
What is Up with the St Louis Cardinals Offense?
Ok, I have tackled the topic of what is perhaps our main weakness, the bullpen, and how it correlates with winning teams, how our middling at best bullpen (at the time) wasn’t doing us any favors. Well that was a month or two ago, feels like 6 weeks? And our bullpen is now worse than […]
Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.
There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. I am particularly pleased that it goes out for free to thousands of subscribers around the world. But, writing this newsletter takes a lot of work. If you are enjoying it and would like to support the project, sign up for one of the subscription options here. It is the equivalent of a fancy cup of coffee per month! Subscribe
‘Implementing terror’: Miami business owners feeling pain of losing TPS workers
. “People are paying for a service, and you have to render that service to the highest quality and standard.”
Why Hybrid Healthcare Is a Business Imperative for Employers in Colorado
Health insurance is one of the largest line items on companies’ balance sheets and a critical factor in workforce stability. As costs and expectations rise, employers and employees want a simpler, more integrated healthcare experience. Yet for many, navigating healthcare still feels fragmented, time-consuming, and overwhelming — from finding the right care provider to understanding […]
'Putting Politics to One Side': Aaron Rai Makes Feelings Clear on DP World Tour's Future
Aaron Rai thinks the DP World Tour matches the PGA Tour’s high-level play and strong competitive depth—a stark contrast from what a majority believe. For professional golfers, the PGA Tour is the biggest platform to showcase their skills.
The Beauty Of Settled Science
Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research. Here are some of my favorite psychology findings: The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine. Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence. Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity. Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require. Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness. GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep. Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way. The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects. Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering. The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines). None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet. In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science: If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage. The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news. Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention. Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun. Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...] A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid. Psychology isn’t centrally the new paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News saying that an n=5 study showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop. The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area. (I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make) Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions. I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general: The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole. To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here. To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee. From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter: [ Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit i love you all conditionally but i love the good part of you unconditionally. even if it becomes a very small part 2:11 AM · Jan 22, 2015 1 Reply · 5 Reposts · 29 Likes ](https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/558084551772471298) This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines! 1 To play devil’s advocate - should one always be so magnamious? Astrology? Phrenology? These seem different in that their entire orientation was flawed from the start; they didn’t simply fail to find the correct constellation-personality connections, the whole project of searching for connections between constellations and personality was doomed from the start. More difficult might be asking the same question about education research, which is notoriously bad. I don’t know enough about education research to know if there’s some settled science of correct and enlightening results lurking in the background beyond the day-to-day froth of poorly-conducted and politically-motivated studies. I think if it’s 90% bad, 10% good, it’s correct to call it bad as a compact way of communicating a useful truth; I think psychology is better than that, but admit it’s a tough judgment call.
AI for care of seniors: Who’s minding the recipe—and whose taste buds should hold sway?
It takes a team to develop, finance and implement a new healthcare AI model. As with any group endeavor, goal-focused cohesion can dissolve. This is a real risk when contributors feel there are too many cooks in the proverbial kitchen.
‘Where’s Mitch?’ McConnell’s absence at Fancy Farm in spotlight
Sen. Mitch McConnell missed Kentucky's Fancy Farm picnic while recovering from a June fall, but his absence is now the event's biggest headline.
North of the Noise: What exercise science can teach us about feeling stuck
I know the sound of it before someone finishes the sentence: the same job, the same house, the same plan mentioned so many times over a decade it’s become almost conversational. The property that never gets bought. The career change that never happens. Offered up with just enough conviction that you think this might finally be the year. Then anot...
Forget 10,000 steps a day. Science says this is the real sweet spot for health
This magic number feels like a medical rule, handed down by doctors across the globe
Apple finally fixed Siri. So why does it feel anticlimactic?
Apple’s long-awaited AI overhaul finally makes Siri the assistant it was always supposed to be. But after years of delays, the launch lands in an AI landscape where chatbots have evolved into agents that can code, reason, create media, and complete complex tasks. Siri AI is genuinely useful, yet it arrives at a moment when simply being a capable AI assistant no longer feels revolutionary.
Lamborghini Revuelto Miura 60° Homage Is Another Birthday Tribute To The First True Supercar
If you feel the need to overrule Lamborghini's designers, is this really the special edition for you?
Americans Feel Stuck. It’s a Public Health Crisis
LDI Fellow Atheendar Venkataramani discusses why Americans feel “stuck,” how this is a threat to public health, and offers potential solutions.
Analysis | Is the midterm cake baked?
The vibes around the economy are bad — polls and focus groups show voters feel like they are getting screwed at the gas pump and at the grocery store, jobs feel harder to come by, and the rise of technology like artificial intelligence is injecting considerable uncertainty into the future.
Updated Vikings' 53-Man Roster Projection After First Four Practices
The first week of Vikings training camp is now in the books, and week 1 was eventful, with the QBs entering camp amid a dramatic battle, as well as a few front office moves that have already helped shake up the roster a bit. Notice that three of the players below have asterisks next to their names indicating that they are not currently on the roster, but that I feel strongly that the Vikings could sign them in the next couple of weeks. Kyler Murray is the odds-on favorite and has looked sharp getting the ball down the field in camp so far.
I replaced Spotify and YouTube Music with this underrated Samsung app; now I can't go back
My offline music library feels complete
Remember Pokemon Ruby? Game Boy Advance Remake Is on the Way
Though it won't support using vintage cartridges, the Android handheld will enable emulation of classic console titles, while retaining the general look and feel of the 2001 Nintendo handheld.
Silent Hill: Townfall's dev team wrecked old TVs with magnets to make its in-game gadget feel real
Silent Hill: Townfall studio Screen Burn used broken TVs and magnets to make its in-game gadget, the CRTV, feel analogue as well as look it.
Want to feel better? Go for a walk in a forest, NC State study says
Spending time in a forest or greenspace, especially if birds are present, has significant mental health benefits -- especially for urban residents.
Maine’s Democratic Senate candidate touts his rural appeal. His hometown has mixed feelings.
In Allagash, a hamlet of some 200 people near Canada, residents are sharply divided over Troy Jackson.
Jay Feely: Politics should be sacrificial
Former NFL placekicker Jay Feely, who won the GOP primary for Arizona's 1st Congressional District, breaks down what he'd do if elected on 'My View with Lara Trump.'
Senior performers in the Valley say they feel young on stage. Science backs that up
CLOVIS, Calif. — Mac McIntosh started singing when he was 8 years old. He’s 77 now, but his glory days are far from over.
Bears Veterans Are Seeing a Different Team Take Shape
After experiencing multiple eras, Bears veterans note a different feel around the team. @thechicagosares dives deeper.
Where have all the bugs gone? Scientists are finding sharp declines
Many people remember road trips back in the day that left windshields splattered with insects – and may get the uncomfortable feeling that things have changed. Here's what researchers are finding.
Pathogenic review: Damn, it feels good to be a virus
The hot new roguelite twin-stick shooter lives up to the hype.
AI Will Make Our Politics Even More Emotional
Politics has always been about emotions as well as reason and self-interest. Great politicians such as Winston Churchill have been able to stir our most profound feelings. Great political moments such as Nelson Mandela’s walk to freedom from Robben Island have moved people to their core.
For college students, a school’s state politics can matter as much as its academics
Students are looking beyond the usual admissions rankings and tuition prices to consider whether a campus — and the state its in — reflects the rights and values they need to feel safe.
'I Feel Profoundly Disappointed': Stellar Blade Dev Destroyed for 'AI Slop' Music Video
"Where's the artistry?"
Does public health *need* MAHA?
Last week, our friend Dr. Craig Spencer sparked an ongoing volatile discussion with his Atlantic article “Public Health Needs MAHA.” Some have come out in strong dissent, others are cheering, and others are simply lamenting that we find ourselves in such a divided world to begin with. We will dare to dip our toes in these controversial waters, too. Does public health need MAHA? We think in some ways yes, and in other ways, no. MAHA leaders versus the everyday MAHA supporter The vitriol in this debate mostly comes from one collapsed distinction: the leadership of MAHA is not necessarily the same as the people who support it. Say “MAHA” and most people picture RFK Jr. Fair enough, as he coined the term and holds most of the power. And, yes, some MAHA followers treat Kennedy as something close to a saint. But talk to the grassroots, and it’s not a monolith. They’re Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. People who distrust vaccines and vaccine supporters. It’s a wide, eclectic coalition. The data backs this too: 4 in 10 Americans support the movement—that’s a lot of people! But according to polls, vaccines and medical choice (the issues most tied to Kennedy personally) are cited by only 4% as their reason for supporting the movement. For many, the motivations are much broader. Many MAHA supporters are signing up for the idea that “something needs to change” with health in this country. They’re asking good-faith questions about corporate influence on our health systems, health care costs, nutrition, chemicals, and clean air and water. These are all questions that plenty of public health professionals recognize as legitimate and also care about very deeply. Blurring the lines between the leadership and grassroots does real damage in two important ways: It hands the 4 in 10 exactly the narrative already fed—that the health ecosystem doesn’t listen, doesn’t care, and paints every critic with the same brush. It gives the actual bad actor more power. RFK Jr. has done irreparable damage and can’t be trusted. What the MAHA movement gets right A healthy population is something the public health field was literally built on, and many of these topics are things we have dedicated our lives to. Yet the MAHA movement has captivated nearly half the country in a way the public health establishment has failed to achieve. So that means MAHA is doing something right. Some of it may be timing (after a Covid-19 pandemic and deep frustration and mistrust with institutions). The movement also does three other things really well: 1. It gives a new, louder voice to system failures. While MAHA is not a monolith, one theme stays consistent across their stories: the system failed them. For some, it was the system that flooded their communities with opioids and then walked away. For others, it was the system that let their business collapse during Covid with no safety net in sight. For others still, it was the system that failed to help them manage a complex chronic illness, bouncing them from physician to physician without any real answers. And in many ways, our health ecosystems are failing Americans. Why are medical bills so incomprehensible? Why do some kids get a healthy school lunch and others don’t? Why do an epidemiologist and a MD/PhD student have to start newsletters in the middle of the biggest public health emergency in a century, just so people can get straight information? Because the systems failed. This deep-seated frustration driving many Americans to search for solutions elsewhere needs to be recognized. 2. MAHA has brilliant comms central to their efforts. MAHA figured out something most health institutions still have not: the information landscape changed. It’s participatory now, not top-down; influence runs through many nodes in a community, not one institution; and storytelling and telling audiences “what you really think” moves people more than data dumps do. MAHA goes where audiences are listening, using podcasts, social media, and memes in ways most health institutions would scoff at—but it works. 3. They are very good at organizing. A MAHA meeting feels like a rally: energy, speakers, music, and most importantly, an action for everyone. Someone’s writing the next policy brief, someone’s seeding a narrative, someone knows the next legislative deadline, someone’s sending the text messages for a campaign. None of this is new (ask the civil rights movement), but MAHA knows it works and has capitalized on it. What MAHA gets wrong This list could be much longer, and this newsletter has spent a lot of time covering it, but here are a few things: Poor use of scientific evidence. This is the fundamental problem with many MAHA policies: the hype outpaces the science, and experts are often villainized for pointing this out. MAHA leadership has traded real solutions for cheap wins. For example, instead of taking on the powerful food industry and passing real reforms, it has celebrated french fries made of beef tallow and taken out artificial dyes from still very sugary children’s cereal. These changes won’t move the needle on America’s diet. MAHA leadership has tried to dismantle vaccine access in the U.S. While many MAHA supporters emphasize other issues, the effort to change vaccine policy has become MAHA’s signature effort. This is not surprising given RFK Jr.’s extensive track record campaigning against vaccines. It has rallied behind the wrong leader. RFK Jr. has a decades-long track record of villifying doctors, scientists, and public health workers, well before he became HHS secretary. He is known for his decades-long work sowing distrust in vaccines as well as life-saving treatments like antiretroviral therapy for HIV. This is not a serious person who can move the needle on health in the U.S, and he has already done serious damage. Public health needs more than defense Defending the evidence is absolutely necessary so health in the U.S. doesn’t move further backward. The public health establishment is very good at defense. The problem is this defense often sounds like defending the status quo, which has failed many people. Public health needs to offer an alternative to RFK Jr.’s MAHA—one that is rooted in evidence, truly listens to and addresses people’s frustrations, and has innovative solutions and the courage to change the systems. How do we get there? Find common ground. Do you know what most people care most about? The abysmal cost of healthcare. Start there. Fight for the human loudly. Too often, communications and engagement center on science with a capital S, funding mechanisms, or the CDC/FDA/NIH. Not the person. So the public doesn’t see themselves in it. Instead, they see people fighting for the very powerful systems that they feel negatively impact their health and well-being. Let the public feel and hear that you see their frustrations, you get it, and you’re fighting for them within the system. Recognize when pro-science messages are alienating people. Facts absolutely matter, but angrily venting only alienates people further. Our friend Elisabeth Marnik recently wrote a New York Times article about her experience growing up unvaccinated and how listening and empathetic conversation are the only ways to reach people that really work (a position backed by communication science). Her comments section was full of hateful comments from pro-vaccine individuals attacking her for daring to suggest we approach vaccine-hesitant individuals with empathy. It is possible to both stand firm behind scientific evidence and empathize with people who don’t trust it. Lean into politics smartly. Often, public health has shied away from politics: Don’t touch it, lest you get burned. But this fails to recognize that the third rail is what fuels the train: who is elected determines our budgets, our priorities, and our authority. Being political means being very savvy in strategy on both sides of the aisle, knowing your audience, and recognizing that political capital is as scarce as financial resources and needs to be allocated accordingly. Bottom line So does public health need MAHA? That’s not really the right question. Public health has a responsibility not to dismiss 40% of the country who feel heard by this movement and are frustrated that the system has failed them. And it has a responsibility to stick to the evidence and recognize MAHA leadership for what it is: a danger to our nation’s health. Both can, and should, be done. Love, YLE and KP A big thanks to Craig Spencer, who had the courage to put his neck out there to start a much-needed discussion at such a critical moment—one that is determining the identity of an entire field. Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD is completing an emergency medicine residency and research fellowship focusing on health literacy and communication. In her free time, she writes the newsletters You Can Know Things debunking health myths and rumors and The Public Health Roundup. Views expressed belong to KP, not her employer. Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) comprises a team of experts, ranging from physicians to immunologists to epidemiologists to nutritionists, working together with one goal: to “translate” ever-evolving public health science so that people are well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. The YLE suite of newsletters reaches over 475,000 people across more than 132 countries. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below: Subscribe