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This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.

The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance. (Of course, it must be said that if you got D’s, you probably didn’t end up at Google.)

Your chance of success has little to do with your age. It’s shaped by your willingness to try repeatedly for a breakthrough.

“We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

“The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a lack of talent. It’s the lack of a deadline. Give someone an enormous task, a supportive community, and a friendly-yet-firm due date, and miracles will happen.”

Things are far worse for those graduating from college this spring. On top of the vanished rite of passage, these graduates will face a non-existent job market, with the overwhelming majority of them left to languish for months or even years trapped in an antechamber separating their educations from their careers. The economic peril is serious, but so is the psychological torment.

The average Times reader sneering at those desert lawns from the Upper West Side might want to think about the canned tomatoes, avocados, and almonds in his or her kitchen before denouncing the irresponsible lifestyles of the California emigres. Because the truth is California doesn’t have a water problem. We all do.

There was the time I was in a Barnes and Noble in Portland and a man buying some manga books seemed to be a couple dollars short. I fished some money out of my pocket and paid the difference. He started to cry. “I’ve just recovered from cancer,” he told me. “I was buying these books tonight to restart my normal life. I’m supposed to begin looking for a job tomorrow.” It was an experience far more gratifying to me than the first time I saw my own name up on a bookstore marquee for a signing.

My Uber ride gave me a glimpse. A glimpse of peace. A glimpse of love. A glimpse of understanding. A glimpse of beautiful diversity.

Today, it’s nearly impossible to build anything in San Francisco. Infrastructure projects balloon indefinitely. In 2001, the city proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness, one of the main arteries. Nearly 20 years later, the new lane’s opening is slated for 2021; Van Ness remains a mess of potholes, equipment, and detours. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge was built in three and a half years. To commemorate its completion, as an encore, the city created an artificial island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Treasure Island took under three years to finish.

Well, if you’re anything like me, you’ve tried a lot of things because you had some kind of result you wanted to achieve. And, if you’re anything like me, that was always why you stopped.

Don’t let guilt get in the way of understanding and being a part of humanity. As I so distinctly experienced and shared, I felt stunted and numbed to the point where I, as a writer, couldn’t write about any of the disasters of this pandemic. I started every conversation with, “I’m so lucky in the grand scheme of things…” and “There are so many that are worse off than I am.” But that guilt prevented me from putting myself in the shoes of others. There are going to be drawdowns, low points, periods of depression and anxiety. We are all being impacted differently, which means that we are all going to need to handle this differently. That is OK, and that is necessary, even.

But what really takes my breath away is how out-of-touch the daily debates on the internet were — “the discourse,” as some of us were taught to call it in college. Among the things the pandemic has clarified for me is the decadence, as my colleague Ross Douthat has described it, of our old culture war. Many of the battles of the past decade now seem self-indulgent and stagnant; others a waste of time.

Unless you’re watching a panel discussion, it’s usually impossible to look at everyone in a group during in-person interactions. Typically, your gaze rests on the one main speaker and then everyone else is in the periphery or even behind you. But thanks to the glories (and more concerning attributes) of Zoom, you can see everyone all at once, along with one person you never usually observe—yourself.This creates visual overload because when we look at a screen, whether it’s a computer or a TV screen, our minds are accustomed to processing what is in front of us as a unified whole. But a Zoom meeting in gallery view isn’t one unified whole. It’s the equivalent of trying to watch 5, 10, 20, or more different TV shows, side-by-side, meanwhile checking a mirror to see how you look. This is incredibly exhausting.

Most companies have reacted to a new all-remote existence with a mandate to “over-communicate.” That has paid dividends in the early weeks, but for some has now led to a nonstop deluge of video calls that — let’s be honest –could simply be emails or Slacks. (Or even, phone calls!)

Tiny little inconveniences and provocations are going to drive us crazy. Kierkegaard put in his diary once: “I can cheerfully struggle against a storm... , but the wind blowing a speck of dust into my eye can irritate me so much that I stamp my foot.” The smaller the affront, the more upset we get - because what we’re actually upset about is our inability to cope.

One of my favorite memories from the early days is of Joe talking to an engineer/designer who was working on an update of the homepage literally a few days before a major launch. She was asking for feedback on what she thought was a complete homepage. Instead, Joe offered, “build something the internet has never seen before.”

You can see that market reset in another way in two big industries that people have spent decades dreaming of moving to digital and to remote - health and education. Both of these are very obviously now in the same period of forced, accelerated adoption and experimentation, but they are also short-circuiting many of the barriers to adoption and experimentation that have made both industries graveyards for innovation and company creation for a decade or two.

“I think a lot of it will remain this way after this crisis,” said Beccy Baird, a senior fellow at the King’s Fund, a health care research charity. “What’s really key is that we don’t lose patients’ ongoing relationships with a group of professionals at their home practice.”

Looking at the information at hand, starting a fundraising process right now has a very low likelihood of being a success. Even if a startup is able to succeed, expect 30–50% lower valuation than expected.

Dr. Petersen said that the impulse to optimize every minute is especially common in millennials, many of whom are now balancing work and child care at home. “I think for millennials, our brains are particularly broken in terms of productivity,” she said. “Either you give up or feel bad about it all the time.”

Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn't a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don't seem risky either.

Ten or 20 years from now, by the time the current crisis has hardened into a cautionary tale about the dangers of governmental incompetence, I imagine we’ll look back on Donald Trump’s Rose Garden news conference of Friday, March 13, as the moment that finally shattered the world’s faith in America. What broke me, at least, was the spectacular smallness on display — how, in the span of about an hour that afternoon, the illusion of American can-do greatness shriveled like a frightened turtle right before our eyes.

I love this kind of stuff because it’s born out of an open mind, child-like curiosity, and a determination to find an answer. Not to get published in a prestigious journal, not to win an award, not to advance a career, not to earn a degree, not to be more well-known. Quite simply, as Richard Feynman put it, “It is the pleasure in finding the thing out.”

Trying to be perfect may be sort of inevitable for people like us, who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and in its good opinion. But at one level it's too hard, and at another, it's too cheap and easy. Because it really requires you mainly to read the zeitgeist of wherever and whenever you happen to be, and to assume the masks necessary to be the best of whatever the zeitgeist dictates or requires. Those requirements shapeshift, sure, but when you're clever you can read them and do the imitation required.

Infinite players, in contrast, look to the future. Because their goal is to keep the game going, they focus less on what happened, and put more effort into figuring out what’s possible. By playing a single, non-repeatable game, they are unconcerned with the maintenance and display of past status. They are more concerned with positioning themselves to deal effectively with whatever challenges come up.

What is it about the desk that allows such personal glimpses into anonymous souls? Is it because when faced with that outrageous sky, the sotol and prickly pear and grassland far below, people inherently turn to thinking about the vast questions in their own lives? Whatever it is, what happens in those notebooks feels important and authentic. “The candor of the journals encouraged me to think more deeply about what I felt and cared about,” says Alpine resident Pam Gaddis, a longtime visitor to the hill. “In a sense, we are all writing for each other, all voicing our piece of the human experience.”

But we are now discovering that some arachnids possess hidden cognitive abilities rivalling those of mammals and birds, including foresight and planning, complex learning and even the capacity to be surprised. Stranger still, the delicate silk threads they spin out behind them, so easily swept up by a feather duster, help them to sense and remember their world. Indeed, spiders’ silk is so important to their cognitive abilities that some scientists believe it should be considered part of their mind.

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

If the lures of Crusoe’s ambition were great, the lures of ambition in our own day are greater still. Crusoe’s ambition could be kindled only by stories. Our own ambitions are stoked by billboards, screens, and Facebook feeds. Never before have their objects seemed so vivid, so close.

A person who was born blind doesn't have the visual inputs to help shape their model of the world. They have to build it with their other senses—a model of the world that Pollak and Corlett argue could be more stable.

Instead, focus on extreme ideas that may be adopted by unusual consumers and then make their way into the mainstream.

In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, owing to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s “instructions for use,” and inexperience in life itself.

First, they note that, like other forms of indirect rationing, rationing through inconvenience preserves patient choice.

The space has certainly been ripe for innovation, with most millennials eschewing regular checkups. Forty-five percent of 18- to 29-year-olds don’t have a primary care physician, according to a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Along with One Medical, startups like Forward, Cityblock and Oak Street are also trying to make health care less miserable — and more millennial.

The Sarco concept came to Nitschke while watching "Soylent Green", a 1970s sci-fi movie in which Charlton Heston, disgusted by a world ravaged by global warming, seeks euthanasia in the serenity of a customised government clinic. It’s set in 2022. Eventually, Nitschke wants the 3D-printed Sarco to be accessible on demand to anyone, anywhere – a sort of cosmic Uber into the great beyond.

Psychology is just a microcosm of sociology. And sociology is higher-emergence psychology—it’s the psychology of giants.

The test run, which took place in August and gave employees five consecutive Fridays off, boosted sales per employee by 40 percent, compared with the same month a year earlier, according to the post. The number of pages printed in the office fell by 59 percent, electricity consumption dropped 23 percent, and 94 percent of employees were satisfied with the program.

Make sure you’re actually being asked to give counsel. It’s easy to confuse being audience to a venting session with being asked to weigh in. Sometimes people just want to feel heard.

But there is a certain freedom in the knowledge that you can just up and vanish at any given moment — it means that you’re never trapped by your circumstances, and instead you’re making a conscious decision to be where you are, doing what you’re doing, that you’re invested in the life you’re living.

The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic—it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050, if every American of the future were to be a direct descendant of Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner (who looks exactly like Emily Ratajkowski).

If a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity, it would no longer be a reduction and thus would no longer be useful to us.

The sky by day is limitless, at night a feast of stars. The sun’s movement across the land makes for a parade of shadows and hues unlike in any other place on the planet. The Chisos Mountains form a majestic blue boundary off in the distance. It’s country as inhospitable as it is spectacular, for eons a place that attracted folks as irascible as the porcupines that nestle in the rocks around these parts.

Climate change is a structural problem involving politics and economics, not personal choices, and solving it will require huge political and economic changes.

So, let’s recap: there’s affordability, a slower pace of life, top-shelf food and culture, and a welcoming, friendly community. During my travels, I found myself—a near-lifelong Houston resident—increasingly bewitched by the notion of small-town life. I began dreaming, to paraphrase Guy Clark’s “L.A. Freeway,” of packing up the dishes, making note of all good wishes, saying adiós to all this concrete, and getting me some dirt-road backstreets.

Clouds, their manifesto says, are not signs of negativity and gloom, but rather “nature’s poetry” and “the most egalitarian of her displays.”

This resource being as limited as it was, should I not be doing something better with it, something more urgent or interesting or authentic? At some point in my late 30s, I recognised the paradoxical source of this anxiety: that every single thing in life took much longer than I expected it to, except for life itself, which went much faster, and would be over before I knew where I was.

It’s also weird that to us, the 2020s sounds like such a rad futuristic decade—and that’s how the 1920s seemed to people 100 years ago today. They were all used to the 19-teens, and suddenly they were like, “whoa cool we’re in the twenties!” Then they got upset thinking about how much farther along in life their 1910 self thought they’d be by 1920.

Where did he go? Did he really make it to Mars? Is he hiding out on the dark side of the Moon? Has he really accepted Chinese citizenship? Or is he just chilling in his luxury bunker in New Zealand? Nobody knows for sure, but with this new mobile game from superstar designers Mindfield you can help track down America's greatest traitor! Based on the classic children’s book, Where’s Elon? challenges you to spot the world’s greatest entrepreneur-turned-environmental-criminal across a dozen beautifully illustrated, scrolling crowd scenes. When you see him point him out quick—and be rewarded with the satisfaction of watching a beautifully rendered drone strike! Fun for the whole family.

Science is not some big immovable mass. It is not infallible. It does not pretend to be able to explain everything or to know everything. Furthermore, there is no such thing as “alternative” science. Science does involve mistakes. But we have yet to find a system of inquiry capable of achieving what it does: move us closer and closer to truths that improve our lives and understanding of the universe.