“Scroll through TikTok or sit next to a Silicon Valley software engineer at a dinner party, and you’ll be bombarded with dopamine-related life hacks. Struggling to stay off your phone? Maybe you’re due for a dopamine detox. Concerned that you’re not enjoying life like you used to? Try dopamine fasting or, for a quick pick-me-up, get dopamine dressed … Dopamine’s first moment in the spotlight inspired more pharmaceutical research. Haloperidol, an antipsychotic commonly used to treat schizophrenia, first went through clinical trials in 1958 — it effectively treated psychosis, but scientists didn’t know why. But in the 1970s, the discovery of dopamine receptors in the brain led to an important realization: haloperidol binds to and blocks a certain type of dopamine receptor, suggesting that dopamine — specifically, having too much of it — plays a central role in schizophrenia. Links between dopamine and mental illness kept popping up in clinical research: Addiction, ADHD, and depression all seemed related to changes in the dopamine system. ADHD medications like Adderall and Ritalin, as well as addictive drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, target the dopamine system, implicating it in habit formation, craving, and euphoria. Together, these results caused a paradigm shift in our understanding of dopamine: If the chemical is involved in disorders of attention and thought, and in substances that affect how we think and feel, then it must play a role in cognition. If our relationship with dopamine goes both ways, meaning our behaviors affect dopamine signaling and dopamine shapes how we feel, that opens the door to optimization. If dopamine responds to what we do when we’re not thinking about it, maybe, just maybe, we can fine-tune our dopamine systems through intentional lifestyle changes.” (Celia Ford/Vox)
“The investigative Lighthouse Reports on Europe’s migration pact highlights human rights abuses in African countries that we have deals with. They are a reminder that those unethical pacts not only undermine our own values. They also don't solve the problem. In a year-long investigation in collaboration with Der Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde, they found evidence that EU is funding, and in some cases contributing directly, to systematic racial profiling, detention, and expulsion of black communities across at least three North African countries. In Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia, refugees and workers are reportedly apprehended and loaded on buses to be left with nothing to drink or eat in arid desert areas. There are also reports of cases where authorities take migrants to hand them over at the border to human traffickers and gangs that use them to extract ransom money. The team used testimony of 50 survivors to geolocate their journey and find open source evidence in support of those cases. In Tunesia the team found 13 such incidents between March 2023 and May 2024, where migrants were rounded up and dumped in desert areas usually close to the Libyan or Algerian borders. The team got information that EU officials and Frontex were well aware of such practices, some told the team that this is part of making migration unattractive. Then there is the question of funding. The EU has given Tunisia, Mauritania and Morocco more than €400m for migration management. Some of the vehicles that were used in these round-ups in Tunesia were funded by Germany and Italy. Funding such practices could make the European Union liable for human rights violations. Outsourcing re-enforces unethical behaviour, while it does not prevent migrants from coming.” (Wolfgang Münchau//Eurointelligence)
“The death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash has dealt a major shock to Iran’s Islamic Republic at a precarious moment for the sclerotic clerical state and the broader Middle East … The crash was likely caused by mundane factors—scenes of the rescue efforts showed inclement weather and dense fog. And for years, Iranians have complained that U.S. and international sanctions left the country vulnerable to dangerous aviation issues as a result of aging or poorly maintained equipment—a grievance that Iranian officials resurfaced in the wake of the crash.Still, the high stakes will only fuel the conspiracy theories that were percolating from the earliest reports of helicopter troubles. Such suspicions draw from a deep well of experience with internal violence and external sabotage. During the revolution’s early years, competition between the revolutionary coalition’s divergent components precipitated a vicious power struggle and acts of terror that killed—among others—a number of influential clerics, cabinet ministers, members of parliament, the president, and the prime minister. Khamenei himself lost the use of his right hand as a result of a 1981 assassination attempt. The regime fought back with a campaign to kill its critics both within and outside Iran as well as enduring efforts to target dissidents in the United States, Europe, and beyond. In 1996, Iran’s security services attempted to kill 21 writers by disabling their bus in the mountains of northwestern Iran, not far from where Raisi’s helicopter crashed—an episode that was later made into a film whose director fled the country only last week on foot to avoid prosecution for his art. That history may predispose many among Iran’s leadership and population to cynical interpretations of the crash. And coming little more than a month since Iranian authorities undertook an unprecedented attack on Israel—launching more than 300 drones and cruise and ballistic missiles at the Jewish state in response to an Israeli strike that killed senior Iranian military officials in Damascus—many may see this as a deferred reprisal by Israel.” (Suzanne Maloney/Brookings)
“For years, media executives built their pitches to advertisers around the idea that they could reach younger audiences, with viewers 18 to 49 years old drawing a big premium and those 25 to 54 offering the greatest appeal to news advertisers. But there is a hard reality these days: Most people watching TV are older than those groups. Among cable channels, the median age for TNT and Bravo viewers is 56, for HGTV it is 66, and even the once-youthful MTV’s median-age viewer is 51, according to Nielsen data. The cable news audience is even older, with MSNBC’s median age at 70, Fox News’s at 69 and CNN’s, 67. Among broadcasters, CBS’s median age is 64 and ABC’s is 66. Now media executives are embracing a new sell. They are focusing more on the mass-market reach of TV, and playing down the importance of age for advertisers. What really matters, they say, is whether your ad is reaching people who are likely to buy your product, whether they are 37 or 67. ‘Everybody uses credit cards and buys paper towels and buys insurance and buys phone plans, so those are not age-specific things,’ said Colleen Fahey Rush, chief research officer at Paramount, owner of CBS and cable channels such as MTV and Comedy Central.” (Isabella Simonetti and Joe Flint/WSJ)
“Miriam Adelson often tells a story from her childhood: Around 1950, when she was 4 or 5 years old and the state of Israel itself was one or two, she wanted to dress up for Purim as Queen Esther. Esther, the Tanakh tells us, was a beautiful Jewish woman who married gentile King Ahasuerus. She used her bravery, smarts, and station to thwart a plot to slaughter the Jews. But Miriam didn’t get to be Esther. Her family, like most Israeli families at the time, had no money. Her mother dressed her up in her older brother’s clothes instead. Miriam Adelson is now 78 and worth $30 billion. She is effectively a queen — the fifth-richest woman in America and the richest Israeli. When she met her late husband, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, in the late 1980s, she was a divorced addiction doctor who had left Tel Aviv for New York to pursue a research fellowship on methadone treatment. She had dedicated her life to lifting up the weak. But like almost all Israelis of her generation, the protection of the Jewish people, the security of the state of Israel, is her true calling. So after she married Sheldon in 1991, she leaned in. As Cicero put it, endless money forms the sinews of war. Through the 1990s, Adelson learned her weapon. She switched from making modest donations to Democrats — common practice among Jewish Americans — to making large donations to Republicans, then unexpected and strange.” (Elizabeth Weil/NYMag)
“Eagle-eyed observers of President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign might have noticed an unusual job posting on its website this week: ‘Partner Manager, Content and Meme Pages.’ Presidential campaigns have tried to insinuate themselves into the esoteric, in-joke-laden online ecosystem for years, often with dubious results: Recall Hillary Clinton, awkwardly exhorting young voters in 2016 to ‘Pokémon Go’ to the polls.’ The ecosystem naturally treats disruptors a little better than incumbents; observers attributed former President Donald Trump’s shocking defeat of Clinton in part to his supporters’ mastery of ‘meme magic.’ The 2024 Biden campaign has already been ramping up its program from 2020 of partnering with online influencers, and the new job — paying someone a full-time salary to serve as what TechCrunch called a ‘seasoned meme lord’ — is a tacit admission that the outside game is now the online game. This form of ersatz, quasi-grassroots culture-jamming is not just a nod to a passing digital fashion. It’s a reckoning with what campaigning will look like in the 21st century, as personalized algorithms work overtime to ensure that users don’t see anything that would make them even a fraction more likely to put their phone down — politics often topping that list of boring or off-putting material.So what does a Biden memelord actually do? Clarke Humphrey, the Biden campaign’s ‘senior adviser for digital persuasion,’ told DFD that the role won’t involve creating memes, but instead setting up partnerships with content creators who would then agree to create memes on the campaign’s behalf. (‘Dark Brandon,’ the campaign’s indisputably signature meme, was after all the organic creation of an inchoate group of online posters appropriating a Chinese illustrator’s artwork.)” (Derek Robertson/Politico)
“The aurora borealis is usually visible only way up north, but two weeks ago the night sky was filled with shimmering curtains of pink and green light that could be seen all the way down into the southern US. People in Texas and Hawaii got out of their cars to stare and take pictures. The cause of this light show was an especially strong blast of solar wind—electrically charged particles shot out from the sun at incredible speeds. And there's more to come as we approach the peak of the current solar cycle, a period of increased solar storms that happens every 11 years. This is one example of what scientists call ‘space weather,’ which deals with the interaction between the sun and the Earth … You might think of the sun as a great ball of fire—but it's not. (Fire is a chemical reaction between oxygen and carbon.) What the sun is, really, is a giant nuclear fusion reactor. In the core, protons are smashed together under extreme pressure. These protons stick together to create the nucleus of a helium atom, with two protons and two neutrons. (Two of the protons decay into neutrons) … The helium nucleus has less mass than the four protons we started with. That mass isn't lost—it's turned into energy, according to Einstein's famous equation E = mc2, where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light. That last number is huge—light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second, and it's hugeness is squared—which means that even a tiny loss of mass creates A LOT of energy. That's why the sun is so hot, with a core temperature of 27 million degrees Fahrenheit … Under this extreme heat, the gases in the outer part of the sun form a plasma in which electrons are ripped away from their atoms, leaving free electrical charges (mostly electrons and protons) zooming around. Some of them are moving fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of the sun. These ejected particles are what we call the ‘solar wind.’” (Rhett Alain/WIRED)
“By now, we’ve seen poll after poll showing that voters look back fondly on Donald Trump’s presidency. The polls suggest that millions of people forget completely, for example, Trump’s shambolic panic when the pandemic was coming, his total failure to order up ventilators and masks, his serial lies that the 15 Covid cases would soon be down to zero, and so on—behavior so obviously disqualifying that failing to see it is, to my mind, akin to seeing a man holding a smoking gun over a dead body and denying that the man was the shooter. Lately, these polls have been joined by other polls that say something just as false and just as dangerous. These polls show people giving Trump credit for things that Biden has accomplished and people being miffed at Biden for all manner of bad stuff that just isn’t real. In the latter category, we find a Harris Poll (yes, Mark Penn, but even so) showing the following hall-of-mirrors results, as Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect: 56 percent of Americans think the country is in a recession, 49 percent believe the stock market is down, and 49 percent also believe unemployment is at an all-time high. We are not close to a recession, which is a decline in gross domestic product in two consecutive quarters. That did happen in early 2022, but the second-quarter dip was very shallow, and most economists didn’t call it a recession. The Dow is up 8,000 points since Biden took office. Unemployment is at its lowest level in half a century. Meyerson fingers—correctly, I think—the fact that so many people get their ‘news’ from social media, which is usually just a collection of video and photo images that can pack an emotional punch but that explain and contextualize nothing.” (Michael Tomasky/TNR)
“According to a report in Mexico News Daily, three panuchos, or limestone objects used by ancient Maya beekeepers, helped a team of archaeologists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) identify the site of an apiary in southern Mexico during construction work on a section of the Maya Train project. Each lid measures about eight inches across and would have been used to plug holes in a hollow log known as a jobón to create a hive for Melipona bees. The artifacts have been dated to the Postclassic period, from about A.D. 950 to 1539, when the Yucatán Peninsula was a hub of honey production. ‘Only one of the lids is in a good state of conservation,’ said INAH archaeologist Carlos Fidel Martínez. The other two objects are highly eroded, he explained. Melipona honey was used by the Maya in ceremonies, as a food, and as a trade commodity. INAH archaeologist Raquel Liliana Hernández Estrada added that the apiary was situated in a residential area on the outskirts of Los Limones, a site where a Maya pyramid still stands, and Chacchoben, a larger Maya settlement inhabited from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 700. For more on Maya honey production, go to ‘Maya Beekeepers.’” (Archaeology)
-—————————————————————————