Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.

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World’s oldest preserved cheese found in necklaces on mummies in China

By Lauren Leffer, Popular Science

“These small lumps of fermented dairy, laid around the necks of the deceased, represent the longest-aged cheese ever discovered–at about 3,500 years old. Not only is the ancient cheese incredibly well-preserved, but a new assessment of the chunks reveals long-hidden information about human culture and a potential path for how dairying practices may have spread across Asia, as described in a study published September 25 in the journal Cell.”

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Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals

By Howtown, Aeon via YouTube

“From the moment when the first known Neanderthal skeleton was discovered in modern-day Germany in 1856, our understanding of these ancient ancestors has been a work in progress. And, as this instalment of the YouTube series Howtown explores, these decades of archaeology and scientific research have forced an important, ongoing conversation about how we understand ourselves. First, the hosts Adam Cole and Joss Fong provide a brief history of Neanderthal discovery, as well as a rundown of how contemporary scientists view the Neanderthals’ place in evolutionary history today. Then, speaking with a series of experts, Cole takes a detailed dive into how, exactly, scientists arrived at the growing consensus that human-Neanderthal interbreeding means that there’s a little bit of Neanderthal in everyone’s family tree.”

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Please Don’t Ask AI If Something Is Poisonous

By Sarah Lewin Frasier, Scientific American

“The way that we’re trying to use these algorithms now as a way of retrieving information is not going to lead us to correct information, because their goal during training is to sound correct and be probable, and there’s not really anything fundamentally tied back to real-world accuracy or to exactly retrieving and quoting the correct source material. And I know people are trying to treat it this way and sell it this way in quite a lot of applications. I think it’s a fundamental mismatch between what people are asking for, this information retrieval, and what these things are actually trained to do, which is to sound correct.

“Anything you’re doing where having the correct answer would be important is not a good use for generative AI.”

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Chappell Roan and the problem with fandom

By Aja Romano, Vox

“What Roan is describing here is an increasing trend around the globe. Fandom has changed over the last decade to become more of a discourse, but while celebs have had to hear more and more of what fans have to say, now fans are getting a peek at what their actions mean to their favorite stars — and a lot of it is not so flattering. It’s unclear whether the celebrities’ pushback is making the situation better or if their protests will ever reach the most entitled fans and paparazzi — those for whom celebrities are less like people and more like collectible Pokémon.

“All of this suggests that Chappell Roan’s fans, and even her paparazzi, aren’t the problem: It’s the increasingly toxic nature of celebrity fandom itself.”

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How pain is misunderstood and ignored in women

By Bianca Nogrady, Nature

“Her research suggests that there is an interaction between sex and chronic pain in this region of the brain, but it’s a perplexing one. Not only did she find differences in subgenual anterior cingulate cortex connectivity between men and women with and without chronic pain conditions, but those sex differences were also influenced by whether the condition was predominantly present in women or in men. For example, ‘it seemed like the men with the female-predominant condition had the abnormal subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, not the women; something that to this day I don’t understand’, Osborne says.”

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Being Empathetic Is Easier when Everyone’s Doing It

By Elizabeth Svoboda, Scientific American

“Increasing empathy, says Stanford University social psychologist Jamil Zaki, will take more than teaching skills such as listening actively to others. Empathy is a socially motivated process, Zaki and other researchers say, meaning that people won’t necessarily empathize just because they know how. Instead—much as kids with athletic peers often want to excel at sports—people want to understand others when they enter into communities where empathy is the established norm.”

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The Cognitive Magic of “Hi”

By Tom Roeper, The MIT Press Reader

“A child who says, ‘Hi, table’ already exhibits creativity and defies the popular doctrine of learning-by-imitation. What could lead a child to say ‘Hi, table’? He never hears anything like it—or does he? Parents now and then may talk about a highchair. Suppose the child thinks he hears ‘Hi, chair’ instead. In fact, all children do hear ‘high chair’ (highchair) or ‘high [some object].’ Now the problem has reversed itself. How does a child who hears ‘high chair’ avoid the conclusion that the person speaking has just said ‘Hi, chair’ and avoid deducing further that ‘Hi, truck’ is equally appropriate? (There are some intonational differences between hi chair and high chair, but that just makes the child’s task more difficult because intonational variety and creativity constitute another problem to be solved.)”

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Brain goop that traps hunger neurons drives obesity

By Max Kozlov, Nature

“They found that this scaffolding became thicker and stickier within weeks of the mice starting the unhealthy diet. As these animals gained weight, their hypothalamus neurons became less able to process insulin normally, even when the hormone was injected directly into their brains. This suggests that the scaffolding’s stickiness stops insulin from getting into the brain. Instead, “it gets stuck”, says co-author Garron Dodd, a neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia.”

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Digging Into an Ancient Apocalypse Controversy From a Hopi Perspective

By Chip Colwell, Sapiens

“The assertions that Hancock makes promote dangerous racist thinking that impacts the Hopi people and other Indigenous communities. His theory appropriates recognition of the Hopi people’s sustainability, migration footprint, and adaptive accomplishments to the Grand Canyon, Chaco Canyon, and overall landscapes and ecosystems of the U.S. Southwest.

“Hancock’s narrative encourages dangerous voices that misrepresent established archaeological knowledge. These false historical narratives affect living cultures and their continued connections to their ancestral homelands.”

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A Fossilized Creature May Explain a Puzzling Painting on a Rock Wall

By Jack Tamisiea, The New York Times

“A paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One posits that this mythic monster was inspired by local fossils of long extinct animals. The author of the study suggests that the Indigenous southern African people who painted the Horned Serpent panel, the San, developed paleontological knowledge about their region that predated the contemporary Western approach to studying creatures that disappeared millions of years ago.”

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Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

By Ted Chiang, The New Yorker

“Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.”

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Ancient DNA unveils a previously unknown line of Neandertals

By Bruce Bower, Science News

“Whether classified as a separate species or a variant of Homo sapiens, Neandertals have typically been viewed as a genetically consistent population. But an adult male’s partial skeleton discovered in France contains genetic clues to a Neandertal line that evolved apart from other European Neandertals for around 50,000 years, nearly up to the time these close relatives of H. sapiens died out, researchers say.”

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Famed Pacific island’s population 'crash' debunked by ancient DNA

By Ewen Callaway, Nature

“The theory that the early Indigenous inhabitants of Rapa Nui — also known as Easter Island — ravaged its ecosystem and caused the population to crash before the arrival of Europeans in the early eighteenth century was popularized in the 2006 book Collapse, by geographer Jared Diamond, but some other scholars have since criticized that theory.

“The latest analysis, published on 11 September in Nature, ‘serves as the final nail in the coffin of this collapse narrative’, says Kathrin Nägele, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. ‘It’s correcting the image of Indigenous people.’”

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Health Effects of 9/11 Still Plague Responders and Survivors

By Tara Haelle, Scientific American

“Nearly 3,000 people died during the deadliest terrorist attack in world history. But in the two decades since then, the number of deaths among survivors and responders—who spent months inhaling the noxious dust, chemicals, fumes and fibers from the debris—has continued creeping up. Researchers have identified more than 60 typesof cancer and about two dozen other conditions that are linked to Ground Zero exposures. As of today, at least 4,627 responders and survivors enrolled in the World Trade Center (WTC) Health Program have died.”

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We’re Bad at Understanding Our Political Opponents

By Elena Kazamia, Nautilus

“The study found that, on average, participants predicted the views of their in-group just over half of the time, whereas that accuracy dropped to 39 percent for their out-group.  Participants were only slightly less confident about their abilities to predict responses for people with whom they disagreed, giving themselves odds of 74 percent to guess the response of their in-group correctly, compared to 72 percent for their out-group. ‘People really aren’t aware that they’re bad at this,’ Payne says.”

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Professional Poker Players Know the Optimal Strategy but Don’t Always Use It

By Jack Murtagh, Scientific American

“Most players agree that to stay competitive at the top levels of poker they must use a blend of game theory’s optimal and exploitative play. Optimal is more defensive, whereas exploitative is more offensive. Some teachers recommend that you should begin a tournament by emulating optimal play—and only after you’ve had time to observe your opponent’s weaknesses should you sprinkle in your exploits. The flexibility to switch between strategies separates the fish from the sharks. ‘This whole process works better the more certain you are that you’re smarter than [your opponent] about the game,’ Kurganov says, adding that ‘you do less exploitative adjustments when you feel like they’re as good or better than you.’”

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Math teacher argues Pi Day should be July 22

By Ben Orlin, Popular Science

“This horrible day that transfixes the nation,
is built on a lousy approximization.
22 over 7 comes closer to pi.
So let’s wait till that date, out in mid-late-July.”

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Why don’t straight men read novels?

By Georgina Elliott, Dazed

“Generally speaking, reading is an indulgence that women permit themselves more than men. In 2022, Deloitte predicted boys and men would continue to spend less time reading books and read them less frequently than women and girls. They were right: in 2023, women made up 80 per cent of the book-buying market in the UK, US, and Canada, and accounted for 65 per cent of all fiction purchases in the UK according to Nielson BookData. The bookish man is a rare species. Case in point: 1.2 million people follow the @hotdudesreading Instagram.”

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Efforts to Build Climate Resilience Do Not Protect Human Health

By David Introcaso, Undark

“Resilience fails to appreciate that harms to human health caused by the climate crisis are innumerable and unrelenting, and potentially impact everyone, everywhere, always. For example, the World Health Organization concluded in 2022 that 99 percent of the global population is exposed to air pollution that threatens their health. More specifically, a recent study concluded that for the more than 60 million Medicare beneficiaries, no safe threshold for exposure exists for the chronic effect of fine particulate matter (particles 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter), largely the result of fossil fuel combustion. Another 2022 study found that nearly 60 percent of known infectious diseases can be aggravated by hazards or pathways related to climate breakdown.”

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We may finally know how the placebo effect relieves pain

By Grace Wade, New Scientist

“Further experiments revealed a pathway connecting these pain-processing neurons to cells in the pontine nuclei and cerebellum – two brain areas with no previous known role in relieving pain.”

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Early Humans Left Africa Much Earlier Than Previously Thought

By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times

“Several new studies, including one published on Thursday, argue that the timeline was wrong. According to new data, several waves of modern humans began leaving the continent about 250,000 years ago.

“‘It wasn’t a single out-of-Africa migration,’ said Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. “There have been lots of migrations out of Africa at different time periods.’”

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Talking to your infant is likely a modern phenomenon. Here’s why.

By Ross Pomeroy, Big Think

“But there’s a problem with much of this research — it’s WEIRD, or originating from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries. In the United States and other WEIRD nations, people often live in small, isolated families, their lives augmented by technology. But for much of humanity’s existence, people didn’t live like this. The societal gulf raises two questions. Is frequent adult-to-child direct speech really the single, optimal pathway to language development? And could it be that children raised in Western settings learn language differently from how our ancestors did?”

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Jurassic Park’s amber-preserved dino DNA is now inspiring a way to store data 

By Payal Dhar, Science News

“To test the resilience of the polymer, the researchers encapsulated strands of DNA containing the encoded Jurassic Park theme music and a human’s entire genetic instruction book in the amberlike material and then exposed it to temperatures of 55° Celsius, 65° C and 75° C at 70 percent humidity over seven days. The team used benign reagents, rather than hydrofluoric acid, to extract the stored DNA, then used DNA-reading techniques to retrieve the stored information, all in a matter of hours — not the days needed to do this with silica-based materials.”

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Governing for the planet

By Jonathan S Blake, Aeon

“This basic mismatch between the scale of the problem and the scale of possible solutions is a source of many of today’s failures of global governance. Nation-states and the global governance institutions they have formed simply aren’t fit for the task of managing things such as viruses, greenhouse gases and biodiversity, which aren’t bound by political borders, but only by the Earth system. As a result, the diplomats may still come to agree on a pandemic treaty – they’ve committed to keep working – but, so long as the structure of the international system continues to treat sovereignty as sacrosanct, they will never be able to effectively govern this or other planetary-scale phenomena.”

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Giant armadillo fossil reveals humans were in South America a surprisingly long time ago

By Katie Hunt, CNN

“The discovery, inferred from cut marks on the ice age creature’s fossilized remains, is significant because it adds to a flurry of recent finds that suggests the Americas were settled far earlier than archaeologists initially thought — perhaps more than 25,000 years ago.”

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The Magic of the Blackboard

By Theo Zenou & Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Nautilus

“To understand why, we talk to Albert Read, author of The Imagination Muscle. He argues that imagination is intertwined with acts of creation, of which writing is an example. ‘You don’t imagine something first and then write it down. It’s through the act of writing that ideas make themselves known.’ Scientists at blackboards have ‘thoughts that wouldn’t come if they just stood there, with their arms folded.’

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Genes are not the blueprint for life: Going beyond the selfish gene

By Denis Noble, Institute of Art and Ideas

“Popularised by Dawkins' work The Selfish Gene, we think genes are the blueprint for life. But might this commonly-held view of biology and evolution be mistaken? Join renowned Oxford biologist, Denis Noble, as he proposes the radical new theory that organisms control their genomes rather than the other way around.”

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Gen X Faces Higher Cancer Rates Than Any Previous Generation

By Lauren J. Young, Scientific American

“The model study, published in JAMA Network Open, sifted through cancer surveillance data collected between 1992 and 2018 on 3.8 million people in the U.S. Researchers looked for patterns in invasive cancer cases—those that have spread beyond the original site—within and among Generation X, Baby Boomers (people born in 1946–1964), the Silent Generation (1928–1945) and the Greatest Generation (1908–1927). The findings suggest that medical advances against some cancers—gained by better screening, prevention and treatment—have been overtaken by startling increases in other cancers, including colon, rectal, thyroid, ovarian and prostate cancers. This troubling trend has researchers baffled and scrambling for answers.”

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A long-standing mystery about breastfeeding may have been solved

By Grace Wade, New Scientist

“For decades, it was unclear how bones maintain strength during breastfeeding, when the body strips calcium from bones to produce nutrient-rich milk. Breastfeeding also lowers levels of oestrogen, a hormone essential for skeletal health. Despite this, lactation only causes temporary dips in bone mass that are resolved between 6 and 12 months after breastfeeding ends.”

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Stone circles unearthed in Norway mark ancient children’s graves

By Laura Baisas, Popular Science

“According to Fossum, the burial site appears to have been used over a long period of time. This indicates that they likely didn’t die of an epidemic, disease outbreak, or some kind of natural disaster. The area around the burial ground is also lined with rock carvings that describe sun worship and various voyages. The team believes that the site must have been an open landscape where lots of people could see them. There were cooking pits and fireplaces near the site, which suggest that ceremonies or gatherings were held in connection to these burials. “

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Did Prehistoric Children Make Figurines Out of Clay?

By Jaimie Seaton, Smithsonian Magazine

“The oldest known ceramics come from a handful of sites in the Czech Republic and date back to about 28,000 B.C.E., roughly 10,000 years after the Neanderthals went extinct. A now iconic figure of a woman and assorted ceramics were found at a Czech site called Dolni Vestonice in 1925. Additional anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines were found over the ensuing decades, and in 2002 fingerprints were discovered on many of the objects.”

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The world’s oldest mechanical computer used a lunar calendar to study the stars

By Andrew Paul, Popular Science

“‘Previous studies had suggested that the calendar ring was likely to have tracked the lunar calendar, but the dual techniques we’ve applied in this piece of work greatly increase the likelihood that this was the case,’ Bayley added.”

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Inside Russia’s Campaign to Steal and Indoctrinate Ukrainian Children

By Greta Uehling, Sapiens

“The estimated number of children sent unlawfully from Ukraine to Russia since the full-scale invasion varies widely, from 20,000 to 750,000. Child removal is a way for Russia to claim the Ukrainian children it has not killed with missile or drone strikes. Through a vast network of shelters and camps, Russians and their supporters provide kids with Russian identity documents, indoctrinate them into pro-Russian beliefs, and, in many cases, send them to foster and adoptive families.”

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Why Some People Haven’t Caught COVID despite Being Exposed

By Saima S. Iqbal, Scientific American

“The three people who fought off transient infections produced heavy doses of signaling proteins called interferons in their nose on day one after infection. In contrast, those who developed a full-blown infection showed interferons in their blood as early as day two but not in their nose until day five.”

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Fossil of Neanderthal child with Down’s syndrome hints at early humans’ compassion

Reuters via The Guardian

“‘Given these symptoms, it is highly unlikely that the mother alone could have provided all the necessary care while also attending to her own needs. Therefore, for Tina to have survived for at least six years, the group must have continuously assisted the mother, either by relieving her in the care of the child, helping with her daily tasks, or both,’ Conde-Valverde added.”

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When Kids Talk to Machines

By Julie Sedivy, Nautilus

“When there’s no obvious communicative intent—if a disembodied voice intones a word over a speaker while a child is gazing at an object—the child is disinclined to map the word onto the object. Mere correlation is not sufficient; the child wants positive evidence of a desire to align minds. In this regard, intelligent machines may be ambiguous even when they are embodied. One study reported that while children could follow the gaze of a robot, they failed to learn the name the robot offered for the object it was ‘looking’ at.^”

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Ancient Genomes Reveal Which Children the Maya Selected for Sacrifice

By Freda Kreier, The New York Times

“Nearly 60 years later, ancient DNA extracted from 64 of the children is offering new insights into the religious rituals of the ancient Maya and their ties to modern descendants. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, an international cohort of researchers revealed that the children — sacrificial victims killed between 500 and 900 A.D. — were all local Maya boys that may have been specifically selected to be killed in sibling pairs.”

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Long COVID finally gets a universal definition

By Tina Hesman Saey, Science News

“According to the National Academies’ definition, long COVID is a medical condition that persists for at least three months after an infection with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Long COVID can affect any organ or system in the body. People may have any of more than 200 symptoms, which may include difficulty breathing, brain fog, blood clots, dizziness, extreme fatigue after exercising, loss of taste or smell, fast heart rate, diarrhea, constipation, diabetes and autoimmune diseases such as lupus. Those symptoms can appear alone or in multiple combinations, can be continuous, get progressively worse or have bouts in which the patient gets better and then worse again.”

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Most Life on Earth is Dormant, After Pulling an ‘Emergency Brake’

By Dan Samorodnitsky, Quanta Magazine

“Sitting around in a dormant state is actually the norm for the majority of life on Earth: By some estimates, 60% of all microbial cells are hibernating at any given time. Even in organisms whose entire bodies do not go dormant, like most mammals, some cellular populations within them rest and wait for the best time to activate.

“‘We live on a dormant planet,’ said Sergey Melnikov, an evolutionary molecular biologist at Newcastle University. ‘Life is mainly about being asleep.’”

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Morrie Markoff, Listed as Oldest Man in the U.S., Dies at 110

By Alex Williams, The New York Times

“He was notable not only for his longevity but also for his unusual lucidity for his age. Up to his final months, he pored over The Los Angeles Times every morning, discussed the war in Ukraine and other world events and posted dispatches about his life on his blog.”

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Neurodivergent Kids Flourish When They’re Taught How Their Brains Work

By Jerome Schultz, Scientific American

“There is a simple and effective answer: When kids have a better understanding of the condition that affects their learning, they tend to have a better self-concept, and they are more likely to feel empowered and motivated to self-advocate. These keys unlock a child’s potential, resulting in better academic performance and better mental health.”

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Bronze Age nomads used cauldrons for blood sausage and yak milk

By Laura Baisas, Popular Science

“Humans have loved fine cookware and milk for thousands of years across multiple continents. Now, a high-tech protein analysis of cauldrons used by nomadic people in present day Mongolia during the Bronze Age indicates that the cookware was used to make sausages and ferment milk. The findings are described in a study published June 5 in the journal Scientific Reports and potentially pushes back the previously understood timeline of when yaks began to be domesticated in the region by thousands of years.”

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Americans Aren't Nostalgic for the Past. They Are Nostalgic for Being 15.

By Eric Boehm, Reason

“And that age is roughly when you were between 11 and 16 years old—regardless of when you were born. Across generations, Americans seem to believe that the best music, the best television, the top sporting events, and the strongest communities are the ones they experienced in their adolescence and early teen years. That's the conclusion drawn by the data crunchers at The Washington Post, who distilled some fascinating recent polling data from YouGov's survey of Americans' views about different decades.”

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Betty Sue Flowers on Myths and Modernity

From iai TV

“Betty Sue Flowers has always been interested in myths for their enduring potential, power, and influence. In this interview, Betty Sue Flowers explores how myths and legends still shape contemporary life, from religious stories and heroic tales to the narratives that shape our histories and economies.”

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Menstrual periods are arriving earlier for younger generations, especially among racial minority and lower-income individuals

From Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

“The findings showed that BMI at age of menarche could explain part of the trend toward periods starting earlier—in other words, that childhood obesity, a risk factor for early puberty and a growing epidemic in the U.S., could be a contributing factor to earlier menarche. Other possible factors that might explain the trend include dietary patterns, psychological stress and adverse childhood experiences, and environmental factors such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals and air pollution.”

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The Big AI Risk Not Enough People are Seeing

By Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic (which ironically enough just signed a deal with OpenAI)

“Hypothetical AI dating concierges sound silly, and they are not exactly humanity’s greatest threat. But we might do well to think of the Bumble founder’s bubbly sales pitch as a canary in the coal mine, a harbinger of a world of algorithms that leave people struggling to be people without assistance. The new AI products coming to market are gate-crashing spheres of activity that were previously the sole province of human beings. Responding to these often disturbing developments requires a principled way of disentangling uses of AI that are legitimately beneficial and prosocial from those that threaten to atrophy our life skills and independence. And that requires us to have a clear idea of what makes human beings human in the first place.”

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We Learn and Make Connections Better When Information Comes from People We Like

By Kate Graham-Shaw, Scientific American

“Now a study shows how cognitive biases could profoundly affect our most basic learning and memory processes. ‘What we show is not that people are biased; that we already kind of know,’ says Inês Bramão, a psychologist at Sweden’s Lund University and co-author of the new study, published in Communications Psychology. ‘We give an explanation of why people are biased. The fundamental mechanism may be that we are more likely to expand our knowledge based on information provided by people we like.’ Such bias could help explain how people develop strongly polarized views.”

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Cultivating Modern Farms Using Ancient Lessons

By Chelsea Fisher, SAPIENS

“Drought-stricken farmers in Spain have reclaimed medieval Moorish irrigation technology. International companies hungry for carbon offsets have paid big money for biochar made using pre-Columbian Amazonian production techniques. Texas ranchers have turned to ancient cover cropping methods to buffer against unpredictable weather patterns.”

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The Ephemeral Organ: Researchers Look Closer at the Placenta

By Claire Marie Porter, Undark

“Every year, there are approximately 5 million pregnancies in the United States. One million of those pregnancies end in miscarriage, and more than 20,000 end in stillbirth. Up to half of these pregnancy losses have unidentified causes. Recent and ongoing research, though, suggests that the placenta may hold the key to understanding and preventing some pregnancy complications, such as preterm birth and maternal and infant mortality. A closer look at the placenta — including its size and function — may have a significant impact on stillbirth rates.”

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Skull Incisions Show Ancient Egyptians’ Interest in Medicine

By Paul Smaglik, Discover Magazine

“‘It was surprising to see the cut marks at the microscope because we immediately realized the significance and implications of the discovery: Ancient Egyptians, more than 4,000 years ago were already performing a surgical intervention in relation to tumors,’ says lead author Edgard Camarós, a paleopathologist at the University of Santiago de Compostela.”

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Microplastics found in every human testicle in study

By Damian Carrington, The Guardian

“Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades, with chemical pollution such as pesticides implicated by many studies. Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory.”

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Scientists may have solved mystery behind Egypt's pyramids

By Malu Cursino, BBC News

“Scientists believe they may have solved the mystery of how 31 pyramids, including the world-famous Giza complex, were built in Egypt more than 4,000 years ago.

“A research team from the University of North Carolina Wilmington has discovered that the pyramids are likely to have been built along a long-lost, ancient branch of the River Nile - which is now hidden under desert and farmland.”

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America’s dime-store Nietzscheans

By Sohrab Ahmari, The New Statesman

“This little-understood sociological fact upends the typical understanding that many have of this sort of ideology. According to a conventional account, reinforced by misguided scholarship such as the recent bestseller White Rural Rage, in the US it is the Trumpian-Jacksonian back country that is seething with racial resentment. Rural Americans, to be sure, can sometimes come across as gruff when sounding off on matters racial and cultural. But it was members of the professional and even upper classes who promoted eugenic or dime-store Nietzschean ideologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Likewise, it is a subset of disaffected or stressed urban professionals today who are developing a counter-culture centred around the worship of strength and the restoration of “natural hierarchies” among large human groups, as supposedly revealed by IQ bell curves.”

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When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’?

By Lisa Miller, The New York Times

“In almost every language, ‘journey’ has become a way to talk abstractly about outcomes, for good reason: According to what linguists call the ‘primary metaphor theory,’ humans learn as babies crawling toward their toys that ‘“purpose” and “destination” coincide,’ said Elena Semino, a linguist at Lancaster University who specializes in metaphor. As we become able to accomplish our goals while sitting still (standardized tests! working from home!), ambition and travel diverge. Yet we continue to envision achievement as a matter of forward progress. This is why we say, ‘“I know what I want, but I don’t know how to get there,”’ Semino explained. ‘Or “I’m at a crossroads.”’”

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Humans Are Driving a New Kind of Evolution in Animals

By Lee Alan Dugatkin, Scientific American

“The darkening of the peppered moth is also an example of anthropogenic evolution: evolutionary change caused by alterations humans make to the environment. In recent years scientists have identified many more cases of human-­mediated evolutionary change. The full scope and effects of anthropogenic evolution are only now coming into focus. But already we have ascertained that humans are shaping the evolutionary trajectories of animals across the globe, from insects to whales. As a result of our influence, key aspects of animal behavior are changing, including where they live, where they breed, what they eat, whom they fight and whom they help. We are remodeling more than just the environments species live in. We’re altering the species themselves as they evolve in response to our impact on their surroundings.”

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A Cubic Millimeter of a Human Brain Has Been Mapped in Spectacular Detail

By Carissa Wong/Nature Magazine for Scientific American

“The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. ‘It’s a little bit humbling,’ says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. ‘How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?’”

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Archaeologists identify the birthplace of the mysterious Yamnaya

By The Economist

“Most European men alive today carry y chromosomes that were brought in by the Yamnaya migrants of the Bronze Age, a legacy of the privileged access the latter managed to obtain, by fair means or foul, to local women. Millions of men in Central and South Asia carry the same y chromosomes, since the Yamnaya expanded eastward too. In January Dr Willerslev’s group reported that a genetic predisposition to multiple sclerosis, an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system, arrived in Europe with the Yamnaya, and spread wherever their descendants did. It may have arisen as part of a package of immune changes that evolved in steppe herders, who lived close to their animals, to protect them against diseases of animal origin—including plague. In a modern context, it causes a different kind of disease.”

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Why Do People Make Music?

By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times

“It’s possible that songs have distinct features because they have a special role in human communication separate from speech, said Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist at Tufts University who was not involved in the study. What’s more, our brains appear to be sensitive to those features. In 2022, Dr. Patel pointed out, researchers discovered human neurons that only responded to singing — not speech or music played on instruments.”

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The Successes and Failures of the Nordic Model: Kjell Ostberg on Swedish Social Democracy

By Matthew McManus, Liberal Currents

“Ostberg is right to be somewhat dour on the merits of Swedish social democracy, let alone the prospect that its core achievements will be replicated given that its heyday is now 50 years past. But I think that his cynicism goes too far, coming across more as chronically disappointed optimism rather than a realistic appraisal of the situation. Many liberals responded with alarm and elitist bunkering in the aftermath of the populist waves in 2016, with some even calling for elites to strike back against the vulgar masses. This is shortsighted. Conservative social scientists like Eatwell/Goodwin and democratic socialists like Thomas Piketty might not agree on much. But they both stress how data suggests populism is largely driven by feelings that political elites are not responsive to the needs of ordinary people, and are more beholden to the rich and powerful. Sadly data by figures like Martin Gilens suggests these feelings have a basis in reality.”

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How sweat and stamina helped make humans exceptional runners–and hunters

By Laura Baisas, Popular Science

“Initially, some anthropologists believed that running long distances in pursuit of game would have been taxing to the human body and not worth the trouble. A more slow paced pursuit was believed to be the better method to both get food while preserving strength.

“Endurance pursuit hypothesis posits that the human ability to run long distances is an adaptation that began roughly two million years ago.” 

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Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.

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Do ‘Griefbots’ Help Mourners Deal With Loss?

By Tim Reinboth, Undark

Public health and technology experts, such as Linnea Laestadius of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, are concerned griefbots could trap mourners in secluded online conversations, unable to move on with their lives. Her work on chatbots suggests people can form strong emotional ties to virtual personas that make them dependent on the program for emotional support. Given how hard it is to predict how such chatbots will affect the way people grieve, Sofka wrote in an email, “it’s challenging for social scientists to develop research questions that capture all possible reactions to this new technology.” 

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The Glorious Proletarian Theater of Pro Wrestling

By Kim Kelly, The Nation

“In a bittersweet moment, I realized we were just a few blocks up from the Sheet Metal Workers union hall. Union labor had built the hall we occupied, yet the workers performing in the ring that night were wholly on their own. Other professional athletes are represented by their own powerful unions, and benefit mightily from that collective power. Meanwhile, their bedazzled counterparts in this fundamentally working-class sport are left out in the cold, abandoned by labor laws, and exploited by greedy big-wig promoters. That’s probably why the pro wrestling community is so tightly knit—it really is them against the world.”

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Electricity creates consciousness: Why our idea of consciousness may be wrong

From iai News

“How could calcium ions rushing through a membrane generate the taste of coffee, the smell of a rose or the feeling of love? Join celebrated biochemist, Nick Lane, as he argues that the deep logic of life is at root an electrical phenomenon.”

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‘Flavorama’ guides readers through the complex landscape of flavor

By Karen Kwon, Science News

“Flavorama is split into sections that each feature one of Johnson’s laws of flavor. After establishing that ‘Flavor is molecules,’ she moves on to ‘Flavor is taste and smell.’ Smell, perhaps counterintuitively, often influences flavor more than taste does, thanks to the numerous smell receptors, she explains. Smell can also evoke emotional memories more intensely than other sensory inputs. Hand-drawn illustrations of the human brain and nasal cavity explain why by showing how nerve cells that line the roof of the nasal cavity detect scent molecules and send signals directly to the limbic system, a part of the brain that handles feelings and memories. Other sensory inputs, in contrast, are first processed in different parts of the brain before arriving at the limbic system.”

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Teens see social media algorithms as accurate reflections of themselves, study finds

By Nora McDonald, The Conversation

“It turns out that the teens we interviewed believe social media algorithms like TikTok’s have gotten so good that they see the reflections of themselves in social media as quite accurate. So much so that teens are quick to attribute content inconsistencies with their self-image as anomalies – for instance, the result of inadvertent engagement with past content, or just a glitch.”

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Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.

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Do you see what he sees? Enle Li’s animations show how subjective our experience of nature really is

By Yaya Azariah Clarke, It’s Nice That

“Enle Li was born in China and later moved to New York City to study graphic design at the School of Visual Arts. During his final year, he found a calling toward ‘intricate storytelling’ and ‘emotive resonance’, he tells us. ‘I’m inspired by the boundaries between rational and irrational perceptions of the world around us’, which has created a body of work that is both surreal and humbling, because it deals with the fact that there is no objective view of what’s around us, we always come with preconceived notions and ideals. Combining animation and visual storytelling, he has created a visual language that spans commissions for the likes of Google, Apple, The Atlantic and Adobe, with each expanding his style and representations of the human perspective. So stop and look for a while, you may just catch a glimpse of how you see nature.”

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The Concerning Global Rise in Hikikomori Syndrome, Explained

By Mark Travers Ph.D., Psychology Today

“A 2022 Japanese cabinet survey uncovered that approximately 1.46 million recluses exist in Japan within the 15-64 age bracket. Additionally, a 2019 survey indicated that 613,000 Japanese adults between 40 and 64 also fell into the category known as ‘adult hikikomori.’"

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Daniel Dennett: The man who saw reality's patterns

By Keith Frankish, iai news

“Dan had the mind of an engineer. He wanted to understand how things work, and he had no sympathy for those who prefer embracing mysteries to solving puzzles. That was just lazy, Dan felt. And Dan was never lazy. He was also keenly aware of how much we don’t yet know and how important it is to identify the right paths for future exploration. Too much of modern philosophy, he felt, was occupied with working out the fine details of theories that were fundamentally flawed. It was ingenious but pointless, he thought, like studying the theory of a chess variant no one plays. He preferred to develop flexible frameworks which could be refined in the light of future scientific discoveries. He called it ‘meanwhileism’. He didn’t have all the answers, but he had a sure sense of where to look for them, and his instincts were proven right time and time again.”

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Robots can make jobs less meaningful for human colleagues

By Brian Heater, TechCrunch

‘If robot adoption in the food and beverages industry were to increase to match that of the automotive industry,” Brookings notes, ‘we estimate a staggering 6.8% decrease in work meaningfulness and a 7.5% decrease in autonomy.’ The autonomy aspect speaks to an ongoing concern over whether the implementation of robotics in industrial settings will make the roles carried out by their human counterparts more robotic as well. Of course, the counterpoint has often been made that these systems effectively remove many of the most repetitive aspects of these roles.”

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The Age of Rebellion

By Katharine Gammon, Nautilus

“The researchers assessed the careers and wars fought by 425 rebel leaders throughout history and around the world and found some major themes: Young rebel leaders were the most likely to lose, middle-aged rebels were most likely to find military success, and older rebels were most likely to reach negotiated settlements.”

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Elon Musk has given us a gift. He’s unintentionally provided us with a large-scale study on how incentives influence behavior. Specifically, he’s dangled a financial reward tied to generating engagement. So far the results are … not great. 

I was never a big fan of Twitter, although it did and still has some positive aspects. But when Musk introduced outcome-based incentives (money), it accelerated the enshittification of the site. So I want to explore that. But it requires some preamble.

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Musk, as you may know, bought Twitter last year. He took the company private. Now, he needs to drive revenue — but in 2023, Twitter’s advertising revenue declined by 50%. Part of his plan to drive revenue is to incentivize users to create content that will then create more ad impressions. The way to do this, Musk reasons, is to share revenue with the users. But not all users. In order to monetize your Twitter engagement in his new regime, you have to pay to be a Twitter Premium user. 

What is Twitter Premium? When Musk took over, he revoked the verified status of users. That’s the little blue checkmark next to account names. This was ostensibly done because Musk and his disciples thought verification was an elitist scam. Instead, he declared, he would open up verification to anyone so long as they paid. He thought this democratized things. But judging by the anemic subscription figures, most viewed Twitter Premium as a shakedown at worst or plain stupid at best.

In the pre-Musk days, I didn’t like Twitter mostly for the same reasons I am still not a fan of most social media: I think it rewards those who are focused on extrinsic rewards, such as status and fame. People (myself included) chase the approval of people we’ve never met in the form of likes and shares and comments. I’m not denying Twitter had some legitimately good and positive uses — it absolutely did, and still does. But it was, and is, a dopamine center that creates addictive feedback loops.

That being said, one thing you could not previously do on Twitter was mone

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tize your tweets with ad revenue. And so that brings us to the large-scale study that Musk has given us — his gift. Twitter Premium monetization scheme adds a new extrinsic reward to the mix: Post stuff that gets a lot of engagement and, in addition to that sweet, sweet, dopamine hit, you can actually get paid. Since the launch of Twitter Premium, the platform has been flooded with junk accounts that post low quality reply bait and accounts that just steal reporting from real people without crediting them but reaping the benefits. Other people just post hellaciously false reports. 

There’s a host of other issues with Musk’s Twitter as well. Porn bots have overrun the place, prompting Musk to institute a new user fee. There are hundreds of paid accounts openly supporting Nazis. The user experience is much worse now as Musk has let personal grievances influence policy, such as when it appeared links to sites Musk had feuded with loaded slower. 

So I think by now you get the gist. In short: Twitter has become a place that monetarily incentivizes virality. Tweets that get a lot of impressions (i.e., they show up in users’ feeds) are not necessarily high quality. They don’t have to be true and they don’t have to be original. 

Now here’s the interesting stuff. Rewards affect motivation, and the effects differ depending on a few factors. One major factor is if you are rewarding behavior or if you are rewarding outcomes. As psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci write in “Self Determination Theory,” “research indicates that when outcomes are rewarded (or when failing to reach them is punished), people tend to take the shortest path to the rewarded outcome — that is, they choose those behaviors that are the easiest to do and/or are most likely to yield the requisite outcome.”

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I beg you, my loyal reader, to read that about 100 times and think through the implications for a society that assumes the pursuit of profit incentivizes people to create the best goods and services — or post good stuff on Twitter. Why would anyone labor on intensive, high quality journalism when they could post “Who's the best dog? I’ll go first” and generate a hundred million impressions?

A couple examples to illustrate the point in other walks of life, again from Ryan & Deci:

First, in experimental settings in which rewards were offered for each solved puzzle and people were given a choice between which puzzles to work on, they chose easy puzzles, whereas when people were allowed to choose from among the same situations without rewards, they chose the more difficult puzzles (Danner & Lonky, 1981; Shapira 176). Participants take the shortest path to getting rewards, thereby precluding themselves from building competencies through choosing more challenging puzzles.

Long before Elon and Twitter, there was another business that provided solid, real-world scenarios which illustrate this phenomenon: Jeffrey Skillings and his team at Enron, who lied about their earnings to artificially inflate Enron’s share price, thereby enriching themselves. This is why Ryan & Deci have referred to this as the “Enron Effect.’ 

The phenomenon has been observed in academic settings. Many studies, including this one from 2002, determined that high-stakes testing did not necessarily lead to an increase in scores, but instead a number of unexpected consequences such as “increased drop-out rates, teachers' and schools' cheating on exams, and teachers' defection from the profession…” Even more grim is research that shows that when money is on the table, adults are more likely to cheat period.

The disheartening thing to me is that a large portion of society can’t even really conceive of any other incentive structure. Incentivizing outcomes is so commonplace in our profit-oriented society that people brag on job applications that they are “results oriented.” We applaud this. Strong characters in movies say things like “I don’t care how you do it, just get it done.” We don’t bat an eye at this sort of thing, but we should. It undermines the entire “myth” of Adam Smith’s invisible hand (which is massively misunderstood in its own right, but that’s another story). 

These aren’t just abstract ideas restricted to academic research or philosophical texts. I work in news media, and there are choices we make all the time in which we know we are leaving money on the table because over-monetizing will create a worse product. Yes, we think it’s better for us in the long run. It’s not entirely altruistic. But we also have a mission we adhere to to do good journalism and there are ways to make more money that would undermine that mission. 

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Twitter sucks now, but that is small potatoes compared to what organizing society around profit is doing to health care, journalism, and almost every other industry you can think of. Is it easier for Boeing to make better planes? Or to just make cheaper planes and increase their margins? Why would any company expend more effort to make better stuff if they can increase their margins by raising prices, lowering costs, or even just lobbying to create a more favorable regulatory environment? Is it easier to make better products to increase sales, thereby increasing a company’s share price … or just buy back the shares and increase their price without having to do any R&D? Why use AI to solve a hard problem, like cancer, when you could use it to create customer service chatbots and persuade companies they can make more money by laying off their support staff?

Of course, not everyone will simply give in to their baser instincts. Motivation isn’t binary but exists on a spectrum from intrinsic (doing something that is its own reward) to extrinsic (just doing it for a reward). The problem is, the people focused most on the reward valued by society (in this case profit) have the inside track. This is why Twitter isn’t completely trash but dominated by trash. Something even Musk seems to have noticed. 

President Kennedy famously said — in his Kennedy accent — “we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” He didn’t say, “we went to mine rare earth metals and profit.” He said we went “because it’s hard.” I don’t think people understand how insightful this statement really is. Humans are the only known creatures who create puzzles just for the sake of solving them. It’s in our nature to solve problems because we derive pleasure from doing so. We don’t need profit to guide us. 

Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.

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Cutting Class: On the Myth of the Middle Class Writer

By Alissa Quart, Literary Hub

“It must be said, though, that the advice “do what you love” was and is usually meant kindly, as a way to correct the old ideas about labor as something that is dutiful or mechanical or lifeless. And “doing what you love” was more achievable in previous eras—at least for some slices of the population—when writing was a job and compensated accordingly. Today, however, writers are often encouraged to work for exposure, or to think of low pay and lack of job security as a supposedly fair exchange for not being bored out of our skulls—yet another hat trick of neoliberalism, where the more work provides actual meaning in people’s lives, the more it’s denigrated as hobby or vanity project, which makes it easier to keep labor costs down across the board.”

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Slippery Slope: How private equity shapes a ski town

By Nick Bowlin, Harpers

“Blixseth’s net worth reached $1.3 billion by 2007, according to Forbes, but the Yellowstone Club filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy during the Great Recession. Years of litigation followed, and Blixseth went to jail twice for contempt of court. I asked Hart if he ever comes back to Big Sky. ‘No, no,’ she said immediately. ‘He would get shot.’ Hart had some choice descriptors for him—’flamboyantly fake,’ ‘very much a chode’—but she also called him a visionary. Blixseth rejected the traditional ski-town model that attracted middle-class families for single vacations, having realized that the real money was in luxury real estate, where the wealthiest people in the world would pay huge sums for amenities, belonging, and above all, seclusion.”

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Walks in Green Parks Mean Stronger Immune Systems and Better Mental Health

By Lydia Denworth, Scientific American

“A second theory suggests that time spent in nature activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which reduces the body’s stress responses. Studies show reductions in cortisol levels—part of those responses—after exposure to greenery. In addition, green space affects health indirectly because time outdoors encourages physical activity and offers chances for social connection, both of which improve mental and physical well-being.”

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Savages! Innocents! Sages! What Do We Really Know About Early Humans?

By Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

“I already anticipate some grumbling from fans of Harari & Co. that Geroulanos, a professor of European intellectual history at New York University, is advancing an anti-science argument. He is not. He has plenty of praise for geneticists and paleontologists who have enlarged our understanding of various areas of inquiry, including human migration, food intake and the Neanderthal genome. What both fascinates and troubles him is our seemingly irrepressible urge to look to the lives of early humans — to that mysterious time before recorded history — to tell us who, essentially, we are. Not to mention that such interpretations can condition how we relate to others: Prehistoric ‘findings’ have been used to shore up a prejudice, justify an injustice or expand an empire.”

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The history-altering medical mystery of an astronaut who fell in the bathroom

By Popular Science

“On February 26, 1964, a 40-year-old man slipped in a hotel bathroom and clocked his head on the tub. The painful tumble would end up altering how the entire world approached space exploration. Why? Because that man was John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, and that fall triggered a medical mystery that pushed to the forefront research into what spaceflight might do to the human body.”

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I am certain that many people, in many different walks of life, wonder if they are doing enough to make the world better, to alleviate suffering, and to just fundamentally be a good person. I’d be skeptical of anyone who did not worry about these things from time to time. But I work in journalism and, at least I like to think, I understand journalism. So I want to explore this idea by talking about journalism.

Recently Nathan J. Robinson wrote an article in his magazine Current Affairs titled “On Being Overwhelmed By Feelings of Complicity and Paralysis.” The headline explains the piece well. Robinson grapples with his sense of efficacy with regard to the weightiest problems facing us: climate change, the threat of nuclear war, the state of labor in America, healthcare, immigration, poverty — it’s not a short list of problems, and that is part of his point.

He writes:

I suppose the job of a left media organization is to try, however futile it may seem, to keep attention on the most pressing moral priorities: stopping war, stopping the climate disaster, building the labor movement, reproductive justice, justice for immigrants, ending mass incarceration, etc. Given the size of the gap between what needs to be done on each issue and what has been done, one can feel a certain paralysis, and in the last couple of years I have found it increasingly difficult to get myself to write. I’ve done something like 1,000 articles, and it feels like I could do 1,000 more with little effect. But I remind myself that there are obligations to the victims. I don’t like the phrase “silence is violence,” but I do think silence is complicity, and as I look back on previous periods in history, I admire those who spoke out against atrocities, and I look with contempt on those who said and did nothing. 

I greatly admire Robinson’s commitment to improving the world. I also greatly empathize with his sense of powerlessness. More than both of those things, I applaud his willingness to more or less challenge himself publicly. That is not an easy thing to do. 

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However, I think he is selling himself short here. I don’t know precisely how many people subscribe to Current Affairs but I know Robinson has 102,000 followers on Twitter. If Current Affairs had even just 1% of those as subscribers, that is 1,000 people who look to Robinson and staff to help them make sense of and understand the world. (I’m positive I’m lowballing here but it’s a nice round number and illustrates the point). It’s also 1,000 people who probably think to themselves, “I relate to how this guy thinks, I’m glad he is saying it better than I ever could.” That is a lot of influence that can be wielded for good—including spurring others to do good. There are probably mayors and other leaders who don’t have that level of influence. There aren’t many people throughout history who can claim to have that kind of reach. 

If it sounds like I’m speaking from experience, I am. I’ve been a subscriber for years and quite simply, it makes me happy it exists. It has made me smarter, it has helped shape some of my views which I then share with other people. In fact, Robinson himself has written multiple times about the importance of joy, and specifically the kind of joy that comes from solidarity. I remember first encountering Current Affairs, one of the things I found empowering was simply that someone was willing to say: Hey, living should be fun. We should try to make life joyous for as many people as possible.

It’s a simple thing to say, yet sadly uncommon, and it resonated with me.

When I began my career in journalism, if you had asked me why journalism is important or you asked me what are the objectives of journalism, solidarity would not have been among my answers. I would have said probably three different things:

1. Journalism informs. This is perhaps the most basic and more core function. People want and need information and journalists go out and get that information and bring it back to them. Sometimes this even means transmitting information over time: It’s often said journalism is the first draft of history.

2. Journalism holds people accountable. This is probably the second most familiar answer. There are powerful people in the government and other aspects of life. Journalists' job is to make sure they aren’t exploiting their power and taking advantage of people. This idea is often expressed as “Journalism is the fourth estate” or “the fourth branch of government”

3. Journalism provides a public form. Robust discussion and debate of ideas is a hallmark of a democratic society and journalism organizations traditionally have been places where differing voices can offer perspectives and opinions on various matters. Not just professional journalists, either. Letters to the editor and radio callers and commenting forums are a place for everyone to have their say. Of course, the limits of “their say” is often hotly contested.

And I believe all of these things are still true today. But my experience has taught me that solidarity is another value. For those unaware, I am the publisher of a website called Talking Points Memo. We’ve done reader surveys for years, but last year we modified them a bit and started doing focus groups. This allows us to ask more detailed questions and really get to understand views toward TPM. One thing that came up again and again and again was a combination of happiness we even existed and relief that we were doing ok financially. People would say it motivated them to know we were doing our job. The work at TPM gave them hope and it made them feel less alone and not so insane.

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When I write it out, it seems obvious. You, the reader might even have said to yourself “that’s obvious, Joe.” But it really wasn’t intuitive to me. It’s very, very easy to get caught up in this cycle of “Ok well journalism informs people to make decisions and then they are supposed to make the right decisions and then the world gets better. So where are the results? Where’s the new laws? Where are the expanded rights and protections? Where’s the this or that.” You get the idea. And those things DO matter, but it’s easy to become myopic and lose track of what is and is not in our control, and forget the good that’s actually coming from the work. Solidarity is one of those things. Robinson writing in 2018:

Actions like Saturday’s marches also have an important function for their participants. It’s a lonely world out there, and people are isolated and depressed. It’s so, so important not to be desperate alone, to find people who can remind you that you’re sane, and to whom you can talk honestly. I was overwhelmed with joy at seeing so many people whose values I shared, working together to further those values. As communities and civic life have been eroded, and ordinary people are shut out from the political process, one can often feel completely disconnected from meaningful collective action. It’s crucial to find other people who care about the things that ought to be cared about, and to feel as if one is part of an actual movement.

Journalism can do these same things. And it does. 

If I wanted to just give Robinson a pep talk I could have emailed him. But I suspect a lot of journalists and activists and people in all sorts of professions harbor these concerns. I’ve written about a sense of helplessness before. Everyone wants to feel a sense of efficacy, a sense of relatedness to others, and a sense of autonomy, but unfortunately our society is not really designed with the support of those basic psychological needs in mind. It’s good to keep this in mind. It’s good to be aware that we all are searching for these basic things. It helps to have more appreciation for each other, which maybe spurs us to be more forthcoming with our generosity and say “hey, thanks for doing that. It meant a lot to me.” You never know who needs to hear it. That’s what solidarity is all about. We all need to keep pushing forward and sometimes it's hard and we have to pick each other up and say, “don’t forget: you're not alone.”

Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.

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What Neuralink Is Missing

By S. I. Rosenbaum, The Atlantic

“Burkhart watched Arbaugh play hands-free computer chess with a mix of approval and frustration at how clearly the demo was created for investors and Musk fans, not for disabled people like him. It’s no secret that Musk’s real goal is to create a BCI device for general consumers, and not just so we can move a cursor around; he envisions a future in which humans can access knowledge directly from computers to “achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” That dream is ethically fraught—privacy, for instance, is tricky when your thoughts are augmented by proprietary algorithms—but it is also a long way from being realized. Researchers have sort of managed two-way information transfer with rats, but no one is sure how the rats felt about it, or whether it’s an experience they’d be willing to pay for at a mall kiosk.”

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Archaeologists Find Ancient Statue of Apollo That Probably Adorned a Magnificent Fountain

By Sonja Anderson, Smithsonian Magazine

“The team determined that the head, complete with a crown of laurels, dates to the second or early third century C.E. Researchers think it was part of a grand fountain that once stood at an intersection of two streets in Philippi, reports Arkeonews’ Oguz Buyukyildirim.”

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The science of ‘weird shit’: why we believe in fate, ghosts and conspiracy theories

By Science Weekly, The Guardian

“Psychologist Chris French has spent decades studying paranormal claims and mysterious experiences, from seemingly-impossible coincidences to paintings that purportedly predict the future. Ian Sample sits down with French to explore why so many of us end up believing in, what he terms, ‘weird shit’, and what we can learn from understanding why we’re drawn to mysterious and mystic phenomena.”

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Here’s how the moon actually impacts your menstrual cycle - new study

By Noa Leach, BBC Science Focus

“They found that there was only a weak correlation between menstrual and lunar cycles, contrary to some popular belief. The fact that the correlation varied across continents supported their theory; this is an indication, they say, that any lunar correlation is actually likely driven more by lifestyle factors (such as sleep-wake cycles) than the Moon.”

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Peter Higgs: science mourns giant of particle physics

By Davide Castelvecchi, Nature

“It was 60 years ago when Higgs first suggested how an elementary particle of unusual properties could pervade the universe in the form of an invisible field, giving other elementary particles their masses. Several other physicists independently thought of this mechanism around the same time, including François Englert, now at the Free University of Brussels. The particle was a crucial element of the theoretical edifice that physicists were building in those years, which later became known as the standard model of particles and fields.”

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Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.

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Gas Trapped in Antarctic Ice Recorded the Mass Death of 56 Million People

By Meg St-Esprit, Atlas Obscura

“This massive reduction in human population was recorded in Antarctica, says King. Places Indigenous people once lived, worked, and farmed were abandoned, and the fabric of the planet was altered.

“‘We know that forests absorb carbon dioxide, thus reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So when there was a large population decline due to epidemics, a lot of natural forest could grow back over previous agricultural land.” The presence of more forested land meant more CO2 was absorbed by those plants, thus reducing carbon dioxide levels across the world. ‘This change in the atmosphere is recorded in our ice bubbles,’ says King.”

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Eclipse Psychology: When the Sun and Moon Align, So Do We

By Katie Weeman, Scientific American

“This connectivity ties into a sociological concept known as ‘collective effervescence,’ Russo and Goldy say. When groups of humans come together over a shared experience, the energy is greater than the sum of its parts. If you’ve ever been to a large concert or sporting event, you’ve felt the electricity generated by a hive of humans. It magnifies our emotions.”

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‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza

By Yuval Abraham, +972 Magazine

“The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.”

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Steve Buscemi Reveals Why His New Film Listens in on a Warmline

By Gary Drevitch, Psychology Today

“Steve Buscemi's new film, The Listener, takes viewers inside the home of a helpline volunteer, played by Tessa Thompson, during an intense overnight shift. Thompson's character, Beth, who is the only person viewers see, fields calls from a range of individuals (voiced by Rebecca Hall, Alia Shawkat, Ricky Velez and others) grappling with loneliness, anxiety, mental illness, and suicidal ideation but sharing a need to have someone listen to them—preferably someone from outside ‘the system.’”

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Our tools shape our selves

By Bryan Norton, aeon

“According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē. The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.”

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Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.

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How Solarpunk Fiction Defies Dystopian Doomerism

By Annie Levin, Current Affairs

“Fortunately, we don’t need to invent a new literary genre to show us the way to a better tomorrow. Just as there is a left-wing climate movement demanding humanity break from fossil fuels to create a bright future for life on Earth, so is there a parallel climate fiction that allows us to imagine that better world. In steps solarpunk, left-wing literature’s answer to the dystopian novel. Solarpunk looks towards a post-capitalist future of renewable energy. It rejects climate ‘doomerism’ and shows what our collective future could look like if we heal our relationship with the natural world.”

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The End of Species: Why it’s time for new ways of naming life

By Jason Roberts, Nautilus

“One of the most prolific over-classifiers, they’ve discovered, was 19th-century biologist Louis Agassiz, who eagerly declared and named North American species based on little evidence, and even less scientific rigor.

“Viewing a single sample of fossilized teeth, Agassiz determined they defined not three different species but three completely new genera of fish. They’ve since been matched to teeth belonging to the fossil of a single individual fish, collapsing an entire branch of his imagined taxonomy. Hundreds of Agassiz’s species identifications have been abandoned on similar grounds.”

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Societies of perpetual movement

By Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, aeon

“New research among hunter-gatherer societies is revealing that the social networks these populations create through mobility might be larger than ever expected. These networks, defined by movement, may also be responsible for the emergence of some characteristics thought to set humans apart from our closest nonhuman primate relatives. The movement of hunter-gatherers may explain the emergence of complex, cumulative culture and our ability to maintain high levels of genetic diversity, even when population sizes drop to very, very low numbers. Far from representing an obsolete mode of living, mobility may hold the key to the continuing survival of these populations, despite pressures to settle. These societies are not the remnants of an outdated, ancient way of life from the distant past. For many hunter-gatherers living in the 21st century, staying mobile is a deliberate choice because it enables large and complex societies – societies that look more like mobile constellations than villages or cities.”

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A supervolcano erupted 74,000 years ago. Here’s how humans survived it.

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, The Washington Post

“The study also challenges a dominant idea about early human dispersal out of Africa: Experts have long thought that humans weren’t able to survive in extremely arid climates, and would have retreated to higher elevations and stayed in place rather than continuing to move through — and ultimately leave — the continent.”

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Daniel Kahneman, Who Plumbed the Psychology of Economics, Dies at 90

By Robert D. Hershey Jr., The New York Times

“As opposed to traditional economics, which assumes that human beings generally act in fully rational ways and that any exceptions tend to disappear as the stakes are raised, the behavioral school is based on exposing hard-wired mental biases that can warp judgment, often with counterintuitive results.”

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