Human Behavior

How To with John Wilson Offers a Martians-Eye View of Homo Sapiens Habits – The New Yorker

How did How To with John Wilson make it onto HBO? I mean that as a compliment. The show, an endearing, oddball comic documentary in six half-hour episodes, isnt glamorous, or suspenseful, or slick. It has minimal drama and no murder, and looks as if it were shot for roughly the same budget that the network once allotted for a pair of Carrie Bradshaws shoes. Theres no sexthough one episode contains an astonishing, if chaste, display of male nuditybut there is a ton of city. Wilsons subject is human behavior, and his terrain is New York, which he trawls with the obsessive devotion of a beachcomber, sifting through the streets with his camera to find the treasures buried among the trash, and not just the figurative kind. The show opens on an image of an overflowing, graffiti-speckled dumpster, with the Manhattan skyline hovering in the background, waiting for her closeup. It never comes. Wilson is interested in what happens at ground level; when he does look up, he cant see the skyscrapers for the scaffolding.

Wilson is thirty-four and lives in Queens. He has worked as a video editor for a private investigator, and as a cameraman on infomercials. The first job must have trained him to look for the telling detail, the blip in the pattern, and the second to whet the visual appetite, or simply to tolerate the superfluous and the occasionally grotesque. (How To includes some footage from Wilsons infomercial years: lots of closeups of processed meat.) He has an eye for pun and metaphor, and an affectionate attunement to human foibles and eccentricities, which he captures with sneaky technique. If you happen to be having an upright nap on a park bench with your jacket draped, shroudlike, over your face, or trying to patiently lure a pigeon into a shopping bag on the streets of midtown in broad daylight, Wilson may well be lurking near you, recording the whole thing.

For years, Wilson posted short films to his Web site, where he garnered a small and passionate following. He is, at heart, a collector and collagist, and he hit on the conceit of mock-instructional videos as a way to organize his abundance of material. One of his fans was the cringe-comedy pioneer Nathan Fielder, who became an executive producer of How To, pitching the concept to networks as Planet Earth, but for New York. That description is sort of right. In episodes with names like How to Make Small Talk and How to Cover Your Furniture, Wilson takes a Martians-eye view of the habits and customs of Homo sapiens, though he doesnt profess the expertise of a David Attenborough. His primary student seems to be himself. Small talk is the glue that binds us all together, and the armor that shields us from each others darkest thoughts is a standard piece of Wilson narration. His affect is that of an awkward man-child; he has a slightly squashed, Kermit the Frog voice that sits in the back of his throat, and the halting, reading-aloud style of a novice public speaker. Even the closed captioning preserves his ums.

What makes the show spark is the specificity of the images that Wilson pairs with his deadpan text. As breezy as the result can seem, his process of foraging is painstaking; the footage that went into the show took two years to gather. Wilson edits musically, using visual beats to create tight rhythms, tonal ironies, felicities, and jokes. The phrase New York is filled with friendly people means something different when it is paired with the sight of a scowling FedEx driver flaunting his crotch in a va fangool grip. The show contains an encyclopedic array of grimaces, eye rolls, and acquiescent smiles. One of my favorite shots is of a portly man in a business suit, rubbing his hands together over and over, in an age-old gesture of distress. What I felt, after nearly three hours of touring through this human menagerie with Wilson as my guide, was a fresh admiration of our species physical ability to express so many variations of the same thing.

Because the success of each episode depends on Wilsons ability to hook a distinctive subject who can nudge it in new directions, we meet a parade of earnest and self-promoting weirdos, not all of equal interest. You can understand how exciting it must have been for Wilson to discover, in a grocery store, an apostle of The Mandela Effectthe phenomenon of commonly shared false memoriesand to follow him to a conference in Ketchum, Idaho, where attendees swapped elaborate theories of the multiverse to explain the fact that they always thought that Oscar Mayer was spelled with two es. But this kind of American kookiness is not all that hard to sniff out, and Wilsons arch, zoological approach stumbles when it courts his viewers condescension. The show, with its scavenger-hunt ethos, can get a little cutesy, and some of the gags border on Facebook meme material. When everyones a documentarian, the professional loses his edge.

Fundamentally, though, Wilson is an appreciator. He likes to talk to people, and people like to talk to him. On a mission to learn how to cook risotto, he wanders into the back yard of a house flying the Italian flag and ends up in the kitchen, where the owner, a middle-aged Italian-American guy, prepares the dish from scratch. (At moments like this, its worth pondering the private worlds that Wilson, a bespectacled, bearded white dude, is given access to, and the ones he isnt.) It can make you a little queasy to watch Wilson focus his lens on some unsuspecting schmo. Still, you could argue that the quirks that he spies on in secret pale in comparison with what people willingly reveal about themselves. In How to Split the Check, Wilson, investigating notions of fairness, attends a dinner on Long Island for an association of soccer referees, which devolves into acrimony and petty theft. If a group of refs cant establish order, who can? Another highlight is a portrait of Wilsons landlady, an Old Country, kerchief-wearing woman he calls Mama, who invites him to watch Jeopardy! on her sofa and does his laundry as if he were her young son. Mama watches Alex Trebek, and the camera watches Mama, returning her devotion with love.

In a sense, How To with John Wilson is the perfect documentary for our documenting-obsessed culture, a bizarro companionor correctiveto Instagrams bombardment of images of other landscapes, other homes, other lives. We take pictures so that we can show one anotherand remind ourselveswhere we were, what we saw, what we wore, what we ate. Wilson opens one episode with a clever montage of people posing for photographs and selfies; under his living lens, they wobble and bob, straining to keep still. That kind of preservation of dailiness is what hes after, too. In an episode called How to Improve Your Memory, he reveals that, for the past decade, he has kept notebooks listing each days activities, beginning with the time he woke up and what he ate for breakfast. The sight of the notebooks, divided into grids and filled with cramped handwriting, is startling. Wilson puts his anxiety on full display; he has spent years worrying about losing the past, but, when he reads over what he has written, he finds that it has managed to escape anyway.

Memory, in New York, is a way of planting a flag in our ever-shifting city, claiming a stake for ourselves. See that bank? It used to be my favorite bar. I remember how it was before, and it was better then. The city is always vanishing, maybe never faster than now. Wilson shot his last episode in early March, as the coronavirus hit the city. He enters a supermarket, trying to find the end of a snaking line of panic shoppers, a new era of city life beginning before his eyes. Then, like everyone else, he retreats home. Will New York still be New York when he ventures out again? A true New Yorker doesnt have to ask.

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How To with John Wilson Offers a Martians-Eye View of Homo Sapiens Habits - The New Yorker

Human Behavior

Public Voices fellows make themselves heard – University of Miami

Faculty members break into an unwelcoming media universe to share their expertise on everything from chronic fatigue to gospel music.

For years, Dr. Ana Palacio has kept a journal, documenting the fleeting thoughts about improving health care that come to her while seeing patients at the Miami VA Medical Center. But assuming that what she had to say was of little consequence, the Miller School of Medicine professor never shared her personal insights.

Today, the Ecuadorean-born internist realizes she undervalued both her eloquence in English and her expertise in recognizing the links between COVID-19 and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a connection she wrote about during The OpEd Projects Public Voices Fellowship that she and 23 other University of Miami faculty members recently completed. Brought to the University by John Bixby, the former vice provost for research, the national initiative aims to increase the influence of women and other underrepresented thinkers in the public discourseand it clearly succeeded in elevating Palacios voice.

Her two commentaries about how research on COVID-19 can help fight ME/CFS not only validated her extensive knowledge about the complex, disabling, and often undiagnosed chronic illness, but led to new research opportunities that could make a difference in the lives of thousands of people suffering from ME/CFS or the constellation of chronic fatigue-like symptoms plaguing an increasing number of COVID-19 survivors.

It was truly a life-changing experience for me, Palacio said of the one-year fellowship, which included interactive seminars, one-on-one coaching with experienced writers/editors, and calls with media insiders. Not only because I learned to value my thoughts, but because I gained the confidence to share them. It showed me the worst that can happen is that nobody reads what I write, and the best that can happen is that you can make a difference.

Despite the pandemic, the Universitys Public Voices fellows published more than three dozen opinion pieces on a range of subjectsfrom why quarantining can be bad for your health to why Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris music mattersin a variety of high-profile, high-exposure publications. They included The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Scientific American, U.S. News & World Report, and The Hill, one of the nations most well-read websites.

Given how difficult it is for new voices to break into the closed media universe even in the best of times, The OpEd Projects mentor-editors found the success of the Universitys fellows during the pandemic especially remarkable. As Neil J. Young and Angela Wright noted, several front-line health care workers were writing between ICU shifts and while juggling new homeschooling, childcare, and other family challenges. Just 24 hours after giving birth to her own daughter, Dr. Candice A. Sternberg, an assistant professor of clinical medicine in the Miller School's Division of Infectious Diseases, wrote about why pregnant women should take extra care against the coronavirus.

The hurdles we face normally in this work are substantial, Young said. Thats why this organization exists. Thats why we do what we do. Its hard to break into an unwelcoming media universe that has a closed gate. Its hard for people to believe they have something worth saying. Its hard for them to write in a form that they are not used to, and its hard to do additional work in already very busy lives. Those are the usual challenges; add the pandemic and its very impressive what Miami accomplished.

Several fellows, including the School of Laws Osamudia Jameswhose commentaries on achieving genuine diversity in higher education and on race, isolation, and parenting in the time of coronavirus appeared in Ms. magazine and The Washington Postwere already accomplished writers in the public sphere. But, for the majority of the fellows, writing for a wider audience was a stretch that pushed them out of their academic comfort zoneto a place they realized they belonged.

I gained so much from itespecially strategies concerning how to write for a broader audience in a way that connects my expertise with current events, said Frost School of Music ethnomusicologist Melvin Butler, one of only three male fellows, who in addition to the piece about the vice-president elect wrote about why Black gospel music still matters. I was reminded of the importance of taking chances and motivated to embrace the fact that my voice can, should in fact, make a difference in the world, Butler added.

Debra Lieberman, an associate professor of psychology and editor-in-chief of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, initially observed a confidence gap among the fellows, including herself. Calling each of the women impressive with a capital I, she said she caught herself wondering how she was included among them. But then she reminded herself of the sense of expertise and confidence the fellowship strove to instill.

I think a lot of women started out as their own worst enemy, but this fellowship turned people into their own best advocates, said Lieberman, whose initial columnfor Psychology Today, about mental app settings for mating, earned her an invitation to host a blog on the magazines website. It made everyone say, No, I am an expert because I have this number of years of training, I have these credentials, I do this type of research, and I am no less a voice you should listen to.

And thats exactly what Palacio realized after U.S. News & World Report published her first column on how COVID-19 can help fight ME/CFS. She wrote the commentary both as a mother of a daughter whose ME/CFS went undiagnosed for years, and as a physician determined to put the condition with such varied symptoms on the radar of other unsuspecting physicians.

She also shared her hope that the connections between ME/CFS and the chronic fatigue symptoms that some COVID-19 patients are experiencing will offer a chance to combat the two debilitating conditions together. When Miami VA researcher Nancy Klimas, the director of the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine at Nova Southeastern University and a renowned authority on ME/CFS, reached out to collaborate with Palacio on her next article on the subject, she felt empowered to seize the opportunity.

Since then, Palacio has joined Klimas grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to screen COVD-19 survivors in Broward County for fatigue and several other persistent symptoms. And as a member of the Miami VA Geriatric Research Education and Clinical Center, she applied for and received $1.2 million from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act to establish a multidisciplinary telehealth clinic for veterans who are experiencing persistent symptoms post-COVID-19 infection.

The clinic is slated to open in Januaryunder the collaborative direction of a physician and mother who once doubted the value of her insights, training, and experience.

For Bixby, who had little trouble convincing Provost Jeffrey Duerk to support Public Voices, the fellowship was a worthy experiment. We werent sure that it would work, but it was a great success, said Bixby, professor of pharmacology and neurological surgery who will return full time to his research at The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis next year. We are impressed by the passionate engagement of the fellows; their sense of purpose, team, and community; and most of all, the outcomethe development of a new community of UM voices who will continue to speak out and to be heard nationally.

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Public Voices fellows make themselves heard - University of Miami

Human Behavior

Most Herkimer County schools shifting to remote learning – The Times Telegram

Donna Thompson|Times Telegram

The winter recess begins Dec. 23 for schools in the Herkimer BOCES area, but most of the component schools will be shifting to at least a day or two of remote instruction prior to that date, according to Herkimer-Fulton-Hamilton-Otsego BOCES Superintendent Sandra Sherwood.

That includes Herkimer BOCES, which is planning to move to virtual instruction for Monday and Tuesday prior to the break as long as circumstances dont force the change prior to that time, Sherwood said. She hopes the two days combined with the winter break will allow BOCES programs to resume as scheduled Jan. 4.

It all depends on human behavior, she added.

Some districts have already switched to remote instruction as the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the county and the resulting precautionary quarantines have created staffing problems.

More: 59 new COVID-19 cases reported Tuesday in Herkimer County

During a special meeting last week, the Central Valley school board decided to move all in-district students to virtual learning beginning Dec. 14. Superintendent Jeremy Rich called the meeting following an announcement from the Herkimer County Health Department that local COVID cases were rising faster than the department's resources could respond, according to a statement posted on the districts website.

Every time teachers are sent home (on precautionary quarantine), we have to fill the classrooms, said Rich in a video posted on the districts website. Were just running out of people. Weve been doing it and piecemealing it together, but were at a breaking point and it doesnt look like its going to get better.

Synchronous learning will be used with some students, allowing the teacher to see all of the students on the screen. The students can interface and interact with the teacher, Rich said. Weve practiced this and feel were positioned to make that happen.

He added, The goal is to return Jan. 4 with rested people, recharged people, and that we will have a full squad going into the second semester.

District residents have been asking when more students can return to in-person learning, he said. Of course that is our goal.

A plan is being developed to bring more students back by February, he said, but added We cant do this alone and we really appreciate your efforts as well.

Frankfort-Schuyler also shifted all of its students to remote instruction effective Dec. 14.

Unfortunately, even one case can have a dramatic impact on our staffing and ability to maintain continuity of instruction, as well as the cleanliness of our buildings, School Superintendent Joseph Palmer said in a statement posted on the districts website. He added that the district had received notification that another staff member tested positive for COVID-19. Although this is only our fifth positive staff case since we reopened, the contact tracing had a significant impact on the safe daily operations of our district. Due to contact tracing we currently are without 20 staff members. We share the same goal with our community and want to remain open for as long as possible; however, continuing in-person instruction under these conditions would be irresponsible. In-person and hybrid learning scheduled are expected to resume Jan. 4.

Herkimer Central School changed its calendar to make Dec. 21a remote learning day for all students and Dec. 22 a remote conference day for teachers with no instruction that day.

The district has only seen a couple of positive cases at the elementary school with a few more reported at the secondary level, but protocols put in place that include isolating classes and grade levels have minimized the impact, according to Superintendent Robert Miller. The district also hired six licensed teaching assistants who can step in to handle classroom teaching. Other staff members who do not have regular classroom assignments can also step in as needed.

We knew we could no longer hire substitute teachers, he said. So far the plan has been working, but Were all susceptible.

Owen D. Young and Poland Central Schools are scheduled to continue their regular schedules through Dec. 22.

Were taking it day by day with the hope of putting in six more school days, ODY School Superintendent Brennan Fahey said during a telephone interview Tuesday. He said the districts rural location is a plus, but he keeps in touch with Herkimer County Public Health and is continually evaluating the situation.

A day of remote learning is planned for Jan. 4 at ODY. The purpose is to make sure it is safe for students and staff to return to in-person instruction and to allow health officials time to contact the school with any information they have following the holidays, according to Fahey.

The Little Falls City School District went to fully remote learning after the Thanksgiving break and plans to continue through January. Superintendent Keith Levatino cited the rise in cases across the region as the reason for the decision.

At Dolgeville, the remote learning period for all students went into effect Nov. 30 with the goal of returning to the regular schedule Dec. 14. That date has been postponed with remote instruction through Dec. 22 and resuming Jan. 4-8. In-person instruction is scheduled to start again Jan. 11. A statement on the districts website cited the increased number of students and staff with positive tests or precautionary quarantines.

Richfield Springs Central School moved its 7-12 students to all virtual learning effective Dec. 7 until the holiday break, while Mount Markham students at all grade levels shifted to remote instruction effective Dec. 9, continuing until the holiday break.

West Canada Valley plans to move to remote instruction for Dec. 21 and 22 and continue it for the week of Jan. 4-8. Extracurricular activities are postponed until Jan. 11. The decision was made after consultations with Herkimer County Public Health and state personnel, according to a posting on the districts website.

Donna Thompson is the government and business reporter for the Times Telegram. For unlimited access to her stories, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.Email her at donna@timestelegram.com.

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Most Herkimer County schools shifting to remote learning - The Times Telegram

Human Behavior

The 10 podcasts to listen to right now, according to the Radio Advisory team – The Daily Briefing

Just in time for your holiday social distancing, the Radio Advisory podcast team offers eight recommendations on the podcasts you should listen to now to better understand issues of social justice, power, and inequity; decipher the meaning behind your favorite songs; and dig into "all the thought that goes into the things we don't think about."

Rachel Woods, Senior Director

Radio Advisory's host and head of content

I have been listening to Science Vs since graduate school. Every episode manages to distill complex areas of science into bit sized episodes that be understood by your average person. As someone who spent most of her education studying public health and exercise physiology, I appreciate host Wendy Zuckerman's ability to separate fact from fiction (looking at you seven-minute workout). The Australian accent and a healthy dose of humor helps too.

Being a science podcast, it shouldn't be a surprise that Science Vs quickly pivoted to covering the coronavirus. I recently went back and binged all 22 episodes they have done on Covid-19. I know what you are thinking: You can't possibly imagine spending your personal time taking in any more information about the pandemic. But here's why I keep coming back:

Chris Phelps, senior product manager

Radio Advisory's producer

I like music, and I like podcasts about music. If I'm not listening to Song Exploder or Strong Songs, it probably means I'm listening to Switched on Pop. You may not even be a fan of pop music, but I've learned there's more to it than just catchy lyrics and tunes. The hosts dive into the meaning of and purpose behind the genre, the storylines that go into making a pop song, and the ways pop music even draws from the past (hello Beethoven!). It's a fun listen that'll teach you something you didn't know about songs at the top of the charts.

Here's where to start:

Jared Landis, Managing Director

Radio Advisory guest

I highly encourage everyone to check out Scene on Radioa tremendous podcast produced by Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies. Yes, I'm a Duke alum myself, but that nothing to do with why I'm recommending Scene on Radio simply put, Scene on Radio is a terrifically researched documentary podcast that challenges the conventional understanding of our national narrative on issues related to social justice, power, and inequality.

Scene on Radio is best known for its Peabody-nominated Season two series, Seeing White. Seeing White takes listeners on a step-by-step journey that starts with the initial construction of race and "whiteness," and then explores how manmade whiteness has been codified into American society.And, in turn, explores how this manmade construct has dictated our country's "haves and have nots." The episodes are built on the excellent documentary work (i.e., research, facts) that I love as a researcher, but each closes with a more personal discussion between the host John Biewen and his collaborator, Chenjerai Kumanyika, to help listeners understand the real-world implication(s). Seeing White is a timeless discussion that's even more relevant after the summer of 2020.

In seasons three and four, Scene on Radio applies the same formula to educate listeners and debunk common myths about sexism and patriarchy (Season 3: Men), as well as democracy (Season 4: The land that never has been yet). Do yourself a favor: Listen to Scene on Radio, get smarter on these topics and start your own conversation.

Darby Sullivan, Consultant

Radio Advisory guest

One of the podcasts I've been most enjoying lately is Song Exploder. Each episode features an artist telling the story of how one of their songs were made. As a non-musician music lover, it's remarkable to hear about the creative processhow a song might start with one lyric, or a melody, or a half-broken instrument an artist found in a pawn shop, and sometime later it emerges fully formed and on repeat in my headphones. As great as it is to listen to some of my favorite artists (check out Waxahatchee discussing her song "Fire" and Janelle Mone's "So Afraid"), the most interesting episodes are often about how theme songs were made (think The Daily or BoJack Horseman).

And can't resist making one other podcast plug: It's almost a year old at this point, but it's never too late to listen to The New York Times' 1619 hosted by the incomparable Nikole Hannah-Jones. At only six episodes, it grapples with how the legacy of American slavery manifests today from the economy to music to health care. Fascinating and moving, 1619 offers another avenue for learning about structural racism. Here's to hoping there's a season two.

Brandi Greenberg, Vice President

Radio Advisory guest

Lately, I've become a regular listener of STAT's The Readout LOUD podcast. Given my preference for old-school reading of books and articles, I was late to the podcast cluband I still struggle to hold my attention with some of the longer, deep-dive podcast formats. But the Readout Loud podcast holds my attention each week.

As with its parent media company, STAT's podcast is laser-focused on the biopharma industry. But within that industry, it covers a huge range of topicsintegrating stories of scientific breakthroughs with stories of potential pricing regulations, moving from stories about Covid-19 treatment options to stories about diversifying clinical trial participants and trends in venture capital investment. The three hosts keep conversation flowing fluidly among each other and with expert guests (such as Zeke Emmanuel) and a range of biotech executives. In brisk episodes ranging from 20-30 minutes, I am able to stay up to speed on the major trends affecting biopharma and often pick up one or two "aha" insights I can share with my team.

Clare Wirth, Consultant

Radio Advisory guest

Like many others, I took time this summer to learn about racial injustice. For that reason, the latest addition to my podcast lineup is The New York Times Still Processing. Culture writers and hosts Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham help listeners understand the enormity of structural racism and how it manifests in our popular culture. They pore through TV shows, movies, art, and the internet. Recent episodes examined the musical Hamilton, Aunt Jemima, Westworld, and Halle Barry.

What I love most is how the hosts challenge each other's thinking in real time, with the undercurrents of big cultural shifts as the backdrop. Yet, somehow the two balance these raw, difficult, and nuanced conversations with moments of levity. They're clearly great friends. If you want a podcast that challenges you to think more critically about popular culture, look no further.

Natalie Trebes, Director

Radio Advisory guest

Did you know that youve probably only seen just one New York City alley in film and TV? Did you know it's because there arent really many alleys in Manhattan?

That's the question-your-reality story that first got me engrossed in 99% Invisible. I could no sooner choose a favorite podcast than a favorite payment model, but 99% Invisible comes pretty close. Helmed by Roman Mars, the show is best described in its own words: It's "about all the thought that goes into the things we don't think about."

Each episode focuses on thoroughly exploring something big or small that often goes unnoticedfrom how cars have led to increased policing power, to why inflatable tube men are the staple of all used car lots. Yes, it really is as broad a scope as that: Some of the self-described main categories the show covers include "Objects," "Sounds," "Visuals," and "Cities."

It's the one podcast that I know is going to leave me intrigued, bemused, and inspired all at once. At the center of it all, Roman elegantly weaves each episode's journey with heartfelt moments that will leave you with a better understanding of human connections and a new way to look at the world.

Start with a recent favorite of mine: The tale of an obscure stamp that represented an entire multinational ecosystem that cropped up among merchant ships stranded for months in the Suez Canal after the Six-Day War in 1967. Crews from several different countries formed the Great Bitter Lake Association and together, despite language barriers, celebrated Christmases and staged their own Olympics. And even made their own stamps.

Ben Palmer, Senior Staff Writer

Radio Advisory copy editor

I'm a sucker for interview podcasts, which is what initially drew me to comedian Pete Holmes' You Made It Weird podcast. Little did I know that this podcast was so much more than just a simple interview podcast.

Holmes is one of my personal favorite comedianshe's excellent at improvising, which makes the podcasts fun, and he's someone who exudes joy in every way, which is infectious to his guests. He's also a fantastic interviewer and goes out of his way to make his interviews unique from your run-of-the-mill press junket talk show interviews.

But perhaps the main draw for me, personally, is how deep into spirituality, mysticism, and mindfulness Holmes is, and how much he incorporates that into each and every podcast. Raised in an evangelical Christian home, Holmes spent a lot of his 20s re-contextualizing his faith and discovering a whole new world of spirituality.

Every conversation that Holmes has on this podcast delves deep into the great mystery of lifethe fact that we're all living embodiments of awareness, spinning on a rock through an infinitely expanding universe. Whether someone uses religious or non-religious language, Holmes is there to just chat (often for 2.5 hours or more). The way he describes the podcast is probably bestit's like he and his guest were sitting at a coffee shop chatting, and you just happened to be sitting behind them, eavesdropping on the conversation.

Whether he's interviewing Adam Sandler, Ezra Klein, or a Buddhist guru, every episode of You Made It Weird is engaging and fascinating.

Alice Lee, Senior Director, Marketing

This is my latest favorite podcast to listen to during my early morning walks. If I were to go back in time and choose a different career, I am quite sure that I would have ended up in psychology Ive always been interested in the way that our minds work and what drives us to do what we do, and hosts Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth delve into interesting human behavior questions like How effective is the placebo effect?, Are you a maximizer or a Satisficer?, and What is the optimal way to be angry?.

They engage light and witty banter while citing plenty of research studies that bring legitimacy to their assertions and that also help me build out my (aspirational) reading list. After we enter the sixth month of social distancing, I have found the quick episodes of this podcast to be a fun escape that have also inspired careful examination of how I approach parenting, work, prioritzation, and relationships.

Joe Shrum, Senior Marketing Specialist

Radio Advisory sound production

Each episode of Ghibliotheque explores a single feature film from legendary Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli. One of the hosts has seen every film and serves as a guide to the other host who hasnt seen any of them. The podcast is low-stakes, has a relaxed aesthetic, and is the perfect excuse to watch more movies.

Theres never been a better time to discover (or rediscover) Studio Ghibli. Most of the studios catalog is available through HBOMax for folks in the US, or Netflix for everyone else. If youre new to Ghibli and dont know where to start, this New York Times article offers some recommendations. You could also start with episode #1 of Ghibliotheque (Spirited Away) and work your way through themthough to be honest, I would skip Grave of the Fireflies and come back to it later. Its an absolutely brilliant film, but its a reeeaaal heavy gut punch.

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The 10 podcasts to listen to right now, according to the Radio Advisory team - The Daily Briefing

Human Behavior

Left To Their Own Devices, People Take On More Risks in Pandemic : Shots – Health News – NPR

Over the summer in New York City, customers could patronize restaurants by using outdoor sidewalk seating. Physical distancing and masks were encouraged, but at this Brooklyn restaurant in July, few stayed far apart or wore a mask. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images hide caption

Over the summer in New York City, customers could patronize restaurants by using outdoor sidewalk seating. Physical distancing and masks were encouraged, but at this Brooklyn restaurant in July, few stayed far apart or wore a mask.

She's embarrassed to admit it, but there were moments over the summer when Adriana Kaplan almost forgot about the pandemic. In the beginning, the Philadelphia native had taken the coronavirus seriously: She had all her groceries delivered and worked her software engineering job from her South Philly home. For the first two months of the pandemic, she barely left the house.

By the end of May though, she was starting to get restless. "I'm not good at just sitting at home," Kaplan, 29, said. "I felt trapped."

Slowly, she began inching her way out of the house, first buying groceries at the corner store during off-hours, when she expected fewer shoppers. She started hanging out with her neighbors again first with masks, but then, increasingly, without. She went to the office a few times, and before long was heading in most days. She traveled home to visit her parents. She went on dates. It started to feel like maybe the pandemic wasn't as serious as she'd thought.

"Nothing was happening to me; I wasn't hearing anybody close to me having it," Kaplan said. "The longer it went on, the more distant it felt."

COVID-19 is now killing 2,300 people a day or many more in the United States reaching a mortality rate higher than during the first wave of the pandemic. But without additional relief money from Congress, many state and local officials have been reluctant to reimpose lockdowns or restrictions that might jeopardize businesses. Instead, they are relying heavily on personal responsibility in the hopes that individuals will, collectively, make the right decisions to curb the virus's spread to follow rules for mask-wearing and social distancing.

Software engineer Adriana Kaplan outside her home in South Philadelphia. Kimberly Paynter/WHYY hide caption

Software engineer Adriana Kaplan outside her home in South Philadelphia.

Yet for many, like Kaplan, the acutely felt problems generated by isolation and inactivity have pushed aside the ominous implications of soaring case counts. Officials are relying on people to do their part to stop viral spread, but the public simply might not be afraid enough anymore for that to work.

In pandemic, health becomes a classic "public good problem"

The repeated refrains from governors, mayors and public health experts have become so familiar, they barely sink in anymore: Wash your hands, wear your mask, watch your distance. Some officials have gone further, pointing to individuals' failure to comply with this guidance as the reason cases are soaring.

"If you're socially distant, and you wore a mask, and you were smart, none of this would be a problem," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently proclaimed. "It's all self-imposed. If you didn't eat the cheesecake, you wouldn't have a weight problem."

Governors such as Cuomo don't want to impose sweeping lockdowns like the ones in the spring without federal relief funding that would help individuals and businesses hold out until a vaccine is widely available. The problem with banking so heavily on human behavior as the only solution to pandemic mitigation though is that individuals are not great at assessing risk.

Research shows that when it comes to risk assessment, people are more likely to believe something hazardous will occur when they can easily picture it: Maybe it's already happened to them, or they've seen or heard about it happening to someone they know.

"For millions of years, we learned what was risky from our own personal experience," said Gretchen Chapman, a psychologist and decision researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. "Now, we're supposed to learn about risk by looking at public health department websites, to see how the cases are going up. Our cognitive system is just not set up to respond to that input for risks."

In the time it might take for the human perception of COVID-19 illness risk to catch up to reality, thousands more people could die. Unless the deaths affect you personally, it's too abstract, and there's no motivating fear to behave accordingly.

But what is real and palpable to many people is the economic pain and physical consequences resulting from shutdowns: Some 22 million Americans lost jobs in March and April. There is a documented increase in psychological distress resulting from isolation, job loss and illness. And mortality for causes other than COVID-19 has soared; people are seeking less health care for acute conditions as hospitals limit elective procedures and people avoid them as vectors of COVID-19 risk.

Chapman described the pandemic as a "public good problem" something that doesn't affect everyone in a society but does require everyone's cooperation to solve.

Young, healthy people may not feel they are putting themselves at much risk of severe illness if they go maskless or hang out in larger groups. But if they contract the virus, they could spread it to someone who won't survive. Everyone must remain vigilant for protective measures to work for those most at risk.

But vigilance can be exhausting. That's why "public good problems" aren't usually left up to individuals to work out on their own, Chapman said.

"We don't say, like, 'Taxes would really help the federal government and community services, [but] we think it should be up to individuals to donate taxes to the government because if they do, it'll be so much better,' " Chapman said. "That would not work. People would not do that."

It's only natural then that many Americans are having a hard time keeping their entire community in mind as they think about how they individually move through the world and behave during the pandemic. Instead, Chapman said, people tend to focus on the patterns in their own behavior and, if they don't end up sick, reach the seemingly logical conclusion that what they are doing is safe.

That's what happened to Kaplan. Throughout her carefree summer, she wasn't hearing scary stories about bodies piling up at morgues, or a friend's parent hospitalized and on a ventilator the anecdotes and images that would serve as daily reminders the pandemic was still killing people.

On the contrary, Kaplan was rewarded for her risky behavior. Dating led to a relationship. She felt connected to her family. And it seemed like everyone else was doing the same thing. In the evenings, for example, she'd often take a stroll. One block over from her house was a bustling thoroughfare, where outdoor tables had taken over the streets and life continued, almost as before.

Fear helps motivate people to stay vigilant, but then it wears off

It's hard to remain constantly vigilant against possible risks, especially for an invisible threat such as a pathogen. The fact that some people stop trying is not unique to this pandemic, said Dr. Robert Aronowitz, who chairs the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He said that pandemics and epidemics don't usually end in a biological sense, rather they are simply foisted for the long term onto the social group most likely to contract them usually one already marginalized.

"AIDS hasn't gone away. There's new cases of AIDS all over the place popping up," Aronowitz said. "There's a sense among straight, middle-class people that it isn't going to hit them in their lifetime," he said, but maintaining that mindset involves "ignoring the populations who are vulnerable."

Those who can afford to forget, do.

As summer turned to fall, Kaplan had a scare. She learned that a colleague she had spent a lot of time with at work had been exposed to COVID-19, which meant Kaplan also had to go into quarantine. She was suddenly flooded with guilt about having been so cavalier, going maskless. It felt reckless.

"While I was doing it, I didn't feel like it was wrong, but looking back at it, I can see it probably wasn't the best choice," Kaplan said.

Now, she's buckling down again with her behaviors. She canceled some travel and declined invitations to a few weddings she had planned to attend. She didn't enjoy it at the time, but she's glad she had that brush with exposure, because it helped jolt her back to reality into remembering that the virus is still out there and dangerous.

Until that scare, it had started to feel like someone else's problem.

This story comes from NPR's reporting partnership with WHYY and Kaiser Health News.

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Left To Their Own Devices, People Take On More Risks in Pandemic : Shots - Health News - NPR

Human Behavior

Infinite Jest, bodegas, and free speech: the worst tweets of 2020 – Vox.com

It was supposed to be a joke about candy. On November 30, Alison Leiby, a 37-year-old comedian and TV writer, was in the middle of moving apartments when she sent a tweet that would make her the websites main character of the day. In laymans terms, that meant shed done something horribly wrong and everyone was talking about it.

People who live outside of NYC and dont have bodegas, she began, where do you go to buy two Diet Cokes, a roll of paper towels, and oh also lemme get some peanut butter m&ms since Im here, why not.

Leiby would like you to know that yes, she has heard of CVS before. The intent of the joke, she says, was not, Where do you hillbillies even go to buy food? it was, Where do you do your impulse candy purchasing? This, however, is not the way the internet received it.

She doesnt know which single retweet was the one to elevate it into a platform-wide discourse, but within an hour or two, the replies had grown from 8,000, to 10,000, then 20,000 (as of publication time, more than 21,000 people have quote-tweeted it and another 20,000 have replied).

The most common responses were to the effect of Literally any place with a cash register or sarcastic quips about, say, Floridians having to wade miles through swamps and braving alligators to get to the nearest Publix. The ordeal, of course, got its own name: #Bodegagate.

Would a tweet like this have generated such a storm in any other year? Maybe, because people on the internet are always outraged over something. But it is undeniable that the tone of internet discourse during the months of the pandemic has changed. In this year of tragedy, of dramatic social and political upheaval, of loneliness, fear, and boredom, the rules about what is or is not acceptable to say or do online are being litigated in real time. The result is that nobody seems to know what the hell theyre doing.

Will my friends judge me if I share photos from my weekend getaway to an Airbnb? Am I a bad person if I posted a black square during the Black Lives Matter protests? Do I need to know or care about what The Letter is and should I tweet about it?

Posting on social media and thereby inviting potential criticism is always somewhat of a risk, but this year the stakes felt unfathomably high. To be online in 2020 was to be confronted by an infinite scroll of confounding, cringeworthy, or otherwise outrageous opinions that, in any other moment, may have been relegated to an off-hand comment at happy hour with friends. Instead, we screamed it into the digital void, allowing those sometimes-terrible, sometimes-merely-inelegant missives to travel far wider than they ever should have. Welcome to the year of bad posts.

In fairness to all of the bad posts mentioned hereafter, pandemics sort of make us lose our minds. Multiple studies of quarantined people have shown that separation from loved ones can deteriorate our mental health in ways that may include stress, depression, irritability, insomnia, fear, confusion, anger, frustration, and boredom. Young people, those who live alone, and those with chronic health conditions are at a greater risk for these things; one US study from April and May showed that nearly two-thirds of people under 30 had high levels of loneliness and that 37 percent said they had low support from family.

The first inkling that this year would bring a barrage of insufferable discourse began before any US lockdowns did. As signs about hand-washing were going up in workplaces and the idea that toilet paper was maybe going to become a valuable commodity was starting to enter the public consciousness, a certain kind of voice reigned supreme: the scold.

To a certain extent, scolding can provide a net benefit to society in times where individual behavior does need to be policed for the greater good wearing masks and social distancing are matters of personal choice, after all. But there is a limit. Supposed rule-breakers who dared to venture to a park or the beach were scolded in the media and online using misleading camera lenses that made everyone appear closer together. Women in hazmat suits screamed at joggers in Central Park, even while in Missouri it was still technically legal to attend a concert. As lockdowns began to add to the strain of working families, parents online scolded the childless for their perceived privilege; child-free people scolded companies for giving parents more time to care for their children.

In the first few months, it seemed as though there was no right way to live. With what seemed like a total lack of government support or consistent directives, individuals took it upon themselves to make their own rules and demanded that everyone else follow the same ones.

At the same time as we were told that Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity and Shakespeare wrote King Lear during pandemics, and therefore we too should spend this uniquely terrifying time contributing great works to society, the rest of the internet was telling us that to be productive in quarantine really means you are being a slave to capitalism. While many of us turned to soothing hobbies like Animal Crossing or bread baking, one woman suggested that buying flour at the store was akin to literally taking food from my mouth because she chooses to make all of her own bread from scratch.

And these were only the most trivial of early-quarantine discourses. The social justice reckonings sparked by the police killing of George Floyd made social media another space for both rampant public shaming and extremely unwise posting habits. Viral activist slideshows made Instagram a minefield: A well-intentioned infographic about racism could come across as performative if someone had never posted political statements before, but to say nothing as a non-Black person could be perceived as white silence. The aesthetically pleasing illustrations of police brutality victims and Spark Notes-style explainers on complex topics like defund the police accelerated their virality, even when the content contained misinformation or collapsed the context with which they were created.

Similarly, when companies and influencers inevitably got called out for their callousness in light of racist behavior or ill-treatment of employees, Instagram was filled with slickly designed apologies articulating a commitment to do better, ironically all the while capitalizing on the aesthetics and mood of the moment with little concrete action attached.

No flashpoint better illustrated this tension than #BlackoutTuesday, which began as an online movement within the entertainment industry where workers could pause and reflect on the ways in which the music business has profited off of Black artists. Within hours, the hashtag was co-opted by white celebrities and trickled down to the masses, divorced from its original intent. In the midst of history-making protests in which Instagram was critical for sharing information between activists, the entire platform was overrun with white users posting mostly contextless black squares. By attempting to show their support for Black Lives Matter, these posts ended up drowning out crucial communication between people actually doing the groundwork.

The level of care devoted to decisions about what to post and what not to trickled down to our most innocuous activities, be they images of small gatherings within pods or an expensive cheese plate, becoming complicated in the context that the posters were enjoying themselves while lots of people were suffering. This anecdote from The Cut editor-in-chief Stella Bugbee is one such example:

I remember getting a text from a friend criticizing someone for documenting their exercise habits on Instagram. Normally she wouldnt have cared, but now the depictions of their outdoorsy life felt tone-deaf. The exchange made me wonder if my posts were the subject of such texts. I shared a beautiful spread of food, only to take it off my Instagram Stories a few hours later, lest it be seen as insensitive to those who were suffering food insecurity. And even as I was having that thought, I knew it wasnt just that I was afraid of causing pain directly but also of appearing unaware that some people were experiencing food insecurity.

Imagine going through this range of confusion and anxiety over a picture of food and yet, it makes sense. One could argue that any way we can find happiness in the face of tragedy says something wonderful about humanity, but you could just as easily question how someone is able to enjoy luxurious dinners while bail funds and food banks desperately need money. There is a case to be made that each of us has the personal responsibility to perform the seriousness of the moment or risk being seen as a Brunch Democrat, someone whose commitment to politics only exists insofar as it affects the privileged.

Fittingly, the worst posting offenders this year were the wealthy: A-listers who felt that the pandemic was the perfect time to make an uncomfortable video of themselves singing Imagine, Kardashians who treated their inner circle to private island getaways and birthday blowouts while swearing it was done safely, a Netflix rom-com star suggesting on Instagram Live that people are going to die of Covid-19 anyway, so whats the big deal, not to mention Madonnas notoriously unsettling bathtub video in which the pop icon, covered in gemstones and rose petals, claimed the virus was the great equalizer.

There is no precedent for a time like this, which is how we end up with lots of Instagrams of people posing with friends and masks couched in mealy-mouthed captions like, before you say anything, we all tested negative!, which just feels embarrassing for everyone involved. If the decision was so difficult to make, why post at all?

Perhaps you are starting to see why a rather sapless tweet about bodegas created such a fervent pile-on, or maybe you need more pandemic examples of people going absolutely bananas over objectively trivial debates online. All of the discourses listed below have received far too much attention as it is, and I include them here not to add to the dogpile or make some sort of bad-faith statement about woke PC culture gone too far, but to illustrate the particular wackiness that was the internet in 2020.

Here are just a few of the things people argued about this year:

Arguably the most divisive and most needlessly drawn-out discourse was centered around the nature of discourse itself. In July, Harpers magazine published an open letter calling for free speech and an end to cancel culture, signed by some of the worlds most prominent thinkers: Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, David Brooks, Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, and Fareed Zakaria among them.

The backlash was immediate. Critics claimed that the argument of The Letter was not actually about free speech but about power, and that cancel culture as these thinkers would like to portray it does not actually exist in the way they think it does (that several of the signees have espoused transphobic beliefs made the content of the letter even more suspect). If the signees ability to speak freely were in any real peril, for instance, how would so many of them occupy the most influential seats in American media and academics?

Debates around free speech have existed in the public sphere for centuries, but as Voxs Zack Beauchamp explained, Whats happening now seems novel because we are currently seeing a wave of social justice activism that seeks to redefine how we understand appropriate debate over these topics, sometimes even pushing to consign to the margins views that may have seemed tolerable in the past.

As dreadful as it often makes the internet feel, social media was the reason The Letter existed in the first place. Without a platform like Twitter, millions of peoples experiences never would have been shared and considered, particularly those of BIPOC.

While most Americans do not have Twitter accounts, journalists and politicians often do, and they have turned heavily in the past decade to the activists, scholars and people of color on Twitter to inform their coverage and policies, wrote University of Pennsylvania communications professor Sarah Jackson in a defense of Twitter in the New York Times. When they havent done so, these communities have responded resoundingly online. And America has listened.

This is social media at its very best: democratizing the discourse so that the loudest and most historically prominent voices must also answer directly to the public. Its something we forget about when we describe Twitter as a hell site, even when so much of it is devoted to inane debates over himbos.

Brandy Jensen, a writer and editor living in New Orleans who could be described as having been Extremely Online since 2015, is often one of the first people to make a joke about an especially bad tweet. This year, though, the stakes felt higher. It felt like everybody was probably too excited to jump on any and all bad posts because were all stuck at home and wanting to yell about stuff, she says.

The bodega tweet, she adds, was the perfect example of a not-especially-good but not-especially-bad tweet whose vicious response felt unwarranted and may not have happened in a different moment. The pathway from bad tweet to death threat is getting shorter and more well-trod, she says. I do wish that people would treat bad posts like the gifts that they are rather than, like, snitching to employers. Have a little bit of perspective about what a tweet actually is.

For instance, sometimes a particularly awful tweet can be the best part of our days. She references the infamous gator tweet sent after a 2-year-old boy was killed by an alligator near a Disney World hotel in 2016. The tweet declared that the person was so finished with white mens entitlement lately that Im not really sad about a 2yo being eaten by a gator bc his daddy ignored signs, a sentiment so outlandishly vile that it almost falls into the category of absurdist humor.

I personally think that theres something beautiful about the kind of endless well of human pathologies, Jensen says. Youll think that youve seen every way that people can be and get a little bored with it all, and then youll come across something that introduces you to like an orientation that you have never even considered before. Like, I just had no idea that people could be stupid in this unique particular way.

Isnt this why we continue to log on, after all? To better understand the range of human behavior and learn about how to be better? There is something oddly wholesome about the most seemingly pointless online debates of the year, and why a scientist quipping that worms are overrated invited a comparison to social justice dynamics. It illustrates just how desperate we are to get things right, to be able to agree on the morality of our thoughts even if they sound completely ridiculous to everyone else.

Leiby says she can understand, theoretically, why people were eager to jump on the bodega tweet. Yet I think we should also understand why there seemed to be so many tweets like it this year. Leiby, for example, says she usually tests her rough draft ideas when she performs standup comedy. Naturally, she wasnt able to this year.

Theres something very different about saying [a joke] out loud to 40 people and being like, All right, maybe I didnt need to say that, so I just wont say it again, versus tweeting it out to the internet where potentially millions of people can see it, she says. I think everybodys feeling the need to express themselves, whatever that means.

Most of us dont do standup, but we do have friends, family, and coworkers who, until this year, we regularly bounced jokes or opinions among. These discussions have since moved online, where it is far easier to lose crucial context and the tones and facial expressions that in-person interaction provides, and where every point must be made in under 280 characters or a 60-second video clip. Its fun to dunk on a bad tweet, but what is the point when the tweet in question was probably sent by someone who, like the rest of us, is lonely, scared, and incurably bored?

The only thing we need to know about the bodega tweet and in all likelihood, most of the tweets we saw this year is that, as Leiby says, I dont think I gave it more than five minutes of thought.

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Human Behavior

Escalent Finds Success of Utilities Tied to Engagement Beyond the Meter, Names 2020 Customer Champions – Business Wire

LIVONIA, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Customer engagement with the nations largest 140 electric, combination and natural gas utilities has reached a new high thanks to effective utility responses to challenges posed by the pandemic and economy. Escalents ECR (engaged customer relationship) index, a comprehensive customer relationship measurement used by utility management to assess customer engagement, increased 15 points this year to 728 (on a 1,000-point benchmark scale) as a result of strengthened brand perceptions and increased product engagement. Forty-two utilities performed above their peers to earn the title of Escalent 2020 Utility Customer Champions. These results are from the 2020 Cogent Syndicated Utility Trusted Brand & Customer Engagement: Residential study by Escalent, a top human behavior and analytics firm.

Customers, Wall Street and regulators have all made it clear that the future success of a utility depends on engagement beyond the meter. Three in four (76%) customers now state their ideal utility should excel in the areas of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG), all categories that align with the ECR indexs Brand Trust component. Customers also report increased product engagement with high use of energy consumption management offerings (64% across 13 offerings) and interest in renewable energy and electric vehicle-related products (74% across seven offerings).

Engaging customers beyond simply satisfying service needs is now a utility reality to ensure future success. Scoring well on the ECR index is critical to growing company value and stakeholder support, said Chris Oberle, senior vice president at Escalent. Utilities have confronted a very tough year by building customer support for their environmental, social, product and management efforts. Our 2020 Customer Champions are leading the pack on these ESG principles.

Escalent congratulates the following utilities as 2020 Customer Champions. These utilities have scored above their peers on the ECR index, a 360-degree measurement of the utility customer relationship through performance on factors that impact Brand Trust, Product Experience and Service Satisfaction.

Cogent Syndicated 2020 Utility Customer Champions

AEP Ohio

Duquesne Light

Pepco

Atmos Energy South

Elizabethtown Gas

Piedmont Natural Gas

Avista

Idaho Power

PPL Electric Utilities

BGE

Intermountain Gas Company

PSE&G

Black Hills Energy Midwest

Kentucky Utilities

RG&E

Cascade Natural Gas

MidAmerican Energy

Salt River Project

CenterPoint Energy Midwest

Montana-Dakota Utilities

SDG&E

Columbia Gas South

New Jersey Natural Gas

TECO Peoples Gas

Columbia Gas of Ohio

NIPSCO

Texas Gas Service

CPS Energy

NW Natural

Toledo Edison

Dayton Power & Light

Oklahoma Natural Gas

Washington Gas

Delmarva Power

OUC

Wisconsin Public Service

DTE Energy

PECO Energy

Xcel Energy Midwest

Duke Energy Midwest

Peoples Gas

Xcel Energy West

The following are ECR scores for the 140 utilities covered in the study.

East Region Utility Brands

Engaged CustomerRelationship index

Service type

RG&E

750

Combination

PECO Energy

743

Combination

PSE&G

741

Combination

BGE

732

Combination

Delmarva Power

730

Combination

Con Edison

723

Combination

National Grid

719

Combination

NYSEG

709

Combination

Eversource

698

Combination

Pepco

749

Electric

PPL Electric Utilities

748

Electric

Duquesne Light

732

Electric

Penelec

726

Electric

Green Mountain Power

725

Electric

Penn Power

725

Electric

Met-Ed

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Escalent Finds Success of Utilities Tied to Engagement Beyond the Meter, Names 2020 Customer Champions - Business Wire

Human Behavior

Vaccine hesitancy part 1: Using connections to drive human-centered approaches for health – Atlantic Council

Mon, Dec 14, 2020

GeoTech CuesbyTiffany Vora, PhD

During a late-night car ride through the Athens hills, I realized that a colleague of mine was vehemently opposed to vaccination. He teaches at a world-leading university and has founded a visionary company; we even live in the same tech-savvy neighborhood in California. And yet there we were: after an intense day of brainstorming with more than a thousand European innovators, he opened up to me about the terrible neurological injury that his son had suffered after a routine vaccination. In my colleagues telling, overnight his son transformed from a charming and open boy with a sunny smile into a withdrawn, nonverbal shadow of his former self.

As a scientist, my first instinct was to counter with data, analyses, and insights from experts. About how vaccinations are possibly the single most important invention in the history of our species, having prevented hundreds of millions deaths over about 200 years, including an estimated 2 to 3 million deaths per year currently. About how vaccines are safe for the overwhelming majority of recipients. About how vaccines do not cause autism, and how after fraudulent claims in the 1990s by a man who subsequently lost his medical license, scientists around the world have doggedly sought evidence of such a linkand have repeatedly failed to find any.

Instead, I listened and asked questions. My colleague and his wife were utterly devastated, and their lives changed forever. They felt repeatedly ignored by their sons doctors and their friends and colleagues in the medical community. In desperation, they looked online, where they discovered an international community openly discussing their experiences, sharing their opinionsand promoting answers out of line with the preponderance of biomedical evidence. He and his wife had found their tribe.

When it comes to matters of public health, opinion is not synonymous with fact, no matter how personal or deeply held the opinion. Health regulations must be made based on evidence and updated as the scientific process unfolds in order to achieve the ultimate goal of better health for all people.

Nonetheless, as the approval and deployment of vaccines against COVID-19 nears, it is essential that public trust be valued, earned, and maintained. This urgency is sharpened by the growing threat posed by misinformation (false information) and disinformation (deliberately false and misleading information), which are widely recognized as major threats to public health and to geopolitical stability.

It is tempting to fall into a battlefield mentality when it comes to vaccination. On one side there are people holding pro-vaccine positions: scientists and health professionals pointing to years of empirical data about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. This group also includes the peoplehundreds of millions, even billions of themwho chose vaccination, perhaps because they trusted their governments and experts, or perhaps because vaccination was easy or mandated. On the other side are people holding anti-vaccination positions, including people who attribute a negative personal experience to vaccination as well as those who have been convinced by anti-vaccination messaging. And in the middle are the undecided or hesitant, who have yet to commit to a stance.

While the battlefield mentality has provided insights into vaccination behaviors, keeping people at the center of efforts to safeguard public health is crucial. In this article, I will shares insights from a recent peer-reviewed investigation of online interactions about vaccination and integrates these insights with an orthogonal approach to understanding vaccine hesitancy. Overall, by seeking shared language around our common goal of health, we can craft strategies for effective evidence-based health interventions.

As more and more worried and desperate people turn to the Internet to form opinions and decide which behaviors to enact, our overall goal should be to have the signal of reputable health information be far stronger than the noise of misinformation and disinformation across platforms and algorithms.

In June 2020, Nature published Johnson et al.s open access, peer-reviewed, graph-theory approach to characterizing the vaccination views of nearly 100 million individuals on Facebook (out of 3 billion current Facebook users). For more information on the data, analyses, and underlying mathematics, see the Supplementary Information accompanying the main article.

At a high level this analysis revealed two crucial insights: (1) people actively seek information in order to formulate a position on vaccination, and (2) these undecided or hesitant people are quantitatively more likely to encounter anti-vaccination clusters (Facebook Pages) than pro-vaccination clusters.

From a more technical graph-theory perspective, cluster size (the number of people following a Facebook Page), linkages (connections between clusters), and network centrality (how connected a cluster is to other influential clusters) are important measures that change over time. Intuitively, the more links between clusters, the more information that can flow. Linkage density is also a critical consideration: if all roads lead to Rome, no matter which path you walk, you end up in the Eternal City. Since people often share mis- and disinformation without knowing that it is false, this dynamic infrastructure is key.

While the anti-vaccination clusters analyzed by Johnson et al. had fewer followers than the pro-vaccination clusters, there were more anti-vaccination clusters than pro-vaccination clusters, and the anti-vaccination clusters were more centrally located in the online ecology of vaccination views. Medium-sized anti-vaccination clusters underwent the most growth, in contrast to the rich get richer mentality of the network flywheel effect that has been popularized by Silicon Valley. Further, during the 2019 measles outbreak, anti-vaccination clusters more successfully increased their network centrality than pro-vaccination clusters.

Importantly, Johnson et al. found that anti-vaccination clusters employ more diversity of narrative than pro-vaccination clusters. In other words, anti-vaccination clusters more often position vaccination as part of a wider discussion involving (often alternative) health, safety, and even conspiracy theories. By broadening the conversation to general wellbeing, anti-vaccination clusters often effectively support diversity and inclusion; no matter your ethnicity, education level, or geographical location, you should want to keep your family healthy!

Particularly in times of crisis, the narrative diversity of anti-vaccination clusters casts a wider net than the traditional, often data-centered stories told by science and health agencies and supported by some social-media companies. This divide is particularly salient in todays COVID-19 crisis: populations at disproportionate risk often have been failed by medical systems and governments in the past. Thus, while pro-vaccination messaging labors under the historical burden of exploitation of marginalized groups, anti-vaccination messaging is amplified by the legitimate fears of these groups and others.

Johnson et al.s analysis of the measles outbreak of 2019 underscores that it is crucial to disseminate and support evidence-based messaging during a major public health crisis such as COVID-19. We need to foster the growth of clusters sharing reliable information as well as the linkage of these clusters to other parts of the network.

Whose job is it to carry out these interventions? There are obvious major considerations involving censorship and freedom of speech. On the one hand, social-media platforms are hosted by private companies, and there are ongoing and important conversations about the extent to which business should be disentangled from the state. On the other hand, health is a publicand therefore obviously governmentalconcern.

When the undecided come looking for information upon which to formulate an opinion, they are not just looking for data: they are looking to connect through storieshuman stories, like my colleagues. This goal of connection at the human level is why I opened this article with my deeply personal memory about a colleagues emotional journey regarding his sons health.

Our responses to an issue depend strongly on how we feel. As a science communicator, I increasingly turn to Moral Foundations Theory. Briefly, this framework acknowledges that innate human intuitions cue emotional responses that can influenceoften far more than we care to admitour opinions and therefore our behaviors. In the six-foundations version of this theory, the foundations of our intuitions are care/harm, authority/subversion, loyalty/betrayal, liberty/oppression, purity/degradation, and fairness/cheating. If a statistical analysis reveals that particular foundations are influential in a given population, then messaging can be tailored to speak directly to those foundations. In a massive body of work over decades, Moral Foundations Theory has been applied to a huge spectrum of problem spaces from implicit bias to climate change to politics and beyond.

Moral Foundations Theory has also been used in several studies focused on vaccination. For example, Amin et al.s peer-reviewed 2017 study in Nature Human Behaviour sought statistically significant connections between vaccine hesitancy and moral values in two large populations of American parents. The analysis identified two connections: to generalize, parents who were highly vaccine hesitant were influenced by beliefs that immunization pollutes the pure bodies of their children (purity/degradation) and that governments should not have the power to control individual behavior (authority/subversion and liberty/oppression). Interestingly, Amin el al.s statistical analyses indicated that these associations were not affected by gender or political ideology.

Moral Foundations Theory constitutes one pathway to increase the narrative diversity, and therefore effectiveness, of messaging that supports human health. Quantitative analysis of particular populations can guide the design of effective strategies; fortunately, social media itself provides ways to gather such data before an intervention is tested and eventually rolled out. Resources are available for visual images, terminology that can be used for natural language processing and other text-based analyses, and even short vignettes.

As the scientist and philosopher Donna Haraway has said, There is a strategic use to speaking the same idiom as the people that you are sharing the room with. You craft a good-enough idiom so you can work on something together.

In other words, by moving away from the habit of versus, we enable a future of together. As we have seen, data and architecture from digital technologies can be mindfully harnessed to foster human connections and, ultimately, to empower human-centered health interventions.

The COVID-19 pandemic is underscoring the dangers of ignoring these insights while simultaneously providing a major opportunity to accumulate the worlds most valuable commodity: trust. In my next article, we will explore strategies for building and maintaining trust, and how to enable effective human-centered health interventions beyond todays crisis.

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Vaccine hesitancy part 1: Using connections to drive human-centered approaches for health - Atlantic Council

Physiology

How and why microbes promote and protect against stress – Newswise

Newswise More than half of the human body is not actually human: The body hosts approximately 100 trillion microbes. These bacteria, yeast and viruses, which make up the human microbiome, affect more than physical health. They also influence behavior and emotions.

Some microbes prosper when the body is under stress, while other microbes contribute to buffering the body against stress. Athena Aktipis, associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, used evolutionary theory to examine the reciprocal relationship between microbes in the human body and stress. The paper was published in BioEssays on December 7.

Microbes have access to physiological systems that can give them the power to stress us out, and there is evidence that contributing to the human bodys stress response serves their evolutionary goals, Aktipis said. This means that microbes can potentially change our physiology to keep the stress response going, ensuring their access to resources so they can proliferate. One example of a microbe that can benefit from host stress is the bacterium E. coli. We call microbes like these stress microbes, and the microbes that can provide resilience against stress, like some species of Lactobacillus, resilience microbes because there is evidence that they affect our physiology in these ways, possibly for their own evolutionary benefit.

Tug-of-war

Stress-loving microbes both contribute to and benefit from the physiological changes that happen in the human body in response to stress, such as high blood glucose levels, increased permeability of the intestines and suppressed immune system responses. These microbes use what evolutionary biologists call a fast life history strategy. Organisms with fast life histories benefit from big bursts of resources, like the increase in blood sugar that happens when people experience stress, and also replicate quickly and in the case of microbes without regard for their host. But the body only benefits from the stress response in specific situations, like escaping danger. In other situations, the body does not benefit from the stress response, setting up a figurative tug-of-war between host and microbe.

All organisms have their own evolutionary interests, and different resources and environments lead to optimal survival and reproduction. What is best for the host is not always what is best for the microbe, and we think this is what might be going on with some pathogenic stress microbes. Sometimes the host response can lead to escalation of the conflict, which can lead to chronic inflammation as the hosts immune system tries in vain to deal with microbes that are causing a problem in the body. Stress can encourage this kind of dysregulated environment in the host that allows some microbes to thrive, Aktipis said.

Not all microbes in the microbiome benefit from a stressed host. Many do better in a stable environment, relying on a slow life history strategy that prioritizes surviving over reproducing. Microbes like these both alter and benefit from physiological processes that help protect the host from stress. Some, like Lactobacillus reuteri, contribute to increased production of the hormone oxytocin, which is associated with feeling calm and connected with others.

Microbes alter host behavior whether it be by promoting stress or contributing to resilience against it in ways that increase the odds they will be able to reproduce, Aktipis said. The composition of our microbiomes influences us in myriad ways: It can change the way we feel in terms of stress and our mental health and influence how we respond to the world around us. But it is a two way street; the way we behave - including what we eat, whether we exercise, and how we manage our stress - also affects the composition of our microbiomes. By changing our behavior, we can affect which microbes are thriving inside us.

Diego Beltran, a psychology graduate student, also contributed to the paper.

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How and why microbes promote and protect against stress - Newswise

Physiology

Noninvasive Imaging Effectively Shows Variations in Renal Blood Flow – Newswise

Newswise Rockville, Md. (December 16, 2020)Renal blood flow changes throughout the day in tandem with the bodys circadian clock, with increasing flow during daytime hours and decreasing flow in the evening and into the night. Researchers made the findings using noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques in healthy people, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Physiology-Renal Physiology. The study also revealed that although circadian variation influenced renal blood flow over the course of the day, it did not affect renal oxygenation in either men or women. The article has been chosen as an APSselect article for December.

Numerous conditions are known to cause renal injury, including diabetes, hypertension, autoimmune diseases and infections. Until now, imaging diagnostics of renal function were often performed using invasive techniques with methods based on ionizing radiation.

MRI is a non-ionizing imaging modality undergoingfast development. A number of noninvasive MRI techniques now make it possible to study different aspects of renal physiology, said corresponding researcher Per Eckerbom, MD, of Uppsala University Hospital in Sweden. MRI scans combining multiple of these noninvasive techniques provide a lot of important information.

Researchers believe the noninvasive MRI techniques used in this study will be a powerful tool of the future to detect renal disease at an early stage and to develop better treatments. Understanding circadian variations and possible differences between the sexes is one key to do so.

Read the full article, Circadian variation in renal blood flow and kidney function in healthy volunteers monitored with noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging, published in the American Journal of Physiology-Renal Physiology.It is highlighted as one of this months best of the best as part of the American Physiological Societys APSselect program. Read all of this months selected research articles.

NOTE TO JOURNALISTS: To schedule an interview with a member of the research team, please contact the APS Communications Office or call 301.634.7314. Find more research highlights in our Newsroom.

Physiology is a broad area of scientific inquiry that focuses on how molecules, cells, tissues and organs function in health and disease. The American Physiological Society connects a global, multidisciplinary community of more than 10,000 biomedical scientists and educators as part of its mission to advance scientific discovery, understand life and improve health. The Society drives collaboration and spotlights scientific discoveries through its 16 scholarly journals and programming that support researchers and educators in their work.

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Noninvasive Imaging Effectively Shows Variations in Renal Blood Flow - Newswise