James' World 2

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The holiday season is often painted as an idyllic vision of rest, conjuring images of warm beverages and bountiful time with loved ones. But many people have trouble unwinding at this time of year. Why do the December holidays offer the promise of respite but never seem to deliver? And is more restorative rest possible during this busy season?

I am a psychologist who studies how rest supports learning, creativity, and well-being. Sleep is often the first thing that many people associate with rest, but humans also require restorative downtime when awake. These active rest periods include physical, social, and creative experiences that can occur throughout the day – not just while mindlessly scrolling on the couch.

When holiday stresses begin to snowball, rest periods replenish depleted psychological resources, reduce stress, and promote well-being. But reaping the full benefits of rest and leisure requires more than a slow morning or a mug of hot cocoa. It’s also about intentionally scheduling active recovery periods that energize us and leave us feeling restored.

That’s because good rest needs to be anticipated, planned, and refined.

Holiday stress

The winter holiday season can take a toll on well-being. Financial stress increases, and daily routines are disrupted. Add the stress of travel, plus a dash of challenging family dynamics, and it’s not surprising that emotional well-being declines during the holiday season.

Quality rest and leisure periods can buffer these stressors, promoting recovery and well-being. They also can help reduce psychological strain and prolong positive emotions as people return to work.

Effective rest comes in many forms, from going outdoors for a walk to socializing, listening to music or engaging in creative hobbies. These activities may feel like distractions, but they serve important mental health functions.

For instance, research finds that walking in nature results in diminished activation in the area of the brain associated with sadness and ruminating thoughts. Walks in nature are also associated with reduced anxiety and stress.

Other studies have shown that activities such as playing the piano or doing calligraphy significantly lower cortisol, a stress hormone. In fact, some of the most promising interventions for depression involve participation in pleasant leisure activities.

Not all idle time is restorative

So why does it feel so hard to get good rest during the holidays?

One of the most robust findings from psychologists and researchers who study leisure is that the effectiveness of rest periods depends on how satisfying they feel to the individual. This might sound obvious, but people often spend their free time doing things that are not satisfying.

For example, a famous 2002 study of how people spent their time found that the most popular form of leisure was watching television. But participants also rated TV time as their least enjoyable activity. Those who watched more than four hours of TV a day rated it as even less enjoyable than those who watched less than two hours a day.

A few years ago, my colleagues and I collected data from college students and found that students reported turning to mindless distractions, such as social media, at the end of the day, but that it usually did not leave them feeling reenergized or restored. Although this study was specifically about college students, when I presented the findings to the larger research team, one of my collaborators said, “It really makes you think about yourself, doesn’t it?” There were silent nods around the room.

Planning for good rest

To combat the pitfall of poor rest cycles, science suggests planning for active rest and pleasant activities, and carrying through with those plans. A large body of research shows that designing, scheduling, and engaging in enjoyable activities is effective at lowering symptoms of depressionand anxiety.

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Twelve years ago, when my daughter was born, my parents were there in the hospital room with me to welcome her. My mother cut the cord, and my father announced, “It’s a girl!” The three of us exclaimed over her incredible size — over 9 pounds — and off-the-charts length — 23 astounding inches. It was everything I’d been dreaming of since I’d first set out to become a single mother by choice.

But not too far away, waiting patiently by the phone for news, was another person, my sometimes-live-in girlfriend, Sarah.

She wasn’t at the birth because I hadn’t invited her to be. In fact, I had expressly told her that she was not invited. I didn’t even want her waiting at home for us. I had embarked on my path toward motherhood on my own, and I was determined to see it through that way, even if the solitude of the journey had become something I had to enforce.

My girlfriend and I had first dated in college, and had spent those years of our early 20s madly in love. But our relationship had ended when she broke my heart by refusing to come with me when I headed off to the West Coast for graduate school. We’d stayed in touch for a while, and then she’d stopped answering my calls. I cried into my whiskey and referred to her among my new friends as “the one who got away.”

I spent the next seven years in and out of disastrous relationships with men who were mostly all wrong for me, commitment-phobic bad boys who couldn’t have been further from wanting what I did: a child. I was approaching 30 and desperate to settle down and start a family. One day, I asked my mother why it was taking so long to find someone who wanted to make a life with me.

“Maybe you’re not someone who’s meant to have just one great love. Maybe your great loves will be many,” she said. This from a woman who’d been married to the same man for nearly 40 years.

But if this was true, I reasoned, then why not have a child on my own right now? I could always fall in love at 50, but I couldn’t have a baby at that age. The more time I spent making the case to everyone around me, the more attached I became to the vision of myself as a single mother by choice. Why would anyone do this with a partner, I thought, when it’s so much less complicated to do it on your own?

So I asked an old ex-boyfriend — smart, attractive, and completely off the rails — if he’d be the donor. He breezily said yes, and I began to make plans to draw up paperwork with a lawyer. And that’s when Sarah stepped back into my life.

First she sent me an email on New Year’s Eve, wishing me an early happy birthday and asking if we could talk on the phone sometime. I was furious. Who did she think she was to show up in my life now, crashing my pre-baby bliss and being a downer on both New Year’s and my birthday? I said sure, she could call me — but she better have a good reason for it.

I wasn’t going to let another relationship head off my dreams of starting a family.

As it turned out, she did: She had cut off contact all those years before because she hadn’t been able to get over our romance. And that’s why she was back in touch now. We still lived on opposite sides of the country, and neither of us had jobs we were ready to walk away from, but how could I say no to the most romantic proposal of my life? She wanted me back.

After that, we spent hours on the phone each day, relearning each other with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. We knew that we belonged together, but “together” was a complicated prospect. At first, she seemed understanding about my continued determination to become a single mother by choice. I made it clear that any relationship with her wasn’t going to change that for me, and she said she wouldn’t mind dating a pregnant lady. In these conversations, we chose to ignore the obvious fact that pregnancy only lasts nine months.

As the weeks passed, she began to ask for me to postpone the paperwork, to wait until our relationship had had more time so that we could embark on this journey of parenthood together, as partners, and without the conspicuous intrusion of my ex-boyfriend’s sperm. But I felt I’d waited long enough. I wasn’t going to let another relationship head off my dreams of starting a family.

Not surprisingly, like so many things having to do with getting pregnant, this was entirely out of my control. Days before Sarah’s first visit to spend a weekend with me at my place in San Francisco, I went to the emergency room for a burst appendix. I had surgery and was officially out of commission for several weeks as I recovered.

By that time, I’d accepted a one-year teaching position in Pennsylvania, only an eight-hour drive from her home in Boston, and I decided it was no longer convenient to use the West Coast ex-boyfriend’s sperm. I spent the next few months moving cross-country, researching clinics, picking an anonymous donor, and downing prenatal vitamins. Then I gave myself a shot of hormones and drove my Subaru to the insemination. I was doing this on my own, just like I’d promised myself.

Meanwhile, my girlfriend and I had come a long way on our path back to partnership. And, up until the morning sickness kicked in, I continued to give her every indication that we were walking it together. Then came months of physical and emotional agony, our lives moving forward against the backdrop of my severe nausea and vomiting, with a propulsion that felt out of my control. I took a permanent job in a small college town in Alabama. She found a new job in Atlanta and followed me south. We bought the house that I lived in mostly without her, and she rented an apartment in the city for herself. My family was thousands of miles away, and I knew no one in my new hometown. On weekends, she’d drive the two hours from Atlanta to buy my groceries and listen from the other room while I threw up. I couldn’t have gotten through it alone, but at the time, alone was exactly what I wanted to be.

While she was doing everything she could to make our dreams come true, I had turned inward. I stopped talking about our future together and started thinking about my own. My all-day, eight-month morning sickness was exacerbated by smell and touch, and I couldn’t stand for her to be near me. The only person I could imagine sharing a space with was the baby, and my tunnel vision of life as a single mom narrowed again.

But though my vision for the future felt like it was gaining new focus, everyone around me seemed to grow more confused. Sarah’s parents called with well-wishes and inquiries about baby gifts, which I accepted with a mixture of scorn and appreciation. Not surprisingly, my new co-workers didn’t understand the situation either, clearly longing to turn our story into one of a happy, little queer nuclear family — something I vehemently objected to, even as Sarah rubbed my swollen feet. It’s a stretch to say that anyone was convinced by the explanation I gave — we’re dating, and I’m having a baby on my own — but I stuck to it. At the baby shower my new friends threw for me, I gleefully unwrapped a baby book and declared, “I hope this one doesn’t have a family tree in it because our family tree only has one side!” My girlfriend sat an armchair away.

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Doug Varone and Dancers said it was withdrawing from a two-night stand in April that had been intended to celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary. Varone, the head of the company, said it would lose $40,000 by pulling out.

“It is financially devastating but morally exhilarating,” he said in an email.

The artists who have protested in recent weeks include Kristy Lee, a folk singer from Alabama, who announced she was pulling out from a free concert on Jan. 14. “I won’t lie to you, canceling shows hurts,” she said in a social media post. “This is how I keep the lights on. But losing my integrity would cost me more than any paycheck.”

The center has responded aggressively to some of the cancellations. Richard Grenell, the chairman of the center, threatened a $1 million lawsuit against Mr. Redd after he canceled the Christmas Eve concert.

The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday about the artist withdrawals. In his letter to Mr. Redd, Mr. Grenell said, “Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance.”

The cancellations underscore the difficulties that Mr. Grenell and Mr. Trump have faced in trying to remake the center in the president’s name. Those who canceled performances or resigned advisory roles in February included the Pulitzer winner Rhiannon Giddens, the so

prano Renée Fleming and the singer-songwriter Ben Folds.

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The head of Doug Varone and Dancers called the decision to cancel two performances at the Kennedy Center “financially devastating but morally exhilarating. ”Credit…Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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Deep down in the Arctic Ocean, life becomes bizarre. One might suppose that at its greatest depths, the icy, dark water would be inhospitable to much, but a new discovery reminds us that that is far from the case.

Off the coast of Greenland, the deep seafloor is littered with towering mounds made of crystallized methane and other gases. Known as the Freya hydrate mounds, these structures act like a “frozen reef,” a haven for creatures that have evolved to live in environments unlike any other on Earth.

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, scientists document the deepest ever found of these mounds, at 3,640 meters—or some 2.26 miles—below the surface. The discovery was made as part of the Ocean Census Arctic Deep–EXTREME24 expedition to explore and research the Arctic environment and document ocean life using tools such as underwater robots.

Incredibly, the mounds, which are also known as gas hydrate cold seeps, release methane gas flares some 3,300 meters up into the water—the tallest such flares ever recorded. Over time, the mounds collapse and reform, a dynamic process that the researchers say gives insights into the Arctic’s various ecosystems.

“These are not static deposits,” Giuliana Panieri, a study co-author and a professor at the Arctic University of Norway, said in a statement about the new research. “They are living geological features, responding to tectonics, deep heat flow, and environmental change.”

Gathered at the mounds are chemosynthetic creatures—life that has evolved to depend not on sun-powered photosynthesis for food but on chemical reactions instead. Some of the creatures seen at the Freya mounds are also found at hydrothermal vents, or fissures in the seafloor through which hot, chemical-laden water erupts, the researchers said, suggesting these ecosystems may be more intertwined than previously thought.

“The links that we have found between life at this seep and hydrothermal vents in the Arctic indicate that these island-like habitats on the ocean floor will need to be protected from any future impacts of deep-sea mining in the region,” said Jon Copley, a study co-author and a professor at the University of Southampton in England, in the same statement.

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UiT / Ocean Census / REV Ocean

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Russian President Vladimir Putin said Ukraine was in no hurry for peace, and if it did not want to resolve their conflict peacefully, Moscow would accomplish all its goals by force.

Putin’s remarks on Saturday, carried by state news agency TASS, followed a vast Russian drone and missile attack that prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to say Russia was demonstrating its wish to continue the war while Kyiv wanted peace.

Zelenskiy is to meet U.S. President Donald Trump in Florida on Sunday to seek a resolution to the war Putin launched nearly four years ago with a full-scale invasion of Russia’s smaller neighbour.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Putin’s remarks.

Russian commanders told Putin during an inspection visit that Moscow’s forces had captured the towns of Myrnohrad, Rodynske and Artemivka in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk, as well as Huliaipole and Stepnohirsk in the Zaporizhzhia region, the Kremlin said on the Telegram messaging app.

Ukraine’s military rejected Russia’s assertions about Huliaipole and Myrnohrad as false statements. The situation in both places remains “difficult”, but “defensive operations” by Ukrainian troops are ongoing, the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in a statement on social media.

The Southern Command of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said on Telegram that “fierce fighting” continued in Huliaipole. “However, a substantial part of Huliaipole continues to be held by the Defence Forces of Ukraine.”

Verifying battlefield claims is difficult as access on both sides is restricted, information is tightly controlled, and front lines shift quickly, with media relying on satellite and geolocated footage that can be partial or delayed.

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If there is a refrain heard across war-shattered Syria, where even the gray-green wilting trees look shellshocked, it is, “We just want to live.”

If there is an ambition in Saudi Arabia, it is to become a major power representing a modern Islam, open and technologically advanced, far from any aggressive Pan-Arab ideology.

If there is a buzzword among the Sunni Gulf monarchies, once driven to paroxysms of fear and rage by the Shiite mullahs of Iran, it is “pragmatism.”

Still, the region remains combustible. The United States responded to the killing of two U.S. soldiers and an American interpreter this month by hitting the Islamic State in Syria with punishing airstrikes that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called “a declaration of vengeance.”

The strikes came soon after the Trump administration said in its National Security Strategy that the region was “emerging as a place of partnership, friendship and investment,” adding that the days when “the Middle East dominated American foreign policy” were “thankfully over.”

Such optimism, based in large part on the Gaza peace agreement signed in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, on Oct. 13, looks overblown, much like President Trump’s claim that day that it took 3,000 years to reach a breakthrough of this kind.

Not everything has been solved overnight by a presidential signature.

In Syria, sectarianism competes with a desire for unity, and violence flares. War festers in Yemen. In Iran, the regime is weak, but its determination to destroy the state of Israel is undimmed. Israeli settlers claw land away from Palestinians in the West Bank, backed by an extreme right-wing Israeli government.

Already, the Gaza accord looks frayed. Israel and Hamas skirmish for advantage. Everything about the peace plan’s next phase — the planned international stabilization force, disarming Hamas, an Israeli withdrawal, and the role of the Palestinian Authority — appears contentious.

Sequencing, or what concessions from which side come first, is the new battleground.

Even so, very few want a return to war. During repeated visits over several months across the region, hope alternated with horror. What was perhaps most striking was a quiet resolve among many people to side with promise over despair and destruction.

“The Gaza war violated the basic Israeli principle of fighting short wars,” said Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli author and historian. “There is complete exhaustion in Israel; the military is exhausted, and there’s been entirely too much reserve duty. These factors weigh against renewed fighting.”

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David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

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