James' World 2

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Well, it finally happened. My 2021 Kindle Paperwhite, which I’ve had for years and still use on a nightly basis, started showing its age and slowing down. Not only was it slow to boot up, but it was also slow to respond to my swipes and taps. Fortunately, after doing some research, I was able to speed up my sluggish Kindle with a few simple troubleshooting tricks.

So if you’re a voracious reader like me and your e-reader is having trouble keeping up with your pace, don’t sweat it, I’ll show you what to do. I’ll also include step-by-step instructions for the latest Kindle Paperwhite.

Be mindful of storage space

I’ll be the first one to tell you that I’ve got an embarrassing number of books on my 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite. I’m always on the hunt for a tale that’s weird yet compelling, which led to me accumulating lots of random books and short stories over the years. So, the first thing I did to speed up my Kindle was remove any books I’m not currently reading.

To do this on an 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite (as well as a 2024 Kindle Paperwhite), navigate to your personal library and press and hold the cover of the book you want to remove. Next, you’ll want to select Remove from Device. If you’re looking to remove multiple books at once, navigate to Settings (from the three vertical dots in the upper right hand corner) > Device Options > Storage Management > Manual Removal > Books. Here you can tick off the books you want to remove and then tap the Remove button at the bottom of the screen.

My real problem is that I download every single book I buy, which isn’t a great habit to develop because they eat up a good amount of storage space, thus impacting overall performance. I tend to only read one or two books at a time, so there’s no reason to download every single book on my device. If you’d like to remove all of your downloaded books at once, the easiest way to do that is with a factory reset.

Wiping the slate clean

If you’re not committed to any books at the present time, you can always reset the Kindle back to its factory settings, which automatically removes all downloaded content. I ended up doing this with my own Kindle and it really improved the boot up speed and touch navigation. Just be aware that this step will also reset the brightness and color temperature. Personally, I like using warmth mode, but the overall speed boost from resetting the device was worth setting up those preferences again.

To reset an 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite back to its factory settings and remove all downloaded books, navigate to Settings > Device Options > Factory Reset. Confirm the factory reset and let your Kindle do the work. This feature will remove your personal data, downloaded content, and unsynced content. Don’t have an 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite? No problem! Below you’ll find instructions on how to factory reset the 2024 Kindle Paperwhite.

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The skinniest pasta yet made—let’s call it “nanotini”—has an average diameter of 372 nanometers and only two ingredients: flour plus formic acid. The latter, a caustic agent typically sprayed by agitated ants, is why researcher Adam Clancy sniffed his creation before he ate it. 

It is generally inadvisable to consume things pickled with formic acid. But Clancy, a chemist at University College London, relied on his understanding of the acid’s odor threshold—the lowest concentration at which the human nose can detect a substance. Clancy trusted that if the pasta was scentless, then it contained too little acid to be dangerous. Satisfied, he chewed a wad of nanotini. “I know you’re not meant to self-experiment, but I’d made the world’s smallest pasta,” Clancy says. “I couldn’t resist.” 

Clancy and his co-authors, who recently published the recipe for their pasta in Nanoscale Advances, aren’t trying to whip up something for Italian restaurants; they are investigating starch nanofibers for their potential as next-generation bandages. Mats of these fibers have pores that permit water to pass through but are too small for bacteria, Clancy says. 

Ideal wound dressings aren’t simple barriers. They should also speed recovery, points out Cornell University graduate student Mohsen Alishahi, who studies nanofiber bandages made with starch derivatives and wasn’t involved with the nanotini project. “Using a natural material such as starch to develop the wound dressing can help the wound heal more quickly,” Alishahi says. Starch should encourage cells around an injury to grow because the fibers resemble the body’s microscopic structural network, called the extracellular matrix. And starch has another natural advantage: made by every species of green plant, it is one of the most common organic compounds on the planet. 

Previous nanofibers had been built from purified starch from corn, maize and rice. This is the first time anyone has done so with plain white flour—thereby, Clancy claims, meeting the definition of the world’s smallest pasta. To make it, his team first dissolved the flour in acid, which uncoiled the flour’s starch clumps so the molecules could be linked into skinny threads.

Next was a delicate, hours-long sequence of heating and cooling. This process is “the most interesting” aspect of the new research, says Pennsylvania State University food scientist Greg Ziegler, who studies starch nanofibers as possible scaffolds for cultured meat and wasn’t involved with the new paper. Despite the impurities of supermarket flour, the resulting liquid had the “proper viscosity for spinning,” Ziegler says, referring to the technique used to make the pasta. 

Pasta makers typically slice dough or push it through small holes to give it shape. But in this case, the starch molecules were electrospun—pulled by electric charge through a hollow needle tip. The liquid whipped out of the needle horizontally, attracted to a grounded plate a few centimeters away. As the acid swiftly dried in flight, the starch chains formed solid but invisible threads; their width was too small to be seen by the unaided eye. What could be seen were the off-white mats that formed when fibers amassed on the plate. These bendy mats looked a bit like tracing paper, but instead of wood pulp, it was exceptionally tiny pasta all the way down. As for the flavor? “I can confirm it needs some seasoning,” Clancy says. 

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Donald Trump has moved at warp speed to nominate people to serve in his Cabinet and other important government posts who have chosen loyalty to him as their most important virtue, making a mockery of merit even as the nominees claim to uphold meritocracy.  

Moreover, like Trump himself, his nominees denigrate science and scientific expertise, subscribe to conspiracy theories, are eager to impose litmus tests in the arts and education, and seem hostile to the world beyond America’s borders.

Elections have consequences, so the saying goes.

And if that wasn’t enough to remind us that elections have consequences, the president-elect announced that on the first day of his administration, he will order a mass deportation of millions of immigrants and impose stiff tariffs on this nation’s most important trading partners.

While much of the post-election commentary has focused on its implications for American democracy,  there is another side to what will unfold starting on Jan. 20. When he takes office, Trump, who promised to Make America Great Again, seems determined to lead America into a period of scientific, cultural, educational, and global retrenchment, which collectively might be called the new “Dark Ages.”

Some see Trump as reviving the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an era of great prosperity as well as technological and industrial growth. It was an era dominated by corrupt “captains of industry” or “robber barons” whose corrupting influence also extended to government and politics. 

However, leaders in the Gilded Age did not reject science and rationality. Quite the contrary, they embraced both because they saw them as essential to the growth of capitalism. And they invested in culture and the arts, rather than trying to make them hue to a particular orthodoxy.

Yes, Trump’s era may ultimately have some attributes of the Gilded Age, I think it will be much worse. 

Trump and his MAGA followers reject the cultural legacy of the people who founded this nation. The people who led the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution were, deeply impressed by “the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution and its emphasis on empiricism, objective observation, and using rationality over faith or tradition as the foundations of truthful knowledge.”  

They founded “an Enlightenment country” and borrowed from the Enlightenment hostility toward the “hierarchically ordered societies of Europe.” 

The president-elect seems determined to end all that. 

In 2017, Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of the writers group PEN America, warned of Trump’s “repudiation of the American ideals — grounded in the Enlightenment — of self-expression, knowledge, dissent, criticism, and truth.” What Nossel predicted then seems even more apt today. 

During the 2024 campaign and transition period, Trump and his cronies have broadcast their determination “to entrench within the machinery of the U.S. government… elemental disdain for intellectuals, analysts, and experts.” They regularly denigrate rationality and elevate superstition, tradition, and hierarchy. 

I call their program a recipe for the return of the “Dark Ages.”

Though the term is now much disputed, the phrase “Dark Ages” is used by some historians to describe a “’ period of intellectual depression in Europe from… the fifth century to the revival of learning about the beginning of the fifteenth….’” During that time, Europe experienced “a decline in culture (and) learning…. and a shift towards a feudal society with limited literacy and widespread superstition.”

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Donald Trump and Jared Kushner (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

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When Lene was a child, she took comfort in a strange nighttime routine. While lying in bed just before she fell asleep, her bedroom would begin to warp, and her body would do so along with it. The far wall would stretch away from her head, her legs lengthening to meet it until she felt like she could touch the door with her toe if she tried. And all the while, it seemed as if she was floating in the corner, observing her distorted body.

“The first time I was very scared,” Lene says, recalling she was between seven and nine years old at the time. “I didn’t tell anyone, because if I told my mom, she would just say, ‘Eh, it’s nothing.’” She recalls that the episodes began happening every night, and eventually they became somewhat comforting. By adolescence, they had stopped, and she largely forgot about them.

Then, a few years ago, Lene, now age 59, learned that her experience had a name. She was at a hospital in Denmark where she works as a secretary in the neurology department. During a meeting where she was taking notes, a neurologist mentioned a patient with something called Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Intrigued, Lene did some research on Google, where she immediately recognized her own experience.

“All my life, since I was a child, I had this thing I couldn’t explain. And suddenly there was a word for it,” Lene says. During episodes of Alice in Wonderland syndrome, the world appears distorted, in many of the same ways that are described in Lewis Carroll’s famous novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Bodies can morph out of shape; time can speed up or slow down; colors can fade or intensify. Often, these symptoms come with a sense of unreality called depersonalization or derealization. These distortions usually last between minutes and days and are known to be triggered by migraine, epilepsy, brain injury, drugs and infections.

While it’s rare to be diagnosed with the condition—fewer than 200 clinical cases have been officially reported since 1955, mainly in children, and it doesn’t appear in any mainstream diagnostic handbooks—Alice-like symptoms appear to be relatively common. One survey study published in 1999 found that some 30 percent of participants had experienced at least one kind of visual distortion in their life. And around 16 percent of migraine patients in a recent study also reported symptoms of Alice in Wonderland syndrome throughout their life. Some researchers have theorized that Carroll experienced these symptoms himself because he was known to experience migraines.

“The symptoms are as fantastical as the narrative of the book,” says Alberto Paniz-Mondolfi, an infectious disease physician at Mount Sinai in New York City, who has encountered the condition throughout his career. “When you don’t have answers, that is an enigma. And this is a condition that remains, in all of its aspects, largely unanswered.”

Still, researchers have begun to assemble many of the pieces of the Alice in Wonderland syndrome puzzle. The number of published studies on the condition has more than doubled since 2010, giving researchers important new insights into what causes these symptoms, says Jan Dirk Blom, a psychiatrist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and author of a 2020 book on the syndrome. And most recently, researchers have uncovered a potential answer to one of the syndrome’s biggest mysteries: What happens in the brain when people enter the rabbit hole?

The Looking Glass

We often think that our five senses allow us to observe the world as it truly exists—that “our brain is some sort of canvas or display for the reality” around us, says Maximilian Friedrich, a neurologist at University Hospital of Würzburg in Germany. “But it turns out that this is not the case. Perception is an active process.” The brain does not record reality through sensory input like a camera; it synthesizes, interprets, and reconstructs it.

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