James' World 2

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By April 12, 2024—three days before the deadline for filing tax returns in the U.S.—more than a quarter of American taxpayers had yet to do so. Procrastination—delaying something despite an awareness of associated negative consequences, leading to discomfort—is a common experience for many. Unfortunately, procrastination tends to carry significant costs. For instance, completing a task when rushing to finish can impact the quality of one’s work. Moreover, procrastination is by its very definition stressful, and naturally, such stress can take its toll. Chronic procrastinators tend to report more symptoms of illness, more visits to the doctor, lower overall well-being, and even greater financial struggles.

So if procrastination is so costly, why do so many people regularly do it? Years of research have provided a reasonably comprehensive list of psychological factors that relate to procrastination. But it’s been unclear what mental processes underlie the decision to start or postpone a task. When faced with an upcoming deadline, how do people decide to initiate a chore or project?

To shed light on this question, we conducted a series of studies examining task delay, the behavioral component of procrastination in which people put off completing something despite lacking any objectively strategic reason to do so. We found that people with a negativity bias tend to delay tasks more, especially if they tend to be poor at self-control.

The central idea guiding our work was that as people pursue their goals, the environment nudges them to make specific assessments that can shape their behavior. For example, once a taxpayer has received all the necessary documentation—typically well before the filing deadline—they may ask themselves, “Do I want to do this now?” This question should bring to mind some positive outcomes (for instance, the satisfaction of completing a chore and, potentially, receiving a tax refund sooner) and some that are negative (such as the tediousness of the task). Ultimately the positives must be weighed against the negatives. Notably, there are individual differences in how people generally weigh positive and negative signals—a characteristic that psychologists call valence weighting bias. Whereas some people tend to give greater weight to the pros, others give greater weight to the cons. We reasoned that those with a more negative weighting bias should be more likely to procrastinate.

Our first study used surveys to identify people who generally expected to receive a tax refund but tended to submit their taxes either early (during the last two weeks of January or early February) or late in tax season (the first two weeks of April).* Some 232 people who met our eligibility criteria participated in a follow-up session, in which we measured their valence weighting bias, using a game affectionately known as “BeanFest.” In this game, people viewed images of beans that varied in shape and number of speckles. Some beans, when selected, yielded points, whereas others led to a loss. We later assessed how participants generalized from these newly learned associations (such as that oblong beans with many speckles were “bad” and that circular beans with few speckles were “good”) to new bean images that had both positive and negative aspects (such as circular beans with many speckles). The people who leaned more heavily on the negative features when assessing the novel beans had a negative valence weighting bias, whereas those who leaned more on the positives had a more positive bias.

The decisions that people make in this game reveal something very fundamental: it turns out that people’s tendencies to generalize either positive or negative associations on this test can serve as a proxy for their general likelihood of weighing pros or cons when making decisions of any sort. Through this process, we found that those people who had reported filing taxes late in the season exhibited a more a more negative valence weighting bias. They apparently felt more preoccupied by the unpleasant aspects of preparing their tax return.

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This is a long read!

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In his new book, The Unseen Body, Dr. Jonathan Reisman offers a guided tour inside the human body, from the remarkable design of our organs to the messages contained in our body fluids.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. We’re going to talk about the hidden world inside our bodies, the remarkable design of our organs, the messages contained in our body fluids, and how things can turn foul when something goes wrong. My guest, Dr. Jonathan Reisman, is an internist, pediatrician, and ER physician, and the author of the new book, “The Unseen Body.” Each chapter is about a specific body part or body fluid from his perspective as a doctor. So there’s chapters on the throat, heart, feces, genitals, liver, brain, skin, urine, blood, and so on. It’s fascinating material, but I want to acknowledge at the start that our conversation will include discussion of body fluids and genitals. And I know that makes some people uncomfortable or squeamish. I suspect Dr. Reisman will try to convince you that you needn’t be squeamish about the complexity of the human body.

Before studying medicine, his passion was studying the natural world and ecology. As a medical student, he found that exploring the body felt similar to exploring the outside world. Each organ was a different creature with its own unique appearance and behaviors. He’s practiced medicine in remote and culturally unique regions of the world, including the Arctic, Antarctica, high altitudes in Nepal, people living on the street in Calcutta, in India, and among the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota. He currently works in several ERs in the Philadelphia area.

Dr. Jonathan Reisman, welcome to FRESH AIR. It’s a fascinating book. I know you’re fascinated by our insides, our organs, our body fluids. It’s part of what drew you to medicine. But many people are squeamish about looking even at a video of a chest cut open during surgery. Why do you think that the body can seem so revolting or upsetting?

JONATHAN REISMAN: Well, thanks so much for having me here today, Terry. I think that a lot of people are simply, you know, grossed out or repulsed by what they’re not used to. You know, when we go about our daily lives, we don’t see the body’s innards. We don’t see our internal organs. And we try to do our best to try not to see the, you know, the excreted bodily fluids that come out of us too. Just our normal daily life does not involve seeing those deeper parts of the body. And part of the reason I named my book “The Unseen Body” is because I’m trying to open up, you know, that unseen portion of the body that we all don’t see in our daily lives, pull back the curtain, if you will, on how all the organs work, how fascinating they are, but also how they impact every aspect of our lives from daily life and, you know, all the milestones of our lives from birth to death and beyond.

GROSS: The first time you could open a cadaver as a medical student, did you find it revolting or fascinating?

REISMAN: I actually found it absolutely fascinating on that first day. In fact, before the end of the very first day of medical school, during which they had us start in the anatomy lab, which is the class in which we would dissect the cadaver over the coming months, before the end of the very first day of medical school, I decided that, when I died, I would want to donate my body for the same medical school dissection, you know, the same thing that was happening between me and the three other medical students that shared this cadaver, you know, kind of exploring its innards and sort of seeing what’s inside this strange man that we never knew in life. And, you know, as an extension, when you look inside the body of another person, you’re necessarily looking inside your own, seeing how you are built, how organs are, you know, organized inside of you. And so it kind of takes on this very self-reflective and philosophical nature. And I was really taken with that from Day 1 and resolved – and I’m still sticking to it – when I die, I want to donate my body for medical student dissection.

GROSS: Well, let’s start talking about a part of the body that does not make people squeamish. I’m thinking of the throat. When you were in med school, you were amazed at how stupidly designed the throat seemed. What seemed stupid about it?

REISMAN: You know, what is its basic function? The throat helps us deal with whatever enters our body, you know, usually through the mouth. We drink. We eat. We inhale. Air comes in through the mouth and the nose. All of it ends up in the throat. And it’s the throat’s very, very important job to deal with all of it. Specifically, the throat has to take food, drink saliva, other things that we mean to swallow and make sure they go into the one tube, the esophagus, the food tube, which goes down to the stomach. The tube right next to the esophagus, literally millimeters away, is the windpipe, which goes down to the lungs. And every single time something passes through the throat, its most important job is to make sure that that – whatever it is besides air does not go down the windpipe.

This – the design seemed fairly stupid to me because if you mess up just once, if you try to talk while swallowing just once or laugh with your mouth full, as we all know, sadly, you know, you can aspirate, choke and die just from one little slip up. So it seemed sort of silly to have these two tubes right next to each other. And every time we swallow food and drink or every time we thoughtlessly swallow our own saliva, which happens basically all day, every day of our lives, that material comes within a few millimeters of slipping into the windpipe, therefore a few millimeters within killing us.

And so it seemed like such a really poor design. Like, maybe food and drink and air could enter the body through different orifices. Of course, it can’t because of how we form in the womb. But it seems like a big problem that can cause a lot of trouble, and especially in contrast to other parts of the body, which seemed so exquisitely designed, so brilliantly constructed to keep us alive, to ensure our survival. The throat almost seemed like a really easy way to die.

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The human body

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Imagine sitting in the center of a firework that has just exploded. After the first flash of light and heat, sparks fly off in all directions, with some streaming together into fiery filaments and others fading quickly into cold, ashy oblivion. After a moment more, the smoke is all that remains—the echo, if you will, of the firework’s big bang.

Now imagine the firework is the universe, which scientists think began with a similar explosion. Where the firework’s expansion is propelled by a chemical reaction, the expansion of the cosmos comes from the energy of empty space itself. From where we sit, it seems that the universe is expanding in all directions, faster and faster at every moment.

This spring scientists announced that something is wrong with the fireworks. For the first time since the discovery of dark energy—the mysterious force that is accelerating our cosmic fireworks show—cosmologists think we may be on the cusp of something new. Two prominent dark energy surveys seeking to measure the nature of this force found evidence that dark energy seems to have weakened over time.

“If it is true, it is a big deal,” says Licia Verde, a theoretical cosmologist at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona in Spain and a member of the collaboration reporting the oddity. “But as usual, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.”

Dark energy was assumed to be a constant force in the universe, as unchanging and reliable as the forward march of time. If the new results are right, it is changeable after all. “It’s mega important,” says Paul J. Steinhardt, a cosmologist at Princeton University, who did not work on the data, adding that this is only true if the results hold up to scrutiny. “But it’s still early days.”

The news is based on a combination of two dark energy studies, called the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), with a third set of preexisting data. DES measures distant supernovae, and the DESI experiment measures galaxies and sound waves from the early universe. The third component measures the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the smoke ring of the cosmic firework.

DES yielded new findings back in February, and DESI came out with novel results in April. The DESI data produced a detailed three-dimensional map of the universe. It showed that galaxies appear to be spread apart less than they should be if dark energy’s role was unchanging through cosmic time.

The DESI telescope is perched on Kitt Peak in Arizona and measures the positions of millions of galaxies as they existed between 12 billion and two billion years ago. Astronomers compared these observed galactic locales against where galaxies are expected to be based on dark energy predictions and saw the lack of expected spreading.

A bigger surprise came when cosmologists combined the DESI galaxies, DES’s supernovae, and the cosmic microwave background. The map of reality began to drift apart from theory.

Theorists have been buzzing since if the results are true, a bedrock assumption of cosmology is incorrect. Scientists might have to throw out the widely held idea that dark energy is a “cosmological constant”—a static element of the universe.

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After his heartfelt reaction to his father’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention thrust him into the spotlight, 17-year-old Gus Walz has become one of the most high-profile people with nonverbal learning disorder.

The condition doesn’t mean Gus can’t speak — he does. After hearing his dad, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, describe his family as “my entire world” Wednesday night, the tearful teenager rose to his feet, pointed toward the stage, and said, “That’s my dad!”

Gus is one of millions of Americans with nonverbal learning disorder. A 2020 study in JAMA Network Open estimated that 3% to 4% of children and adolescents in the U.S. may have the condition, and another study this year in Scientific Reports concluded that the prevalence in children may be as high as 8%.

The condition, known as NVLD, was first recognized in 1967 and doesn’t yet have a formal clinical definition. It is characterized by a significant gap between verbal abilities — which are just fine — and nonverbal kinds of learning that involve visual-spatial processing, such as telling time on an analog clock, reading a map, and balancing a budget.

Those challenges with spatial awareness can give children trouble with motor skills. That can make them clumsy or cause problems with tasks like tying shoes, using silverware, and writing by hand, according to the NVLD Project, a nonprofit that aims to have the condition added to the American Psychiatric Assn.’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

In a way, having NVLD is like the opposite of having dyslexia, according to Scott Bezsylko, who works with neurodivergent students as executive director of Winston Preparatory School.

Reading is not a problem for kids with NVLD, who often have a large vocabulary. They’re also able to recall facts and memorize things like multiplication tables.

School becomes more challenging toward the end of elementary school when learning becomes more about noticing patterns and applying concepts. That can cause problems with reading comprehension and more advanced kinds of math problems.

NVLD also affects higher-order thinking, which is used to organize our thoughts and plan a project that requires multiple steps.

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The latest annual impact report from the Global Foodbanking Network — a nonprofit that works with regional food banks in more than 50 countries to fight hunger — found that its member organizations provided 1.7 billion meals to more than 40 million people in 2023. According to the nonprofit, this redistribution of food, much of which was recovered from farms or wholesale produce markets, mitigated an estimated 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

These numbers reflect an ongoing, high demand for food banks. Last year, the Global Foodbanking Network, or GFN, served almost as many people as it did in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic sent food insecurity soaring. In order to respond to this pressing need in their communities, many of GFN’s member organizations have invested in agricultural recovery, working to rescue food from farmers before it gets thrown out.

Their efforts show how food banks can serve the dual purpose of addressing hunger and protecting the environment. By intercepting perfectly good, edible food before it winds up in the landfill, food banks help mitigate harmful greenhouse gas emissions created by food loss and waste.

“There is always food that is unnecessarily wasted,” said Emily Broad Leib, the founding director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, who has worked with GFN before but was not involved in the recent study. All that unnecessary waste means “there is ongoing need for scaling up food banks and food-recovery operations,” Broad Leib added.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations found that 13 percent of food was lost while it was making its way from producers to retailers in 2022. Subsequently, 19 percent was wasted by retailers, restaurants, and households, according to a recent analysis from the United Nations Environment Program. The world’s households alone let 1 billion meals go to waste each day. The scope of food wasted around the world has been shockingly high for years: In 2011, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations released a study that suggested roughly one-third of food produced globally is never eaten.

Food waste at this scale comes with massive planetary impacts. When food goes uneaten, all of the emissions associated with growing, transporting, and processing it are rendered unnecessary. Furthermore, when food rots in landfills, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas that is roughly 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that 58 percent of methane emissions from U.S. landfills come from food waste. Globally, food loss and waste have been estimated to be responsible for 8 percent to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing them is essential for achieving climate targets.

Food banks can play a special role in that reduction by rescuing more food before it’s lost and redirecting it to people in need. “Our members have been building out their redistribution capacity,” said Lisa Moon, the president and CEO of GFN. “I think that was our first challenge in the face of this rising need: How do we as an organization capture more supply?”

In order to do this, food banks within GFN member organizations have been coordinating more closely with farmers to redirect surplus food from landfills. GFN defines surplus food as food from commercial streams that was grown for human consumption but that, for some reason or another, cannot be sold. So-called “ugly” produce — misshapen food that never makes it to the grocery store because of its looks — falls into this category.

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Google’s flagship Pixel smartphone line touts security as a centerpiece feature, offering guaranteed software updates for seven years and running stock Android that’s meant to be free of third-party add-ons and bloatware. On Thursday, though, researchers from the mobile device security firm iVerify are publishing findings on an Android vulnerability that seems to have been present in every Android release for Pixel since September 2017 and could expose the devices to manipulation and takeover.

The issue relates to a software package called “Showcase.apk” that runs at the system level and lurks invisible to users. The application was developed by the enterprise software company Smith Micro for Verizon as a mechanism for putting phones into a retail store demo mode—it is not Google software. Yet for years, it has been in each Android release for Pixel and has deep system privileges, including remote code execution and remote software installation. Even riskier, the application is designed to download a configuration file over an unencrypted HTTP web connection that iVerify researchers say could be hijacked by an attacker to take control of the application and then the entire victim device.

Verify disclosed its findings to Google at the beginning of May, and the tech giant has not yet released a fix for the issue. Google spokesperson Ed Fernandez tells WIRED in a statement that Showcase “is no longer being used” by Verizon, and Android will remove Showcase from all supported Pixel devices with a software update “in the coming weeks.” He added that Google has not seen evidence of active exploitation and that the app is not present in the new Pixel 9 series devices that Google announced this week.

In response to WIRED’s inquiry about Showcase’s vulnerability, Verizon spokesperson George Koroneos says, “The APK in question was used for retail demos and is no longer in use.” Smith Micro said in a statement that, “The APK in question was previously licensed to Verizon for in-store retail demos, and is no longer in use.”

“I’ve seen a lot of Android vulnerabilities, and this one is unique in a few ways and quite troubling,” says Rocky Cole, chief operating officer of iVerify and a former US National Security Agency analyst. “When Showcase.apk runs, it has the ability to take over the phone. But the code is, frankly, shoddy. It raises questions about why third-party software that runs with such high privileges so deep in the operating system was not tested more deeply. It seems to me that Google has been pushing bloatware to Pixel devices around the world.”

iVerify researchers discovered the application after the company’s threat-detection scanner flagged an unusual Google Play Store app validation on a user’s device. The customer, big data analytics company Palantir, worked with iVerify to investigate

Showcase.apk and disclose the findings to Google. Palantir chief information security officer Dane Stuckey says that the discovery and what he describes as Google’s slow, opaque response has prompted Palantir to phase out not just Pixel phones, but all Android devices across the company.

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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

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