James' World 2

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As the fumes took effect, they bathed his mind in what James called “the tremendously exciting sense of … metaphysical illumination.” What stuck with him after the drugs wore off, though, was not any particular thought — which he soberly conceded as “meaningless drivel” — but the intense feeling of meaning they came packaged in. He called that sense of significance the “noetic quality” of mystical experience.

The noetic quality describes a sensation of encountering revelations of the highest order, where the secret workings of your mind and the world are unfolded before you. But as James also described, these encounters have an elusive quality that makes them difficult to communicate. And through the 20th century, mainstream psychology moved away from nebulous ideas like noeticism and meaning, in favor of variables that were more objective and observable.

Until 2006, when a landmark paper led by the late Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University signaled that research on the profound sense of meaning that accompanies noetic insights was making its way back into mainstream psychology — this time by way of psychedelic drugs.

Griffiths’s study found that, two months after taking psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, two-thirds out of 30 volunteers rated their subsequent trip as one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives. Further studies that ask the same question have pushed that number to as high as 87 percent of participants, confirming the curious fact that a group of molecules can reliably deliver on demand what the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl called the central human motivation: the search for meaning.

Despite the past two decades of research documenting the tight relationship between psychedelics and meaningful experiences, we still know surprisingly little about what’s actually going on in the brain when psychedelic-assisted meaning sets in. In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, psychologists Patric Plesa and Rotem Petranker pointed out that even “the best minds in psychedelic research … consistently report that psychedelics enhance a subjective sense of meaning without an explicit theory of meaning.” It’s strange that we lack a mechanical understanding of something so central to a life well lived. If we understood more about the neural mechanics of these bursts of revelation, could we learn anything about how to coax them into our sober lives more often?

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A viral video showed a turtle with a straw stuck up its nose. Stories about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch revealed how island-sized trash mounds had collected in the ocean between Hawaii and California. And then there was that National Geographic cover of a plastic bag floating in the water, beneath the scrawled words “Planet or Plastic?” The issue publicized a remarkable statistic: Despite the world’s efforts to recycle, 91% ends up in the trash.

You may already be part of the growing number of people who are trying to ditch plastic. I’ve tried to faithfully bring my reusable Baggu bags ($12) to the grocery store, and carry my own metal straw ($4 for three) with me when I go out to restaurants. I use S’well and BKR bottles ($25 and $45) instead of plastic water bottles. I like to congratulate myself for these small steps, but something weird happened once I began cutting down. I suddenly saw how much other plastic filled my kitchen, bathroom, and closet. I saw it in my toddler’s sippy cups and toys, in the cling film enveloping the meat and produce at the grocery store, and in the contents of my medicine cabinet. How could I ever hope to curb plastic, given that it’s woven into every part of my life?

As I’ve begun to explore more ways to cut down, I’ve realized that the task ahead is not as painful as it might seem. This is partly thanks to a flock of new startups coming up with alternatives to everyday plastic products. I’ve researched many of these brands and tested many of their products to give you a totally achievable, relatively painless, and very convenient guide to get started curbing your plastic use.

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Are you ready to take your fight against plastic to the next level?

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If you haven’t heard it or felt it yourself, people are angry about the state of tipping. Consumers have noticed that they’re being asked to tip more often and for higher amounts than before. They buy their morning coffee and the barista flips around a screen that nudges them to add on a little more, or they go to pick up lunch, and they’re prompted to leave an extra $1. In particularly confounding situations, some people have found themselves being asked to tip their dermatologist or an e-commerce website. In the media, story after story has been written, recorded, and televised about the current state of affairs in tip culture in America.

To describe this culture, we’ve coined terms like “tipflation” and “guilt-tipping.” Many of the conversations I find myself in about high prices these days end with someone saying, “And then you’re supposed to tip on top of it.”

Contrary to the high emotions around it, tip requests aren’t that big a deal. What every frustrated consumer seems to forget is that you can just say no — plenty of people do. (Whether you should is a separate question, especially for workers whose livelihoods depend on tips.) Tipping in the vast majority of cases is optional. Maybe that tip jar was a little easier to ignore than the tablet, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret here: The worker behind the counter hoped you’d put money into the jar, you just didn’t feel as icky about not doing it.

“There are bigger things in this world going on to get frustrated about,” said Dianne Gottsman, a national etiquette expert.

So why does this rile people up so much? Tipping has become a sort of proxy for frustrations about the economy; it’s a small thing that often feels easier to focus on than the bigger things, like inflation. It can pit workers, consumers, and even businesses against one another in a way that’s uncomfortable for all involved.

It’s also an issue with no easy solutions. Some service workers don’t want tipping to go away, even if it means they’ll be paid a higher base wage. And while it’s easy to suggest businesses simply pay their workers more, that extra pay will come from somewhere — often in higher prices being passed on to consumers.

Why tipping gets people in such a tizzy

One thing is true: Tipping is different from what it used to be, even a few years ago. During the pandemic, there was a groundswell of support for service workers and small businesses, and practically everyone who could overtip did. That support hasn’t lasted — society has pretty quickly given up on worrying about essential workers — but some of the tipping changes have. “That emboldened a lot of companies to be more aggressive in asking for tips,” said Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at Bankrate. “It was followed pretty quickly by this big bout of inflation, and now we’re starting to see the backlash.”

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Grout is no fun. The word even sounds unhappy. And the bright white stuff shows Every. Little. Blemish. It’s porous, hard to get to, easily stains—the list goes on. But fret not, here we have it: some helpful tips to make your least favorite chore a little more bearable.

Materials

• Baking Soda
• Vinegar
• Hydrogen peroxide (optional)
• Spray bottle
• Grout brush or scrub brush (a toothbrush works as well!)
• Small bowl

Instructions

Step 1: Start with vinegar.

Fill your spray bottle with a 1:1 solution of vinegar and water and spray the work area generously. Let the solution sit for about five minutes, then follow up with a grout brush or a scrub brush. If you don’t have one of these, a toothbrush works in a pinch. Rinse with warm water.

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Photos by Ashley Poskin

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A century ago, August Krogh, a Danish physiologist who had just won the Nobel Prize, embarked on a U.S. lecture tour. Krogh studied the intricate network of blood vessels that nourish our muscles, but he was increasingly interested in diabetes—a condition that his wife, the physician Marie Krogh, not only treated but also suffered from. Marie asked her husband to stop in Toronto, where a surgeon and a medical student had experimented with “pancreatic extract,” which appeared to shift sugar from the bloodstream into muscles and other organs. Krogh returned to Denmark with permission to sell the stuff. He and some colleagues started Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, and in the spring of 1923, they injected their first patients with an early miracle drug: insulin.

The next year, two Nordisk employees, brothers named Thorvald and Harald Pedersen, left the company. Krogh apparently asked Harald, “What are you going to do?”

“We want to make insulin,” Harald responded.

“Well, you’ll never manage that,” Krogh said.

Krogh was wrong. The Pedersens founded Novo Terapeutisk Laboratorium, and for decades, the two rival companies produced much of the world’s insulin. In the early days, they operated hospitals mostly for people with Type 1 diabetes, a previously fatal autoimmune condition in which the body produces little or no insulin. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, their market grew: obesity and an associated condition, Type 2 diabetes, were becoming more common. Novo and Nordisk, which merged in 1989, explored other potential diabetes remedies, including a naturally occurring hormone, GLP-1, that appeared to exert exquisite control over blood sugar. It would eventually form the basis for one of the world’s most profitable drugs.

Krogh once argued that, for many biological problems, “there will be some animal of choice, or a few such animals, on which it can be most conveniently studied”—an insight known as Krogh’s principle. Originally, GLP-1 wasn’t considered a useful medicine because it dissolved too quickly in the body. But in the nineteen-nineties, as though in homage to Krogh, an endocrinologist at the Department of Veterans Affairs discovered that the venom of Gila monsters, a type of lizard native to North America, carried a peptide similar to GLP-1 that lasted for hours. He licensed his finding to researchers who developed a twice-daily injection that imitated the lizard peptide. Meanwhile, scientists at Novo Nordisk developed their own GLP-1 analogue and, in 2010, released a once-daily injection called liraglutide, or Victoza, for Type 2 diabetes. The GLP-1 drugs had another effect, too: people taking them lost a little weight.

If the story ended there, so-called GLP-1 agonists—also known as incretin mimetics, because they mimic natural gut hormones—would not be very well known. But Novo Nordisk wanted a medication that people didn’t have to inject every day, so it developed a once-weekly formulation. For reasons that remain a mystery, semaglutide, which is sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, caused profound reductions in weight. A two-hundred-pound woman might easily lose thirty pounds on the medication. People who had struggled to lose weight since childhood suddenly could.

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There’s also been an uptick in anecdotal reports of a brutal, long-lasting cough going around. As one TikTok user put it: everyone seems to have “a hacking cough that’s been going on for weeks.”

Doctors around the country have noticed it, too. “We have been seeing an unusually large number of patients who had typical viral upper respiratory infections, but have had a lingering cough that has lasted weeks to months,” Dr. Scott Braunstein, a double-board certified internal medicine and emergency medicine physician and the national medical director of Sollis Health, told HuffPost.

It doesn’t appear to be the flu or COVID, but another pathogen that’s attacking and irritating our respiratory systems, according to experts.

Dr. Janet O’Mahony, an internal medicine physician at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, said many of her patients have recently come into her practice with a nasty cough that’s lingered for two weeks or so. Some people have also had sinus congestion, a sore throat, and post-nasal drip.

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The first time I opened the app for Temu, the viral Chinese shopping site, a pop-up greeted me: I could spin a wheel to win $200. The spinner landed on “1 more chance.” I spun again, and this time, I won $200. But wait, there was more — if I checked out in the next 10 minutes, I could net a cool $300. Cold hard cash right into my wallet? Well, no: $300 worth of coupons, which, on Temu, can buy you selected home goods, cutesy electronics, apparel — really, anything you can imagine.

This carnival barker’s pitch is Temu’s opening gambit; it’s how the company hopes to draw you in and keep you coming back. Such promotional offers and games are brazen enough to catch the eye — or turn off a skeptical shopper completely. The loud and disorienting introduction is also your first clue into what Temu offers: a dizzying circus of dirt-cheap things. A pair of wireless over-the-ear headphones for $6.80. An earbud-cleaning set (for getting into the tiny crevices) for just 98 cents. A 14-piece food chopper for $15.49. A set of hair clips in the shape of Danish biscuits for $2.49. It’s virtual aisle after virtual aisle of amusing, offbeat, baffling objects and gag gifts, a Dollar General mixed with Etsy, with a dash of Spencer’s.

A little over a year ago, Temu didn’t exist. It launched in September 2022 but quickly rose to the top of app store charts, thanks in large part to a flurry of ads across social media and not one, but two, pricey Super Bowl ads that touted the company’s discordant tagline: “Shop like a billionaire.” As of May, according to the app-industry analysis site Business of Apps, Temu, which sells in 48 countries, had more than 100 million active users in the US.

Like Amazon, the site sells a seemingly infinite range of products, but where Amazon revolutionized easy shopping, particularly for those customers who have a clear idea of what they’re looking to buy (usually some essential item that’s cheapest on the site or hard to source elsewhere), Temu has refined the art of nudging people to make impulse purchases. It does this by accentuating how affordable it is to indulge your every curiosity online.

Earlier this year, New York Magazine’s John Herrman wondered whether Temu was the future of buying things; it’s more like the inevitable conclusion of a retail race to the bottom for which Amazon drafted the blueprint.

How Temu found its market in the US

With such a diversity of often downright weird stuff on the site, it’s hard to know precisely who the Temu customer is. On a cursory browse, I see five pairs of ankle socks for $2.69 and a pack of adorable miniature poker cards for just 39 cents. A Temu spokesperson told Vox in an email that “every day is like Black Friday on our platform.”

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Siobhán Gallagher for Vox

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This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.

She is 76.

Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly, most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”

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Illustration by Klaus Kremmerz

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The Jay Stephen Hooper Memorial Heliport sits on top of a brutalist brick-and-concrete building, the C. Erwin Piper Technical Center, across from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. It’s an area where trains, buses, and highways all converge, and where the sounds of helicopters coming and going are barely noticeable above the din of engines and the smell of exhaust. From the ground, the heliport is barely visible. The best view of it is nearby, from the Cesar Chavez Bridge, over the Los Angeles River, which, in this part of the city, is just a low stream of water in a giant concrete aqueduct. From there, looking over a rail yard, one can see the helicopters parked at an angle on the roof, and the blinking of video monitors inside of an observation tower. On a recent evening, just before sunset, a police helicopter alighted, paused for a few minutes with its propeller spinning, then took off again.

The C. Erwin Piper Technical Center is the headquarters of the Air Support Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, which, according to the L.A.P.D., is the largest local airborne law-enforcement unit in the world. The division has seventeen helicopters in its fleet and more than ninety employees, and keeps at least two helicopters airborne for twenty hours a day or more, if deemed necessary. The aircraft are a constant part of the L.A. backdrop, like palm trees and traffic. A cluster of them hovering might indicate a crime or an accident, but one would have to be motivated to find out for sure. In addition to the L.A.P.D. patrols, there are also many news helicopters in L.A., plus the choppers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Aero Bureau and of the Fire Department, and private helos ferrying the very wealthy. These other helicopters are identifiable on radar apps you can download onto your phone, but L.A.P.D. helicopters aren’t always labelled on these apps, which can make them difficult to track. They are often black with a white stripe down the middle, somewhat orca-like in appearance. At night, they blink with green and red lights, or beam blinding Nightsun spotlights toward the ground. The division’s mascot is a cartoon buzzard, in apparent honor of their tendency to circle. Rare is the day in central L.A. when you go without seeing one. They have made their way into movies—“Blue Thunder,” “Boyz n the Hood”—and into the city’s psyche.

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In the past few years, as public sentiment toward the police has shifted, the L.A.P.D.’s helicopters have also come under scrutiny. Photograph by Stuart Palley

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