People warned me before I came to Tel Aviv a few days ago that the Israel of Oct. 7 is an Israel that I’ve never been to before. They were right. It is a place in which Israelis have never lived before, a nation that Israeli generals have never had to protect before, an ally that America has never had to defend before — certainly not with the urgency and resolve that would lead a U.S. president to fly over and buck up the whole nation.
After traveling around Israel and the West Bank, I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any other time since its War of Independence in 1948. And it’s for three key reasons:
First, Israel is facing threats from a set of enemies who combine medieval theocratic worldviews with 21st-century weaponry — and are no longer organized as small bands of militiamen but as modern armies with brigades, battalions, cyber-capabilities, long-range rockets, drones, and technical support. I am speaking about Iranian-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen — and now even the openly Hamas-embracing Vladimir Putin. These foes have long been there, but all of them seemed to surface together like dragons during this conflict, threatening Israel with a 360-degree war all at once.
How does a modern democracy live with such a threat? This is exactly the question these demonic forces wanted to instill in the mind of every Israeli. They are not seeking a territorial compromise with the Jewish state. Their goal is to collapse the confidence of Israelis that their defense and intelligence services can protect them from surprise attacks across their borders — so Israelis will, first, move away from the border regions, and then they will move out of the country altogether.
I am stunned by how many Israelis now feel this danger personally, no matter where they live — starting with a friend who lives in Jerusalem telling me that she and her husband just got gun licenses to have pistols at home. No one is going to snatch their children and take them into a tunnel. Hamas, alas, has tunneled fear into many, many Israeli heads far from the Gaza border.
Everything in our homes gathers dust. But what exactly is it? Where does it come from, and why does it keep coming back? Is it from outside? Is it fibres from our clothes and cells from our skin?
Yes, but it’s a lot more than that.
People from all around Australia and 35 other countries have been sending their dust to Macquarie University’s DustSafe program. Instead of emptying the vacuum cleaner into the bin, they package it up and we analyze it. As a result, we are getting to know the secrets of your dust!
Here’s a taste of what we know so far.
Dust Is Everywhere
Dust is everywhere. It settles on all surfaces in the natural environment as well as inside homes and buildings — where we spend about 90% of our time, even before COVID.
Some dust is natural, coming from rocks, soils, and even space. But the DustSafe program is revealing Australian house dust can include nasties such as:
radioactive elements
antibiotic-resistant genes (genes that make bacteria resistant to antibiotics)
microplastics and
perfluorinated chemicals (PFAS) found in fire-fighting foams, stain and water protection for fabrics and carpets, some packaging and other sources.
Dust From Inside Your Home
Some estimates suggest one-third of trace element contaminants in household dust originate from sources inside your home, with the rest migrating from outside via air, clothes, pets, shoes, and the like.
This week, Taylor Swift’s 1989 debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard 200. And it didn’t just top the chart; her album scored the biggest debut since Adele’s 25 released in 2015.
This is an odd milestone considering that Swift released 1989 in October 2014—surely you recall the album’s ubiquitous millennial pop anthems “Blank Space,” “Bad Blood,” and “Shake It Off.” But that was the old 1989. The new 1989—the album that last week outperformed the streaming figures of the original release in the same period by more than 1,300 percent—is 1989 (Taylor’s Version). This is the latest of several such rerecordings, each debuting at no. 1 and each marketed as “Taylor’s Version,” hinting at the underlying vendetta that prompted dueling versions of these albums in the first place: Scooter Braun’s purchase of Big Machine for over $300 million in a secretive deal with the record label’s founder, Scott Borchetta, that incurred the wildly productive wrath of Swift.
Swift, Borchetta, and Braun have something of a convoluted history that’s crucial to understanding this whole mess. Swift previously tried—and failed—to buy her master recordings, as Borchetta preferred to price her masters into the terms of a new recording contract with Big Machine—terms Swift rejected. Swift says she assumed Borchetta would sell her back catalog once she left Big Machine for Universal Music Group. The issue is Braun, specifically. Swift says he brought her to tears with his “incessant, manipulative bullying” on more than one occasion, citing, for instance, his involvement in her humiliating feud with Kanye West. She’s also criticized Borchetta for orchestrating the deal despite knowing her history with Braun. Swift described her earlier music as being “beholden to men who had no part in creating it.”
Over a year after the acquisition, Braun sold the master rights of Swift’s first six albums to the investment firm Shamrock Capital, but—according to Swift—Braun still continues to profit from the recordings per the terms of the sale. So, Swift, possibly inspired by a tweet from Kelly Clarkson, began to rerecord and rerelease those six albums produced under Big Machine to reclaim her back catalog and excise Braun from her musical legacy. This was at once a deeply personal feud and a broader crusade for musicians’ rights. Taylor’s Versions were a peculiar gambit, the realization of a strategy devised a couple of decades earlier by Prince in his notorious campaign against Warner Bros. in the 1990s.
Caleb Scharf wants to take you on an epic tour. His book, The Zoomable Universe, starts from the ends of the observable universe, exploring its biggest structures, like groups of galaxies, and goes all the way down to the Planck length—less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a meter. It is a breathtaking synthesis of the large and small. Readers journeying through the book are treated to pictures, diagrams, and illustrations, all accompanied by Scharf’s lucid, conversational prose. These visual aids give vital depth and perspective to the phenomena that he points out like a cosmic safari guide. Did you know, he offers, that all the Milky Way’s stars can fit inside the volume of our solar system?
Scharf, the director of Columbia University’s Astrobiology Center, is a suitably engaging guide. He’s the author of the 2012 book Gravity’s Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Universe, and he speculated in Nautilus about whether alien life could be so advanced as to be indistinguishable from physics.
In The Zoomable Universe, Scharf puts the notion of scale—in biology and physics—center-stage. “The start of your journey through this book and through all known scales of reality is at that edge between known and unknown,” he writes. Nautilus caught up with him to talk about our experience with scale and why he thinks it’s mysterious. (Scharf is a member of Nautilus’ advisory board.)
Why is scale interesting?
Scale is fascinating. Scientifically, it’s a fundamental property of reality. We don’t even think about it. We talk about space and time—and perhaps we puzzle more over the nature of time than we do over the nature of scale or space—but it’s equally mysterious.
What’s mysterious about scale?
It’s something we all have direct experience of, even intuitively. We learn to evaluate the size of things. But we’re operating as humans in a very, very narrow slice of what is out there. And we’re aware of a very narrow range of scales: In some sense, we know more about the very large than we do about the very small.
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In The Zoomable Universe, Scharf puts the notion of scale—in biology and physics—center-stage. “The start of your journey through this book and through all known scales of reality is at that edge between known and unknown,” he writes. Illustrations by Ron Miller.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments next week in a pivotal firearms case that could have profound implications for how police and courts deal with domestic violence.
The question: Should people who are placed under domestic violence protection orders also lose access to their guns?
For many victim advocates, the answer is obvious. Women are five times more likely to be killed in a domestic violence incident when the abuser has access to a gun. Advocates argue that the gun restrictions tied to such orders are among the most powerful tools for domestic violence victims and that without them, more people will die.
For gun rights groups and their most ardent supporters, that is beside the point. They contend that people subject to protection orders haven’t been convicted of a crime and that taking their firearms away violates the Second Amendment. If the government can disarm them, they ask, who could the government disarm next?
Earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit sided with gun rights supporters, invalidating a federal law passed by Congress in 1994 that bars people under domestic violence orders from having firearms.
If the Supreme Court upholds that decision and rules that gun restrictions tied to restraining orders are unconstitutional, states would have fewer options to stop domestic abusers from possessing, and using, guns. And in conservative states, the aggressive rollback of gun control laws means that it is already easier for people to get guns to begin with.
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Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica. Source images: Protective orders obtained by WPLN; lithograph by George Bellows via Wikimedia Commons; supremecourt.gov; California Department of Justice Firearms Safety Certificate Manual
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Nausea sucks. It’s painful and all-consuming, and there’s almost nothing to be done once it hits. Little things can help—get some fresh air, sip a ginger ale, nibble on crackers—but nausea is on its own timeline. It sticks around until it’s ready to leave.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve held on so tightly to a bit of wisdom that my mom gave me when I was a kid plagued by stomachaches. It was something I could do that maybe, maybe, would help bring an end to the pain. And it didn’t require much effort. The trick, my mom told me, was to simply lie down on my left side.
The way I imagined it as a kid was that the hole in my stomach that led to my intestines was on the left side, so lying positioned that way would help it drain faster and make it stop hurting sooner. (Turns out this is not what is happening, but it’s what I believed at the time.) I’d lie on my side and envision the painful stuff inside me swirling out of my stomach. These days, whether it be the flu, a hangover, or stop-and-go traffic, I still find myself lying on my left side, urging the nausea away. It helps—a bit!
I’ve only recently begun to wonder if the trick is more than just a piece of mom wisdom. Turns out the whole concept of resting on your left side stems from the tradition of ayurveda, a system of medicine that originated in India more than 3,000 years ago. More recently, scientists have studied how body position can affect digestion, focusing on acid reflux. The evidence suggests that lying on the left side indeed reduces heartburn. For instance, in a small study from 2000, those who lay on their left side experienced fewer and shorter reflux episodes in the four hours after eating a fatty meal than did those who lay on their right side
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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus.
Diana Henriques was first stricken in late 1996. A business reporter for The New York Times, she was in the midst of a punishing effort to bring a reporting project to fruition. Then one morning she awoke to find herself incapable of pinching her contact lens between her thumb and forefinger.
Henriques’s hands were soon cursed with numbness, frailty, and a gnawing ache she found similar to menstrual cramps. These maladies destroyed her ability to type—the lifeblood of her profession—without experiencing debilitating pain.
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Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Millennium Images / GalleryStock.
While you can’t necessarily eliminate the laundry list of stressors going on in the world right now, you can implement strategies to help manage your own emotions to decrease your anxiety. And there’s something you already do all day, every day, that is an excellent tool to tap into: your breath. Yep, breathing exercises for anxiety went mainstream during the COVID-19 pandemic, and as many people have found after trying them out, these stress-busting techniques can really come in handy whenever you’re feeling overwhelmed.
ICYMI, anxiety is pretty normal. It’s the most common mental illness in the United States, and it impacts nearly 40 million adults in the country each year, per the Anxiety & Depression Association of America. (That’s just over 18 percent of the population!)
So, how exactly does breathing help? Turns out how you breathe can affect your heart rate, blood pressure, and nervous system, all of which play a role in your body’s anxiety and stress levels, explains Rachel L. Goldman, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in private practice who is also a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
For example, shallow breathing typically involves drawing just a bit of air into your lungs, and taking shorter and faster breaths through your mouth (think: using only your upper chest to breathe). Engaging in this type of breathing can typically cause stress, panic, anxiety, tension, and pain, as it signals to your body that it’s in its “flight” response, Goldman explains.
Deep breathing, on the other hand, usually draws air deep into your lungs through your nose, and uses your chest to bring air into your diaphragm. The result? You’re able to get more oxygen into your brain and reduce your blood pressure and heart rate. Plus, it signals to your body that you can relax, that you’re safe, which is what makes it great for relieving anxiety, says Goldman.
Several years ago, a British man named Harry picked his nose. A hidden camera recorded him in this private moment, then someone uploaded the video to the internet, and soon Harry’s pratfall exploded into a worldwide meme. Millions of people—most of them in the United States—became obsessed with the video. Everywhere Harry went, strangers shot significant looks at him and touched their nostrils, as if to say, “Hey, you’re that nose-picking guy!”
Harry loved the attention—he described his fame as a “safety blanket” and said he felt as if everyone on the street had become his friend. But there was a problem with Harry’s internet stardom: No one else could perceive it.
In a parallel reality where most of us live, Harry had been diagnosed with psychotic delusions, many of them seemingly borrowed from the YouTube videos he obsessively watched.
His family convinced him to visit a mental health clinic affiliated with the University of Birmingham. There, he enthused to his clinician—Rosa Ritunnano—that he was “the happiest man in the world.” Harry told Ritunnano that he could read and control other people’s thoughts; he deployed his telepathy to battle the lizard-humans and the Illuminati at the center of a web of power. These enemies, for their part, surveilled him through hidden cameras and telepathic spies.
As nightmarish as that all might sound, Harry relished the attention from the imaginary conspirators who monitored him. “If I found out that they [were] not watching me and reading my mind, I would feel alone and crazy,” he explained to Ritunnano.
Though he was engaged in an apocalyptic psi war, Harry was also a remarkably pleasant fellow who seemed to pose no threat to anyone. He did refuse his prescribed antipsychotic medications, but when Ritunnano and her colleagues asked him whether he would submit to a battery of pencil-and-paper tests, he cheerfully agreed. And so the doctors administered some whimsically named tools that are used to measure self-worth, including the Purpose in Life Test, the Life Regard Index and the Existential Meaning Scale. Harry aced them all.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Amir Levy/Getty Images
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James' World 2 