James' World 2

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What’s the secret to a fulfilling career? Most advice focuses on finding purpose and satisfaction in your work. If you can just land the perfect job doing meaningful work, you’ll finally be happy. But my research across a wide range of organizations and industries shows that our understanding of what leads to professional satisfaction is often misplaced. People tend to overestimate the importance of the what when they should be focusing on the who.

In interviews with a diverse group of 160 people from a variety of industries and positions, my colleagues and I found again and again that flourishing in your career depends as much on your relationships, both in and out of work, as it does on your job itself. People whose work is mundane or demanding are just as likely to feel satisfied and fulfilled as those with fun or inspiring jobs if they proactively invest in relationships that nourish them and create a sense of purpose.

The importance of relationships is backed up by research. Studies show that social connections play a central role in fostering a sense of purpose and well-being in the workplace. They also impact the bottom line: Effective management of social capital within organizations facilitates learning and knowledge sharing, increases employee retention and engagement, reduces burnout, sparks innovation, and improves employee and organizational performance.

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For decades, this was a deeply personal and uncomfortable question no one wanted to answer. But pay transparency is becoming more mainstream today. Already seven states require employers to disclose salary ranges during the hiring process.

And more workers are taking matters into their own hands, too. On social media, people are openly sharing what they do for work and how much money they make. The goal is to empower others to seek higher pay and to address pay inequity, which disproportionately affects women and minorities.

One of the leading voices in this movement is Hannah Williams, a 26-year-old content creator from Alexandria, Va. who in April 2022 launched Salary Transparent Street, a viral TikTok series in which she asks strangers across the country how much money they make. Her videos have reached tens of millions of people with short, lively interviews that feature teachers, nurses, data analysts, and government workers, all revealing their pay. Recent videos highlighted an event planner making $80,000 per year; an interpreter making $43,000; a college statistics professor making $70,000; a software engineer making $191,000; a nurse anesthetist making $280,000; and a water vendor outside the White House who reported making $3,000–$4,000 per week.

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The idea of mindfulness activities promoting healthy and restful sleep isn’t novel; in fact, there are numerous mindfulness methods that are both poised to improve mood and get someone in the space that invites restful sleep. Some hinge on breathing exercises; others focus more so on meditation; and others still ask you to practice mental exercises, like cognitive shuffling. Another option to add to your bedtime toolbox? Savoring, a mindfulness technique that involves concentrating on positive thoughts and basking in the joy and peace such thoughts bring you as a means to ease into sleep.

Research on savoring has positively connected it to well-being in general, and a recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Gerontology and Geriatrics examined its effect on sleep. According to the findings, “higher levels of savoring were significantly associated with lower levels of sleep-related impairment.” On the flip side, rumination, or dwelling on thoughts and memories that aren’t happiness-inducing, was associated with higher levels of sleep impairment and disturbance.

While more research is needed to connect a causal relationship between A+ sleep and savoring, we can still deduce that putting yourself in happy state before bed stands to help your case when it comes to having sweet dreams. Given that stress and sleep have an adversarial relationship, it make sense that putting yourself in a positive mindset absent of stress would help your case.

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Imagine waking up in pitch darkness paralyzed from head to toe. You try to scream but can’t. Suddenly you realize there is a ghost with bloody fangs hovering over you. Before you know, the creature violently attacks you.

While this sounds like something out of a horror movie, experiences like this called sleep paralysis are quite common as shown in our research in more than six countries.

Sleep paralysis—paralysis upon falling asleep or awakening—affects about 1 in 5 people. If being paralyzed when waking up isn’t chilling enough, some people worldwide encounter terrorizing bedroom intruders, ranging from magical witches and demons to blood-sucking vampires. These surreal sights can best be described as a nightmare coming alive before your eyes.

But why does sleep paralysis occur and, crucially, why does it come with these uncanny visions? Although the science behind the bodily paralysis is now understood, it has remained a mystery why you might see a ghost.

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The discovery of a hidden primordial black hole, which formed just 750 million years after the Big Bang, suggests that it may be the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of the cosmic monsters hiding in the early universe.

A rare supermassive black hole found hiding at the dawn of the universe could indicate that there were thousands more of the ravenous monsters stalking the early cosmos than scientists thought — and astronomers aren’t sure why. 

The primordial black hole is around 1 billion times the mass of our sun and was found at the center of the galaxy COS-87259. The ancient galaxy formed just 750 million years after the Big Bang and was spotted by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory in Chile, in a tiny patch of sky less than 10 times the size of the full moon.

Obscured beneath a cloak of turbulent stardust, the rapidly growing black hole was seen consuming part of its accretion disc of orbiting matter while spewing the leftovers out in a jet traveling close to the speed of light. The monster black hole appears to be at a rare intermediate stage of growth, somewhere between a dusty, star-forming galaxy and an enormous, brightly glowing black hole called a quasar. 

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An illustration of a quasar, which the new black hole is an early form of, blasting a jet of hot, radioactive wind into the cosmos. (Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

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You’re not being paranoid. If you always feel like somebody’s watching you, as the song goes, you’re probably right. Especially if you’re at work.

Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, as labor shifted to work-from-home, a huge number of US employers ramped up the use of surveillance software to track employees. The research firm Gartner says 60 percent of large employers have deployed such monitoring software—it doubled during the pandemic—and will likely hit 70 percent in the next few years.

That’s right—even as we’ve shifted toward a hybrid model with many workers returning to offices, different methods of employee surveillance (dubbed “bossware” by some) aren’t going away; it’s here to stay and could get much more invasive. 

As detailed in the book Your Boss Is an Algorithm, authors Antonio Aloisi and Valerio de Stefano describe “expanded managerial powers” that companies have put into place over the pandemic. This includes the adoption of more tools, including software and hardware, to track worker productivity, their day-to-day activities and movements, computer and mobile phone keystrokes, and even their health statuses. 

This can be called “datafication” or “informatization,” according to the book, or “the practice by which every movement, either offline or online, is traced, revised and stored as necessary, for statistical, financial, commercial and electoral purposes.”

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Photograph: Robert Daly/Getty Images

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Among the forests of Yellowstone National Park, some wolf packs share their territory with cougars. Generally, the two species leave each other alone, although wolves may occasionally run a cougar up a tree and steal its kill—or poke around its feces, which the felines use to mark their territory.

Whether from this scat or the water contaminated with it, some wolves manage to pick up a strange feline parasite. This parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, doesn’t make the wolves ill, but it does change their behavior, making many of them bolder and more inclined to take risks—for better or for worse.

Scientists who have been studying the Yellowstone wolves found that those infected byT. gondii are more likely to disperse from their pack or start a pack of their own. “Dispersal is one of the most dangerous things because survival actually decreases for dispersing wolves, so not very many wolves actually survive the dispersal process,” says Connor Meyer, a researcher at the University of Montana, and one of the authors of the study, published in Nature. But if that wolf succeeds and becomes a pack leader, it will father more pups, achieving a greater reproductive success—a reward that may be worth the risk.

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A parasite infection can make a leader of the pack—or a dead wolf.

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