James' World 2

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In the opening of HBO’s The Last of Us, a couple of scientists on a 1960s-era interview show debate the possibility of a fungus-driven pandemic destroying humanity. It not only sets the tone for the show, it makes you wonder if something like that could actually happen. The answer: No. At least, not right now. In the future, though, it’s a possibility.

This got me thinking about what kind of infection is most likely to ravage humanity and destroy our way of life in the coming years. The contenders: Bacteria, viruses, and fungus. Each has an impressive historical kill count and its own strengths and weaknesses.

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Image: ETAJOE (Shutterstock)

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I feel like I’ve lost years of my life to sleeplessness—sometimes I look as if I have, too. Most nights I wake in the middle of the night, suddenly on some kind of vigil for that saber-toothed tiger attack. But of course, the tiger never comes (I know this because I am then awake for hours). For me, a good night’s sleep is a meager six hours. The worst-case scenario—about four hours, broken into little pieces (a bit like me)—happens all too frequently. 

Like many insomniacs, I’ve tried everything: over-the-counter sleeping pills (they work, but dependency feels wrong), quitting caffeine and alcohol (it helps, but it is no cure), ear plugs and eye masks (essential), sleep podcasts, bedtime breathwork, magnesium and melatonin (all useless), and CBTi (that’s ‘i’ for insomnia—effective but brutal, and my bad habits and wakefulness always won out). I have followed all the received wisdom around sleep hygiene—to no real effect. And with all the literature around the negative health consequences of sleeplessness, it’s easy to let panic steer your life into obsessiveness around sleep. That didn’t help either. 

But then a chance conversation a couple of months ago with the sleep coach Camilla Stoddart changed everything. “Have you tried journaling?” she asked. I hadn’t. I was always too self-conscious, too unconvinced. To me, journalling belonged with pillow mists and milky drinks in the softly-softly, totally ineffective category. Stoddart explained the science: “The amygdala is your brain’s worry center, and is responsible for emotional processing—it’s the amygdala that judges whether something is worth panicking over.” It was my stressed-out amygdala that was waking me up, she said, adding, “but journalling will help to switch it off.”

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Photographed by Steven Meisel, Vogue, June 2006

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Your heart plays a key role in your overall health. It’s the main organ in your cardiovascular system, making it responsible for moving blood throughout the body, controlling your pulse rate, and maintaining your blood pressure. You might be wondering since the heart is such a vital organ, how can we keep it healthy? Turns out, your diet has an important job. 

Everyone from the American Heart Association to the US Department of Health and Human Services recommends making specific food choices to support a healthy heart. Because foods for heart health can reduce other potential cardiovascular issues — like high blood pressure and high cholesterol — it’s worth keeping that in mind as you plan your weekly meals. 

Keep reading to find out what foods to look for, what foods you’re probably already eating, and what a heart-healthy diet looks like overall.

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Ana Galvañ

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A few weeks before us mere mortals were spending our mornings and pay packets trying to get tickets to see Beyoncé, the Atlantis Hotel Dubai was hemorrhaging thousands of dollars per second to have her play its launch party. Bey reportedly took home $24 million for the hour-and-a-half concert, which would take anyone on an average salary a lifetime to earn – if they worked for 526 years, that is. But, hey, at least we might get to see her on the big screen on a rainy night in Sunderland and not heat the house for a week?

An invite-only affair, over a thousand sparkling stars of the glitterati (from the Jenners to, er, Liam Payne) popped to the playground of the rich for one night only. In her first performance for four years, Beyoncé ran through 19 of her biggest bops; made several nods to Dubai with a local orchestra, Lebanese dance troupe, and outfits from designer Atelier Zuhr; then ended by levitating over the crowd for a firework-laden rendition of “Drunk In Love” – oh, and she didn’t perform a single song from her queerest project to date, Renaissance.

This created online buzz from the Bey Hive for all the wrong reasons: In the United Arab Emirates, homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death. Considering that Renaissance is an ode to ballroom and the Black queer community – as Bey herself noted in her Grammys acceptance speech – it feels more than myopic to not only play in the UAE but choose not to play anything from the album. Naturally, Atlantis Dubai’s PR team declined to answer VICE’s questions about the gig, so instead, I spoke to the pioneers behind the whole concept – the bookers.

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Photo: Mason Poole/Parkwood Media via Getty Images

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In the early 2000s, just a few years before Netflix began offering streaming services and when time spent watching TV in America was at its peak, Cristel Russell had an observation: Amid the boom of new television series, why did so many people choose to rewatch shows they’d already seen? Russell, a professor of marketing at the Graziadio Business School at Pepperdine University, realized the phenomenon applied not only to television, but books, movies, and travel experiences, too. “I thought this question had already been studied,” she says. “And it turned out it had not.”

Russell and a collaborator, the marketing researcher Sidney Levy, interviewed 23 study participants to parse their motivations for revisiting familiar media. Published in 2011, Russell and Levy’s paper helped define the concept of a rewatch — volitional reconsumption — and explained why nostalgia isn’t the primary motivation for returning to these shows.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What did you find motivated people to revisit certain media?

Going into this, I thought that it would be nostalgia because that would have seemed like the most logical reason. Participants would say [shows were] like comfort food. They would go back to something that was familiar, and they knew they liked it, but they didn’t necessarily remember the details of why they liked it. They knew that it was a funny show, but they couldn’t really remember exactly what was funny about it, or they knew that it was a movie that made them feel good at the end, but couldn’t remember the details. They enjoyed it that much more because now they were rediscovering it as if it were new because they couldn’t remember exactly.

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Does an English speaker perceive reality differently from say, a Swahili speaker? Does language shape our thoughts and change the way we think? Maybe.

The idea that the words, grammar, and metaphors we use result in our differing perceptions of experiences have long been a point of contention for linguists.

But just how much impact language has on the way we think is challenging to determine, says Betty Birner, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at Northern Illinois University. Other factors, like culture, meaning the traditions and habits we pick up from those around us, also shape the way we talk, the things we talk about, and hence, changes the way we think or even how we remember things.

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We are living through a traumatic inflection point in our American story. Millions of our fellow citizens are hurting from a series of pandemics. Our public health system, our economic fate, and issues of racial justice all are on the line at the very same time. So, too, is democracy itself.

Observing the vicious murder of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis last spring was not only shocking; it was disorienting. I wondered: was this 1968 all over again, or the Red Summer of 1919, when anti-black violence consumed the country amidst another devastating pandemic, or 1877, the year the bright lights of Reconstruction were violently snuffed out just a dozen years after the Civil War restored the Union on the basis of freedom and equal citizenship under the law? And this was before the presidential election in November!

The tense days that followed—made all the more desolate by the loss of such icons as John Lewis and C.T. Vivian—only reinforced my sense that the history of the first Reconstruction was being refracted through our own lives and in our own time. Then came the special elections in Georgia in January, when, on the eve of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Dr. King’s church in Atlanta, became the first African American ever sent to the Senate from his state and the eleventh Black American to be elevated to that chamber overall. The first had been Hiram Revels, of Mississippi, in 1870, and, like Warnock, Revels had been a man of the Word. In fact, during Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner tells us, three of the first sixteen African American members of Congress were ministers, and of the more than 2,000 Black officeholders at every level of government in that era, more than 240 were ministers—second only to farmers.

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Imagine a world where everyone had brown skin. Tens of thousands of years ago, that was the case, say scientists at Pennsylvania State University. So, how did white people get here? The answer lies in that tricky component of evolution known as a genetic mutation.

Out of Africa

Scientists have long known that Africa is the cradle of human civilization. There, our ancestors shed most of their body hair around 2 million years ago, and their dark skin protected them from skin cancer and other harmful effects of UV radiation. When humans began leaving Africa 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, a skin-whitening mutation appeared randomly in a sole individual, according to a 2005 Penn State study.1 That mutation proved advantageous as humans moved into Europe. Why? Because it allowed the migrants increased access to vitamin D, which is crucial to absorbing calcium and keeping bones strong.

“Sun intensity is great enough in equatorial regions that the vitamin can still be made in dark-skinned people despite the ultraviolet shielding effects of melanin,” explains Rick Weiss of The Washington Post, which reported on the

findings. But in the north, where sunlight is less intense and more clothing must be worn to combat the cold, melanin’s ultraviolet shielding could have been a liability.

Just a Color

This makes sense, but did scientists identify a bonafide race gene as well? Hardly. As the Post notes, the scientific community maintains that “race is a vaguely defined biological, social, and political concept…and skin color is only part of what race is—and is not.”

Researchers still say that race is more of a social construct than a scientific one because people of purportedly the same race can have as many differences in their DNA as people of separate so-called races do. It’s also difficult for scientists to determine where one race ends and another begins, considering that people of supposedly different races may have overlapping features in terms of hair color and texture, skin color, facial features, and other characteristics.

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