James' World 2

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If you worry about a wet or damp basement, a busy sump pump, or muddy puddles in your yard after a heavy rainfall, this story is for you. We want to introduce you to a new tool to improve drainage— a rain garden.

A rain garden is basically a plant pond, that is, a garden bed that you plant with special deep-rooted species. These plants help the water rapidly seep into the soil, away from your house, and out of your hair. You direct the rainwater from the downspouts to the garden via a swale (a stone channel) or plastic piping. The garden captures the water and, when properly designed, drains it into the soil within a day. You don’t have to worry about creating a mosquito haven; the water drains before mosquitoes even have time to breed.

If there’s an especially heavy rainfall, excess water may overflow the rain garden and run into the storm sewer system. Even so, the rain garden will have done its job. It will have channeled water away from your foundation and reduced the load on the sewer system. A rain garden also reduces the amount of lawn chemicals and pet wastes that may otherwise run off into local lakes and rivers. In some communities, the runoff problem is so big that homes with rain gardens qualify for a tax break! Call your municipality to learn your local policy.

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Family Handyman

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If you want to know how to do something, don’t just search the internet. Instead, find a person who already knows how and ask them. At first, they’ll give you a hurried, broad-strokes kind of answer, assuming that you’re uninterested in all the procedural details. But of course, that’s precisely what you’re after! Ask for a slowed-down, step-by-step guide through the minutiae of the thing.

For seven years, I did exactly that — I called a stranger and asked that person to describe how to do a specific task or skill. For my weekly advice column in The New York Times Magazine, I interviewed hundreds of experts, among them a heart surgeon; a congresswoman; a boy scout who survived a tsunami; a hospital baby cuddler; a telenovela star; an iceberg-dodging sea captain; many psychologists; a grave digger; scientists; artists; astronauts; and a 13-year-old lemonade entrepreneur.

Sometimes the instruction was for a physical task (How to Rescue a Cat From a Tree or How to Milk a Killer Whale), and other times the skill was emotional (How to Apologize to a Child or How to Propose an Open Relationship). In every case, the advice eventually drifted from precise instructions to the most existential guidance on how to navigate the world. Take the safecracker from Providence, R.I., who, after some 40 years on the job, knows that nearly all locked safes will be empty but that humans will want them opened anyway; we’re curious, covetous, and prone to disregard terrible odds (How to Crack a Safe). Or the laughter researcher who has tickled humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas and reminds us that touch should be consensual (How to Tickle Someone). Or the octogenarian British actor’s advice on how to play dead: You don’t need flailing, gasping or guts spilling out — sometimes death is just a quiet slide toward stillness.

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DuckDuckGo’s tracker-removing email service, which has been available in private beta for a year, is now open to anyone who uses a DuckDuckGo mobile app, browser extension, or Mac browser. It has also added a few more privacy tools.

The service provides you a duck.com email address, one intended to be given out for the kind of “Subscribe to our newsletter for 20 percent off” emails you know exist only to harvest data and target you for ads. Email sent to your duck.com address forwards to your chosen primary email—but with trackers removed.

Email Protection now also fixes up links, strips them of tracking modifiers, upgrades unencrypted HTTP URLs to HTTPS where possible, and, for the rare necessary reply, allows you to send directly from your duck address instead of exposing your primary email. During their closed beta, DuckDuckGo claims that 85 percent of the emails it processed contained hidden trackers.

To sign up for Email Protection, you’ll need to use either the DuckDuckGo mobile app for iOS or Android, use DuckDuckGo’s browser extension on Firefox, Chrome, Edge, or Brave, or use its beta Mac browser (the list for which must be joined in the DuckDuckGo mobile app).

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DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection, now available in public beta, gives you an email address that will strip trackers from emails and forward the rest to you.

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Molybdenite, even to the trained eye, looks almost identical to graphite — a lustrous, silvery crystal. It acts similarly too, sloughing off flakes in a way that would make for a good pencil filling. But to an electron, the two grids of atoms form different worlds. The distinction first entered the scientific record 244 years ago. Carl Scheele, a Swedish chemist renowned for his discovery of oxygen, plunged each mineral into assorted acids and watched the lurid clouds of gas that billowed forth. Scheele, who eventually paid for this approach with his life, dying of suspected heavy metal poisoning at 43, concluded that molybdenite was a new substance. Describing it in a letter to the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in 1778, he wrote, “I refer here not to the commonly known graphite that one can acquire from the apothecary. This transition metal seems to be unknown.”

With its tendency to flake into powdery fragments, molybdenite became a popular lubricant in the 20th century. It helped skis glide farther through the snow and smoothed the exit of bullets from rifle barrels in Vietnam.

Today, that same flakiness is fueling a physics revolution.

The breakthroughs started with graphite and Scotch tape. Researchers discovered by chance in 2004 that they could use tape to peel off flakes of graphite just one atom thick. These crystalline sheets, each a flat array of carbon atoms, had astonishing properties that were radically different from those of the three-dimensional crystals they came from. Graphene (as its discoverers dubbed it) was a whole new category of substance — a 2D material. Its discovery transformed condensed matter physics, the branch of physics that seeks to understand the many forms and behaviors of matter. Nearly half of all physicists are condensed matter physicists; it’s the subfield that brought us computer chips, lasers, LED bulbs, MRI machines, solar panels, and all manner of modern technological marvels. After graphene’s discovery, thousands of condensed matter physicists started studying the new material, hoping it would undergird future technologies.

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Of his partnership with Jie Shan (left), Kin Fai Mak said, “One plus one is more than two.”  Sasha Maslov and Olena Shmahalo for Quanta Magazine

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Just as hair colors vary from person to person, so too does the way we experience the world – especially for those people who are HSPs, or highly sensitive people.

The term, coined by psychologist Dr. Elaine Aron, is used to describe the estimated 15-20% of people who experience the world more intensely and deeply than the average person. 

As a result, HSPs may feel easily overwhelmed and grow emotionally exhausted more easily – but that doesn’t mean being a HSP is a bad thing. In fact, there are plenty of upsides to being a HSP, too, such as an ability to forge deeper and more meaningful relationships.

If you’ve ever been told you’re “too sensitive” or criticized for taking things “too personally,” you’re probably wondering whether you might be a HSP, too. 

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“I want a party in the woods with an all-night campfire. I’ll be off to the side in a sleeping bag, nice and cozy. There will be s’mores and cocktails. My friends can come and go, saying goodbye however they want, or just sitting quietly with me and holding my hand. Nobody should touch my feet, though. I hate having my feet touched. A playlist of my favorite songs should be on repeat. I’d like to die as the fire burns out at dawn. Lights out and lights out, you know?”

I’m on Zoom and a chaplain from Iowa is describing her ideal final hours of life. We’re training to become end-of-life doulas, and this morning’s assignment is to help each other talk through a final hours ritual. It’s one of many exercises designed to confront us with our own mortality, so we can leave our own feelings about death at the door before we step across someone else’s threshold to help with theirs.

End-of-life (EOL) doulas are at the opposite end of the life cycle spectrum from birth doulas. They provide non-clinical care (emotional, logistical, and physical) and help with planning; engage with life reviews and legacy work; and provide support for family and friends so caretakers can bring their best, rested selves to support their dying loved one.

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