James' World 2

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For decades, Keith Krehbiel took high doses of medications with a debilitating side effect—severe nausea—following his diagnosis with early-onset Parkinson’s disease at age 42 in 1997. When each dose wore off, he experienced dyskinesia—involuntary, repetitive muscle movements. In his case, this consisted of head bobbing and weaving. Krehbiel is among one million Americans who live with this progressive neurological disorder, which causes slowed movements, tremors, and balance problems.

But soon after surgery to implant electrodes into specific areas of his brain in 2020, his life dramatically improved. “My tremor went away almost entirely,” says Krehbiel, now age 70 and a professor emeritus of political science at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, whose Parkinson’s symptoms began at age 40 and were initially misdiagnosed as repetitive stress injury from computer use. “I reduced my Parkinson’s meds by more than two thirds,” he adds. “And I no longer have a sensation of a foggy brain, nor nausea or dyskinesia.”

Krehbiel was the first participant to enroll in a clinical trial testing a new form of deep-brain stimulation (DBS), a technology that gained approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for Parkinson’s tremor and essential tremor in 1997 (it was later approved for other symptoms and conditions). The new adaptive system adjusts stimulation levels automatically based on the person’s individual brain signals. In late February it received FDA approval for Parkinson’s disease ‘based on results of the international multicenter trial, which involved participants at 10 sites across a total of four countries—the U.S., the Netherlands, Canada, and France.

This technology is suitable for anyone with Parkinson’s, not just individuals in clinical trials, says Helen Bronte-Stewart, the recent trial’s global lead investigator and a neurologist specializing in movement disorders at Stanford Medicine. “Like a cardiac pacemaker that responds to the rhythms of the heart, adaptive deep-brain stimulation uses a person’s individual brain signals to control the electric pulses it delivers,” Bronte-Stewart says. “This makes it more personalized, precise, and efficient than older DBS methods.”

“Traditional DBS delivers constant stimulation, which doesn’t always match the fluctuating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease,” adds neurologist Todd Herrington, another of the trial’s investigators and director of the deep-brain stimulation program at Massachusetts General Hospital. With adaptive DBS, “the goal is to adjust stimulation in real-time to provide more effective symptom control, fewer side effects and improved patient quality of life.”

Current FDA approval of this adaptive system is for the treatment of Parkinson’s only, not essential tremor, dystonia (a neurological disorder that causes excessive, repetitive, and involuntary muscle contractions) or epilepsy, which still rely on traditional, continuous DBS, Herrington says.

“Our personalized treatment can control debilitating tremors for a person living with Parkinson’s,” says Ashwini Sharan, chief medical officer of the neuromodulation operating unit at Medtronic, the Minneapolis-based medical device company that manufactures this technology. Placed under the skin of the chest, a DBS device transports electrical signals through very thin wires to an area in the brain that controls movement.

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CLIMATEWIRE | How can projects that scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere reduce their sky-high costs?

For a planned development in Texas, one answer is to draw power directly from a wind farm.

The innovative project, announced Monday by three European companies, could be the world’s first direct air capture development to rely primarily on so-called behind the meter electricity. That means the DAC facility would run mainly with low-cost clean power that’s generated on site, not metered out from the grid.

The facility is slated to come online in 2028 and is intended to eventually remove up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year — more than the average annual emissions of a natural gas plant, according to EPA data. The planned facility is larger than any other direct air capture plant currently in operation, although several DAC projects under development are similarly sized.

The new Texas project is being led by Return Carbon, a Dutch project development and investment company, and Skytree, a direct air capture technology firm also based in the Netherlands, with wind power from the North American renewables subsidiary of EDF, the state-owned French utility. Carbon dioxide the facility pulls from the sky would be stored permanently underground by the Texas firm Verified Carbon.

“It is a new framework, which we have agreed with EDF,” said Martijn Verwoerd, the co-founder and managing director of Return Carbon, said in an interview before publicly revealing the deal. “That’s why we’re announcing it.”

The novel agreement would ensure that Return Carbon, which plans to own and operate the direct air capture facility, has access to consistent supply of low-cost clean energy from Texas’s windy gulf coast. Verwoerd declined to say the price per kilowatt-hour Return Carbon has locked in and said the consortium would decide on a precise location later this year.

For EDF, the deal would reduce the likelihood that it has to sell its electricity at a loss or even pay to add it to the grid, Verwoerd explained. Utilities can suffer so called negative power prices when electricity production exceeds the demand for power.

The agreement also allows EDF to redirect its electricity from Return Carbon onto the grid when there is “peak pricing in the market,” he said. In that scenario, the direct air capture facility could operate using renewable energy from a separate agreement Return Carbon has struck with other power providers or go offline until electricity prices fall to an acceptable level.

It’s a “win-win for all parties,” Verwoerd said.

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, scientists say the world needs to immediately reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide, the main source of which is the burning of oil, gas and coal. At the same time, countries and companies need to begin deploying carbon dioxide removal technologies such as direct air capture to reduce the amount of carbon that’s already been spewed into the atmosphere.

Neither are happening quickly enough, with President Donald Trump promising to double down on oil drilling while slashing federal support for climate-related initiatives.

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Sleepovers were mostly a nightmare for me as a child, and I mean that literally: I had nightmares every single time I slept over at a friend’s house. Too embarrassed to tote my babyish night-light from home, I’d lie awake roiled with terror. Come morning—my Rolodex of anxieties exhausted—I’d immediately begin lobbying my mother on the drive home for the exact same sleepover routine the next weekend. I loved sleepovers.

Sleepovers helped me escape my nerdy little comfort zone. They were an opportunity to be silly and a touch subversive, and to get a glimpse of how other families lived their lives. Old-school prank phone calls were usually on offer—an act of mild sociopathy I would have sooner died to avoid than try alone in my own home, or by daylight. I once got a concussion after an excitable girl hit me with a blunt object, and I had to be driven home in the middle of the night. Another time a friend and I got in trouble for deliberately pouring copious amounts of “blood” (red food coloring) on her sheets as a joke.

We occasionally snooped around family areas that were clearly off-limits, and I recall that some of the more louche parents had Playboy magazines in full view in their bathrooms. My own family home was particularly attractive as a sleepover venue because, apart from the distinction of having a “cool” mom who provided junk food, we also had access to my father’s medical journals, which featured black-and-white photos of naked adults with genital tumors and other afflictions.

My childhood spanned the era of what I’ll call, unscientifically, “Peak Sleepover,” a period from roughly the mid-1960s to the early ’80s that’s fondly remembered (by those of us with poor memories and limited insight) for its laissez-faire parenting norms. Today’s parents appear more skeptical of sleepovers. On TikTok, a father and psychiatrist got millions of views for a pair of videos in which he explains why he doesn’t let his children attend sleepovers. In 2023, The Washington Post published an article featuring parents worried about their kids being exposed to a range of concerns, including excess screen time and domestic violence.

I’m not unsympathetic to some of the no-sleepover arguments, but denying our children a chance to learn up close from other families shortchanges children’s autonomy. I think it’s fair to ask why adults can’t organize our lives better to give children reasonable and age-appropriate experiences that put them at non-zero but nonetheless, limited risk, and that benefit their maturation.

No one is suggesting—certainly I am not—that children should be entrusted to unsafe households for a night. I’m deeply aware of all that can go wrong when adults fail to protect a child. I’ve spent my professional life trying to persuade adults to take children’s needs seriously. But one badly neglected need is that of acquiring resilience and self-sufficiency.

Basic due diligence (asking about firearms in the home, or whether older siblings’ friends or a new boyfriend are visiting, for example) is essential for any interaction between kids and other families. But after the threshold for safety has been met, why does it matter if our kids eat junk food for a night, or hear unwelcome political views, or sit through the wrong kind of prayers (or no prayers) at dinnertime? Why would we want to deprive a child of the occasional strange or uncomfortable experience at another family’s house—even one that might directly conflict with our values or our preferred practices? Isn’t an understanding of human differences a bulwark against frailty and narcissism? We’re not talking about moving in with a new family, just spending the night!

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Forget the canary in a coal mine: today the danger zone is the entire U.S., and the sentinel species comprise a growing list that includes the Golden-cheeked Warbler, the Florida Scrub Jay and the Mottled Duck.

These are among 42 U.S. bird species that have been placed on “red alert” by the conservation initiative Road to Recovery—and included in State of the Birds 2025, a new report released by a separate group of governmental and nonprofit organizations called the North American Bird Conservation Initiative. The report analyzes population trends for more than 700 bird species across the U.S. and its key habitat types—and identifies a total of 229 species that experts deem to be of high or moderate conservation concern. “Bird populations are continuing to decline, and one third of species in the U.S. require urgent conservation attention,” says report co-author Amanda Rodewald, an ecologist at Cornell University.

This is bad news for humans, too, she emphasizes. The concerning declines in bird populations “indicate to us that environments are changing in ways that can have negative outcomes for people as well,” Rodewald says. “We live in the same habitats as birds, so if they’re not healthy for birds, they’re not healthy for us.” In addition, bird-related activities, such as purchasing bird seed for feeders or equipment for bird-watching and photography, contributed some $279 billion to the U.S. economy in 2022 alone.

Road to Recovery had looked at population trends for each species, identifying birds on the “tipping point” and grouping them into three color-coded categories based on total and recent trends. For example, the Greater Prairie Chicken, an eye-catching and iconic bird that has lost much of its habitat and splintered into small groups with little genetic diversity, is listed as a “red alert” tipping-point species. In contrast, a “yellow alert” tipping-point species called the Pinyon Jay has also lost its woodland habitat because of drought and insects, among other factors, but its populations are stabilizing.

The new report evaluates how birds that are reliant on particular ecosystems are faring. Those that are found only in grasslands or in arid landscapes, for example, are doing quite poorly, with populations decreasing by more than 40 percent since 1970. Among 31 species that rely on arid landscapes, none are showing population increases.

One new development raises particular concern: duck species overall have seen steep declines in the past few years, potentially because of drought, Rodewald says. “That is certainly sobering,” she says, noting that waterfowl and waterbirds overall had always been a “bright spot” in similar analyses.

Peter Marra, a conservation biologist at Georgetown University, who was not involved in the new report but conducted 2019 work showing that the U.S. had some three billion fewer birds than in 1970, says that the new findings offer a valuable look at which species need the most urgent response.

Both Rodewald and Marra highlight shorebirds as a group to be concerned about. Species in this group rely on the delicate regions where freshwater or saltwater meets land, Marra says. “We’re changing the natural landscape in multiple and complex ways, and to expect these species to persist is just crazy,” he says.

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But pediatricians and nutritionists say there are a few things to know before doling out dark chocolate to your little ones.

“It would be recommended that the child not eat dark chocolate in excess and avoid providing it before bed,” Amy Reed, a registered dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, told HuffPost.

The main reason is that dark chocolate contains caffeine, she explained.

While there’s no harm for most kids to eat some dark chocolate (and any other kind of chocolate), moderation is key, explained Anet Piridzhanyan, a clinical dietitian in the Center for Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

“All foods, including candy, have a place at the table,” she told HuffPost. But here’s what you should know about giving your kids dark chocolate.

How much caffeine is in dark chocolate — and is it too much for kids?

An ounce of dark chocolate with 60-69% cacao contains 24 mg of caffeine, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s about the same amount as a quarter cup of coffee, Beth Natt, system medical director of pediatrics at Atlantic Health System, told HuffPost.

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After delivering a keynote to an audience of district managers and C-Suite leaders, several attendees came up to me afterward to talk about how I balance leadership responsibilities with being a parent. Interestingly, it was a group of five men, and their questions prompted me to write this entire article.

“How do your leadership philosophies shape your parenting style?” he asked me.

“It’s simple,” I replied. “The philosophies are the same.”

I shared that as both a leader and a mother, one of my greatest ambitions is to empower the people around me. To me, leadership, whether at home or at work, isn’t just about strategy and execution; it’s about fostering resilience, encouraging critical thinking and nurturing confidence.

Another leader asked, “Can you share some of the things you teach your clients and your kids?”

And this is what I shared.

The first is: Embrace mistakes as opportunities to grow

In our home, my husband and I see mistakes as learning moments. We both feel strongly about having children who feel they can run to us when they make a mistake — not run from us. To do this, we make it a point to acknowledge our own mistakes openly, demonstrating to our kids that this is a safe space and showing that taking accountability is a strength, not a weakness.

This lesson extends beyond the home — whether in the workplace or the boardroom, creating a culture where people can learn from mistakes leads to stronger, more innovative teams. I’ll never forget when a teacher told me our oldest daughter walked into school and proudly shouted to the entire class, “My mom makes a lot of mistakes!”

The second is: Be curious before you point fingers

A pivotal moment in my parenting journey was when a member of my team posted to LinkedIn announcing the launch of a new product. The only problem with that move was that we weren’t planning on announcing the product quite yet. We had a marketing plan in place, social media posts in the works, and a landing page that wasn’t live. I was in the kitchen when my phone started buzzing with all of these alerts congratulating me, and I had no idea. Then I saw the post. And my stomach dropped. I just kept saying, “Oh no… oh no…” My daughter was next to me and saw I was upset.

“Are you going to fire him?” She asked.

“No,” I said. “I need to figure out what he was thinking when he made this decision so we can talk about it.”

Before bedtime, my daughter could see I wasn’t myself.

“What are you going to do?” she asked me.

“I’m going to try to find the silver lining.”

She asked what that meant, and I explained it.

When you find the silver lining, if you find something else that’s good on top of that, will that be your gold lining?” she inquired.

“You know what? It should be,” I said. “Once I find the silver lining, I’m going to try the gold lining for sure.”

She then asked, “Did all of the people who know you see this post?”

“No,” I said.

“Then the silver lining can be that you still have a lot of people to tell.”

And she fell asleep.

In parenting, when my kids make a mistake, we don’t ask, “Why did you do that?!” We choose to take a step back and ask, “What were you thinking?” In work scenarios, I’ve found approaching situations with curiosity before blame leads to constructive conversations and deeper understanding. My team and I grew stronger from this misstep, and my daughter got to see what it looks like to take a step back and understand a mistake before making any major decisions. She also learned the valuable skill of finding the good in things — even when that feels hard.

The third is: Prioritize effort over outcome

Success isn’t defined solely by results — it’s about the dedication and perseverance behind them. When my daughter proudly presents a project she has worked on, I focus on the effort.

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The world is divided by war. Influenza outbreaks smolder in livestock herds and bird flocks for years. The public is deeply skeptical of the value of medical interventions. Public health agencies offer misleading advice and are focused only on keeping the public calm. There is a shortage of qualified medical professionals, with no end in sight.

No, this isn’t 2025—it’s 1918. In the pivotal book The Great Influenza, historian John Barry lays out the conditions that primed the population of the U.S. that year for one of the worst plagues in history and acted like so much dry tinder just waiting for a spark. That spark exploded into the conflagration of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide and left many others disabled.

A little more than a century later, now is perhaps as good a time as any to ask the question: How prepared are we for another influenza pandemic? On the surface, this is an easy question to answer. Modern medicine and public health have advanced far beyond 1918. Whereas the scientists of that era struggled to identify the germ that caused the pandemic, we live in a time of genomic sequencing and global infectious disease surveillance, of mRNA vaccine technology and antiviral medications. Our governments have pandemic preparedness plans, stockpiles of vaccines and drugs, and, having dealt with the COVID pandemic, experience with contact tracing and isolation.

Other conditions, however, are eerily similar to those of 1918. Geopolitical crises crowd public health concerns off the front page of newspapers. A dangerous influenza strain, in this case the H5N1 avian flu virus, has recently been circulating freely within poultry flocks, spreading widely in livestock herds in the U.S. and causing infections in farm workers. False lessons drawn from the COVID pandemic have driven public skepticism of medical information to all-time highs. Public health agencies sometimes offer contradictory and falsely soothing messages, further eroding their credibility. And after five years of COVID, hospital systems are stretched thin, and burnout and staffing shortages have thinned the ranks of the doctors and nurses who will be on the front line of the next pandemic. Making matters worse, the Trump administration’s interventions over the past two months have gravely weakened surveillance of and control over the virus’s spread.

The global response to the COVID pandemic offers little solace. In late 2019, as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, gripped China, infectious disease surveillance failed across much of the rest of the globe. Western governments faltered right out of the gate at limiting the spread of the virus—contact tracing detected fewer than 2 percent of all COVID cases in the U.S., for example. The pandemic response plan was ignored, and molecular tests were too few and too late. There were not enough high-quality masks, and antiviral drugs for COVID had not yet been developed. The plan was to “flatten the curve,” but in practice, hospitals ran out of beds, intensive care units ran out of oxygen and morgues ran out of space. While lives were saved by social distancing and eventually vaccines, millions also died needlessly across the globe. They were victims of poor pandemic policy and a sluggish public health response, as well as misinformation and disinformation about vaccines and other health measures.

But that was—and still is—a different pandemic, one caused by a coronavirus rather than influenza, with a far lower death rate for acute cases and a somewhat different set of challenges. In contrast, when pandemic influenza hit in 1918, it killed 3 to 5 percent of the world’s population, and around half of those deaths were in young and healthy people. A pandemic similar in scale today would leave 200 to 400 million dead.

Revisiting the Deadly 1918 Pandemic

It’s hard to imagine now, but the 1918 influenza was far worse than the flu we know. Although many affected people experienced a severe bout of seasonal flu—fever, chills, body aches and headaches, followed by recovery—some fared a lot worse. As Barry puts it, these people “came with an extraordinary array of symptoms, symptoms either previously unknown entirely in influenza or experienced with previously unknown intensity.” Those symptoms included agonizing joint pain, burning pain above the diaphragm, subcutaneous emphysema (which occurs when pockets of air accumulate just beneath the skin), ruptured eardrums, kidney failure and severe nosebleeds.

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