James' World 2

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The Israeli military responded with air strikes on Gaza and launched a ground offensive. More than 21,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

During a temporary truce at the end of November, Hamas released 105 hostages and Israel freed 240 Palestinian prisoners in exchange.

What is the goal of Israel’s military operation in Gaza?

Since the 7 October attacks, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warplanes have carried out air strikes across Gaza while its troops have moved through the territory.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had a “clear goal of destroying Hamas’s military and governing capabilities”, as well as freeing the hostages.

Israel, the UK, US and other Western powers class Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Mr Netanyahu also declared that Israel would have “overall security responsibility” for Gaza “for an indefinite period” after the conflict. However, he later said Israel had no plans to reoccupy the territory.

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They say the only constant is change, but in the business world, there is another one: Meetings suck. They devour your time, zap your energy, and drain your motivation for any task more demanding than a nap. Yet, managers and organizations insist on swarming people’s calendars with these schedule-cramming hours of busywork.

However, this second constant may not be as irrevocable as it seems. Research shows that meetings can be tremendously beneficial for everyone involved. The problem is that few managers have been trained to lead them effectively.

To help, Big Think recently spoke* with Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science, management, and psychology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the author of Glad We Met and The Surprising Science of Meetings. During our conversation, we discuss who meetings are for, why they go wrong so often, and strategies to facilitate them more successfully.

Big Think: How did the office meeting evolve, and what are its benefits?

Rogelberg: Humans gather. It’s what we do. We’ve gathered since cave-person times, but ultimately, it was during the Industrial Revolution that we started to move away from traditional command-and-control systems and started to recognize that elevating other voices allowed for more ideas to emerge. It was an appreciation that diverse voices can bring diverse ideas and solutions to complex problems.

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A supporter of former President Donald J. Trump watching him speak at a campaign event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in October. No state in the nation swung as heavily Republican between 2012 and 2020 as Iowa. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Many nutrition studies rely on people to accurately remember what they consumed up to a year ago, Dr. Lampe said. And it’s tricky to understand how single foods may influence your health when they’re part of a larger diet, she said, adding that your lifestyle, environment, hormones, and genes can also play a role.

No single food can prevent cancer on its own, said Nigel Brockton, the vice president of research at the American Institute for Cancer Research in Washington, D.C. But following a healthy diet does seem to reduce the risk, he said.

Here are some foods that experts say are worth adding to your plate.

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Credit…Sarah Mafféïs

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They turned up in shifts, all through the course of lockdown: mice, ants, weevils, moths, a fox, and, on one unhappy occasion, a magpie in the kitchen. I have been obliged to show the door to all manner of wildlife, with varying degrees of success. The magpie was eager to leave. The ants less so. The moths are still with us.

It’s easy to get angry with household pests, and sometimes – on encountering a particularly rapacious mouse, say – it’s possible to wish them great harm. But most people, I suspect, would rather be as humane as possible when getting rid of invaders. And even when kindness can’t stop you killing things, squeamishness often will. Unfortunately, many pest control products still associate effectiveness with lethality. The ant trap I bought says it “destroys ants and their nests!” I really just wanted them off the worktop. Is it possible to keep your home pest-free using only humane, nonlethal means?

The first thing I had to learn about humane pest control is that the people who promote it don’t like the word pest. Rodents and insects are all wildlife, with a vital part to play in our ecosystem. “Commonly, people call them pests, but they have the same right to live on this planet as we do,” says Laura-Lisa Hellwig, campaigns manager at the vegan charity Viva!. “And some of them have been here for a much longer time than we have. Really, we should find a peaceful way to live together instead of eradicating or cruelly killing some of them.”

Step one, then, is to check if you can simply coexist with your would-be pest.

“When people see, you know, a bee nest in their guttering on the side of their house, the first thing they think is: ‘We need to find a way to control that,’” says Kevin Newell, the founder of Humane Wildlife Solutions, a pioneering nonlethal wildlife control company based in Scotland. He is speaking to me by phone over the peeping of recently rescued baby lesser black-backed gulls, which are temporarily living in his office before being rehomed at a wildlife refuge.

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Tim Dowling … ‘It’s easy to get angry with household pests.’ Photo by Philippe TURPIN/Getty Images

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Hope you love this song, it is appropriate for our times!

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Kodi Lee

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These “wellness checks” reflect the fact that everybody has become more conscious of the need to be kind to others. That’s a good thing. Our workplace has become a setting where the best bosses and colleagues take pride in showing sensitivity to the emotional and physical well-being of others.

And for these reasons, beginning a letter or a conversation with “I hope you are well” has some merit. But even if it reflects the best of intentions, this opening should be abandoned for the following five reasons.

1. IT’S A CLICHÉ

First, this opening is a non-starter, because it’s overly general. Of course you want to begin an email or conversation with something that warms up the relationship. I call this the “grabber.” But people who use “I hope you are well” or a similar phrase are simply making a pro forma statement that could be made to anyone. The words sound good but have no deeper personal or individual meaning.

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As the fumes took effect, they bathed his mind in what James called “the tremendously exciting sense of … metaphysical illumination.” What stuck with him after the drugs wore off, though, was not any particular thought — which he soberly conceded as “meaningless drivel” — but the intense feeling of meaning they came packaged in. He called that sense of significance the “noetic quality” of mystical experience.

The noetic quality describes a sensation of encountering revelations of the highest order, where the secret workings of your mind and the world are unfolded before you. But as James also described, these encounters have an elusive quality that makes them difficult to communicate. And through the 20th century, mainstream psychology moved away from nebulous ideas like noeticism and meaning, in favor of variables that were more objective and observable.

Until 2006, when a landmark paper led by the late Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University signaled that research on the profound sense of meaning that accompanies noetic insights was making its way back into mainstream psychology — this time by way of psychedelic drugs.

Griffiths’s study found that, two months after taking psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, two-thirds out of 30 volunteers rated their subsequent trip as one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives. Further studies that ask the same question have pushed that number to as high as 87 percent of participants, confirming the curious fact that a group of molecules can reliably deliver on demand what the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl called the central human motivation: the search for meaning.

Despite the past two decades of research documenting the tight relationship between psychedelics and meaningful experiences, we still know surprisingly little about what’s actually going on in the brain when psychedelic-assisted meaning sets in. In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, psychologists Patric Plesa and Rotem Petranker pointed out that even “the best minds in psychedelic research … consistently report that psychedelics enhance a subjective sense of meaning without an explicit theory of meaning.” It’s strange that we lack a mechanical understanding of something so central to a life well lived. If we understood more about the neural mechanics of these bursts of revelation, could we learn anything about how to coax them into our sober lives more often?

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A viral video showed a turtle with a straw stuck up its nose. Stories about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch revealed how island-sized trash mounds had collected in the ocean between Hawaii and California. And then there was that National Geographic cover of a plastic bag floating in the water, beneath the scrawled words “Planet or Plastic?” The issue publicized a remarkable statistic: Despite the world’s efforts to recycle, 91% ends up in the trash.

You may already be part of the growing number of people who are trying to ditch plastic. I’ve tried to faithfully bring my reusable Baggu bags ($12) to the grocery store, and carry my own metal straw ($4 for three) with me when I go out to restaurants. I use S’well and BKR bottles ($25 and $45) instead of plastic water bottles. I like to congratulate myself for these small steps, but something weird happened once I began cutting down. I suddenly saw how much other plastic filled my kitchen, bathroom, and closet. I saw it in my toddler’s sippy cups and toys, in the cling film enveloping the meat and produce at the grocery store, and in the contents of my medicine cabinet. How could I ever hope to curb plastic, given that it’s woven into every part of my life?

As I’ve begun to explore more ways to cut down, I’ve realized that the task ahead is not as painful as it might seem. This is partly thanks to a flock of new startups coming up with alternatives to everyday plastic products. I’ve researched many of these brands and tested many of their products to give you a totally achievable, relatively painless, and very convenient guide to get started curbing your plastic use.

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Are you ready to take your fight against plastic to the next level?

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