James' World 2

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If you haven’t heard it or felt it yourself, people are angry about the state of tipping. Consumers have noticed that they’re being asked to tip more often and for higher amounts than before. They buy their morning coffee and the barista flips around a screen that nudges them to add on a little more, or they go to pick up lunch, and they’re prompted to leave an extra $1. In particularly confounding situations, some people have found themselves being asked to tip their dermatologist or an e-commerce website. In the media, story after story has been written, recorded, and televised about the current state of affairs in tip culture in America.

To describe this culture, we’ve coined terms like “tipflation” and “guilt-tipping.” Many of the conversations I find myself in about high prices these days end with someone saying, “And then you’re supposed to tip on top of it.”

Contrary to the high emotions around it, tip requests aren’t that big a deal. What every frustrated consumer seems to forget is that you can just say no — plenty of people do. (Whether you should is a separate question, especially for workers whose livelihoods depend on tips.) Tipping in the vast majority of cases is optional. Maybe that tip jar was a little easier to ignore than the tablet, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret here: The worker behind the counter hoped you’d put money into the jar, you just didn’t feel as icky about not doing it.

“There are bigger things in this world going on to get frustrated about,” said Dianne Gottsman, a national etiquette expert.

So why does this rile people up so much? Tipping has become a sort of proxy for frustrations about the economy; it’s a small thing that often feels easier to focus on than the bigger things, like inflation. It can pit workers, consumers, and even businesses against one another in a way that’s uncomfortable for all involved.

It’s also an issue with no easy solutions. Some service workers don’t want tipping to go away, even if it means they’ll be paid a higher base wage. And while it’s easy to suggest businesses simply pay their workers more, that extra pay will come from somewhere — often in higher prices being passed on to consumers.

Why tipping gets people in such a tizzy

One thing is true: Tipping is different from what it used to be, even a few years ago. During the pandemic, there was a groundswell of support for service workers and small businesses, and practically everyone who could overtip did. That support hasn’t lasted — society has pretty quickly given up on worrying about essential workers — but some of the tipping changes have. “That emboldened a lot of companies to be more aggressive in asking for tips,” said Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at Bankrate. “It was followed pretty quickly by this big bout of inflation, and now we’re starting to see the backlash.”

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Grout is no fun. The word even sounds unhappy. And the bright white stuff shows Every. Little. Blemish. It’s porous, hard to get to, easily stains—the list goes on. But fret not, here we have it: some helpful tips to make your least favorite chore a little more bearable.

Materials

• Baking Soda
• Vinegar
• Hydrogen peroxide (optional)
• Spray bottle
• Grout brush or scrub brush (a toothbrush works as well!)
• Small bowl

Instructions

Step 1: Start with vinegar.

Fill your spray bottle with a 1:1 solution of vinegar and water and spray the work area generously. Let the solution sit for about five minutes, then follow up with a grout brush or a scrub brush. If you don’t have one of these, a toothbrush works in a pinch. Rinse with warm water.

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Photos by Ashley Poskin

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A century ago, August Krogh, a Danish physiologist who had just won the Nobel Prize, embarked on a U.S. lecture tour. Krogh studied the intricate network of blood vessels that nourish our muscles, but he was increasingly interested in diabetes—a condition that his wife, the physician Marie Krogh, not only treated but also suffered from. Marie asked her husband to stop in Toronto, where a surgeon and a medical student had experimented with “pancreatic extract,” which appeared to shift sugar from the bloodstream into muscles and other organs. Krogh returned to Denmark with permission to sell the stuff. He and some colleagues started Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, and in the spring of 1923, they injected their first patients with an early miracle drug: insulin.

The next year, two Nordisk employees, brothers named Thorvald and Harald Pedersen, left the company. Krogh apparently asked Harald, “What are you going to do?”

“We want to make insulin,” Harald responded.

“Well, you’ll never manage that,” Krogh said.

Krogh was wrong. The Pedersens founded Novo Terapeutisk Laboratorium, and for decades, the two rival companies produced much of the world’s insulin. In the early days, they operated hospitals mostly for people with Type 1 diabetes, a previously fatal autoimmune condition in which the body produces little or no insulin. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, their market grew: obesity and an associated condition, Type 2 diabetes, were becoming more common. Novo and Nordisk, which merged in 1989, explored other potential diabetes remedies, including a naturally occurring hormone, GLP-1, that appeared to exert exquisite control over blood sugar. It would eventually form the basis for one of the world’s most profitable drugs.

Krogh once argued that, for many biological problems, “there will be some animal of choice, or a few such animals, on which it can be most conveniently studied”—an insight known as Krogh’s principle. Originally, GLP-1 wasn’t considered a useful medicine because it dissolved too quickly in the body. But in the nineteen-nineties, as though in homage to Krogh, an endocrinologist at the Department of Veterans Affairs discovered that the venom of Gila monsters, a type of lizard native to North America, carried a peptide similar to GLP-1 that lasted for hours. He licensed his finding to researchers who developed a twice-daily injection that imitated the lizard peptide. Meanwhile, scientists at Novo Nordisk developed their own GLP-1 analogue and, in 2010, released a once-daily injection called liraglutide, or Victoza, for Type 2 diabetes. The GLP-1 drugs had another effect, too: people taking them lost a little weight.

If the story ended there, so-called GLP-1 agonists—also known as incretin mimetics, because they mimic natural gut hormones—would not be very well known. But Novo Nordisk wanted a medication that people didn’t have to inject every day, so it developed a once-weekly formulation. For reasons that remain a mystery, semaglutide, which is sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, caused profound reductions in weight. A two-hundred-pound woman might easily lose thirty pounds on the medication. People who had struggled to lose weight since childhood suddenly could.

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There’s also been an uptick in anecdotal reports of a brutal, long-lasting cough going around. As one TikTok user put it: everyone seems to have “a hacking cough that’s been going on for weeks.”

Doctors around the country have noticed it, too. “We have been seeing an unusually large number of patients who had typical viral upper respiratory infections, but have had a lingering cough that has lasted weeks to months,” Dr. Scott Braunstein, a double-board certified internal medicine and emergency medicine physician and the national medical director of Sollis Health, told HuffPost.

It doesn’t appear to be the flu or COVID, but another pathogen that’s attacking and irritating our respiratory systems, according to experts.

Dr. Janet O’Mahony, an internal medicine physician at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, said many of her patients have recently come into her practice with a nasty cough that’s lingered for two weeks or so. Some people have also had sinus congestion, a sore throat, and post-nasal drip.

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The first time I opened the app for Temu, the viral Chinese shopping site, a pop-up greeted me: I could spin a wheel to win $200. The spinner landed on “1 more chance.” I spun again, and this time, I won $200. But wait, there was more — if I checked out in the next 10 minutes, I could net a cool $300. Cold hard cash right into my wallet? Well, no: $300 worth of coupons, which, on Temu, can buy you selected home goods, cutesy electronics, apparel — really, anything you can imagine.

This carnival barker’s pitch is Temu’s opening gambit; it’s how the company hopes to draw you in and keep you coming back. Such promotional offers and games are brazen enough to catch the eye — or turn off a skeptical shopper completely. The loud and disorienting introduction is also your first clue into what Temu offers: a dizzying circus of dirt-cheap things. A pair of wireless over-the-ear headphones for $6.80. An earbud-cleaning set (for getting into the tiny crevices) for just 98 cents. A 14-piece food chopper for $15.49. A set of hair clips in the shape of Danish biscuits for $2.49. It’s virtual aisle after virtual aisle of amusing, offbeat, baffling objects and gag gifts, a Dollar General mixed with Etsy, with a dash of Spencer’s.

A little over a year ago, Temu didn’t exist. It launched in September 2022 but quickly rose to the top of app store charts, thanks in large part to a flurry of ads across social media and not one, but two, pricey Super Bowl ads that touted the company’s discordant tagline: “Shop like a billionaire.” As of May, according to the app-industry analysis site Business of Apps, Temu, which sells in 48 countries, had more than 100 million active users in the US.

Like Amazon, the site sells a seemingly infinite range of products, but where Amazon revolutionized easy shopping, particularly for those customers who have a clear idea of what they’re looking to buy (usually some essential item that’s cheapest on the site or hard to source elsewhere), Temu has refined the art of nudging people to make impulse purchases. It does this by accentuating how affordable it is to indulge your every curiosity online.

Earlier this year, New York Magazine’s John Herrman wondered whether Temu was the future of buying things; it’s more like the inevitable conclusion of a retail race to the bottom for which Amazon drafted the blueprint.

How Temu found its market in the US

With such a diversity of often downright weird stuff on the site, it’s hard to know precisely who the Temu customer is. On a cursory browse, I see five pairs of ankle socks for $2.69 and a pack of adorable miniature poker cards for just 39 cents. A Temu spokesperson told Vox in an email that “every day is like Black Friday on our platform.”

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Siobhán Gallagher for Vox

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This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.

She is 76.

Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly, most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”

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Illustration by Klaus Kremmerz

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The Jay Stephen Hooper Memorial Heliport sits on top of a brutalist brick-and-concrete building, the C. Erwin Piper Technical Center, across from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. It’s an area where trains, buses, and highways all converge, and where the sounds of helicopters coming and going are barely noticeable above the din of engines and the smell of exhaust. From the ground, the heliport is barely visible. The best view of it is nearby, from the Cesar Chavez Bridge, over the Los Angeles River, which, in this part of the city, is just a low stream of water in a giant concrete aqueduct. From there, looking over a rail yard, one can see the helicopters parked at an angle on the roof, and the blinking of video monitors inside of an observation tower. On a recent evening, just before sunset, a police helicopter alighted, paused for a few minutes with its propeller spinning, then took off again.

The C. Erwin Piper Technical Center is the headquarters of the Air Support Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, which, according to the L.A.P.D., is the largest local airborne law-enforcement unit in the world. The division has seventeen helicopters in its fleet and more than ninety employees, and keeps at least two helicopters airborne for twenty hours a day or more, if deemed necessary. The aircraft are a constant part of the L.A. backdrop, like palm trees and traffic. A cluster of them hovering might indicate a crime or an accident, but one would have to be motivated to find out for sure. In addition to the L.A.P.D. patrols, there are also many news helicopters in L.A., plus the choppers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Aero Bureau and of the Fire Department, and private helos ferrying the very wealthy. These other helicopters are identifiable on radar apps you can download onto your phone, but L.A.P.D. helicopters aren’t always labelled on these apps, which can make them difficult to track. They are often black with a white stripe down the middle, somewhat orca-like in appearance. At night, they blink with green and red lights, or beam blinding Nightsun spotlights toward the ground. The division’s mascot is a cartoon buzzard, in apparent honor of their tendency to circle. Rare is the day in central L.A. when you go without seeing one. They have made their way into movies—“Blue Thunder,” “Boyz n the Hood”—and into the city’s psyche.

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In the past few years, as public sentiment toward the police has shifted, the L.A.P.D.’s helicopters have also come under scrutiny. Photograph by Stuart Palley

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“It seems like we’ve been battling climate change for decades and made no progress,” Dr. Hannah Ritchie says. “I want to push back on that.” Ritchie, a senior researcher in the Program on Global Development at the University of Oxford and deputy editor at the online publication Our World in Data, is the author of the upcoming book, “Not the End of the World.” In it, she argues that the flood of doom-laden stats and stories about climate change is obscuring our ability to imagine solutions to the crisis and envision a sustainable, livable future. That brighter story is one Ritchie, who is 30, builds by pointing to the progress being made in areas like deforestation, air cleanliness, and the falling cost and rising adoption of clean-energy technologies. “For a long time I felt helplessness, that these problems were massive and unsolvable,” Ritchie says. “It’s important to counter those feelings. We need to go much faster, but there is a lot of progress to acknowledge and lessons to learn.” The year 2023 was the hottest on record — horrible wildfires, catastrophic flooding, ongoing loss of biodiversity, carbon emissions continuing to rise. I look at that and think, Boy, this is bad. How do you interpret the year we just had? We probably see it in a similar way. It has been an incredibly bad year. To some extent, it’s been anomalous. We’ve gone from having three consecutive years of La Niña, which tends to have a cooling impact, then rapidly flipped into an El Niño, which has a warming effect.

Which doesn’t take us away from the fact that we have a warming planet, but I also see the flip side, which is lots of positive things happening.

What feels most productive to me is not to stare at the bad stuff and say, “This is bad,” but to look and say: “This is positive stuff. How can I try to contribute to accelerating the good outpacing the bad?” Something like a third of Americans say climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress.

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Photo Illustration by Bráulio Amado

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Carving out time for mindfulness often feels like an indulgence, but it’s necessary. And unlike everything else on your to-do list, there are simple ways to pause and reset—like the 4-7-8 breathing technique. A controlled breathing pattern intended to help the mind and body relax, the 4-7-8 technique has helped many transition from a stressful storm into a more focused, present self.

“Breath work is an active meditation that helps reframe the nervous system’s response to trauma and triggers,” says Jasmine Marie, founder and CEO of Black Girls Breathing. “Decreasing anxiety and stress and regulating the nervous system’s response to anxiety and stress are some of the many benefits experienced by those who incorporate the practice into their daily and weekly routines.” 

The benefits of deep breathing are plentiful. Research has found that slow, conscious breathing exercises, like the 4-7-8 technique, are linked to mental function, in that they can enhance emotional control and psychological well-being. 

So what is 4-7-8 breathing?

The 4-7-8 breathing method, also referred to as “relaxing breath,” is based on principles of pranayama, the ancient yogic ritual of directing energy through control of the breath. While breathing techniques of this nature have been developed over centuries, the technique known as 4-7-8 breathing specifically is credited to American doctor Andrew Weil, who had a particular focus on alternative medicine. The simple technique involves breathing in for four seconds, holding the breath for seven seconds, and then breathing out for eight seconds.

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