James' World 2

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After we got married, my husband would forget … a lot. He’d take out the trash and forget to put a new bag in the bin. He’d jot down a grocery list, hop in his car, and take off … sans grocery list. He’d drop the kids off to school and jet off to work, forgetting to mention that they’d decided to be car riders, not bus riders. These slips drove me bonkers.

To make matters worse, I wasn’t faultless either. I had a habit of overbooking appointments, once even quadruple booking us to be in different places across town in a single afternoon. I was tired of bickering, exhausted of upsetting friends I’d promised to carve time for, and completely over my husband’s and my endless cycle of forgetfulness.

One day, I reached my wit’s end. I’d triple booked, committing to a birthday party, a lunch date with friends, and dinner at my mom’s all without realizing until the day of. By the time we arrived at my mom’s, we learned she’d left on a grocery run and locked her keys inside the home. Even better, my husband’s forgetfulness kicked in. He reassured her he had her spare set stowed in our glove compartment, but after scouring the car in a frenzy, muttering he knew they were there somewhere, he turned up empty-handed. In the end, I jumped the fence and learned how to jimmy open a window, tearing my favorite skirt in the process.

By the time we made it home, we fell into bed exhausted by the spectacle that had become our lives. I began wondering if, in this age of technology, there was a magical app for couples like us who had trouble keeping our heads on straight. Full disclaimer: I get that “there’s an app for that,” and there are people for that app—I’m just not one of them. (I still use the browser version of YouTube on my phone!) However, users downloaded over 36 billion apps from Google Play and the Apple App Store combined in just the first quarter of 2021. And I was about to become one of them.

After a bit of research, I found a few apps that let every family member (and even babysitters) with a smartphone keep in sync with one another.

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Photograph: Getty Images

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Emergencies often are unpredictable. But you can still plan for them.

During this week alone, millions of people across the country experienced catastrophic emergencies. Hurricane Ida left millions of Louisiana residents without power or without access to food and water. Flash floods in New Jersey and New York caught many people off guard. Near Lake Tahoe, some residents evacuated in less than an hour after an evacuation order as fires threatened their homes. In August, flash floods ravaged Central Tennessee, and earlier this year, millions of people in Texas were left without electricity and water following a winter storm.

Unfortunately, climate scientists now warn that weather emergencies like these may be the new normal, as global warming leads to heavier rains, stronger hurricanes, more tornadoes, and bigger wildfires. The average number of climate- and weather-related disasters per decade has increased nearly 35 percent since the 1990s, according to the World Disasters Report.

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Credit…Eden Weingart

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The year was 1993 and, aged 16, I was about to sit my Geography GCSE exam. This was an ‘old school’ style public examination, held in the school’s gymnasium. A stifling odor of floor wax and dust hung heavy in the air. Victorian-era single desks featuring ink wells that had been utterly redundant for about three generations were arranged into rows with unerring precision. The silence was so unnatural and oppressive, it seemed to have a tangible density.

Nonetheless, I had crammed for this exam like a champion and was feeling confident. I took a deep breath, opened my examination booklet, and glanced over the first page of questions. A gut-wrenching realization quickly dawned on me, captured perfectly by a single piece of graffiti etched into the haggard surface of my desk. It read: ‘Oh Sh*t! There goes college, 1992.’

Clearly, I hadn’t been the only one whose confidence in their exam preparation was misplaced. However, it wouldn’t be until I started teaching psychology some 12 years later that I fully understood why. Here’s the bad news: research from psychology indicates that our ability to accurately monitor and evaluate our level of knowledge or skill (referred to as metacognitive ability) is often flawed. These flaws tend to give us an inflated perception of our knowledge and understanding, encouraging us to persevere with ineffective methods of studying that quietly, but persistently, undermine our efforts to learn. It’s easy to demonstrate this by examining some preferred study practices and considering the misconceptions about learning that they reflect. Let’s kick off things by looking at that perennial favorite: cramming.

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Photo by Piotr Malecki/Panos Pictures

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