James' World 2

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One person was killed in a storm-related car crash as Hurricane Lala imposed fierce winds and pouring rain on Hawaii’s Big Island on Saturday, Gov. Josh Green said.

With the worst likely yet to come, Honolulu Fire Chief Sheldon Hao said first responders have responded to 40 reports of damaged roofs and downed trees. More than 84,000 utility customers in the state, most on the Big Island, were without electricity, according to utility tracker PowerOutage.us.

Lala making landfall on the Big Island would mark history, as a hurricane hasn’t done so in 155 years.

“Hurricane Lala is passing just south of Hawaiʻi Island, where winds are peaking and some areas have already received more than 13 inches of rain,” Green said on X. “Conditions are worsening across Maui County, Oʻahu and Kaua‘i tonight.”

Green, speaking in a video update, said he’s started the process that will lead to the declaration of a major disaster. He did not provide further details about the fatality.

Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi said at a news conference that search and rescue crews were working in dire conditions at Oahu’s Lulumahu Falls Trail to find a hiker.

Additionally, Honolulu Ocean Safety Department director Kurt Lager said lifeguards made 59 rescues Saturday. He urged people not to get in the water on Sunday.

“It’s not a day to come to the beach,” he said at the news conference. “It’s not a day to go paddling or surfing.”

In its latest forecast discussion, National Hurricane Center meteorologists said the hurricane is displaying a possible new track, making it “unclear if Lala will actually make a landfall on the Big Island.”

In an update Saturday night, the center said “the eyewall of Lala is nearing South Point,” on the Big Island, with the hurricane’s official position at 35 miles south of South Point.

Lala was headed northwest at 9 mph, it said.

The tropical cyclone is unleashing what could be life-threatening rain on the Big Island as it produces sustained winds of 75 mph, hurricane center director Michael Brennan said in a video update at 11 a.m. local time.

“Some locations have already picked up more than a foot of rain,” he said. “We’re also seeing numerous hurricane-level wind gusts, especially at higher elevations.”

The most inundated part of the island is its windward or eastern side, with higher elevations getting both precipitation and the strongest winds, Brennan said.

Parts of the windward sides of the Big Island and Maui each reported about a foot of rain or slightly more, the hurricane center said in an update.

“Heavy rain continues to spread across the eastern main Hawaiian Islands,” it said.

Though the center’s forecast cone for the hurricane puts it in line with a historic, direct hit on the Big Island, forecasters late Saturday morning said a developing low-pressure trough to the west could cause Lala to brush by to the south.

The tropical cyclone could strengthen in the next few hours, with its most-damaging time frame being the next 6 to 12 hours, Brennan said. But afterward, the impacts of interacting with the Big Island will weaken it significantly, hurricane center forecasters said.

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Forecasters warn of life-threatening flooding, mudslides and damaging winds, with up to 25 inches of rain possible at higher elevations.

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The American ambassador expressed outrage and declared that the United States stood with the Philippines, the oldest U.S. treaty ally in Southeast Asia.

Yet no one expects China to curb its expansionist activities in the region anytime soon. And there are growing doubts among Asian nations over what the United States would be willing to do to deter China, given the enormous distraction and resource drain of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

The United States is running low on critical weapons, including air defense interceptors. Iran’s missile and drone attacks have forced U.S. troops to leave bases in the Middle East and destroyed the sites, an indication of what the Chinese military — which is much more powerful than Iran’s — could do in a conflict in Asia.

In early July, China conducted a rare test firing of a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile that carried a dummy warhead, sending it into the Pacific Ocean from a nuclear-powered submarine. It is one of the most powerful elements in its arsenal.

While China tests its might, President Trump’s State Department is closing consulates in Japan and Indonesia, according to congressional officials briefed on the decision.

Mr. Trump’s second term “has been a colossal failure for U.S. interests in the Asia region,” Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.

“This strategy, if you can call it one, is a gift to China that is undermining U.S. credibility and harming our national security,” he added.

Trump appointees say the administration is not ceding ground in Asia. In a speech in Manila on Aug. 10, Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, said the Trump administration aimed to “maintain a posture of deterrence by denial along the first island chain” — meaning it was willing to commit military resources to dissuade China from invading or attacking islands that include Taiwan and ones in the Philippines and Japan.

But Mr. Colby also said allies needed to spend more on defense and should try to integrate their militaries with that of the United States — and “not vainly and futilely seek to exclude or supplant us.”

Mr. Trump’s global trade war, whose targets have included Southeast Asian nations, has also revealed to allies and partners that the United States can be a commercial antagonist.

The U.S. government has lacked an economic vision for Southeast Asia for years, as Democratic and Republican politicians retreated from a Pacific Rim trade pact that President Barack Obama promoted.

That has left countries in Southeast Asia wondering what happened to the U.S. drive to ensure that it remains a presence that balances against China.

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The Sierra Madre, a Philippine naval ship, in the South China Sea in 2023. Last month, a Chinese Coast Guard vessel began circling the ship and confronted Philippine service members. Credit…Aaron Favila/Associated Press

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Alzheimer’s disease disproportionately affects women—around two thirds of the people who develop it are female. Why that is the case isn’t totally clear. It may be because women tend to live longer than men or perhaps because of social or genetic factors. But emerging research points to another potential risk factor: menopause.

During menopause, the ovaries stop producing mature eggs, and the production of estrogen, a sex hormone critical to female reproductive health, slows. Research hints that this precipitous drop in estrogen may affect how our brains age.

“One of the prevailing hypotheses is that this sharp decline in estrogen may somehow contribute to differences in brain aging,” including the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s, says Jennifer Bruno, a cognitive neuroscientist at Stanford University.

Now a new study by Bruno and her colleagues that was published in Neurology on Wednesday provides another clue to the possible link between menopause and dementia.

The researchers analyzed two datasets that included a total of 21,462 patient records; for one of the datasets, nearly 3,000 people had donated their brains for science when they died. Overall, patients who took estrogen-only hormone therapy for menopause were less likely to display signs of memory loss or cognitive decline or to be diagnosed with dementia.

In the nearly 3,000 patients who donated their brains to science, the brains of those who took estrogen were less likely to show neurobiological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease, such as beta-amyloid plaques or tangles of tau protein. The researchers accounted for confounding factors such as age, race, history of hypertension and other traits, notes Jacob Shaw, a study co-author and psychiatry resident at Massachusetts General Hospital/McLean Hospital. The other dataset also showed a drop in Alzheimer’s-related biomarkers in living patients who took estrogen.

Importantly, the study surfaces an association between estrogen-only hormone therapy and a lower risk of dementia—it doesn’t prove that estrogen-only therapy prevents or treats dementia.

There may be other factors at play, says Hadi Hosseini, a neuroscientist at Stanford University and the study’s senior author. It could be that women who took estrogen-only hormone therapy were healthier overall than those who did not or had better access to health care, or something else could have been involved, he says.

Another limitation is that the research team didn’t have access to information about why each of the patients had been taking estrogen-only therapy. Because it is associated with an increased risk of endometrial cancer, estrogen-only therapy is primarily recommended for menopause treatment in women who have undergone hysterectomies, but the datasets in this study didn’t include hysterectomy records.

Another complication is that some past research suggests that other hormonal therapies, including a combination of the sex hormone progesterone and estrogen, may be associated with a higher risk of dementia. It’s not totally clear why.

More research into the relationship between menopause, estrogen and dementia—including long-term studies that track patients as they age—is needed, the authors say. “It sets the stage for the future randomized controlled trials,” Bruno says.

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Hmmmm … The Trump administration is screwing the USA for Profit!

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Key Points

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Cases of cyclosporiasis were mounting rapidly in Michigan, and state health officials were homing in on a common thread: Many of those who had fallen ill had eaten at Taco Bell.

On July 1, they asked the company for its supply chain records, crucial information in tracing ingredients that may have caused the outbreak.

On July 3, they wrote and asked for the records again.

On July 6, they wrote a third time. 

“With the rapid nature of this outbreak and the number of people affected, we need to ensure we are completing traceback in a timely manner to preserve public health,” Lauren Edwards, an epidemiologist on the state’s rapid response team, said in an email to executives at Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell. (The New York Times obtained the correspondence under Michigan’s open records law.)

Later that day, Taco Bell provided some records to the state, which by then was working with the federal Food and Drug Administration. The F.D.A. asked for additional records two days later. Finally, on July 13, the agency received all the records it needed to pinpoint lettuce from a Taylor Farms plant in Mexico as a source of the outbreak.

A federal rule that had been scheduled to take effect in January would have required Taco Bell to send those records within 24 hours. But last year, the Trump administration delayed the implementation of that rule until mid 2028, saying companies needed more time to prepare.

Food safety experts say the postponement has hindered the response to the outbreak, the largest cluster in a record number of cyclospora cases in the United States this year.

“Time translates into illnesses and lives,” said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, who reviewed the emails from Michigan. He added: “We would have had a much better response to this outbreak if they hadn’t delayed that rule.”

Cyclospora, which can cause explosive diarrhea, cramps and other severe symptoms, has been a recognized driver of foodborne illness for nearly 30 years. But this year’s massive toll — totaling more than 24,500 confirmed or suspected cases so far and two deaths — reveals shortcomings in the U.S. food safety system that may leave Americans more vulnerable to future pathogens, public health experts say.

Many point to an erosion of food safety oversight during the Trump administration, stemming in part from its aggressive efforts to roll back regulations and shrink the federal government. Last year, the F.D.A. laid off many of the staff who supported food inspectors’ travel planning and who coordinate with foreign governments on food safety. (An F.D.A. spokesman said on Friday that “travel support staff and staff that coordinated with foreign governments have been reinstated.”) The administration eliminated a committee tasked with studying problems that led to outbreaks. It also cut a program focused on cyclospora tracking.

“So far this administration has made our food less safe, not safer,” said Scott Faber, the senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “By firing food safety experts, by reducing the number of inspections, by tracking fewer pathogens, and by failing to set up a traceability system that makes sure that we’re able to to clear the shelves quickly.”

Donald Prater, the F.D.A.’s acting deputy commissioner for food, said the agency responded swiftly with the information it had on hand. He added that even if the 24-hour rule had been in effect, it would not have made a major impact on managing this outbreak response.

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Last year, the Food and Drug Administration cut a program that tracked cyclospora outbreaks and delayed a rule that would have required companies to swiftly provide supply chain records in investigations of foodborne disease outbreaks. Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

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Metformin is one of the most prescribed medicines in the U.S., primarily to treat or prevent type 2 diabetes. But how it works has been something of a mystery. Now researchers have discovered that the substance essentially transforms a person’s gut cells into a sugar sink, resulting in lowered levels of glucose.

Evidence of this mechanism stretches as far back as 1989, when French metabolic researcher Jean Girard and his colleagues published a paper describing how metformin increased the amount of glucose rats absorbed in their intestines. But when research picked up after the drug was finally approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in 1995, scientists mostly moved toward the theory that metformin reduced the liver’s production of glucose. “It was as if the preexisting science had never existed,” says University of Cambridge metabolism researcher Stephen O’Rahilly, who was not involved in the new study.

Later, radiologists discovered that metformin can cause patients’ guts to “light up like a beacon” during a positron-emission tomography scan, O’Rahilly says. (This version of the test used a tracer molecule that goes to tissues consuming sugar.) Gradually, metabolic scientists began to think this gut absorption of sugar could be important, and they revisited the old research. Not long after, University of Cambridge mitochondrial biologist Judy Hirst found that at very high levels, the drug blocks mitochondria from using oxygen.

For their new study, Northwestern University mitochondrial biologist Navdeep Chandel and his team wanted to figure out how these two ideas fit together: that metformin both causes the gut to absorb more glucose and blocks mitochondria’s oxygen use. Cell respiration, in which cells convert sugars into usable energy, happens inside mitochondria. So Chandel’s group complemented mitochondrial complex I, an enzyme necessary for cell respiration, with a yeast enzyme that isn’t affected by metformin and that they knew could perform some of the same functions in mice’s guts. In those mice, respiration continued as expected, but metformin didn’t reduce blood sugar levels. They concluded that when accumulated at high-enough levels, metformin, by blocking oxygen use, prompts gut cells to switch to a different metabolic pathway that uses much more sugar to produce energy.

This result is counterintuitive, especially considering metformin’s potential connection to antiaging effects. “All these people always say that for longevity, I want to boost my mitochondria,” Chandel says. “If anything, [metformin is] inhibiting mitochondria reversibly, transitively.”

“The broader lesson,” he adds, “is that inhibiting mitochondria may be beneficial when it is done in the right cells, for the right amount of time, without exposing the whole body to the broad toxicity of a mitochondrial inhibitor.” The new work was reported in Nature Metabolism.

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Thomas Fuchs

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At the 2026 ESSENCE Festival of Culture in New Orleans, the Black Heart Association screened more than 700 attendees, but founders Tara and Frederick Robinson’s work extends far beyond one weekend. Through free screenings, health education, local partnerships, and a commitment to meeting people where they are, the Black-owned nonprofit is working year-round to help underserved communities better understand their heart health and advocate for the care they deserve.

Three-time heart attack survivor and her husband bring their heart health initiative to the community hub at the 2026 ESSENCE Festival of Culture

“Can you imagine waking up April 10, 2014, and telling your husband something is wrong? Can you imagine your left arm being numb, your neck bothering you…your chest feeling like you swallowed a pill but didn’t drink enough water? Can you imagine feeling sick to your stomach and having to go to the emergency room, just to be told, ‘You’re too thin,’ ‘There is nothing showing on your EKG or in your blood work,’ and, ‘Just follow up with your primary care [physician]?’

Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence in the Black community, especially women, when it comes to healthcare. For Fort Worth, Texas native Tara Robinson, this was the beginning of her finding her purpose. But it didn’t just end there.

“Can you imagine being released, going to work (don’t judge me), and having that happen again in your classroom in front of your students? And then going back to the ER and being told that insurance would not cover what you ‘claim’ you’re having because nothing is showing up on their tests? Having to go back and forth with a white female cardiologist trying to get her to just keep [you] overnight? Can you imagine having to advocate for yourself during a crisis? Can you imagine being released at 11:00, going back at 12:00, having a massive heart attack, then going into cardiac arrest?”

Thankfully, God sent her an angel in the form of a New Orleans-born ICU nurse who was by her side every step of the way, telling her it was going to be okay. “God saved my life on that day. I died on that operating table and went to heaven. And it was in my ICU bed that I knew this fight belonged to me. That’s where my journey started. But I don’t want our people to have to imagine these things, and that’s why [my husband and I] started the Black Heart Association.”

Tara and Frederick Robinson founded BHA together in 2016 after her third and final near-death experience. Recognizing that the Black community faces a 54 percent higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, it has become their life mission to help individuals understand the causes, effects, and symptoms of heart disease and take meaningful action to prevent it. Staying true to this mission, BHA has traveled to more than 50 cities, serving 300 different communities and providing over 20,000 screenings to those who need it most.

For four years, Tara and Frederick have brought BHA’s year-round mission to the ESSENCE Festival of Culture in New Orleans, offering free heart health screenings to attendees. Screenings include A1C testing, which measures one’s average blood sugar, as well as kidney function and a complete cholesterol panel.

“Since we started serving at ESSENCE Fest, I remember year one, we served right on the street outside of the Le Meridien Hotel,” Frederick recalls. “We had our mobile unit with myself, my wife [Tara], and maybe two other team members. We were super small then.”

At the 2026 festival, they expanded their presence inside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, fully immersed inside the community hub located directly next to the Coca-Cola stage, one of the biggest across the entire daytime experience.

“Having the expanded space was really, really, really beneficial,” Frederick says. “Anytime you have more space, you can be more creative with what you come up with in terms of how to engage the community.”

Sponsored by Amgen, the festival activation brought BHA’s community-first approach to life with their “Drop the Beat, Not Your Health” activation, giving folks headphones to jam out to the music of their choice while they wait in line to be screened.

“The idea is that they can be entertained while also waiting to learn more about their health,” Frederick explains. “That’s always good for us because we never want to lose people. That’s the beauty of ESSENCE Fest…there’s so many people, and they want to take advantage of all of the free services. But when you’re providing a service that’s so important, as a provider, it kind of makes your anxiety go up a little bit because you’re so afraid somebody’s going to become impatient, or they’re going to walk away and not come back around. And, who knows…that could be that one person that you really, really needed to have that conversation with that you missed out on just because you weren’t able to hold them there, or because there were so many other things that were pulling at them that they walked away.”

The interactive setup helped BHA keep attendees engaged long enough to connect them with care, as they were able to screen over 700 attendees, while overall educating and informing double the amount of people screened.

“This space allows us to do that. This location allows us to do that. There are other things happening right here in the vicinity that people are able to engage with without having to leave our booth,” Frederick continues. “And they can pop right back in and get their screening done and have these conversations. This is amazing.
It’s a great time, as always. We’re meeting some great people, having some great conversations. We know that what we do matters, so we know that the impact is great.”

That emphasis on trust extends beyond the festival. Frederick credits BHA’s community engagement to its ongoing collaboration with phlebotomists, labs, universities, and public health organizations local to the communities being served. The organization had four screeners who directly interacted with attendees every day, and all of them were from the city of New Orleans.

“You never want to pull up into somebody’s backyard and set up and start cooking…that’s how we look at it,” Frederick shares. “Our team [from Texas] is here with us, but we always try to partner with people who are in the city, who know the people…because we understand how big trust is with our community, especially when it comes to healthcare. If I know you, and I trust you, then I’m more likely to have a conversation with you, and I’m more likely to engage with you. Those are the things that we want to always make sure we are keeping at the forefront of how we serve. If they need me for support, great, but I get out of the way and just let love lead, and we never go wrong.”

Even after BHA and its partners complete the heart screenings, their engagement doesn’t stop there, demonstrating their commitment to providing top-notch health service to communities who may not receive that from other healthcare providers.

“One thing we make sure we do is stay engaged and stay locked in. People just want to know that you are listening and that you’re acknowledging what they’re saying,” Frederick says. “We like to communicate and talk them through the process so that they’re not in the dark.

“We expect five-star service from everywhere…our restaurants, our hotels, but we don’t expect that service from our doctors, and we should,” Tara shares, encouraging people to advocate themselves by any means necessary, even if that means switching primary care providers. “Get to searching for somebody else because there are doctors out here that care about us, and you deserve to be heard. Anything else is unacceptable.”

The reality is that cardiac disease is the number one killer of Black women. With that in mind, Tara also says it is critical to use your voice and “know before you go.”

“When I say that someone dies [from cardiovascular disease] every 36 seconds, I don’t want that to be you,” Tara shares. “They tell us not to be bold or not to, you know, raise our voices because that’s one of the ways that they kind of suppress us…but I say raise your voice, and then know the chain of command within the hospital. We teach our Black kids how to deal with being pulled over by the police. We have to know the exact same steps when we’re going to the healthcare system. So when you go in there, already know what you’re asking for, and be demanding. You know your body better than anyone. And a lot of it is sometimes just getting to a heart specialist. Sometimes you can’t get past your primary care physician about it, so you have to insist on speaking to the person that knows the heart better than anyone.”

For Tara and Frederick, the festival is one stop in a much larger mission. The disparities facing Black communities—and the family histories that can compound cardiovascular risk—are why BHA continues this work across the country year-round.

“Invite us to your cities. That’s why we exist…to come pull up in your city,” Tara says. “We will come to your family’s house. We want to do the house parties. We want to do your family reunions and all the things, and all of that is free.”

“As long as there is an ESSENCE Fest, there’s going to be a BHA at ESSENCE Fest, but we understand that there’s a need all day, every day,” Frederick adds. “We don’t just want to be a yearly vendor at ESSENCE Fest; we want to be a permanent presence in the city. We want to be a resource. We want to be a connector. We want to be a part of whatever people need in order to live out their best life because at the end of the day, all we got is each other, and we want people to be here. We want people to be well, and we want people to be happy and not just for themselves but everybody that they’re connected to because we are all, at the end of the day, we’re one, and we’re better together.”

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Since the day she began her campaign for Congress, Paige Cognetti, the Democratic mayor of Scranton, has centered her pitch to voters on the prodigious stock trading of the House Republican she is seeking to unseat, Representative Rob Bresnahan Jr. of Pennsylvania.

“This year he’s already made 600 trades,” Ms. Cognetti said in the announcement video for her campaign in September. “Sold Chinese stocks the week of a tariff. Buys missile stocks before a war. Buys jet stocks before a big contract. Oversees crypto? Buys crypto stocks before a vote.”

It may be the district where the issue rings the loudest. Democrats are running ads highlighting how Mr. Bresnahan profited from a data center development by trading stocks related to the industry, and recent polls show Ms. Cognetti with a narrow lead. But she is not alone in zeroing in on stock trading by members of Congress as a potent line of attack in this year’s midterm elections.

Like many members of Congress who trade substantial amounts of stock, Mr. Bresnahan, the wealthy former chief executive of an electrical contracting company, has said he relies on a financial adviser to make his trades and never knows about the transactions before they happen or when they occur.

Mr. Bresnahan’s campaign said that Ms. Cognetti’s descriptions of his trades were “lies” and that he has “taken legitimate steps to ban congressional stock trading.”

Still, at a time when many voters are experiencing economic hardship and have grown increasingly suspicious that the political system is rigged, the mere possibility that a member of Congress could be profiting from the job has become politically toxic.

Roughly a quarter of legislators on Capitol Hill have traded individual stocks this term, with some buying and selling millions of dollars in shares. Since the start of this term in January 2025, members and their families have collectively traded $160 million to $664 million in individual stocks, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected from members’ required financial filings by 2iQ Research, an analytics firm.

An overwhelming majority of voters in both parties view stock trading by lawmakers with great suspicion and say they support barring them from doing so. The public backlash has fueled efforts by members of both parties, so far unsuccessful, to enact new legislation banning the practice.

In the meantime, both sides are leveraging the issue in the fight for control of Congress.

Democrats and Republicans alike are seeking to weaponize incumbents’ trades, particularly those where they can show the appearance of a conflict of interest, and putting them at the forefront of ads and campaign attacks in the country’s most competitive districts. It is a way to portray their opponents as corrupt and out of touch with the financial realities of working-class Americans.

In Northern New Jersey’s competitive Seventh Congressional District, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been targeting Representative Thomas H. Kean Jr. for continuing to trade stocks while missing more than 100 votes during an extended absence for what he later said was treatment for depression. Mr. Kean’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In Virginia, Democrats are attacking Representative Rob Wittman for trading more than $2.5 million in stocks between 2015 and 2023 while serving in Congress — including buying defense stocks like Lockheed Martin and Honeywell while serving on the Armed Services Committee.

“There’s a vicious cycle in Washington: Politicians trade stocks in the industries they’re supposed to regulate, then protect those industries instead of you,” said the caption with a campaign video that his opponent, Shannon Taylor, a prosecutor, posted online. “Let’s ban congressional stock trading — for good.”

(An outside group supporting Mr. Wittman apparently views this line of attack as effective: This week, it began running an ad highlighting his vote for a watered-down stock trading bill that passed the House passed in July, noting that he voted to put an end to the “greed and corruption” of “fat cat lawmakers.”) Mr. Wittman’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Republicans have also identified the issue as resonant with their voters.

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Almost 60 percent of lawmakers in Congress own stock, according to an analysis by Common Cause, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focused on making government more accountable. Credit…Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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In a first, the U.S. has approved an influenza vaccine that relies on mRNA technology—the same technology that underpinned the wildly successful Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID vaccines.

The approval marks a sea change for the Trump administration. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a vocal critic of mRNA vaccines. And his agency has canceled millions of dollars in funding for mRNA vaccine research. Indeed, the Food and Drug Administration, which falls under Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services, initially declined to review the mRNA flu shot earlier this year before reversing its decision just a week later.

That vaccine is called mFlusiva and is made by Moderna. The approval covers two of the most vulnerable populations for flu—adults aged 50 to 65 and adults aged 65 and up—on the condition that Moderna will run a further clinical trial in the older group. Past trial data show that Moderna’s vaccine is around 27 percent more effective at protecting against the disease than a standard flu shot.

For more than 70 years, flu vaccines in the U.S. have been manufactured using one of three techniques: there have been egg-based vaccines (the most commonly available type), cell-culture based vaccines, and recombinant vaccines. Vaccines in the last category insert harmless genetic material from a virus into cells in order to trigger the immune system.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines work differently. Messenger RNA copies instructions from viral DNA and teaches the body’s cells to build and recognize copies of viral proteins. The body can then create antibodies if it should ever encounter that protein again, enabling it to fight off infections.

The other great advantage of mRNA vaccines is that they can be rejiggered quickly to respond to emerging strains of a virus. Traditional flu vaccines are made to protect people from the types of influenza viruses that scientists predict may circulate in people during the forthcoming flu season. But they have to be made six months in advance of the actual flu season, which means these predictions can fall short of reality. Moderna’s new vaccine takes just two to three months to manufacture and roll out.

The flu kills between 6,300 and 52,000 people each year, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. The public health agency recommends anyone older than the age of six months who has no health reason preventing them from getting a flu shot to receive one every year in order to protect against disease.

“The Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a new mRNA flu vaccine is welcome news and provides another important option to help protect people from a virus that sends hundreds of thousands of Americans to the hospital each year and claims thousands of lives,” said Ronald G. Nahass, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America, in a statement. “As we prepare for flu season, the most important message is simple: Vaccination saves lives.”

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Personality psychology has spent decades demonstrating that people display remarkable consistency in broad traits while simultaneously adapting their behavior across situations. There is, to add more nuance to this matter, significant variability in the degree to which we connect the different roles or personas we activate in different areas of life, as entrepreneur and thinker Riccarda Zezza illustrates in a compelling new book about the science of transilience.

We are often different people with different audiences, not because we are deceptive, but because context changes which version of ourselves is adaptive. At the same time, as the great Jarvis Cocker wisely remarked, “You will always be stuck with yourself, no matter where you go or what you do.” In other words, even if you tried to be someone else, that is still you trying to be someone else!

This should hardly surprise us. Civilization itself depends on our ability to strategically display those aspects of ourselves that are relevant to each specific audience and occasion, which tends to involve the ability to suppress impulses rather than express them. Imagine a world in which surgeons behaved “authentically” during operations, pilots authentically during turbulence, or judges authentically when sentencing particularly irritating defendants.

Human progress owes far more to emotional regulation than emotional expression. We evolved because we learned to inhibit, censor, delay gratification, cooperate, and strategically present ourselves in ways that allowed strangers to trust us enough to build villages, companies, and eventually multinational corporations.

Which brings us to perhaps my least favorite corporate slogan: “Bring your whole self to work.” I don’t know about you, but my whole self is not even welcome at home. Members of my family routinely ask me to leave parts of it outside the door, even during festive or holiday dinners. Apparently, nobody enjoys hearing my deep psychological analyses of themselves or passionately arguing about the world and the World Cup—and somehow grumpy me, impulsive me, and control-freak me, are rather not welcome at home!? If even those who love us most prefer a carefully edited version of our personalities, it seems optimistic to assume colleagues deserve the unabridged edition or director’s cut of ourselves.

By the same token, it is rarely the case that unfiltered honesty is rewarded, let alone celebrated. Consider perhaps the most predictable interview question ever asked: “Why do you want this job?” Radical authenticity would require an answer along the lines of: “Because at this stage I would take any job, regardless of what it requires, and even if it means putting up with you.” The reason virtually nobody (unless they are unemployable) answers this way is that successful social interaction depends on impression management.

That is, once we hit emotional and psychological maturity, which not everybody achieves, it is typically the case that we habituate to instinctively edit reality into socially acceptable forms of interactions, because by that stage we have typically learned that cooperation requires at least as much diplomacy as the impulse to broadcast our unfiltered thoughts and feelings to others.

Mark Snyder’s influential work on self-monitoring—the tendency to predict and care about how your actions affect others—followed by decades of subsequent research, has consistently shown that individuals who adapt their self-presentation across situations tend to navigate organizations more successfully than those who insist on behaving identically everywhere.

We like to think that it is morally superior to be uncompromisingly rigid in how we present ourselves, but what others actually value is the willingness to make an effort to acknowledge that they exist, and that we are happy to tweak or edit our behavior to accommodate. It is no different from cooking vegetarian food when you invite someone over for dinner who is a vegetarian.

The workplace, then, does not need your “real” self. It needs your best self. Failing that, anything in between those two would do! Crucially, those are rarely the same thing.

High-stakes environments reward judgment, restraint, self-awareness, and social intelligence, not emotional disinhibition. Elon Musk and Donald Trump can tweet (or is it the correct verb X now?) whatever they want, but 99.9% of humans are hugely incentivized to modulate their behavior according to the social requirements of the situation. It is not a sign of weakness but rather civility and social skills. Ironically, what many organizations describe as “authenticity” is often little more than behavioral impulsiveness reflecting our inability or unwillingness to understand that the right to be ourselves cannot override our obligation to others.

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[Source Image: Adobe Stock]

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