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Smells hover just below our conscious awareness, conjuring up emotions and memories that shape how we perceive and navigate the world.

An unexpected whiff of a long-forgotten snack or a dusty book can transport a person to years past — enabling a kind of time travel that makes hazy memories more vivid.

It’s puzzling then that smell is a sense that, according to scientists, has been largely — and unfairly — ignored in most attempts to understand the past. A growing number of researchers now want to reconstruct ancient aromas and use them to learn more about how we used to live.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people who caught the disease temporarily lost their sense of smell, prompting a newfound appreciation of the importance of odor in their lives. New research projects are underway to understand what the past smelled like and identify what contemporary scents should be preserved for posterity.

“It’s a very vital sense. Smell was also very important in the past and it was probably even more important because in the past not everything was so sanitized,” said Barbara Huber, a doctoral researcher of archaeology at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany.

The challenge of finding past smells is how to capture an ephemeral phenomenon: Archaeologists typically find and study things we can touch, and these are the artifacts we encounter in museums.

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Smell

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Last month, I decided to get a snack from a convenience store. As I walked to the door, there was another customer ahead of me. And he opened the door for himself without bothering to look back.

How rude, I thought. Who doesn’t hold the door open for someone behind them! I got my snack, returned to my car and stewed about the incident. Didn’t he see me? Did he do that on purpose? The thoughts consumed me as I drove around running errands — and even continued over the next few days.

I knew I was wasting a lot of emotional energy on a seemingly trivial moment. And it got me wondering — why was I taking this incident so personally? And how do I manage my feelings about it?

To help answer these questions, I turned to Ethan Kross, psychologist and author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It; psychotherapist Sana Powell, author of Mental Health Journal for Women: Creative Prompts and Practices to Improve Your Well-Being; and clinical psychologist Adia Gooden. They told me it’s human to get upset when we feel offended by something that someone did or said, because we may feel their actions or words are a personal affront to our character.

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Stretching can feel like a real hassle, but it really is crucial to preventing injury and maintaining a good range of mobility—especially if you’re engaging in serious weight training. You should always throw some basic stretches into your pre-and post-workout, do what feels good, and talk to a doctor if something hurts in more than an “oooh yeah, that’s the stuff” kind of way.

But just because stretching is a core pillar of fitness doesn’t mean it comes naturally to everyone who works out. Even if you don’t work out, you should still be stretching. We talked to two of our favorite fitness and mobility experts to find out which stretches are crucial for everyone.

What parts of the body are most in need of attention?

For people who don’t get much physical activity in—or just don’t pay much mind to stretching—hips are an important place to start limbering up.

“Having mobility in your hips is important for decreasing and preventing lower back pain,” says Mike Watkins, a licensed athletic trainer, injury rehabilitation specialist, manual therapy expert, and founder of Festive Fitness & Wellness in Philadelphia. “Shakira said it best when she said ‘hips don’t lie.’”

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We asked experts for the moves everyone should work on. Unsplash

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Humans grow up with a powerful drive to learn how things work and why certain patterns and properties exist in the world. Wonder, a word with multiple related meanings, has one sense that captures this desire to know. You employ wonder when you ask questions such as ‘How do fish breathe underwater?’ or ‘Why do air conditioners drip water?’ Wonder, as I describe it here, is more than the sort of curiosity that motivates someone to seek a simple factual answer (eg, ‘What is the biggest kind of dog?’) Wonder moves someone to seek out explanations – especially about the patterns of cause and effect that underlie phenomena. It is also different from awe, which can occur as a more passive state of amazement. Wonder involves active thought and engagement. It invokes conjectures about ‘how’ and ‘why’. It might even launch speculations about different possible worlds. Wonder motivates targeted explorations and discoveries.

In its most mature forms – in adults who have flourished as lifelong wonderers – wonder promotes sustained excavation of the rich causal architectures of the world. It helps us to appreciate everything around us more fully. We come to see a more richly textured and dynamic reality. For example, through wondering and learning about how and why songbirds sing, how the first flowers break through frozen ground, and how animals hibernate, we come to see and experience the first days of spring in more immersive and rewarding ways. Each instance of wondering in turn launches a branching network of new instances and opens a door to the potentially endless joy of successive discoveries. If this sounds overly euphoric, it is exactly how renowned polymaths describe their lives, from childhood to their final moments.

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Temptation is part of life. It is commonplace to find yourself in situations where what you want to do and what you feel you should do are in conflict – for instance, choosing between a delicious dessert versus sticking to a diet, or playing video games instead of studying, or watching a movie rather than going to the gym. During these times, you likely aspire to make the ‘right’ decision – the decision that propels you towards your long-term goals. Successfully resisting temptations or, in other words, exerting high self-control more often is probably something you strive for. There’s certainly a widespread cultural belief in the value of greater willpower and self-discipline, as a glance at any self-help shelf or magazine rack will attest. Yet research by us and others tells a far more interesting and nuanced story about the pros and cons of being someone with ample self-control.

Unsurprisingly, a good deal of past research has focused on the positive outcomes and impacts of having high self-control. Findings show that people with greater self-control experience benefits such as higher productivity and success at school and work, greater success and satisfaction in their relationships, and they are viewed as more trustworthy by their peers. Naturally, these impressive outcomes shine a highly favorable light on the trait, and they jibe with the way that willpower is vaunted in popular culture. But, in fact, there’s growing evidence that self-control is not an exclusively beneficial characteristic – it can also come with various downsides, suggesting we would do well to take a more nuanced view of this trait and our desire for more of it.

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A customer at Happiness Forgets cocktail bar in London. Photo by Ian Teh/Panos

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Getting to know someone new—we mean really getting to know them—can be a thrill (for extroverts, under the right circumstances). But it can also feel like a downright daunting task. This is especially true for introverts, or anyone entering into a new situation—whether that’s a first date, a new job, a new city, or even a new identity (like first-time parenthood… or trying to emerge from two years of quarantine lifestyle).

To get the conversation going in the right direction, remember it’s not just about talking, but about listening, too. And that means asking the right questions, thought-starters primed to get at real substance rather than small talk.

“Whether a new colleague at work, a business mixer, or even in a social scene, getting to know someone isn’t the easiest task,” explains Dr. Wayne Pernell, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and specializes in helping people achieve greater success and satisfaction in life and work.

A good rule of thumb? “You never start with the weather,” he says. “It’s too easy. It doesn’t give you information, and ultimately it doesn’t mean anything. Instead, focus on something that’s meaningful, but not a common topic.”

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Questions About Likes/Dislikes

Questions and more questions

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Historically, Britain has been timid about table condiments. Salt and pepper are often the standard duo, while an exhilarating array of flavorings is deployed globally to tweak cooked foods: traditional spices, evolving spice mixes, clever powders created by imaginative chefs. What could be better than sprinkling a dash of vibrant color across your meals? Here are 22 ways to spice up your food.

Dehydrated chicken skin

“It will transform chips, fish, boring salads, anything,” enthuses Sam Grainger, the chef-owner at Belzan in Liverpool. On a greaseproof tray, flatten chicken skin, salt it, and scatter with garlic and thyme. Place baking paper on top and a tray to weigh it down. Oven roast at 170C (150C fan)/335F/gas 3½ for 40 minutes, until the skin is crisp. Remove the top tray and paper, and continue to dry the skin in the oven at about 75C fan for a further eight hours. Let it cool on kitchen towels to absorb any oil. Pat dry.

Using a blender, blitz the skin and a little coarse salt to a fine powder. Portion out your batch of powder – you could use an ice-cube tray or clingfilm “twists” – and freeze in an airtight container.

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A sprinkling of Egyptian dukkah or Indian chaat masala can elevate a simple dinner. Photograph: Martin Steinthaler/Getty Images

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“Pay attention to the clock in your body, not just the one on the wall,” she says. “Human beings have circadian rhythms. We were designed for mental alertness in the morning and physical dexterity in the afternoon. That’s just how the body clock works.”

Instead of randomly tackling to-dos, McGeorge breaks up the day into four quadrants, each lasting about two hours. And each quadrant can be an ideal time to tackling different types of work.

The first quadrant

The first two hours of the day are for high-intensity, high-impact work. These tasks are the most important things you are paid to do, and they require the most brainpower.

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[Source Photo: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels]

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Since we started carrying smartphones with decent cameras in our pockets wherever we go, we’ve collectively taken more and more photos. Over the past decade, I’ve shot maybe 50,000 with my iPhones, which makes for a hell of a lot of mediocre pictures—and very few good ones.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re in a somewhat similar situation: years of shooting smartphone photos have given you an entirely unsorted, multi-thousand-picture camera roll.

Digital photos are wonderful, but there’s no point shooting them if you just leave them sitting on your smartphone, totally ignored. Sure you’ve thought about putting everything in place, but just thinking about diving into those folders most likely scares you. Don’t worry—I’m here to tell you that sorting that photo mess of yours can be done, though it won’t be quick.

Keep or Cull

There are two main strategies when it comes to sorting through thousands of photos, depending on how you feel about them: You can either aim to keep the good photos or you can cull the bad ones.

Keeping the good photos is easier and will give you a much smaller library. You’re essentially adopting a “hell yeah” or “nope” approach. Simply work your way through all your photos and pull out the ones you think are objectively great. Anything that doesn’t hit the mark gets deleted.

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Digital photos are free and don’t take up any physical space. No wonder most of us are digital hoarders. Photo by Antonio Gravante via Depositphotos

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