James' World 2

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Humans are not all equal in every way. There are a few individuals who have achieved an unparalleled mastery in their field — and they are what I call the exceptionals. Put another way, they are the 1% of the 1% of the world’s most successful people.

Some examples include innovators like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, athletes like Michael Jordan and Serena Williams, and musicians like Mozart and Beethoven. Or they may be people you’ve never heard of who invented life-saving drugs or won Nobel Prizes by making fundamental advances in knowledge.

In my five-plus years of studying how to raise exceptional adults, I’ve found that almost all of them, at a young age, developed the skills to maximize the physical, mental and social potential available to them. In most cases, their parents had an enormous impact in creating an environment that allowed them to thrive.

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Titovailona | Twenty20

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One of the most troubling features of the digital revolution is that some people pay to subject themselves to surveillance that others are forced to endure and would, if anything, pay to be free of.

Consider a GPS tracker you can wear around one of your arms or legs. Make it sleek and cool — think the Apple Watch or FitBit — and some will pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for the privilege of wearing it. Make it bulky and obtrusive, and others, as a condition of release from jail or prison, being on probation, or awaiting an immigration hearing, will be forced to wear one — and forced to pay for it too.

In each case, the device collects intimate and detailed biometric information about its wearer and uploads that data to servers, communities, and repositories. To the providers of the devices, this data and the subsequent processing of it are the main reasons the devices exist. They are means of extraction: That data enables further study, prediction, and control of human beings and populations. While some providers certainly profit from the sale of devices, this secondary market for behavioral control and prediction is where the real money is — the heart of what Shoshana Zuboff rightly calls surveillance capitalism.

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Image: By Russell Sadeghpour for Real Life.

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Four years ago, Matice Ahnjamine filmed her first vlog. Ahnjamine, gorgeous in red lipstick and box braids, stands against a monochrome background and introduces herself to new viewers. “Welcome t-t-t-t-to my YouTube channel,” she says. “As you can ssssee I stutter, and that is why I wanted to start this YouTube channel.” Over the next five minutes, she describes how most of her life she felt alone until, at twenty-eight, she met another person who stuttered. It was exhilarating to encounter someone who spoke with “long pauses” and “made these crazy faces like me,” and now she wants to offer that same sense of connection to other people through her videos—to let us know we’re not alone.

I can imagine what Ahnjamine’s channel might have meant to me had it existed in those early, uncomfortable years of accepting and defining myself as a person who stutters. I had no role models to look to, and all the depictions of disfluency I saw came refracted through able-bodied performers in movies and on television—actors who wore disfluency as a costume. I only heard impressions of stutters, never real ones; I knew only characters who stuttered, not people.

This is still the case for most nonstutterers, whose points of reference for disfluency are usually either works of caricature or inspiration porn. The disclosure of my disfluency is sometimes met with invocations of scripted films: Oh, like The King’s Speech? like The Waterboy? like A Fish Called Wanda? But these are scripted stories, anchored by people pretending to talk like me. In these films stuttering is a dramatic obstacle, a tragic flaw, a character-defining challenge. Ahnjamine’s videos, on the other hand, give first-person insights into the experience of disfluency and impart that stuttering is what we do, not who we are.

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Screencap via Matice Ahnjamine/YouTube

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Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of the Universe at the super-small scale: atoms and subatomic particles that operate in ways that classical physics can’t explain. In order to explore this tension between the quantum and the classical, scientists are attempting to get larger and larger objects to behave in a quantum-like way.

In the case of this particular study, the object in question is a tiny glass nanosphere, 100 nanometers in diameter – about a thousand times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. To our minds, that’s very, very small, but in terms of quantum physics, it’s actually rather huge, made up to 10 million atoms.

Pushing such a nanosphere into the realm of quantum mechanics is actually a huge achievement, and yet that’s exactly what physicists have now accomplished.

Using carefully calibrated laser lights, the nanosphere was suspended in its lowest quantum mechanical state, one of extremely limited motion where quantum behavior can start to happen.

“This is the first time that such a method has been used to control the quantum state of a macroscopic object in free space,” says Lukas Novotny, a professor of photonics from ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

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© ETH Zurich

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