One ism missing from the list of, 14,000 is Trumpism! These articles are long reads!
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Do you know many words ending in ism? If not, don’t worry – you’re about to learn some pretty interesting philosophy words. Each of these words describes a specific philosophical concept or idea. And they all have a suffix of ISM.
What makes these terms so interesting is that they all have different meanings. They can be used to describe different aspects of life, religion, politics, science, and more. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at some of the more common (and not so common) ISM words, and discuss what they mean.
They’re all worth knowing if you want to sound smart at your next cocktail party. And they can break the ice for your next game of Scrabble, Words With Friends, or crosswords. So get ready to learn about idealism, nihilism, and more!
NOTE: There are about 14,000 words in this blog post, so using the Table of Contents below will be helpful if there’s something specific you’re searching for.
On Aug. 4, 2020, Clorox’s chief executive officer, Benno Dorer, told Reuters that there would likely be a shortage of the company’s name-brand disinfectant wipes until 2021. Even though the company increased its production by 40%, the Covid-19 pandemic increased demand for the wipes by more than 500%—far more than annual spikes related to flu season.
But even though Clorox wipes may not be on grocery store shelves as much as they used to, there are plenty of alternative disinfectants, including ones you can make yourself. And some of them are better for the planet, too.
The shortage of Clorox wipes stems from crushing demand, but also from its supply chain. While most of its products will bounce back from shortages in the next six months (predicted at the time this article was written in August 2020), Dorer told Reuters, disinfecting wipes “will probably take longer because it’s a very complex supply chain to make them,” including the IP-protected material Clorox uses for the wipe itself.
“What people like about Clorox wipes is that they’re consistent and quality-controlled,” says Rachel Noble, an environmental microbiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In other words, they feel like they can trust the product—which is especially important in such uncertain times.
Fortunately, there are plenty of effective alternatives. The US Environmental Protection Agency has a list of nearly 500 different disinfectant products that work to kill SARS-CoV-2 if you’re looking for something store-bought in lieu of Clorox wipes.
There are ways to make your own wipe substitutes at home, says Noble, but in order to be effective, they have to be made properly.
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So many more ways to clean. Photo by Reuters/Chip Somodevilla
They turned up in shifts, all through the course of lockdown: mice, ants, weevils, moths, a fox and, on one unhappy occasion, a magpie in the kitchen. I have been obliged to show the door to all manner of wildlife, with varying degrees of success. The magpie was eager to leave. The ants less so. The moths are still with us.
It’s easy to get angry with household pests, and sometimes – on encountering a particularly rapacious mouse, say – it’s possible to wish them great harm. But most people, I suspect, would rather be as humane as possible when getting rid of invaders. And even when kindness can’t stop you killing things, squeamishness often will. Unfortunately, many pest control products still associate effectiveness with lethality. The ant trap I bought says it “destroys ants and their nests!” I really just wanted them off the worktop. Is it possible to keep your home pest-free using only humane, nonlethal means?
The first thing I had to learn about humane pest control is that the people who promote it don’t like the word pest. Rodents and insects are all wildlife, with a vital part to play in our ecosystem. “Commonly, people call them pests, but they have the same right to live on this planet as we do,” says Laura-Lisa Hellwig, campaigns manager at the vegan charity Viva!. “And some of them have been here for a much longer time than we have. Really, we should find a peaceful way to live together instead of eradicating or cruelly killing some of them.”
Step one, then, is to check if you can simply coexist with your would-be pest.
“When people see, you know, a bee nest in their guttering on the side of their house, the first thing they think is: ‘We need to find a way to control that,’” says Kevin Newell, the founder of Humane Wildlife Solutions, a pioneering nonlethal wildlife control company based in Scotland. He is speaking to me by phone over the peeping of recently rescued baby lesser black-backed gulls, which are temporarily living in his office before being rehomed at a wildlife refuge.
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Tim Dowling … ‘It’s easy to get angry with household pests.’ Photo by Philippe TURPIN/Getty Images
Our descendants will look back on this time in human history with a mixture of confusion and disgust. Americans spend around 90 percent of their time in indoor spaces, which we heat by burning fossil fuels that also warm the planet and sully the air of our homes. Our descendants will be especially confused because for years we’ve had easy access to a cleaner, more efficient alternative: the fully electric heat pump.
At long last, though, the humble heat pump is exploding in popularity. Unlike a boiler or furnace, which burn fossil fuels to produce heat, this device transfers heat through an outdoor unit into the indoor space. (It looks a bit like a traditional air conditioner.) In the winter, a heat pump extracts heat from outdoor air, but it can be reversed in the summer to pump heat out, providing cooling. Exchanging heat in this way is much more efficient than generating it.
Last year, 4 million heat pumps were installed in the US, up from 1.7 million in 2012. Europe, too, is coming around to the heat pump, with sales increasing 28 percent in Germany in 2021 and 60 percent in Poland. That’s no small feat, given the global pandemic slowdown, and it’s just the beginning of growth, especially with Europe’s push for energy independence from Russia amid the war in Ukraine.
“Heat pumps are a few years behind electric vehicles but really deserve similar attention and could deliver very sizable reductions in emissions if we deployed them much more rapidly,” says Jan Rosenow, director of European programs at the Regulatory Assistance Project, an NGO dedicated to the transition to clean energy.
Here’s how heat pumps work, how governments can use them to reduce emissions, and how you can get your hands on one.
Moving Heat, Not Making It
A heat pump works on the same principle as a refrigerator, which keeps your food cold not by pumping cool air in, but by pumping warm air out. The heat you feel on the outside of the machine is actually being transferred away. Similarly, a heat pump can cool a building by moving hot air out. Or, in the winter, a heat pump can warm a building by operating as a sort of “reverse refrigerator,” extracting heat from even cold outdoor air and bringing it inside. (That’s putting it simply—the engineering involved is rather complex.)
Natural gas is a fossil fuel. Like other fossil fuels such as coal and oil, natural gas forms from the plants, animals, and microorganisms that lived millions of years ago.
There are several different theories to explain how fossil fuels are formed. The most prevalent theory is that they form underground, under intense conditions. As plants, animals, and microorganisms decompose, they are gradually covered by layers of soil, sediment, and sometimes rock. Over millions of years, the organic matter is compressed. As the organic matter moves deeper into Earth’s crust, it encounters higher and higher temperatures.
The combination of compression and high temperature causes the carbon bonds in the organic matter to break down. This molecular breakdown produces thermogenicmethane—natural gas. Methane, probably the most abundant organic compound on Earth, is made of carbon and hydrogen (CH4).
Natural gas deposits are often found near oil deposits. Deposits of natural gas close to Earth’s surface are usually dwarfed by nearby oil deposits. Deeper deposits—formed at higher temperatures and under more pressure—have more natural gas than oil. The deepest deposits can be made up of pure natural gas.
Natural gas does not have to be formed deep underground, however. It can also be formed by tiny microorganisms called methanogens. Methanogens live in the intestines of animals (including humans) and in low-oxygen areas near the surface of Earth. Landfills, for example, are full of decomposing matter that methanogens break down into a type of methane called biogenic methane. The process of methanogens creating natural gas (methane) is called methanogenesis.
Although most biogenic methane escapes into the atmosphere, there are new technologies being created to contain and harvest this potential energy source.
Thermogenic methane—the natural gas formed deep beneath Earth’s surface—can also escape into the atmosphere. Some of the gas is able to rise through permeable matter, such as porous rock, and eventually dissipate into the atmosphere.
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Photograph by David Cupp: Burgan Field/ The Burgan oil field, in Kuwait, is one of the richest oil fields in the world. Natural gas, some of which is seen burning here, is often found near deposits of oil and coal. Oil, coal, and natural gas are fossil fuels.
Take only pictures, leave only footprints. We’ve all heard it, but how many of us actually heed it? Today, with more than 1 billion people traveling every year, it’s imperative for frequent travelers to engage in sustainable practices that tread lightly on the Earth. To that end, a multitude of useful apps and websites have emerged to help us be greener globe-trotters: before, during, and after the journey. The following digital resources feature functions that range from finding flights with the lowest C02 emissions to locating sustainably sourced, seasonal food. What’s more—each of these environmentally friendly tools is totally free to use.
Locavore
If you like eating local, Locavore will be your friend for life. This free iOS app uses your phone’s GPS to help you determine which fruits and vegetables are in season wherever you are in the world. In addition, it pinpoints the location of nearby farmers’ markets, farms open to the public, and community-supported agricultural venues. The mobile app also offers quick and easy recipes for an extra fee and prompts users to share their finds on Facebook, inspiring other farm-to-table travelers to join the locavore movement.
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Sustainability-minded apps and websites help reduce the environmental impact of travel by making it easier to find fuel-efficient flights, seek out eco-friendly hotels, and calculate carbon emissions in real-time. Illustration courtesy of alexacrib / Shutterstock.
I’ve struggled with insomnia nearly all of my adult life.
Typically, I’m able to fall asleep within an hour or two, but often it takes much longer, and the anxiety about not sleeping has made it so much worse. I’ve accepted that this is something I just have to live with.
A few years ago, I started wearing a sleep mask and turning on cable news so that the mindless banter in the background would distract me from my thoughts long enough to pass out. This isn’t the wisest strategy, but it has, occasionally, worked. Lately, I’ve started listening to meditation apps that play sounds of waves crashing or fire crackling.
If any of this resonates with you, you might be interested in a new book by Henry Nicholls called Sleepyhead: The Neuroscience of a Good Night’s Rest. Nicholls, a science journalist in England, chose the topic of sleep in part because of his personal experience with narcolepsy, a rare neurological disorder that impacts the brain’s ability to control sleep-wake cycles. So he decided to write a book about how to sleep better.
Nicholls surveyed the latest medical research on sleep, interviewed many of the researchers involved, and underwent intense sleep therapy to treat his own condition.
I spoke to him recently about what he learned and about some of the practical things you can do to get a better night’s sleep.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
What’s the key to a good night’s sleep?
Henry Nicholls
The simplest thing is to work on something called “sleep stability,” which is very common advice in insomnia clinics and something my physician, Dr. David O’Regan, recommended as part of my cognitive behavioral therapy course for insomnia.
In theory, Nate works 40 hours a week in the operations department at a major fintech company. In reality, Nate works one hour a day at most. He moseys over to his computer whenever he gets an alert on his phone that he’s got a task to complete. Otherwise, he spends most of the day doing, basically, whatever he feels — he sleeps in, he watches TV, he does household chores. His only real restriction is that he can’t stray too far from home in the event he is needed for something.
“I don’t have a problem with being asked to do work; it’s just I’m not really being asked,” he says. Maybe he could take more initiative and try to take on more, but he gets good performance reviews and raises as it is, so he figures, why bother? Plus, it’s not like he can waltz up to his boss to announce there’s no real business reason for his existence. “How do I initiate that conversation that’s, ‘Hey, I haven’t been doing much of anything this whole time, I need more to do’? You don’t really want to draw attention to it,” says Nate, which is a pseudonym. Vox granted him anonymity to speak for this story for obvious reasons, as we did all of the workers interviewed.
Strongly suspecting that a certain person isn’t doing much, or not nearly enough to fill up what is ostensibly an eight-hour day, seems to be a near-universal work experience. Many people have also, at some point in time, been that less-than-occupied worker. Sometimes, it’s intentional. Other times, like in Nate’s case, that’s just how the corporate cards have been dealt.
These jobless employed are a persistent presence in the working world, their existence a bug that’s become a feature. There’s a percentage of every job that’s bullshit, and in their case, that’s 90 percent, minimum. “It’s not good for the culture. It can engender huge resentment from the person’s colleagues, especially if they themselves are overworked, and you do see that combination a lot,” says Alison Green, a career columnist and expert who runs the website Ask a Manager. “It also raises questions for people about whoever is supposed to be managing that person. Are they incompetent? Do they suck at managing?”
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Your suspicions are right: That one guy at work really doesn’t do anything. A-R-T-U-R via Getty Images/iStockphoto
If companies want to leave Russia, the president is setting the terms — in ways that benefit his government, his elites, and his war.
Soon after Russian troops invaded his country, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, made a plea to Western companies: “Leave Russia,” he said. “Make sure that the Russians do not receive a single penny.”
President Vladimir V. Putin had other plans.
Mr. Putin has turned the exits of major Western companies into a windfall for Russia’s loyal elite and the state itself. He has forced companies wishing to sell to do so at fire-sale prices. He has limited sales to buyers anointed by Moscow. Sometimes he has seized firms outright.
A New York Times investigation traced how Mr. Putin has turned an expected misfortune into an enrichment scheme. Western companies that have announced departures have declared more than $103 billion in losses since the start of the war, according to a Times analysis of financial reports. Mr. Putin has squeezed companies for as much of that wealth as possible by dictating the terms of their departure.
He has also subjected those exits to ever-increasing taxes, generating at least $1.25 billion in the past year for Russia’s war chest.
“Go for a walk,” it said, the no-nonsense command perched in a prominent spot above Katherine May’s desk.
Ms. May, a British author who wrote the best-selling memoir “Wintering” about a fallow and difficult period of her life, had come across more hard times during the height of the pandemic. She was bored, restless, burned out. Her usual ritual — walking — had fallen away, along with other activities that used to bring her pleasure: collecting pebbles, swimming in the sea, savoring a book.
“There was nothing that made the world feel interesting to me,” Ms. May said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “I felt like my head was kind of full and empty at the same time.”
In Ms. May’s latest book, “Enchantment,” she describes how a simple series of actions, like writing that note, helped her to discover little things that filled her with wonder and awe — and, in turn, made her feel alive again.
“You have to keep pursuing it until you get that tingle that tells you that you’ve found something that’s magical to you,” Ms. May said. “It’s trial and error, isn’t it?”
We asked Ms. May for tips on how you can do the same.
Commit to noticing the world around you
“We have to find the humility to be open to experience every single day and to allow ourselves to learn something,” Ms. May wrote in “Enchantment.”
This, she acknowledges, “is easier said than done.”
“Let yourself go past those thoughts that tell you it’s silly or pointless or a waste of time, or you’re far too busy to possibly do this,” Ms. May said during the interview. “Instead give yourself permission to want that in the first place — to crave that contact with the sacred, and that feeling of being able to commune with something that’s bigger than you are.”
Entering a state of wonder is akin to using a muscle, Ms. May said. Put yourself in that mindset more often and it gradually becomes easier.
First, you must “give in to the fascination” that you feel in everyday moments. For example, Ms. May gets “really excited” when she sees light dance across the surface of her coffee.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Photograph by David Cupp: Burgan Field/ The Burgan oil field, in Kuwait, is one of the richest oil fields in the world. Natural gas, some of which is seen burning here, is often found near deposits of oil and coal. Oil, coal, and natural gas are fossil fuels.
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James' World 2 