James' World 2

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“It’s surprisingly hard to think of nothing at all”, is one of my first thoughts as I’m lying in the maw of a machine that is scanning my brain. I was told to focus on a black cross while the functional Magnetic Resonance Imagine (fMRI) machine does its noisy work. It also feels impossible to keep my eyes open. The hum of the scanner is somewhat hypnotic, and I worry a little bit that drifting off will affect how my brain appears on the resulting images.

As a science journalist I’ve always been fascinated by the workings of the mind, which is how I found myself inside a scanner at Royal Holloway, University of London, to have my brain examined before embarking on a six-week brain-altering course.

My goal was to investigate whether there’s a way we can influence meaningful brain change ourselves. By altering aspects of my daily life, I hoped to find out if it is possible to strengthen crucial connections in our brain, and keep our mind healthier in the process. Along the way I learnt techniques we can all use – with some powerful results.

Our brain has an incredible ability to adapt, learn and grow because by its nature, it is plastic – that is, it changes. This is called neuroplasticity, which simply means the brain’s ability to adapt and evolve over time in structure and function. It was once thought to be limited to youth but we now know it’s a constant force in shaping who we are. Every time we learn a new skill, our brain adapts.

Neuroscientists and psychologists are now finding that we have the power to control that to some extent.  And there’s good reason to want to boost our brain – an increasing number of studies suggest it can play a role in delaying or preventing degenerative brain diseases.

So, with the help of Thorsten Barnhofer, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Surrey in the UK, that’s what I set out to do. He’s currently running a study on the effects of mindfulness in managing stress and difficult emotions, with a special focus on individuals with severe depression.

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Simple mindfulness exercises can help keep our minds healthy, research shows (Credit: BBC)

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A new portrait of Queen Victoria’s black goddaughter, Sarah Forbes Bonetta, is now on view at Osborne, the Hanover monarch’s beloved seaside home.

Per a statement, the painting—created by artist Hannah Uzor—is based on a photograph currently housed at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It’s one of a series of works commissioned by English Heritage to spotlight historical black figures whose stories have previously been overlooked.

“What I find interesting about Sarah is that she challenges our assumptions about the status of black women in Victorian Britain,” says Uzor, whose family and children share Bonetta’s Nigerian heritage, in the statement. “ … To see Sarah return to Osborne, her godmother’s home, is very satisfying and I hope my portrait will mean more people discover her story.”

Born into a prominent Yoruba family in 1843, Bonetta was just 5 years old when a rival king, Gezo of Dahomey (located in what is now Benin), defeated her tribe. As Caroline Bressey, a cultural and historical geographer at University College London, wrote in a 2005 journal article, Gezo killed the young girl’s parents and enslaved her, forcing her to fulfill “whatever role was required of her” at the Dahomey court.

Bonetta ended up in England as the result of a failed diplomatic mission. In 1850, British Captain Frederick Forbes tried—and failed—to convince Gezo to abandon his role in the slave trade. The king gifted Bonetta to the captain as an act of conciliation; Forbes, in turn, brought the orphaned child back to his home country, renaming her after himself and the ship on which they’d arrived.

“Where do you start? Her story is an extraordinary one,” Anna Eavis, curatorial director of English Heritage, tells the Guardian’s Mark Brown. “Through her life we can also see a number of interesting and quite uncomfortable things around colonial attitudes to her.” Tangie

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Sarah Forbes Bonetta, as seen in 1856 (left) and 1862 (right). Hannah Uzor’s new portrait is based on the 1862 photograph. L: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020 and R: National Portrait Gallery

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A few years ago, it seemed like the trajectory of body diversity and inclusivity could only continue going upward. Across several major industries—particularly fashion, beauty, entertainment, and music—we witnessed an incredible surge of representation for bodies of all sizes, skin tones, gender expressions, ages, and abilities. Plus-size models walked top designers’ runways! Disabled models starred in luxury campaigns! Trans models showed up on billboards—and not just in the month of June! Finally, it seemed the industries that long felt like the exclusionary gatekeepers of the “ideal body” now seemed to welcome all bodies, reflecting their diverse consumer bases.

Then, came the backlash—or, perhaps more accurately, a quiet retreat back into the beauty standards of the ‘90s and ‘00s. As low-rise jeans and Y2K fashion made their comebacks, so returned the ultra-thin ideal. As journalist Gianluca Russo noted in September 2022 for The Zoe Report, plus-size representation in New York Fashion Week has seen a razor-sharp decline. And, despite the Fenty effect leading to an industry-wide expectation of base makeup to have 40- and 50-shade ranges, Black models continue to experience discrimination on sets, with many still bringing their own foundations and concealers just in case the makeup artist’s case doesn’t carry the right colors for their skin tones. In 2023, another major shift arrived: The releases of Ozempic and similar treatments marked revolutionary developments and supported the long-held stance of many medical professionals and advocates that obesity is a matter of biology, not willpower—sparked frenzied responses, from debate and confusion to corporate pivoting.

None of these are easy or simple conversations. They all contribute to a larger dialogue that many activists, academics, writers, and regular folks have carried on, despite it seeing fewer headlines nowadays. We’ve brought together several stories by writers exploring the complexities of these issues, and shed light on their less-discussed elements. Now, the only question: How will you participate in the body-inclusivity conversation?

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What body is perfect

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The changes garnered attention — Discord was going mainstream, tech analysts said — but they papered over the reality that the app remained vulnerable to bad actors, and a privacy-first approach left the company in the dark about much of what took place in its chatrooms.

Into that void stepped Jack Teixeira, the young Air National Guard member from Massachusetts who allegedly exploited Discord’s lack of oversight and content moderation to share top-secret intelligence documents for more than a year.

As the covid pandemic locked them down at home, Teixeira and a group of followers spent their days in a tightknit chat server that he eventually controlled. What began as a place to hang out while playing first-person-shooter games, laugh at gory videos and trade vile memes became something else entirely — the scene of one of the most damaging leaks of classified national security secrets in years.

Discord executives say no one ever reported to them that Teixeira was sharing classified material on the platform. It is not possible, added John Redgrave, Discord’s vice president of trust and safety, for the company to identify what is or isn’t classified. When Discord became aware of Teixeira’s alleged leaking, staff moved “as fast as humanly possible” to assess the scope of what had happened and identify the leaker.

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(Illustration by Lucy Naland/The Washington Post; Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post; Federal Bureau of Investigation; Discord screenshots; Unsplash; iStock)

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Click the link below for the article:

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A few years ago, it seemed like the trajectory of body diversity and inclusivity could only continue going upward. Across several major industries—particularly fashion, beauty, entertainment, and music—we witnessed an incredible surge of representation for bodies of all sizes, skin tones, gender expressions, ages, and abilities. Plus-size models walked top designers’ runways! Disabled models starred in luxury campaigns! Trans models showed up on billboards—and not just in the month of June! Finally, it seemed the industries that long felt like the exclusionary gatekeepers of the “ideal body” now seemed to welcome all bodies, reflecting their diverse consumer bases.

Then, came the backlash—or, perhaps more accurately, a quiet retreat back into the beauty standards of the ‘90s and ‘00s. As low-rise jeans and Y2K fashion made their comebacks, so returned the ultra-thin ideal. As journalist Gianluca Russo noted in September 2022 for The Zoe Report, plus-size representation in New York Fashion Week has seen a razor-sharp decline. And, despite the Fenty effect leading to an industry-wide expectation of base makeup to have 40- and 50-shade ranges, Black models continue to experience discrimination on sets, with many still bringing their own foundations and concealers just in case the makeup artist’s case doesn’t carry the right colors for their skin tones. In 2023, another major shift arrived: The releases of Ozempic and similar treatments marked revolutionary developments and supported the long-held stance of many medical professionals and advocates that obesity is a matter of biology, not willpower—sparked frenzied responses, from debate and confusion to corporate pivoting.

None of these are easy or simple conversations. They all contribute to a larger dialogue that many activists, academics, writers, and regular folks have carried on, despite it seeing fewer headlines nowadays. We’ve brought together several stories by writers exploring the complexities of these issues, and shed light on their less-discussed elements. Now, the only question: How will you participate in the body-inclusivity conversation?

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What body is perfect

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Click the link below for the article:

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On 26 February 2015, Cates Holderness, a BuzzFeed community manager, posted a picture of a dress, captioned: ‘There’s a lot of debate on Tumblr about this right now, and we need to settle it.’ The post was accompanied by a poll that racked up millions of votes in a matter of days. About two-thirds of people saw the dress as white and gold. The rest, as blue and black. The comments section was filled with bewildered calls to ‘go check your eyes’ and all-caps accusations of trolling.

Vision scientists were quick to point out that the difference in appearance had to do with the ambiguity of ambient light in the photograph. If the visual system resolved the photograph as being taken indoors with its warmer light, the dress would appear blue and black; if outdoors, white and gold. That spring, the annual Vision Sciences Society conference had a live demo of the actual dress (blue and black, for the record) lit in different ways to demonstrate the way the difference of ambient light shifted its appearance. But none of this explains why the visual systems of different people would automatically infer different ambient light (one predictive factor seems to be a person’s typical wake-up time: night owls have more exposure to warmer, indoor light).

Whatever the full explanation turns out to be, it is remarkable that this type of genuine difference in visual appearance could elude us so completely. Until #TheDress went viral, no one, not even vision scientists, had any idea that these specific discrepancies in color appearance existed. This is all the more remarkable considering how easy it is to establish this difference. In the case of #TheDress, it’s as easy as asking ‘What colors do you see?’ If we could be oblivious to such an easy-to-measure difference in subjective experience, how many other such differences might there be that can be discovered if only we know where to look and which questions to ask?

Take the case of Blake Ross, the co-creator of the Firefox web browser. For the first three decades of his life, Ross assumed his subjective experience was typical. After all, why wouldn’t he? Then he read a popular science story about people who do not have visual imagery. While most people can, without much effort, form vivid images in their ‘mind’s eye’, others cannot – a condition that has been documented since the 1800s but only recently named: aphantasia. Ross learned from the article that he himself had aphantasia. His reaction was memorable: ‘Imagine your phone buzzes with breaking news: WASHINGTON SCIENTISTS DISCOVER TAIL-LESS MAN. Well, then, what are you?’

Ross went on to ask his friends about what it’s like for them when they imagine various things, quickly realizing that, just as he took his lack of imagery as a fact of the human condition, they similarly took their presence of visual imagery as a given. ‘I have never visualized anything in my entire life,’ Ross wrote in Vox in 2016. ‘I can’t “see” my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom, or the run I went on 10 minutes ago… I’m 30 years old, and I never knew a human could do any of this. And it is blowing my goddamn mind.’

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Photo by Christopher Anderson/Magnum

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Click the link below for the article:

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Click the link below the picture

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A few years ago, it seemed like the trajectory of body diversity and inclusivity could only continue going upward. Across several major industries—particularly fashion, beauty, entertainment, and music—we witnessed an incredible surge of representation for bodies of all sizes, skin tones, gender expressions, ages, and abilities. Plus-size models walked top designers’ runways! Disabled models starred in luxury campaigns! Trans models showed up on billboards—and not just in the month of June! Finally, it seemed the industries that long felt like the exclusionary gatekeepers of the “ideal body” now seemed to welcome all bodies, reflecting their diverse consumer bases.

Then, came the backlash—or, perhaps more accurately, a quiet retreat back into the beauty standards of the ‘90s and ‘00s. As low-rise jeans and Y2K fashion made their comebacks, so returned the ultra-thin ideal. As journalist Gianluca Russo noted in September 2022 for The Zoe Report, plus-size representation in New York Fashion Week has seen a razor-sharp decline. And, despite the Fenty effect leading to an industry-wide expectation of base makeup to have 40- and 50-shade ranges, Black models continue to experience discrimination on sets, with many still bringing their own foundations and concealers just in case the makeup artist’s case doesn’t carry the right colors for their skin tones. In 2023, another major shift arrived: The releases of Ozempic and similar treatments marked revolutionary developments and supported the long-held stance of many medical professionals and advocates that obesity is a matter of biology, not willpower—sparked frenzied responses, from debate and confusion to corporate pivoting.

None of these are easy or simple conversations. They all contribute to a larger dialogue that many activists, academics, writers, and regular folks have carried on, despite it seeing fewer headlines nowadays. We’ve brought together several stories by writers exploring the complexities of these issues, and shed light on their less-discussed elements. Now, the only question: How will you participate in the body-inclusivity conversation?

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What body is perfect

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Click the link below for the article:

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I have absolutely no idea what makes Vincenzo a good cat. It’s a fact I keep to myself when I meet his owner, Donna Dzurishin, at the Garden State Cat Expo in New Jersey in mid-July. At one of the biggest cat shows in the country, my ignorance puts me in the minority. Plus, Donna’s got that warm kind of energy that almost compels you to hug her — it’s not clear if you need it, she needs it, or maybe you both do. You definitely can’t hug Vincenzo or any of the cats competing. The first rule of the cat show is that you don’t touch the cats (unless you ask first, and, as I come to learn, are prepared to be turned down).

Vincenzo is a solid black Persian — a black cat dusted in gray, with a long fluffy tail and round copper eyes that are hard to make out amid all the fur. People sometimes tell Donna, who has long black hair, that they look alike. Her daughter makes fun of her for it. Vincenzo is an “absolutely beautiful boy,” per Donna, and her first show cat — they’ve only been competing since February. There’s been a learning curve in navigating the show circuit, not to mention Vincenzo’s high-maintenance grooming routine, which rivals that of a Kardashian. “I’m obsessive-compulsive, so I put everything into it,” Donna says.

The idea that someone — let alone hundreds of people — would put their cat into a contest is foreign to me. I cannot fathom caring about ranking cats or undertaking the apparent effort being put in here. Why one cat might be “better” than the next is a mystery.

Donna describes what it is that makes Vincenzo special — his stocky body, his short legs, his nice round head. “Did you see him?” she asks. I don’t want to admit that the visual isn’t helping much in terms of my personal comprehension. Our conversation is cut short because the pair have been called to the ring. Donna pulls a nonplussed Vincenzo from his tent, fluffs him up as best she can, and hurries off. I wish her luck but then decide to follow — in the ring she’s headed to, Vincenzo is in the running for best cat, and I may as well see what happens.

As we walk over, Donna’s friend pulls me aside. She tells me Donna’s husband passed away recently, and cat shows have given her new life. The stakes suddenly feel high.

I am not a cat person. Whenever friends ask why I don’t have one — after all, I am a single woman in her 30s — my response is always the same: There’s too big a risk your cat hates you. Cat owners’ stories are basically, “Oh my God, you won’t believe what Fluffy just did! So cute!” And then they tell you about something objectively destructive and, occasionally, gross. Even if your cat likes you, it’s sometimes distant and perhaps kind of an asshole — most cats are. It’s not a bad thing, really. (See: Grumpy Cat, a cultural icon.) They’re semi-wild animals we have as pets, which is a whole separate, complicated issue on its own. The main expectation you can have of a cat is that you can’t have a lot of expectations.

Cats are the ones that got themselves into this situation in the first place, historically speaking. They’ve been living with humans for 4,000 years, dating back to the ancient Egyptians, who deeply admired them, and probably even earlier. (In the Middle Ages, they were associated with witches and devilry, so ancient times were probably a much better era to be a cat.)

Unlike other pets, cats are self-domesticated, because humans — and their crops and grains and food — attract rodents. Cats figured out that where there are people, there are rats and mice, so they started hanging around. They came to America as furry little colonists, on ships.

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Mary Kirkpatrick for Vox

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A few years ago, it seemed like the trajectory of body diversity and inclusivity could only continue going upward. Across several major industries—particularly fashion, beauty, entertainment, and music—we witnessed an incredible surge of representation for bodies of all sizes, skin tones, gender expressions, ages, and abilities. Plus-size models walked top designers’ runways! Disabled models starred in luxury campaigns! Trans models showed up on billboards—and not just in the month of June! Finally, it seemed the industries that long felt like the exclusionary gatekeepers of the “ideal body” now seemed to welcome all bodies, reflecting their diverse consumer bases.

Then, came the backlash—or, perhaps more accurately, a quiet retreat back into the beauty standards of the ‘90s and ‘00s. As low-rise jeans and Y2K fashion made their comebacks, so returned the ultra-thin ideal. As journalist Gianluca Russo noted in September 2022 for The Zoe Report, plus-size representation in New York Fashion Week has seen a razor-sharp decline. And, despite the Fenty effect leading to an industry-wide expectation of base makeup to have 40- and 50-shade ranges, Black models continue to experience discrimination on sets, with many still bringing their own foundations and concealers just in case the makeup artist’s case doesn’t carry the right colors for their skin tones. In 2023, another major shift arrived: The releases of Ozempic and similar treatments marked revolutionary developments and supported the long-held stance of many medical professionals and advocates that obesity is a matter of biology, not willpower—sparked frenzied responses, from debate and confusion to corporate pivoting.

None of these are easy or simple conversations. They all contribute to a larger dialogue that many activists, academics, writers, and regular folks have carried on, despite it seeing fewer headlines nowadays. We’ve brought together several stories by writers exploring the complexities of these issues, and shed light on their less-discussed elements. Now, the only question: How will you participate in the body-inclusivity conversation?

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What body is perfect

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Click the link below for the article:

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Unwanted food comments don’t just come from family and friends; they often come from coworkers as well. Whether you’re working remotely or in-person, food comments can pop up during meetings or in casual conversations. “We don’t know why someone is eating the foods they eat. It could be related to their culture, a medical condition, or because they are in recovery [from an eating disorder],” says Zariel Grullón, RDN, CDN, registered dietitian at Your Latina Nutritionist.

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Although people don’t usually have bad intentions when they make unwanted food comments, they can cause real harm, especially for those recovering from chronic dieting or disordered eating. If you’re the one being triggered by food comments at work, it can be overwhelming to set boundaries with coworkers. It may feel awkward or uncomfortable, but there are ways to address these unwelcome comments. We spoke with a dietitian and therapist specializing in eating disorders and disordered eating to share their top tips for coping with triggering food comments from coworkers.

Remember unwanted food comments aren’t facts

When we hear diet-centric comments about food, it can trigger disordered thoughts or behaviors. The media is one of the biggest perpetrators of these comments. Social media is especially tough since it’s full of so-called nutritionists who have received little to no training in nutrition science.

Remember that your coworkers are also victims of diet culture. They hear the same misinformation in the media, and they may internalize it. So, when you hear triggering food comments, Allyson Inez Ford, LPCC, an eating disorder therapist, recommends reminding yourself that just because someone believes something doesn’t make it accurate. “They are speaking from diet and wellness culture misinformation, which we are all surrounded by, unfortunately,” Food says, “and while it is triggering, it is not based on facts; therefore, it’s not something you should take in as your personal truth.”

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Photo: Getty Images/ Hinterhaus Productions

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