James' World 2

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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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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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Nathaniel Kleitman, known as the “father of modern sleep research,” was born in 1895 in Bessarabia—now Moldova—and spent much of his youth on the run. First, pogroms drove him to Palestine; then the First World War chased him to the United States. At the age of twenty, he landed in New York penniless; by twenty-eight, he’d worked his way through City College and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Soon after, he joined the faculty there. An early sponsor of Kleitman’s sleep research was the Wander Company, which manufactured Ovaltine and hoped to promote it as a remedy for insomnia.

Until Kleitman came along, sleep was, as one commentator has put it, “a huge blind spot in the science of physiology.” No one bothered to study it because it was defined by what it wasn’t—sleep was a state of not being awake and, at the same time, of not being comatose or dead. (It’s unclear what exactly attracted Kleitman to this academically marginal topic, but it has been suggested that it fitted with his own marginalized background.)

In one of Kleitman’s first experiments, he kept half a dozen young men awake for days at a stretch, then ran them through a battery of physical and psychological tests. Frequently, he used himself as a subject. As a participant in the sleep-deprivation experiment, Kleitman stayed awake longer than anyone else—a hundred and fifteen hours straight. At one point, exhausted and apparently hallucinating, he declared, apropos of nothing in particular, “It is because they are against the system.” (Asked what he meant, he said he’d been under the impression that he was “having a heated argument with the observer on the subject of labor unions.”) In another self-administered experiment, Kleitman spent six weeks underground, in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, trying to live according to a twenty-eight-hour day. (He found that he could not.)

In the early nineteen-fifties, Kleitman’s research was sponsored in part by Swift, the meatpacking company, which was interested in finding out whether feeding babies a high-protein diet would make them sleep more soundly. It was at this point that he—or, really, one of his graduate students—stumbled onto a great discovery. Casting around for a dissertation topic, the student, Eugene Aserinsky, decided to hook sleepers up to an early version of an electroencephalogram machine, which scribbled across half a mile of paper each night. In the process, Aserinsky noticed that several times each night the sleepers went through periods when their eyes darted wildly back and forth. Kleitman insisted that the experiment be repeated yet again, this time on his daughter, Esther. In 1953, he and Aserinsky introduced the world to “rapid eye movement,” or REM sleep. Another of Kleitman’s graduate students, William C. Dement, now a professor of psychiatry at the Stanford medical school, has described this as the year that “the study of sleep became a true scientific field.”

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Sleep is a time suck. If you multiplied the average recommended number of hours we should sleep in a day—eight for a typical adult—by the number of days in an average lifespan (78.8 years in the United States), that would amount to about 9,587.3 days. That’s one-third of your life spent unconscious. From an evolutionary standpoint, sleep is quite literally a waste of your time, yet it’s fought its way through countless years of adaptation in nearly every living animal on Earth. So it must be important, right?

In fact, researchers have found that sleep plays a vital role in the functioning of nearly every organ system in the body. At the same time, medical conditions, a busy schedule, and even the simple unavoidable act of aging constantly challenge the number of hours we allow ourselves. But that begs the question: how much sleep do we actually need? And can we train ourselves to need less?

First, let’s talk about that eight-hour figure that gets tossed around. It’s far from some arbitrary number. It’s truly the number of hours we naturally crave, and there are two pretty strong pieces of evidence for it. In a series of experiments, researchers took study participants into a laboratory with no sunlight or other visual cues and, at night, gave them a non-negotiable, nine-hour-long opportunity to sleep. They did this each night for a number of weeks, and the results were always the same: even when provided with more time, humans will typically spend an average of eight hours catching up on their Zzz.

And that wasn’t the only study to support the eight-hour sleep schedule. Back in 1938, a sleep researcher named Nathaniel Kleitman and one of his students spent 32 days living in Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, one of the longest and deepest caves in the world—an environment completely void of sunlight. When they analyzed their sleep patterns, they found that they, too, slept about eight to eight and a half hours per night.

But what happens when we deprive ourselves, as many Americans do, of all or some of these recommended hours? It turns out, a lot. In 2003, David Dinges and Gregory Belenky, both sleep researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Walter Reed Army Research Institute, performed some of the most pivotal studies on the consequences of sleep deprivation thus far. Their goal was to figure out how little sleep a person could get away with, without having it affect their cognitive performance.

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How many hours of sleep do you actually need?. Pixabay

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If we have stuff we neither want nor need, what should we do with it?

A lot of people save items for “someday,” but Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, aka The Minimalists, advise against that. The Minimalists have a 20/20 rule, which states that if you can get an item within 20 minutes for $20 or less, you don’t have to keep it for “just in case.” Also consider that people buy just about anything, even broken, nonfunctional tech they use to repair other things. You never know what you can get if you’re willing to part with something you may otherwise trash or stash away.

So now that you have stuff you want to unload, we have solutions.

When Cash Would’ve Been Better Than a Sweater

It’s sweet to receive a gift, but when it’s the wrong size, color, or just not your style, it makes sense to not wear it and keep the tags on. That way you can take advantage of the opportunity to sell it as a new item—NWT (New With Tags)—which brings you the most bang for your buck.

The only game in town for online reselling used to be eBay, and for years it was the best place to find and sell sold-out, discontinued, or vintage items in multiple categories—clothes, shoes, electronics, sports gear, cars, etc. Many people have made jobs for themselves side-hustling on eBay.

If it’s clothing you want to get rid of, there are sites dedicated to this, and they each offer something a little different.

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Photograph: Gerd Zahn/Getty images

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More than a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, another Black woman insisted on her right to ride on a New York City streetcar — an act of defiance that eventually led to the desegregation of the city’s transit systems.

On Sunday, July 16, 1854, Elizabeth Jennings, a schoolteacher in her 20s, boarded a horse-drawn Third Avenue trolley to go to the First Colored American Congregational Church in Lower Manhattan, where she played the organ.

The streetcar’s conductor lied and said the car was full, telling Jennings she had to wait for a car reserved for Black passengers, according to a report by the New York Tribune in 1855. Then, African Americans were only allowed on trolleys with signs reading, “Colored People Allowed in This Train.”

When Jennings refused to disembark, the conductor forcefully threw her off.

“I screamed murder with all my voice and my companion screamed out, ‘You will kill her. Don’t kill her,'” Jennings wrote in a statement.

Reports from the time recounted how Jennings picked herself back up and tried to board the train again until a policeman came and removed her from the car.

A legal fight for desegregation

Jennings came from a family who fought for racial equity: Her father, Thomas L. Jennings, was the first Black person to hold a patent, which he obtained in 1821 for a new method of dry cleaning clothing. He bought his family’s freedom with the patent’s proceeds.

The streetcar incident sparked fury among Black New Yorkers, who organized a movement to end racial discrimination on streetcars. With the help of her father, Jennings sued the Third Avenue Railroad Company. She was represented by Arthur, then a 24-year-old lawyer. The attorney would later become the 21st US president.

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Courtesy of Kansas State Historical Society via Museum of the City of New York

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For a time, in the late 1980s, it looked like the field of neural networks was dead. Its researchers, who were seeking answers about consciousness by creating interconnected webs of computing units, could not overcome the limitations of their tools. Hardware did not compute at fast enough speeds. Software was too simplistic. It wasn’t until the 2010s that technology had advanced far enough to allow theories “that seemed almost frozen in amber” to be explored further.

That scientists could leap far ahead into new theoretical territory yet make little experimental progress in computational neuroscience underlines the challenges and complexity in explaining the workings of mind and consciousness. In Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, journalist and Scientific American contributor George Musser brings readers along on this quest, tracking the development of different ideas and suppositions that aim to elucidate how consciousness might have arisen and what processes inform—if not create—our perceptions of reality.

Investigating the mind and confronting the “hard problem” of consciousness necessarily require the collision of disciplines. The field’s most significant researchers seem to have stumbled into it from myriad backgrounds—semiconductors, psychiatry, and cosmology, among other fields—and it’s Musser who wanders into these scientists at conferences, in cafeterias and in train cars to get details on the latest findings. His book is structured as an overview in the form of an expansive series of questions. It begins with the mechanical and local—say, how a brain might anticipate information—and progresses toward ones that threaten any simplistic notion of reality, such as: What if we’re only a floating blob mind that briefly materializes in the death throes of a universe?

It’s no surprise that the study and building of neural networks have become central to learning about the mind. Unlike simple computers, these networks can involve many parallel systems of interwoven logic, much like our brain and its wiring. Simulated neurons in a network, for instance, allow for the dynamism of feedback, enabling the network to form associations and learn algorithmically. What we consider as consciousness could be an emergent property of these highly organized, interconnected systems.

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Credit: Alex Eben Meyer

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Tens of millions of people in the U.S. have struggled with long COVID-19: a suite of symptoms that can persist long after an initial COVID-19 infection and impact one’s day-to-day life. Typically, these “long haulers” experience fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and joint pain. At its worst, however, the syndrome can leave them bedridden.

Now studies suggest the rates of long COVID may be dropping. Although the investigations were not designed to assess the reason for this trend, scientists suspect the downturn is a result of increased immunity to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID), milder variants of that pathogen, and improved treatments. It is a welcome reprieve, but the decline does not help the millions of people who are already suffering from long COVID. Moreover, experts warn that the risk is still not zero. And without a clear explanation for the downward trend, it is unclear whether it will continue.

“You have to be vigilant,” says Paul Elliott, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London’s School of Public Health. “You can’t just relax these days and be done.”

There is reason for hope, however. Elliott and his team recently reported that people infected during the pandemic’s Omicron wave were 88 percent less likely to develop long COVID, compared with those infected with the original strain that emerged in Wuhan, China. The research, published in October in Nature Communications, is the latest in a growing number of studies that point to a downswing in the debilitating condition. This summer, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that the proportion of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who went on to develop long COVID-19 dropped from 18.9 percent in June 2022 to 11 percent in January 2023. And just a few months before that, European researchers found that the risk of long COVID among cancer patients fell from 19.1 percent in 2020 to 6.2 percent in early 2022. Other studies show similar findings.

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Thinking of spring-cleaning? Whether you’re finally cleaning up the junk drawer or upgrading your tech, don’t condemn your old device to your in-home gadget graveyard — or worse, the garbage. We all hang onto outdated tech for our own reasons, but there are also multiple ways to repurpose old devices for your smart home, using them as security cameras and more.

Whatever the tech, when it’s finally time to say goodbye, there’s a right way to dispose of your old gadgets — and there are a lot of wrong ways. We’ll show you which is which.

What to do before you get rid of a device

When you’re finished with a gadget, make sure it’s also finished with you. Make sure to back up anything you want off the device — photos, videos, songs — and then perform a factory reset. Here are a few CNET articles to help clarify the finer points of wiping a device:

How to recycle smartphones 

Smartphone Recycling lets you print a free FedEx shipping label or request a recycling kit. Ship your old smartphone, and you might even get paid, depending on the device’s condition and age. Smartphone Recycling accepts devices in bulk, so you have to ship a minimum of 10. Depending on how long you’ve been hoarding phones, you might meet this quota on your own. If not, check with friends and family and make it a group effort.

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What do you do with your phone when it’s served its purpose? We’ll give you some options.  Sarah Tew/CNET

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