A rare super blue moon will shine in the sky as August wraps up.
The month already featured a supermoon as it began, but the second full supermoon of the month — which will appear on Aug. 30 — will also be a blue moon. A blue moon is not actually blue in color; the term signifies a second full moon within a single month.
August’s first full moon rose on Aug. 1 and was the second of four consecutive supermoons. On average, supermoons are about 16% brighter than an average moon. They also appear bigger than the average full moon. According to NASA, it’s similar to the size difference between a quarter and a nickel. The phenomenon occurs when the moon’s orbit is closest to Earth at the same time the moon is full.
The Aug. 30 supermoon will appear to be even closer than the full moon at the beginning of the month. The last of the four consecutive supermoons this year will be the Sept. 28 “Harvest Moon.”
Those who miss out on the blue moon will have quite a wait before the next one. While around 25% of full moons are supermoons, just 3% of full moons are blue moons, according to NASA. The next blue moon after the one on Aug. 30 will be in May 2026. Astronomy fans will be in for a special treat come 2037, which will feature super blue moons in January and March.
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The silhouette of treetops on a hill seen in front of the moon
When you first bought your first house, it probably seemed enormous, especially if you were moving from a tiny apartment. But inevitably, the longer you own it (and start filling it with stuff, pets, and children), the smaller it seems.
What’s to be done? Buy a larger home? Sure, but that’s going to be expensive, especially right now. Get a storage unit? Now your stuff is 20 minutes away, and you have a new monthly bill to pay. Add an addition to your existing house? Also, expensive—but it doesn’t have to be. While adding a whole new room or wing to your house might be the ideal solution to your space needs, if you don’t have the cash for such a project, there are lower-cost options you could consider.
Finishing an existing unfinished space
The first option to consider is finishing the spaces that already exist. Unfinished areas like basements don’t count as livable space in your house, so finishing them adds value and space to your home.
If you have a garage, that’s going to be the cheapest space to finish. Garages are often already attached to the main level of the house, have a door connection to the rest of the space, and are probably wired up with electricity at the least. The average cost of converting a garage is around $15,000, though it can go a lot higher if you need to add plumbing for a bathroom or if your garage is very large (or if you’re trying to convert one portion of a 3-car garage and keeping the rest for a car). The main downside is the loss of covered parking, but this is a cheap way to gain square footage.
Unfinished attics and basements are also obvious targets for finishing, with the cost to finish a basement averaging about $23,000 and the cost of finishing an attic averaging $25,000.
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We’re supposed to do things routinely for our health, like brushing our teeth, showering, and exercising.
And there are basic hygiene tasks to maintain or boost your financial health, too — actions you can take annually to make sure you’re on track to meet your goals.
Think of this routine as a quick checkup for your finances. Life Kit has more suggestions for handling your finances, but here are five good habits to get into every year –– no appointment necessary.
Look to the future
Ask yourself where you want to be three, five, or ten years from now. Brent Weiss, a certified financial planner at Facet, asks his clients this question when helping them devise their financial goals. And then he asks: “What has to happen in your life for you to look back and say, ‘That was a wildly successful period of my life?’ But here’s the trick. You can’t mention money.”
Chances are, you’ve been there. You walk into a conference room, dinner party, or group of playground parents and make a comment that immediately shifts the ballast of the conversation. Eyes dart at you. Their message is clear: Dude read the room. But you’ve already said or done something out of sync with what’s appropriate in the moment.
It happens. But it’s avoidable. When you’re told to — or sense that you should — “read the room,” it means that you need to slow down and pick up on the social cues around you. Is someone upset? Having a serious conversation? What is the overall tone? Learning how to read the room is an important skill, one that can be honed by pausing to observe a few key details.
While the impulse may be rooted in shyness or social anxiety, people who fail to read the room rarely suffer from passivity. They don’t enter as much as barge in. Subtle and restrained are not calling cards.
“They gotta make a splash,” says Laura Dudley, associate clinical professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University.
Confidence isn’t the problem. The issue is the inability to adjust. Think about if you’re home alone. You know that you can act a certain way, i.e., wear no pants. If company is there, you know enough to put on clothes. It’s about understanding context, and with a party, event, meeting or playground conversation, it means seeing and hearing what’s spoken and unspoken.
Properly reading a room requires a willingness to watch and bend to the situation, all of which can feel initially foreign. But it all falls into the possible-to-do category.
Reading a room begins with raising your awareness. If you were recently at a barbecue and reviewing the events, and think, That conversation went sideways fast. Was it me? — that’s enough self-reflection to lead to change. But if you cling to the attitude of, I am how I am: Deal — you’ll never be able to read the room because every interaction is about you, when it’s pretty much the opposite.
“Every relationship is a negotiation,” says Darrin J. Griffin, associate professor, chair of the communication studies department at University of Alabama, and co-author of Lying and Deception. “It needs concession. To win, it’s gotta be a win-win.”
16 These people are grumblers and complainers, living only to satisfy their desires. They brag loudly about themselves, and they flatter others to get what they want.
If you’re anything like me, then you might experience mild analysis paralysis when choosing what to order from an extensive menu. I am so indecisive that the waiter often has to come back a few minutes after taking everyone else’s order to finally hear mine. Many of the choices seem good, but by trying to ensure I select the absolute best, I run the risk of missing out altogether.
Even before the internet brought unprecedented consumer options directly into our homes and the phones in the palms of our hands, choice had long been seen as the driving force of capitalism. The ability of consumers to choose between competing providers of products and services dictates which businesses thrive and which bite the dust – or so goes the long-held belief. The competitive environment engendered by consumers’ free choice supposedly drives innovation and efficiency, delivering a better overall consumer experience.
However, more recent theorists have suggested that increased choice can induce a range of anxieties in consumers – from the fear of missing out (Fomo) on a better opportunity, to loss of presence in a chosen activity (thinking “why am I doing this when I could have been doing something else?”) and regret from choosing poorly. The raised expectations presented by a broad range of choices can lead some consumers to feel that no experience is truly satisfactory, and others to experience analysis paralysis. That more options provide an inferior consumer experience and make potential customers less likely to complete a purchase is a hypothesis known as the “paradox of choice”. Indeed, experiments on consumer behavior have suggested that excessive choice can leave consumers feeling ill-informed and indecisive when making a purchasing decision.
A handful of years ago, some friends and I were all in the midst of a romantic drought. It had been so long since we’d felt excited about anyone that we started to worry that the problem was with us. Had we simply grown incapable of that kind of feeling? We imagined that our jaded little hearts might look like peach pits, shriveled and hard.
This was the era, though, when we started using the phrase glimmer of hope. Glimmers came whenever we felt a giddy kick of affection—maybe for a friend of a friend, or the bartender at our favorite place, or the pottery-class buddy at the next wheel over. The hope was that these crushes—which were rarely communicated to their subjects—signaled that our hearts might someday soften up and become, once again, hospitable to life. Anytime we glimpsed a light at the end of our tunnel of romantic numbness, we’d text one another: Glimmer of hope!!!!
These glimmers helped us power through the seemingly endless tundra of uneventful singlehood. Whether they were reciprocated wasn’t really the point. It was about the feeling: the sweet, hopeful rush.
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Illustration by Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Rawpixel.
Asylum seekers have stretched New York City to its limits, according to Mayor Eric Adams, who described an “unprecedented state of emergency” this week as he called upon New York state and federal lawmakers and agencies to offer more support.
Adams’s office estimated that the city would spend $12 billion over three fiscal years to shelter and support the tens of thousands of migrants projected to arrive over that period.
A number of circumstances have converged to push people to New York City, including the end of Title 42, the health directive originally put in place under the Trump administration during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as efforts by Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas to send people who have crossed the southern US border to states run by Democrats.
But many choose to come of their own volition; New York City has a right to shelter directive, which means the city has an obligation to shelter those who request it. However, a long-standing affordable housing crisis has also helped push the city’s shelter system to the brink, overwhelming facilities to the point that asylum seekers are already sleeping in the streets outside of shelters.
But even as Adams called on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Congress to provide more funding to care for asylum seekers and institute comprehensive immigration reform, Adams’s administration is seeking to amend the rules of the right to shelter decree, which would give City Hall the ability to suspend the right to shelter in some situations.
“This is one of the most responsible things any leader can do when they realize the system is buckling, and we want to prevent it from collapsing,” Adams said in late May when City Hall initially requested the changes.
Though Adams called Hochul and the state government a “partner” at a press conference Wednesday, it’s not clear exactly how closely the two governments are working together, given a recent court order seemingly designed to force the two parties to make a cooperative plan to manage the situation.
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Mayor Eric Adams speaks during a public safety announcement on gun violence at New York City Hall on July 31, 2023.Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
And so apologized William Carlos Williams, presumably to his wife, Flossie, in his 1934 poem “This Is Just to Say.” My own apologies tend to be somewhat less elegant, and certainly less worthy of publication. In my defense, however, I don’t directly repurpose my apologies as content for TheAtlantic, explaining to my wife before a large audience that although I have been an insensitive jerk for the millionth time, it was totally worth it.
Apologizing well, after all, is tricky. It requires personal strength, a good ear, and a fair bit of psychological sophistication, which is why so many apologies are unsuccessful. If you have something you need to apologize for—or if you would just like to be ready to deal with the fallout from your next screw-up—here is your primer on the art and science of contrition.
From a neurocognitive viewpoint, apologies are extremely complex, involving at least three distinct processes. First is cognitive control, because you are making a choice to say you are sorry even though doing so is difficult and uncomfortable, which involves the lateral prefrontal cortex. Second is perspective taking, which involves thinking about how something you have said or done was experienced by another person and putting yourself in their position, implicating the temporoparietal junction. Last is social valuation, the way you calculate how much your apology will help everyone involved as opposed to just yourself, which mobilizes the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
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.
Photo: Sue Smith (Shutterstock)
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Illustration by Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Rawpixel.
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James' World 2 