James' World 2

Could one of our ex-presidents be a Malignant Narcissist? Hmmmm…

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A malignant narcissist is an abusive person who finds pleasure in lying, manipulating, and using other people in order to get the things that they want.

Narcissism is a personality trait recognized throughout history, but awareness of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and narcissistic personality in popular culture has grown. As a result, people may wonder whether they are dealing with someone who is selfish, thoughtless, or overly power-seeking—or if they are dealing with someone with a true disorder.

This article discusses what it means to be a malignant narcissist and how to spot the signs. It also explores what causes this type of behavior and what you can do to protect yourself from a malignant narcissist.

Types of Narcissism

Malignant narcissism is one of several different types of narcissism. The five main types are:

1. Overt narcissism
2. Covert narcissism
3. Communal narcissism
4. Antagonistic narcissism
5. Malignant narcissism

Malignant narcissism is considered by many to be the most severe type. That’s why it helps to recognize when you have someone with this condition in your life and what to expect from interactions with them. This knowledge can also provide insight into how to deal with them in the healthiest way possible.

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Verywell / Theresa Chiechi

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A few years ago I was hired to help revise a psychology textbook to make it more engaging for Gen Z. I’m a millennial, but my younger brother is Gen Z (“digital natives” born between 1997 and 2012), and our perceptions of American life differ—sometimes significantly.

To help with my revisions, I read iGen by psychologist Jean Twenge. The book’s central hypothesis is that Gen Z is uniquely and acutely concerned with tolerance, diversity, and social justice, more so than any American generation before.

But as with every generation, there are outliers. And these outliers can surprise us and teach us what makes the subgroups of a generation tick.

As a social psychologist who studies the interplay between societal structures and individual psychology, I have seen that relationship come into focus during this presidential election. I’ve followed exit polls closely, watching for psychological “surprises” in policy trends—places where behavioral expectations for individuals and groups (based on their psychology, history, and sociodemographic orientations) diverge from what actually unfolds. What I’ve seen in the voting trends of Gen Z is something politicos need to pay attention to as the next generation reaches voting age: the young white male vote is skewing conservative, in part because of how society defines and sets expectations around masculinity.

Gen Z, as a bloc, should have voted blue. Democrats, after all, claim to be the party of progress, especially when compared with the present iteration of the Republican Party, and Twenge argues that Gen Z individuals are “obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality.” Kamala Harris centered herself on a key progressive issue—salvaging women’s right to

abortion—whereas Donald Trump’ campaign was full of sexist remarks and a promise to roll back protections for transgender students in schools. And while Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz was hailed as a progressive champion, Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance espoused regressive and demeaning views about women’s place in American society. All in all, if it’s true that Gen Zers are defined by their progressive views on sociopolitical issues, they should have voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic ticket. The Harris-Walz campaign was certainly counting on it.

And they did, sort of. Fifty-four percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 voted for Harris and Walz. This is nothing new: Young people skew blue. Yet, if what Twenge and others say is true, and this group is uniquely concerned with social justice, this number should have been higher. I was certain that Gen Zers—regardless of their gender, educational attainment, or geographic location—would overwhelmingly vote for Harris. But they didn’t. Democrats lost a lot of footing with young voters, despite nearly every historically marginalized group, especially LGBTQ+ youth, leaning left.

Who, then, didn’t vote as expected? Young Gen Z white men—mainly those without college degrees—voted overwhelmingly for Trump (67 percent), which is eerily similar to their just-older millennial peers (also 67 percent). By comparison, young white working class Gen Z women were more likely to vote blue (43 percent) than their just-older millennial peers (34 percent).

As a researcher who studies identity, behavior, and aggression among young men, these patterns set off alarm bells for me.

But the answer isn’t as simple as “toxic masculinity.” What really led white, working class Gen Z men to align themselves with Trump—a candidate characterized by his anger, aggression, hatefulness, hegemony, and specific brand of manhood? Based on research spanning decades, including my own, the answer relates to three core ideas of social psychology: conformity, motivation, and threat.

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When I told my roommate that I had accepted a teaching job in Brooklyn, her jaw dropped.

“The school with the hour-and-a-half commute?” she asked.

“Well, technically three hours round trip,” I said. “But yes.”

Over the next six months, I continued to have similar conversations with friends, colleagues, and mentors. All of them thought I was crazy to trade my 25-minute commute from the Upper West Side to a Manhattan high school for an interborough expedition involving both the subway and a bus.

I had my doubts too. Research shows that more time spent commuting correlates with higher levels of fatigue and stress; another study reveals that longer commute times are associated with lower job and leisure-time satisfaction. Intuitively, “in transit” does not seem like a fun way to spend a decent chunk of one’s precious waking hours. I assumed I would tough it out for a year before finding a new job or moving closer to work.

But once I started commuting that far, I discovered something shocking: I loved it. In a postpandemic world where people are less willing than ever to travel for work, my long commute is the only thing keeping me sane.

Having hours of time on the train each week means I’m making unprecedented progress toward my goals of applying to grad school and regularly publishing essays. When I had a short commute, I tried waking up early to write for an hour before leaving for work, but maintaining the motivation to rise at 6 when I didn’t have to was difficult. Plus, I struggled to concentrate at home. I’d often get distracted by the dishwasher that I really should empty or the couch I could nap on for “just five minutes.” (It’s never just five minutes.)

Now I have three hours of guaranteed writing time every day, with home distractions out of sight and out of mind. I have a routine when I get on the subway: I stand next to the platform elevator to be directly in front of the train doors when they open. Then, I sit at the end of the bench to avoid getting squished between two strangers and place my laptop on its case, creating a makeshift desk. At first, I was convinced that everyone was judging me, but people are much more concerned with themselves or making sure they’re on the right train than they are with me. With my newfound time to work, I’ve even picked up an editing side gig that I complete solely on the subway. Not having consistent cell service to check Instagram means I’m especially focused.

When I’m not working during my commute, the quiet time to myself allows me to decompress from a chaotic day of managing teenagers. Teaching requires me to pivot with a moment’s notice based on how my students are feeling: Mia is about to blow up because Alejandro is in her seat? OK, pause my instruction and defuse the situation. The whole class enters the room, yelling about a fight they’ve just witnessed? Time to circulate to get people settled and facilitate an activity that channels their energy productively.

Life at home can be chaotic too. With a short commute, I found that having only 25 minutes before interacting with my roommates once again left me feeling stressed and overextended. My longer commute allows me to both work and have a little time to read, reflect on the day, or simply close my eyes so that I’m a calmer, more grounded person after I get home. Sure, there are people around me on the subway, but no one is going to ask me for anything.

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Right now, people who love looking at the wonders of the heavens have it better than ever. Every day brings some new jaw-dropping snapshot from at least one of the myriad observatories now operating on the ground or in space, each offering a new view of alien worlds, exploding stars, colliding galaxies or any number of other astrophysical phenomena. Most of these images are paeans to cosmic forces and inconceivable scales that carve stunning beauty from epic violence.

But not everything in our galaxy (or beyond) is the outcome of such ostentatious chaos. Some of the most visually captivating celestial objects are quiet, steady, even calm—and so dark that they not only emit no visible light but actually absorb it, creating a blackness so profound they seem to be a notch cut out in space.

These shadowy expanses have many sobriquets—dark nebulae, dust clouds, knots—but I prefer to call them Bok globules, a name they received in honor of Dutch-American astronomer Bart Bok, who studied them.

A Bok globule is a small, dense clump of cosmic dust; millions of them are scattered around our galaxy. They are cold and opaque to visible light, so much so that until quite recently the only way to see them was in silhouette against brighter background material. While not as splashy as their star-factory cousins, such as the Orion Nebula, Bok globules can still make stars, albeit in a more artisanal way: they make one or a few at a time that are largely hidden from our prying eyes in the dust’s abyssal depths.

Of all the dark globules we can see with our telescopes, my favorite beyond a doubt is Barnard 68, colloquially called B68. Located about 500 light-years from Earth, it’s a vaguely comma-shaped and coal-black cloud a mere half light-year wide, spanning some five trillion kilometers. We see it easily because it’s in the constellation Ophiuchus, with the star-packed center of our Milky Way galaxy as its backdrop. B68 appears to us as negative space, an absence of stars.

Why is it so dark? Although mostly made of hydrogen gas (like pretty much everything else in our galaxy), B68 also has an abundance of carbon. Some of this element is locked up in small molecules such as carbon monoxide, but much of the rest instead resides in long, complex molecules that make up what astronomers generically call dust. One distinguishing (or extinguishing) characteristic of dust is its capacity to block visible light.

And dust clouds can be dark indeed. In the case of B68, any star located on the other side from us will have its light diminished by a factor of 15 trillion. To put this in perspective, dimming the sun in our sky by this much would reduce it to a fourth-magnitude star difficult to spot in even mildly light-polluted skies. If you were on one side of B68 and the sun on the other, the sun’s light would be so attenuated across that half light-year that it would become invisible to the naked eye.

Such extreme darkness makes B68—and Bok globules more generally—subject to continual mistaken identity. Some years ago astronomers discovered the existence of huge volumes of space largely bereft of galaxies; these are called cosmic voids and can be many millions of light-years across. Alas, I’ve seen quite a few breathless videos and articles about them illustrated with an image of B68. It’s irritating to me as an astronomer to see this mistake because these are very different objects, but it’s also rather amusing because the actual voids being discussed are millions of times larger than our friendly nearby Bok globule.

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A gunman dressed in dark clothing and wearing a mask over his lower face ambushed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday morning in midtown Manhattan, where Thompson’s company was hosting a conference. The New York Police Department said the shooting was a “targeted attack” and that the gunman remains at large, but few other details have been released. Surveillance video captured the moment the shooter calmly approached Thompson, pointed a pistol equipped with a silencer, fired multiple shots, and fled on an electric bike. Police are now combing through video footage to track him down, including at a nearby Starbucks the shooter visited.

Many who noted the details of the shooting had an immediate question: Is this what a professional hit looks like in real life? The NYPD has said nothing of the sort, but that didn’t stop speculation from running rampant online. Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has decades of expertise studying professional killers, has a unique perspective on that. He’s spent years dispelling myths about contract killings born of movies and Law & Order episodes. He told me he found aspects of the attack peculiar and agreed to talk to me while emphasizing that it’s too early to draw definitive conclusions about a crime for which very little information has been released. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dennis Kenney: The first thing that’s unusual is that the shooter appeared to have a silencer. They’re not impossible to get, but they’re not readily available. The second thing is that he appeared to have inside information on the victim’s location. He knew where to wait and when to wait. The fact that he used the silencer didn’t make sense to me at first until I saw that the shooting took place at about 6:30 in the morning. Generally, if it was a midmorning sort of thing, you’d want a gun that made a lot of noise to scare observers off. But obviously, at that time, no one was around. It also suggested that the urgency of the shooting was important. CEOs of health care companies are just not that hard to find in isolated settings. So the fact that he chose to do it in midtown Manhattan was a little bit unique.

Police called it a “brazen targeted attack.” You’ve studied contract killings and so-called hit men and sought to dispel myths about these kinds of crimes. What do you think of speculation that this was a hit?

I think it’s pretty unlikely. My understanding is the CEO was being investigated for insider trading and some other financial violation. The fact that he ran a health care company—they tend to leave a lot of angry people in their wake. So, it seemed to be someone who knew what they were doing, but the idea of a professional hit man, those are pretty few and far between. So I would think more likely it was somebody with a particular grudge that had access to inside information to know where to be and when to be there.

Do contract killings usually play out in such dramatic fashion?

A professional hit man would probably prefer to do something less public with limited exposure. Doing it in the middle of midtown—there’s just too many things that can go wrong, so you probably prefer generally not to do it there. However, if it was time sensitive, then that would make a difference. There’s a range of hit men, so it could be somebody that was hired, but it’s unlikely.

Is there any other reason you think it’s unlikely?

This obviously was not the target’s usual routine. A professional would generally try to catch him in his regular routine in a place where the exposure of the shooter is minimized so that the risk of being caught or observed is pretty low. Manhattan, particularly in midtown, you’ve got cameras everywhere. I understand that they’ve got some fairly decent shots of the guy’s face while he was in Starbucks or something like that nearby. The exposure was fairly high, and most professionals don’t like that amount of risk. Again, unless it was time sensitive—there could be any number of reasons why it was important that it happened that day.

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New York City Police Department

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Jupiter will be visible all night along — no telescope required. However, stargazers who have a telescope or pair of binoculars can also catch a glimpse of its four largest moons.

The biggest planet in the solar system will be on display in the December sky as it shines brighter than it has all year.

On Saturday, Dec. 7, Jupiter will reach opposition, the point in its orbit when it appears in the exact opposite part of the sky than the sun. This is also around the time when the planet is closest to the Earth, making it appear particularly bright.

Jupiter will be visible all night along — no telescope required. However, stargazers who have a telescope or pair of binoculars can also catch a glimpse of its four largest moons.

Although the event takes place during the first full weekend of December, any night throughout the month with favorable weather will be good for viewing the planet as it will remain incredibly bright into the start of the new year.

The next time Jupiter appears this bright will not be until January of 2026.

Next week, look for one of the best meteor showers of the year. The Geminid meteor shower peaks on the night of Thursday, Dec. 12, into the early hours of Friday, Dec. 13. Most years, it boasts up to 120 meteors per hour; however, a nearly full moon will outshine many of the dimmer me

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The gas giant Jupiter will reach opposition on the night of Dec. 7. The gas giant will continue to shine bright for the remainder of the month. Catch our solar system’s largest planet at its best!

An image of what Jupiter and its four largest moons look like through a telescope. (ScienceAtNASA)

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With a job market heating up and employee resentment boiling over, “revenge quitting” looks to be on the horizon for 2025.

Edel Holliday-Quinn, a business psychologist, told Business Insider that some workers feel burned out and undervalued in part due to increased workloads and a back-and-forth about hybrid working.

In 2025, she said, many people are therefore thinking: “New year, new job.”

“The job market is starting to loosen up, and for those who have been simmering with frustration, this might be the year they finally quit—not just quietly, but loudly,” Holliday-Quinn said.

“Revenge quitting,” she said, is where employees leave not just to move on “but to make a point.”

Burnout and toxicity

Employment analysts previously told BI that the Great Detachment is plaguing workplaces and is one of the biggest challenges leaders face.

Partner that with the fact it might be easier to switch jobs next year, and employers could soon realize their best talent is jumping ship.

“If we as HR leaders don’t act now, we do run the risk that a lot of those employees will just decide the opportunities are not there for them in the current company,” Ciara Harrington, the Chief People Officer of the corporate training platform Skillsoft, told BI.

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Feeling emotionally drained at work? Is your patience exhausted? Your energy low? If so, you’re showing clinical markers of burnout.

And you’re not alone. In a January 2024 mental health survey conducted by NAMI, more than half of all managers (54%) indicated that they had felt burned out during the past year because of their job. Among employees of all levels, 36% said their mental health had suffered due to work demands. Even folks in the C-suite are heading for the exits.

No one ever said leadership was easy. But in recent years, as with so many jobs, being a leader has, in fact, become harder. Leaders rush from meeting to meeting feeling like lunchroom attendants for an unruly junior high. With exponentially escalating business complexity; diminished civility; and intrusive, pervasive technological interruptions, you may feel like it’s barely possible to keep order, let alone lead employees on an inspiring journey.

It’s Not Your Imagination: Where Leadership Is Tougher

Four specific areas that most leaders care about have genuinely become more difficult in the past few years: hyping up their teams, getting to the truth, focusing on strategy, and staying sane themselves. But understanding how and why each of these leadership loads has become more difficult to carry can set you on the path to doing better.

1. Leader as Cheerleader: Hyping Up Your Team

Sometime in 2011, my boss brought me a chocolate muffin. I mention this not only because it was my introduction to the idea of servant leadership (thank you, Dave!) but also because it remains an excellent example of the simplicity of morale-building. You don’t have to hire a brass band and shoot off fireworks; you do have to say thank you, send a nice email, and offer a bit of chocolate at around 3:00 p.m. Consistently appreciate the humans around you. Be a mensch.

The basics of keeping your team energized haven’t changed. But the environment in which you’re doing so certainly has. Work in 2024 has been noisy. For instance, the average worker receives 121 emails a day — and that’s not counting instant messaging pings, texts, or, God forbid, phone calls. Let’s say that you, as their manager, send 10% of those emails. That’s still more than 100 messages a day that you didn’t send. Those messages could be morale-destroying, truly exciting, or anywhere in between — and don’t even get employees started on dealing with the oversharers and negativity-dispensers in group chat (and private group chats). You’re bringing a chocolate muffin into an environment akin to Times Square at high noon. It’s hard to be loud enough to get people’s attention, and the pressure to be authentic has never been higher.

What to do: First of all, don’t get knocked off your game. It’s tempting, in the face of so much cross-talk, to retreat behind a robotic facade and a series of irritatingly bland and distinctly corporate-flavored communications. Don’t do that. Continue your “ground game” for keeping the team’s spirits up, in a way that’s authentic to you. But adapt your approach to fight the clutter and the conflicting messages around you. Relentlessly join in the conversation wherever it occurs — and be punchy. A quick, funny GIF, a one-line email, or a two-minute conversation at someone’s desk can all be effective, if that’s where folks are listening. In general, think shorter, more frequent communication, varied across more channels. You can’t be everywhere, but you can make your personal warmth felt in bursts.

2. Leader as Detective: Getting to the Truth

Data-driven leadership was supposed to save the world — or at least bring us closer to a shared view of what was actually going on inside any given organization. No more turmoil: We had dashboards! The truth was going to be right at our fingertips, and every decision was going to be smarter as a result.

Instead, a proliferation of data of questionable quality, housed within a host of competing systems, now just confuses many people further. You could compare the current state of play to Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film Rashomon — in which a terrible crime is described by four different narrators, none of whose accounts match.

Worse, though, the right comparison might not exist in the world of thrillers but rather in science fiction. Many organizations have enough data telling different stories that they qualify as a full-on metaverse — with different leaders living in different realities, with their own streams of data attached. That’s painful: Instead of starting every conversation from a shared understanding, you’re more at cross purposes than ever.

What to do: Think like a data scientist — not in the sense of learning to code or performing advanced analytics, but in the sense of asking better questions of information, in a structured and methodical way. Don’t be afraid to ask where data came from, what the gaps in a data set might be, or what kinds of analytics were performed to get to the numbers you’re seeing. Come in with a hypothesis and see if it proves out rather than just taking the numbers at face value. It’s slightly counterintuitive, but being a tougher data analyst makes you a better truth sleuth.

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Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images

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 The body of a Pennsylvania woman believed to have fallen into a fresh sinkhole this week while searching for her cat has been found in a long-abandoned mine that the sinkhole exposed, state police said Friday.

Elizabeth Pollard, 64, was found dead Friday in the mine in the southwestern Pennsylvania community of Marguerite shortly after 11:15 a.m., Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson Trooper Steve Limani said. Crews still were working to recover her body early Friday afternoon, he said.

Pollard’s family has been notified, Limani said.

“The family … kept telling us, ‘We really want to have the body back so we can lay her to rest,” Limani said. “As a group, we just really wanted to make sure that we were able to do that.”

Pollard’s body was found “not far away from where we believe that she’d been when she fell through the sinkhole,” Limani said. “It was just a matter of the work to remove all the dirt.”

Officials are expected to hold a news conference about the situation Friday afternoon, Limani said.

The discovery ends a dayslong search that started early Tuesday when, according to state police, a relative told authorities that Pollard and her 5-year-old granddaughter had left in a car to look for her cat Monday afternoon and had not been heard from since.

Police who were looking for the woman then discovered her vehicle early Tuesday – with her granddaughter unharmed inside after being there nearly 12 hours – parked near a restaurant. A fresh, deep sinkhole was just steps away.

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Rescue workers searched Thursday for Elizabeth Pollard at a sinkhole in Marguerite, Pennsylvania. (Photo credit: Matt Freed/AP via CNN Newsource)

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Spices bring up feelings of comfort, cultural belonging, and holidays. They can make our homes smell amazing and our food taste delicious. They can satisfy our cravings, expand our culinary horizons, and help us eat things that we might normally dislike. Spices have health-enhancing properties and, in medicine, have been used to heal people since the ancient times.

Recently, however, spices have been getting a bad rep.

In September 2024, Consumer Reports, a nonprofit organization created to inform consumers about products sold in the U.S., investigated more than three dozen ground cinnamon products and found that 1 in 3 contained lead levels above 1 part per million, enough to trigger a recall in New York, one U.S. state that has published guidelines for heavy metals in spices.

The Food and Drug Administration issued three alerts throughout 2024, warning consumers about lead in certain brands of cinnamon products. Such notices rightfully put consumers on alert and have people wondering if the spice products they buy are safe – or not.

As an environmental epidemiologist with training in nutritional sciences, I have investigated the relationship between nutritional status, diets, and heavy metal exposures in children.

There are several things consumers should be thinking about when it comes to lead – and other heavy metals – in cinnamon.

Why is lead found in cinnamon?

Most people are familiar with cinnamon in two forms – sticks and ground spice. Both come from the dried inner bark of the cinnamon tree, which is harvested after a few years of cultivation. For the U.S. market, cinnamon is largely imported from Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, and China.

One way that lead could accumulate in cinnamon tree bark is when trees are cultivated in contaminated soil. Lead can also be introduced in cinnamon products during processing, such as grinding.

When ground cinnamon is prepared, some producers may add lead compounds intentionally to enhance the weight or color of the product and, thus, fetch a higher sale price. This is known as “food adulteration,” and products with known or suspected adulteration are refused entry into the U.S.

However, in the fall of 2023, approximately 600 cases of elevated blood lead levels in the U.S., defined as levels equal to or above 3.5 micrograms per deciliter – mostly among children – were linked to the consumption of certain brands of cinnamon apple sauce. The levels of lead in cinnamon used to manufacture those products ranged from 2,270 to 5,110 parts per million, indicating food adulteration. The manufacturing plant was investigated by the FDA.

More broadly, spices purchased from vendors in the U.S. have lower lead levels than those sold abroad.

There is some evidence that cinnamon sticks have lower lead levels than ground spice. Lead levels in ground cinnamon sold in the U.S. and analyzed by Consumer Reports ranged from 0.02 to 3.52 parts per million. These levels were at least 1,500 times lower than in the adulterated cinnamon.

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