James' World 2

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Historically, Britain has been timid about table condiments. Salt and pepper are often the standard duo, while an exhilarating array of flavorings is deployed globally to tweak cooked foods: traditional spices, evolving spice mixes, clever powders created by imaginative chefs. What could be better than sprinkling a dash of vibrant color across your meals? Here are 22 ways to spice up your food.

Dehydrated chicken skin

“It will transform chips, fish, boring salads, anything,” enthuses Sam Grainger, the chef-owner at Belzan in Liverpool. On a greaseproof tray, flatten chicken skin, salt it, and scatter with garlic and thyme. Place baking paper on top and a tray to weigh it down. Oven roast at 170C (150C fan)/335F/gas 3½ for 40 minutes, until the skin is crisp. Remove the top tray and paper, and continue to dry the skin in the oven at about 75C fan for a further eight hours. Let it cool on kitchen towels to absorb any oil. Pat dry.

Using a blender, blitz the skin and a little coarse salt to a fine powder. Portion out your batch of powder – you could use an ice-cube tray or clingfilm “twists” – and freeze in an airtight container.

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A sprinkling of Egyptian dukkah or Indian chaat masala can elevate a simple dinner. Photograph: Martin Steinthaler/Getty Images

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“Pay attention to the clock in your body, not just the one on the wall,” she says. “Human beings have circadian rhythms. We were designed for mental alertness in the morning and physical dexterity in the afternoon. That’s just how the body clock works.”

Instead of randomly tackling to-dos, McGeorge breaks up the day into four quadrants, each lasting about two hours. And each quadrant can be an ideal time to tackling different types of work.

The first quadrant

The first two hours of the day are for high-intensity, high-impact work. These tasks are the most important things you are paid to do, and they require the most brainpower.

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[Source Photo: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels]

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Since we started carrying smartphones with decent cameras in our pockets wherever we go, we’ve collectively taken more and more photos. Over the past decade, I’ve shot maybe 50,000 with my iPhones, which makes for a hell of a lot of mediocre pictures—and very few good ones.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re in a somewhat similar situation: years of shooting smartphone photos have given you an entirely unsorted, multi-thousand-picture camera roll.

Digital photos are wonderful, but there’s no point shooting them if you just leave them sitting on your smartphone, totally ignored. Sure you’ve thought about putting everything in place, but just thinking about diving into those folders most likely scares you. Don’t worry—I’m here to tell you that sorting that photo mess of yours can be done, though it won’t be quick.

Keep or Cull

There are two main strategies when it comes to sorting through thousands of photos, depending on how you feel about them: You can either aim to keep the good photos or you can cull the bad ones.

Keeping the good photos is easier and will give you a much smaller library. You’re essentially adopting a “hell yeah” or “nope” approach. Simply work your way through all your photos and pull out the ones you think are objectively great. Anything that doesn’t hit the mark gets deleted.

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Digital photos are free and don’t take up any physical space. No wonder most of us are digital hoarders. Photo by Antonio Gravante via Depositphotos

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Quick, how do you hold your phone? Is the bottom of it resting on your pinkie, while you cradle the back with your index, middle, and ring fingers, and your thumb does all the scrolling? Alas, like the many other seemingly easy, intuitive things we do, it is wrong.

While the one-handed claw is seemingly the most convenient way to grip your device, over prolonged periods of time, it could be doing damage to your wrist and aggravating your ulnar nerve—among other issues.

What is smartphone pinkie?

You may already be familiar with the term “smartphone finger,” also known as texting tendinitis, texting thumb, and gamer’s thumb. But now we must also contend with “smartphone pinkie” (not a medical term—yet). According to Healthline, “The fingers most impacted by holding a smartphone, tablet, or video game controller are your pinky and thumb,” which can become cramped or inflamed.

Ann Lund, an occupational therapist and certified hand therapist at the Mayo Clinic told the Washington Post that given the smaller size of the pinkie, it won’t “tolerate the pressure and the positioning as well as a larger digit.” Michelle G. Carlson, a hand and upper extremity surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York added that using your pinkie to hold up the weight of your phone can strain the ligament that connects the finger to your hand. But that’s not all.

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Photo: carballo (Shutterstock)

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When was the last time you bragged about being sensitive?

Most likely, the answer is never. There are plenty of traits we take pride in but being “sensitive” is usually perceived as a weakness. It’s used to mean you’re fragile, thin-skinned, or just overreacting. Men are told that they shouldn’t be sensitive at all, whereas women are told not to be “so” sensitive—an infuriating set of words that ought to be retired.

Either way, the message sensitive people get isn’t to celebrate who they are. It’s that they should “overcome” their sensitivity and “toughen up.” Putting aside that this approach doesn’t work, it’s wrongheaded. Sensitivity is largely genetic, and not something you can turn off. It is a trait linked to giftedness and something we ought to embrace. In fact, according to three decades of research, it’s not only a healthy trait, it also serves as a a powerful asset.

As a personality trait, being sensitive means you take in more information from your environment, and you do more with it. Sensitive people are wired at a brain level to process information more deeply than others do. That includes sensory input (like noticing the texture of a fabric), emotional input (reading social cues), and ideas (spending a longer time thinking things through and making more connections between concepts).

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“Sorry! Computers need to be accountable to people!” he said, and then made sure to clarify, “That was not a Freudian slip.”

Slip or not, the laughter in the room betrayed a latent anxiety. Progress in artificial intelligence has been moving so unbelievably fast lately that the question is becoming unavoidable: How long until AI dominates our world to the point where we’re answering to it rather than it answering to us?

First, last year, we got DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, which can turn a few words of text into a stunning image. Then Microsoft-backed OpenAI gave us ChatGPT, which can write essays so convincing that it freaks out everyone from teachers (what if it helps students cheat?) to journalists (could it replace them?) to disinformation experts (will it amplify conspiracy theories?). And in February, we got Bing (a.k.a. Sydney), the chatbot that both delighted and disturbed beta users with eerie interactions. Now we’ve got GPT-4 — not just the latest large language model, but a multimodal one that can respond to text as well as images.

Fear of falling behind Microsoft has prompted Google and Baidu to accelerate the launch of their own rival chatbots. The AI race is clearly on.

But is racing such a great idea? We don’t even know how to deal with the problems that ChatGPT and Bing raise — and they’re bush league compared to what’s coming.

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AI

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Dinesh Raj, who lives in the south Indian city of Salem, treasures his account on microwork website Amazon Mechanical Turk, even if competition for data annotation tasks on the crowdsourced platform is high, and the pay is low.

The 30-year-old, who has an engineering degree, has struggled to find a well-paid job and relies on the platform for much of his income, which can vary every day.

“I work at night when there are more jobs from U.S. clients,” said Raj, who has done tasks on Amazon MTurk for about four years.

“Of 10 tasks I do, only two may get approved, so I have to do more tasks to make $10-$30 a day. But it’s still better than nothing,” said Raj, who sometimes rents out his ID to members of a Facebook group of Indian workers on Amazon MTurk.

The explosive growth in artificial intelligence (AI) is driving the need for large training datasets, which are serviced by millions of workers labeling text, images, video, and audio for everything from voice recognition assistants to face recognition to 3D image recognition for autonomous vehicles.

India makes up about a third of global online freelance workers, according to the International Labour Organization, with developing nations accounting for about two-thirds of the total remote workforce.

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Employees work at their desks inside Tech Mahindra office building in Noida on the outskirts of New Delhi March 18, 2013. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

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On a clear, moonless night, you might be able to see thousands of stars sparkling like jewels above. But a keen eye will notice that they don’t all look alike. Some glow brighter than others, and some display warm red hues.

Astronomers have identified several different types of stars in the universe, as diverse as small brown dwarfs and red supergiants. Stars in the prime of their lives, known as main sequence stars, are typically classified by how hot they are. Since most star temperatures can’t be directly measured, explains Natalie Gosnell, an assistant professor in physics at Colorado College, astronomers need to look at another signal: temperature. This is largely inferred by the color of the light a star emits, which is reflected in many names given to star types.  

Each category, however, is connected. A star moves through various designations throughout its lifetime, an evolution shaped by its original mass and the reactions that occur within the roiling stellar body. 

In the beginning…

All stars form from a cloud of dust and gas when turbulence pushes enough of that material together, pressed into one body by gravity. As that clump collapses in on itself, it starts to spin. The material in the middle heats up, forming a dense core known as a protostar. Gravity draws even more material toward the developing star as it spins, making it bigger and bigger. Some of that stuff may eventually form planets, asteroids, and comets in orbit around the new star.

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured this blue star shedding outer layers of gas and dust. NASA, ESA, STScI

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Whether it’s a meetup at a dimly lit bar, an awkward blind date, a speed-dating event, or even an answer to a classified ad in the newspaper, American dating has long been an experiment of throwing strangers together and hoping for the best. In many cases, there was little to connect people except a shared geography or, perhaps, a mutual acquaintance.

For the most part, this dating formula worked. American marriages are full of people who started dating when they were complete strangers. A survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life, where I’m the director, found that 46% of married Americans reported not knowing their spouse before they started dating.

But that’s changing: Today’s young adults, especially young women, are increasingly finding romance in their friend groups. In our survey, 43% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 said they were in a relationship with someone who was first a friend, including an astonishing 50% of women in that cohort. This is double the 21% of people over 65 who reported having been friends with their partner or spouse before they started dating. Among older couples, 52% said their significant other was a complete stranger to them before they got together, while only 35% of young people said the same. In other words, a lot more older Americans created a relationship out of thin air.

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Instead of relying on dating apps or meeting a stranger, Gen Z is increasingly finding romance in their friend groups. Arif Qazi / Insider

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We are constantly bending and being bent to the will of others—and neurotechnology may be enabling new methods for those seeking to bend others to their will. In 2021, Ahmed Shaheed, during his mandate as the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, presented the first-ever report on freedom of thought, which argued that “freedom of thought” should be interpreted to include the right not to reveal one’s thoughts nor to be penalized for them. He also recommended that freedom of thought include the right not to have our thoughts manipulated. But manipulation is a slippery concept. If ill-defined, an absolute prohibition on it could do more harm to human interactions than good.

About a decade ago, I went down a rabbit hole trying to untangle claims about philosophical and legal free will. The written debate goes back at least two thousand years, but neuroscientists have recently joined the fray by arguing that decision-making is hardwired in our brains. Punishment, they argue, cannot be justified by retributivism—an eye for an eye—because people are not morally culpable for their actions. I disagree and have sought in my own scholarship to explain why freedom of action is a freedom worth defending.

In a well-known 1971 essay titled “Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person,” the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt describes what he calls a peculiar characteristic of humans—that we can form “second-order desires.” Besides our subconscious preferences, biases, and desires, we can also “want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives.” Frankfurt calls this capacity for reflective self-evaluation of those biases and desires “higher-order volition.” We don’t have to be fully aware of our unconscious desires to engage in reflective self-evaluation. We might be completely unaware of some desires while being mistaken about others. Free will, he argues, is our capacity to form higher-order volitions, by recognizing certain desires as our own.

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Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

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