James' World 2

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“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus. — Turkish proverb,”

 

Hmmmmm…History is repeating itself yet again!

 

Isaiah 59:14

New Living Translation

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You might find these videos enlightening!

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A. R. Bernard: one of many

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Part of soccer’s beauty lies in its unpredictability.

Already in World Cup 2026, we have seen Morocco tie with five-time champion Brazil and Australia overturn the odds by beating Turkey. But few surprises will top a Cabo Verde team ranked 67th at the start of the tournament holding Spain—many pundits’ pick for the title—to a 0-0 draw.

But what goes into deciding whether a team wins, draws, or loses? Of course, the quality of the players and coaching staff matters. And recent advances in sports analytics, including real-time player geolocation metrics, have led to the adoption of data-driven in-game decisions. Top football teams increasingly rely on big data and predictive algorithms to gain an advantage.

But sports psychology plays a big role, too. And that is where I come in. I have a passion for sports in general and soccer in particular—it is the game I grew up playing in Germany.

Now, as a sport psychologist and director of the Global Sport Leadership Solutions Lab at Drexel University, I study how players and coaches can manage chaos on the pitch to strategically improve performance and win.

Below, I outline several modern psychological principles that are essential to all 48 teams battling it out in Mexico, Canada and the U.S. during the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

5 steps for soccer success

Disruption — It is true across all sports, and certainly in modern soccer, that the winning team will benefit from disrupting its opponent. Disruptive tactics can include brute-force tactical fouls, high-speed counterattacks that catch the opposition off balance, deceptive set pieces that create organized chaos, high-pressure tactics that force opponents into errors, and getting under the skin of opposition players.

Disrupting the organization and rhythm of the opposing team is both a mindset and a tactic that can lead to goal-scoring opportunities. A team that can disrupt an opponent’s flow can often overturn a skill disadvantage or demoralize weaker teams.

Attentional fitness — Scoring goals in international soccer is difficult. A great striker is worth his or her weight in gold. They not only possess exceptional dribbling and spectacular one-on-one skills but also strong “attentional fitness,” which requires cognitive efficiency and a work ethic to get into positions to score.

Such players are celebrated for their “coolness” and on-the-ball craft, but it is their psychological intelligence that makes them special. One of the first skills to break under pressure is the ability to focus. The quintessential goal scorer does not freeze.

One could call it “nerves of steel,” but that is just a metaphor for managing multiple sources of attention simultaneously and efficiently. Strikers such as England’s Harry Kane, France’s Kylian Mbappé, and Norway’s Erling Haaland maintain attentional control under pressure. They lock into the moment when it matters most and seamlessly shift between tasks.

Controlled mind-wandering — Mind-wandering is a spontaneous zoning out of your immediate surroundings. In sports, mind-wandering is often seen as negative because inattention at a crucial moment can lead to disaster. But it is difficult to maintain focus for 90-plus minutes during a soccer game. And new neuroimaging evidence suggests that in moments of mind-wandering, the brain is not at rest at all. Rather, it is just processing information differently.

As such, controlled mind-wandering, which involves active mental exploration, can be highly beneficial in performance sports—even if only for a few seconds. The best players seem to know when to focus and when to pull back. They sometimes look away from the ball and absorb a broader perspective of the game. Then, when a crucial game-scoring opportunity arises, they lock in their focus and are 100 percent present.

When researchers examined where Argentine great Lionel Messi looks, they found that his eyes are often off the ball. Common sense in soccer has been to keep your eyes on the ball, but new research suggests that the winner will also mind-wander and look away from the action. Messi’s brain can seemingly do things many of his opponents’ cannot; he appears to have world-class cognitive skills.

Resilience (for referees) — Soccer is one of the most difficult sports to officiate. Not only must referees be in excellent physical condition, they must also be able to manage the game emotionally. This has become increasingly difficult, with professional players routinely simulating injuries and an offside rule that is interpreted to within fractions of an inch.

And then there is one of the most difficult and controversial cognitive decisions in all of sports: the penalty kick, awarded for committing a foul in one’s own penalty box.

With the stakes so high and everyone watching, the modern World Cup referee must have exceptional multitasking, communications and management skills. Referees are part of the fabric of the match, whether they want to be or not. Everybody is judging them—even more so in 2026, since referees are wearing cameras on their temples, so the viewing public can see the game from their point of view. The psychological toolbox of the 2026 World Cup referee is complex, but it has to start with a good dose of psychological resiliency.

Tactical creativity — Tactical creativity in soccer is related to finding solutions on the pitch to complex individual or team situations. It almost always relies on divergent thinking and is often surprising and original. Research has shown that creativity is within everyone’s reach, including soccer players, especially if tactical creativity has been part of the training plan. As a result, the evolution of playing styles in elite soccer over the past few decades has shifted away from a structured, defense-heavy, possession-based system toward a modern, data-driven way to play based on pressing the opposing team high up the pitch. This requires players to take on multiple roles on the pitch. It requires a balance of both inspiration—or open-mindedness—and perspiration, or discipline.

Of course, to be creative, one has to have the freedom to experiment; “play like children,” U.S. head coach Mauricio Pochettino suggested. Tactical creativityis a key driver of the cognitive skill set that allows players such as Croatia’s Luka Modrić and Belgium’s Kevin De Bruyne to see several moves ahead. These modern soccer stars not only play soccer on a different level, but they also think soccer on a different level.

With the World Cup now underway, sports psychologists like myself—along with fans the globe over—can observe how athletes put some of these principles to work. And with any luck, the tournament will have “wow” moments of creativity that will be remembered for a lifetime.

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Philip Yabut/Moment

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Old people cry a lot. I will see a sweet child in the street, watch a news story about a heroic rescue, or catch sight of a peony or of a full moon, and my eyes will be awash with tears. Whatever it is that I am feeling seems expressible only this way. People weep for joy or sorrow. I do neither, consciously.

Something comes over me, as it did the other day when I was sitting alone in an elegant room at the New York Society Library, waiting for an event at which I was to speak. It was one of those breathlessly hot days in mid-May, and the heat outside seemed to compound the still silence inside. For no apparent reason, I began to sing a song from “Carousel” called “If I Loved You.” I don’t mean that I muttered the song softly or mouthed the words or whispered. I mean that I sang clearly, nearly belting it out, as if I were onstage in the middle of the play: “If I loved you, / Words wouldn’t come in an easy way / Round in circles I’d go / Longin’ to tell you / But afraid and shy, / I’d let my golden chances pass me by.”

And sure enough, I started tearing up, as I tend to do often these days.

My singing at the Society Library lasted less than a minute. My event was about to begin, and I left the room thinking of what I was going to say. All the tentative beauty of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song had vanished along with my tears. But for a moment there, I was living in the world of the lyrics, a world of thwarted possibility and regret — not my own but rather that of everyone, the world I have arrived at after 85 years of living. And I was saying or singing to that world how I’d love you if I loved you.

Why do I tear up so often? I think it has to do with the past, how much past has built up inside me all these years. I first saw “Carousel” when I was 10 and was frightened by Billy Bigelow’s violent death. I saw it again when my granddaughter Jessica appeared in a school version of the play, and I heard “Soliloquy,” which includes the recurring phrase “my little girl,” not long after our daughter Amy died. Yet these days, I may tear up not for the play specifically but rather for all the years the play has rested with me, and whatever I’m feeling is both gone and remembered.

The past is a strange thing, both present and missing. In John Donne’s “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star,” he creates a list of impossible things en route to his scoundrel’s lament that there’s no such thing as a woman who is faithful. “Tell me where all past years are,” he writes. It’s like the common phrase “Where did the time go?” to indicate that a stretch of time has passed too quickly to enjoy it fully. Here, Donne means the phrase literally. Where does time go? It is impossible to know.

And how suddenly the present becomes the past. Lifelong friends, here yesterday, gone today.

So many things lost in a life, my life, yours. So much left to articulate yearning. The proposition of “If I Loved You” is that, in fact, I do love you, but I cannot say it. I don’t have the words or the nerve. In Jane Austen’s “Emma,” the stoic Mr. Knightley says to the meddling heroine, “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”

Is that why I tear up? Because I’m so overwhelmed with life as I approach the end of it that I’m at a loss for words, and all I can do is cry?

Overwhelmed. That seems to be the basis of weeping. Lord Byron contemplates losing his love, then regaining it. “How shall I greet thee? / With silence and tears.” In fact, tears are a form of silence. Voltaire called them “the silent language of grief.” They are for everything we cannot say, a tear for every word. A tear rolls down our face, glistens, then dries and disappears. Or we wipe it away, as if we are ashamed of it, as if we are getting rid of it. We never do, any more than we get rid of the pain that the endorphins were sent to cure.

In older age, the inexpressible may occur more frequently because one is approaching the ultimate inexpressibility of dying. We cannot know death until it is too late to report back on it. And we know the impossibility of knowing until all knowing has vanished into the past, the remembered, forgotten past.

Whatever happened to your life long ago, whatever carousel you were on, reminds you of yourself, who also happened long ago. So you’re tearing up for all that is gone, all that monumental past, vast and variegated. These days, I have so much past behind, and within me, it’s as if it bubbles over.

In my appearance that day, I said that one of the beauties of old age lies in appreciating what one has as opposed to ever wanting something new. This is true. But all that one has can gang up on you, too, and hit you when you least expect it. Such as the time I found myself all alone in an elegant room at the New York Society Library and sang my heart out.

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Lidewij Mulder

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Japan’s catastrophic Tohoku-Oki earthquake in 2011 was so strong that it caused the entire country to “slip,” in some areas by as much as five or six millimeters, according to new research.

This “extraordinary observation,” as it is described in a new study published today in Science, was likely triggered by seismic waves bouncing off Earth’s core in the wake of the magnitude 9.0 quake. This never-before-seen event could present a previously unknown hazard associated with earthquakes, says Sunyoung Park, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago.

Park and her team relied on an extensive Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) dataset to document subtle movement at sites across Japan in the minutes after the 2011 Tohoku-Oki quake. What they saw baffled them, Park says.

“The co-authors and I, we were all kind of initially puzzled by the observation,” Park says, referring to the movement of Japan. “Because this was such an unusual thing, we took a lot of time going through different possibilities.”

After ruling out other possible explanations for what they were seeing, such as a processing error in the GNSS data, the researchers concluded that “ScS waves”—seismic waves that travel through Earth’s mantle, ping off the planet’s iron core and return to the surface—had made Japan shift position.

Five or six millimeters—about the length of an average adult’s pinky toenail—might not sound like a lot. And it’s not uncommon for land to shift much more than that during earthquakes, causing “offsets,” where you might see, say, a disconnected road. But those movements are typically localized to areas near the center of the quake, Park says. Until now, researchers had never documented land movement at this scale—an entire country “nudged” by ScS waves, Park says.

“Dynamic earthquake triggering,” or “when seismic waves from an earthquake ‘nudge’ a fault already close to breaking into having an earthquake,” is well documented, says earthquake geologist Wendy Bohon. “However, this paper outlines a previously unrecognized source for this type of occurrence”: ScS waves. “The authors’ observations of triggered slip from this source across an area six to seven times greater than the area that broke during the main shock is extraordinary.”

In this case, it took about 15 minutes or so for the waves generated by the quake to travel to Earth’s core and back. The “slip” appears to have happened gradually, possibly over the course of around 100 or 200 seconds, so people in Japan probably wouldn’t have felt it, Park says. But it’s unclear if that would be the case for future ScS-triggered slips in Japan or elsewhere.

More research is needed to better understand why exactly this earthquake made Japan slip and whether future events such as this might be more damaging. The Tohoku-Oki quake was one of the world’s largest and most devastating: the initial shock and following tsunami killed more than 18,000 people and caused an estimated $220 billion in damage (in 2011 dollars), according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The new findings could help people around the world better prepare for possible dangers hidden in the aftermath of quakes, Park says.

“I think we should be aware of the fact that there could be this potential triggering of an event many minutes after [an earthquake’s] main shaking has passed,” she says.

This “new type of seismic hazard” is one which “we might want to think about,” she adds.

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Scientists have revealed insights from ancient scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago, after an AI breakthrough helped uncover some of their secrets.

The trove of hundreds of scrolls was buried in Herculaneum by the famous eruption in A.D. 79 that also destroyed nearby Pompeii. Uncovering the contents of the fragile carbonized papyrus is a puzzle that has fixated researchers since their rediscovery three centuries ago, but only in recent years has AI-enabled “digital unwrapping” become possible.

Researchers from the University of Kentucky and Naples on Thursday revealed recovered texts from authors previously lost to history, including philosophical takes on ethics, the arts, human behavior, and theology.

In one text, an unknown author appears to warn against excessive impulse. Another key concept, researchers say, is phronesis, ancient Greek for “practical wisdom.” In another passage, the ancient author writes: “We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature.”

“It’s been a long time since the classical period, and we feel a distance from that culture. And then you read the words, and then the distance shrinks immediately,” Brent Seals, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky and one of the foremost experts in the digital restoration of cultural antiquities, told NBC News.

“They were worried about living a good life and understanding the world,” he added.

Previous attempts to unwrap the scrolls, discovered in the ruins of a Herculaneum villa thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, have produced mixed results.

In the 18th century, an Italian monk, Father Antonio Piaggio, invented a device to gently unroll the carbonized papyrus. It was painstaking work: It took four years to unravel the first scroll, revealing ancient Greek texts, and many more years to unfold 500 more. But most were so carbonized they crumbled apart.

Since then, papyrologists have patiently tried to put the pieces together, like parts of an ancient puzzle, revealing one letter and word at a time.

They also kept another 600 badly carbonized scrolls — impossible to open with mechanical methods without reducing them to ash — intact and carefully stored, most of them in the National Library in Naples.

While modern 3D X-ray technology has allowed some insight into the scrolls since, extracting text has proved especially challenging, given the partially destroyed papyrus is as black as the ink.

But a breakthrough came in 2023, when three students used machine-learning algorithms to extract ancient Greek letters from a “virtually unwrapped” scroll, claiming a $1 million prize for the discovery, which has led to rapid advancements since.

“In the past, it would take more than one month to decipher one phrase. Now we get full texts,” said Gianluca del Mastro, professor of papyrology at Naples’ University Campania Luigi Vanvitelli.

“It is an amazing feeling because I am the first with my colleagues to be able to read the ideas of philosophers from the third, second, and the first century B.C. It is a completely new world for us,” he said.

Some breakthroughs have been unexpected. One scroll “was marked in the catalog as having no visible ink,” Seals said, only for researchers to find that it did, and “may be one of the oldest Roman scrolls ever discovered.”

So far, researchers have managed to read only 10% of the scrolls. On Thursday, the University of Kentucky announced a new $1 million prize to anyone able to decipher a complete scroll, a feat the researchers once considered impossible, by June next year.

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A Herculaneum scroll with red laser lines being scanned at the Institut de France by Brent Seales and his team.EduceLab

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For weeks, the Israeli news media has been obsessing about the once-ironclad U.S.-Israeli relationship.

President Trump’s pursuit of a peace deal with Iran, which many Israelis see as a betrayal, and his repeated berating of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have raised doubts about whether they can still call Mr. Trump the best friend in the White House that Israel has ever had.

Then came Tuesday’s election results in New York City. Three pro-Palestinian candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a harsh critic of Israel, defeated moderates in hotly contested Democratic congressional primaries.

No one in Israel is suggesting a pivot to China or Russia quite yet. But those who have studied or steered the U.S.-Israel relationship say that the strains and tensions are fast becoming worrisome for Israel.

“I’m extremely concerned,” said Asaf Zamir, a deputy mayor of Tel Aviv who was Israel’s consul general in New York from 2021 to 2023. All three candidates had made fierce criticism of Israel central to their campaigns and political identities. “And they say it out loud in the most Jewish city in the world, after Jerusalem.”

Experts on the relationship warn that Israel may not be able to count on solid support from Washington for much longer — whether in concrete assistance like billions of dollars in yearly military aid, in symbolic backing like reliable vetoes of anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations, or even in tax exemptions for U.S. charities benefiting Israeli causes.

“There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.

Some pro-Israel moderates also won House primaries in New York on Tuesday. But the victories by the candidates Mr. Mamdani aided — Brad Lander and Claire Valdez, who accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza; and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who has questioned Israel’s right to exist and, like Ms. Valdez, calls it an apartheid state — landed like bold new dots on a scatter chart revealing a clear trend of rising American hostility to Israel.

Mr. Zamir, the Tel Aviv deputy mayor, said, “I’m waking up and hearing that we’re ‘genocidal’ and ‘apartheid.’”

“I’m a left-wing, two-state, pro-peace Israeli, but I’m not blind or crazy,” he added. “I know what the situation in Israel is, and we’re not those things we’re being called. And yet, more and more Americans are buying into and voting on those grounds. That troubles me.”

Israel was already hemorrhaging popularity in the United States, and in both parties, largely over its prosecution of the two-year war in Gaza after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, in which about 1,200 people were killed and some 250 taken hostage. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed in the ensuing war, food shortages caused widespread famine, and the enclave has been largely destroyed by Israel’s campaign.

Americans’ sympathy for the Palestinians exceeded their sympathy for Israel for the first time in a New York Times/Siena poll in September. And 60 percent of Americans said that they held unfavorable opinions of Israel in a Pew survey in April, up from 42 percent in 2022.

“If I were the Israelis, I wouldn’t necessarily be concerned with three or four members of Congress who are way out to the left,” Michael Koplow, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group, said of Tuesday’s primary results.

But, he said, those new lawmakers signaled a broader Democratic turn against Israel. “Opposition to Israel is now the major foreign policy issue,” he noted. “It’s not on the fringe anymore; it’s not even relegated to the sidelines in terms of its importance. It’s front and center in campaigns and in worldviews.”

It could well be front and center again in the 2028 presidential primaries, and Israelis watching American politics say they can imagine the eventual nominees of both parties agreeing on little except that U.S. policy toward Israel needs to change.

For Democratic critics of Israel, the rift has focused on the perception that the two countries no longer share the same values, chiefly when it comes to human rights and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

“The ‘specialness’ of this relationship was pleasant and easygoing and taken for granted for decades,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster who grew up in New York. That was until Israel’s war with Hamas, she added, when many Democrats and a growing number of Republicans “realized that a special relationship was all well and good as long as Israel wasn’t killing thousands of babies in Gaza. People just broke over that.”

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, center, in Manhattan on Tuesday. Three pro-Palestinian candidates backed by Mr. Mamdani, an ardent critic of Israel, defeated moderates in Democratic congressional primaries this week. Credit…Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times

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The latest generation of obesity drugs might have another potential benefit: improving fertility in men. A systematic review presented today at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois, suggests that GLP-1 medications might increase testosterone levels and help to improve the quality of sperm in men with obesity.

The evidence is still preliminary, and more robust trials are needed to confirm the association, says review co-author Pratibha Natesh, an endocrinologist at Warwick Medical School in Coventry, UK. But emerging evidence from other sources points in the same direction.

Perfect sperm

Most of the next-generation obesity drugs that have come on the market in the past five years work by binding to the same receptor as a natural hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), creating a feeling of fullness. To learn how the drugs affect male fertility, Natesh and her colleagues searched the literature for randomized controlled trials of GLP-1 drugs that included measurements of testosterone levels in men. They found only five studies.

(This article uses ‘men’ to reflect the language used in the review and other studies, while recognizing that not all people who have sperm identify themselves as men.)

In one study, for example, 30 men with low testosterone levels, a condition known as hypogonadism, and obesity were assigned to receive either a GLP-1 drug or testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) at random. At the end of 16 weeks, the testosterone levels of both groups had risen.

Another study randomly assigned 25 men with type 2 diabetes and hypogonadism to receive either a GLP-1 drug or TRT. After 24 weeks, testosterone levels increased in both groups, although the increase was greater among those receiving TRT. In the GLP-1 group, however, sperm quality improved. The percentage of morphologically typical sperm — those with a perfect shape and size — went from 2% at the start of the study to 4% by the end. In the TRT group, sperm count and quality declined, which is expected during this type of therapy.

The other three studies included in the review involved healthy men receiving GLP-1 medications for short periods of time and showed that the drugs had no effect on testosterone levels.

Testosterone boost

The findings of the systematic review are supported by other studies, including research presented last month at the American Urological Association annual meeting in Washington DC by Andrés Guillén-Lozoya, a physician at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Guillén-Lozoya and his colleagues analysed the electronic health records of more than 1,600 men who had been prescribed obesity drugs and found that participants’ testosterone levels increased by around 30% after treatment with either a GLP-1 drug or a drug that mimics both GLP-1 and a separate hormone called glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide.

And a retrospective study examined the electronic health records of 215 men who were being treated with weight-loss drugs. It found that after treatment, their testosterone levels were, on average, around 20% higher than before treatment.

Fat cells’ effect

Scientists say that it is not surprising that the drugs might affect male fertility. It is well known that obesity lowers levels of testosterone, which is an essential hormone for the production of sperm and therefore for fertility. One reason for the relationship between obesity and lower testosterone is that fat cells contain high levels of an enzyme that converts testosterone into oestradiol, the main female sex hormone. But other metabolic changes and the increased levels of inflammation caused by obesity also affect testosterone production.

Natesh says that the team’s findings should be an “eye opener to all endocrinologists” who are treating men, especially people who are planning to conceive, and have both obesity and symptoms of low testosterone, which can include low libido, depressed mood, and muscle loss. The data suggest that, for people who have low testosterone, addressing obesity with lifestyle changes and possibly weight-loss drugs is a reasonable strategy. In many cases, those interventions will be enough to bring testosterone levels back up.

“I come across a number of patients in this similar situation,” Natesh says. Her advice to colleagues who are treating people with obesity and low testosterone is not to prescribe “testosterone immediately, look at the broader picture.”

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