James' World 2

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Though she did not know it at the time, Harvard had been alerted to the evidence of fraud a few months earlier by three other behavioral scientists who publish a blog called Data Colada, which focuses on the validity of social science research. The bloggers said it appeared that Dr. Gino had tampered with data to make her studies appear more impressive than they were. In some cases, they said, someone had moved numbers around in a spreadsheet so that they better aligned with her hypothesis. In another paper, data points appeared to have been altered to exaggerate the finding.

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A voice says: “Close your left hand. Don’t ask yourself whether you’re asleep. Think about trees.”

I’m lying in bed. A sleep mask covers my eyes. A tangle of wires covers my left hand. At the tip of my ring finger, a sensor measures my heart rate. A flexible length of plastic embedded with circuits stretches from my palm to the top of my middle finger. This will record the hypnic jerks and spastic opening-hand motions that signal my entry into hypnagogia, the first stage of sleep, where thoughts slip free of conscious control.

There’s a laptop on the bedside table; the screen shows fluctuating green and red lines. Adam Haar Horowitz, who is running the experiment, speaks to me over Zoom, monitoring my somatic information. The device I wear is called a Dormio. It was developed by Adam and a team of professors and researchers at the MIT Media Lab to facilitate “dream incubation,” the shaping of dreams according to words or images chosen by the dreamer. I’m wearing a prototype. Adam envisions a time when the components of the Dormio will be widely available; anyone will be able to download its blueprint and, with a few cheap premade circuits, construct her own dream incubator.

The way it works is simple. The device connects to a website where you can record a voice message to yourself—“think about trees”—that will play as you begin to fall asleep. Dormio detects when you enter hypnagogia, waits a short period, then awakens you and prompts you to describe what you’re experiencing, and sends the recording to your hard drive. You can also alter the parameters of awakening, which enables you to enter deeper or shallower levels of sleep. This first time, Adam is manning the controls himself; his is the voice reminding me to think about trees.

I settle into bed. The Dormio feels light on my hand, and I soon forget about it. My eyes are closed under the mask.

“Hold the image of a tree in your mind.”

I’m not going to be able to do this, I think. A spark of nervous energy runs through my legs.

“Relax. Don’t ask yourself whether you’re asleep. Think about trees.”

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Illustrations by Beppe Giacobbe

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The half-bearded behavioral economist Dan Ariely tends to preface discussions of his work—which has inquired into the mechanisms of pain, manipulation and lies—with a reminder that he comes by both his eccentric facial hair and his academic interests honestly. He tells a version of the story in the introduction to his breezy first book, “Predictably Irrational,” a patchwork of marketing advice and cerebral self-help. One afternoon in Israel, Ariely—an “18-year-old military trainee,” according to the Times—was nearly incinerated. “An explosion of a large magnesium flare, the kind used to illuminate battlefields at night, left 70 percent of my body covered with third-degree burns,” he writes. He spent three years in the hospital, a period that estranged him from the routine practices of everyday life. The nurses, for example, stripped his bandages all at once, as per the cliché. Ariely suspected that he might prefer a gradual removal, even if the result was a greater sum of agony. In an early psychological experiment he later conducted, he submitted this instinct to empirical review. He subsequently found that certain manipulations of an unpleasant experience might make it seem milder in hindsight. In onstage patter, he referred to a famous study in which researchers gave colonoscopy patients either a painful half-hour procedure or a painful half-hour procedure that concluded with a few additional minutes of lesser misery. The patients preferred the latter, and this provided a reliable punch line for Ariely, who liked to say that the secret was to “leave the probe in.” This was not, strictly speaking, optimal—why should we prefer the scenario with bonus pain? But all around Ariely people seemed trapped by a narrow understanding of human behavior. “If the nurses, with all their experience, misunderstood what constituted reality for the patients they cared so much about, perhaps other people similarly misunderstand the consequences of their behaviors,” he writes. “Predictably Irrational,” which was published in 2008, was an instant airport-book classic, and augured an extraordinarily successful career for Ariely as an enigmatic swami of the but-actually circuit.

Ariely was born in New York City in 1967 and grew up north of Tel Aviv; his father ran an import-export business. He studied psychology at Tel Aviv University, then returned to the United States for doctoral degrees in cognitive psychology at the University of North Carolina and in business administration at Duke. He liked to say that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning Israeli American psychologist, had pointed him in this direction. In the previous twenty years, Kahneman and his partner, Amos Tversky, had pioneered the field of “judgment and decision-making,” which revealed the rational-actor model of neoclassical economics to be a convenient fiction. (The colonoscopy study that Ariely loved, for example, was Kahneman’s.) Ariely, a wily character with a vivid origin story, presented himself as the natural heir to this new science of human folly. In 1998, with his pick of choice appointments, he accepted a position at M.I.T. Despite having little training in economics, he seemed poised to help renovate the profession. “In Dan’s early days, he was the most celebrated young intellectual academic,” a senior figure in the discipline told me. “I wouldn’t say he was known for being super careful, but he had a reputation as a serious scientist, and was considered the future of the field.”

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Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they’ve both been accused of fabricating data.

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For decades, GQ was the place men learned to dress themselves. We’d teach you how to talk to your tailor, introduce you to your next game-raising boots, and—crucially—lay down a handful of hard and fast rules about style that you, the reader, were meant to follow religiously. Like: Never wear a tie wider than three inches. Plaid flannels are fine for a lumberyard or a hardware store, but not a formal office. Don’t go shirtless at a music festival. (That one is still true.) On occasion, we’d even explain how to properly break the rules with panache.

But a few years ago, GQ pumped the brakes on all the lawmaking. The thought was: We had entered menswear’s Wild Style era, where stylish guys began exploring new modes of self-expression at every turn—ditching their tuxes for flowy tunics and jumpsuits on the red carpet; dabbling in makeup and nail polish; investing in flashy It bags. Dictating exactly what one should and shouldn’t wear suddenly felt curmudgeonly and antiquated. Who were we to stand in the way of progress? It was a time for unbridled experimentation—for freaking it without restraint—and our precious style rules fell by the wayside.

In 2023, though, the moment finally feels right for us to lay down a few new sartorial edicts. The anything-goes abandon of the last couple years has given way to a return to elegance—and quite frankly, some of you have been allowed to dress yourselves unchecked for too long.

That’s why our team has come together to devise this new list of Dos and Don’ts for a new age of men’s style. Some of the advice is traditional, like which tie knots to avoid like the plague; some of it is extremely right now, like how best to parse TikTok menswear trends (hint: don’t). Unlike in the past, however, when GQ would’ve issued definitive rules as an institution, these new guidelines are a little more fluid and subjective, based more heavily on the personal style and lived experiences of our staffers (and a handful of our fashionable friends) than ever before. Follow them, ignore them, debate them, share them—it’s really up to you. These are GQ’s Dos and Don’ts for getting dressed right now.

Repeat your outfits over and over and over.

Trust us: No one but you is keeping track of how often you’ve worn those jeans with that shirt. Part of the beauty of holding onto clothes for the long haul is finding new things to enjoy about them—how good your ass looks in those jeans, say, or how sick a tie looks with that shirt—once you’ve worn them, so thoroughly you thought they had no secrets left to reveal. —Avidan Grossman

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Gabriel Alcaia

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Congress averted a shutdown on Saturday by mere hours, passing a measure that extends government funding for the next 45 days. The stopgap bill funds the government at the current $1.6 trillion annual rate until Nov. 17, the deadline by which it needs to pass another bill to avoid a government shutdown.

But while the Senate’s 88 to 9 vote salvaged the wages of millions of federal employees and social security payments for those in need, the act omits funding for what some deem critical—including Ukraine aid—while also increasing tensions between Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his more conservative colleagues.

McCarthy attempted to pass a separate resolution that would better appease his far-right colleagues on Friday, but that bill fell short by 21 votes, prompting the Speaker to seek an alternative route. “It’s alright if Republicans and Democrats join together to do what is right,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy has since faced criticism from the President for his failure to abide by funding agreements settled during the debt ceiling deal in May, and faces threats to his speakership.

“We should never have been in this position in the first place. Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis,” said Biden in a statement. “For weeks, extreme House Republicans tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans. They failed.”

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President Biden

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The Luddites have a bad reputation.

These days, the word is most commonly used as an insult—shorthand for somebody who doesn’t understand new technology, is skeptical of progress, and wants to remain stuck in the ways of the past.

That perception couldn’t be more wrong, according to Brian Merchant. In his new book, Blood in the Machine, Merchant argues that understanding the true history of the Luddites is vital for workers today grappling with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in the workplace. 

“At least in my lifetime, the Luddites have never been more relevant,” Merchant, 39, tells TIME. “We are confronting a series of cases where technology is being used by tech companies and executives in different industries as a means of trying to drive down wages and worsen conditions so that the entrepreneurial class can make more money.”

Who were the Luddites?

If you know anything about the Luddites, you probably know that they were English textile workers who, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, resisted the introduction of new machinery. They would sneak into factories in the dead of night and destroy the power-looms they believed were threatening their jobs.

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The felled tree at Sycamore Gap, beside Hadrian’s Wall, on Thursday. The authorities said they had arrested a teenager and a man in connection with what they described as an act of vandalism. Credit…Owen Humphreys/Press Association, via Associated Press

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In 2011, when she was in college studying abroad in Peru, Alice Robb ran out of reading material and picked up a copy of Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. Her initial skepticism quickly dissolved, and she and a friend spent the summer practicing LaBerge’s tips: they recounted their dreams to each other; they did “reality tests” during the day to trigger similar checks while sleeping. Robb began keeping a rigorous dream journal and found that, after very little time, she began remembering her dreams in detail.

In short, she began taking her dreams very seriously — a stance that she has maintained since. In her new book, Why We Dream, Robb, a science journalist, presents a comprehensive and compelling account of theories of and research on dreaming from ancient times through the present day. Throughout, she displays an intense respect for what our minds do while we’re sleeping, and the findings she presents — that dreaming is essential for sanity, that analyzing our dreams can be revelatory, that dreams can be used as diagnostic tools and even manipulated for our own mental health—corroborate her conviction that, as a culture, we would benefit from paying more careful attention.

Robb and I met at a bar near where she lives in Brooklyn to talk about dreams’ predictive power, what it’s like to make your dream journal entries public (hint: uncomfortable), and what closely observing our dreams can offer.

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Wildest dreams

Photo by Eddie Kopp / Unsplash

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