James' World 2

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Forward progress is a funny thing. It’s important to strive for in all areas of life, but it can be hard to gauge. And it can lead to tricky questions like, am I moving in the right direction? Are we? When it comes to relationships, this is more often true than not, especially when there’s so much fear-inducing messaging about what makes marriages fail rather than what makes them succeed. It’s crucial for couples to grow together, to become more comfortable, to build trust, to gain confidence, but what are the signs of growth in a relationship to focus on?

Growth, notes Dr. Ketan Parmar, a psychiatrist, and mental health expert at ClinicSpots, is an essential aspect of any healthy and fulfilling relationship. “It means that you and your partner are not only compatible, but also willing to learn, change, and evolve together,” he says. Growth in a relationship, he adds, can take many forms, such as overcoming challenges, pursuing goals, developing new skills, or exploring new interests. “When you grow together as a couple, you strengthen your bond, deepen your intimacy, and enhance your happiness.”

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The Right Direction

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Building wealth might not be as difficult as you think, says self-made millionaire and author of “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” Ramit Sethi.

Having spent 20 years of his career writing about finances and psychology, Sethi knows what it takes to grow your money. The No. 1 way to get rich: keep it boring, he tells CNBC Make It.

“The top ways to grow your wealth are really simple, almost deceptively so,” he says. “And they seem boring, but they are the ones that actually work.”

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I love vacations, but my dog Evvie makes them a bit more complicated — and expensive.

If my partner and I want to take her with us, it means we have to drive, because at 50 pounds she’s too big for air travel. That adds time and limits the number of potential destinations. Then there’s the question of where we can stay: Hotels often add a pet surcharge (anywhere from $10 to $100 per night) and many Airbnb rentals don’t allow pets.

We could leave her at home, but there isn’t always a friend available to stay with her, and pet sitters are expensive — ranging anywhere from $35 to $85 if we drop her off at their house (where she’ll probably be with a few other animals), and more if they come to ours. (We live in the high-priced Washington, DC, metro area — rates are likely a bit lower elsewhere.) We could put her at a boarding facility, which cost around $75 per night, but she’d have to spend our holiday in a new, unfamiliar environment without us — and with a bunch of other dogs equally out of their element.

My partner and I always manage to cobble together something, but it adds an additional layer of planning — and often stress — to our vacations because it’s harder to unwind if we’re worried about her well-being. Is she bored? Is she getting enough play time? Was she given meds at the right hour? So on and so on.

If you live in one of the nearly 48 million households with a dog — or one of the 32 million with a cat — you can probably relate. But there’s a lot we can do, and should do, given how frustrated and bored our pets may be even when we’re home. When we go on vacation, which disrupts their routines and likely means they’ll have fewer opportunities for exercise and play, we should be extra mindful to give them a good time.

Evvie wasn’t available for comment, but I spoke with two dog experts, one cat expert, and an experienced housesitter on how to give our companion animals the best life possible while we’re out trying to live ours — and if we think that means including our pet on vacation, how to bring them along for the ride.

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Naomi Elliott for Vox

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During the Great Recession, public discourse about the economy underwent something of a Great Disappointment.

For much of the country’s history, most Americans assumed that the future would bring them or their descendants greater affluence. Despite periodic economic crises, the overall story seemed to be one of progress for every stratum of the population. Those expectations were largely borne out: The standard of living enjoyed by working-class Americans for much of the mid-20th century, for example, was far superior to that enjoyed by affluent Americans a generation or two earlier.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

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Jaime Colindres’ third-floor room at the American Hotel in Los Angeles was tiny, but in it, he painted expansive scenes of the American West on salvaged pieces of wood. Guitar sounds filled the halls, and neighbors kept their doors open. Some residents landed there when the city’s ruthless rental market slammed its doors on them, but they quickly soaked up the creative soul that creaked and hummed, rattled, and swelled through the battered hotel.

That was 10 years ago.

The American is now a boutique tourist hotel in LA’s downtown Arts District. Nearly all of its longtime residents have been replaced. But the culprit is not gentrification. It’s the city’s failure to enforce its own laws to preserve affordable housing.

A 2008 city ordinance sought to protect residential hotels like the American. Residential hotels often offer single-room dwellings and are sometimes the only housing that elderly, disabled, and low-income people can afford. But Capital & Main and ProPublica found 21 such buildings, including the American, offering rooms to travelers.

Under the ordinance, owners who convert or demolish residential hotel rooms must either build new units or pay into a city housing fund. None of the 21 have received clearances from the city showing that they’ve done either, according to Housing Department records. But the agency has cited only four of the hotels for residential hotel violations, even as some buildings went through obvious transformations and publicly advertise rooms on travel websites, the news organizations found. The American wasn’t one of the hotels cited.

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Jaime Colindres lived at the American Hotel in the 1990s and again for about five years in the 2010s.

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Still, the meetings succeeded in giving Cirque du Soleil a sweeping plan to transform itself. This week, the company will release a video game on the popular gaming platform Roblox. It produced a show last month for Motorola to introduce a new phone. It is working on a line of home goods (think psychedelic curtains) and a television documentary series (current title: “Down to Clown”).

“They’re saying: ‘Forget the circus. Forget the red-nosed clown and the big tent and the popcorn. Think about this as an artistic statement,’” Emma said. “And they’re trying to channel that into selling consumer products.”

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Marie-Andrée Lemire/Cirque du Soleil

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Scientists are raising alarms about the risk of simultaneous crop failures occurring in multiple regions across the globe as a result of human-driven climate change, a catastrophe that poses an underestimated threat to the global food supply, reports a new study.

Using sophisticated climate models, researchers zeroed in on the effects of the jet stream, a system of rapidly flowing winds in the atmosphere, on heat extremes around the world. The results revealed that “meandering” jet stream patterns can produce weather anomalies in some of the most important crop-producing lands on Earth, an ominous signal that “synchronized” harvest collapses could occur in the future.

Climate change, which is driven by human consumption of fossil fuels, is placing enormous new pressures on humans and other lifeforms on the planet. In particular, rising temperatures are fueling more intense extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, droughts, floods, wildfires, and storms, all of which have adverse effects on food production worldwide. Given that disruptions to the global food supply can be deadly, especially for import-reliant nations, scientists have been galvanized to better understand the complex risks that climate change poses to global crop yields.

To that end, scientists led by climate scientist Kai Kornhuber from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory set out to study meandering jet streams, which are especially wavy wind patterns in the sky that have remained a wild card in climate and crop models. 

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Image: skaman306 via Getty Images

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