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Humans grow up with a powerful drive to learn how things work and why certain patterns and properties exist in the world. Wonder, a word with multiple related meanings, has one sense that captures this desire to know. You employ wonder when you ask questions such as ‘How do fish breathe underwater?’ or ‘Why do air conditioners drip water?’ Wonder, as I describe it here, is more than the sort of curiosity that motivates someone to seek a simple factual answer (eg, ‘What is the biggest kind of dog?’) Wonder moves someone to seek out explanations – especially about the patterns of cause and effect that underlie phenomena. It is also different from awe, which can occur as a more passive state of amazement. Wonder involves active thought and engagement. It invokes conjectures about ‘how’ and ‘why’. It might even launch speculations about different possible worlds. Wonder motivates targeted explorations and discoveries.

In its most mature forms – in adults who have flourished as lifelong wonderers – wonder promotes sustained excavation of the rich causal architectures of the world. It helps us to appreciate everything around us more fully. We come to see a more richly textured and dynamic reality. For example, through wondering and learning about how and why songbirds sing, how the first flowers break through frozen ground, and how animals hibernate, we come to see and experience the first days of spring in more immersive and rewarding ways. Each instance of wondering in turn launches a branching network of new instances and opens a door to the potentially endless joy of successive discoveries. If this sounds overly euphoric, it is exactly how renowned polymaths describe their lives, from childhood to their final moments.

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Photo by Charles Gullung/Getty

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Temptation is part of life. It is commonplace to find yourself in situations where what you want to do and what you feel you should do are in conflict – for instance, choosing between a delicious dessert versus sticking to a diet, or playing video games instead of studying, or watching a movie rather than going to the gym. During these times, you likely aspire to make the ‘right’ decision – the decision that propels you towards your long-term goals. Successfully resisting temptations or, in other words, exerting high self-control more often is probably something you strive for. There’s certainly a widespread cultural belief in the value of greater willpower and self-discipline, as a glance at any self-help shelf or magazine rack will attest. Yet research by us and others tells a far more interesting and nuanced story about the pros and cons of being someone with ample self-control.

Unsurprisingly, a good deal of past research has focused on the positive outcomes and impacts of having high self-control. Findings show that people with greater self-control experience benefits such as higher productivity and success at school and work, greater success and satisfaction in their relationships, and they are viewed as more trustworthy by their peers. Naturally, these impressive outcomes shine a highly favorable light on the trait, and they jibe with the way that willpower is vaunted in popular culture. But, in fact, there’s growing evidence that self-control is not an exclusively beneficial characteristic – it can also come with various downsides, suggesting we would do well to take a more nuanced view of this trait and our desire for more of it.

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A customer at Happiness Forgets cocktail bar in London. Photo by Ian Teh/Panos

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Getting to know someone new—we mean really getting to know them—can be a thrill (for extroverts, under the right circumstances). But it can also feel like a downright daunting task. This is especially true for introverts, or anyone entering into a new situation—whether that’s a first date, a new job, a new city, or even a new identity (like first-time parenthood… or trying to emerge from two years of quarantine lifestyle).

To get the conversation going in the right direction, remember it’s not just about talking, but about listening, too. And that means asking the right questions, thought-starters primed to get at real substance rather than small talk.

“Whether a new colleague at work, a business mixer, or even in a social scene, getting to know someone isn’t the easiest task,” explains Dr. Wayne Pernell, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and specializes in helping people achieve greater success and satisfaction in life and work.

A good rule of thumb? “You never start with the weather,” he says. “It’s too easy. It doesn’t give you information, and ultimately it doesn’t mean anything. Instead, focus on something that’s meaningful, but not a common topic.”

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Questions About Likes/Dislikes

Questions and more questions

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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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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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