My Doctor Told Me to Eat More Plants to Lower My Blood Pressure. It Worked.

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My Doctor Told Me to Eat More Plants to Lower My Blood Pressure. It Worked. I now go weeks at times without eating meat, and I eat small portions when I do. I used to eat a lot of cheese but now restrict myself to grating a bit of parmesan on my soups and salads. Instead, I fill myself up on oatmeal, soy milk, and fruit in the morning; and whole-grain breads and pasta, lentils or beans and vegetables in my big mid-day meal. When we go out, if I don’t eat vegetarian, I usually will eat fish. Continued here

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The Rise of the Millionaire LinkedIn Influencer By this year, he’d gained more than 300,000 followers. Along the way, he noticed a shift in the inquiries he received. No longer were people mostly asking for software advice. “They were asking me about how I was using LinkedIn,” he said. Today, Welsh is a full-blown LinkedIn influencer who teaches other people to use the platform as well as he does, and his one-man LinkedIn-focused business now brings in nearly $2 million annually, he said.After years of being known as a place to share resumes and search for jobs, LinkedIn has quietly transformed into a center for a different sort of influencer—the ROI-obsessed go-getter. It is, in many ways, ground zero for hustle culture and what some have deemed “toxic positivity,” an aspirational place for people more concerned with self-care and cash flow than wisecracks and unattainable beauty.  Continued here

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This scientist is trying to create an accessible, unhackable voting machine Gilbert didn’t just want to publish a paper outlining his findings. He wanted the election security community to recognize what he’d accomplished—to acknowledge that this was, in fact, a breakthrough. In the spring of 2022, he emailed several of the most respected and vocal critics of voting technology, including Andrew Appel, a computer scientist at Princeton University. He issued a simple challenge: Hack my machine.After nearly two decades in the election space, Gilbert knew he was jumping feet-first into perhaps the most contentious debate over election administration in the United States—what role, if any, touch-screen ballot-marking devices should play in the voting process. Federal law requires polling sites to have at least one voting machine on-site that can serve voters with disabilities, and at least 30% of votes were cast on some kind of machine in the 2020 general election, as opposed a hand-marked ballot. Continued here

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What it’s like to be a woman in tech in India India’s tech sector employs significantly more women than any other private sector in the country: Around 36% of the five million employees in the tech industry are women, according to the latest available figures from Nasscom, the industry’s trade association. Yet, gender-based discrimination remains rife. According to a 2021 report, women are increasingly entering tech roles. However, while many women are employed in the sector as a whole, they are less represented in senior roles: Only 7% of them hold executive-level positions, according to a 2022 report. Sometimes, this inequality can be measured, as with unequal pay or the “glass ceiling” that occurs as women fail to progress into leadership roles. But it also manifests in the everyday culture of work life, with women reporting that they are treated differently in the office. “Such everyday sexism is often invisible; therefore, it often is ignored by those who can take action against it,” Cheshta Arora, a researcher at the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, told Rest of World. However, she added, it creates an adverse impact on women’s careers and well-being.  Continued here

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The Rue Age: Older Adults Disengage from Regrets, Young People Fixate on Them New research suggests that elderly brains are less susceptible to regret than are the brains of the young and depressed Continued here

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There Are Different Types Of Loneliness. Which One Are You Struggling With? If you are lonely you may think people do not want to talk to you. This is understandable but research shows that, more often than not, people are usually a lot happier after having a conversation with someone.Loneliness is a normal human emotion; it is simply a sign of wanting contact with people. It is not a personal failing. Continued here

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How to start exercising regularly from scratch, by someone who did it Things changed, however, during the UK’s third lockdown at the end of 2020. Like most people, I’d picked up a healthy walking habit during the first lockdown, but as time passed and the weather grew colder, I’d found it hard to keep it up. So, as winter got into full swing and the idea of staying home for even longer began to sink in, I began to worry about how much time I was spending sat down indoors. Faced with this newfound realisation, I decided to try once again to build an exercise habit. However, instead of diving headfirst into cardio (the only form of exercise I’d ever really done) I decided to start with a short at-home strength training session courtesy of Stylist’s Strong Women Training Club. It wasn’t easy – as you might expect, I had absolutely zero strength in my arms and legs – but as the minutes passed by and my muscles burned, I actually began to enjoy myself.  Continued here

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Giant steps: why walking in nature is good for mind, body and soul Six weeks after my daughter was born, I found myself on the packed dirt path that runs along the River Cam in Grantchester Meadows. It was seven in the morning and cold. Frost lined every blade of grass, and my breath made clouds in front of me. But it was a bright, sunny day. After weeks of settling into motherhood indoors – unceasing night feeds, tears, and exhaustion – a walk in the sun seemed like the best possible thing to do.It’s not that I hadn’t been outside in all that time. Most days I’d only gone as far as the end of my neighbourhood, on short strolls to give the baby some fresh air. Before parental leave, I’d been busy in my job as a nature and travel writer, often taking long walks in the name of work – and, if I was honest, I really missed it. I hadn’t felt that feeling of really walking for a while: warmth in my legs, a building momentum, the repetition of each step beneath my feet. And I knew that I needed to feel, and do, something for me. Continued here

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Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming.  But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate. Continued here

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Human exceptionalism imposes horrible costs on other animals | Psyche Ideas One of the most remarkable cats I have ever lived with was an all-white female with one blue and one green eye. She was hard of hearing, though not deaf. She came to us from a local animal rescuer along with her sister; the pair, whom I named Kayley and Hayley, joined the large outdoor-indoor enclosure for homeless cats in our side yard.The sisters made good lives for themselves for eight years, spending much of their time together. Kayley was the more adventurous, taking evident enjoyment in climbing to the top of green leafy bushes to bask and doze in the sun. She weathered the partial surgical amputation of both ears owing to cancer.Then Hayley died of cancer. We laid her body on a tarp in the grass. Several cats sniffed at it briefly, but Kayley acted unlike anyone else. She stared long and fixedly at her sister from a short distance away. For the first time in her life, she was without her closest companion. Continued here

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The Weird and Wonderful Daniel Radcliffe As an elder millennial, I find it a little weird to sit down with Daniel Radcliffe. How could it not be? Sure, he’s no longer the actor who found stratospheric global fame as a preteen: the professional haircut, the piercing eyes, the surprisingly ropey musculature, the self-effacing introduction all prove as much. “Hi, I’m Dan,” he says when we meet one recent day in Manhattan, a tiny ritual of disarmament repeated with journalists and fans alike.We’re ostensibly here to discuss his star turn in Weird, a faux-biopic of comedy legend “Weird Al” Yankovic for which he donned a curly wig, grew a real mustache, and learned how to play the accordion. But then there’s the obvious thing — what Radcliffe simply refers to as “Potter,” his leading role in the eight-part adaptation of the best-selling book series of all-time, the role that permanently canonized him in the hearts and minds of ‘90s and ‘00s kids. Before meeting, I’d assembled a list of potential venues where our interview might take place — casual slice joints, quiet dining rooms awaiting the downtown lunch rush. Eventually, common sense kicked in. New Yorkers may be cool about their celebrities, but Radcliffe’s association as The Boy Who Lived still inspires hysteric devotion in millions of fans worldwide, and for basic security concerns — to say nothing of the difficulties of establishing any kind of conversational rhythm while being interrupted for a photo every 27 seconds, which I suspect Radcliffe would be too polite to turn down — it’s agreed we’ll meet in a more private space. In fact, right now nobody else is in Gemma, the hotel restaurant we’ve decided on, besides the servers and a cadre of publicists hanging in the wings. And since we’ve convened at an hour both too early and too late to eat anything, it’s just water for both of us. Continued here

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Manish Bhardwaj: A moral blueprint for reimagining capitalism We know capitalism exacerbates injustice and inequality worldwide. So how can we fix it? Professor and social entrepreneur Manish Bhardwaj thinks we need to integrate "moral clarity" -- which he defines as "doing the right thing because it is right, and not from fear of sanction or in expectation of reward" -- into society at a foundational level. In this practical talk, he explains how to use the language of moral clarity as a compass for organizations, communities and our personal lives -- and how it could help create a more just world. Continued here

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‘It's important to bring the spirit of emergencies to the long term' Business leaders may feel that they have been dealing with a never-ending series of crises since the COVID-19 pandemic began nearly three years ago. A health emergency ushered in a supply chain disruption that yielded an inflation predicament; add in higher energy prices and other upheavals, and the demands on leaders’ crisis management skills are at an all-time high. Continued here

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Key trends in US logistics according to 70 CXOs Global supply chains have recently faced unprecedented disruption and volatile freight rates. This September, we brought the brightest minds in logistics to our Future of Logistics Conference in Atlanta, Georgia to find out how logistics providers can remain resilient and responsive in the face of disruption. The conference collaborated with Georgia Tech’s Supply Chain and Logistics Institute to host networking events, panel discussions, and breakouts for an expert group of around 70 chief experience officers (CXOs), founders, and investors, from both large industry players and disruptors, who are shaping the logistics space today. Continued here

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Halftime for the K–12 stimulus: How are districts faring? K–12 schools in the United States have a limited window of opportunity to effectively spend pandemic-related stimulus dollars. The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) 1 1. “Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund,” Office of Elementary & Secondary Education, October 2022. ESSER received funds under three COVID-19 relief packages passed by Congress: the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act; the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act; and the American Rescue Plan. allocates $190 billion in federal funding to the nation’s schools—an amount equal to roughly a quarter of the annual K–12 budget of $795 billion. 2 2. Latest available figures (2018–19 school year) from “The condition of education 2022 at a glance,” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), accessed September 7, 2022. ESSER is the largest single federal investment ever in primary and secondary education and provides roughly double what schools received under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. 3 3. “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” US Department of Education, September 3, 2019. But the funds must be fully obligated by September 2024, meaning the clock is ticking for districts to make the most of this opportunity. Continued here

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Accelerating green growth in the built environment The world is coming together to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and all industries and sectors will need to contribute. The built environment is no exception. In fact, this setting—which refers to the full life cycle (design, materials manufacturing, construction, usage, and demolition) of all residential and commercial buildings and infrastructure—is directly or indirectly responsible for approximately 40 percent of global COâ‚‚ emissions from fuel combustion and 25 percent of overall greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. 1 1. Tony Hansen, Focko Imhorst, Anna Moore, and Sebastian Reiter, “Glasgow COP26 2021: Decarbonizing the built environment,” McKinsey, November 11, 2021. As a result, it is among the highest-emitting industries, emitting more than electricity production, shipping, and aviation. Continued here

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Twitter Is Changing Fast. Here's What Could Happen Next If you've been on Twitter in the past week, you may have noticed that the platform has been emanating some slightly different vibes. Mostly because everybody on there is talking about how Elon Musk just bought the place. There's no doubt Twitter—as a company and as a community—is in flux. So far Musk has already fired top executives, flirted with adding additional paid tiers of service, tasked employees with finding ways to make the company more money, and spread his own share of misinformation.Lauren Goode: It's great to have you on. And I should also note that I am remote this week, so if I sound a little bit different, it's because I'm not in our San Francisco studio with Mike. Vittoria, you cover power and platforms for WIRED, which is why we've asked you to come on the show because we want to talk about what else? Twitter. As you've surely all heard by now, Elon Musk has officially bought Twitter for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share, and he is moving pretty fast. So far he has already fired top executives, dissolved the board of directors, and well, he has spread some misinformation. Now, since this is a fast-moving story, I wasn't joking earlier when I said I didn't know what was going to happen in the next couple of hours. It's moving as we are recording this, and we should note that we're recording this on Tuesday, November 1st, which is a couple of days before you will hear the show. So please forgive us if Elon decides to turn Twitter into a dating app between now and then, or do something even more consequential, like let Donald Trump back onto Twitter just before the midterm elections. But we're here today to talk about the long future of Twitter and how it's going to be monetized. Vittoria, first tell us about paid verification and what we know about it and how it might change Twitter. Continued here

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Dear Artists: Do Not Fear AI Image Generators In 1992, the poet Anne Carson published a little book called Short Talks. It’s a series of micro-essays, ranging in length from a sentence to a paragraph, on seemingly disconnected subjects—orchids, rain, the mythic Andean vicuña. Her “Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff” is what it sounds like. Her “Short Talk on Trout” is mostly about the types of trout that appear in haiku. In what passes for the book’s introduction, Carson writes, with dry Canadian relatability, “I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime.” Right about when she published that, the internet started to take off.Fast-forward 30 years and one of the latest ways to avoid boredom, at least for me, is to stay up late and goof around with AI image generation. Tools such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion can be instructed, with textual prompts, to produce ersatz oil paintings of dogs in hats in the style of Titian, or simulated photos of plasticine models of astronauts riding horses. When I first started playing with Stable Diffusion—which is open source and very fun—I was reminded of Carson’s talks. I went back to them to figure out why. Pretty quickly I realized that the resemblance had something to do with form. Continued here

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The Harms of Psychedelics Need to Be Put Into Context In November 2021, when the psychedelics company Compass Pathways released the top-line results of its trial looking at psilocybin in patients with treatment-resistant depression, the stock of the company plunged almost 30 percent. The dive was reportedly prompted by the somewhat-middling results of the research—but also because of the scattering of serious adverse events that occurred during the trial.Amid the psychedelic renaissance, bringing up their potential harms has been somewhat of a taboo. The field, vilified for decades, has only just recently reentered the mainstream, after all. But as clinical trials get bigger—and the drugs are increasingly commercialized—more negative outcomes are likely to transpire. With the Compass trial results hinting at this, arguably now’s the time to open up the dialog about psychedelics’ potential adverse effects—even if it means tempering the hype that has built up.Those results, now published in full in the New England Journal of Medicine, represent the largest randomized, controlled, double-blind psilocybin therapy study ever done. The participants—233 of them, across 22 sites in 10 countries—were split into three roughly equal groups. One group received 1 milligram of COMP360, Compass’s synthetic psilocybin, a dose so low it served as the placebo. The next group received 10 mg and the last group 25 mg. Psychological support was also offered alongside the treatment.  Continued here

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Who - or what - would survive an all-out nuclear war? The possible effect of such a conflict has become less hypothetical recently, given the threat that Russia might escalate the war against Ukraine using tactical nukes. A large-scale nuclear war, where significant numbers of warheads are detonated (as of last count, there are more than 13,000 such weapons in the world today) would have many catastrophic consequences. The immediate effect on society was well described in a 1979 study commissioned by the U.S. Senate, which included a fictional account of the impact on one American town, Charlottesville, Virginia.A 2019 paper by Joshua Coupe of Rutgers University and colleagues, based on their simulation of a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, showed that about 150 million metric tons of soot (aerosols of black carbon) would be ejected into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and resulting in a drop in average global temperature of nearly 10° C for many years. Precipitation rates would decrease, and the distribution of rainfall would change drastically. The growing season in mid-latitudes would be cut by about 90 percent, and some places would get snow even in summer. The result: starvation over much of the globe, not only for humans but for many animals. Continued here

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Overspending? Psychological tips to break the cycle Shopping can also be a coping mechanism, providing a quick diversion from difficulties like anxiety, depression, and self-uncertainty. For some, overspending becomes buying-shopping disorder, or compulsive shopping disorder (CSD), which is characterized by repetitive, uncontrollable spending that causes serious life difficulties. A 2015 meta-analysis suggests about 5% of people — or around 18 million Americans — experience CSD, and this number may be increasing as online shopping becomes more prevalent. First, identify your important values and goals. Ask yourself why it is important to stop overspending. Consider the big picture. What long-term reward will come from reining in your spending (e.g., becoming debt-free, saving for a down payment, feeling pride or control)? As much as possible, separate money and material items from your personal identity, as a materialist mindset tends to decrease well-being and increase unhelpful spending behaviors. Instead, consider what is important to you that isn’t related to consumption, like honesty, humor, family, or hard work. Continued here

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Humans are 8% virus. Here's why that matters. Like modern HIV, these ancient retroviruses had to insert their genetic material into their host’s genome to replicate. Usually this kind of viral genetic material isn’t passed down from generation to generation. But some ancient retroviruses gained the ability to infect germ cells, such as egg or sperm, that do pass their DNA down to future generations. By targeting germ cells, these retroviruses became incorporated into human ancestral genomes over the course of millions of years and may have implications for how researchers screen and test for diseases today.Viruses insert their genomes into their hosts in the form of a provirus. There are around 30 different kinds of human endogenous retroviruses in people today, amounting to over 60,000 proviruses in the human genome. They demonstrate the long history of the many pandemics humanity has been subjected to over the course of evolution. Scientists think these viruses once widely infected the population, since they have become fixed in not only the human genome but also in chimpanzee, gorilla and other primate genomes. Continued here

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What the Mars rovers saw: A review of "Good Night Oppy" The plan was crazy. Six months after being blasted into interplanetary space, the robot rover Opportunity screamed toward the red planet, with no intention of slowing down or easing into orbit. Instead, the $400 million probe dove straight in, using the thin layer of gases Mars calls an atmosphere to shed as much speed as possible. It deployed a supersonic parachute, then its rockets halted the spacecraft 40 feet above the surface of the planet. Finally, a tether spooled the lander downward. A cocoon of giant airbags inflated explosively around Opportunity, allowing the tether to be cut and dropping the robot to the ground, where it bounced around like a beach ball caught in a storm’s gale. It was crazy, but it worked. Opportunity made it to the surface of the red planet and began its remarkable story of exploration. That story is the subject of a new film, Good Night Oppy, that was released this week. It is a story that deserves to be heard. In a time when our societal project seems to struggle to move forward in any way, Opportunity’s continued success, long after its official three-month lifespan ran out, is both inspiring and necessary. Most important, though, is the way the discoveries Opportunity made — along with its sister robot Spirit — changed our understanding of Mars forever. Continued here

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IceCube finds neutrinos from 47 million light-years away Neutrinos are, in many ways, the most difficult species of known particle to detect at all. Produced wherever nuclear reactions or radioactive decays occur, you’d have to make a lead barrier that was approximately a light-year thick to have a 50/50 shot of stopping a neutrino in motion. Although there are many places neutrinos are made — in the Big Bang, in distant stars, in stellar cataclysms, etc. — the overwhelming majority of neutrinos we see come from just three sources: radioactive decays, the Sun, and from cosmic ray showers produced in Earth’s upper atmosphere.Still, the IceCube neutrino observatory, located deep under the ice at the South Pole, has revolutionized the science of neutrino astronomy. Since 2010, it’s sensitive to neutrino interactions within more than one cubic kilometer of glacial ice, allowing us to detect neutrinos from all across the Universe, including from active galaxies whose jets point right at us: blazars. Now, in a neutrino first, it’s detected 79 excess events coming from a nearby, dust-obscured active galaxy: Messier 77. This galaxy, just 47 million light-years away, is the first in the nearby Universe to be detected via its unique neutrino signature, taking astronomy into new, uncharted territory. Continued here

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How to deal with regret | Psyche Guides As a practising psychologist, I hear about instances of regret such as these all the time. Regret is a very common negative emotional experience, driven by thoughts of what might have happened if one had behaved differently in the past. Who among us has not bemoaned what could have been? One study of regret found that over the course of about a week, participants reported experiencing regret about nearly a third of decisions they recalled making during that time.A typical feature of regret is self-blame over making the ‘wrong’ choice, whether it was doing something that you now believe you shouldn’t have done, or not doing something that you now think you should have. Some regrets are mild and fleeting and, as such, do not cause much heartache. But it’s possible to be haunted by regret – consumed by self-reproach, sadness, and a sense of loss over what you could have had. If you have been grappling with this stronger form of regret, this Guide will offer you strategies for coping with it, and for transforming it into a positive force in your life. Continued here

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Our children will need to find the beauty in our burnt planet | Psyche Ideas The early hominins who watched Pleistocene ice ages flicking on and off saw the coming and going of whole worlds. For roughly 2.5 million years, until around 9700 BCE, they watched sea levels fall, exposing coasts and inlands, then rise, reflooding and sundering land bridges that turned Tasmania and Britain to islands. Glaciers crowned mountain ranges and filled valleys; ice sheets plated over oceans and turned the northern Americas and Eurasia into Antarcticas, then melted into grasslands and forests. Millions of species went extinct; millions of others, humans among them, became climate refugees. Out of these frost-thaw cycles emerged the genus Homo, a creature for whom change was constant. The story of our ancestors is one of new worlds emerging, being made habitable, and even welcomed.I see the world through a pyric prism. In the reforging of Earth, I see fires, especially those burning fossil fuels, as a cause. I see fires, mutating into megafires, as a consequence – and fires everywhere as a catalyst. The Anthropocene is, for me, a Pyrocene, as humanity’s fire practices create the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age. But fire, and even the charred landscapes it can leave in its wake, is more than an issue of human health, busted ecosystems, creaky institutions or bad behaviour. This is also a matter of aesthetics. Continued here

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Let’s Stop the Copy-Paste Latina TikTok Trend, Please Copy-paste may be a useful function on our phones and computers, but lately, it’s become harmful on TikTok. Over the past few weeks, the term “copy-paste Latina” has emerged among Latine creators on the app, and no matter how innocent it sounds, its repercussions are dangerous. Continued here

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Your Holiday Survival Guide To Really Good Gifts for Guys From gag gifts to luxury pieces, here are our favorite gift ideas for that hard-to-please fellow. Continued here

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Tabitha Brown On Vegan Eating & The Power Of Family Dinners In the latest episode of Go Off, Sis, we chatted with Tabitha Brown, actress, vegan social media star, and "world's favorite mom and auntie" about going viral, TikTok, and the power of family dinners. Continued here

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A Disability Advocate Explains The *Right* Way To Increase Representation In Beauty Lauren "Lolo" Spencer, actress and disability advocate, on the makeup look that makes her confident and what the industry can do to be more inclusive. Continued here

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The date of the big HBO Max and Discovery Plus merger moved up From their user interface to their backend to their content, the two services are extraordinarily different, with HBO Max likely leading Discovery Plus in subscriptions as it had approximately 76.8 million users in April before the acquisition, and the combined services now have 94.9 million subscribers. But Zaslav’s plan has always been to merge the two services, which his team views as targeting very different markets. Early this year, a slide claiming HBO Max skewed male and Discovery Plus skewed female offended users of both services even while reinforcing Zaslav’s view on the matter.Zaslav, as I’ve noted before, isn’t particularly concerned with who gets offended in his quest to make Warner Bros. Discovery a profitable company. On the earnings call, he noted that when the show Fixer Upper: The Castle premiered on HBO Max, it quickly moved into the top five most watched shows on the service, confirming WBD’s “thesis” that a combined app will be more successful and drive more subscriptions and less churn. The show also aired on the Magnolia Network and streamed on Discovery Plus. Continued here

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Why AI Will Never Fully Capture Human Language In clipped yet lyrical prose, the novel goes on to narrate a road trip from New York to New Orleans taken by six friends. The narrator of the novel is not one of the friends, however. It’s the car itself: an artificial intelligence network on wheels equipped with a camera, a GPS, and a microphone. The various gadgets fed information into a laptop running AI software, then a printer spat out sentences—sometimes coherent, sometimes poetic—as the group glided south down the highway. Continued here

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How the world’s best chocolate is getting even better In Madagascar, an updated approach to producing cocoa, the main ingredient in the world’s favorite Halloween treats, is protecting the country's endangered lemurs.Ambanja, MadagascarSome of the best cocoa on Earth is produced in Madagascar, where an updated approach to farming cacao, the main ingredient in the world’s favorite sweet, is offering benefits for the country's unique ecosystem.Traditional, soil-depleting farming practices for the country’s staple crop of rice are taking their toll on the land and the creatures that live on it. Certain varieties of cacao, on the other hand, are not heat tolerant; fruit and hardwood trees are mixed in with cacao trees to provide shade. This method, called agroforestry, though practiced, is going through a renaissance in a bid to encourage more cacao farming and to improve yields.And there’s another advantage: Sustaining an ecosystem increases biodiversity, encouraging more animals, such as Madagascar’s endangered lemurs, to return to the land. Continued here

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Time: understand how you use it, create more of it, maximize it, and sustain it Start with designing just one workday. How might you proactively structure a workday that has a high chance of being focused, productive, and healthy? Make 2-3 small changes across notifications, deep-work time, emails, and boundary-setting. Then at the end of the day, review what you learned. What worked? What didn’t? Then try again for another day. Double down on 1-2 practices you already implemented and select 1-2 more to test. Continued here

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6 Behavioral Nudges to Reduce Bias in Hiring and Promotions In today’s talent marketplace, everybody is looking for new ways to make the best hiring and promotion decisions. In this article, building on decision intelligence and evidence-based solutions that drive scalable change, the author lays out six behavioral nudges that can help companies develop practices that reduce bias, boost diversity, and create the best possible talent pools. Continued here

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Consumer Pressure Is Key to Fixing Dire Labor Conditions in the Clothing Supply Chain The plethora of different audit systems and standards for assessing labor practices in factories in the apparel supply chain continues to produce disappointing improvements in working conditions. An approach under development would change that by using data from different audit methods to create simple information that consumers could easily understand. By doing so, it would harness the voice of the consumer in the effort to improve labor practices. Continued here

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The Emotional Labor of Being a Leader While leaders have always performed emotional labor, this demand has increased dramatically over the last few years. Organizations need to stop dismissing this substantial emotional burden. In this piece, the authors explain why organizations need to start offering more support and outline practical strategies to try: 1) Recognize emotional labor as labor. 2) Promote self-compassion from the top down. 3) Provide training on handling others’ emotions. 4) Create peer support groups. As the adage goes and the research proves, it’s lonely at the top. By recognizing emotional labor and providing proper education, training, and support, organizations can help leaders effectively handle this essential but often overlooked requirement of their role. Continued here

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A carbon-free future starts with driving less Can we use less energy from fossil fuels while also meeting our transportation needs? Enter shared electric micromobility: the transition away from dependence on cars and towards lightweight transport options like electric scooters, which release a fraction of the carbon emissions of conventional transport. Helping people get around on the world's largest shared electric vehicles system, entrepreneur and Lime CEO Wayne Ting shares how his company redesigned their scooters so parts can be reused and recycled, ultimately reducing their direct and indirect carbon output. "We have to work at building a future of transportation that is shared, affordable, but most importantly, carbon-free," says Ting Continued here

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Jen Gunter: Do you really need 8 hours of sleep every night? When you can't sleep, you're desperate for help. And there's a booming industry waiting to tell you all the ways a lack of sleep can ruin your health -- and to sell you fancy gadgets to help you finally doze off. Shedding light on this flawed doomsday messaging, Dr. Jen Gunter explains why you shouldn't lose sleep over sleep -- and what to do instead. (For more on how your body works, tune in to her podcast, Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter, from the TED Audio Collective.) Continued here