Why France Is Banning the Hijab for Their Olympic Athletes

After months of campaigning by sporting organizations, France has not reversed its decision to ban French athletes who observe the hijab from participating in the summer Olympics; a move that human rights organizations say is, at best, a contradiction of the nation’s pledge to deliver the first gender-equal games, and at worst, a breach of international human rights treaties.

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“It shows Muslim women that when the French authorities talk about equality between men and women, they don’t see them as women. They don’t count them,” says Anna Błuś, Amnesty International’s women’s rights researcher in Europe. “It’s really important for major human rights organizations such as ours, to be very vocal on this issue, and to publicly show solidarity with Muslim women’s rights groups,” Błuś says. “These communities and these women have been demonized and vilified for years.” 

On Tuesday, Amnesty International published a report calling out French authorities for the “discriminatory hypocrisy” of its hijab bans across a number of sports including soccer, volleyball, and basketball. Amnesty’s report details the racial and gendered discrimination and barriers to entry that French Muslim athletes currently face at professional and amateur level. It also addresses the IOC’s refusal to apply pressure on authorities to overturn the ban, which does not apply to non-French participants at the Olympics. 

In September, French Sports Minister Amelie Oudea-Castera stated that a ban would be in effect for the Olympics, despite the International Olympic Committee (IOC) having no uniform rule against wearing a headscarf. The stipulation is one of a growing number of secularist policies in France that disproportionately affect Muslim girls and women, according to Błuś, including the 2004 banning of “ostentatious religious symbols” in state-run schools that saw the hijab banned, followed by a 2023 decision to ban students from wearing the abaya, a modest robe. 

In a statement sent to TIME, the IOC said that while its own rules mean that women are free to observe the hijab, athletes competing for French national teams are considered to be civil servants who must act in accordance with national contexts. “This means that they must respect the principles of secularism (laïcité) and neutrality, which, according to French law, means prohibition from wearing outwardly religious symbols, including the hijab, veil and headscarf when they are acting in their official capacity and on official occasions as members of the French national team,” the statement said. Athletes—including from France—are permitted to wear hijabs in athletes’ villages.

According to the IOC’s statement, one French athlete who observes hijab qualified for the 2024 Olympic games but it says the situation “has been resolved to the satisfaction of everyone.” 

A spokesperson for the French Sports Ministry says that while an athlete “will never be banned from a competition because of their religious beliefs,” its secularism rules act as a “framework” for wearing religious symbols, which it has deemed the hijab to be. “There is no general ban on wearing the veil in sports fields in France. The law, clarified by administrative jurisprudence, outlines two specific cases,” the statement adds, outlining bans on political and religious symbols for athletes on the French national teams and engaged amateur practice.

How does France’s hijab ban impact Muslim athletes?

Regulations against religious symbols are not exclusive to the Olympics, and have been prevalent in French sports at both recreational and professional levels. One such ban by the French Basketball Federation (FFBB), dubbed Article 9.3, came into effect in December 2022, and forbids the wearing of “any equipment with a religious or political connotation.” 

Among those campaigning for regulation reform are Hélène Bâ, a 22-year-old basketball player who has been participating in the sport since she was five years old. Bâ took a break from basketball for four years while she studied international law at university, before trying to return to professional games in 2022. It was then that she learned that the French Federation of Basketball prohibited accessories that cover the head. 

“It was a real shock to me, because we know what this means in the French context, it means that you can’t play as a hijabi player,” Bâ, who is not playing in the Olympics this summer, tells TIME. “I went to my game in another town and the referee told my coach that I couldn’t play with my sports hijab,” Bâ says, noting that her coach told her the referee wanted her to remove it, along with her long sleeve t-shirt. Bâ said that the referee said her attire was “dangerous” and forbade her from playing unless she removed it. She stayed on the bench for the duration of the game, unwilling to sacrifice her beliefs to participate. 

“When you cannot play, it first impacts your mental health, especially when sport and basketball has been such a huge part of your life,” Bâ says. “It’s also difficult because from a physical health point of view, you are not playing sports anymore.” 

Bâ is not alone in this experience. Diaba Konaté, 24, was a young basketball talent at the top of her game when she both reached the finals of the U18 European Championship and the Youth Olympic Games in 2018. (She is not playing in the Olympics this summer.) She earned a full scholarship to play with UC Irvine in the U.S. But the prospect of playing for France again became elusive with the hijab ban. Konaté told Al Jazeera she began wearing the hijab two years ago and was “humiliated” when she was told she could not participate in French tournaments unless she removed it. 

Basket Pour Toutes (Basketball For All)

Konaté found community in Basket Pour Toutes (Basketball For All), a group co-founded by Bâ, alongside coach Timothée Gauthierot and sociologist Haifa Tlili. The collective was created in October 2023 in a bid to fight back against discrimination in basketball and provide a sense of community to young Hijab-observing girls who love the sport. It consists of players, coaches, and human rights defenders coming together to rally for change and to organize events.

Basket Pour Toutes and the Sport & Rights Alliance wrote a letter to the IOC in May, which was published in June, calling on the body to pressure France into overturning its discriminatory ban. “Our message is that we just want to play sports. Muslim women who wear the hijab have rights like any other citizen,” says Bâ. 

Bâ says that the young Muslim girls they engage with deserve to see members of their community performing at the highest level in their sport, including at the Olympics. ”If they see French hijabi players they will say ‘okay, I could be that girl, I can be that player, I can be that athlete,” she says. Without this, and without a clear pathway to play sport on their terms, she fears that Muslim girls are sent the message that sport is not for them. 

Tlili says she has observed a lot of French Muslims who want to expatriate and play abroad, adding that some French Muslim players feel they are being forced to choose between identity and sport. “This is not what they want,” Tlili says. “They really want to practice in France because all their family and friends are there, and they are proud to be French.”

source https://time.com/7000437/france-sporting-hijab-ban-olympics/

The Real History Behind the Tornado-Control Theories in Twisters

Central to the plot of Twisters, the 2024 stand-alone sequel to the 1996 blockbuster Twister, is a scientific dream: researcher Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) wants to launch absorbent polymer material into a tornado to deprive the storm of moisture and kill it. It makes for a compelling premise, one that turns a natural phenomenon like a tornado into a sort of sentient movie monster that humans can take on and overcome.

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It seems like an innovative idea: not just study a tornado, like the storm chasers in Twister did, but confront and eliminate one altogether. And indeed, this notion is almost as old as tornado research itself. Researchers and members of the public alike have proposed various schemes to stop tornadoes over the decades. None have been feasible enough to test, let alone work. But the real problem with this approach is that, while trying to stop a tornado makes for compelling movie drama, in the real world resources could be better spent on studying and implementing more practical solutions for saving lives and property in the path of tornadoes.

Attempts at weather modification in the United States began in earnest in the 1940s and grew in the 1950s, as government officials and researchers pursued ways of shaping the weather to suit national needs. They sought to improve flight safety, bring moisture to drought-prone areas, protect crops, and more. Others wanted to use the weather for military advantage or to stop hurricanes before they could reach the coast. Much of the research focused on cloud seeding, in which researchers added agents like silver iodide to clouds to produce precipitation. The bulk of the research and discussion focused on precipitation and large storm systems like hurricanes, but tornado research also included speculation about weather control.

Read More: Will Deadly Tornadoes Be More Common With Climate Change? It’s Complicated

In 1961, a civil engineer sent a letter to the director of the National Severe Storms Project (established in 1960 and later renamed the National Severe Storms Laboratory, or NSSL). The letter proposed using unmanned aircraft to “fly through the upper part of tornadoes” and use rockets to launch napalm into the tornado to increase the temperature and “cut off the tornado.” Accompanying the proposal was a sketch of a tornado and proposed rocket trajectory. The author had drawn a tiny house near the base of the tornado and a stick figure running away.

Startlingly, officials did not seem to find this plan outlandish. One NSSP researcher attached a note to the proposal that read: “This sounds theoretically possible. Might be very difficult to guide the missile into the proper place, though.” Difficult indeed.

This response reflected a Cold War-era receptiveness to the possibility that, with enough research and technological expertise, scientists might be able to harness the weather. As historian of meteorology Kristine Harper put it, “weather control efforts fit in with the postwar, Cold War-era hubris that people could gain the power to dominate nature.”

Severe storms researchers were still attempting to learn some of the most basic information about tornadoes—How do they form? How fast are their wind speeds? But some outspoken team members hypothesized to the press that, once they knew more, tornado control would be a logical future step. In 1965, for example, an Oklahoma newspaper wrote that “Eventually, when weathermen know the exact causes of a tornado, they may be able to prevent its formation, possibly by a cloud-seeding technique.”

It’s hard to blame anyone in the Great Plains for this wishful thinking, especially in 1965, when a series of tornadoes known as the Palm Sunday outbreak had devastated communities across multiple states, causing 271 fatalities, thousands of injuries, and $200 million dollars in damages (in 1965 dollars). Still, researchers were far from determining even the specifics of tornado formation, let alone how to stop one.

Many weather researchers were reluctant to embrace wide-scale weather modification. The atmosphere, they understood, was complex and there was much they still did not know about how a slight change in one area would impact weather somewhere else.

Read More: How to Monitor and Stay Safe in Extreme Heat, Using the CDC’s New HeatRisk Tool

In the 1970s, some atmospheric scientists used the language of tornado control—which appealed to elected officials in the Great Plains—to argue for more research funding. Simultaneously many concluded, as NSSL director Edwin Kessler and a coauthor put it, that regarding tornado modification, “the evidence is not now persuasive that this will ever be possible.”

In 1972, researchers at the National Severe Storms Laboratory launched a new form of field observation known as the Tornado Intercept Project, the first scientific storm chasing effort. Between chasers’ ground observations and data from Doppler radar, they made dramatic strides in understanding tornadoes. But the more scientists learned about tornadoes, the more they realized just how complex the atmospheric phenomena were.

As the 1970s continued, faith in technological fixes—and the funding that had come along with it—began to wane. By the 1980s, official interest in weather modification and the possibility of tornado control faded. In addition to a lack of funding and bureaucratic support, the complexity of severe storms themselves deterred scientists from believing they would be able to stop a tornado any time soon.

The NSSL continued to field pitches for ideas about stopping tornadoes, but they came from increasingly fringe perspectives.The office received a rambling letter, for example, from a self-described “freelance imagineer” in 1982. Sometimes officials were pressed to comment publicly when reporters got wind of one of these ideas. In 1990, an Oklahoma newspaper reported on a self-financed inventor who wanted to use a “150-pound bomb flown into the full force of a twister with a remote-controlled helicopter” to stop a tornado. In an understated dismissal, a state official told the reporter that they “were pretty uncomfortable” with the proposal. Robert Maddox, then director of the NSSL, explained that destroying a tornado would be more complicated—and potentially harmful—than many such proposals reflected. “There are folks around like this who basically have their own ideas that they can modify or affect a natural process like a tornado storm,” he said, “but the reality is they’re dealing with terribly huge energetics.”

Today, some weather modification projects are still underway in the United States, focusing primarily on improving precipitation in drought-prone areas, mitigating hail to protect crops, or improving snowpack. Debate continues over the efficacy of these efforts.

Agencies like the NSSL continue to field suggestions from the public for unlikely schemes to stop tornadoes. In a region where destructive storms are a frighteningly regular occurrence, the idea of being able to stop a tornado has powerful emotional appeal. But there remains little evidence that it is realistic—or advisable—to control tornadoes.

Read More: How Cloud Seeding Works and Why It’s Wrongly Blamed for Floods From Dubai to California

Present-day tornado research is often less flashy than fighting tornadoes head-on. Scientists are seeking to continue to improve tornado warnings and give more advanced notice. Some researchers have also turned to social and behavioral science to try to understand how people respond to warnings. Some of the greatest potential to limiting injury and property damage from severe storms seems to come from improving building codes to reflect scientific knowledge and helping local residents evaluate tornado risks to take safety precautions.

It makes sense that filmmakers would latch onto the idea of tornado control, which is more compelling for movie audiences than gathering incrementally better data that will take years of analysis.

But the impulse also reflects our troubling tendency to be drawn to the sexiness of technological solutions to complex problems. The hope that humans might still be able to stop a tornado harks back to the Cold War era faith in new technology, often at the expense of employing knowledge already proven effective. It’s a focus that pervades much of the American response to climate change, a belief that we will eventually engineer novel technological solutions rather than adopt behaviors and enact policies that we already know will make a difference.

There’s something reassuring about imagining the atmosphere as the antagonist in a monster movie (in one scene in Twisters, a tornado tears through a movie theater screening Frankenstein), a daunting foe that the hero’s bravery and ingenuity will nonetheless overcome. But the atmosphere isn’t our enemy. It’s not deliberately coming after our loved ones. Despite decades of careful scientific research, it is still frustratingly complex. The sooner we decide to live with and responsibly respond to that complexity, the better—and safer—we will all be.

Kate Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University, where she is writing a history of storm chasing. She also hosts Drafting the Past, a podcast about writing history.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/6999581/twisters-tornado-real-history/

The Massive Cultural Changes That Made Dr. Ruth Possible

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who died this past Saturday at the age of 96, had an astonishing career as a sex therapist who combined professional expertise and an impish sense of humor. Through her radio program, two television shows, nearly 50 books, and innumerable public appearances, Dr. Ruth made clear that she considered sexual pleasure extremely important—and she had a blast talking about it. She found joy in the world around her and urged others to have fun, too.

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Her optimistic outlook emerged from a childhood of unimaginable loss and struggle, making her emphasis on joy a choice, not merely a quirk of personality. Dr. Ruth left a legacy of sexual candor and the need to defend pleasure as a universal right—a conversation that is more relevant today than ever.

In 1938, a 10-year-old Westheimer (born Karola Seigel) was sent by her parents and grandmother from their home near Frankfurt, Germany, to Switzerland to escape the Nazis. An only child, she never saw her family again. Instead, among other Jewish refugee children at the Swiss orphanage, she formed friendships and had her first boyfriend, a relationship she credits with not only helping her smile while being forced to provide domestic labor to the Christian children who lived there, but with advancing her education. Her boyfriend snuck her his textbooks at night, as girls were not admitted to the village school. The pleasures of learning and the pleasures of physical affection (at that point in her life, “a little kissing,” as she explained in her 2003 memoir) went hand in hand.

Read More: Dr. Ruth Westheimer, America’s Pioneering Sex Therapist, Dies at 96

Her life was full of upheaval. She moved to Palestine in the mid-1940s and nearly died from shrapnel wounds amid Israeli-Palestinian fighting, followed a new husband to France, and then moved to the United States and married for a second and then a third time. Happily married to Fred Westheimer, who adopted her daughter from a previous marriage and with whom Ruth had a son, she earned a Ph.D. in education in 1970 and then became a licensed sex therapist with a private practice and teaching jobs.

Her career in sex therapy was possible only because of dramatic shifts in American life. Landmark studies of sexuality, from the “Kinsey Reports” of 1948 and 1953, to Human Sexual Response (1968) by William Masters and Virginia Johnson, revealed that women had sex lives as varied and complex as men did—and that much of the received wisdom about female sexuality, queer desires, and marital sex bore little relation to reality. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and feminist demands for sex equality created new opportunities for frank discussions of erotic desires. Feminists called for unrestricted access to contraception and abortion, insisting that sexual pleasure and bodily autonomy were basic human freedoms. Gay liberationists and LGBTQ+ reformers protested discrimination in everything from employment to mental health care.

As Westheimer herself would argue strenuously throughout her career, these activists insisted that when it came to sex, there was no “normal.” Framing sexuality as an essential component of human self-determination, they insisted on their right to the varied pleasures of consensual sex.

Yet non-judgmental sexual candor remained controversial. Comprehensive sex education, first introduced in the 1960s, almost immediately became a source of right-wing radicalization, as thousands of conservative white women mobilized to ban discussions of homosexuality, premarital sex, and masturbation in their children’s schools. In the 1970s, some states and municipalities put in place new antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people, but others reinforced their laws against sodomy and banned gay men and lesbians from public-sector employment. Speaking out in favor of sexual equality and against anti-gay prejudice remained controversial. Many of the more mainstream sex advice guides of the time, such as Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), reiterated older ideas about the primacy of male sexual needs and almost entirely overlooked queer sexualities.

A few sexual iconoclasts persisted. Betty Dodson, a less formally trained sex educator than Westheimer was, gained a measure of fame from her self-published treatise Liberating Masturbation (1972) and its follow-up, Sex for One: The Joy of Self-Loving (1987). Dodson urged women to explore orgasmic self-sufficiency as part of their political emancipation, but she never attained anything near the name recognition of Dr. Ruth.

Dr. Ruth’s petite frame stood above the rest, as she rose to become the nation’s most visible advocate for a wide range of sexual pleasures in the conservative 1980s. In 1982, when Westheimer was in her 50s, she landed her first radio program (initially, just 15 minutes long, airing at midnight on Sundays). “Sexually Speaking,” as it was called, was a platform that enabled her to share her joyful sexual ethos with the wider American public. It was only then that her career as “Dr. Ruth” began.

Her ethos of sexual acceptance was nothing short of radical in the United States in the 1980s.

As the HIV/AIDS crisis roiled the nation and gay men were falsely blamed for its spread, Dr. Ruth  advocated for people with AIDS and insisted on destigmatizing sex between consenting adults, whatever the genders of the partners. She ignored television network prohibitions on sexually explicit language by talking about vaginas, orgasms, and masturbation on Late Night with David Letterman, the Arsenio Hall Show, Good Morning America, and other programs, all with her trademark combination of wit and candor, winking and chuckling as she explained everything from how to do Kegel exercises to the importance of clear communication in sexual relationships.

The nation turned rightward, but Westheimer held her ground. She matter-of-factly discussed the value of masturbation (including recommendations to incorporate vibrators and other sex toys into partnered sex) even as Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the first Black person and the first woman to be the U.S. Surgeon General, was forced to resign in 1994 after suggesting that sex-education programs include mention of masturbation. Critics tried to ban her from their universities and even states (including one attempt at a citizen’s arrest during a talk at Oklahoma State University in 1985), but she was undeterred. There was nothing dirty or wrong about sex, she taught, and refused to concede to anyone who found her advice shocking.

Read More: You’ve Decided to Break Up With Your Partner. Now What?

Dr. Ruth also refuted any notion that sex was less important to women than it was to men. “Women need sex,” she explained in 2019. She urged women not to fake orgasm unless they had to, a “little white lie” to protect a man’s feeling—although she recommended that women break off relationships with men who couldn’t handle a little critical feedback about their performance in bed. With her German accent and diminutive stature (she was, at her peak, 4’7”), Dr. Ruth was at once a grandmotherly advice-giver and a sexual-health expert.

As many states continue to debate the appropriateness of books about LGBTQ topics and to ban discussions of queer sex in high school curricula, Westheimer’s non-judgmental approach to sexual pleasure remains both important and, for many Americans, controversial. Conservative proposals to outlaw not only abortion but also many of the most reliable forms of contraception threaten to return women in the United States to the days of fearing unwanted pregnancies from otherwise wanted sex.

For Westheimer, sexual pleasure was not the least superficial. Experiencing joy was, for her, an act of defiance. “I did not know that my eventual contribution to the world would be to talk about orgasms and erections,” she told the Harvard Business Review in 2016, “but I did know I had to do something for others to justify being alive.”

Rebecca L. Davis teaches history at the University of Delaware. She is the author, most recently, of Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality and America and writes the Carnal Knowledge newsletter.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/6999931/dr-ruth-westheimer-history/

Why You Get Your Best Ideas in the Shower

I have long since gotten out of the habit of writing down my best ideas in felt-tip pen. Felt-tip ink runs, after all, and half of the time I have a brainstorm to record I am dripping wet. That’s because more often than not I have dashed straight from the shower. I am not remotely alone in finding the shower a wonderful place to be wildly creative.

Social media is rife with groups dedicated to sharing so-called “shower thoughts.” “One of my favorites on Reddit is ‘People often talk about how every snowflake is unique, but every potato is unique, too, and nobody talks about that,’” says Zachary Irving, assistant professor of philosophy and cognitive science at the University of Virginia.

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What is it about the shower that brings out the Eureka! in us? And what is it about similar, seemingly mindless things—walking, working out, doing the dishes—that affect us the same way?

Irving has made it something of a life mission to explore the question of how to induce states of creative mind-wandering. “I describe this [kind of thought] as unguided or unconstrained attentional thinking,” he says. “Your brain codes that it doesn’t need you to engage in detail, it doesn’t need your perceptual attention or motor attention, and that allows your mind to have this random kind of movement.”

A moderately engaging activity like a shower provides the perfect environment. Go too boring—think sitting in a chair and staring into middle-distance—and you’ll be too unstimulated to be creative.

“When we’re super, super-bored, we seek stimulation,” says Irving. “So we just stop our mind from wandering by, say, checking our phone. That’s not going to lead to the kind of creativity we need.”

The power of the shower

The proper balance between engagement and disengagement is turbocharged in the shower. John Kounios, professor of psychology at Drexel University and co-author of the book The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain, thinks he knows why. In the shower we are on-task—washing, shampooing, shaving, in a familiar and purposeful sequence—but we’re also cut off from the world. “There’s sensory restriction,” Kounios says. “There’s white noise and you really can’t see too much.” There’s a tactile component to a shower too. The temperature of the water, Kounios points out, is more or less the same as the temperature of the body, so there is nothing too cold or too hot to draw you out of the literal immersion of the experience.

Shower thoughts and related mind-wandering are part of what Kounios calls a “brain blink.” In one 2004 paper in the journal PLoS Biology, Kounios and his colleagues studied people’s brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), while the people worked on a kind of puzzle known as a remote association test, in which subjects are given three words and have to come up with a fourth word that connects them all. (The words “loser,” ”throat,” and “spot,” for example, could all be connected by the word “sore,” which precedes them in common phrases.)

Read More: How Often Do You Actually Need to Shower?

There are two ways to solve the problem. The more plodding way is the co-called analytical approach in which people can take things word by word, by pairing “crab,” for example, with “cake,” and seeing if that word also works with “pine” and “sauce”—which it doesn’t. (The correct word in this case would be “apple.”) In the alternative, the technique known as the insight insight approach could work too—just rolling the words around in your head until the solution presents itself.

There’s no doubt which approach is more satisfying: The answer achieved by insight with its happy Aha! is just a lot more fun (and creative).

In Kounios’ study, people were instructed to solve the problems and then push a button indicating whether they’d come up with the answer by analysis or insight. In the insight case, the brain scans showed that in the second before the answer was reached, there was a burst of alpha waves in the right occipital cortex, which processes vision. Alpha waves actually suppress brain activity, but when they occur in the occipital cortex, they’re a very good thing.

Consider the way we often close our eyes or look at the floor or the ceiling when we’re trying to solve a problem—effectively shutting out distracting stimuli that get in the way of the work. The alpha burst does the same in the brain without our having to move or close our eyes, clearing the cognitive decks to help us reach the right solution. “For an instant before you have an insight,” Kounios says, “you’re less aware of your environment.”

Showering causes just that kind of brain blink to happen in a sort of open-ended way—but showering is by no means the only or even best way to achieve it. “Each person may have something that works for them,” Kounios says, “whether it’s walking the dog or gardening or whatever. It should be something that has low demands, not no demands.”

Here are other ways to benefit from “shower thoughts” on dry land. 

Have a rest

Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has looked into the shower-thought phenomenon and points to the “hypnagogic state,” the zone just between sleep and wakefulness, as being especially fertile ground for insights. Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali, he says, made it a habit to nap sitting up with objects in their hands, so that when they dozed off, the objects would drop, waking them up and allowing them to snag any insights before they vanished. 

Read More: How to Take the Perfect Nap

But it’s not necessary to deny yourself your rest; deep sleep can yield its own creative dividends. There is something real about sleeping on a problem, with thoughts and ideas having a chance to consolidate overnight and become clearer and sharper the next day. Here too the shower can come into play. “Oftentimes we’re showering in the morning,” Schooler says. “So we can be the beneficiary of whatever incubation and consolidation process took place during sleep.”

Take a walk

Walking semi-mindlessly has also been shown to have this effect. “Plato and Aristotle were [part of] the peripatetic school,” says Schooler, “because they did their philosophizing while walking.” He points to at least one study showing that being pushed in a wheelchair did not have the same effect on creativity, suggesting that it is something about the physical experience of the walk, as opposed to simply seeing the landscape go by, that has the salutary effect.

Turn off your phone

There is, Irving says, a “spontaneity deficit” in modern culture, with our phones becoming a barrier to creative mind-wandering. To get the most out of your mind during whatever activity you choose, shut the phone off or at least silence the ringer and the buzzer.

Turn off your worry

To the greatest degree possible, allow creativity time to be a vacation from problem-solving. The problems will be there when you emerge from your reverie; address them then. “Mind-wandering should not devolve into rumination,” says Kounios.

Forget the agenda 

The best mind-wandering has no goal. If you go into a session of free-associating with any kind of purpose, well, that association is a lot less free. 

Be happy

A cheery state is not always easy to summon up on demand, but if you start your shower or walk or workout with a memory of, say, the best vacation you ever had, you’re likelier to find the creative spark, says Kounios.

Immerse yourself in nature and art

Both are known to help the mind unmoor itself, says Schooler.

Ask yourself questions

Make them undemanding, free-floating ones—like what was your happiest day, what was your most surprising day. Those kinds of questions, says Schooler, “are likely to promote the productive, generative form of mind-wandering he calls ‘mind-wondering.’”

source https://time.com/6999592/shower-thoughts-best-ideas/

More Americans Apply for Jobless Benefits as Layoffs Settle at Higher Levels in Recent Weeks

U.S. filings for unemployment benefits rose again last week and appear to be settling consistently at a slightly higher though still healthy level.

Jobless claims for the week ending July 13 rose by 20,000 to 243,000 from 223,000 the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

The total number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits rose after declining last week for the first time in 10 weeks.

About 1.87 million Americans were collecting jobless benefits for the week of July 6, around 20,000 more than the previous week. That’s the most since November of 2021.

Weekly unemployment claims are widely considered as representative of layoffs.

source https://time.com/7000043/more-americans-apply-for-jobless-benefits-layoffs-settle-higher-levels/

Here’s What We Know About Trump Vice President Pick J.D. Vance’s Net Worth

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance has been selected as Donald Trump’s running mate for the 2024 presidential election. After Trump made the announcement at the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Monday, July 15, Vance spoke out on X (formerly Twitter). “Just overwhelmed with gratitude. What an honor it is to run alongside President Donald J. Trump,” Vance wrote. “He delivered peace and prosperity once, and with your help, he’ll do it again. Onward to victory!”

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Vance, 39, made headlines after his memoir Hillbilly Elegy was published in 2016. The book chronicles his upbringing in rural Ohio in a community experiencing severe economic decline and has sold at least 1.6 million copies to date. Hillbilly Elegy was adapted into a film in 2020 and was distributed by Netflix.

The Ohio Senator ultimately was able to advance himself by enlisting in the Marine Corps directly after high school, where he served as a combat correspondent. After finishing his service, he completed a bachelor’s degree in political science and philosophy at Ohio State University before going on to complete a law degree at Yale University. 

After initially working as a law clerk for Senator John Cornyn and judge David Bunning, Vance changed career paths to work as a venture capitalist, according to the Texas Tribune. In 2018, he and his wife Usha Chilukuri—who share three children—bought a home in Cincinnati for $1.4 million. It is now estimated to be worth $1.8 million, per Forbes. By 2021, Vance was believed to hold between $3 million and $10 million in liquid assets and venture capital holdings, according to Forbes.

In early 2023, Vance and his wife bought a second home in Alexandria, Virginia, for $1.6 million. That property is believed to be worth $1.8 million today. Forbes estimates his total real estate assets to be worth $4 million. 

Interestingly, it was reportedly support from a Silicon Valley billionaire that has been especially crucial to funding Vance’s political career. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal who Vance became close with after he was hired by the Venture Capital firm Mithril Capital which Thiel co-founded, donated $10 million to Vance’s Senatorial campaign in March 2021, helping him launch his political career. Vance’s time in the venture capital world, which gathered pace in 2015 when he joined Thiel’s company, also allowed him to make connections with other high profile individuals, including Tesla founder Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks, per the New York Times.

According to Forbes, Vance is “worth an estimated $10 million” today. Meanwhile, the website Celebrity Net Worth, which also provides ballpark estimates of the net worths of various well-known people, estimates that Vance is worth approximately $5 million as of today.

source https://time.com/6999522/jd-vance-net-worth-estimations-trump-vice-president-pick-background/

Those About to Die Is a Lurid Sports Soap for Men Who Can’t Stop Thinking About the Roman Empire

The Roman Empire haunts the minds of men, as the women of TikTok recently discovered and reported to the world. That preoccupation doesn’t seem so silly when you think about the American Empire in 2024; we’ve got demagogues, doddering elder statesmen, unpopular wars, economic polarization, the odd assassination attempt, the increasing substitution of bread and circus for substantive political discourse. But are most guys really fixated on the way our decline mirrors that of our forefathers? Or are they daydreaming about military conquest and gladiator death matches because ancient Rome is, in the words of preeminent scholar Mary Beard, a “safe place for macho fantasies”? As historian Tom Holland put it in an essay for TIME: “The Roman Empire was the apex predator of antiquity: powerful, terrifying, box-office.”

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So it isn’t too surprising that it’s this powerful, terrifying, box-office Rome that we encounter in Those About to Die, a new Peacock drama set during Emperor Vespasian’s reign in A.D. 79. Premiering July 18, the series spotlights the chariot racers and gladiators who kept the Roman masses entertained at Circus Maximus and later the Colosseum, many of them involuntarily and often at the cost of their lives. It’s a solid premise for a mega-budget sports drama (the 10-episode first season reportedly cost $150 million). But the execution is at once ghoulishly violent, cartoonishly soapy, and too formulaic to transcend the macho fantasies of its makers.

A project this expensive must have bankable names associated with it, and in that respect, Those About to Die delivers. The series marks the television debut of Roland Emmerich, the blockbuster maker behind Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, who directed the season’s first three and final two episodes. Creator Robert Rodat earned an Academy Award nomination as the screenwriter of Saving Private Ryan. And Anthony Hopkins plays the aging eminence Vespasian—a role that turns out to be quite a bit smaller than the trailer suggests.

The show’s true protagonist is the chariot races’ ambitious sports-betting magnate, Tenax, capably portrayed by Iwan Rheon, the Welsh actor who gave such a chilling performance as Game of Thrones’ psychopathic Ramsay Bolton. Having risen from humble means, with the requisite cache of damning secrets in his past, Tenax is no longer satisfied with his successful gambling operation. Now, he wants to create a fifth faction of charioteers to disrupt the existing four, all controlled by powerful patrician shareholders. His secret weapon is Scorpus (Dimitri Leonidas), a volatile champion racer who refers to himself in the third person, spends his free time wine-drunk at brothels, and whose sudden defection from the blue faction incites bitter conflict.

Tenax also needs an ally in the political realm—and he scores a mighty one in Domitian (Jojo Macari, pouting in every closeup), the younger of Vespasian’s two sons. If Tenax is the antihero of Those About Die—a poor man’s Don Draper or Tony Soprano, who does terrible things well but has redeeming qualities and his own peculiar moral code—then Domitian is its openly sadistic villain. A skillful rhetorician who represents his father’s interests in the Senate, he’s livid that Vespasian favors his older brother Titus (Tom Hughes), a military leader in an unpopular romance with the Queen of Judaea (Lara Wolf’s Berenice), as his successor. Viewers don’t really get a chance to wonder how far Domitian would go to win, because he’s killing and maiming and conspiring, not to mention mistreating his male lovers, from the beginning.

Elsewhere in the Empire, we meet three North African siblings who are dragged to Rome and sold as slaves after one, Aura (Kyshan Wilson), kills a soldier who tries to rape her younger sister, Jula (Alicia Edogamhe). Their brother Kwame (Moe Hashim), a gifted lion tracker, comes to their aid but ends up in the capital, too, as a gladiator. Their fiercely loyal mother, Cala (Sara Martins), follows, determined to free her children. With trustworthy help hard to find, the family becomes integral to Tenax’s story (and the canny Cala becomes his will-they-or-won’t-they love interest). So does another sibling trio, the Corsi brothers, who journey to Rome from Spain with some game-changing horses to sell.

It’s a lot of characters, and I haven’t even gotten into Kwame’s fellow gladiators or the smug patricians who are Tenax and Domitian’s common enemy. Rodat’s decision to introduce them all in the premiere, rather than incorporate new faces as the story unfolds, makes for a confusing start. And excessively long chariot-racing scenes limit opportunities, even within episodes that feel interminable at nearly an hour apiece, to advance the plot and develop characters. 

The unwieldy cast is just one element that Those About to Die borrows from Game of Thrones, which has become the template for TV’s adult-oriented genre dramas. The set pieces are grand in scale but hollow, compared to Thrones’ best battle scenes, in impact. Whether the darkly lit cinematography is a gritty aesthetic choice or an easy way of masking visual flaws is anyone’s guess. Characters get killed off with abandon, and the body count ratchets up as the season progresses, though it’s hard to imagine these deaths moving anyone to tears. Emmerich’s camera lingers on wanton violence and sweaty sex; a drinking game that required players to do a shot every time someone got murdered stark naked during a sexual encounter could be lethal.

The show’s gaze is decisively male. Of the 14 executive producers attached to the project, including Emmerich and Rodat, who made their names with action spectacles and war stories, 13 are men. Emmerich splits directing duties with Marco Kreuzpaintner; their cinematographers are, respectively, Vittorio Omodel Zorini and Daniel Gottschalk. Those About to Die is loosely based on Daniel P. Mannix’s 1958 nonfiction book of the same name. (Two of the season’s five writers are women, so let’s be grateful for small victories.) Its machismo not only colors combat scenes and bedroom conquests, but also restricts the roles of its few prominent female characters. Tenax’s counterpart Cala aside, they’re silent prostitutes, scheming lovers, slaves.

Not that there are any especially memorable characters of any gender. There’s little consensus on what makes a soap opera, but one common element, from Dynasty to Yellowstone, is a cast of flat caricatures engaged in an endless war of ambitions. There are only a few types of people, among the two dozen or so we meet, in this show. The youth are uniformly idealistic. Everyone else is primarily defined by ruthlessness, though their motivations vary. Cala would betray anyone to bring her children safely home; then there’s Domitian, who needs to have his sandal on someone’s neck just to feel alive. The question that is supposed to consume us throughout the season, I guess, is whether Tenax is, at his core, more like the former or the latter.

But what really propels the show from episode to episode, more than any performance or personality, is a tidal wave of gore. While Thrones and House of the Dragon periodically puncture viewers’ delight in violence with thoughtful depictions of grief, guilt, and the futility of war, Those About to Die—bereft as it is of actual ideas—never lets human misery wreck the fun of watching horses trample racers, crocodiles bite people’s heads off, and trembling children get their throats slit. Emmerich and Rodat make it easy to shake our heads at the crowds cheering on this carnage in the arena without feeling implicated in the same bloodthirsty voyeurism. It’s those drunk Romans who are the problem, not us, whose lives in the present surely contain no echoes of that past! Gratuitous sex can be a benign pleasure; violence of this particular variety, by contrast, feels desensitizing, designed to make us stare at it in a hungry, dead-eyed stupor.

Those About to Die was in the works long before men’s ambient awareness of ancient Rome started trending (as was the forthcoming Gladiator sequel), and it’s a safe bet that Hollywood has been scrambling extra hard in the past several months to further satisfy their obsession. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s a smart and timely historical drama to be made about Rome’s long decline, even one that might unfold during this tumultuous period, a decade after the cataclysmic Year of the Four Emperors. But Those About to Die certainly isn’t it.

source https://time.com/6999115/those-about-to-die-review/