One of the nation’s few environmental economists, Ando, a professor at The Ohio State University, tries to put a price tag on animals and ecosystems to make sure they’re adequately valued in our modern economy. Protecting nature from the many threats it faces, such as deforestation and climate change, can be expensive. Ando’s goal is to make sure the benefits of those protections are not overlooked.
In fact, there’s a simple scientific explanation: The mysterious mechanism that powers the Ouija board is called the ideomotor effect (pronounced “idio-mo-tor” or “id-ee-aah-meh-ter”), and it’s basically a way for your body to talk to itself.
The ideomotor effect is an example of unconscious, involuntary physical movement — that is, we move when we’re not trying to move. If you’ve ever experienced the sudden feeling of jerking awake from sleep (known as the hypnic jerk), you’ve experienced a more abrupt version of the ideomotor effect: your brain signaling your body to move without your conscious awareness. The obvious difference is that the ideomotor effect happens when you’re awake, so the reflexive movements you make are much smaller.
All week, I’ve lived off mysterious packages like this one, handed over by cafés, takeaways, and restaurants across London. Inside is food once destined for the bin. Instead, I’ve rescued it using Too Good To Go, a Danish app that is surging in popularity, selling over 120 million meals last year and expanding fast in the US. For five days, I decided to divert my weekly food budget to eat exclusively through the app, paying between £3 and £6 (about $4 to $8) for meals that range from a handful of cakes to a giant box of groceries, in an attempt to understand what a tech company can teach me about food waste in my own city.
To be memed is to be remembered, and the movie theaters know that.
But I’m ready for the day when taste and texture take precedence over visuals. Or at the very least, the day when people who want a dense pastry do not turn to croissant dough. Danishes are right there!
The five stages are as much a metaphor for grief as shattered glass, despite the common tendency to take them literally. For many people, this metaphor is effective for making sense of grief. For me, however, shattered glass is a more meaningful and helpful metaphor. It captures a profound insight well put by the philosopher Mariana Alessandri in her book Night Vision (2023): ‘Grief puts us in touch with a basic fact: surviving hurts.’
Anyone who has looked out an airplane window while flying between the Americas and Asia has no doubt marveled at the vast expanse of water and the relatively few specks of land that dot the ocean, particularly in its northern and eastern regions. Christina’s Thompson’s Sea People successfully answers the questions: “How did anyone ever traverse and survive, much less thrive, in such a potentially hostile environment? And where did these people come from?”