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As an obsessed amateur photographer, I spend too much time reading photography forums on the Internet. Not long ago, I came across a particularly plaintive discussion. “Let’s say, hypothetically, I’d like my future great, great grandchildren (and their offspring) to see some of my photos,” someone wrote. “Not necessarily hundreds or thousands of my photos. Maybe just a few.” What would it take to make this possible? The responses piled up, full of cautionary notes. Pictures could be stored digitally, but there was a good chance that today’s files wouldn’t work on tomorrow’s computers. They could be stored physically (on archival paper, in archival boxes), but could still suffer from leaky basements or moving-day chaos. Ultimately, the biggest obstacle was attention, or the lack of it. Why would your descendants care about your pictures? Lots of people have old photos showing long-dead relatives they can’t identify. The bottom line seemed to be that, if you weren’t a great artist, or didn’t photograph moments of historical importance, then your photos would die with you.
After reading, I scrolled through my own collection of photographs. I have roughly ten thousand stored in Adobe Lightroom (the program I use to edit my photos), and thousands more squirrelled away on various hard drives and cloud services. I also have boxes of prints and binders of film negatives here and there. Although I’ve been photographing seriously since my twenties, the pace of my production has increased markedly since I’ve had kids; I’m now adding a little more than two thousand pictures a year to my archive. This suggests that, by the time I’m eighty, I’ll have about a hundred thousand photos in my hoard—three times as many as are held by the Museum of Modern Art.
Perusing my photo library, I sensed in its scale an element of the absurd—a quality that the philosopher Thomas Nagel associates with “a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality.” It’s absurd when “someone gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already been passed,” he writes, or when, “as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.” I’m no Sally Mann or Steve McCurry, and yet I’m amassing an expansive visual account of my life. My pictures are well considered, and made with fancy equipment, and even with some imaginative and physical effort—it’s not so easy to photograph a water-gun fight in the pool!—but they are fundamentally ordinary. Photographs don’t have to be art: in a recent book, the critic Nathan Jurgenson explored the rise of “social photos”—the immediately sharable dressing-room selfies, appetizer snapshots, and view-from-the-hotel-balcony landscapes that aren’t meant to be art works but are, instead, “about developing and conveying your view, your experience, your imagination in the now.” But, even though I share some of my photos with family and friends, they aren’t social. They’re made for broadly artistic reasons, even though they’re just everyday photographs.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
In 2015, Ruby Franke, a 32-year-old Mormon woman in Utah, became another parent sharing her family’s life on YouTube. The first video on her now-defunct channel, 8 Passengers, begins with old footage of her standing in a modest kitchen, her five children gathered around in anticipation as she cuts into a cake to reveal the gender of her sixth child. The video jumps to a scene at the hospital shortly after her new daughter’s birth. Resting in bed, Ruby cradles the baby and her youngest son, a serious-faced 3-year-old boy in blue overalls. “Can you show me where her nose is?” she asks him as he points. “Where’s her eyes?” When an elder son reports that the camera is almost out of battery, Ruby replies softly, “Go ahead, turn it off. That’s okay.”
Over the next six years, 8 Passengers would grow into one of the most-watched family YouTube channels of all time, amassing, at its peak, roughly 2.5 million subscribers and more than a billion views. Ruby and her husband, Kevin, distinguished themselves as a messy-but-wholesome alternative to the polished, world-traveling, Montessori-practicing parenting influencers taking over feeds.
The audience was diverse. There were parents, of course, but also teenage girls, single women, and people just curious about Mormon life. The most die-hard 8 Passengers fans not only followed along on YouTube but also gathered in dedicated online forums, where they analyzed the affairs of the Franke family, of which they had encyclopedic knowledge. They discussed whether the Franke children were getting enough social interaction and when the older ones should be allowed to start dating. They celebrated the children’s birthdays.
These fans were, in late 2019, among the first to realize something was off. In 8 Passengers’ posts, Ruby appeared colder, they thought; the couple’s already stern parenting style had sharpened. That August, in between videos about swimming lessons and school supplies, Ruby and Kevin shared with viewers that they’d sent their eldest son to a wilderness camp for wayward teens. After another video, in which the son revealed that his parents refused to let him sleep in his bed, viewers sprang into detective mode. They analyzed footage. They shared theories: Ruby had joined a cult; her marriage was in trouble; there were problems at home. The rumors picked up in 2022 when Ruby and Kevin
Late in the summer of 2023, Ruby’s two youngest children, then ages 9 and 12 — the baby girl and the boy in the overalls in the very first 8 Passengers video — were found hundreds of miles from home. They were wounded and emaciated, the victims of abuse by Ruby and Hildebrandt. Both women pleaded guilty to four counts of felony child abuse and are now in prison, leaving viewers to wonder who and what they had been watching and whether there had been signs all along.
Read the rest of this article at: The Cut
AS SOMEONE whose running shoes rarely leave the closet, I am both in awe of, and perplexed by, my endurance athlete friends. Particularly hard to grasp is that their love of running marathons or cycling up mountains isn’t in spite of those efforts being so gruelling. They enjoy them precisely for that reason.
Humans, as a species, often think of ourselves as intrinsically lazy, even if scientists prefer terms like “effort averse”. But we know that putting effort in can be deeply rewarding, to the extent that we may choose a more difficult process even if the outcome remains identical. We also seem to value effort after the fact, taking unreasonable pride in a poorly constructed piece of flat-pack furniture, say, because it was a struggle to assemble.
Since then, psychologists have been figuring out the origins of the effort paradox and why some of us struggle with tasks that others might find easy. What they are finding is offering fresh insights not only into how you can get off the couch and into your running shoes, but also how you can learn more effectively, better empathise with others and even cultivate a more meaningful life. “[It seems] that if we can become more effort‑willing, we can learn to tolerate the aversiveness of effort,” says Inzlicht.
For the past century, the “law of least effort” has held that humans, along with other animals, prefer to avoid exertion. Think of a sidewalk that is blocked. Do you take a shortcut around the barriers or follow a signposted detour? Most of us opt for the former. “We have very few laws in psychology,” says cognitive psychologist Gesine Dreisbach at the University of Regensburg in Germany. “That one is pretty strong.”
Read the rest of this article at: New Scientist
MARCO ZENONE IS a public health researcher who studies misinformation and online portrayals of health and wellness issues. A few years ago, he wanted to study the usefulness and accuracy of mental health TikTok videos. When he asked whether I’d be interested in joining his team, I didn’t hesitate.
We took a sample of the top 1,000 TikTok videos with the hashtag #mentalhealth from a specific time frame in 2021 and then analyzed the content. Most videos involved users sharing their personal stories, thoughts, or perspectives, and over one-third contained advice or information presented as factual. When we analyzed the videos with advice and information—which were watched over 1 billion times—we found that 67 percent could be considered useful but 33 percent were misleading. Some of the misleading ones parroted anti-psychiatry tropes, such as the idea that medications aren’t helpful and “are for profit only.” Alarmingly, the misleading videos also received more views, likes, comments, and shares than the ones we classified as useful. Our findings are consistent with other studies showing that TikTok videos contain high amounts of misinformation about more specific health topics, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, diabetes, prostate cancer, and COVID-19.
TikTok is only one gargantuan source of mental health misinformation where online creators can—unintentionally or not—play expert and therapist to billions of users. We are at a point in human history where we have access to the best available information at our fingertips, and yet it doesn’t lead to better-informed health decisions, because that information is drowned out by a rival proliferation of emotionally charged fake science news, conspiracies, alternative facts, and social media echo chambers.
THE SO-CALLED FATHER of the wellness movement, biostatistician Halbert L. Dunn, first used the term in Canadian Journal of Public Health in 1959. Dunn distinguished between good health—freedom from illness—and high-level wellness, defined as “an integrated method of functioning which is oriented toward maximizing the potential of which the individual is capable, within the environment where he is functioning.” Dunn’s thoughtful definition didn’t stick. “Wellness” quickly took on a life of its own.
In many parts of North America, wellness has now sprouted on every corner. Across from your local Starbucks, you’ll see yoga and meditation classes interspersed with spa, weight loss, massage, acupuncture, and chiropractic clinics. Employee wellness programs offering subsidized gym memberships for work-life balance and mental health are a click away.
In her book The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, and the False Promise of Self-Care, journalist Rina Raphael laments how there’s no agreed-upon definition of wellness, noting that it’s one reason the industry has grown so big. “Wellness has devolved into an ambiguous marketing term that can just as easily mean activated charcoal toothpaste as it does mindfulness.” It has seemingly ballooned to include anything and everything. Ask one guru what they mean by wellness and receive a different answer from the next. The term has drifted from Dunn’s definition and morphed into dollar signs, drawing us into a never-ending cycle of enhancing our health by treating problems we didn’t know we had.
The wellness industry is currently valued at a breathtaking $5.6 trillion (US) worldwide, which includes earnings from bona fide resources for healthier living (e.g., sports and exercise classes) as well as alternative medicine products and services. It also includes what’s been dubbed the $181 billion (US) global mental wellness economy, to capture money spent on sleep services and monitors, meditation and mindfulness resources, supplements for “brain health,” cannabis and psychedelics, and self-help delivered by gurus, coaches, organizations, and apps.
Read the rest of this article at: The Walrus
There are a few things Stanley Tucci has learned in his more than 40 years of acting onscreen. He hates waiting around. He tends to overthink his roles. He knows his feelings about his performance matter far less than those of the viewer. “I just want the actor to make me feel something, but a lot of times people think the opposite: ‘I’m supposed to have all feelings so that you can have all these feelings as the audience,’” Tucci says on this week’s Little Gold Men (listen or read below). “I don’t want that. I don’t care what you feel, whether you’re onstage or onscreen. How do you make me feel? That’s the whole point of what we do. It’s not about you.”
Tucci’s résumé proves that he’s figured out this part of the gig. Whether as a monstrous serial killer in The Lovely Bones or as Meryl Streep’s loyal right hand in The Devil Wears Prada and Julie & Julia, the Oscar nominee has emerged as the rare character actor to click deeply and broadly with audiences. He’s inspired countless memes, become a specific kind of sex symbol, and—thanks to his TV shows Searching for Italy and the upcoming Tucci in Italy, to say nothing of his Instagram—successfully embarked on a parallel career as a food commentator and connoisseur. That doesn’t mean his journey has been without obstacles. Health scaresand fallow periods have kept Tucci on his toes, if increasingly determined to get a little “choosier” in what he takes on.
Read the rest of this article at: Vanity Fair
