Cross-Text Connections

In a study of the benefits of having free time, Marissa Sharif found that the reported sense of life satisfaction tended to plateau when participants had two hours of free time per day and actually began to fall when they had five hours of free time per day. After further research, Sharif concluded that this dip in life satisfaction mainly occurred when individuals spent all their free time unproductively, such as by watching TV or playing games.

Psychologist James Maddux cautions against suggesting an ideal amount of free time. The human desire for both free time and productivity is universal, but Maddux asserts that individuals have unique needs for life satisfaction. Furthermore, he points out that there is no objective definition for what constitutes productivity; reading a book might be considered a productive activity by some, but idleness by others.

Imagine you and your friend are trying to decide where to eat lunch. When people try to make joint decisions like this, they often don’t reveal their true preferences. Instead, they say they would be happy with all options because they think this response will help them appear more easygoing and likable to the other person.

Research shows that people who don’t state their preferences when making a decision with others aren’t more likable in the eyes of others. In fact, stating that you have no preference actually makes the decision more difficult for other people. It can also cause them to feel less happy with their ultimate decision and with you.

From the extinct Shasta ground sloth to the living Hoffmann’s two-toed sloth, sloths are among the most appealing animals native to the Americas. But scientists still have a lot to learn about them. Unlike their ancient ground-dwelling relations, today’s sloths spend most of their time high up in trees. The sloths’ inaccessibility has made it hard for scientists to study them.

By using a hat-like monitor, biologist Bryson Voirin and colleagues can at last discover the previously hidden activities of sloths. Such monitors can provide information to correct misconceptions. It was long believed that sloths are very gentle. But, in fact, sloths have very sharp claws and will attack if threatened.

Despite how the Indian dish madras differs from Mauritius's gato pima, both dishes are described as a "curry." The word's history, however, is fraught. It's a term created by British and Portuguese colonizers to refer to the myriad spiced sauces with ties to the Indian subcontinent. In 1973, chef Madhur Jaffrey dismissed the term "curry" as inaccurate, and in 2021 blogger Nisha Vedi Pawar suggested that people abandon the term both for its colonial origin and for its failure to grasp the intricacies of India's cuisines.

Growing up in India, chef Chintan Pandya didn't encounter the term "curry" often: his family didn't cook curries, but some of his neighbors did. Although the blanket use of the term is rooted in colonialism, Pandya calls some of his dishes curries. Having traveled throughout India as part of his training, he came to appreciate the country's diverse cuisines and the diverse uses of the term "curry."

One challenge faced by researchers studying global urbanization is that countries may define urban settlements differently. Many countries define urban settlements based on the number of people living in them. However, countries do not all use the same number; for example, Iceland uses a minimum population of 200, while the Netherlands uses 20,000. Other countries use a combination of population and other factors. This variation makes it difficult for researchers to compare aspects of urbanization in different countries.

Recently, a group of six international organizations developed global definitions of common types of settlements. The group developed a new measure called the “degree of urbanization.” This new measure establishes global criteria used to define three types of settlements (cities, towns, and rural areas) and allows researchers to better understand global urbanization rates.

In 2019 Belo Horizonte, Brazil, was named a City of Gastronomy by UNESCO in recognition of the city’s unique food culture. The honor is well known among residents of the city as well as tourists who visit. It’s obvious that the selection of Belo Horizonte by UNESCO has brought awareness to local recipes, cooking practices, and chefs and has provided a boost to the city’s tourism industry.

Many people in Belo Horizonte’s restaurant industry hoped that food tourism would increase after the city was chosen as a City of Gastronomy in 2019. However, as researcher Ferang Park and colleagues argue, cities must still create effective marketing strategies to benefit fully from being named a City of Gastronomy. Without an intentional effort to promote the city’s food scene, many current and potential visitors to Belo Horizonte may not even be aware that it’s home to uniquely delicious food.

Norse settlers occupied part of Greenland from about 985 CE until the early 15th century, when they mysteriously abandoned the region. Many researchers cite increasingly lower temperatures to explain why the Norse fled. The researchers reason that the Norse settlers arrived in the region while the climate was warm and were able to remain there until temperatures declined during the Little Ice Age, which occurred between the 14th and 19th centuries.

Jeffrey Salacup, Isla Castañeda, and colleagues analyzed sediment samples from a lake in Greenland close to the Norse settlement. This allowed them to reconstruct the area’s climate history. The researchers found no evidence of substantial temperature changes during the settlement period. They argue that instead the region experienced a persistent drought, which played a more important role in forcing the Norse out of the area than did increasingly lower temperatures.

Tool use in wild birds is rare and observed almost exclusively in foraging contexts, but male palm cockatoos create and employ tools in mating displays. Using their beaks to carve sticks and seedpods into drumstick-like percussive instruments, these birds then use the instruments they've made to repeatedly tap tree branches, creating rhythmic patterns that appear to be unique to individual birds.

Not only are the percussive mating displays of male palm cockatoos idiosyncratic, so apparently are the tools used in them. A team of biologists compared discarded instruments made by 12 palm cockatoos and found that the tools varied in mass, length, and width significantly more than would occur through chance alone. Moreover, the team observed no evidence of imitation among the birds in the designs of their tools.

Conventional wisdom long held that human social systems evolved in stages, beginning with hunter-gatherers forming small bands of members with roughly equal status. The shift to agriculture about 12,000 years ago sparked population growth that led to the emergence of groups with hierarchical structures: associations of clans first, then chiefdoms, and finally, bureaucratic states.

In a 2021 book, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow maintain that humans have always been socially flexible, alternately forming systems based on hierarchy and collective ones with decentralized leadership. The authors point to evidence that as far back as 50,000 years ago some hunter-gatherers adjusted their social structures seasonally, at times dispersing in small groups but also assembling into communities that included esteemed individuals.

An excavation in Chiquihuite Cave in central Mexico has upended the belief that approximately 13,000 years ago, a group known as the Clovis people were the first human inhabitants of North America. More than 200 crude stone tools were found embedded in a layer of earth that is up to 33,150 years old, revealing that humans occupied the cave thousands of years before the Clovis people reached the continent.

The objects uncovered in Chiquihuite Cave are intriguing, but it is premature to characterize them as tools. The stone pieces are so roughly shaped that they may have simply fractured from rocks during natural geological activity in the cave. Moreover, their unearthing has thus far not been accompanied by discoveries of other signs of human activity or even traces of human DNA from surfaces.

The poet Audre Lorde once claimed that poetry is the most inexpensive of art forms to practice. While people who pursue other art forms—sculpture, architecture, theater—require large blocks of uninterrupted time as well as money to complete their work, poets can write, as Lorde said, “between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper.” So poets can make worthwhile art even if they must earn their living in another way.

Any assessment of the state of contemporary poetry must reckon with the professionalization of the field. While it is possible in theory for anyone to publish in Poetry, Kenyon Review, or a similar major poetry outlet, many people who do so have professional training in poetry and extensive practice writing it, which requires time not often available to those who must also work full-time jobs. Thus, financial security indirectly affects which people become poets.

With a shell that measured 1.7 meters, the extinct mollusk Parapuzosia seppenradensis is the largest ammonite in the fossil record. Ever since fossilized remains of this large ammonite were first discovered in 1895, scientists have been perplexed by its size. After examining 154 ammonite fossils including P. seppenradensis fossils from Texas and Parapuzosia leptophylla (a smaller ammonite species) fossils from England, paleontologist Christina Ifrim, Arturo H. González-González, and colleagues concluded that P. seppenradensis may have evolved from P. leptophylla and gradually increased in size as larger ammonites were better able to escape being preyed on by mosasaurs.

Christina Ifrim and her team have expanded our understanding of the evolutionary history of ammonites in general, but their study has some gaps that will require additional research to fill. For instance, there’s evidence that mosasaurs preyed on ammonites, but there’s no direct evidence that they interacted specifically with P. seppenradensis.

Isaac Asimov, author of The Naked Sun and Pebble in the Sky, is highly regarded despite his mediocre writing style. His prose is workmanlike; his characters are flat and discuss ideas rather than emotions. That his work is enjoyable despite this is a testament to his prodigious imagination — even if people read his books only for the ideas, they will have plenty to consider.

Asimov is critiqued for his style, but it is wrong to fault a writer for failing to do what he never intended to do. For example, although most of his novel Foundation consists of people discussing science and politics and we find out little about his characters' lives, Asimov wanted to convey the vast sweep of human history over centuries, and one of his points is that at such a timescale, individuals don't matter. Thus his lack of characterization is central to his thematic aims.

To many artists in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, the American wilderness symbolized innocence and untouched beauty. So George Inness's decision to foreground a railroad in his 1855 painting The Lackawanna Valley is notable, since images of railroads often alluded to the destruction of wilderness in the name of progress. In fact, art historian Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. argues that Inness glorifies the subject of the railroad by painting a scene that suggests hopefulness rather than devastation.

It is impossible to deduce anything about George Inness's attitude toward his subject in the painting The Lackawanna Valley, primarily because it is a commissioned work. Inness was restricted in how he could portray the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Company: his client was the company's first president, who had requested the painting possibly as a way to promote the company's rail network.