Adani Abutto

5 followers · 40 following · 796 views

on the atlas — 210

highlights — 278

Psychological health does not mean having no expectations; it means not being possessed by them. This makes room for lively expectancy. Such expectancy is followed by agreements that fulfill it or acceptance of disappointment as a legitimate condition of existence, to be greeted without protest or blame. The alternative is ego-entitlement with its brazen mindsets of wish and demand.
Daily Review | Readwise
After all the numbers were crunched, Fremont, Calif., the city on the southeast shore of San Francisco Bay, came out on top. It had the best rating for well-being, as well as the seventh-lowest rate of residents experiencing depression.
The Happiest Cities of 2026 - The New York Times
Obama opted against taking sides in the ideological disputes that often divided the politically polarized Law Review staff, casting himself instead as a mediator and conciliator. That approach earned the enduring respect of Law Review members including those not necessarily inclined to agree with his political views today. “He tended not to enter these debates and disputes but rather bring people together and forge compromises,”
Obama first made history at Harvard Law - Harvard Law School | Harvard Law School
Friendship has real power for kids. Juvonen thinks that friendship may even begin to resemble an attachment relationship like what children initially have with parents. These “are really very, very close and emotionally intimate relationships,” Juvonen told me. “And even if that particular relationship doesn’t last, it has ramifications on subsequent relationships.” Too often educators and parents fail to appreciate the potential upside of these strong ties. Teachers often separate friends, whose banter can be disruptive in the classroom. Yet when researchers record student conversations duri…
Friendship Is Crucial to the Adolescent Brain - The Atlantic
On 30 September 2018, Berners-Lee announced his open-source startup Inrupt to fuel a commercial ecosystem around the Solid project, which aims to give users more control over their personal data and let them choose where the data goes, who's allowed to see certain elements and which apps are allowed to see that data
Tim Berners-Lee
Even before I first met Ms. Salinas, I had been wondering when to remove the Nanit from its perch above my older daughter’s bed. She may simply outgrow it before my husband and I come to a formal opinion on privacy versus convenience. These days, she no longer naps, and in the mornings she is as likely to greet us in our own bed than the other way around. There’s still joy on her face, and I make sure to see it there, rather than on a screen.
Nanit and Other Baby-Tracking Start-Ups Eye Collecting Even More Data - The New York Times
A different read of the babytech industry is that it’s all nonsense: Infants survived just fine before cameras with infrared night vision, humidity sensors and 256-bit encryption. My mother, who raised three of us, has made no secret that she thinks my generation is crazy.
Nanit and Other Baby-Tracking Start-Ups Eye Collecting Even More Data - The New York Times
For the Nanit-pilled, it’s almost silly to object to the idea of precisely tracking a baby. Victoria Vaynberg, the company’s marketing chief, pointed out how thoroughly surveillance-like behavior has infiltrated every part of our lives. “We care about where our food delivery is and we want to be able to track it to the exact block until it arrives,” she told me. “Yet there’s a hesitation about knowing exactly how long your baby slept?”
Nanit and Other Baby-Tracking Start-Ups Eye Collecting Even More Data - The New York Times
Nanit’s people are upfront about not being entirely sure about all the potential uses of their devices. “I’m not going to sit here and pretend that we know the answer to what all of this data is going to unlock in the future,” Ms. Salinas said. She pointed to recent breakthroughs from adult wearables, like detecting atrial fibrillation and the early signs of Parkinson’s disease, as proof that the possibilities could be significant.
Nanit and Other Baby-Tracking Start-Ups Eye Collecting Even More Data - The New York Times
She also suggested that when our own Nanit-tracked children have children, they’ll value the ability to go back and look at their own bedtimes. Nanit does not store video footage forever, but her comment made me wonder if that function was inevitable. I shuddered to imagine a permanent record of every time I’ve testily denied a fourth book over vocal protest.
Nanit and Other Baby-Tracking Start-Ups Eye Collecting Even More Data - The New York Times
Traditional therapy demands a certain anonymity on the part of the clinician. But “media therapists,” as the psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck long ago described this segment of the guru class, build their images on self-revelation. Given that LePera had shared so much about her own life online and in her popular self-help books, it was logical that her followers would be curious about what had changed.
Self-Help Influencer Nicole LePera Faces Litigation - The New York Times
I will never know the hunger and desperation that defined your twenties. It’s amazing how much can change in a generation. You have never hesitated to tell me how proud you are of me. And yet, with all the privileges I have as a healthy young woman with a Yale degree, nothing I accomplish can compare to what you’ve done. You transformed your suffering so that I never felt it, never saw it hidden deep inside the wellspring of your love, until I was old enough to be curious and started digging. I know you don’t want me to, but I cry for you when I think about your past. It makes me want to do ev…
The Fruits of Your Suffering: A Letter to My Refugee Mom | The On Being Project
I sit with you on the floor of your bedroom, having finally gathered the courage to fly home and ask properly for you to tell me about your life so that I can record it. We talk in Vietnamese, a language I speak and understand because of you. But how can I ever truly understand what you have lived through, or what it means for me to inherit this history?
The Fruits of Your Suffering: A Letter to My Refugee Mom | The On Being Project
A story from the book Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks recounts his wife learning about his past of growing up poor without enough food, and understanding why he always overpacks their children’s lunches and overfeeds them. He never told her explicitly about his past, but it was something she pieced together from knowing him deeply. He never even consciously realized that was why he was overfeeding their children and constantly packing them way too much food. His story recounts him realizing that she knew him so well, that at times it’s even better than he knew himself. It’s a sweet story of being…
You need people in the same curiosity bracket as you
A persnickety linguist or historian might object that there is no unbroken line of insurgent friendship that lies hidden in history. They would be right: it is a zig-zagging, disjointed line, always being broken and reassembled, a story among other stories, resonant with many other non-European genealogies of relational freedom. But this elusiveness is what makes it precious and powerful: it is peoples’ capacity to constantly form new complicities amidst control and violence. Friendship is a process and an open question, with partial responses, further questions, flashes of certainty and confi…
Friendship is a root of freedom – Joyful Militancy
Freedom is the space that opens when knee-jerk reactions and stifling habits are suspended. It is the parent learning to trust their kid, or the teen who flees a violent home with support from friends. It is the scream of refusal that elicits rage and action from others. But the key is that one never does any of this alone, whether a humble gesture causing a subtle shift, or a decisive act catalyzing dramatic change. Freedom, gentleness and ferocity always comes from—and feeds back into—the web of relationships and affections in which everyone is immersed.
Friendship is a root of freedom – Joyful Militancy
two friends fold their lives together; they draw new capacities out of each other. They hurt each other, and they work through it, emerging more intertwined than before. They are no longer sure which ideas and mannerisms were ‘their own’ and which belonged to the friend. They know each others’ triggers and tendencies, intimately. One finds himself in trouble, and the other drops everything to help, at great personal risk. But this risk and sacrifice is not because it is morally right, or because they have calculated that it is in their own self-interest. It not even felt as a choice; it is som…
Friendship is a root of freedom – Joyful Militancy
Affect begins in the middle: amidst our situations, in our neighborhoods, with our own penchants, habits, loves, complicities and connections. There is no individual that comes before the dense network of relations we’re enmeshed in. We are always shaping our worlds, and being shaped by them. Freedom can mean nothing other than the active participation in affect: the expansion of what we’re capable of—what we’re able to feel and do together.
Friendship is a root of freedom – Joyful Militancy
What I know now is this: identity isn’t something you find. It’s something you build, slowly, from the choices you make when nobody is measuring. And those choices are made of smaller things than we think. What we read. Who we spend time with. What we let ourselves want. What we buy and why. How we structure our days when nobody is telling us how. We are, in the most literal sense, the accumulation of what we give our attention to — and for a long time I had been giving mine away without really deciding to.
The year I said "no" to everything
"There's a growing sense of protection over our time and calling someone requires the recipient to pause their day and dedicate attention to the conversation - a difficult thing for multitaskers to do."
Why Gen Z & Millennials are hung up on answering the phone
But for me, listening to a five-minute voice note from a friend updating me about their life is painful - they get side-tracked, every second word is "like" or "uhm" and the whole story could have been told in a couple of text messages.
Why Gen Z & Millennials are hung up on answering the phone
In the Uswitch survey, 37% of 18-34s say voice notes are their preference of communication. In comparison, only 1% of 35 to 54-year-olds prefer voice messages over a call.
Why Gen Z & Millennials are hung up on answering the phone
After all, when it costs 10p a text there was no way I was going to spill over to 161 characters. In 2009, phone calls on my mobile would have cost a fortune. “We didn’t give you this phone so you could gossip with your friends all evening,” my parents would remind me as they looked through my monthly phone bill.
Why Gen Z & Millennials are hung up on answering the phone
The second explanation is that people are hanging out less because we’re all so damn busy. As The New York Times’ Jessica Grose notes, people in their 30s and 40s have less leisure time than they did two decades ago. As Anne Helen Petersen has said, Americans have a tendency to spread out, and the built environment of the U.S. housing market forces many people to move away from friends and family, which means they ultimately buy a bit of loneliness with their money.
Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out - The Atlantic
These days, “we have a lot of friends that tend to only share a common history with us, not with each other,” Anna Goldfarb, the author of Modern Friendship, told me. You have one friend you know from work and one friend you know from a previous job, but they don’t know each other. To see them both would require two separate brunch dates when you’re not sure you even have time for one. “We have to come up with individual reasons for each friendship to keep it active,” Goldfarb said.
Why We’re All Too Busy for Friends - The Atlantic
Another big hurdle is the time and effort it takes to schedule a gathering. In recent decades, participation in groups that allow friends to meet up easily—such as unions, civic clubs, and religious congregations—has dwindled. “One of the really great things about these institutions is they regularize contact,” Cox told me. “You’re there at the same time or for the same kind of meetings … with shared values and expectations for behavior. So it really takes a lot of the work off the plate of the individual.”
Why We’re All Too Busy for Friends - The Atlantic
Pennington’s research fits with past findings that Americans now spend less than three hours a week with friends, compared with more than six hours a decade ago. Instead, we’re spending ever more time alone. These days, “the number of people we can develop some kind of connection to seems boundless, but the opportunities to develop deep, meaningful, even transformative relationships are much more difficult,” Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, told me.
Why We’re All Too Busy for Friends - The Atlantic
alking less can also create a self-reinforcing cycle. When we don’t practice having small interactions, Sandstrom told me, “then we feel more anxious, and then we don’t want to do it.” But these casual interactions sometimes lead to big, important relationships: “How will I find my best friend that I don’t know that I have if I’m too nervous to talk to people?”
Another Symptom of Growing Isolation - The Atlantic
Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex and the author of Once Upon a Stranger, studies “weak ties,” or the people we talk with casually throughout the day. She has found that although these interactions might seem meaningless, they boost our sense of well-being, making us feel part of something bigger, even if we’re just buying milk or chatting with a colleague at the office coffee maker
Another Symptom of Growing Isolation - The Atlantic
Kirkland & Ellis recently said it set aside $500 million to create its own AI platform rather than rely on tools also used by competitors, while Freshfields struck a deal with Anthropic to co-build specialized AI applications. Cleary Gottlieb bought legal-tech firm Springbok AI, bringing a team of AI engineers in-house.
Exclusive | This Lawyer Upended ‘Big Law’ Once. He Has a Plan to Do It Again. - WSJ
Maybe that’s the path forward for couples and single people alike: to lean into the precarity, not because it’s easier or more pleasant but because they’re interested in where that will lead. Perel tells partners that they don’t need to try creating distance or adding novelty to their relationships; all they need to do is accept that it already exists.
The Eroticism Shortage - The Atlantic
You might think that in the past two decades, Americans would’ve grown accustomed to uncertainty. But Perel believes that many people are struggling to cope with that precarity. Why learn how, when you can use Google Maps to see exactly how delayed your train is, or ask ChatGPT to give you a breakdown of anything you don’t immediately understand? In a superficial sense, the world is more graspable and predictable than ever. Sometimes, though, that can make a person more afraid of ambiguity, more attached to the fiction that we can ever know what’s around the corner—or in our partner’s head.
The Eroticism Shortage - The Atlantic
I asked, “How do you think I’m different now?” She paused. “You are lighter, easier, more relaxed. You laugh more, smile more. There aren’t any hidden rules. I don’t have to translate your mood. You tell me right away when I make you mad, which honestly delights me. You are speaking your mind.” I smiled. “Okay, go on.” She continued, “When something goes off course, you let it go. If not right away, then after some time thinking about it, digesting it. You seem to be letting go of a bigger set of cultural standards, of some sort of externally imposed idea of who you should be.” I recognized wh…
Daily Review | Readwise
A related observation is that I love reading other people’s life updates. Not necessarily grand, year in review-scale productions, though those are nice too, but just what has happened in the last day or week or two, along with brief, partly-baked thoughts about those happenings, usually on a lowkey blog of some sort. Maybe this is a nosy drive, but that aside, it’s ironic that I’ve struggled to give myself the permission to create and share the exact kind of content I enjoy reading.
What stops me from writing | Kat Huang
Garber estimated that the number of international students coming to the U.S. has fallen by roughly 20 percent nationwide. He added that the effects were already apparent among postdoctoral scholars. “The way that this will play out, or has the potential to play out, is that fewer scholars, students, researchers from other countries will come to the United States. And we are feeling this immediately when it comes to postdoctoral scholars,” he said. “Many postdoctoral scholars in the United States come from other countries.”
Garber Calls New Student Visa Limit ‘Odd,’ Warns of Impact on Graduate Students | News | The Harvard Crimson
On Sunday, a mathematician reported that he and friends had disproved a conjecture that had first been proposed in 1939. Using the Fable A.I. model from Anthropic, they found a counterexample while watching the World Cup final.
Four Young Mathematicians Receive Prestigious Fields Medals - The New York Times
When the present felt unbearable, my aspirations allowed me to transcend my surroundings. I think about sitting in the back seat of my rusty car, clutching an SAT book. I still bear the scars of my work ethic; I wish I’d known, like today’s youth, how to give myself more grace. But I also wish they understood how the dream itself illuminated the path a few feet ahead of me, until I stood on solid ground.
Opinion | Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don’t Blame Them. - The New York Times
While talking to students, I found myself questioning my own choice to worship at the altar of work. I wrote much of this article on weekends, sometimes while my toddler begged for me; I have chronic pain triggered by sitting too long; I don’t know how to turn off my drive. Before talking to these students, I never really considered what “success at any cost” actually cost me. At the same time, ambition isn’t just about personal accomplishments. It’s also about having faith in our ability to shape the future. Speaking to Mx. Durhal and other young adults for whom tomorrow seems uncertain, I se…
Opinion | Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don’t Blame Them. - The New York Times
The belief that you shape your own destiny strongly tracks with health, income and happiness. People who feel they have agency tend to eat better, apply for more jobs and recover more easily from setbacks. It’s true that in times of uncertainty, despair is a rational response. But when young people stop believing that long-term effort will improve their lives, something larger is lost: the capacity to imagine a meaningful future.
Opinion | Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don’t Blame Them. - The New York Times
This lack of present, or future, reward is pushing some young people to reject the grind entirely. In Mx. Durhal’s worldview, delayed gratification just isn’t worth the wait.
Opinion | Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don’t Blame Them. - The New York Times
In a recent poll, Gen Z-ers on average said that in order to feel financially successful they would need to earn nearly $600,000 a year — or roughly what the top 2 percent of Americans make. Most of the students I spoke to told me they would need $200,000 to $300,000 a year just to feel stable. To be rich, or afford kids, many said they would need millions in the bank. A 2010 Pew survey found that for millennials entering adulthood, marriage and children were far more important than owning a home, earning a lot of money or having free time. While the desire to create a happy family certainly h…
Opinion | Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don’t Blame Them. - The New York Times
Identifying with your work is no longer the vibe. I started at Google gung ho and left so jaded by sexual harassment that I promised myself I’d never love a job again. The fall of Ms. Holmes and other executives accused of fraud created a societywide disenchantment with supposedly genius company founders. Then came Covid-19, which forced a reappraisal of how much space the office should occupy in our lives. A half-decade later, state minimum wage laws top out under $18 an hour while the stock market mints new millionaires in the U.S. at the rate of 1,200 a day.
Opinion | Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don’t Blame Them. - The New York Times
Centuries ago, some Europeans had a more relational conception of freedom, which wasn’t just about the absence of external constraints, but also about our immersion in the relationships that sustain us and make us thrive.
Friendship is a root of freedom – Joyful Militancy
Von der Leyen said that children under 3 should have no exposure to screens at all. She noted infinite scrolling as one of the "addictive" traits that tech companies must address. The European Commission is likely to come up with a proposal for the 27 member countries to consider in the near future.
French lawmakers approve social media ban for kids under 15 : NPR
PARIS — France banned children under 15 from using social media on Tuesday, becoming the first country in the European Union to pass a blanket ban on the platforms as concerns grow worldwide over the harmful effects of digital content on kids.
French lawmakers approve social media ban for kids under 15 : NPR
I tried to be the perfect patient: if I did everything right, if I was nice to everyone all the time, if I didn’t need any help or have any problems, then it would work.
Tatiana Schlossberg on Being Diagnosed with Leukemia After Giving Birth | The New Yorker
“For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” Ms. Schlossberg wrote. “Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
Tatiana Schlossberg Submitted a Heartbreaking Essay to The New Yorker on Her Cancer Diagnosis, Fully Formed - The New York Times
When you love someone fully, without hedging or having an exit strategy, it implicitly asks them: do you love like this too? Most people don’t. They love with reservations, with one foot always near the door. So wholehearted love can feel confronting. Not because it is wrong, but because it reveals the places where another person remains fragmented, fearful, or emotionally divided.
Is Love Enough? - by rachael annabelle - knottedbrains
Living across so many cities also helped me develop my own sense of self and taste in things because I spent an incredible amount of time alone. I spent an outsized amount of time thinking about life, am comfortable exploring places alone, and often find joy in the little things I see, taste and feel along the way.
i want to be everything at once, but i do not want to be average
Belonging is built, not given. My parents were told, more than once, that they weren’t wanted. A church they hoped to join turned them away when they applied for membership, even though it actively supported missionaries in Asia. They didn’t argue. They found another church that welcomed them, and stayed there for the rest of their lives. They never waited for permission to belong somewhere. They kept looking until they found a place that would let them build a life, then built more places alongside it.
What This Fourth of July Means to a Child of Immigrants