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After a year dominated by protests against police killings of Black Americans, the books on the list of the most frequently challenged titles of 2020 reflected the movement - and the backlash to it.

"The Hate U Give" can be found on The New York Times bestseller list as well as on some banned books list. Credit... Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press

When the American Library Association released its list of the 10 most frequently banned or challenged books of 2020, it was no surprise to Angie Thomas that her debut novel, "The Hate U Give," had made its return to the list for a third appearance.

"The book has basically been on that list since it came out," Thomas said on Wednesday. "I joke to people and say all the time, There are two lists you can usually find 'The Hate U Give' on: The New York Times and the most banned book list."

The novel, about a 16-year-old Black girl who witnesses a police officer shoot and kill her childhood friend, grapples with timely subjects like police violence and race relations and is the subject of constant challenges. According to the library association, challenges to the book have cited its drug references, profanity and "an anti-police message."

Similar objections also led to three other works being included on the 2020 most challenged list: "Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You"; "All American Boys"; and "Something Happened in Our Town: A Child's Story About Racial Injustice."

Image

Credit... Nicole Craine for The New York Times

"Stamped" and "All American Boys," the second- and third-most challenged books on the 2020 list, make their appearances after a year of high-profile killings of Black people by the police and nationwide protests against racial injustice.

The books, and the attempts made to ban them from institutions, are reflective of current social movements, according to E. Sybil Durand, an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University whose expertise includes young adult literature. Books, she said, can help facilitate conversations about race that some teachers may find difficult to bring up in the classroom.

"Good literature reflects what's going on in the world, what's going on in society," Durand said. "It shows us the ugly parts, and I think that that's what makes people uncomfortable."

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, which compiles the annual list, said 2020's most challenged books exhibited a slight shift from previous years. In 2019, eight out of the 10 books on the association's list featured L.G.B.T.Q. subject matter. For 2020, however, that majority was fractured, with the addition of books that touch on racial injustice and police violence toward Black people and books by authors of color.

"In this case, we're seeing an effort to stigmatize and vilify stories about racial injustice, the experiences of Black persons and starting a very necessary and needed discussion about police violence," Caldwell-Stone said.

According to the library association, reasons cited for challenging and banning " Stamped," a work of nonfiction by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds, include assertions that it contains "selective storytelling incidents" and "does not encompass racism against all people." The book, which is geared toward young adults, "documents how generations of Americans have challenged the idea that the racial groups are equals," Kendi said in a statement.

He added that he was proud of the book and saw irony in campaigns to ban it.

"The heartbeat of racism is denial, and the history in 'Stamped' will not be denied, nor will young people's access to this book be canceled," Kendi said in a statement.

Reynolds, who wrote "All American Boys" with Brendan Kiely and who was recently named the honorary chair for Banned Books Week 2021, has continually spoken out against censorship.

"So STAMPED is #2 most banned book, and ALL AMERICAN BOYS is #3. I hate this," Reynolds said on Twitter. "Let the babies have books. If you disagree with something I've said, why not engage in discourse instead of discouragement?"

Thomas said it was disappointing to see that books reflecting Black children's experience with racism had been targeted so frequently after a summer filled with demand for books on antiracism and so many public commitments by companies and corporations to fight racism.

"The list shows the hypocrisy of the statements, and the efforts that people claim to have made this past year as far as antiracism," she said.

In most states, efforts to ban or censor books begin at the school board, said James Blasingame, an English professor at Arizona State University and executive director of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents. A majority of the objections to more than 270 books that the library association said were challenged in 2020 took place in schools and public libraries and were initiated by parents, patrons and board members.

A legal standard for banning books was addressed in a 1982 Supreme Court case in which the court found that books could not be removed from a school library or curriculum simply because someone didn't agree with the ideas within a book. Based on his past experience as a school administrator, Blasingame said books that raised concerns usually elicited strong opinions for particular snippets or short passages without the book's entirety even being taken into consideration.

"Most of my experience, when I've been invited in by school boards to say what I know about a book, is that the parents who object didn't read the book, they don't really know what it is," he said.

The number of children's books by Black authors and about Black children in the United States has increased over the years, but experts and authors agree that there is still room for improvement. Out of almost 4,000 books geared toward children and teens that were published in 2019, 232 were written by Black authors, and only 471 featured Black characters, according to data from the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"There's been more books that reflect sort of contemporary times, and this is what young adult literature does and does very well," Durand said. "Then, as more books have been available, you see a response to those, especially the ones that are popular."

In her own experience, Thomas said, outrage from parents and school districts has only further encouraged young readers to grab copies of "The Hate U Give," leading it to be a fixture on the New York Times best-seller list.

"Even when they ban it, they can't silence it," she said.

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Books About Racism and Police Violence Fill Out List of 'Most Challenged' Titles

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After a year dominated by protests against police killings of Black Americans, the books on the list of the most frequently challenged titles of 2020 reflected the movement - and the backlash to it.

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Can You Tell Real Art From AI Generated Art?

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Can You Tell Real Art From AI Generated Art?

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AI technology is advancing rapidly, and those who don't follow the latest trends may be surprised by some of the new possibilities AI brings.

We decided to do our own experiment and see if internet users are able to pick up clues and recognize photos, artworks, music, and texts created by Artificial Intelligence.

What followed exceeded our wildest expectations.

In some survey groups, as many as 87% of respondents mistook an AI-generated image for a real photo of a person. Only 62% of respondents interested in AI and machine learning managed to answer more than half of the questions correctly. Among the remaining respondents, more than 64% were wrong most of the time.

"Well, that's it then. AI will rule us all!"-one of our respondents commented upon seeing the results.

But will it though?
Here's what the report covers:

How many people mistook AI creations for human-made ones (images, artwork, music, and text)

What criteria respondents used when judging if an example was real or fake

Potential risks of not being aware of current developments in AI

How to recognize deepfakes and AI-generated content to avoid being misled

Choose the section to scroll down automatically:

Take the AI Test

You can still take the test but your results will not be included in our study.

You'll get your score at the end (it won't ask for your email).

Good luck!

You can check the correct answers here.

Read on to find out more about the results of other participants.

A 2-Minute AI Primer

Let's start with the basics.

In case you missed or happened to fall asleep during your AI deep learning classes at school-don't worry. For some reason, I have no recollection of them either.

Here is a quick refresher on some core AI concepts.
Artificial Intelligence vs Machine Learning and Deep Learning

The term Artificial Intelligence has the broadest scope. It refers to any type of technology that appears to "make its own decisions."

Machine Learning is one of the methods used in advanced AI solutions. ML algorithms self-improve automatically by analyzing more and more data.

Deep Learning is a type of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks.

Most of our examples use Generative Adversarial Networks -a deep learning technique.

GANs have two networks that try to outsmart each other. Imagine two AIs playing charades.

The networks are known as generators and discriminators. For example, they can analyze a huge database of cat photos. Afterward, the generator creates a random image of a cat. The discriminator evaluates if it looks real enough. And they are getting better and better to the point when we get this:

These images are quite convincing, aren't they? But if you take a closer look, you'll notice that the tails, collars, and backgrounds are all messed up. That's because in the original database some cats wear collars, some don't. The AI tries to cover all bases and creates a mashup with a visible trace of a collar that blends with the fur.

Now-

Everything seems obvious once you know what to pay attention to.

In our survey, it turned out that respondents were better at identifying fake cats than fake people!

Almost 70% recognized an AI-generated cat photo but only 32% correctly identified one of the AI-generated people (we'll come back to that later).

Let's see how our respondents managed to tell if something is real or created by AI.

Major Findings of Our AI Test

A typical response to the survey was:
I am so confused, I feel like I don't know anything anymore. Is this real life?
But it seems a little bit excessive.

Here are some of the most interesting things that we discovered:

Respondents who felt confident about their answers had worse results than those who weren't so sure

Survey respondents who believed they answered most questions correctly had worse results than those with doubts. Over 78% of respondents who thought their score is very likely to be high got less than half of the answers right. In comparison, those who were most pessimistic did significantly better, with the majority of them scoring above the average.
Two-thirds of people who think they would recognize a chatbot struggle with identifying AI-generated texts

The majority of our survey respondents believe they would recognize if they were talking to a human or AI online. However, even those very confident were only able to identify the samples correctly 34% of the time. While most internet users say they prefer to talk to a human rather than a chatbot, it's possible that soon they may not be able to tell the difference.
About 24% of male and only 17% of female respondents made less than 3 mistakes when judging photos

Male respondents did slightly better at photographs. Female respondents had a better ear for catching the human element in music. Interestingly, non-binary respondents were most successful and performed better in all categories. More than 37% of respondents who declared as non-binary made less than 3 mistakes when judging photos (out of 7 examples). However, this correlation can be linked with age-there are significantly more Gen Z respondents not identifying themselves as exclusively male or female.
Younger respondents are more likely to recognize AI-generated images than Millennials, Gen X, or Baby Boomers

The total average score was highest among Gen Z respondents (11.5 out of 21) and lowest among Baby Boomers (9.0). The results were similar in most categories but the younger respondents did much better in evaluating the photos. Additionally, people interested in AI technologies and acquainted with terms like neural networks performed better than people who were unfamiliar with these concepts (scroll down for details).
AI-modified images of people are more difficult to recognize than images generated by AI from scratch

Some AI-generated examples were recognized correctly by more than 64.3% of respondents. However, AI filters applied to real photos turned out to be more tricky. Only 1 in 5 respondents was able to point out the original photo among the ones with age and gender changed by AI.

Human vs AI: Detailed Results

Familiarity with AI technology proved to be the most important factor in the test score.

Below is the distribution of scores for people interested in AI vs the rest.

A significant number of our respondents were surprised by the difficulty of the test.

If we look at the individual questions, the responders were usually right or very divided. In some examples, they were way off. Winning streaks were extremely rare. Even if we excluded the samples without obvious hints, everyone made a mistake at some point.

It's kind of scary, yet fascinating, how the lines between what a human can create and what AI can generate are blurring as these systems learn more.
FalseRelief
A respondent from Reddit

Let's take a closer look at specific categories to find out more.

Photos: Real or AI

The survey included stock photos, photos modified with FaceApp, and images generated by sites such as ThisPersonDoesNotExist (and ThisCatDoesNotExist).

Would you like to give it a try?

Here are two faces. One of them is a real photo and the other is an AI-generated image. Can you tell which is which?

Was it difficult?

Click here to see if you were right.

These two images were not part of our survey. However, they should give you an idea about the nature of our questions.

We found something quite disturbing.

While the example generated with an old version of StyleGAN tricked only 35.7% of our responders, the one created recently by StyleGAN2 convinced 68.3% of them.

Let's take a closer look at it:

The responders interested in AI were able to tell that the photo was not real and this person did not exist. The rest was convinced that it was a human.

As you can see, a great deal of the arguments on both sides is very subjective.

More than 23% of the respondents who gave the correct answer stated that it "looks unnatural." Many people simply go with their gut feeling. However, it can be deceptive and it works both ways.

Why?

Here is the opposite case-a photo mistaken for an image generated by AI.

Almost 72% of the ones who believed this photo to be generated by AI thought that it "looks unnatural."

As you can see, there are different kinds of "unnaturalness." Some of them are AI- and others human-specific. AI faces as such can be very convincing. But there are some things that should give you a hint.
How to spot the differences between real photos and AI:

Photos that are heavily photoshopped were usually taken by humans-the AI algorithms are mostly trained with repositories of unedited photos

AI struggles with replicating unique or unusual elements-a specific makeup pattern, earrings, clothes (or lack thereof), hair highlights, or accessories are a dead giveaway

AI-generated faces are usually very symmetrical and both eyes are at the same level

Real professional photos are sharper and have more details while amateur photos are noisier-most AI-generated photos are neither

If a photo is cropped and doesn't show shoulders, hands, or the whole hairdo, it could be AI-generated

Skin imperfections and eye reflections don't make images authentic

Sometimes AI-generated hair and teeth are messed up but it doesn't have to always be the case

Paying attention to these details improves your odds at judging if images are created by humans or AI. But the technology improves very fast. You can never be 100% sure.

Artwork: Can AI Create Art?

Once more, let's start with a quiz question.

Can you tell which painting is real and which was generated with AI?

If you want to check the correct answer go here.

AI can conjure up amazing images in the blink of an eye. While most of these rarely end up in art galleries, there are some narrow areas where AI-generated contents work surprisingly well.

Here is an example of an AI-generated landscape that could be used as a background by a concept artist.

An example of an AI-generated landscape

You can also very easily make a photo turn into an impressionistic painting. For the untrained eye, the effects are indistinguishable from the works of real painters.

In this example, both AI enthusiasts and the general survey respondents were equally wrong.

Many of the responders admitted that this artwork could be either and there is no way of deciding for sure. Almost 9% believed that this image is "beautiful"-a quality unlikely to be replicated by an algorithm.

The example above has been generated with ArtBreeder. We can use sliders for aspects such as the number of trees or weather and lighting conditions. By changing the values we can decide what we want our image to look like.

Apart from generating images from scratch, we can also create fake AI paintings by using filters on photos. Here is the original photo used for our experiment.

This technique didn't convince the majority of the survey respondents. But their impressions are very interesting nonetheless.

Some respondents claimed that the picture was too bad or ugly. For some reason, AI is expected to create something more advanced. There are some opinions that suggest the image is uncreative exactly because it is human-made.
How can you tell if an artwork was created by a human or a machine?

AI-generated art looks procedural-there are some visible swirl-like patterns that you can learn to recognize

Artists apply more detail and definition when working on the most important element of their artwork

AI processes everything indiscriminately

With paintings that were digitized by means of photography, you can usually zoom in on details

AI-generated artworks are usually low resolution and they lack detail

Abstract, surreal, or landscape images may look convincing but AI can't generate complex and realistic scenes with human figures

StyleGAN can replicate brush strokes and textures but only in a very mechanical way that doesn't follow the form of objects

Music: AI vs Human Composer Test

Most respondents felt that music was the most difficult of all the categories included in our AI test.

It is difficult to separate the aspect of composition and performance. It turned out to be very misleading. The results were to a large extent linked with expectations towards music.

An EDM track arranged by a human producer was identified as AI-generated by 71.4% of the respondents. On the other hand, a song created by AI (trained on the songs of the Beatles and performed by musicians) convinced 61.6% of people to be composed by a human.

The songs were perceived as too bad/chaotic for "smart" artificial intelligence or too good/complex for a human. The sense of human inferiority to AI capabilities is one of the recurring themes of the survey.

The two examples with "classical" music were quite similar to each other. They also did not contain too many elements that could be perceived as red herrings.

Let's take a closer look at them.

Now-

Let's take a quick look at the real McCoy.

One example threw the respondents off guard. It was a composition created by AI but performed by human musicians ("Daddy's Car"). Almost 40% of them argued that it sounds like it was performed by a human (therefore it must have been composed by one too).

It suggests that musicians who use the support of AI for composing new songs and pieces can mask it with ease. There are many factors that make music sound "human-made" and the actual notes are only one of the elements.

So far, AI won't create a Tony-worthy musical. But it can pass as a movie or video games soundtrack (that can be much cheaper and generated in minutes). Since many people can't tell the difference, we can expect more AI-generated elevator music.

Texts: Can AI Write Articles & Translate?

Writing is in many ways similar to music. In music, we have a specific set of notes and an infinite number of ways to combine them. It's the same with words and sentences.

Since both AI and humans use the same building blocks, sometimes recognizing AI is downright impossible.

Our survey respondents considered various clues. Sometimes they turned out to be accurate and sometimes not. For example, John Ormsby's translation of "Don Quixote" from 1885 was identified as AI by almost 66% of the respondents. The text seemed illogical, awkward, and hard to follow.

Quite the opposite happened with the opening lines from "One Hundred Years of Solitude" translated with AI. It convinced 62% of people to be written by a human translator.

Most of the respondents were correct when judging contemporary lifestyle articles. Our AI test questions included one text written by a commercial AI and one by human journalists. Both articles were about weight loss.

About 81.5% of the respondents recognized the real fragment of an article published in Cosmopolitan as written by a real person. It makes it twice more human than an AI-generated text which convinced only 36.9% of them.

As you can see many elements appear as both arguments for and against the text having been written by AI.
Seems natural and well written-it is an attempt to trick me into selecting human!
Some respondents were getting quite obsessed with bluffs and double bluffs.

AI vs Human in 2021: Insights

One of our survey respondents said:
I learned today that I could be very easily tricked by an AI. I hope I never have to deal with that in a bad way.
With easy-to-use tools, anyone can generate a fake profile picture for social media. Or use a smartphone filter to become a beautiful biker-girl with thousands of fans on Twitter. In spite of being a fifty-year-old man in real life.

AI-based image manipulation, especially combined with Photoshop, can be a powerful tool of deception. Here is one more example from our AI test.

Almost 30% of the respondents thought that the third photo is the original. And they were wrong.

The correct answer was selected only by 20% of people who took our AI test.

Quite scary, isn't it?

OK-

So what exactly are we dealing with? Will AI take over the world? Are human beings inferior to machine intelligence? Will our beloved celebrities be replaced with deepfakes?

Artificial Intelligence Timeline:

1950: Alan Turing, a computer scientist, creates his famous imitation game a.k.a. the Turing test

1966: Joseph Weizenbaum creates Eliza-a computer program that can have conversations (a chatbot)

1980: John Searle presents the Chinese room thought experiment and argues that computers cannot develop consciousness

1990: Hugh Loebner launches a competition in which artificial intelligence programs try to pass the Turing test

2001: Stevan Harnad refutes the Chinese room argument

2008: Eugene Goostman becomes the first chatbot to pass the imitation game (but still comes second and doesn't win the Loebner Prize)

2014: Ian Goodfellow invents generative adversarial networks that revolutionize machine learning

It's 2021.

And it seems that GANs, deep learning text generators, and AI-powered music software can fool most of us. Not all the time and not with enough context given. But still...

Let's sum it all up.
Bad news:

Short pieces of text and music created by humans and AI are often indistinguishable even for professionals in a given field

An AI-generated photo from 2018 has been mistaken for a real person by 35.7% of respondents and the one from 2021 by 68.3%-nobody knows what the 2025 results will be

It is extremely difficult to tell if some features (like hairstyle or gender) have been altered by AI apps, even if the photo resolution is way bigger than most avatars and profile photos

AI can be a powerful tool for spreading misinformation

Good news:

AI is still more difficult to use than traditional techniques-if someone wants to deceive you, it is easier to steal real photos than to generate fake ones

Gen Z respondents seem to have a higher level of visual literacy and are more likely to identify fake photos. If dangers related to AI manipulations were to become more common, it would be probably just a matter of raising awareness

The AI does well at generating very specific elements with predictable structures (such as faces) but fails with more complex images

The last point is critical. Let me demonstrate.

AI! Create me a cat!

AI:

No! Bad AI! This is just a fake headshot photo of a cat. Show me a complete cat.

(Drumroll)

AI:

See what I mean?

Machines think-if we can call it that way-in a different way than human beings. If we train our AI with 100,000 cat faces, the results will look surprisingly good. The photos have a clear underlying pattern (eyes, ears, whiskers) that the AI can crack. But once there is a body (and countless unpredictable positions the cat body can take) the AI has no clue what's going on.

The entire cat generated by AI looks like an abomination straight out of a horror movie.

AI can generate some tiny elements but right now only human writers, artists, musicians can put them together in a meaningful way.

Here are some AI-generated paintings:

Some of you may think that they are still better than the works of many contemporary artists. But they are just procedural patterns and random elements stitched together-look hypnotizing but lack structure. It is not a real human-like intelligence.

The art of composition and managing larger structures is still out of AI's reach.

Moreover, AI is not something we should be afraid of. A world of AI-news presenters and AI-teachers does not seem that bad.

Unless you are a news presenter or a teacher of course.

Final Thoughts & Methodology

We are quite used to people taking our chatbots as real live chat operators. We kind of assumed that some of the people taking the survey would also have trouble telling the difference between human and AI-generated content.

Still, we're blown away by the results.

Originally, we published the survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We got about 600 responses. The demographic composition of MTurk workers is very accurate, which was very helpful. However, the scores were somewhat surprising.

We needed a larger sample size.

With the help of Reddit, we managed to get 1,200 additional responses.

Then the survey went viral. It was featured by Vice, which gave us more than 20,000 (!!!) extra responses. And the numbers are still growing.

The survey appeared in the tech news section-most of the respondents were people interested in technology. Both Vice readers and Redditors are more tech savvy than an average person.

Here is an example of how the results differed between the segments:

In most examples, however, the differences weren't so drastic. We decided to base the report on our initial sample of 1,766 respondents. The differences between responses from Vice and the general Reddit sample were less than 5% in almost all cases.

We did use all responses in one of the main infographics and the score chart.

Once we collect and analyze more data, an extended PDF version of the report will be published. If you want to receive it via email, click here.

Correct Answers

Here are the right answers to the AI test. There are 22 questions but only 21 points because one of the questions is an attention check.

And here are the answers to the questions from this article:

1. B is a real photo and A is AI-generated

2. A is a real painting and B is AI-generated

Did you get them right?

Sources

Here is the list of tools and resources that we used to prepare our AI test:

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Human vs AI Test: Can We Tell the Difference Anymore?

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AI technology is advancing rapidly, and those who don't follow the latest trends may be surprised by some of the new possibilities AI brings. We decided to do our own experiment and see if internet users are able to pick up clues and recognize photos, artworks, music, and texts created by Artificial Intelligence.

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When people have a hole in their life, they often fill it with angry politics.

Mr. Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute.

Credit... John Taggart for The New York Times

America is suffering an epidemic of loneliness.

According to a recent large-scale survey from the health care provider Cigna, most Americans suffer from strong feelings of loneliness and a lack of significance in their relationships. Nearly half say they sometimes or always feel alone or "left out." Thirteen percent of Americans say that zero people know them well. The survey, which charts social isolation using a common measure known as the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale, shows that loneliness is worse in each successive generation.

This problem is at the heart of the new book "Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal," by Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. Mr. Sasse argues that "loneliness is killing us," citing, among other things, the skyrocketing rates of suicide and overdose deaths in America. This year, 45,000 Americans will take their lives, and more than 70,000 will die from drug overdoses.

Mr. Sasse's assertion that loneliness is killing us takes on even darker significance in the wake of the mail-bomb campaign against critics of President Trump and the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, both of which were perpetrated by isolated - and apparently very lonely - men. Mr. Sasse's book was published before these events, but he presciently described what he believes lonely people increasingly do to fill the hole of belonging in their lives: They turn to angry politics.

In the "siloed," or isolated, worlds of cable television, ideological punditry, campus politics and social media, people find a sense of community in the polarized tribes forming on the left and the right in America. Essentially, people locate their sense of "us" through the contempt peddled about "them" on the other side of the political spectrum.

There is profit to be made here. The "outrage industrial complex" is what I call the industries that accumulate wealth and power by providing this simulacrum of community that people crave - but cannot seem to find in real life.

Why are we becoming so lonely? One reason is the changing nature of work. Work is one of the key sources of friendship and community. Think of your own relationships; surely many of your closest friendships - perhaps even your relationship with your spouse - started in the workplace. Yet the reality of the workplace is rapidly attenuating, as people hop from job to job, and from city to city, as steady work becomes harder to find and the "gig" economy grows.

Mr. Sasse worries even more, however, about a pervasive feeling of homelessness: Too many Americans don't have a place they think of as home - a "thick" community in which people know and look out for one another and invest in relationships that are not transient. To adopt a phrase coined in Sports Illustrated, one might say we increasingly lack that "hometown gym on a Friday night feeling."

Mr. Sasse finds this phrase irresistible and warmly relates it to his own life growing up in Fremont, Neb., a town of 26,000 residents. He describes the high school sports events on Friday nights that drew the townspeople together in a common love for their neighbors and community that made most differences - especially political differences - seem trivial. He relates with deep fondness the feelings he experienced, after moving away for a couple of decades for school and work, when he returned to Fremont's small-town life with his family, and the deep sense of belonging it created.

In what might be called "the social capital of death," Mr. Sasse charmingly describes the sense of being rooted that it gives him, at a robust and healthy 46, to own a burial plot for himself in Fremont's local cemetery. A précis of Mr. Sasse's recommendations to America thus might be this: Go where you get that hometown-gym-on-a-Friday-night feeling, put down roots and make plans to fertilize the soil.

That can be a tricky proposition for many of us. On reading the book, I asked myself where I might get that hometown-gym feeling, where I have natural roots, where I can imagine being buried. No specific place came to mind. I have no Fremont - not even Seattle, my hometown, which is a perfectly nice place, but one I unsentimentally left behind 35 years ago.

All this is particularly germane to my wife and me at the moment, as we prepare to move from Maryland to Massachusetts in the coming months. We fear the loneliness we are sure to feel as we enter a completely new place where neither of us grew up or has ever lived. Is a thick community and the happiness it brings out of reach for rootless cosmopolitans like us?

I recently put these questions to Mr. Sasse. He told me I had it all wrong - that moving back home and going to the gym on Friday aren't actually the point; rather, the trick is "learning how to intentionally invest in the places where we actually live." In other words, being a member of a community isn't about whether I have a Fremont. It isn't about how I feel about any place I have lived, nor about my fear of isolation in a new city. It is about the neighbor I choose to be in the community I wind up calling my home.

And there lies the challenge to each of us in a country suffering from loneliness and ripped apart by political opportunists seeking to capitalize on that isolation. Each of us can be happier, and America will start to heal, when we become the kind neighbors and generous friends we wish we had.

Arthur C. Brooks (@arthurbrooks) is the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing opinion writer and the host of the podcast "The Arthur Brooks Show."
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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Opinion | How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart (Published 2018)

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When people have a hole in their life, they often fill it with angry politics. Mr. Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute. America is suffering an epidemic of loneliness. According to a recent large-scale survey from the health care provider Cigna, most Americans suffer from strong feelings of loneliness and a lack of significance in their relationships.

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Give your future self a break.

Credit... Getty Images

Welcome to the Smarter Living newsletter. The editor, Tim Herrera, emails readers with tips and advice for living a better, more fulfilling life. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
I have this awful, corny joke I trot out whenever I'm glossing over details for future plans with friends or brushing off something I don't want to deal with: "That's Future Tim's problem. Let that chump deal with it."

Poor, poor Future Tim. Constantly set up for failure by that jerk Past Tim.

As Present Tim - who, ahem, is always on top of things - I can say that Past Tim isn't bad. He's just wired that way. And I'm sure as you're reading this, a few instances come to mind of when Past You has, quite inconsiderably, set up Future You for failure.

Why do we do this to ourselves? What makes us act against our own self-interest, even when we are acutely aware we're doing so?

At work is present bias, our natural tendency to place our short-term needs and desires ahead of our long-term needs and desires. A lot of the time this comes in the form of procrastination, and there have also been many studies that suggest it's a primary reason we're bad at saving for retirement. (You might know that by another name, hyperbolic discounting: Most people would prefer $100 today instead of $110 tomorrow, for example.)

Like many cognitive biases, this is a counterproductive behavior that we're programmed to engage in, and some studies have suggested that we do this because we perceive our future selves the same way we perceive total strangers.

In other words: When I'm brushing off responsibilities, part of my brain unconsciously believes that they're now the problem of an actual stranger. Yikes.

How do we get around this? It starts with thinking of your future self as ... you.

Meet your new best friend: Future Happy You, the far more content cousin of Future You.

This idea was notably tested in a 2011 paper from Hal Hershfield, which found that when subjects were shown digitally altered images of themselves made to look retirement age, they were likelier to save more money from a hypothetical windfall. In another experiment, three groups of subjects were shown one of three things: an avatar of themselves exercising; an avatar of a different person exercising; or an avatar of themselves loitering. You can guess which group reported the highest levels of real-world exercise 24 hours later.

[Like what you're reading? Sign up here for the Smarter Living newsletter to get stories like this (and much more!) delivered straight to your inbox every Monday morning.]
Of course, getting a digital projection of your future self to help with every decision is impossible. But there are ways to tap into that way of thinking.

Let's say you habitually neglect your retirement savings. Instead of looking at future saving as making "financial decisions," put yourself in the mind-set of thinking about the lifestyle you want when you're retired. Picture yourself however many years hence, now retired, living the life you set up. Experts say this simple paradigm shift can change your entire approach to those decisions - even though they're exactly the same.

Yes, this idea of future projection - "What will my life be like after I make this decision?" - is difficult to wrap your head around, especially when Future You is getting a better deal than Present You. That's why splurging on something fun today is so much easier than stashing that money in a 401(k).

But try to put yourself in the shoes of your new friend, Future Happy You: That person is going to be so thankful that Present You socked away that cash.

How do you get around your needs and wants right now in favor of setting yourself up for the future? Tell me on Twitter @timherrera or email me at tim@nytimes.com

Have a great week!

- Tim

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This week I've invited S.L. contributor - one of my favorite writers - Jen Doll to tell us how to make your social media life less demanding without cutting it out completely.
I know, I know: You need Twitter for work. Or Facebook to stay in touch with your relatives. Or Instagram because it's fun. But you can feel it all getting out of hand sometimes, leaving you scrolling and spiraling. What to do?

The blocker apps. SelfControl is a good one, as is Freedom. Basically, prevent yourself from accessing the sites that distract you the most. When you block websites, you let someone else do the hard work of saying no for you.

Take them off your phone. A year or so ago I deleted Facebook from my phone. I didn't miss it, and my battery life was much better. Then I did the same with Twitter, and I haven't looked back. The witty tweet will wait; you can always write it down and save it for when you return to your computer. And you're more likely to think of witty tweets when engaging with the world.

Walk away. I've been practicing a new technique when my social media interactions start to feel all-consuming and negative. I get up and take a walk. It brings a feeling of peace and perspective. It's valuable to remind yourself that what's happening on social media is not the only thing happening in the world, and you have the power to disengage.

Work on your "actual" stuff. If social media seems to be eating up all your time, ask yourself why you're there in the first place, and then only use it for that. If it's to promote your work - well, you've got to do your work. Or, as a wise person said once, put the big rocks in the jar first. The small rocks can fit in wherever.

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Why It's So Hard to Put 'Future You' Ahead of 'Present You' (Published 2018)

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Give your future self a break. Welcome to the Smarter Living newsletter. The editor, Tim Herrera , emails readers with tips and advice for living a better, more fulfilling life. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

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Our well-being is local and relative - if you live in a struggling area and your status is slipping, even if you are relatively comfortable, you are probably at least a bit miserable.

Mr. Rauch is the author of "The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50."

Credit... Tyler Comrie

In 1990, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain was challenged by a Labour member of Parliament on the subject of growing inequality. "All levels of income are better off than they were in 1979," she retorted. "The honorable member is saying that he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich. ... What a policy!"

That slap-down was an iconic formulation of a premise of the Thatcher-Reagan conservative revolution: Poverty is a social problem, but inequality, as such, is not. Governments should aim to increase the incomes and opportunities of all, especially the poor, but to worry about the gap between the rich and the rest is "the politics of envy."

Morally speaking, Mrs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan should have been right. As long as I am better off, why should I begrudge your doing better still? Yet something was amiss with this consensus - something that goes far to explain why Reagan-Thatcher conservatism has caved in under pressure from the populisms of President Trump on the right and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on the left.

In America (and also in other countries), an impressive postwar rise in material well-being has had zero effect on personal well-being. The divergence between economic growth and subjective satisfaction began decades ago. Real per capita income has more than tripled since the late 1950s, but the percentage of people saying they are very happy has, if anything, slightly declined.

Why? Researching happiness and age, I did a deep dive into the relatively new discipline of happiness economics and emerged impressed by two findings. One is that all happiness is local. According to World Bank data, the share of the world's population living on less than $1.90 a day (inflation adjusted) declined to under 10 percent in 2015 from 44 percent in 1980, an astounding achievement.

But ordinary people's well-being depends mainly on their immediate surroundings. If you are an autoworker who loses your job in Massena, N.Y., when G.M. closes its local plant (moving some jobs to Mexico) and who spends years out of work and who watches as schools shut down and shops go dark and young people flee - for you, the fact that America's big coastal cities are doing great, or that more than half a billion Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty, merely rubs salt in your wounds.

Second, all happiness is relative. Although moral philosophers may wish Homo sapiens were wired more rationally, we humans are walking, talking status meters, constantly judging our worth and social standing by comparing ourselves with others today and with our own prior selves.

According to the Brookings Institution economist Carol Graham, poor whites are far more unhappy and pessimistic than poor blacks, even though, in absolute terms, they are better off. That would not make sense if absolute standing determined subjective well-being. It does make sense, however, when we look at relative standing. Less-educated whites (especially men) have seen their relative standing decline sharply, both compared with their parents and with rising nonwhites. Blacks, by contrast, have seen themselves doing better than expected and closing the economic and social gap.

Absolute standing is not irrelevant, and people will tolerate and sometimes even embrace inequality if they believe the system is fair and lets them get ahead. Still, the witticism (frequently attributed to Gore Vidal) that "it is not enough for me to succeed; others must fail" is uncomfortably accurate. In a striking experiment, certain households in Kenyan villages were randomly chosen to receive large financial windfalls. The lucky beneficiaries were pleased, of course, but their increased happiness was much more than offset by the increased unhappiness of other households, which lost nothing in absolute terms but suddenly saw themselves falling behind. Pondering the accumulated evidence, the British happiness economist Richard Layard concluded, "These studies provide clear evidence that a rise in other people's income hurts your happiness."

Inequality, in short, is immiserating. One could cite more evidence in the same vein. Places in the United States with more inequality have higher stress and worry, more political polarization and lower social connectedness, even among the wealthy. Moreover, what counts for subjective well-being is not just reality but also perception. If social media and reality TV disproportionately depict millionaires and amazing homes, or if talk-radio pundits insist that government takes from hard-working whites to subsidize lazy minorities, resentment grows, never mind what the statistics may say.

In a poor country with low inequality, rising national income should make people happier, and of course reducing poverty is a good in and of itself. But in a wealthy, unequal country like today's America, gains in national income can decouple from well-being.

"Each person would become happier because he was richer, but less happy because other people were richer," Mr. Layard writes. "The two effects would cancel each other out, because relative income would be unchanged."

Moreover, if inequality is growing (as is the case in the United States), economic growth pushes the rungs of the socioeconomic ladder farther apart even as it lifts the ladder. Because people tend to compare upward when gauging status, they perceive themselves to be losing ground.

In light of what happiness economists have had to say, the interesting question is not why the Reagan-Thatcher consensus finally failed but why it prevailed for two generations. Partly, I think, because its call to transcend envy is morally appealing, and partly because, in the 1980s and 1990s, pro-growth policies and free-market economics seemed to have turned around a troubled economy. But partly also because there was no viable alternative. Mainstream liberalism worried about inequality but offered only policies that much of the public viewed as discredited or unfair.

Now the Reagan-Thatcherist alternative has crumbled, too. In 2008, the economic meltdown made the system look rigged and ignited a populist backlash. In 2016, the backlash coalesced behind the populisms of Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders, each of whom had a compelling story to tell those suffering from real or perceived loss of status: We will de-rig the system with radical solutions like trade wars and socialized medicine. Those may be (as I believe) wrong answers to the problem of inequality, but they are answers, and their appeal is evident.

Today it is free-market conservatism that is voiceless. After insisting for two generations that inequality does not matter, the heirs of Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher - people like the House speaker, Paul Ryan - have neither a coherent program to reduce inequality nor a philosophical rationale to seek one.

Like it or not, inequality in today's America drives politics toward rage and polarization, and toward destabilizing and dangerous populisms of both left and right. Trumpism and Sandersism have something to say about inequality, but mainstream conservatism does not, and it will be no match for them until it does.

Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of " The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50. "
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Opinion | Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not (Published 2018)

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Our well-being is local and relative - if you live in a struggling area and your status is slipping, even if you are relatively comfortable, you are probably at least a bit miserable. Mr. Rauch is the author of "The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50."

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You might think you know what it takes to lead a happier life... more money, a better job, or Instagram-worthy vacations. You're dead wrong. Yale professor Dr. Laurie Santos has studied the science of happiness and found that many of us do the exact opposite of what will truly make our lives better. Based on the psychology course she teaches at Yale - the most popular class in the university's 300-year history - The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos will take you through the latest scientific research and share some surprising and inspiring stories that will change the way you think about happiness.

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The U.N.'s World Happiness Report - created to curtail our unhealthy obsession with G.D.P. - is dominated every year by the Nordic countries. We head to Denmark to learn the secrets of this happiness epidemic (and to see if we should steal them).
Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called "How to Be Happy." (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, , or , get the , or listen via the media player above.)

* * *

Until a few years ago, Helen Russell was leading a seemingly happy life in London, working as an editor for the fashion magazine Marie Claire. True, she did feel restless at times; also true: she and her husband had been struggling with fertility treatments. That said, she had no intention of leaving the U.K.

Helen RUSSELL: Until out of the blue, one wet Wednesday, my husband came home and told me he'd been offered his dream job working for Lego in Denmark. And we knew nothing about the country, as many people in other countries are fairly ignorant of Scandinavia. We couldn't really have pinpointed it on a map.

They decided to go for it. But as soon as they arrived - in a small town in the rural hinterlands of Denmark, in the dead of winter- she had regrets.

RUSSELL: My husband left to go to work at 7:30 a.m. I didn't know anyone. I didn't speak the language. I was in this freezing cold, dark country all by myself. I did a lot of howling at the moon, thinking I'd made the biggest mistake ever. And I did a lot of eating danish pastries, because as a repressed Brit, I like to eat my emotions.

But Russell had heard - as you may have heard - that Denmark is routinely at or near the very top of the annual happiness ranking compiled by the United Nations. And the other Nordic countries - Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland - pretty much dominate the top 10. Russell naturally wondered: why? What are the causes, and consequences, of this alleged happiness epidemic? Was it for real? What are the downsides? She set out to answer these questions, in a book she called The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country. Along the way, she asked nearly every Dane she met how they would rank their happiness on a scale of 1 to 10. A funny thing happened during this process: Russell herself became quite a bit happier.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: what causes all this happiness?

Jeffrey SACHS: What it is, I think, is a kind of ethos of life.

What's keeping less-happy countries from copying it?

Meik WIKING: The price tag.

And: an economist who thinks we should worry more about well-being and less about traditional measures like GDP:

SACHS: My God. Let's get serious about the quality of our lives, and stop this nonsense of chasing such a poor indicator that is taking us actually farther away from our happiness.

* * *

I recently spent a few days in Copenhagen. There was one person I was very excited to meet.

WIKING: So my name is DUBNER: And is "Viking" a common surname here? WIKING: No. I think we're a handful of people. My dad is called Wolf. I have a brother called Kenneth. I have a couple of nephews, one is called Max Wiking, so he needs to grow up big and tall. DUBNER: Do you do Halloween here, where you dress up as costumes? WIKING: I see where this is going. DUBNER: I'm just curious, were you a Viking every year when you were a child? WIKING: No. But there was one episode, yes. , and I'm the C.E.O. of the Happiness Research Institute here in Copenhagen.

Wiking has a background in political science, economics, and sociology - all of which figure in understanding what's called happiness.

WIKING: One of the challenges we have with happiness is to define it and to measure it. And we should first and foremost acknowledge that it's a wide umbrella term. So you have one understanding of what happiness is, and I have another one. So we need to break it down and look at different components. The first is an overall life satisfaction. And here you essentially ask your respondents to take a step back and evaluate their lives.

Happiness researchers also track people's moods in the moment.

WIKING: "How happy are you right now? How happy were you yesterday?" And there we can see that weather, what day of the week it is, impacts our happiness levels. People are happier - no big surprise - on the weekend, than they are on Monday mornings.

They also measure people's sense of meaning.

WIKING: That builds on what thought the good life was. To him, the good life was the meaningful life. So here we try to understand, do people have a sense of purpose?

A sense of purpose. A self-evaluation of life satisfaction. You may think all this sounds a bit squishy - especially to an economist, yes?

SACHS: I'm going to answer anything you're going to ask me.

Okay, we'll ask some questions. First one's easy: would you please introduce yourself?

SACHS: , a university professor at Columbia University. And I am special adviser to the United Nations Secretary General on the Sustainable Development Goals. One part of that is human well-being. And so I am a co-editor each year of the World Happiness Report.

The World Happiness Report - that's where Denmark and the other Nordic countries always come out on top. Jeff Sachs, just so you know, isn't some woo-woo feel-good witch doctor. You may have heard him on our program before, talking about his work as an interventional economist for governments in crisis:

SACHS: I worked in Poland and in Russia after the communist system collapsed.

Also in Bolivia, trying to tame its hyperinflation.

SACHS: And I worked in Latin America very extensively for several years after the work in Bolivia.

The calls kept coming.

SACHS: And then in 1995, another quite decisive turn for me was an invitation to go to Zambia and to see what this experience and these lessons might mean for Africa.

Over time, and because of those experiences, Sachs came to believe that his fellow economists had left something out of their worldview. Something, in fact, quite vital.

SACHS: The economics profession took a very bad turn roughly 150 years ago when it decided that since it wasn't possible to measure happiness or to compare happiness across individuals, we would look basically at consumer preferences.

The inspiration to incorporate happiness into economic modeling came from a rather unlikely source.

SACHS: So back in 1971, the fourth king of Bhutan - who also brought democracy to the country - was an extremely, extremely wise leader, he raised the question already, why are we pursuing Gross National Product when we should be pursuing Gross National Happiness? You know it's such a wonderful phrase. And GNH entered the vocabulary of a small niche of economists and a small niche of Buddhists, and others who are dreaming of this, already, decades ago. But Bhutan went ahead as a very poor country and actually set up the mechanisms for detailed survey measurement of dimensions of Gross National Happiness. It set up a Gross National Happiness commission. It ordered that all legislation should be an evaluated happiness benefit-cost ratio.

Sachs began meeting with the king, and they brought more world leaders and economists into the happiness conversation. This ultimately led to the creation of the U.N.'s World Happiness Report. The concept was jarring to many of Sachs's colleagues, particularly in the U.S.

SACHS: Well, in our country, we don't talk about almost anything else in the public space. It's all about growth, GDP, incomes. Of course, there is a massive industry of happiness studies, self-help manuals, helping people to overcome all sorts of unhappinesses, trying to help people find meaning in their lives, trying to help people make better decisions about their lives.

To Sachs, the booming self-help industry in rich countries like the U.S. reveals a disturbing paradox.

SACHS: We have the paradox that income per person rises in the United States, but happiness does not. And it's not that that's because humans are humans. It's because the U.S. is falling behind other countries, because we are not pursuing dimensions of happiness that are extremely important: our physical health, the mental health in our community, the social support, the honesty in government. And this is weighing down American well-being.

Like the Danish happiness expert Meik Wiking, Sachs finds wisdom in the ancient Greek model.

SACHS: I go with Aristotle - he's my guy, my favorite philosopher. And he pointed out in the Nicomachean Ethics, 2,300 years ago, that to be happy requires the good benefit of having material needs met. So don't deny those, he said. But he also said, only aiming for wealth, single-mindedly pursuing a higher wealth, is certainly no way to happiness and after a certain point of income, work on other things - work on your friendship, work on your mental health, work your physical health. Work on good governance, work on your charitableness. Because in this kind of world, a good life is a balanced and a virtuous life. Not a single-minded pursuit of income.

Okay, if these are the factors that supposedly generate happiness - community, good mental and physical health, good governance - and since Denmark and the other Nordic countries top the happiness rankings, let's take a look at how they address those factors. Let's start with the social-safety net; Meik Wiking again:

WIKING: There is obviously universal healthcare. There's also free university education. In fact, now - DUBNER: Up through university - I mean, along - from the lower level, too - it's always free, yes? WIKING: So, heavily subsidized kindergarten, primary school free, high school free, and university free. And you get a government grant. And that creates also a lot of social mobility. So - DUBNER: As does health care not being tied to a job, which we have mostly in the States. WIKING: Exactly.

Danes also work fewer hours: on average, 27.6 hours per week, compared to 34.4 in the U.S. To Helen Russell, moving here from Britain, that was a big change.

RUSSELL: There's no stigma to clocking off - people work mainly from 8 until 4 in offices. There's no stigma to leaving at 4 because you've got to go pick up your kids from daycare, you've got to go make supper, or you just need to get on with your hobbies.

Denmark strives toward egalitarianism on the gender front, and its parental-leave policies are famously generous.

RUSSELL: So there's 52 weeks - both parents can share it between them. And you can defer, I think, 13 weeks of this for, I believe it's up to eight or possibly nine years. I have a friend whose family are - she has two children and the youngest one is now five, but she's taking 13 weeks off next year to go on a big trip around Australia. And I was outraged by this, like, "Goodness, isn't this taking the mick a little bit?" She said, "No, it's perfectly acceptable here." So yeah, it's just a different mindset, I guess. SACHS: The basic idea of social democracy is to pay attention to social cohesion, to provide ample social goods like healthcare available automatically for all, education at all levels available for all, vacation time available for all.

Jeff Sachs argues this strong social support in the Nordic model contributes to a number of healthy outcomes.

SACHS: The life expectancy is higher. Our obesity epidemic does not exist in those countries. Our opioid epidemic does not exist in those countries. WIKING: There is also a high level of trust towards the government. And that goes hand in hand with the Nordic countries being at the low end when it comes to corruption, or perceived corruption. We have a different perception of the state. So what I see from over here, you feel you need to be protected from the state. Is that a fair assumption? DUBNER: It's a fair assumption for a significant fraction, at least, of Americans, let's say - not all, certainly, but yeah. WIKING: And people in the Nordic countries will feel that the state protects us from things. The high level of social security is one element, that there is a notion that if you fall, you will be picked up. So I think we see more the state on our side, and helping us create good conditions for good lives.

Scandinavia also gets high marks on interpersonal social trust.

WIKING: So if you ask Danes and Norwegians and Swedes, do you feel that most people can be trusted, or can you become too careful when it comes to strangers? Three out of four would say, "Yes, you can trust most strangers." The global average is one in four. RUSSELL: So you may have heard of - there was a DUBNER: And have you become more trusting as well? RUSSELL: Yeah, I think so. I don't want to reveal too much about where I live, but I regularly forget to lock car and/or house. DUBNER: But considering the very high level of support in Denmark for citizens from prenatal, really, until literally after death, my question - which is maybe unanswerable - is, would you say that the very high level of social trust is a result of such a generous social security system, or the cause of it? in New York a few years ago of a Danish woman who was there, who left her child sleeping outside in a pram, which is what you do in Denmark, and was arrested for child neglect. And lots of people in Denmark didn't understand why it was such a fuss, because in Denmark people trust most people. And this plays into everything. You are not anxious if you trust the people around you, you're not scared they're going to rob you to put food on their table. There's something interesting about the experience of living Danishly that increases your levels of trust. So immigrants to Denmark also end up adopting Danish values, or their levels of trust rise as the experience of being around Danes and being in this environment starts to sort of filter in, and bed down. So it's a real debate, actually - there's a bit of both.
RUSSELL: That's a really interesting question, and it's something that academics in Denmark are still very much grappling with. Some of the economists that I spoke to for The Year of Living Danishly put it that, actually, these high levels of trust have been here, that pre-date the social services and social welfare system. Other people argue it's the other way around.

Russell enumerates several other factors that may contribute to a relatively high state of Danish happiness. Most people belong to at least a few clubs or community groups; they spend a lot of time on fitness and outdoor activities; and they don't put too much emphasis on material possessions.

WIKING: Yes, it's frowned upon to flash your wealth, to flash your success.

Meik Wiking again.

WIKING: That is quite common in the Nordic countries. So it also sort of puts a lid on conspicuous consumption. DUBNER: So do you believe that that is a driver, major or minor, of overall happiness, that people feel less compelled to compare themselves to others? WIKING: Yes, a minor one, but I think it's one. And yeah, there's so many studies out there that show that inequality is bad for health, for crime rates, for murder rates, and all sorts of things. RUSSELL: It's really interesting. So I - literally this morning, I've just come from an independent coffee bar and there's an equality there. There is not a difference between the person who is serving me coffee and the person buying the coffee. You can talk as equals, because you know that you are both probably, after tax, taking home around about the same amount. And everybody is having a sort of decent life. On the flip side, there's not the same service culture. I was just back in the U.K. for work. Oh my goodness, everyone was so nice to me. And when I go to the States, that's even more so, and I have to remind myself, "Oh, they're being nice to me because there's a financial imperative." And there is more of a service culture in some places than others. In Denmark, that's not the case. You don't expect bells and whistles. But I'm kind of fine with that now.

There is one more Danish attribute that's said to greatly contribute to happiness.

WIKING: So it's pronounced "hooguh." DUBNER: Hygge. WIKING: Well done. So I think the best explanation of what hygge is, is the art of creating a nice atmosphere. So it's about togetherness. It's about pleasure. It's about warmth. It's about relaxation. And that is a key cornerstone of Danish culture. To Danes, hygge is perhaps what freedom is to the Americans. DUBNER: But I gather there are also physical components of it that are specific - a lot of candles, good lighting, and good pastries and so on. Pillows. WIKING: Right. Because hygge is about atmosphere, lighting is important. Lamps are important. Candles are crucial. So we're - so Danes burn twice as much candle wax as number two in Europe, which is Austria.

Wiking is the author of an international best-seller called The Little Book of Hygge.

WIKING: And I receive a lot of letters from readers saying, I've been having hygge all my life. I just didn't know there was a word for it. So I think what we did with hygge was, we gave a word or a language for people to appreciate something they were already doing. RUSSELL: It's in every area of Danish life. And I'm working with UNESCO right now to get it put on the World Heritage Intangibles List . Studies show that if you are practicing hygge, it's a bit like self-kindness, but without the woo. And it makes you nicer to other people. This has a ripple effect out into society. So it really does contribute to happiness.

* * *

I was recently in Copenhagen, speaking with Meik Wiking who's C.E.O. of the Happiness Research Institute. I'd been hearing about all the factors that make Denmark and the other Nordic countries rank so high on the U.N.'s World Happiness Report - the generous healthcare and child-care and education benefits, the strong levels of social trust; and the hygge! It was all sounding a bit too good to be true.

That, again, is the economist Jeff Sachs, an editor of the World Happiness Report.

SACHS: And they end up paying, oh, 45 to 50 percent of national income. RUSSELL: A lot of people are paying around 50 per cent.

And that's the recent British transplant Helen Russell.

RUSSELL: I'd say most things - if you're doing your grocery shop, it's maybe 20 percent more. Goods and services are very expensive. So yeah, life is more expensive. There is not very much extra when you've paid for everything.

But the data show that high taxes and prices are generally considered worthwhile.

WIKING: Nine out of ten Danes are happily paying their taxes. There is an acknowledgement that we collectively invest in the public good, and that is fed back to people in terms of quality of life. RUSSELL: There is something about the taxes. When you're paying that much tax, you have to trust that this is all going to be worth it. And like life, you know, we're all trapped by something - we have to choose what we're going to be trapped by. And for me, that seems quite a good thing to put my chips on. DUBNER: One counterargument is that well, if you have that, you have that, what you don't have are the huge rewards for innovation and invention. So there are a lot of things that we complain about in the U.S., including income inequality, including the lack of a lot of the social-service network that a lot of European countries have. But we are the country that makes Apple and Google. And on and on and on and on. It seems that there's an upside to status-seeking, as well as downsides. RUSSELL: You're right in terms of accomplishment. There isn't the same incentive perhaps to go the extra mile that there might be in the U.K. and the U.S., I'd say. So I know that in some places of work, for instance, if your team is working on something but it's 4 o'clock, they're going to go home. That can be a frustration for people coming from other countries who are used to people staying there, to really impress the boss or just to do that extra bit. I think for me and from weighing up the pros and cons, there are always trade offs. And the idea that you can have most of the people doing okay and fairly happy - well no, pretty happy actually - that feels sort of worth it, rather than a couple of tall poppies and everyone else in the gutter. WIKING: I think perhaps Danes have lower materialistic ambitions than in some countries. But in terms of having an interesting job, having a happy family, having a healthy hobby and keeping fit, I think there is a lot of, sort of, expectations that people want to live up to. DUBNER: Okay, so you've told us that Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries are relatively very high on social trust compared to the rest of the world. And you've told us that social trust drives happiness. We also know that social trust decreases when diversity increases. At least, that's what a lot of literature that I've seen has to say. And we know that Denmark and other Scandinavian countries are - relative to other rich countries, the U.S. and the U.K. in particular - are not very diverse. WIKING: Yeah. So it's true, in some of the Nordic countries, there is a high level of homogeneity. In Sweden it's much less - they've been much more welcoming to refugees and immigrants, in the past years, than for instance, Denmark and Norway. But then again, if you see the level of trust, that has not declined. DUBNER: In Sweden, yet, you're saying? WIKING: In Sweden, in Denmark, in Norway, in those countries that have accepted immigrants. DUBNER: Has it been long enough, though, to know? Like with the refugees, coming primarily from Syria and Iraq, that's relatively recent. WIKING: That's true. But - DUBNER: And I also wonder - when I see those numbers, I wonder whether those refugees are part of the survey on social trust? Do we know? WIKING: They are. But now it's refugees from Syria. But when I grew up, it was refugees from Vietnam. Then, in the '90s, it was refugees from Bosnia. Then also in the '70s, it was not refugees, but migrant workers from Turkey. So we've had a lot of different waves of migrants, it's not a new phenomenon. And I don't see evidence that trust had fallen in the Nordic countries, in that time. DUBNER: I've read and heard from people who move here either as highly skilled workers or as refugees, that Denmark works great if you're Danish. And that it's much harder - and granted, most countries are this way - but one particular complaint in Scandinavia is that even when you're being treated fairly and given opportunities, economic and educational opportunities, and so on, it can be very, very hard to break into the society. WIKING: Yes. And that's what I hear also from expats living here, from my international friends, that it's very, very difficult to penetrate the social circles in Denmark and Scandinavia. So it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of time. It's a really, really tight-knit network, and it's also a very small country. And people still live down the block from people who they know from, they were in kindergarten together. SACHS: I believe that social, linguistic, ethnic, religious homogeneity probably is conducive to the social democratic model, but I don't believe that diversity is a barrier to it. How much do you think the social trust in a place like Denmark is driven by some version of homogeneity? I've read that something like 85 percent of Danish citizens are not only born here, but are ethnically derived from Danes. So how much of it is just a sort of comfort with belonging to a club that you belong to?

The economist Jeff Sachs again. The 2018 edition of the World Happiness Report focused on migration and happiness. One finding, he says, jumped out at his team of researchers.

SACHS: People who move from a poor, unhappy, violence-filled country to a happy Nordic country become like the Nordic citizens in the country. They do carry some of the legacy of the country that they came from. But the adjustment is remarkably fast.

But of course the adjustment depends on how welcoming a new country is.

Meik Wiking again.

WIKING: First and foremost, it's important to note that the World Happiness Report, that is based on a national average. So you have people above that average and below that average. DUBNER: And the suicide rate here, for instance, is not wildly low - in fact it's somewhere in the middle, correct? WIKING: Yeah, you would expect that the happiest countries in the world have a suicide rate of zero. DUBNER: Although truthfully, the data show that there is a WIKING: So, if you look at the U.S. states, the individual states, the higher level of life satisfaction, the higher level of suicide rates. DUBNER: The most compelling explanation of suicide I've ever heard about - discussed with the fellow who promulgates it - because we don't really know that much about suicide, because it's taboo, the research is very distant and so on. But he calls it the "no-one-left-to-blame" theory. Which is that if you have problems in life, but you've got a toxic environment or a nasty government, you can always imagine that life will get a lot better. But if you're surrounded by happy, shiny people and you're not happy and shiny, it can be - so can you talk about that notion in a place that's so happy? WIKING: Yeah. So there is a term, "the happiness-suicide paradox," that talks about exactly that - that it might be more difficult to be unhappy in an otherwise happy society. If everybody around you feels that life is great, that are oh-so-happy, and you yourself feel unhappy, then that could create a stronger contrast and maybe you start to blame yourself. And more developed countries have reduced the reasons why we should be unhappy. You know, eliminate poverty, have eliminated lack of education - then if I have all these opportunities, why am I still unhappy? We start to internalize that cause and blame ourselves. , in that suicide increases with well-being and prosperity, yeah?

Helen Russell, the British expat, has now lived in Denmark for six years. You may recall that she and her husband had been trying, unsuccessfully, to have children back at home.

RUSSELL: We had been trying to start a family for years, trying many different types of fertility treatment. But it never quite worked, and the only feedback I kept getting from various medical professionals was, "Oh, you know, we don't know what it is, but you're quite stressed, and" - but everyone in London is stressed. It's city life, it's what you do. So you just carry on. Life is busy. We just carry on. DUBNER: Then you moved to Denmark. I understand now, you have not one, but three children. So is Denmark also somehow a fertility engine - how did that work? RUSSELL: I am now riddled with children, you are quite right. I have a litter. Yeah, I think - so, full disclosure: child number one, Little Red, I found out I was pregnant six months after moving here. And so, he - yeah, that is a result of being more relaxed, and that is an incredible thing. Also the work-life balance is more conducive to being relaxed enough to conceive, and also to having a family here. Women can have a career and a family because everything's shared a bit more equally between the sexes, and there is this heavily subsidized child care. I actually had I.V.F. for my twins who were born last year. But again, it's cheaper to have I.V.F. here than it certainly would have been in the U.K.. And interestingly, Denmark is one of the biggest exporters of sperm, so there's a lot of genetically Danish babies that will be coming around the place in the next few years.

This suggests a nice study for some demographer out there - to see whether all those genetically Danish babies will go spreading happiness around the globe. In the meantime, Helen Russell has also adapted to the Danish style of parenting.

Thanks to Helen Russell, Jeffrey Sachs, and Meik Wiking for speaking with us.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Max Miller and Anders Kelto, with help from Alvin Melathe, and a special thanks to Denmark Radio for helping us out in Vejle. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rosalsky, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, and Andy Meisenheimer. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
SOURCES RESOURCES EXTRA
Here's where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

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How to Be Happy (Ep. 345) - Freakonomics

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The U.N.'s World Happiness Report - created to curtail our unhealthy obsession with G.D.P. - is dominated every year by the Nordic countries. We head to Denmark to learn the secrets of this happiness epidemic (and to see if we should steal them).

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Americans are the unhappiest they've been in years: report

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Americans are as unhappy as they've been in years - and it seems to be a trend. That's one of the main takeaways from Wednesday's release of the annual "World Happiness Report," put out to coincide with the United Nations' International Day of Happiness.

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In 1964, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan published his opus Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In it he writes, "In the long run, a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act." Or, put more simply: "Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself."

This idea that the media technologies we rely on reshape us on a fundamental, cognitive level sits at the center of Nicholas Carr's 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. A world defined by oral traditions is more social, unstructured, and multisensory; a world defined by the written word is more individualistic, disciplined, and hypervisual. A world defined by texting, scrolling, and social feedback is addicted to stimulus, constantly forming and affirming expressions of identity, accustomed to waves of information.

Back in 2010, Carr argued that the internet was changing how we thought, and not necessarily for the better. "My brain, I realized, wasn't just drifting," he wrote in The Shallows. "It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the same way the net fed it - and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became." His book, a finalist for the Pulitzer that year, was dismissed by many, including me. Ten years on, I regret that dismissal. Reading it now, The Shallows is outrageously prescient, offering a framework and language for ideas and experiences I've been struggling to define for a decade.

Carr saw where we were going, and now I wanted to ask him where we are. In this conversation on The Ezra Klein Show, Carr and I discuss how speaking, reading, and now the internet have each changed our brains in different ways, why "paying attention" doesn't come naturally to us, why we're still reading Marshall McLuhan, how human memory actually works, why having your phone in sight makes you less creative, what separates "deep reading" from simply reading, why deep reading is getting harder, why building connections is more important than absorbing information, the benefits to collapsing the world into a connected digital community, and much more.

The point of this conversation is not that the internet is bad, nor that it is good. It's that it is changing us, just as every medium before it has. We need to see those changes clearly in order to take control of them ourselves.

An edited excerpt from our conversation follows. The full conversation can be heard on The Ezra Klein Show.

Ezra Klein

I want to start where you start in the book, with Marshall McLuhan. One of his ideas is that, in the long run, content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. What does that mean?

Nick Carr

McLuhan believed that when a new communication tool arrives, everybody focuses on the content that comes through it. And that's natural. When radio was invented, people were interested in radio programs. When TV came along, they were interested in TV shows. When you had a telephone in your house, you were interested in the conversation you were having.

But what McLuhan believed is that the communication technology itself shapes the way we perceive things and the way we communicate in ways that we're pretty much oblivious to because we're so focused on the information coming through the medium.

In the long run, he thought the technology's way of shaping the way we think ultimately had a much greater effect on us and in our lives than did the content flowing through the medium, whether it was television or the internet or whatever.

Ezra Klein

Can you give me an example of how previous technologies changed us?

Nick Carr

I'll start with the printing press. The arrival of the medium of printed text meant that we could sit down and read. For McLuhan, this was the big revolution because you can only read by yourself - it's not a group activity. So when people started to read and literacy became more and more widespread, people removed themselves from the social world that they spent most of their time in. He believed this made us much more individualistic. We began to define ourselves as individuals, as people who had this particular mix of knowledge that we got from books and newspapers and so forth.

And he also went further than that. He thought that the printed page gave our visual sense, our sense of sight, dominance over all the other senses. And as a result, he believed that we became not only more individualistic, but we became more alienated from other people and the world itself because we no longer paid as much attention to our tactile sense and our sense of smell and so forth.

Up until the more recent arrival of electronic media, radio and television, the dominant medium was the printed page, which imposed on us a particular way of seeing and thinking. And that was very individualized and very fragmented.

Ezra Klein

A move you make in the book, which seems important here, is that these new technologies don't just change us by changing our habits, they actually change our brains. You write at one point, "The brain of the book reader was more than a literate brain. It was a literary brain." Do you want to talk a bit about that process, and why people should see it as relevant here?

Nick Carr

As I read McLuhan and read other media theorists, I certainly came to agree with them that something deep happens when we adapt ourselves to a new means of communication. So that raised a question: How does that work? What's going on inside of our skulls that allows these kind of changes to happen?

That led me to recent discoveries over the last 40 years about what's called neuroplasticity, the incredible malleability of our brains. Our brains are constantly adapting to our environment, and when there's a change in the environment, there's a change in the way we think. It's a biological change, not just a change of habit.

When we adapt to a new medium - whether printed page or television or, more recently, the internet and social media and so forth - more and more neurons get recruited to the particular brain processes that you're using more often thanks to the different information technologies. But ways of thinking that aren't encouraged by the technology - we begin to lose those abilities.

That's analogous to our muscles. If you exercise a certain muscle, that muscle gets stronger. If you don't exercise another one, it atrophies. Something similar seems to happen within our brains.

Ezra Klein

Can you give me an example from the pre-internet era? When you compare somebody living in an oral culture with somebody living in a written culture, what facilities would have strengthened and what would have weakened? What would have changed?

Nick Carr

One thing that changed pretty dramatically is that the visual cortex, the part of our brain that processes our vision, became dedicated to deciphering text. When a child learns to read, at first it's very slow and halting. They have to actually identify each letter and kind of sound it out in their brain and then put the letters together to form a word, figure out how to say the word, and then figure out what that word means.

As we practice that, more and more neurons get dedicated to reading. Eventually, you no longer have to decipher a particular letter or even a particular word because our brains represent those letters and words - it's automatic. So we got all the benefits that come with being good readers, whether it's the value of losing yourself in a novel or the value of gaining complex information from some sophisticated nonfiction book.

But we also lost something. One thing we lost is a lot of our visual acuity in reading nature and reading the world. If you look at older cultures that aren't text-based, you see incredible abilities to, for instance, navigate by all sorts of natural signs. This acuity in reading the world, which also requires a lot of the visual cortex, we lost some of that simply because we had to reprogram our brain to become good readers.

Ezra Klein

Let's talk about what the internet does to our brains. But I want to make a confession first, which is that when this book came out 10 years ago, I was very resistant to it. I felt like the internet was making me so much smarter, so how dare this guy come along and tell me that I'm in the shallows?

It's funny because 10 years later, everything has just become faster and faster and faster, and my experience of what the internet is doing to me changed. I went from feeling able to contain it to totally overwhelmed by it.

I'd love to hear first what you felt the internet was doing to our brains back in 2010, and then how you feel it has changed in the ensuing decade.

Nick Carr

It's good to set the stage by thinking back to 2010. Our main way of being online back then was through computers. The iPhone had come out, but smartphones hadn't taken over yet. Social media was around, but it was still on the periphery. People used it, but they weren't living their lives through social media. So it was a very different technological world than today.

Yet back then the evidence already was strongly suggesting that the internet was a very powerful way to access lots of information very quickly. We were all concentrating on that great new bounty of information: the more information, the better - the faster it comes to me, the better.

What we lost sight of was how we actually take that information into our mind. There's all sorts of very good evidence that if you're distracted - if your attention is shifting very quickly - you can gather lots of information in a very swift fashion, but you're not going to assemble it very well into knowledge. It's going to just remain bits of information. You're not going to develop a rich store of personal knowledge, which is all about connections and associations.

I think it was quite clear even back then that we were making this big tradeoff between getting lots and lots of information very, very quickly and developing a rich base of knowledge. What was lost was not only the ability to engage in deep reading and attentive thought and contemplation, but also when we come across new information, the ability to bring it into our mind and put it into a broader context. That takes time. That takes attention. That takes focus.

The fundamental argument of The Shallows was that we were making this tradeoff. What I worried about then, and what I still worry about, is whether that tradeoff is worth it - are we losing more than we ultimately gain?

What's happened since then? On one level, I think it's magnified all of my concerns. Over the last 10 years, the smartphone took over as the dominant form of the computer. Unlike a laptop, the smartphone is always on. It's always with us. We can access it almost instantaneously. People walk around with it in their hands. So this constant distraction that I documented with laptops and desktops is now much more dominant. It goes on all the time.

Also social media exploded and became one of, if not the main, things people do with computers. And the way social media distributes information, the way it gives particular value or particular emphasis to very emotional information and simplified, kind of strong messages, I think all of this has made the problems I tried to delineate more intense in kind of [a] deeper set within society.

What has also become clearer and clearer in the last 10 years is that now there's also a big social effect of the technology. On the one hand, all the distractions that we had 10 years ago have proliferated, but also the way we make sense of things socially has changed dramatically as social media has essentially taken over media.
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How technology literally changes our brains

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In 1964, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan published his opus Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man . In it he writes, "In the long run, a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act." Or, put more simply: "Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself."

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nonfiction

Credit... Sean Dong

GENIUS MAKERS
The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World
By Cade Metz

FUTUREPROOF
9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
By Kevin Roose

It is as hard to understand a technological revolution while it is happening as to know what a hurricane will do while the winds are still gaining speed. Through the emergence of technologies now regarded as basic elements of modernity - electric power, the arrival of automobiles and airplanes and now the internet - people have tried, with hit-and-miss success, to assess their future impact.

The most persistent and touching error has been the ever-dashed hope that, as machines are able to do more work, human beings will be freed to do less, and will have more time for culture and contemplation. The greatest imaginative challenge seems to be foreseeing which changes will arrive sooner than expected (computers outplaying chess grandmasters), and which will be surprisingly slow (flying cars). The tech-world sayingis that people chronically overestimate what technology can do in a year, and underestimate what it can do in a decade and beyond.

So it inevitably goes with one of this moment's revolutions, the combination of ever-higher computing speed and vastly more-voluminous data that together are the foundations of artificial intelligence, or A.I. Depending on how you count, the A.I. revolution began about 60 years ago, dating to the dawn of the computer age and a concept called the "Perceptron" - or has just barely begun. Its implications range from utilities already routinized into daily life (like real-time updates on traffic flow), to ominous steps toward "1984"-style perpetual-surveillance states (like China's facial recognition system, which within one second can match a name to a photo of any person within the country).

Looking back, it's easy to recognize the damage done by waiting too long to face important choices about technology - or leaving those choices to whatever a private interest might find profitable. These go from the role of the automobile in creating America's sprawl-suburb landscape to the role of Facebook and other companies in fostering the disinformation society.

"Genius Makers" and "Futureproof," both by experienced technology reporters now at The New York Times, are part of a rapidly growing literature attempting to make sense of the A.I. hurricane we are living through. These are very different kinds of books - Cade Metz's is mainly reportorial, about how we got here; Kevin Roose's is a casual-toned but carefully constructed set of guidelines about where individuals and societies should go next. But each valuably suggests a framework for the right questions to ask now about A.I. and its use.

"Genius Makers" is about the people who have built the A.I. world - scientists, engineers, linguists, gamers - more than about the technology itself, or its good and bad effects. The fundamental technical debates and discoveries on which A.I. is based are a background to the individual profiles and corporate-drama scenes Metz presents. The longest running, most consequential debate is between proponents of two different approaches to increasing computerized "intelligence," which can be oversimplified as "thinking like a person" versus "thinking like a machine."

The first boils down to using "neural networks" - the neurons in this case being computer circuits - that are designed to conduct endless trial-and-error experiments and improve their accuracy as they match their conclusions against real-world data. The second boils down to equipping a computer with detailed sets of rules - rules of syntax and semantics for language translation, rules of syndrome-pattern for medical diagnoses. Much of Metz's story runs from excitement for neural networks in the early 1960s, to an "A.I. winter" in the 1970s, when that era's computers proved too limited to do the job, to a recent revival of a neural-network approach toward "deep learning," which is essentially the result of the faster and more complex self-correction of today's enormously capable machines.

Metz tells the story of more than a dozen of the world's A.I. pioneers, of whom two come across most vividly. One is Geoffrey Hinton, an English-born computer scientist now in his mid-70s, who is introduced in the prologue as "The Man Who Didn't Sit Down." Because of a back condition, Hinton finds it excruciating to sit in a chair - and he has not done so since 2005. Instead he spends his waking hours standing, walking or lying down. This means, among other things, that he cannot take commercial airplane flights. In one crucial scene of Metz's tale he is placed on a makeshift bed on the floor of a Gulfstream, and then strapped down for the flight across the Atlantic to an A.I. meeting in London.

The other most prominent figure in Metz's book is Demis Hassabis, who grew up in London and is now in his mid-40s. He is a former chess prodigy and electronic-games entrepreneur and designer who founded a company called DeepMind, now a leading force in the quest for the grail of A.G.I., or artificial general intelligence.

"Superintelligence was possible and he believed it could be dangerous, but he also believed it was still many years away," Metz writes of Hassabis. "'We need to use the downtime, when things are calm, to prepare for when things get serious in the decades to come,' he has said. 'The time we have now is valuable, and we need to make use of it.'"

Making use of that time is the entire theme of "Futureproof." Roose's book has two sections: "The Machines," about the surprising potential and equally surprising limits of automated intelligence, and "The Rules," which offers nine maxims for how people and organizations can best respond. In structure the book might look like a familiar, business-oriented "Secrets of Success" tract. But it is actually a concise, insightful and sophisticated guide to maintaining humane values in an age of new machines.

In the book's first section, Roose lays out distinctions between jobs and industries in which A.I. is likely to dominate, and those where it still disappoints. Computers are unmatchable in speed and complexity within known boundaries - the rules of chess, even the way points an airplane must follow through the sky. (Today's airlines can use A.I. guidance to "autoland" without a pilot, whereas today's cars can't safely "autodrive" down your street, in part because no pedestrian is going to lurch into a plane's descent path.) But the more fluid the setting, the greater the difficulties. "Most A.I. is built to solve a single problem, and fails when you ask it to do something else," he writes. "And so far, A.I. has fared poorly at what is called 'transfer learning' - using information gained while solving one problem to do something else."

Roose links this technological transformation to the many others that societies have undergone. Nearly all have eventually made humanity richer overall - in the long run. But, he writes, "we don't live in the aggregate or over the long term. We experience major economic shifts as individuals with finite careers and life spans."

"Futureproof" offers suggestions for individual pursuits and for social policy. But the most eloquent parts of the book come when Roose moves from preserving livelihoods to protecting basic humanity.

Social-media algorithms, he points out, are ever more precisely honed to attract and hold your attention. Click on the next video, scroll to the next tweet. Thus technology becomes humanity's master, rather than the reverse. "There are established ways to train our brains to better guard our attention," writes Roose - who, it is worth noting, is a millennial-era writer who specializes in digital technology. "For me, the best attention-guarding ritual of all is reading - sitting down to read physical, printed books for long stretches of time, with my phone sequestered somewhere far away."

Technology's effects are driven by technology itself, but even more by human choice. Roose warns against treating "technological change as a disembodied natural force that simply happens to us, like gravity or thermodynamics." Instead we all should realize that "none of this is predetermined. ... Regulators, not robots, decide what limits to place on emerging technologies like facial recognition and targeted digital advertising." The message from both of these books is that the sky is not falling - but it could. There is time to make a choice.

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nonfiction GENIUS MAKERS The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World By Cade Metz FUTUREPROOF 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation By Kevin Roose It is as hard to understand a technological revolution while it is happening as to know what a hurricane will do while the winds are still gaining speed.

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In a crosswalk at rush hour, you thread your way through the oncoming crowd, your eyes passing over the faces before you. This wayfinding might feel like something you're doing on your own. But scientists who study the movements of crowds have found that a simple trip through a crowd is much more like a dance we perform with those around us.

And so it might not come as too much of a surprise to learn that a person staring down at a phone, lost in a private world while walking, really messes with the vibe, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

Humans use a variety of visual cues to anticipate where other members of a crowd will go next, said Hisashi Murakami, a professor at Kyoto Institute of Technology and an author of the new paper. He was curious what would happen if attention to those details were disrupted, and so, in a series of outdoor experiments on the campus of the University of Tokyo, he and his colleagues filmed two groups of students in a walkway about 30 feet long.

The groups walked toward each other at a normal pace. When the groups met, the students intuitively performed a maneuver familiar to those who study crowds: They formed lanes. When a person at the front of one group found a way through the oncoming group, others fell in behind that person, creating several ribbons of walkers going past one another. This was effortless, and almost instantaneous.

The researchers then asked three of the students to perform a task on their phones while they walked - simple single-digit addition, not too taxing but enough to keep their gazes directed down instead of forward.

When those students were placed at the back of their group, the distraction did not affect how the groups moved past each other. But when the distracted walkers were at the front of the pack, there was a dramatic slowdown in the whole group's walking pace. It also took longer for clear lanes to form.

Distracted people also did not move smoothly. They took big steps sideways or dodged others in a way that the researchers rarely saw when there were no distractions. The inattentive pedestrians in the experiment induced that behavior in others as well; the people who weren't looking at their phones moved in a more choppy fashion than they did when there were no phone-gazers. It appeared that a few people not giving their full attention to navigation could change the behavior of the whole crowd of more than 50 people.

Looking at one's phone might have that effect because it deprives others of the information contained in our gazes, the researchers suggest. Where we look as we move broadcasts details about where we intend to go next. Without that, it's harder for passers-by to avoid us gracefully. And merely dodging other people as we move along, eyes averted, rather than moving with purpose, makes us even more unpredictable.

As more and more people use smartphones and other devices that contribute to distracted walking, it may be necessary for architects and city planners concerned with the movement of crowds to take that altered behavior into account, the researchers say.

Dr. Murakami plans next to track people's eye movements as they walk past one another. He hopes that these studies will reveal how our gazes helps us navigate crowds - what messages we transmit about our next steps as we perform this daily ritual, all unknowing.

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If You Look at Your Phone While Walking, You're an Agent of Chaos

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In a crosswalk at rush hour, you thread your way through the oncoming crowd, your eyes passing over the faces before you. This wayfinding might feel like something you're doing on your own. But scientists who study the movements of crowds have found that a simple trip through a crowd is much more like a dance we perform with those around us.

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Essay by the Director of the 2018 Movie Version

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Essay by the Director of the 2018 Movie Version

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Why ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Is the Book for Our Social Media Age (Published 2018)

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Ray Bradbury believed that serious thought was under threat from television and mass media. Ramin Bahrani, who adapted Bradbury’s novel for film, says it’s more relevant than ever.

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You might be tempted to throw up your hands in exasperation at these findings. It's easy to be discouraged by the fact that we are driven instinctively toward a goal that doesn't actually satisfy us.

Luckily, there is a loophole. Research shows that how the wealthier among us spend their money makes all the difference for their well-being. Specifically, spending money to have experiences, buying time, and giving money away to help others all reliably raise happiness. Thus, if you have a little excess income, it's best to use it on those three things.
Read: Who actually feels satisfied about money?
The key factor connecting all those approaches is other people. If you buy an experience, whether it be a vacation or just a dinner out, you can raise your happiness if you share it with someone you love. Friends and family are two key ingredients in well-being, and fun experiences with these people give us sweet memories we can enjoy for the rest of our lives-unlike the designer shoes that will wear out or go out of style.

Likewise, if you pay someone to do something time-consuming that you don't like to do (for example, cutting your yard), and don't waste the time you gain on unpleasant things like doom-scrolling on social media, you can get a happiness boost by spending those extra hours with others. As an added bonus, you might be able to convert your excess capital into earned income for someone who is still climbing the well-being curve.

And if you use your money to charitably support a person or a worthy cause, your brain will respond with boosts in dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, elevating your mood. Charitable giving is also linked to higher earning, which you can then spend on relationships, experiences, and charity.
Read: A counterintuitive way to cheer up when you're down
Left to our urges and natural desires, we can get stuck in a cycle of dissatisfaction, in which we work, earn, buy, and hope to finally get happier. But we don't have to play that futile game. Anyone who acquires money can use it to buy some happiness, and do a little self-improvement in the process. If we don't have much, we can spend any extra cash on removing some of the stressors in our daily lives. When we have enough to meet our basic needs, we can fight our materialistic impulses and spend time enjoying the people around us. And if we are lucky enough to have extra income, we can make it into a source of happiness, by transforming it into a means to share, and to love others better.

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You might be tempted to throw up your hands in exasperation at these findings. It's easy to be discouraged by the fact that we are driven instinctively toward a goal that doesn't actually satisfy us. Luckily, there is a loophole. Research shows that how the wealthier among us spend their money makes all the difference for their well-being.