I'm a Behavioral Scientist. Here's How I Pull Myself Out of a Funk | The Dysfunctional Superpower | The Junk Is Winning | Hurricane Otis Was Too Fast for the Forecasters

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I'm a Behavioral Scientist. Here's How I Pull Myself Out of a Funk - Inc.com

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The Dysfunctional Superpower - Foreign Affairs

The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia. And no one alive can remember a time when an adversary had as much economic, scientific, technological, and military power as China does today.

The problem, however, is that at the very moment that events demand a strong and coherent response from the United States, the country cannot provide one. Its fractured political leadership—Republican and Democratic, in the White House and in Congress—has failed to convince enough Americans that developments in China and Russia matter. Political leaders have failed to explain how the threats posed by these countries are interconnected. They have failed to articulate a long-term strategy to ensure that the United States, and democratic values more broadly, will prevail.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have much in common, but two shared convictions stand out. First, each is convinced that his personal destiny is to restore the glory days of his country’s imperial past. For Xi, this means reclaiming imperial China’s once dominant role in Asia while harboring even greater ambitions for global influence. For Putin, it means pursuing an awkward mixture of reviving the Russian Empire and recapturing the deference that was accorded the Soviet Union. Second, both leaders are convinced that the developed democracies—above all, the United States—are past their prime and have entered an irreversible decline. This decline, they believe, is evident in these democracies’ growing isolationism, political polarization, and domestic disarray.

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The Junk Is Winning - The Atlantic

TikTok would like to sell me a brush. Or, more specifically, an UNbrush. The $18 implement, made by the hair-tool brand FHI Heat, looks like a regular paddle brush, but with its rear panel removed so that air can flow through its perforated sheet of plastic bristles. Its promise, according to the dozens of video reviews that TikTok has pushed into my feed in the past week, is simple: The UNbrush cuts through tangles like a hot knife through butter, even if your hair is highly textured or coated in salt water after a day at the beach. At times, every third or fourth video in my feed has shown the brush doing exactly that, accompanied by a coupon code—never the same one, never for the same amount—and a link to buy.

The UNbrush is just one of many assorted products—mascaras, office chairs, battery-powered kitchen scrubbers—that have recently gone viral on TikTok Shop, which officially launched in the United States last month. TikTok’s endless stream of unpredictable, algorithmically selected clips has long been a powerful—if erratic—engine for shopping. Many people’s feeds were already full of informal, chatty reviews and product demonstrations that, at their best, feel like you’re getting a genuine tip from a friend. These videos have sold scores of seemingly random consumer goods, so TikTok Shop is the company’s bid to profit from those sales directly instead of sending those dollars elsewhere.

Thousands of sellers have rushed to list their wares on the platform, but TikTok Shop’s rollout hasn’t been universally beloved by the app’s U.S. users. To encourage creators to promote the shop’s products, people with at least 5,000 followers can join an affiliate-marketing program that pays them a commission on any sales they refer with their shopping links—a long-standing feature of more traditional online retailers, made potentially more powerful because of TikTok’s newly closed ecosystem of recommendations and sales. As my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote during the feature’s test phase this past summer, some users have balked at how much TikTok Shop encourages their fellow TikTokers not just to share recommendations but also to more pointedly hawk products, pushing people’s feeds even further toward a low-rent, Gen Z version of QVC.

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Hurricane Otis Was Too Fast for the Forecasters - The Atlantic

In the hours before Hurricane Otis made landfall, everything aligned to birth a beast. The hurricane, which arrived near Acapulco, Mexico, early this morning, had an improbable combination of terrible traits. It was small and nimble, as tropical storms go, which reduced the amount of data points available to forecasters and made it harder to track. It came toward land at night, which is the least ideal time for a chaos-inducing event to hit a population center. Winds in the upper atmosphere were moving in exactly the way that hurricanes like. Its compact size also meant that it didn’t need as much energy to become ferocious as a more sprawling storm would. And energy in its particular patch of superheated ocean was in no short supply.

Yesterday morning, Otis was merely a tropical storm. Then the system moved over a near-shore patch of hot water, where the sea-surface temperatures reached 31 degrees Celsius in some places (88 degrees Fahrenheit). It “explosively intensified” in a “nightmare scenario,” according to the National Hurricane Center, gaining more than 100 miles per hour of wind speed in 24 hours. Suddenly, the tropical storm became a Category 5 hurricane just before reaching Acapulco—home to 1 million people—at 12:25 a.m. local time. And no one saw it coming.

A short 16 hours before Otis made landfall, the National Hurricane Center predicted that it would come ashore as a Category 1 storm. Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, both veteran hurricane specialists, called that “one of the biggest and most consequential forecast-model misses of recent years.”

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