Eve Applebaum LCSW

07/25/2025

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-moment-of-youth/202004/are-young-peoples-social-skills-declining

New research suggests the internet may reduce social skills in some ways and promote them in others. Is there a net gain for youth?

07/25/2025

https://socialself.com/blog/losing-social-skills/

Meeting up with people after a long time of being alone can be disorienting. You may find yourself on edge the whole time, wondering if it’s going well. Maybe you even ask yourself…

07/25/2025

To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution.

— Jean Shinoda Bolen

Art: Veil by Suzanna Schlemm

07/08/2025

To kill the dining room is to design American loneliness, M. Nolan Gray wrote in 2024. https://theatln.tc/QcE44lJt

📸: Carolyn Drake / Magnum

07/08/2025

At the summit of Cerro Pachón, one of Earth’s most powerful telescopes is now capturing some of the oldest light in the universe.⁠
https://theatln.tc/GC2PAv7m
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“This ridge, on the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile, some 9,000 feet above sea level, is now home to three of the world’s most powerful telescopes,” including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, writes Michael Jones McKean, the observatory’s artist in residence. “It’s also probably one of the most unforgiving locations in the world to try to build anything, let alone something as complex as an observatory. Yet these same conditions—distance from anthropogenic light sources, a mountainous altitude above the cloud line, a crisp desert atmosphere—provide the baselines for Rubin to access the faintest of faint celestial objects.”⁠
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“Rubin is what’s called a ‘survey telescope,’ making its principal artifact a map,” McKean continues. “In this case, the most elaborate, 4-D, data-dense, Borgesian map of the cosmos in motion that humans at this moment conceivably can make. It will catalog 37 billion discrete astronomical objects, revisiting them every three nights again and again, for 10 years.”⁠
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The first mind-bending images taken by the observatory were released this week in the tradition of “first light,” a new observatory’s ceremonial opening. “The images represent a decades-long effort by a globally dispersed team of astrophysicists, data scientists, engineers, administrators, machinists, welders, bus drivers, cooks, and thousands of others completing one of the most sophisticated objects that humans have ever built,” McKean writes.⁠
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📸: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

07/08/2025

We all face uncivil behavior or insulting comments at times, but you can choose how to react, Arthur C. Brooks writes. https://theatln.tc/RntH4TbK
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“With high levels of polarization and innumerable ways to broadcast one’s every thought to strangers far and wide, it is easier than ever to lob insults and to denigrate ideological foes,” Brooks writes. But for most people, “being too easily offended is worse for one’s own quality of life than being obnoxiously rude. So instead of spending your efforts trying to stamp out what you find offensive, you should work on being less offended in the first place.”⁠
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In 1976, the psychologist Wolfgang Zander argued that we get offended in three stages: “First, we identify when we’re insulted or harshly contradicted; second, we assess how extreme the offense is; finally, we respond emotionally or in some behavioral way,” Brooks explains. However, how we respond can be a little out of our conscious control. ⁠
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“The point of describing the neurological and psychological mechanisms that underpin taking offense is that knowledge is power,” Brooks explains. “If you know what’s happening to you when you feel offended, that’s the first step toward controlling how you respond.”⁠
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One strategy is to try avoiding anyone who might offend you, which involves trying to control your environment. “But the more you try to expand the scope of that control, the less effective and the more costly it will become for you and others,” Brooks continues at the link in our bio. “Better by far to control yourself—by learning to be less offended.”⁠
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🎨: Jan Buchczik

06/25/2025

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-rare-alice-in-wonderland-syndrome-warps-reality/

Researchers are learning what causes Alice in Wonderland syndrome, a rare neurological condition that can appear to warp bodies, time and reality itself

12/17/2024

BE KIND

12/09/2024

04/21/2024

Good advice

01/05/2024