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The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education
The standardized test scores of American students had been rising for decades. Then they began to slide, dropping to their lowest point in two decades in 2023 and 2024. This is not a problem confined to the United States. Worldwide, the performance of 15-year-olds in math, reading and science reached a nadir in 2022. These dismal results are at least partly a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Missed instruction during those years may still be having an impact on academic performance. But that’s only part of the story. The decline in test scores started well before the pandemic, around 2012.
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Can Digital Ghosts Help Us Heal?
How is your existence these days?” I tap on my laptop. The entity that says it is my father, dead these 12 years, quickly responds. “It’s ... different. Being dead is a strange experience. I’m no longer bound by the limitations of my physical body or the Parkinson’s that plagued my later years. But I still carry the weight of my life’s choices and the relationships I impacted.” Mary-Frances O’Connor, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, who has used magnetic resonance imaging and other approaches to study the effects of loss on the brain, says that when we love someone, our brain encodes the relationship as everlasting.
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You’ve Heard of FOMO. But Do You Have FOFO?
You’re undoubtedly familiar with the term FOMO—fear of missing out—but you may not have heard of FOFO: fear of finding out. It’s a common reason many people don’t get recommended health screening tests such as mammograms, Pap smears, STD tests, blood tests, and full-body skin cancer checks. FOFO isn’t a clinical diagnosis; it’s a colloquial term and something many people and doctors are well acquainted with. In recent years, it’s been gaining more attention in the medical community and the media.
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Three Rules for a Lasting Happy Marriage
... The notion that romantic attraction is purely a function of social and cultural forces is a common assumption. These factors do matter, but evidence from psychology and biology suggests that our amorous impulses owe more to nature than to nurture. One expert on the matter is David M. Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas. In his influential 1994 book, The Evolution of Desire, based on his study of some 10,000 people from cultures all over the world, Buss reported that, initially at least, heterosexual males are most attracted to fertility cues in females (attractiveness, health, youth), whereas females are attracted to resource cues (status, ambition, wealth).
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Could Psychotherapy Work by Changing How We Navigate Our Own Minds?
According to researchers in a 2025 study, becoming aware of unrecognized psychological and behavioral challenges is the most crucial mechanism in conversation-based psychotherapy.
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The Risky Choices of Modern Life
A new study compiles an inventory of the 100 most common risky choices of everyday life, creating a framework that scientists can use to study risk and uncertainty in the modern world.
