The Atlantic

In interviews, many potential employers ask questions about habits, skills, and ambitions—but “what they might really be looking for is a gut feeling of enthusiasm about you,” Arthur C. Brooks writes. https://lnkd.in/ebmkcpBQ Excitement about a job, though, goes both ways: You need to not only be good at eliciting enthusiasm in others, but also feel excited yourself. “To find the job that gives you the best chance of loving your work, you need to be attentive to your own gut sense,” Brooks continues. “These feelings contain a lot of information that you need but to which you might not have conscious access.” To best understand your gut response to an opportunity, there are specific feelings that you should be aware of: excitement, fear, and deadness. “The trick is to be able to tell which of them is most present in that inchoate gut feeling.” Researchers have found that for simple decisions, it doesn’t matter whether people use intuition or reasoning to arrive at a conclusion. But for complex decisions, a feeling-based determination is more than twice as likely as reasoning to lead to an optimal outcome. This finding suggests that “it doesn’t matter how you decide something straightforward, such as whether to take the one job available when you have been unemployed for a long time,” Brooks writes. “When you have multiple professional options, using your gut to evaluate the choices may be the best course.” “There is no way to get perfect information about a professional opportunity in advance,” Brooks continues. “But a reliable way to raise the odds of a good choice is to look for a lot of excitement, a little fear of danger, and as close to zero deadness as possible.” And evaluating potential professional opportunities is just one area of uncertainty where your gut intuition can be useful. “The same principle can apply to any complex life choice: Organize your thinking in such a way that you are paying systematic attention to your gut feelings,” Brooks writes. https://lnkd.in/ebmkcpBQ

Joe Biden announced he is withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race. "In the end, and to his credit, Joe Biden got to where he needed to be, and not a moment too soon," writes Peter Wehner.

Exercise. Eat well. Have many, and warm, social relationships. In "How to Build a Happy Life," Arthur Brooks —in conversation with Rebecca Rashid and Robert Waldinger—examines what science says about the key elements of happier living: https://lnkd.in/engm3Vk3

“Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,” Zoë Schlanger writes. Even though Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, it was written by veterans of his first administration, and is “widely seen as a blueprint for a second Trump term.” https://lnkd.in/ewPcK75C The proposal suggests that the National Weather Service, which operates under NOAA, should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.” It also advises that “NOAA’s scientific-research arm, which studies things such as Arctic-ice dynamics and how greenhouse gases behave … should be aggressively shrunk,” Schlanger continues. NOAA's repository of climate data is “proof of human-induced global warming. It’s fitting, then, that the agency would be a target of hard-right activists and the Heritage Foundation, which has received fossil-fuel funding.” “Private companies might be better funded and, theoretically, less subject to political whims,” Schlanger writes—but they still use NOAA’s data. “Commercializing the agency’s underlying data risks creating a system of tiered services. One could imagine a future where private outfits charge subscriptions for their weather reports, and only some municipalities are able to pay for the best forecasts.” “Violent storms like Sandy make clear that America’s national security is only as strong as our ability to accurately predict the weather,” Schlanger continues. “Eliminating or privatizing climate information won’t eliminate the effects of climate change. It will only make them more deadly.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/ewPcK75C 🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

My wife and I have an agreement: One day a week, we do absolutely nothing. In a society obsessed with productivity, this is harder than it should be—but it’s worth it, Jason Heller writes. (From 2023) https://lnkd.in/dBZncuXy

In ways both large and small, American society still assumes that the default adult has a partner and that the default household contains multiple people, Joe Pinsker wrote in 2021. https://lnkd.in/eGV2nezX⁠ According to the Census Bureau’s count, that year there were 36 million solo dwellers, and together they made up 28 percent of U.S. households. Yet society creates barriers to living alone, including the costs of housing, health care, and education. Many who live by themselves are effectively penalized at work too. Managers might assume those who live alone have extra time to work late or take on extra projects. More concerning, some health-care protocols are essentially built on the assumption that a patient lives with someone who can support them. Additionally, people who live alone don’t always get to take full advantage of government policies. ⁠ ⁠ In smaller ways, too, society complicates life for those who live alone. Buying food items in bulk can be cheaper, recipes are rarely written for a single diner, and many restaurants won’t easily seat a single patron, some say. “Those who live alone, to be clear, are not lonely and miserable. Research indicates that, young or old, single people are more social than their partnered peers,” Pinsker continues. “In the future, lots of Americans are going to live alone—tens of millions already do—and eventually, society will, with hope, catch up.” 📷: David Steets / laif / Redux

Seemingly everyone these days wants a plus-one to a wedding. The result can be an expensive, dramatic mess. What if, Faith Hill asks, we did away with plus-ones? Tell us about a time you didn’t get a plus-one—or if you’ve ever regretted handing an invite out. Read more: https://lnkd.in/e8XP3tiA

Many animals are more sophisticated than we once thought: Chimps recognize themselves in mirrors, elephants use namelike calls, and some animals use their past to plan ahead. In The Wonder Reader, Isabel Fattal explores the “humanlike” ways of animals:

Some leaders on the left say that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has broken the orthodoxy they expect on Israel: For this anti-Israel maximalist segment, “any recognition of Israel’s existence is tantamount to betrayal,” Arash Azizi writes: https://lnkd.in/e4Rvr4-3

Most revolutions come from the young. Will the next be driven by older adults? David Brooks reported in 2023 on the high-achieving professionals pursuing a new vision of the good life.⁠ https://lnkd.in/epRm93SR ⁠ “Encore” programs at universities such as Stanford and Notre Dame help a privileged set who are ready to choose purpose over leisure in their retirement. As they consider questions around life’s deepest and most fundamental truths, these adults have “revealed something I take to be a general human truth: Most of us don’t just want simple happiness; we want intensity. We want to feel that sense of existential urgency you get when you are engrossed in some meaningful project, when you know you are doing something important and good,” Brooks wrote.⁠ ⁠ There’s an urgent need to democratize these types of programs and make less rarefied versions available to the tens of millions of people retiring every year. The lessons from them, Brooks argued, can benefit people of every age, as many younger adults look at the manic careerism of older generations and see a recipe for an anxious, exhausting, and existentially empty life.⁠ ⁠ Read more: https://lnkd.in/epRm93SR ⁠ 🎨: Alanah Sarginson