CityLab: Why the Trip Back Always Feels Shorter

We’ve all felt it before: for whatever reason, the trip coming home seemed a lot quicker than the trip going there. This isn’t just you losing your already tenuous grip on reality; on the contrary, several studies have confirmed the existence of what researchers call the “return trip effect.” Even when travel distance and time are the same there and back, the back feels measurably shorter.

Exactly why this effect occurs is a source of ongoing inquiry. Eryn Brown at the L.A. Times reports on a new study in PLOS One offering one potential explanation: it’s not that we’re bad at judging how long a trip is taking, it’s that we’re bad at remembering how long it took. That’s what the researchers found when asking study participants to watch a video of a round-trip then asking them to judge its length in real-time and retrospectively.

The study does support the basic “return trip effect,” but its methods and reasoning are unconvincing. The sample size was woefully small, at 20 participants. The researchers assumed we have to travel the exact same route there and back to feel the effect, which isn’t necessarily true. And their conclusion was flat: even if people recall return trips poorly, the question of why they have this particular memory failure still remains.

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Political Critique: Tens of thousands in nationalist march in Warsaw

In the last years, 11 November has become the biggest annual event for nationalists and supporters of the extreme right in Poland. According to estimates, around 60 000 people marched with torches and smoke bombs, shouting nationalist, anti-refugee, anti-European, and anti-Semitic slogans through the streets of Warsaw. Although the ruling Law and Justice party did not officialy take part, President Duda sent a letter to the demonstrating nationalists in which he praised patriotic values. An alternative march was organized also by the Committee for the Defense of Democracy (KOD), an umbrella organization bringing together the liberal opposition, which declared a pro-European orientation and criticised the government. Later in the afternoon, over 1000 people gathered at an anti-fascist demonstration, organised by anarchist organizations and the Razem party, in order to protest against nationalism, racism, and xenophobia and in support of openness and solidarity.

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Nautilus Magazine: You Can Have Emotions You Don’t Feel

But emotions are complicated things. Even if we do feel an emotion, there are parts associated with it that we aren’t usually aware of. Clinical psychologists, for example, recommend to patients with anger issues to look out for the warning signs—sweating in the palms, for example, or clenching of the jaws—so they can perhaps mitigate upcoming rage. And when we are frightened, or sexually aroused, our heart and breathing rates increase often without our notice (though we can recognize the change if its pointed out). What’s more, fear seems capable of covertly heightening sexual arousal—or being mistaken for it. [...]

Perhaps, if emotions used to work without conscious awareness, that explains why they still can. “The original function of emotion,” they say, “was to allow the organism to react appropriately” to the good and bad things in life, “and conscious feelings might not always have been required.”

Indeed, one 2005 study in humans showed a difference in brain pattern between unconscious and conscious—or “subliminal and supraliminal”—fear. The researchers thought this could help us understand the mechanisms underlying fear following trauma, which, they say, is “automatic and outside immediate conscious control.”

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Nautilus Magazine: Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

The stories have become all too familiar in Japan, though people often do their best to ignore them. An elderly or middle-aged person, usually a man, is found dead, at home in his apartment, frequently right in his bed. It has been days, weeks, or even months since he has had contact with another human being. Often the discovery is made by a landlord frustrated at not receiving a rent payment or a neighbor who notices an unpleasant smell. The deceased has almost no connections with the world around him: no job, no relationships with neighbors, no spouse or children who care to be in contact. He has little desire to take care of his home, his relationships, his health. “The majority of lonely deaths are people who are kind of messy,” Taichi Yoshida, who runs a moving company that often cleans out apartments where people are discovered long after they die, told Time magazine. “It’s the person who, when they take something out, they don’t put it back; when something breaks, they don’t fix it; when a relationship falls apart, they don’t repair it.” [...]

In many ways, kodokushi seems to be specifically Japanese. It’s afflicting a society simultaneously coping with significant change in family structure and a generation-long economic slump. Japanese people in sad isolation may feel limited by gaman, the ideal of suffering through tough times without complaint, keeping a stiff upper lip. Similarly, the society has traditionally rejected the American trend toward medicalizing mental illness and mood disorders, spurning talk therapy and antidepressants long after they became commonplace in the West. Many lonely seniors never reach out for help or connection. 

But the increase in deaths of despair may not be unique to Japan. In November of last year, Nobel Prize–winning economist Angus Deaton and Anne Case reported a reversal in one of the most reliable and reassuring trends in modern public health: A big slice of the American populace was dying faster than expected. Deaton and Case, a pair of Princeton economists who happen to be married to each other, specifically found that the mortality rate for white people aged 45–54 without a college education had increased dramatically between 1999 and 2013. The increase ran counter to all recent historical precedent, and it contrasted with concurrent decreases among black and Hispanic people in the U.S. and nationwide decreases in all other rich countries. “Half a million people are dead who should not be dead,” Deaton told the Washington Post. “About 40 times the Ebola stats. You’re getting up there with [deaths from] HIV-AIDS.” Deaton said the increase is so contrary to longstanding trends that demographers’ first reaction would be to say, “‘You’ve got to have made a mistake. That cannot possibly be true.’”

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Motherboard: Floating Utopias for the Age of Rising Seas

A two mile-thick ice sheet in Antarctica is collapsing, which all but guarantees at least 10 feet of global sea level rise. That's grim news for the 44 percent of the world's population living in coastal areas, who now face the dire prospect of preparing for the coming tides. Developing the necessary engineering solutions, as well as plans to anticipate some inevitable social and economic destabilization, will prove a daunting challenge for millions of communities worldwide. Which is why, along with the engineers, we're going to need utopianists. [...]

Now, we're faced with an existential crises of another stripe. Scientists have for the last few years considered a significant amount of global warming, and the sea level rise it brings with it, an inevitability. Now that we have a forebodingly certain baseline in place, it's an apt time to look at some of the many utopian ideas that have quite literally—yeah, sorry—been floated to cope with the rising tides. [...]

Whether grandiose, or of the humbler variety, both sci-fi designers and urban planners are imagining how to raise our metropolises up to ride atop the rising tides. First, let's look at what is maybe the most prevalent medium for modern utopianism on the internet—design fiction. You've maybe already seen some examples of the genre running through your feed; the self-sustaining, ark-like city designed to float in a globally-warmed world. 

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