The Atlantic: How Many Photographs of You Are Out There In the World?

And those are just numbers from a handful of social-media companies. Weibo, What’sApp, Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram all add to the pile. In 2014, according to Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report, people uploaded an average of 1.8 billion digital images every single day. That’s 657 billion photos per year. Another way to think about it: Every two minutes, humans take more photos than ever existed in total 150 years ago. [...]

After all, that 657 billion number is just photos that were uploaded online, not ones that are stored on someone’s computer. It also doesn’t include security cameras, or closed-circuit systems, or body-worn camera footage, or aerial-drone shots. The United Kingdom has 6 million surveillance cameras in service. According to CrimeFeed.com, the average American is caught on camera 75 time a day. Some of that footage is stored and backed up, while some of it is lost immediately. There’s a channel on my television that broadcasts traffic cameras across the city, including one at Times Square, where there are always people who probably have no idea I’m watching them in my living room. There’s a livestream of Abbey Road. And real-time footage of Piazza di Spagna, one of the famous public squares in Rome. [...]

Schoenebeck studies how parents and teens relate to digital photos—she looks at things like moms posting baby-photos online, and how teenagers feel about their earlier selves immortalized in digital images on Facebook. She and Hand both talked about how teens today take a lot of care in the photos they post. Instead of dumping all 30 photos they took at the Eiffel Tower into a Facebook album, they’ll post two. Their relationship with photos isn’t one of personal memory, but rather of public identity. Hand describes the thinking: “Of course you take images in order to distribute them, that’s what they’re for.”

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Salon: It’s high time: If we can legalize marijuana, why can’t we end the misguided War on Drugs?

On Election Day, my home state of California voted to legalize recreational cannabis, as did Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada. So the 2016 elections represented a substantial victory for the legalization movement, which has managed to pass referendums in seven states. With 57 percent of the country now supporting marijuana legalization, according to Pew, it seems likely there will be a nationwide victory sometime in the next few years. However, the War on Drugs is far from over. [...]

Researchers in Switzerland found in 2014 that LSD can be helpful for patients dealing with end-of-life anxiety related to a terminal illness. The same sort of conclusion has been drawn for psilocybin. Psilocybin has also proven useful for treating severe depression. MDMA has shown great promise for treating PTSD, when used alongside psychotherapy. All of the drugs remain illegal in the United States, and there has been little effort to change that.

Let’s not stop there, though. The War on Drugs has cost America well over $1 trillion since it began under Richard Nixon. This war has been the main cause of our country’s mass incarceration problem. As it is often noted, we have 5 percent of the world’s population and roughly 25 percent of its prisoners. You cannot have a War on Drugs, you can only have a war on people. As Gore Vidal famously used to say of the War on Terror, you cannot have a war on a noun, as that is like saying you’re at war with dandruff. Too many can’t get jobs because of criminal records or lose decades of their lives over small offenses.

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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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