If you spend time on social media, you have probably found yourself comparing your own life to your friends, family, total strangers, and celebs. You might find yourself thinking that everyone else seems to be leading a fuller, richer, or more exciting life based on the tiny, curated glimpse you see on their Instagram or Facebook posts. As the saying goes, comparison really can be the thief of joy. Detoxing from your social connections can be a good way to focus on what’s important in your own life without comparing yourself to others. Fear of missing out, known as FOMO, is the fear that you are missing the experiences that everyone else is having. Constant connectivity can feed this fear. You might find yourself overcommitting to social events out of the fear that you’ll be left behind. FOMO can also keep you constantly checking your device out of fear that you are going to miss an important text, message or post.

Doing a digital detox is one way to set limits and reduce your fear of missing out. The key is to do it in a way that doesn’t leave you feeling cut off from what’s happening in your digital world. Some might suggest that a true digital detox would involve predefined abstinence from any and all digital devices and social media connections, but it is important to make your device usage work for your own life and demands.

Detaching from your devices can benefit your mental well-being but doing a digital detox does not have to involve a complete separation from your phone and other tech connections. The process is often more about setting boundaries and making sure that you are using your devices in a way that benefit, rather than harm, your emotional and physical health. If you can do a complete digital detox for a certain amount of time, it might be something you want to try. Being completely disconnected can feel liberating and refreshing for some people. For a lot of people, completely forgoing all forms of digital communication might not be possible, particularly if you really do rely on staying connected for work, school, or other obligations. This doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy the benefits of a digital detox; the key is to make disconnecting something that works for your schedule and your life.

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The Washington Post
Opinion: Brazil’s racist wave of mass incarceration
Fausto Salvadori is a reporter for the news site Ponte Jornalismo in Brazil.

A few days ago, my son-in-law told me that he was on a walk with my daughter and grandson in the center of São Paulo, the most populous city in Brazil, when a group of police officers approached them. My 2-year-old grandson didn’t understand why the officers were pointing a gun at his father. I am 40 years older than him, and I don’t understand it either, much less accept it, although I know that situations like this are frequent in Brazil. Unlike my son-in-law, I don’t usually go through this. But I’m White. He’s Black.

In a country that for so long has lied to itself by asserting that it is a “racial democracy”, I can say that the police have rarely approached me on the street, but my son-in-law says that at one point, he was accosted 20 times in a single year. This situation represents a real lethal threat for Black people: They constitute 56 percent of Brazilians but account for 79 percent of those killed by the police. There’s also the fear of being detained; 67 percent of the prison population is Black.

The Anti-Drug Act, approved in 2006, accelerated a mass incarceration process that mainly affects Black and poor people and that the Brazilian government had been promoting since the 1990s. Following this law, the number of people incarcerated for drug crimes increased by 156 percent, according to research by Una guerra adictiva. Now, 1 in 3 prisoners is in jail because of this law. In the case of women, that percentage is over 60. This kind of incarceration – carried out in the name of the War on Drugs – is part of the reason Brazil is the country with the third-largest prison population globally. With about 750,000 inmates, it’s behind only the United States and China.

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Your brain’s roughly 86 billion interconnected neurons endow it with the ability to understand the world, plan actions, and solve problems. Doing so requires the brain to incorporate all available information. By combining information from all of your body’s senses, the brain paints a picture of the world around you. Then, using inference and instinct, the brain makes sense of the picture it assembles.

The brain both makes and uses emotions, which are value judgments that help the brain respond effectively to events. It associates the pictures it assembles with feelings to form memories. Our brains store those memories, learn from them, and use that knowledge in the future. By combining all of these tools with imagination, your brain can predict future events, calculate your next move, and devise plans for future opportunities. Consciousness requires that all of these activities function normally. In other words, your brain’s trillions of connections work together to understand the world, to think about the future, and to create … you.

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The Amazon rainforest is now emitting more carbon dioxide than it is able to absorb, scientists have confirmed for the first time. The emissions amount to a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, according to a study. The giant forest had previously been a carbon sink, absorbing the emissions driving the climate crisis, but is now causing its acceleration, researchers said.

Most of the emissions are caused by fires, many deliberately set to clear land for beef and soy production. But even without fires, hotter temperatures and droughts mean the south-eastern Amazon has become a source of CO₂, rather than a sink.

Growing trees and plants have taken up about a quarter of all fossil fuel emissions since 1960, with the Amazon playing a major role as the largest tropical forest. Losing the Amazon’s power to capture CO₂ is a stark warning that slashing emissions from fossil fuels is more urgent than ever, scientists said.

The research used small planes to measure CO₂ levels up to 4,500 m above the forest over the last decade, showing how the whole Amazon is changing. Previous studies indicating the Amazon was becoming a source of CO₂ were based on satellite data, which can be hampered by cloud cover, or ground measurements of trees, which can cover only a tiny part of the vast region.

The scientists said the discovery that part of the Amazon was emitting carbon even without fires was particularly worrying. They said it was most likely the result of each year’s deforestation and fires making adjacent forests more susceptible the next year. The trees produce much of the region’s rain, so fewer trees means more severe droughts and heatwaves and more tree deaths and fires.

Peter and David were on a train. Peter said, “See that Indian standing on the corner? If you ask him what he had for breakfast ten years ago hell remember.” “O.K.," said David, “Pl ask him.” He walked up to the Indian and said, “What did you have for breakfast ten years ago?” The Indian said, “Eggs." David did not believe the Indian. He thought that anybody could have said that. Ten years later David saw the same Indian he had talked to 10 years before. He walked up to the Indian and said, “How?” The Indian replied, “Scrambled..

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‘Emily in Paris’ star says he partly understands why critics panned the ‘cliché’ Netflix show

Despite being a huge hit for Netflix, critics across the board (particularly French critics) have slammed the show for indulging in outdated and offensive stereotypes that present Parisians as rude, sexist, and elitist.

The main love interest in Netflix’s controversial comedy “Emily in Paris” said he partly understands why critics have panned the show. “I think they’re right in a way,” Lucas Bravo, who plays chef Gabriel in the show, said during an interview with Cosmopolitan.

The 32-year-old French actor continued: “At some point, if you want to tell a story about Paris, you have to choose an angle. You have to choose a vision. French critics, they didn’t understand the fact that it’s just one vision. They’re like, ‘Oh, this is not what Paris is.’ Of course. Paris is many things.”

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China used to be the largest recipient of excess plastic waste, but the country cracked down on the practice in 2018. Since then, countries like the UK, the US, and Canada have scrambled to find other dumping grounds.

Many of these countries have since restricted the practice as well after getting inundated with junk plastic. Both the Philippines and Malaysia have sent shipping containers full of plastic waste back to where they came from.

"Malaysia will not be the dumping ground of the world", Yeo Bee Yin, Malaysia’s environment minister, said at the time. "We will fight back. Even though we are a small country, we can’t be bullied by developed countries."

"What the citizens of the UK [and other countries] think they have sent for recycling are actually being dumped in our country," she added. "Malaysians have a right to clean air, clean water, and a clean environment to live in, just like citizens of developed nations."

Low-income countries such as Bangladesh, Laos, Senegal, and Ethiopia have emerged as the new dumping grounds due to lax environmental laws, according to the Guardian.

Environmental groups have long warned that the plastic pollution crisis has been spiraling out of control. Many countries have vowed to reduce plastic production, and global conventions have been convened to improve international recycling and waste management. But plastic production is expected to increase by 40% over the next decade.

While the EU will seek to take responsibility for the amount of waste it generates, countries such as the UK will continue to pass the responsibility elsewhere.

"We had assumed the UK would at least follow the EU, and so it is a shock to find out now that instead they choose to have a far weaker control procedure, which can still permit exports of contaminated and difficultto-recycle plastics to developing countries," Jim Puckett, director of the Basel Action Network, told the Guardian. He added: "They are talking the talk, but they have failed to walk the walk."