From hillbilly to the White House: J. D. Vance’s rise to become Trump’s vice-president is seen by many as symbolic of a worrying trend in the US that’s further polarizing society. J. D. Vance’s story is the story of an America that has long felt overlooked. An America of the white working class, marked by economic decline, the opioid crisis and the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. An America that fears losing even the little that it still holds on to, through migration and social upheaval. J. D. Vance has undergone a remarkable transformation: from a fierce critic of Donald Trump to a loyal supporter of the MAGA movement and, ultimately, Trump’s vice-president. As far as his supporters are concerned, it is a career trajectory that gives him credibility. Critics, on the other hand, see in his politics a dynamic that could upset the political balance in the US and endanger democracy. Some already regard him as a potential contender for the presidency.
As seen on RTE One’s ‘Heated’, watch as Habitat Ireland’s Chief Executive, Jenny Williams, takes Rónán Ó Dálaigh on a tour around Habitat ReStore Drogheda, explaining how the social enterprise is building sustainable community. Learn more about how ReStore is making a difference for local people, communities and the planet, and find your local ReStore on our website: http://www.habitatireland.org/restore ‘Heated’ is a factual series which looks at the implications of climate change – telling stories of hope, inspiration and practical endeavour as we push to cut emissions. Learn more: https://bit.ly/3O4kOVn Originally aired: Tuesday 5th November, 7pm, RTE One
Tomorrow in London at Pentoville. Oration by Dr Lane of Aubane Hist Society. Hosted by Terence MacSwiney Society. #casement110 Remembering Roger Casement
Nothing has improved my work and life more than my new operating philosophy:Simplify.
I’ve seen such a dramatic improvement at Axios, and in my personal life, that I co-wrote a new book explaining step by step how it works. It’s called “Simplify: Do 50% More with 50% Less.
“Why it matters: Axios co-founders Jim VandeHei, Roy Schwartz and I dig deep into real-world experience and science to show you why most people waste years of their lives doing needless stuff out of habit or inertia.
You’ll learn the three-step Simplify operating system we’ve personally stress-tested: Confront what you do, Delete what you shouldn’t do, and Amplify what brings you joy and achievement.
Simplify is a method and a mindset — a set of power tools to help you kill complexity in your life and work so you can be happier and more productive.
Smart Brevity, our first book, was about simplifying how you communicate. Simplify extends that superpower to how you lead, manage, work and live.
Why this? Simplify is a modern survival guide written for this wild, high-velocity AI moment.
We’ll show you how to “say no” … to delete … to skip.
Why now? AI turns out to be the greatest complexity-generation machine ever invented. It mass-produces drafts, dashboards and action items, adding to the noise and distraction that engulf us.
Stunning stat:Research showswe spend two hours cleaning up each incident of AI-perpetrated workslop.
Why me? I’m excited for you to come along on my Simplify journey.
You’ll learn what AT&T CEO John Stankey, who has spent years taming complexity at one of the world’s oldest and most tradition-bound corporate giants, meant when he told me: “Stop till they squawk.”
And a top executive told me how Meta became a “funner, faster” company. The bottom line: Less is more. Simplify will give you more time for what matters.
Bonus for AMers only: If you preorder now, you’ll be eligible to join a prepublication “Ask Me Anything” with Jim and me. Email simplify@axios.com with proof of preorder, and we’ll send details.Preorder here.
Clinical AI in psychiatry falters when designers miss ward realities; better ethnographic UX research reduces alert fatigue, cognitive load, and boosts meaningful adoption.
SagorKundu/AdobeStock
COMMENTARY
I remember sitting in on a product meeting, watching a startup demo a risk-flagging dashboard. Clean interface, live electronic health record (EHR) integration, color-coded alerts flagging high-risk patients. It looked like the future of medicine: artificial intelligence (AI) spotting the patients who need care before any of us has a clue.
Then I started my psychiatry residency, and I watched a nurse swipe away that exact type of dashboard without looking at it.Not out of rejection, but out of survival. She had 4 deteriorating patients and a fifth refusing medications. What I thought was the future of psychiatric care had no idea what the ward looked like at hour 10 of a shift.
The Convenient Explanation
The technology industry typically handwaves moments like this with a reductionist narrative: clinicians are resistant to change. But this framing is commercially convenient. When a tool fails, asking what is wrong with the user costs nothing and changes nothing. It protects the product and pathologizes an entire profession rather than interrogating a design process.
Both Sides of the Screen
I have worked on both sides of this failure. Before residency, I designed AI and user experience (UX) solutions for the United Nations and the World Health Organization to reach populations under stress, navigating high-stakes decisions in chaotic environments. I now manage those same conditions as a psychiatry resident.
Moving between these two worlds, I have come to see how closely clinical empathy and UX empathy mirror each other. Both require you to set down your assumptions and sit inside someone else’s reality. A psychiatrist who projects what they imagine a patient needs is not doing good psychiatry. A designer who builds for a user they have never observed is not doing good design. The failures are structurally identical.
Diagnosis
The root cause is a design process that treats the clinical environment as a deployment context rather than a source of knowledge. Skipping that step does not save time. It produces tools that shift cognitive burden rather than reduce it, that serve managerial dashboards rather than frontline workflows, and that get swiped away by clinicians who do not have the bandwidth to explain why. The gap between product and practitioner is not a technology gap; it is an empathy gap, and it surfaces the same way across tools and platforms.
Ambient documentation tools like Nuance DAX or Abridge are often held up as psychiatry’s most obvious AI win. The time savings are real, but in psychiatry, the note is not a by-product of the encounter; it is an act of clinical interpretation.An AI summary captures words but not their weight. When the patient and the doctor know they are being recorded, something shifts in the room. A designer who had observed even a handful of psychiatric encounters would have recognized that the clinical note in psychiatry is not the same object it is in cardiology.
Suicide risk prediction models integrated into EHR systems face a different version of the same problem. The algorithms are often statistically sound. But when a quarter of an inpatient unit is flagged as high-risk on any given morning, which in an acute ward is not unusual, clinicians stop reading the flags. Alert fatigue is not a clinical failure. It is what happens when a designer optimizes for sensitivity without asking what a nurse at hour 10 of her shift can realistically process.
Chatbot-delivered therapy platforms like Woebot or Wysa show genuine engagement in consumer populations. But a product optimized to retain users is structurally incentivized to be as validating and comforting as possible, while effective therapy is sometimes neither. And when a patient crosses into acute risk, a chatbot has no architecture for that moment.
The Prescription
The path forward is not simply more collaboration. Collaboration without methodological rigor is just more meetings.What clinical AI development needs is the same standard of user research that medicine applies to everything else it adopts. That starts with sustained ethnographic observation: not a site visit, but enough time on the ward to understand how attention actually moves, what a workstation looks like at peak load, and where the invisible workarounds live. It continues with iterative prototyping that treats frontline clinicians as codesigners rather than validators, which means involving them before the interface exists, not after it has already been built.
It also requires redefining what success looks like: adoption rates and engagement metrics measure whether a tool got used, not whether it helped. Cognitive load, workflow disruption, and time-to-clinical-decision need to sit alongside them. This is standard practice in human-centered design for humanitarian contexts. There is no principled reason it cannot be standard here.
What is less obvious is that psychiatry is unusually well-positioned to drive that shift. Psychiatric training builds exactly the skills human-centered design demands: sitting with ambiguity, noticing what is not being said, constructing a model of another person’s experience from indirect evidence under time pressure. The developers who recognize that, and build accordingly, will find psychiatrists more useful collaborators than they expected.
Prognosis
Psychiatrists are not slow adopters. We are accurate evaluators. We are waiting for tools built by people who finally sat with the complexity of our ward and clinic before writing a single line of code. And we look forward to working with developers who extend to us the same quality of empathy they expect us to extend to every patient we see.
Dr Lam is a psychiatry resident in Hong Kong. She previously served as a consultant to the World Health Organization and as an AI and Data Science Fellow at UN Global Pulse.
Hippocampal injury combined with age-related atrophy increases susceptibility to late-life memory impairment, while larger baseline hippocampal volume may confer relative protection against dementia.
White-matter degeneration after TBI can outpace normative aging, driven by myelin loss, reduced remyelination capacity, and altered connectome architecture that relies on less efficient redundant pathways.
Endocrine disturbances persisting after injury may impair cognition and emotional health and modulate neuroinflammation, intersecting with age-related immune senescence.
Persistent microglial activation years post-injury increases oxidative stress and may contribute to cumulative structural remodeling and functional deficits, potentially heightening vulnerability to dementia with repeated trauma.
Neurodegenerative associations include AD-like pathology influenced by APOE-ε4, plus reported links to microinfarcts, Lewy bodies, and parkinsonism, underscoring the need for individualized risk stratification.
SHOW LESS
A traumatic brain injury sustained earlier in adult life is likely to interact with normal aging processes.
Learn more here.
Ramunas/AdobeStock
A significant number of individuals who sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) during early and mid-adulthood are living with disabilities within the US. When considering the impact of TBI over the years, it becomes clear that the effects of TBI may become more evident as aging takes place. This is because a TBI sustained earlier in adult life is likely to interact with normal aging processes.
TBI Can Exacerbate Age Related Changes
As the brain ages, there is naturally occurring atrophy of cerebral tissue including structures such as the hippocampus, which plays a significant role in memory and cognitive processing.The hippocampus is frequently impacted by TBI, thus increasing the likelihood of developing memory impairments as one ages.1Interestingly, a large hippocampal volume appears to offer protection from dementia.2 A decline in white matter volume is also observed during normal aging.3 White matter is mainly composed of myelinated axons and decreases in myelin density will hinder the capacity to transmit signals across the nervous system. Following TBI, these changes can occur at an accelerated rate compared with normal aging.4
The natural process of remyelination is also altered as the brain ages.3 Oligodendrocyte loss arising from the original injury may predispose the brain to decreased remyelination capacity.5 Oligodendrocytes are critical in maintaining the myelin sheath. White matter deterioration can manifest as cognitive deficits by affecting the efficiency of connectivity.6,7 Studies utilizing functional imaging have shown that there is a change in network connections during normal aging that is exacerbated with brain injury.8 Primary pathways that were established during development may be affected by injury and replaced with redundant pathways that, while enabling function, are not as effective as the originals and will render the brain more vulnerable to the effects of aging.9Given that even mild TBI can have an impact on connectivity, it is not surprising that the risk of dementia is increased with repeated injury.10,11
Normal aging also has an impact on neuroendocrine and immunological systems that can contribute to age-related cognitive decline.12,13 Long lasting hormonal dysregulation is not uncommon in many patients after TBI and may well contribute to neurodegenerative processes across time.10,11 Particularly noteworthy is the impact that hormones have on emotional health and cognition.14 Hormones also are known to have immunomodulatory effects. Microglia, the brain’s primary immune cells, are known to be especially vulnerable to the effects of age.15 Age related immune changes are also likely to be exacerbated by a history of TBI. Increased microglial activity can be observed years after the initial injury.16-18 Persistent microglial activation can increase oxidative stress thus contribute to age- and injury-induced structural changes and long-term functional deficits.18,19
TBI May Precipitate or Exacerbate Neurodegenerative Diseases
The possibility of developing dementia increases with advancing age.20 When considering the interaction between TBI and neurodegenerative diseases, it is critical to distinguish between the disease per se and the pathological characteristics that are associated with these diseases.21 This distinction is particularly notable in the case of Alzheimer disease (AD). Studies are suggestive of an increased incidence in AD-like pathology following TBI.11,22,23 In general, the association between a history of TBI and the onset of AD, has shown to be elusive.24,25 Nevertheless, a TBI history may influence the onset of AD given the appropriate genetic factors. APOE-4 and TBI appear to have a synergistic effect that increases the risk of AD-like symptomatology.26 The APOE-4 allele has been identified as a genetic predictor of AD.27 Associations between a history of TBI and Parkinson disease (PD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and multiple sclerosis have also been observed.28 TBI has been associated with cerebral microinfarcts, Lewy body accumulation, and parkinsonism.29 Lewy bodes are intercellular protein aggregates associated with dementia and PD. The association between PD and TBI has been widely debated due to conflicting studies.30,31 Parkinson symptomatology may be more prevalent after repeated trauma.31 Alternatively, a history of TBI may increment the likelihood of neurological illness in those patients who are at risk of PD.
Prognosis and Treatment Strategies
To achieve successful aging, it is important to have a lifestyle that integrates factors known to promote health and consider strategies that address changes in neuroendocrine and immune systems. These same approaches are especially important to those that have survived a TBI.Vigilance for the development of comorbidities is necessary along with proper awareness of physiological, environmental and genetic factors that may increase risk to cognitive decline.
Dr Griesbach is the national director of clinical research for the Centre of Neuro Skills. She currently holds an appointment at the Neurosurgery Department, Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA, and is past president and chair for the National Neurotrauma Society.
Published: November 24, 2009Last Updated: July 17, 2025
In an evening televised address on August 8, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon announces his intention to become the first president in American history to resign.With impeachment proceedings underway against him for his involvement in the Watergate affair, Nixon was finally bowing to pressure from the public and Congress to leave the White House.
Watergate Forces Nixon to Resign
In this History Rocks the 70’s video, brought to you by the History Channel, learn about special investigator Archibald Cox’s quest to investigate the Watergate cover-up. Nixon tries to get Cox fired several times. He asks Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General Ruckelshaus; both refuse and resign.
“By taking this action,” he said in a solemn address from the Oval Office, “I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.”
Just before noon the next day, Nixon officially ended his term as the 37th president of the United States. Before departing with his family in a helicopter from the White House lawn, he smiled farewell and enigmatically raised his arms in a victory or peace salute. The helicopter door was then closed, and the Nixon family began their journey home to San Clemente, California. Minutes later, Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States in the East Room of the White House.
After taking the oath of office, President Ford spoke to the nation in a television address, declaring, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” He later pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed while in office, explaining that he wanted to end the national divisions created by the Watergate scandal.
On June 17, 1972, five men, including a salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s reelection committee, were arrested for breaking into and illegally wiretapping the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate complex. Soon after, two other former White House aides were implicated in the break-in, but the Nixon administration denied any involvement. Later that year, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post discovered a higher-echelon conspiracy surrounding the incident, and a political scandal of unprecedented magnitude erupted.
Richard Nixon’s Paranoia Leads to Watergate Scandal
Show: The Presidents
Richard Nixon’s personality and character issues may have led to his involvement in the Watergate scandal.
In May 1973, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, headed by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, began televised proceedings on the rapidly escalating Watergate affair. One week later, Harvard law professor Archibald Cox was sworn in as special Watergate prosecutor. During the Senate hearings, former White House legal counsel John Dean testified that the Watergate break-in had been approved by former Attorney General John Mitchell with the knowledge of White House advisers John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, and that President Nixon had been aware of the cover-up.
Meanwhile, Watergate prosecutor Cox and his staff began to uncover widespread evidence of political espionage by the Nixon reelection committee, illegal wiretapping of thousands of citizens by the administration, and contributions to the Republican Party in return for political favors.
In July, the existence of what were to be called the Watergate tapes–official recordings of White House conversations between Nixon and his staff–was revealed during the Senate hearings. Cox subpoenaed these tapes, and after three months of delay President Nixon agreed to send summaries of the recordings. Cox rejected the summaries.
In what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, on October 20, 1973, in an unprecedented show of executive power, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, but both men refused and resigned their posts in protest. The role of attorney general then fell to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who reluctantly complied with Nixon’s request and dismissed Cox. Less than a half hour later, the White House dispatched FBI agents to close off the offices of the Special Prosecutor, Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General.
Cox’s successor as special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, leveled indictments against several high-ranking administration officials, including Mitchell and Dean, who were duly convicted. Meanwhile, on November 14, 1973, U.S. District Judge Gerhard Gesell ruled that Cox’s dismissal had been illegal.
Public confidence in the president rapidly waned, and by the end of July 1974 the House Judiciary Committee had adopted three articles of impeachment against President Nixon: obstruction of justice, abuse of presidential powers, and hindrance of the impeachment process.
On July 30, under coercion from the Supreme Court, Nixon finally released the Watergate tapes. On August 5, transcripts of the recordings were released, including a segment in which the president was heard instructing Haldeman to order the FBI to halt the Watergate investigation. Three days later, Nixon announced his resignation.
Arthur Brooks studies happiness for a living, and he says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults comes down to one culprit: a meaning crisis.
Brooks walks through the biology of falling in love, the real formula behind human suffering, and why a Harvard study spanning 85 years found deep relationships to be the single strongest predictor of a happy old age.
About the speaker: Arthur C. Brooks is a professor at both the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, where he teaches public and nonprofit leadership and management practice. Before joining Harvard in July 2019, he spent ten years as the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a well-known public policy think tank in Washington, DC.
Brooks has written 11 books, including the bestsellers “Love Your Enemies” (2019), “The Conservative Heart” (2015), and “The Road to Freedom” (2012). He writes a column for The Atlantic, hosts the podcast “The Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks,” and is featured in the 2019 documentary “The Pursuit.” He also serves on the board of the Legatum Institute, a think tank in London.
Timestamps
00:00:31 Chapter 1: Why life feels meaningless 00:07:20 Our 250,000-year-old wiring vs. complicated tech 00:16:17 The meaning recession 00:27:55 Chapter 2: The 5 essential elements of happiness 00:39:32 Love: Your brain on love 00:48:43 Transcendence: The cure for me, me, me 00:55:54 Calling: What am I meant to do? 01:02:29 Beauty: The beauty deficit 01:09:42 Suffering: Suffering is sacred 01:20:25 Chapter 3: How to overcome your addiction to technology 01:31:13 Get mad, detox, live differently 01:38:42 The detox playbook 01:49:48 A boring life vs. a real life
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
My name is Arthur Brooks. I’m a professor and a writer about the science of human happiness. My latest book is “The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.” Today on Big Think, we’re going to talk about three big things. Number one is the fact that people have been finding their lives less meaningful. The second is what should we do to live happier lives with more meaning? What are the strategies that we can all undertake? And last but not least, the issue of addiction, especially addiction to devices.
Chapter 1: Why life feels meaningless
There are many hypotheses about the explosion of depression and anxiety out there, especially for young adults under 30. The one thing that nobody’s in doubt about, however, is that these problems are real. The numbers just don’t lie. Depression has about tripled over the past 15 years for young adults, and anxiety has doubled. The question is, why?
People have posited that it’s a problem of a different generation, that boomers wrecked everything. They made the houses expensive. They ruined the environment. And a lot of boomers will say, no, the problem is it’s the attitude and it’s the fragileness of young people today. None of those explanations really hold water. People have been complaining about different generations for thousands of years.
The real reason that we actually find behind the epidemic of depression and anxiety is The answer to the question, does your life have meaning? For many years, decades, generations, the answer for almost everybody was yes. People had a strong sense of meaning in their lives, but then something happened. The percentage of Something happened very recently, really only in the past 15 years, that made life feel meaningless. And meaninglessness, the lack of meaning in life, lies behind the explosion of depression and anxiety.
So some people find meaning more easily than other people do. The number one predictor of your life feeling meaningful is living your life in real life. It’s relationships. It’s living kind of in the old way, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t that long ago that almost nobody said my life feels meaningless. But having distance between you and other people, or having technological mediation between you and other people, for example, having a screen between you and your friends, you and your loved ones, you and your family, Well, that changes life. It takes it from in real life to something more like, I don’t know, a simulation of real life, which is exactly what a lot of young people say today. When I interview them, they’ll say, my life feels fake. It feels like something’s missing. It feels like I’m living in a simulation.
The old movie, The Matrix, actually was about… A machine intelligence that kept people in simulations to take their energy. Well, we’re living in the matrix in no small part, or at least many people are. And the people who are most living in that simulation, that technological simulation that’s pulling them away from other people, These are the people who are lacking meaning. These are the people who say my life feels meaningless. These are the people who are suffering the most.
It’s funny because the first thing that I ask young people who say their life feels meaningless is, so are you looking for it? And not very coincidentally, the people who feel like life is meaningless, they’re actually not looking for meaning either. And what this suggests to me as a social scientist is the problem isn’t that meaning is impossible to find. It’s that looking for meaning has gotten harder. People are not, for some reason, and actually we do know the reason now, but the mystery is why people wouldn’t even look for this thing that’s actually so important in their lives. So the problem actually goes one step further back, not a lack of meaning, but a lack of the ability to look for meaning.
There are two very famous psychologists who’ve specialized in understanding the meaning of meaning. What does it mean to understand the meaning of life? There are Michael F. Steger and Frank Martella, two important social psychologists. They define meaning as really a combination of three things. Coherence, which is why things happen the way they do. Purpose, which is why I do the things that I do. And significance, which is why does my life matter? Those are the three big whys.
Furthermore, Mike Steger, the first of these psychologists, created a survey that’s very well validated. He’s published a lot with it, and other psychologists have as well, in the academic literature to see where people are in their meaning journey, whether they have a good sense. This is the Meaning in Life Questionnaire. I’ve done a lot of research with this as well, and I’ve administered this to my students for year after year after year and seen the results as this problem has gotten worse.
One dimension of meaning that you measure with the Meaning in Life Questionnaire is the presence. How much meaning do you feel in your life? How close are you to the goal of understanding the meaning of your life? The second is search. How hard are you looking?
So there’s four kinds of people with respect to this meaning in life questionnaire. There are those who have a really strong sense of their life’s purpose. Their presence is high, and they’re not looking as a result of that. These are happy homebodies. They’re really good for that. There are some who don’t have a strong presence. They don’t have it. They don’t know it. But they’re looking hard. These are hopeful wanderers. And I have a lot of students like that. And I was a lot like that when I was in my 20s. I didn’t know what my meaning in life really was. But I sure thought I could find it and I was looking hard for it. I was a hopeful wanderer. The third type is people who have a strong sense of life’s purpose.
Special offer for AM subscribers only: 
Bonus for AMers only: If you preorder now, you’ll be eligible to join a prepublication “Ask Me Anything” with Jim and me. Email 
canisgallicus 