Do you feel compelled to constantly check your smartphone for texts, emails or social media posts? Do you find yourself multi-tasking throughout the day just to get things done?
Yes? Then you may be robbing yourself of the very happiness, peace and joy you crave.
Happily, there is a simple remedy. According to the latest research, a powerful technique called “mindfulness”—the practice of purposely focusing your attention on the present moment—has been found to be the key element to happiness and a healthier mind and body.
Order your copy of Positive Psychology today and discover the many ways this technique can help liberate you from the stress, anxiety and depression you may be facing. You’ll discover how to help:
Increase your focus, alertness and mental relaxation with simple mindfulness techniques.
Short-circuit the anxiety caused by Facebook envy, Twitter rage and other social media hazards.
Build deeper and more intimate long-term relationships.
Employ simple activities that lead to happier, more resilient relationships.
Let go of resentment, envy and grudges—emotions that hurt you more than they hurt people who may have wronged you.
Stop beating yourself up when things go wrong—with powerful “self-compassion” techniques.
Experience the “warm glow” of happiness by re-discovering a universal trait of a life well-lived.
Develop the resilience to handle difficulties more easily and bounce back more rapidly after dramatic or unpleasant events.
And more powerful techniques from the mental health experts at Harvard Medical School.
Put the power of Positive Psychology to work for you now. Order your copy today and see how it can give you a happier, more contented outlook on life!
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Published: November 24, 2009Last Updated: May 28, 2025
On August 5, 1962, movie actress Marilyn Monroe is found dead in her home in Los Angeles. She was discovered lying nude on her bed, face down, with a telephone in one hand. Empty bottles of pills, prescribed to treat her depression, were littered around the room. After a brief investigation, Los Angeles police concluded that her death was “caused by a self-administered overdose of sedative drugs and that the mode of death is probable suicide.”
Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926. Her mother was emotionally unstable and frequently confined to an asylum, so Norma Jeane was reared by a succession of foster parents and in an orphanage. At the age of 16, she married a fellow worker in an aircraft factory, but they divorced a few years later. She took up modeling in 1944 and in 1946 signed a short-term contract with 20th Century Fox, taking as her screen name Marilyn Monroe. She had a few bit parts and then returned to modeling, famously posing nude for a calendar in 1949.
A Tour of Old Hollywood
The stars! The sights! See Hollywood as it was in the 1960s, as television and movies became equals in Los Angeles’ most famous neighborhood.
2:05m watch
She began to attract attention as an actress in 1950 after appearing in minor roles in the The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve. Although she was onscreen only briefly playing a mistress in both films, audiences took note of the blonde bombshell, and she won a new contract from Fox. Her acting career took off in the early 1950s with performances in Love Nest (1951), Monkey Business (1952), and Niagara (1953).
Celebrated for her voluptuousness and wide-eyed charm, she won international fame for her sex-symbol roles in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954). The Seven-Year Itch (1955) showcased her comedic talents and features the classic scene where she stands over a subway grating and has her white skirt billowed up by the wind from a passing train. In 1954, she married baseball great Joe DiMaggio, attracting further publicity, but they divorced eight months later.
In 1955, she studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York City and subsequently gave a strong performance as a hapless entertainer in Bus Stop (1956). In 1956, she married playwright Arthur Miller. She made The Prince and the Showgirl—a critical and commercial failure—with Laurence Olivier in 1957 but in 1959 gave an acclaimed performance in the hit comedy Some Like It Hot. Her last role, in The Misfits (1961), was directed by John Huston and written by Miller, whom she divorced just one week before the film’s opening.
Empty pill bottles were found in Marilyn Monroes bedroom after she was found dead in 1962.
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images
By 1961, Monroe, beset by depression, was under the constant care of a psychiatrist. Increasingly erratic in the last months of her life, she lived as a virtual recluse in her Brentwood, Los Angeles, home. After midnight on August 5, 1962, her maid, Eunice Murray, noticed Monroe’s bedroom light on. When Murray found the door locked and Marilyn unresponsive to her calls, she called Monroe’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who gained access to the room by breaking a window. Entering, he found Marilyn dead, and the police were called sometime after. An autopsy found a fatal amount of sedatives in her system, and her death was ruled probable suicide.
In recent decades, there have been a number of conspiracy theories about her death, most of which contend that she was murdered by John and/or Robert Kennedy, with whom she allegedly had love affairs. These theories claim that the Kennedys killed her (or had her killed) because they feared she would make public their love affairs and other government secrets she was gathering. On August 4, 1962, Robert Kennedy, then attorney general in his older brother’s cabinet, was in fact in Los Angeles. Two decades after the fact, Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, announced for the first time that the attorney general had visited Marilyn on the night of her death and quarreled with her, but the reliability of these and other statements made by Murray are questionable.
Decades after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains a major cultural icon.
Japan is considering integrating U.S.-made AI systems—such as Palantir’s Maven Smart System and Anduril’s Lattice—into its Self-Defense Forces to speed up military decision-making and improve interoperability with U.S. forces. To reduce dependence on foreign technology and address security concerns, Tokyo is also exploring a Japanese AI “command center,” potentially powered by Sakana AI, to oversee and coordinate multiple AI systems, with plans to host the supporting infrastructure inside Japan. Source: Nikkei Asia
Trump has REJECTED Zelensky’s appeal for hundreds of additional Patriot interceptors. He cited a shortage in U.S. stocks, saying they were needed in the Middle East instead. Zelensky says the number of air defense missiles supplied “has dropped threefold compared with 2025.” Source: Financial Times / Writer: Samuel
There’s a reason the State gets away with wasting so much of our money
1 day ago
5 min read
It costs twice as much to run Ireland today as it did 10 years ago. Total government expenditure in 2015 was just over €63 billion; today it is about €130 billion. I am saying “about” because no one is really sure of the exact figure. This year, the State will spend €15 billion-€20 billion on public procurement: buying stuff on your behalf from private contractors. The reason we can’t be more specific on amounts is that, as things stand, the State can’t say precisely whether it got what it paid for, at the price agreed, nor whether projects delivered what they originally claimed they would deliver. The reason for this messiness is there is no total figure for what the State is buying, from whom and for what. Yes, you read that correctly.
There is no aggregate accountability in Ireland because each spending department is its own fiefdom, with different systems and different budgetary procedures.
Nothing joins up. What’s more, no one is in charge. There is no one person whose job it is to add up all the departments’ expenditure and give a precise figure. In the turf war that is intra-departmental politics, the departments don’t give details unless forced to by public pressure. Within the public service, a culture of secrecy shrouds even the most basic transactions. Tax money seems to disappear into a black hole and what often comes out are second-rate services, budget overruns and projects that are not completed on time. The disparity between what we pay in tax and what we get from the State is a source of deep frustration, particularly relative to the public services delivered by similarly wealthy European social democracies.
The question is why is this happening?
When policies are announced in Ireland, is there any mechanism for measuring their success? This is particularly important when current expenditure is bigger than capital expenditure. At least with capital spending you can see the thing that was supposed to be built. With current expenditure, spending is far more amorphous, open-ended and driven by vague aspirations rather than specific outcomes. When the State is spending so much money, an unwillingness or inability to measure specifically how much is being committed to various projects means the country is simply drifting, buoyed up by American multinationals, allowing the State to get away with waste.
In recent months a group of young maths and physics graduates called The Problem Solving Association, working for purely altruistic, one might even say patriotic, reasons, came together to use their technical ability, data expertise and maths brains to assess what is happening to your tax money once it gets sucked into the bureaucratic vacuum that is the Irish State. They are doing this, making data available to the citizens, precisely because the State won’t.
These young, concerned citizens have created a vast public procurement tracker that, in their words, “generates vast amounts of transactional data, but this information remains fragmented across departments, agencies and reporting systems. The Public Payments Tracker consolidates this distributed data into a unified analytical framework, aggregating records from over 190 state entities covering €78.5 billion across 400,000+ transactions”.
The results are shocking.
They found that the Irish State can’t trace a euro of public money from the budget line that authorised it through to the supplier who was paid for it. Hundreds of thousands of tenders, contract awards, purchase orders and payments sit in disconnected systems that never join up. So the basic “contract delivery test” that every private company accountant requires to assess spending can’t be applied at any scale. The association asked every Government department a set of questions: how many tenders finished under, on or over estimate? How much was spent above award values? And what was total procurement spend over five years? Only a few departments answered all three completely. The departments of Housing and Justice answered none.
All accounting departments in big organisations follow a money trail, a sequence from buying the services to the delivery, which typically goes along the following sequential pattern: tender → contract award → contract → purchase order → invoice → payment. Once an organisation follows this basic pattern, everyone knows who paid for what and to whom; the purchase order accords with the invoice documenting what work was done and, on receipt of this, the contractor is paid. This is precisely how to run a company.
The Irish State can’t provide this for the running of government. We might as well be putting our finger in the air when it comes to assessing what is spent on what for what outcome. The national accounting system has evolved in a siloed manner, with every spending department looking after its own affairs and nobody aggregating any data in an easy-to-use format. There is no central organisation that aggregates all spending, which might give a top civil servant or campaigning politician a clear picture of how much is being spent on what.
Once the mathematicians started looking at the numbers they found a mess: there were no unique identifiers for suppliers, tenders, contracts or payments: nothing links them. Because of the use of wildly inconsistent formats such as different column headers, different structures and standardised reporting across bodies, it was almost impossible to readily compare and aggregate data. Many departments report data in a pdf rather than machine-readable format (excel/csv), even when the numbers originate in excel. According to the number crunchers, some departments even say this is deliberate “to avoid manipulation” – but manipulation is the whole point of the exercise to be able to compare and assess value for money.
I realise this may all seem technical, arcane and a bit remote, but the Government is a money in/money out system. Taxes come in and services come out. The upside to standardising all this information – knowing who is getting paid for what, how many suppliers there are and how many departments are using the same suppliers for similar tasks – is enormous.
From a value-for-money perspective the Irish State is the largest buyer in the country (€15–20 billion per year) but behaves like it is hundreds of small buyers. It is not benefiting from its dominant buyer position. Think of the deals it could get by negotiating as one. In principle it has more buying power than a retail giant such as Walmart in many categories; in practice it has almost none. A linked ledger is what turns “hundreds of disconnected buyers” into one big buyer that can actually negotiate. The State could also compare prices for similar goods and projects across bodies and regions. It can also see total exposure to a supplier, concentration risks and any supplier’s performance can be pooled instead of relearned separately by every public body.
The power of data is transparency. It is the power of the future. Let’s embrace it on behalf of all of us.
Oh, where are you coming from, soldier, gaunt soldier, With weapons beyond any reach of my mind, With weapons so deadly the world must grow older And die in its tracks, if it does not turn kind? —Song for Three Soldiers, Stephen Vincent Benét
The 1990s were foundational movie-watching years for me. I was in my teens, and the films I consumed filled out my world, which at the time was narrow. I grew up in the small town of Winterset, Iowa (pop. 5,000) and it was through cinema that I first saw the gritty streets of New York City; witnessed a passionate kiss between lovers; heard Arabic, French, and Japanese; and experienced what has become my favorite activity: being told a story on a big screen in a room full of strangers.
That decade was a golden age for disaster movies: Twister (1996, man vs. nature), Independence Day (1996, man vs. alien), and Armageddon (1998, man vs. meteor). I logged countless hours in movie theaters watching beautiful people scream, run, drive, scream, shoot, cleverly quip despite certain death, kiss, scream, and always (even if a few characters had shuffled off the mortal movie coil gracefully and cinematically along the way) the heroes triumph against The Big Bad Thing that has come to destroy them—be it tornado, extraterrestrial, or killer rock from space.
Watching these films was a thrilling experience: cramming into the back row of a theater with my nerdy friends, big, buttery popcorn and enormous Diet Coke in hand as we screeched in terror, clutching one another tightly while the ubiquitous James Horner or John Williams score soared, blubbering when Bruce Willis sacrificed himself for the greater good, and holding our breath, praying that our favorite characters would make it out alive. It was exhilarating. These films were glorious and glossy products that Hollywood reliably churned out and that we would happily watch over and over again.
As I’ve gotten older, my palette has matured. I gravitate toward arguably more intellectual fare, but out of a sense of nostalgia—or maybe duty—I buy tickets and go to the sequels, prequels and remakes of the films of my youth; showing up to the theater for each reboot, franchise installment, and sequel. And each time, I sit in my seat, decidedly disconnected. I do not clutch the arm of my husband in the seat next to me, I do not hold my breath and pray. These new films are glossier than ever, but something has changed for me. Maybe the scripts have gotten worse, maybe there have just been one too many sequels.
Or perhaps it’s a third thing. Perhaps it’s that I don’t particularly want to pay $20 to see the screaming, the running, the driving, the shooting, the clever quipping. I neither seek out nor shy away from escapism in my cinema (I’m a film curator, my profession requires an open mind. But when footage of bombs dropping, genocide, and the loss of life is livestreamed every day on the small screen in our pockets, I realize I have become tired—exhausted, in fact—by the endless parade of CGI disasters released every Friday at a movie theater near you.
What’s more, my standard of cinematic terror has been so raised by Peter Watkins’ 1965 pseudo-documentary The War Game that every other big screen cataclysmic storyline feels like folly, other disaster movies come across as distraction.
Watkins, a Brit, was commissioned by the BBC to make The War Game. Most people knew nothing about the arms race, and Watkins planned to make an informational film about the effect of a nuclear strike on Britain.
Boy, did he.
The finished film—a 47-minute, uncompromising nightmare—was immediately suppressed by the BBC, who refused to release it, declaring it “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.” (The National Archives 1965). Though they denied it, saying the decision to pull The War Game from television was their own, there is evidence that the BBC screened the film for members of the British Ministry of Defence, who pressured them to ban the film. The War Game was eventually given limited release in cinemas, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and finally aired on the BBC in 1985, twenty years later.
Watkins was staunchly anti-war, and throughout his career he used his medium to faithfully communicate his message. Culloden, the feature he made prior to The War Game, portrayed the brutality and futility of the battlefield; and with The War Game, he set out to detail the ultimate disaster: man vs. nuclear catastrophe; man vs. extinction. At a steady clip, Watkins, using a cast of non-actors, matter-of-factly dramatizes September 18 to Christmas Day—the 99 days of terror that follow the dropping of a Soviet nuclear bomb on the outskirts of Kent, England.
Shot in the style of a dry news report, Watkins steadies his camera dispassionately at his subjects, forcing the audience to bear witness as a narrator, without an ounce of sentiment or dramatic soundtrack, explains how little time the citizens of Kent have to take shelter (approximately three minutes, maybe fewer) at the drop of the bomb; how—because he was struck by the bomb’s thermal radiation—this little boy’s eyeballs melted; how 12 seconds later this building collapses due to the subsequent shockwave; or how 10 miles away in Rochester, an airburst has caused the firestorm you see here. And here we see, horrified viewers, Britain is striking back—dropping a bomb on the Soviets. Nuclear war has begun.
The flash from a bomb detonation blinds a civil defense worker and a passerby, in this still from “The War Game.” Via BBC.
As the medical professionals interviewed in the film tell us: those who live, who make it past the initial blast, the chaos, and the overwhelmed emergency rooms (for every 800 injured, there is one doctor) will succumb to their wounds, to radiation poisoning, or simply to the mental toll of what they have seen.
Those who endure beyond these atrocities live to face the awful truth: After the bomb drops, there are no heroic gestures—this isn’t that kind of disaster movie. No single man or woman rises up from the ashes to lead the weak to victory against armed men guarding the caches of food—the hungry are shot on the spot. A sick child does not miraculously overcome his ailments thanks to the power of love—no, the narrator impassively tells us that he has seven bedridden years to come, and then will die from an unknown illness, likely caused by highly enriched uranium.
Throughout the film Watkins weaves in “man on the street” interviews with the people of Kent, those not involved in the dramatization. The narrator asks them what they know about nuclear war, or the threat of nuclear-armed states. “Very little.” “I’m afraid I don’t know much about atomic radiation at all.” “There won’t be a war, no.” A resident is seen showing off his bomb shelter—a shallow hole in the ground, covered by sandbags.
You can imagine the film concluding in a 1965 screening room, the lights turning on to reveal BBC executives and UK government officials with ashen faces, all immediately agreeing that it would never see the light of day, if they had anything to say about it. You might even agree with them, to a degree: It is a hard film to watch. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw said that after he saw The War Game, “It seemed as if I had entered a new era of disillusioned adulthood” (Bradshaw 2025). You can choose, then, to not watch it. Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books of my childhood, you too can choose your own movie disaster when you go to the cinema. Or sit on the couch or pick up your phone: man vs. fill in the blank.
As I write this, we’re a month into another war with Iran, which the White House and its newly retitled Department of War has named “Operation Epic Fury.” White House spokespeople are struggling to define the goal of the operation, or the action itself: It’s a war, or definitely not a war; the goal is to disarm Iran’s nuclear capabilities; or Iran has no nuclear capabilities because we already obliterated those.
Since the operation began, the White House has been posting stylized videos on its TikTok account to promote the war. In one, Nintendo Wii games are intercut with clips of “unclassified” infrared footage of bombs dropping on Iran military sites; a Wii golf game declares “Hole in one!” before cutting to the annihilation of a jet; a bowling ball hits all the pins, followed by grainy black-and-white footage of an artillery site ablaze: “Strike!”
The video that has gotten the most attention is one featuring clips of Hollywood blockbusters. Titled “Justice the American Way,” followed by the fire and American flag emojis, and set to music from the video game Halo, the TikTok begins with Robert Downey Jr. as Ironman’s Tony Stark, at a bay of computers. “Wake up, Daddy’s home,” he announces. In quick succession we see: Russell Crowe in Gladiator (“Strength and honor”), Mel Gibson in Braveheart (“What will you do without freedom?”), Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick (“Maverick’s inbound”) before the screen fills with infrared footage of an enormous explosion. Scenes from John Wick, Superman (“I’m here to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.”), Star Wars, and Transformers follow, alongside half-a-dozen shots of bombs dropping. It is not possible for viewers to know if in the strike footage there is loss of life, or to know what is left when the dust clears, but there is no question that they will recognize Mel Gibson, and everyone certainly knows that is Tom Cruise.
The United States military has a long, healthy relationship with Hollywood. Newsreels from wartime, movies romanticizing war; the military-entertainment complex is strong.
But these TikTok videos…there is something especially dangerous happening here. What associations do the average person have with Top Gun: Maverick? Big, buttery popcorn, Diet Coke, a sweeping Hans Zimmer score, Alpha masculinity. By connecting scenes of Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell to shots of bomb impacts in Iran, a message is being sent loud and clear: Real war is just like the movies. Dropping bombs makes you feel like a Hollywood movie star, like an Avenger, like Tom Cruise.
With The War Game, Watkins’ message was clear: When a bomb drops, the destruction is so complete, there can be no heroes. When you see the horrors that come from the pushing of the button, do you still think the man who pushes the button is brave?Sixty years later, the official White House TikTok account is publishing videos of military footage set to Los Del Río’s The Macarena, and the audience loves it: Comments on these videos are rapturous in their praise. “Whoever runs this account deserves a raise and is a legend.” “Iconic.”
I am nostalgic about those silly disaster movies of my youth and the thrill they gave me—who doesn’t like being entertained? Cinema has been thrilling audiences since 1896, when brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière showed an audience footage of a train arriving at a station and they fled, thinking the train was coming straight for them. When they realized there was no danger, they returned to their seats and an industry was born.The War Game was dangerous because it told the truth about the horrors of nuclear war; these TikTok videos are dangerous because they tell a lie—that war is a game and it’s as easy as getting a hole in one.
Editor’s note: Like many of the older films that are mentioned in this article, “The War Game” can be seen by doing a search for it on YouTube. More recent movies can be viewed by paying the usual subscription services online, buying a DVD, or renting via the local library—or even [shocking] going in-person to a revival at the local cinema. And if one looks hard enough, there are still a few summertime drive-in movie theaters around, as the July issue of the Bulletin goes to press.
The Bulletin elevates expert voices above the noise. But as an independent nonprofit organization, our operations depend on the support of readers like you. Help us continue to deliver quality journalism that holds leaders accountable. Your support of our work at any level is important. In return, we promise our coverage will be understandable, influential, vigilant, solution-oriented, and fair-minded. Together we can make a difference.
The Rundown: Some U.S. schools are getting fleets of remotely piloted “attack drones” that can fire pepper rounds, disorient, and even ram an active shooter in the halls — controlled by a private response team hundreds of miles away in Austin.
The details:
Nine schools in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado are joining Mithril Defense’s rollout, with quadcopters stationed in secure boxes around each campus.The drones launch within seconds and can spray pepper gel, fire strobes, and sound sirens to slow a shooter down, or ram into them at up to 70 mph.Human operators fly the drones remotely from Mithril’s Austin headquarters and relay the shooter’s position to responding police. Florida allocated $557K for a three-school pilot, Georgia approved $500K for five schools, and a new Colorado charter is paying its own way.
Why it matters: The $4B a year U.S. schools spend on physical security buys hardware that reports; these drones act on a judgment call made by a contractor in Austin. Officials are uneasy — Omnilert’s AI gun detector once flagged a teenager’s Doritos bag, yet failed to see the handgun used in a fatal Tennessee school shooting.
Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up
Parents, if you’re thinking about subjecting your child to some bizarre AI experiment: don’t.
“Toddler spent her first night ever sleeping with someone else in the same room: her toddler cousin,” wrote Nicholas Charriere, the CEO of an AI-powered website builder called Mocha, in an X post on Friday.
Charriere, seeing that his child was about to have a very formative experience, decided he would record “everything” the two tykes said to each other in their “nonsensical toddler dialect” by “sneaking a mic in there.”
Then, of course, he fed the recordings into an AI model, Claude.
Using the AI, Charriere explained, he “built a private webpage for the whole family with the audio split into clips, all named and trimmed.”
Attached is a photo of the webpage autopsy of the kids’ conversations, divided into a tracklist of all the best goo-goo-ga-ga highlights, like “Hi Mama,” “I’m a Big Boy,” and “I Did Fart.”
“Pure joy from everyone,” Charriere declared. “AI is pretty great.”
Not everyone agreed. Charriere’s tale was met with heaps of backlash, with many calling it “creepy” and invasive.
“I’d hate my parents if I found out they did this,” one replier wrote, receiving more likes than Charrierer’s original tweet (as did many other call-out posts). “No respect for privacy. Those are people, not miniature versions of yourself made for the purpose of amusing you.”
Mike Duncan, the history podcaster and author, was even more scathing.
“Why preserve the sanctity and privacy of late night sleepover chats when you can secretly record everything and feed into the AI slop machine and post about it,” he fumed.
Any time parenting and AI intersect is going to be divisive, and it’s a topic we’re going to keep hearing more about. (This incident went viral enough that it ended up on X’s trending tab under the incredible AI-generated headline, “Tech Exec Uses AI to Clip Toddler Chats for Family Memories.”) Some moms and dads see AI tools as a way to make parenting a little easier, keeping their kids placated and occupied and providing themselves some relief. AI can help them make decisions — like, controversially, picking their child’s name.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that he heavily relies on ChatGPT to care for his kid and recently mused about using AI to generate podcasts on a child’s favorite topics that they can listen to on their way to school. (A comedian’s rejoinder, “What if you just talked to your children,” went mega-viral.)
AI skeptics, though, see the tech as a lazy way of replacing human interaction and note the privacy risks that AI models pose. AI companies aren’t always transparent about how the data you feed into them, including your conversations, will be used, and it’s possible that the stuff you share will be used to train future AI models.
Spying on toddlers and feeding their secrets into an AI might not be giving away anything too compromisingly personal, given how young they are. But you have to admit it’s a little strange to build a website out of it and brag about it online.And how might the child feel when they realize that they can’t trust anything they say to be private? We suspect that there may not be “pure joy” for that revelation.
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.