I’m a doctor — here are 5 signs your body needs more nutrients

The caught-on-camera saga unfolded just moments after the flight from London had touched down at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport last Thursday.

Chargers let victory slip away from them as Arizona Cardinals kick a last-second field goal for the win.

Eight months after capturing the UFC featherweight crown, Ilia Topuria has managed to find himself linked to champions in three of the surrounding weight classes — not to mention the most successful crossover star in the history of the sport. On the plus side is Merab Dvalishvili, Topuria’s fellow Georgian and good friend who just...

Law enforcement officials found five people killed in a shooting inside a home southeast of Seattle and took a teenager into custody, police said.

Researchers in South Korea have developed a drone-based flying shopping cart that can go where no cart has gone before.

Israel Defense Forces said it struck a Hezbollah naval base in Beirut, along with other terrorist targets. Meanwhile, Iran worked to rally Gulf Arab nations.

“I’m not eating gummies,” Harris said, breaking into her signature cackle.

Former President Trump holds a slim lead over Vice President Kamala Harris in Georgia, one of the key states for winning the White House.

With Part 2 of "Simone Biles: Rising" coming out Friday, the film's director, Katie Walsh, sat down with Fox News Digital to discuss to "awesome" experience of following her around Paris.

The pieces are go-with-everything black, but they’re anything but basic.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel on Tuesday on his 11th visit to the region since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.

Rev. Marcelo Pérez was shot dead by two gunmen when he was in his van, just after he had finished celebrating Mass, the state prosecutors' office said.

China's military is conducting live-fire drills around islands near Taiwan Tuesday that are being tracked by the Taiwan Defense Ministry.

Eagle Academy in D.C. abruptly closed after years of financial troubles and declining student enrollment. Public records and interviews show the city and Eagle’s own board lacked a clear picture of the school’s situation.

Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox.

Israel’s elite spy agency Mossad has a full-spectrum arsenal of high-tech and low-tech tricks to hunt down Israel’s enemies and bring them to justice.

St. Louis lawmakers passed a bill that would repeal an ordinance from the 1940s that barred barbers from working after 6:30 p.m. and on Sundays and holidays.

Something really stinks in The Bronx. A landlord is holding his nose and gagging after getting socked with a $1,000 summons from the city Health Department over a foul odor identified as resembling "animal waste" on his premises.

Whatever the outcome on Nov. 5, moving abroad to work remotely is becoming a real option. But it takes careful financial planning.

"How you respond to the clock change can set the tone for the following months," writes Kari Leibowitz.

The Celtics will raise an 18th championship banner to the Garden’s already crowded rafters. The Knicks are welcome to watch. 

Elliot Mintz became the long distance confidant of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Then he saw the cruel side of Lennon and picked up the pieces after the former Beatle was fatally shot.

Voters make selections at their voting booths inside an early voting site on October 17, 2024 in Hendersonville, North Carolina. | Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images The Today, Explained podcast is taking a deep dive into the major themes of the 2024 election through the lens of seven battleground states. We’ve heard from voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin so far; this week we turn to North Carolina, where a storm last month devastated the state — and some of its election infrastructure. Officials in North Carolina are preparing for an election like no other in the wake of Hurricane Helene. The storm scrambled North Carolinians’ voting infrastructure — washing away absentee ballots, disrupting mail service, and destroying polling locations — and could impact what Election Day looks like in two weeks. The state is expected to be close — former President Donald Trump won by just 1.3 percentage points in 2020, and current polling averages suggest an even tighter race this year — and all eyes are on the mountains, which received the brunt of the hurricane’s impact last month.  While some parts of life are getting back to normal after Hurricane Helene swept through last month — power returning, internet service restored — many people in the west of the state are still without potable water in their homes.  With so many people displaced or managing repairs, experts have raised concerns about depressed voter turnout. “The question is going to be: If you’re having to avoid swallowing water while you shower, how important is voting going to be to you?” Steve Harrison, a political reporter at NPR affiliate station WFAE, told Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram.  In an effort to ensure the election proceeds as close to normally as possible, local election officials have been allowed to move polling locations and adjust hours. The state has also updated rules for absentee voters, allowing them to return their completed ballots to counties other than their home county, as previously required — though the state stopped short of re-instituting a three-day grace period for ballots to be returned for counting.  Even with the added flexibility, actually communicating the changes to voters in the affected areas remains challenging. “Information is hard to get, because the internet is down and cell service is down, and everything changes on a day-to-day basis,” Buncombe County resident Kaitlyn Leaf said. “Sometimes hour by hour.” (Leaf is married to a Vox Media employee, audio engineer Patrick Boyd.) So far, officials’ efforts to create more flexibility for voters seem to be paying off: The state set a turnout record on the first day of early voting, which began in all 100 counties on October 17, though it’s unclear how many of those votes were cast in the affected areas.  These voters could have an outsized impact on the outcome of the national election, according to Harrison’s analysis. Of the 15 counties that were most impacted by Helene, Biden won only two in 2020: Buncombe, home to the liberal city of Asheville, and Watauga, where Appalachian State University is located. The rest, Trump won by wide margins.  Polling averages show the 2024 presidential race in North Carolina as a dead heat, which means any decrease in turnout in those counties could ultimately hurt the former president’s chances.   “If it’s incredibly close, I don’t think we’re going to hear the last of Helene,” Harrison told Today, Explained.  Election Day worries in other battleground states, briefly explained  North Carolina isn’t the only state that could run into Election Day obstacles, though Hurricane Helene’s impact makes its situation unique. Extraordinarily thin margins and wrinkles in the vote-counting rules in other battleground states could delay the full results of the election past November 5. With polls showing several of the battleground states neck-and-neck between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, election officials are warning that they may need to count a greater share of ballots before media organizations are able to reliably make their projections, resulting in a multi-day process similar to 2020. Many states are also dealing with last-minute attempts to purge voter rolls and change election rules. But at least two states are likely to see delays because their election rules stayed the same.  In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, election officials are barred from processing mail ballots until 7 am on Election Day. In other states with mail-in ballots, workers may prepare ballots for counting earlier — verifying signatures, flattening the ballots — in order to streamline vote counting on Election Day. Wisconsin and Pennsylvania election workers’ later starts may result in delayed calls this year, particularly if the race comes down just a few thousand votes.  Both state legislatures considered updating their rules after the 2020 election, but conspiracy theories and partisan gridlock ultimately killed bills that would have done so.  “It’s a real frustration,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt told CNN in September. “[The proposed legislation] does not benefit any candidate. It does not benefit any party. It only benefits the public in knowing results earlier and our election officials, who otherwise don’t have to work day and night.” As we saw in 2020, any delay between Election Day and the final results leaves ample room for conspiracy theories to take hold — something Trump is likely to take full advantage of. In 2020, Trump posted about “surprise ballot dumps” in Milwaukee after a jump in Biden votes when the city reported all of its absentee ballots at the same time. (He still falsely claims that he won Wisconsin in 2020.) CNN political correspondent Sara Murray says voters ought to ignore the conspiracy theories in the event of a longer wait for results in 2024.“Just because this takes a couple of days doesn’t mean that there is some kind of mass-scale voter fraud going on,” she told Today, Explained. “It doesn’t mean machines are flipping votes. It doesn’t mean people are throwing away ballots. It just means election workers are still counting the votes.”

Photographs by Jenna GarrettThe kids held it together pretty well until right after gymnastics. At the end of a long day that included school, a chaotic playdate, and a mostly ignored lunch of sandwiches, the parenting coach Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta picked up her twins from the tumbling gym around 5:30. The two 8-year-olds joined their 6-year-old sister inside Chelsey’s silver minivan.Chelsey, an energetic 41-year-old, promotes gentle parenting, a philosophy in which prioritizing a good relationship with your kid trumps getting them to obey you. I was tagging along with her family for a few days to see how her strategy—stay calm, name emotions, don’t punish kids for acting out—works in practice.During the long, hot, winding ride back home, things began to devolve. One of the girls didn’t want any music. One wanted music and to sing along. One was turning the heater up too high—at least according to her sister, who was overheating. (I agreed not to name the kids or to disclose which one behaved in which way.)[Read: The fairy-tale promises of Montessori parenting]Chelsey pulled over to settle everyone down. In the soothing, melodic tone that she recommends parents use with their children, she assured the girls that having some dinner would make them feel a lot better.“No it won’t,” one of the girls said.“You’re feeling like it won’t,” Chelsey said, validating her daughter’s feelings—another one of her parenting tricks.“Don’t talk to me like I’m 3 years old,” the girl shot back.By the time they arrived home, two girls were in tears. There were fruitless demands for screen time and ice cream. Chelsey held one sobbing child while another chopped vegetables. A freshly prepared soup was ignored, and the girls ate that ubiquitous kid comfort food: pasta with shredded cheese.To an untrained eye, it might look like Chelsey’s methods didn’t work that night. The evening seemed to substantiate the fears of parents and experts who think gentle parenting might be too gentle, turning kids into entitled monarchs and parents into their exhausted therapists. But Chelsey says her goal wasn’t to get the kids to behave better. It was to maintain her loving connection to them. She blamed herself for placing too many demands on them throughout the day, and for not preparing them for the presence of a reporter. “They were super dysregulated,” she told me later. “They didn’t have the capacity to cooperate.”I wouldn’t have handled the post-gymnastics meltdown exactly the way Chelsey did, but I’m also not sure how I would have handled it at all. (My son is six months old, so I have a little time before he starts complaining about my song choices.) I understand that you’re not supposed to yell at your kids, but also that, occasionally, you’re supposed to get them to do what you say—like briefly stop looking at a screen or eat some actual food. This is the essential conundrum that brings people to gentle parenting.By day, Chelsey runs a parent-coaching business with her own mom, Robin Hauge. I’m like a lot of the parents who turn to them for help, and like a lot of the Millennials who are nervously having kids these days: schooled in the latest child-psychology research, in possession of disposable income, and desperately trying to do better than my own parents. Many clients, Robin told me, are “searching for something different than they had.” Maybe that something, I thought, is gentle parenting. Top left: Chelsey at home before heading to pick up her kids from school. Bottom right: Her mother, Robin, during a visit with the family. (Jenna Garrett for The Atlantic) I found Chelsey through TikTok, where she has some 300,000 followers. Almost as soon as the blue plus sign materialized on my pregnancy test last July, the app’s algorithm magically took note and began serving me her videos.My husband and I spurred this process along, cramming, as we were, for the midterm known as “baby.” We bought books. We downloaded name apps. We fought sectarian wars over the relative correctness of rival infant-sleep strategies. The parenting internet was happy to oblige. At one point, I saw an Instagram post that explained how to talk to my kid about avocados. (Hint: Do not say “they’re good for you!”) It was all so confusing, and I desperately wanted to do it right.Chelsey seemed to offer a step-by-step parenting plan. In one video, she shows just how solicitous gentle parents should be toward their children. Role-playing both the parent and the child, she demonstrated what not to do when your kid refuses to put her jacket on.Wearing a pink bike helmet, Chelsey portrays a willful child screaming, “I don’t want to put my stupid jacket on!” Then, slightly louder, Chelsey plays the mom, saying, “I don’t care! It’s cold outside. Put your jacket on!” Playing the child again, Chelsey grabs the jacket and thrashes it around the room.Then Chelsey breaks character to address her TikTok audience. By yelling over her child, Chelsey explains, she escalated the situation. If this happens, she says, the parent should soften her demeanor. They could, for example, apologize. “You know what, sweet pea? That was really tricky with the jacket,” the parent should say. “I’m so sorry … I’m going to work on using my inside voice.” Then she could cook her kid’s favorite dinner to make up for it. If your child doesn’t respond when you apologize, Chelsey says, that’s fine—it’s on you to repair the relationship.[Read: How raising a child is like writing a novel]Chelsey also explains how a parent should handle a child screaming about her jacket. Instead of yelling back, she says, you should speak in a whisper and carry the jacket yourself, or stuff it into their backpack. “Frankly,” she says, “I would not force a kid to put a jacket on.”Watching the video, I tried to imagine my parents apologizing to me after I refused to do something they said. This was difficult, because my parents have never apologized to me, and also, until I was well into my 20s, I never refused to do anything they said.Russian parents like mine, who believe that children should always listen to their parents and that getting cold is a death sentence, would have long ago hit “Unfollow.” Indeed, when I recently told my cousin about gentle parenting, he scoffed. “This is the road to prison,” he said.I don’t have many parenting role models who aren’t Russian. Most of my American friends don’t have kids. I myself grew up in the ’90s in West Texas, where a “gentle” punishment meant detention instead of a beating. I want to do better by my son—if only I can figure out how. Left: Chelsey brushes her daughter’s hair in the morning before school. Right: One of her daughters holds a chicken in the school garden. (Jenna Garrett for The Atlantic) Chelsey and her husband, Samuel, live with the girls in an airy house tucked into a redwood forest north of Santa Cruz, California. Their days consist of work-from-home sprints interrupted by taxiing their kids to school and activities, a lifestyle that’s common in their area.In 2018, Chelsey, who has a Ph.D. in education, was working as a research associate at Stanford, parenting three children under 3, and also helping raise her teenage niece, who had come from Mexico to stay with the family for a while. By her own description, she was flailing. One morning, all three of the little girls fought over the one purple spoon in a set of rainbow-colored spoons. Chelsey tried suggesting the yellow spoon, or the red spoon, or that they take turns with the purple spoon. No dice. “It was like, everybody all crying all the time,” she told me.Noticing her struggles, Robin, Chelsey’s mom, who runs a school for children with behavioral problems, thought Chelsey might benefit from taking a parenting class she offered, in which she taught parents how to handle challenging children. Perhaps sensing how such a proposal would land with her own adult daughter, she had Chelsey’s cousin bring up the idea. “You can’t suggest anything to your daughter,” Robin told me.Chelsey was skeptical. But she now says the course “changed everything.” Previously, she had tried to learn about gentle parenting—which is also sometimes called respectful parenting, and arose in the middle of the 20th century out of concerns that parents were too harsh—from reading books, but she didn’t understand how to put the ideas into practice. The class made Chelsey realize that she was speaking to her kids negatively much of the time—stop hitting your sister! Often, what the kids needed was not more instructions but what she calls “connection,” or feeling loved and seen by their parents. (The correct way to resolve the spoon fight, Chelsey says, was to validate each child’s reality, saying something like “You really wanted the purple spoon. The orange spoon doesn’t taste good.” The child might still pout, but that’s okay.)Chelsey and Robin both say that Chelsey and her brother were parented gently—Robin never yelled, for instance. But there was a difference between experiencing gentle parenting herself and seeing how it could apply to her own kids.After the class was over, Robin never said “I told you so.” That’s something “you never do as a mother,” she told me. One of Robin’s first recommendations is to rid your interactions with your child of these types of “zingers.” They feel like an “eff you,” she said. (I always thought that was the point.)Chelsey left her job at Stanford to help her mother teach a course called Guiding Cooperation. Together, they grew that course into a business. They charge a fee that starts at $5,000 per family for a 12-week parenting program that includes video lessons along with group and individual coaching. At any given time, the program includes about 40 to 50 families, they said, whose kids typically range in age from 2 to 13.In one Zoom group-coaching session I observed, Chelsey asked her parent-clients to close their eyes and imagine sitting at a table with all the materials they’d need to work on a beloved project. “Around the table are all of the people that are the perfectly right people to do this project with,” she said softly. “Maybe you’re creating; maybe there’s bowls of yarn, or computers, laptops.”Then, suddenly, she started clapping loudly. “Get the laptops, get everything! There’s a giant fire! Take that out of the room!” she yelled.Chelsey asked the parents how that felt. They said alarming, panicky, and angry. Chelsey explained that many children are in this state when parents try to transition them from one activity to another too quickly. “The same body sensations happen for our kids,” she explained.This is a recurring theme of Chelsey and Robin’s advice—that kids have many of the same emotions adults do. When they’re overwhelmed, they sometimes cry and scream. Don’t you? When punished, they don’t think about what they’ve done; they stew.The goal of their programs is to decrease tantrums, but not through punishments or even rewards like sticker charts (too transactional, and kids often stop caring about the stickers). Chelsey says she has never given her girls a time-out. Rather than compliance, Chelsey and Robin seek cooperation—meaning the child does what you say because they want to do it. “I don’t even use the word obey or disobey,” Robin told me.Instead of ordering kids to stop doing something, Chelsey advocates “positive opposites”—telling kids what they can do instead. Don’t instruct them not to jump on the couch; tell them to jump on the trampoline. One of Chelsey’s daughters in the playroom (Jenna Garrett for The Atlantic) Praise for good behavior is a part of Chelsey’s philosophy, but she warns that this, too, requires care. Many parents go with “good job,” for instance. But Chelsey argues that this is confusing, because children don’t have jobs. Instead, she suggests commenting on specific things children do well, such as “You came down to dinner on time! Cool!” and “You’re sitting next to your sister keeping your hands on your own body? That’s awesome!”During transitions, she recommends talking to younger kids in a sing-songy voice and in a kind of broken English: Okay, water bottle in backpack, now we’re walking to car. She says it’s easier for kids to process information this way. Chelsey and Robin suggest trying these strategies three to five times before switching tactics if they don’t seem to be working.Psychologists I interviewed said that some of these strategies are evidence-based and effective. Most kids respond well to praise, for example, and tactics like singing and offering alternatives can make it more fun for kids to do what they’re told. However, they argue that consequences are also important, and that showering kids with positive attention when they misbehave can backfire. Time-out, in particular, has been proved to change behavior and improve academic performance, says Corey Lieneman, a clinical child psychologist at the University of Nebraska who co-wrote a book about time-out. For older kids, she told me, taking away privileges such as video games is effective—and is, in a way, a form of time-out. Lieneman also said there’s nothing wrong with using rewards, because “no little kid is going to just want to do all of the things that we want them to do.”[Read: No spanking, no time-out, no problems]Chelsey and Robin admit that their method can be difficult, but they argue that this is just how much effort it takes to be a parent—especially when you have strong-willed kids. They push back on the typical reassurance that all a parent really needs is to be “good enough”—the early-child psychologist D. W. Winnicott’s notion that a parent need not be perfect, but “ordinary devoted.” “Good-enough parenting is not actually good enough for all children,” Chelsey says in another TikTok video. If you have a more challenging child, she says, “you’re gonna have to be more intentional, you’re gonna have to be more careful with your language, you’re gonna have to spend more time co-regulating. And honestly, what a gift that is, to have a child who demands more.” Left: Playroom fun. Right: One of Chelsey’s daughters reaches for a clay bird at school. (Jenna Garrett for The Atlantic) There’s no way to objectively measure Chelsey’s success. She and her mom say that no one has ever asked for their money back, and that most parents see good results.But some parents may struggle to raise their kids this way. For one thing, although Chelsey argues that you would feel less busy if you yelled at your kids less, some parents work so much that there’s no time to prepare a special apology dinner. The U.S. surgeon general recently deemed parental stress a public-health concern, in part because of the sheer amount of time this kind of intensive parenting requires.I spoke with one mom, Katerina, who hasn’t taken Chelsey’s class but who learned about gentle parenting through her own reading. (She asked to go by her first name only because she has a public-facing role at work.) For a while, she said, she tried to be an ultra-gentle parent with her two girls, but she found it hard to find time to validate all of their feelings and still get dinner on the table. “It requires a certain level of commitment and capacity that I think most moms don’t have,” she told me. She ultimately landed on trying to talk through her kids’ feelings most of the time, but also sometimes using rewards and consequences, such as taking away her 9-year-old’s chocolate for lying. “She accepted her fate,” she told me.And although children’s emotions are obviously important, some parenting researchers feel that gentle parenting doesn’t sufficiently emphasize how kids’ actions can affect other people. What if, in refusing to put her jacket on, the child made her sister late for school too? (Robin and Chelsey counter that they are teaching kids how to be empathetic by modeling empathy toward them.) “Societies all around the world also focus on how your actions and your words affect other people’s feelings,” Michaeleen Doucleff, an NPR science correspondent and the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, told me. Some gentle-parenting experts promote empathizing with kids by saying things like I know, it’s so hard to share. “Well, is it? Is it hard to share?” Doucleff said. Do you actually want your kid to think that?Rebecah Freeling, another Bay Area parenting coach, who specializes in kids with behavioral problems, says that gentle parenting can leave some parents struggling to set boundaries. What happens if you’re validating feelings and heaping on praise, but your kid still does drugs behind your back?Chelsey says kids should never be punished, other than through occasional “natural and logical consequences”—like if a child throws and breaks the TV remote and it will no longer turn on the TV. Even something egregious, such as a teenager skipping school, Chelsey says should be handled by trying to determine, “What is going on at school, that you are not going?”The most obvious problem with this approach is that it doesn’t adequately prepare children for the real world, where a boss is less likely to ask “What is going on at work, that you are not going?” than she is to fire you if you don’t show up.[Read: Is it wrong to tell kids to apologize?]But children, Chelsey counters, “are going to learn to be responsible adults when their nervous systems are honored.” She also seems to have a rather rosy view of corporate America: If you’re failing at work, “I hope your boss is supporting you to get back to a place of regulation so that you can do the work.” Chelsey and her children in the school garden (Jenna Garrett for The Atlantic) In Freeling’s view, however, it’s acceptable for a teen to, say, lose a preordained amount of screen time if they won’t fulfill basic responsibilities. Some parents who have tried gentle parenting come to Freeling saying that they feel bullied by their kids, or like they can’t ever say no. Some, Freeling said, sound like they’re describing an abusive relationship with a spouse: I do everything he asks, and he’s still hitting me. Sometimes, even connecting with your kid can start to feel transactional—I’m connecting. Why aren’t you listening? One mother told Freeling that after she stopped trying to apply gentle parenting, “she could now free herself from the belief that she wasn’t loving her child right.”When I asked Robin if people have trouble remembering the techniques she and Chelsey teach, she said, “One hundred percent.” Indeed, their tactics seem hard to recall, and to execute, when everyone is tired and hungry and preoccupied—so much so that even Chelsey sometimes deviates from her own advice. She says she doesn’t make her kids share, but when I was with them, one of the girls tried to call dibs on a bag of potato chips, and Chelsey told her to give some to her sisters. When one of the girls began eating cantaloupe with a ladle, Chelsey told her, “Not for eating, honey,” which is not a positive opposite. “It would have been stronger had I said, ‘We eat with a spoon,’” she acknowledged later.After a few days with Chelsey and Robin, though, I came around to the view that their work is more than just a series of expensive scripts that you’ll strain to remember mid-meltdown. I realized that sometimes the point of this kind of program is to be not a permanent cure but a kind of ongoing emotional support. Watching Chelsey’s group-coaching sessions, I noticed that many parents seemed worried they were the only ones who couldn’t get their kids to behave. One mom, whose child had ripped something off the wall on the way out of preschool, said she feels “shame around the perceived idea that I can’t control my kid.”As dozens of people have already warned me, parenting is the “hardest job you’ll ever have,” and I got the sense that, for her clients and TikTok followers, Chelsey is shouldering some of this intensely personal toil. There is something about Chelsey that makes people feel like it’s all going to be okay—you’re going to do better than your parents, but you’ll also mess up a lot, and that’s normal.“In the ’90s, gentle parenting was, like, smacking your kid with the spoon instead of your hand,” said Mary Brock, one of the parents on the call. Later, she told me she likes how Chelsey and Robin listen to her, and give her encouragement without judgment. “I wish I had a gentle parent,” Brock added. “That’s what this class does for me.”Chelsey often says that the first step to calming your kids is to calm yourself. Maybe gentle parenting, then, is less about soothing kids than it is about soothing their parents.

"I never thought he liked me, and I felt badly, because I think he's a terrific guy," Trump, 78, said of the Hollywood star.

"I don't think it's bulletproof, Dante."

Trump has over 58% chance of winning election, according to average of betting markets.

A new report ranked the best Halloween towns in the U.S. ahead of the spooky holiday. WalletHub analysts compared 100 cities to create a list of cities with the best celebrations.

Giulia Manfrini was surfing in the Mentawai islands when a swordfish "suddenly jumped and struck her in the chest," officials said.

Veteran Democratic Party strategist James Carville warned that commentators are fixated on polling numbers rather than warning about Trump's potential future policies.

Guayule, a small shrub grown in the Southwest, may be the answer tire manufacturers need to become more sustainable and environmentally friendly

This is what came out when I prompted Canva’s AI tool to create a “view from cafe in autumn, quaint street, foliage, coffee, aesthetic, small town.” Interesting how it placed said foliage indoors! | Image generated by Rebecca Jennings using Canva A rain-soaked street at dusk, pictured through the window of a coffee shop. String lights hang between old brick buildings, a church steeple in the distance. In the foreground, a candlelit table with mugs of coffee, tea, and … a corked glass jug of beige liquid? Next to a floating hunk of sourdough? And also the table is covered in water? This is the platonic ideal of “autumn,” according to one photo that’s gone viral both on X, where it’s been seen almost 12 million times, and Pinterest, where it’s the very first picture that comes up when you search “fall inspo.” At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a tiny street in Edinburgh or the part of Boston that looks like Gilmore Girls. But like so many other viral autumnal vibes photos this year, the image, with its nonsensical details and uncanny aura, appears to be AI-generated.  AI “autumn vibes” imagery makes up a ton of the most popular fall photos on Pinterest right now, from a moody outdoor book display on yet another rain-soaked street to a sunlit farmer’s market to several instances of coffee cups perched on tousled bedspreads. All of them appear normal until you zoom in and realize the books don’t contain actual letters and the pillows are actually made of bath mat material.  Dreaming of a wet table with three types of bread and a broccoli latte ☺️?? https://t.co/uIqRCRlqcC— mj slenderman (@othermiike) September 25, 2024 It’s not just limited to Pinterest or “vibes”: AI-generated content is now infiltrating social media in ways that have a meaningful impact on people’s lives. Knitters and crocheters hoping to craft fall sweaters are being inundated with nonsensical AI patterns and inspo images on Reddit. An entirely fake restaurant has gained 75,000 followers on Instagram by claiming to be “number one in Austin” and posting over-the-top seasonal food items like a croissant shaped like Moo Deng. Meanwhile, folks hoping to curl up with a cozy fantasy novel or a bedtime story for their kids are confronted with a library of Chat GPT-generated nonsense “written” by nonexistent authors on the Kindle bookstore, while their YouTube algorithms serve them bot-generated fall ambiance videos. Autumn, it seems, is being eaten by AI.  Not everyone is — and please excuse the following pun — falling for it. When the fake café photo went viral on X, it caused a deluge of quote-tweets asking why the hell anyone needed to use AI when you could just as easily post one of the many actual photos taken in real cities that do, in fact, look like this.  The crux of the issue now is the sheer scale of it: Scammers and spammers can unleash a barrage of text and images with the click of a button Colloquially, all this garbage is widely considered “slop,” a term for the spammy AI-generated images, text, and videos that clog up internet platforms and make it more difficult and unpleasant than ever to be online. In reality, this moment of peak slop is the natural culmination of platforms that incentivize virality and engagement at all costs — no matter how low-quality the content happens to be. But the crux of the issue now is the sheer scale of it: Scammers and spammers can unleash a barrage of text and images with the click of a button, so that searches for legitimate information or a casual scroll through social media require even more time and effort to bypass the junk. Misinformation about crucial news events and election coverage is spreading on platforms. Academic and literary publications are being spammed with low-quality submissions, making it harder to suss out genuine creative or scholarly work.  Of course, there are more urgent concerns regarding the rise of generative AI: its enormous energy consumption, for one, or the rampant creation of deepfake porn used to harass and abuse women. Considering all that, it’s easy to look at cute AI-generated fall pictures on Pinterest as a relative non-issue, a side effect of a technology that could (arguably) greatly benefit humanity.  But as Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, a publication covering tech, explains, these images normalize AI slop and desensitize our ability to discern what’s real and what’s fake. “The clogging of feeds and of search results is not just a side effect, but a main effect of all of this,” he told me. “It’s harder for a journalist writing an article to break through, or an artist painting a picture, or a musician making a song when they’re competing with not just a bunch of other humans making stuff, but humans who are using this automatic creation machine to make things at a scale that is impossible otherwise.” The problem is so bad that tools used to track the human usage of certain words online are no longer effective due to the prevalence of large-language models.  AI slop typically comes from people trying to make money by going viral on social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok all have programs that pay creators directly based on how much engagement their content receives, and AI makes it easier than ever to produce and test that content. That’s led to an entire cottage industry of people all over the world who teach paid courses on how to produce highly engaging AI slop, sharing information on the best prompts to generate the most attention-getting posts. On Facebook, AI posters say they make around $100 per 1,000 likes, and some TikTokers are making $5,000 per month at their side hustles. It’s a decent amount for anyone but especially lucrative in countries where many AI content hustlers are based, such as India, Vietnam, and the Philippines. One Kenya-based creator told New York magazine that his process involves asking ChatGPT something like, “WRITE ME 10 PROMPT picture OF JESUS WHICH WILLING BRING HIGH ENGAGEMENT ON FACEBOOK” and then plugging those prompts into an image generator like Leonardo.ai and Midjourney.  Rather than being worried about their platforms being overrun with low-quality engagement bait, Meta and X seem entirely unconcerned and even supportive of it. “There seems to be very little interest from any platform in taking action about this stuff,” says Koebler. “They are actively, in some cases, generating it themselves, and being like, ‘Look how cool this technology is!’”  Both Meta and X have invested heavily in AI, offering tools for users to add to the ever-increasing deluge of slop on their platforms. Meta’s official account even posted an AI photo of the northern lights over San Francisco on Threads — its top reply is a NASA engineer explaining why images like this spread false information and “muddy the waters of reality.” AI slop will continue to exist as long as people are finding ways to make money from it, just like any practice on social media, from the merely irksome to the actually dangerous. Koebler guesses that AI spam got so popular because some of the platforms cracked down on content stolen from real creators, making AI the second-easiest option for spammers.  “People are just posting whatever they’re getting out of these AI generator machines, regardless of the level of quality,” he says, “because of the ways that virality and social media algorithms work, even if you have the world’s greatest piece of content, it might not go viral, whereas something that is not very good might, just because you won the luck of the draw.” There’s a particular irony with AI-generated images of fall vibes, considering fall is disappearing from many parts of the US and AI emissions have become a major contributor to climate change.  And it’s not as if the internet is starving for aesthetically pleasing fall inspo: Every September, social media is flooded with images of pumpkin-strewn stoops, cozy blankets on comfy sofas, or small towns covered in yellow and orange leaves. For the past few years, we’ve christened these mini-moments online with names: Meg Ryan fall, which had its own outfit and playlist recommendations, or Christian girl autumn, where people unleashed their inner white woman by putting on wide-brimmed hats and knee-high boots to grab pumpkin spice lattes. (This year, it seems like the Gilmores’ fictional Connecticut town of Stars Hollow is providing much of the inspiration.)  It’s all very cutesy and wholesome, but even this type of human-made content is increasingly little more than a plot to get viewers to click on affiliate links to Amazon storefronts or ultra-cheap TikTok Shop junk. In this way, they’re not all that dissimilar from AI slop: Platforms are encouraging their users to be professional salespeople, whether they’re hawking unethically made clothing and home goods or spamming audiences with AI-generated inspo photos. Both are low-quality, quick-to-produce types of content that drive engagement and, therefore, revenue, even when regular users say they hate it.  Part of the joy in scrolling through fall photos, after all, is knowing that these places exist and that you could theoretically visit them, that the world fundamentally changes in autumn, and that there’s only a small window of time to marvel at how beautiful it all is. An AI-generated image represents the precise opposite: It’s just one of the infinite possible arrangements of pixels for machines to keep churning out indefinitely. 

A few thoughts as one New York baseball season ended and the other continued into the World Series.

The Nets have a front office trying to tank, a coach trying to build a winning culture and players with something to prove.

The Post’s Stefan Bondy, Brian Lewis and Mike Vaccaro answer the most pressing questions as NBA tips off.

Emotional farewells at Dunedin airport's drop-off area had been causing traffic jams before authorities took action.

Through the first four games, the Washington Capitals are 3-1-0 and the Dubois line has 12 points.

I was heartbroken when I lost my ability to play the violin after breaking my wrist. But when an old friend suggested I try the cello, I found magic.

Plus, the booming Halloween economy.

A lawsuit says a boy was expelled over emails to another boy; one said, "You dead yet" with squirt guns. The pair went to a school fair together the next day.

Why aren't newspapers printing articles about Kamala Harris' civil and criminal trials and efforts to steal the presidency? It's not bias.

Lombardo Palacios was 15 when he confessed to murder following hours of police interrogation that employed pressure tactics many experts now say are unreliable. Seventeen years later, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón will ask a court to set Palacios and his co-defendant free.

'It Ends With Us' and 'Marcel the Shell With Shoes On' actor Jenny Slate chats with The Times about her book 'Lifeform,' motherhood and why she's one Hollywood actor who does not want to direct.

A man suspected of strangling three woman to death in Ventura County in 1977 heads to court after new DNA technology shed light on the slayings.

The nation will only get the education it demands from its presidential candidates, and right now, the demands are too low.

In a tight Orange County congressional race, mailers sent by GOP Rep. Michelle Steel link Democrat Derek Tran to Mao Zedong and socialism, while Tran's ads say Steel can't be trusted to "stand up to China"

25 years after the original film's premiere, the actor reflects on his career and 'The Best Man' franchise — and reveals the cast's strategy for keeping it alive.

As you walk past the shops on Sagunto Street, you’d be forgiven for thinking you hear your spurs jangling.