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☆ A new study confirms it: The pandemic turned us all into jerks
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-11 | by ( Adam Rogers | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

Graceless under pressureTo see how the pandemic affected us, researchers looked at the so-called Big Five personality traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness. But the new study found a surprising shift during the pandemic — roughly equivalent to what they'd expect from 10 years of life, not two. During the first months of the pandemic, Sutin's team found little personality change. "The only thing that went wrong," says Brent Roberts, a psychologist and expert in personality change at the University of Illinois, "is the goddamn pandemic kept going." For some Americans, the most stressful thing about the pandemic was experts telling them they should help people they don't like.

In 2010, three of Marilyn Monroe’s chest and pelvis X-rays sold for $45,000. The real-life Monroe was gutsy enough to break a contract with 20th Century Fox and start her own production company, which she named Marilyn Monroe Productions. American actress Marilyn Monroe in Times Square, New York City, on December 12, 1955. I’m not saying films about Marilyn Monroe must be filled with butterflies and sunshine, or that art should never be difficult or emotionally disturbing. We are ultimately left with a bleak vision of Monroe’s life, albeit one that, perhaps due to de Armas’ acting more than the script itself, is still affecting.

☆ All the economic good news, from jobs to inflation, was just a momentary blip. The worst is yet to come.
▼ + stars: | 2022-08-30 | by ( Neil Dutta | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

From inflation to consumer spending, there are clear signs that the economy is still in real danger of being pushed into a recession. While Americans' expectations for inflation over the next 12 months have ebbed somewhat, they're still sitting at 6.2%. With strong private demand, consumers are signaling that while labor-market conditions are strong, momentum is slipping. This means the increase in consumers' spending in the first half of the year was driven exclusively by them tapping into their savings. Prematurely easing inflation-reduction policy with inflation rates still elevated risks pushing up inflation expectations and entrenching a higher inflation rate into the economy.

Per his defense, when conspiracy theorist Alex Jones called the Sandy Hook parents crisis actors, “he was looking at the world through dirty glasses.” Maybe so. But he has built a career selling “dirty glasses” to people like my mother, a self-described “truther” who spread misinformation before and after the Sandy Hook shooting. In this respect, my mother isn’t unique: Millions of Americans continue to spread Jones’ misinformation even as he is publicly debunked. Jones’ influence over my mother in the last months of 1999 is hard to overstate. During the trial in Texas, Jones’ attorney warned that “if you look at the world through dirty glasses, everything you see is dirty.“ Thirty years ago, Alex Jones sold my mother a pair of glasses, a lens into the world.

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