Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too

Plus: the real magic of rituals; can tripping save the planet?; don’t treat your life as a project; and deep learning is hitting a wall. [View in browser]( | [Become a member]( December 11, 2022   Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here](. Good Morning! Here’s some of the most popular stories from Nautilus—and this week’s Behind the Scenes with journalist [Erica Gies]( [READ NAUTILUS](   [ANTHROPOLOGY]( [The Real Magic of Rituals]( We might call them superstitions or spells, but they genuinely drum anxiety away. BY DIMITRIS XYGALATAS Tennis star Rafael Nadal performs an elaborate repertoire of rituals before and during every match. [Continue reading →]( Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [SUBSCRIBE TODAY](   [A Package as Elegant as the Stories Within]( Give the deep thinkers in your life a gift that will inspire curiosity and conversation throughout the holidays and beyond. A package as elegant as the stories within, the [Nautilus holiday gift subscription box]( will continue to deliver fascinating science and high quality journalism long after it has been unwrapped. Each box includes: - Nautilus Issue 46 - A limited-edition embossed Nautilus hardcover Moleskine notebook (5" x 8.25") - A welcome note from Nautilus’ editor - A personalized note from you, the sender - An annual subscription to Nautilus, including All Access Digital + 6 Collectible Print Issues sent throughout the year You now have until December 12th to [place your order]( to guarantee the gift arrives before Christmas Day. [Get the Nautilus Holiday Gift Subscription Box](   Popular This Week [PHILOSOPHY]( [Don’t Treat Your Life as a Project]( Fight the tendency to see your life as a narrative journey. BY KIERAN SETIYA [Continue reading →]( [TECHNOLOGY]( [Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall]( What would it take for artificial intelligence to make real progress? BY GARY MARCUS [Continue reading →]( [PSYCHOLOGY]( [Can Tripping Save the Planet?]( The mysterious connection between psychedelic use and eco-activism. BY SIMRAN SETHI [Continue reading →]( [PSYCHOLOGY]( [Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too]( Many famous scientists have something in common—they didn’t work long hours. BY ALEX SOOJUNG-KIM PANG [Continue reading →](   BEHIND THE SCENES [Erica Gies Takes Us Behind “Why We Need Muck to Fight Rising Sea Levels”]( I learned, in my recent conversation with the journalist Erica Gies, that people who work in water have a joke about levees. “There are two kinds of levees,” she said. “Ones that have failed—and ones that are going to fail.” There’s wisdom in that fatalism. The punchline reflects a deep truth that Gies wanted to get across in her new book. And that is, as her book’s title declares: [Water Always Wins]( (subtitled: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge). Her [recent story]( is an excerpt from the book. Much of the industrialized world labors under an illusion that we can control water. “Need water? Build a damn,” Gies said. “Worried about flooding? Build a levee.” The solutions to issues like those seem straightforward, but water is a force that’s not easy to tame. “There was a big meta study over 40 years,” Gies said, “that found that big dams on rivers brought water to 20 percent of the world’s population, but decreased water availability to 24 percent of the world’s population.” She spoke of the substance as having “agency,” given its relationships with rock and soil, microbes, and animals like us. “A lot of these wetlands that are filled in and then built upon—they frequently flood,” she said. “The water remembers. The water still goes where the water wants to go.” Poetic language for a real phenomenon. One of the main goals of Water Always Wins is to help people see that the damage we incur from extreme weather isn’t only a matter of climate change. “We’re seeing really epic droughts and floods almost every day in the news somewhere around the world—one third of Pakistan was underwater earlier this year—but it’s not just climate change causing these extremes,” Gies said. “It’s also our development choices. And that is urban sprawl, industrial agriculture, and the very concrete hard-infrastructure way that we are trying to control water.” Gies’ book is [deeply reported](. She went to many places in the United States as well as around the world—to Iraq, Peru, India, Kenya, and more. In our conversation, she explained what sort of challenges with water people are confronting, and how they’re working to handle it. In Peru and India, for example, people are rehabilitating ancient water-management systems. They’re “slowing the water on the land,” Gies said, “moving it underground so that then it would travel more slowly and be available to them throughout the year.” In Iraq, people are living on top of the wetlands, using the reeds that grow there as a renewable resource for their homes. “It’s this really interesting example of just a radically different way of looking at wetlands,” Gies said. “That’s not to suggest that people elsewhere are going to start doing that where they aren’t doing it now. But I put it in the book because I felt like it helps us to question our presumptions about what wetlands are, and what they can be.” Those wetlands, Gies pointed out, could be getting more water if it weren’t for the dams Turkey has been constructing upstream the last few decades, in an effort to transform dry areas into an agricultural heartland. “The country refuses to have transboundary discussions about water,” she said. “To their mind, the rivers, the Tigris, the Euphrates, originated in Turkey and so therefore they’re going to take what they want.” [Watch here](. —Brian Gallagher, associate editor   [“]()[Scientists who spent 25 hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent five.](” [Alex Soojung-Kim Pang explains why you get more done when you work less.](   More in Anthropology [The Sorcerer’s Apprentice]( An anthropologist schooled in spiritual healing offers wisdom for troubled times. BY ANNA BADKHEN Once upon a time, in a thatched spirit hut in the Nigerien village of Tillaberi, the Songhay master sorcerer Adamu Jenitongo told the American anthropologist Paul Stoller that the bush was angry. [Continue reading →]( [A Viral Twitter Thread Reawakens the Dark History of Anthropology]( I’m an anthropologist and rarely have I seen such a harmful mix of inaccuracies and stereotypes about Indigenous people. BY DORSA AMIR In March, a diet coach named Anthony Gustin, founder of an online food store called Perfect Keto (“Empowering your health journey in a food system that doesn’t care”), went viral on social media. [Continue reading →](   P.S. A recent [study]( in Nature Aging found that severe COVID is associated with molecular signatures of aging in the human brain. What could aging, at least under normal circumstances, do for the brain? One of the consequences [might be wisdom](. “While aging diminishes activity in certain brain regions,” Anil Ananthaswamy wrote, “there’s tantalizing evidence this may be compensated by changes in brain regions associated with supportive and social behavior.”   Today’s newsletter was written by Brian Gallagher   OCEAN [A Holiday Gift Packed with Purpose]( Help conserve the oceans this holiday season when you buy the [Nautilus Membership + Ocean Book Bundle]([.]( For each bundle purchased, 10% will be donated to Mobilize for the Ocean, a non-profit initiative to financially support ocean conservation. Each [Nautilus Membership + Ocean Book Bundle](includes: - An All-Access annual subscription to Nautilus, print or digital ($89/$59 value) - A copy of Ocean, Exploring the Marine World (retails for $64.95 + shipping) - Subscription to the Nautilus Ocean newsletter - Inaugural membership to the Ocean Conservation Corps. Give the ocean steward in your life the perfect gift. This [bundle]( is now available until Dec 12, 2022 and all books are guaranteed to arrive by Christmas Day. Details of your Ocean Conservation Corp. membership will be emailed to you upon the launch of the non-profit initiative. [Buy Your Bundle](   [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( Copyright © 2022 NautilusNext, All rights reserved. You were subscribed to the newsletter from nautil.us. Our mailing address is: NautilusNext 360 W 36th Street, 7S, New York, NY 10018 Don't want to hear from us anymore? Click here to [unsubscribe](.