Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!
Tonight is an open thread night but you know the rest of the deal.
1) I know that the person profiled in this New York Times story has a persona non grata status here at Daily Kos but it is nice to see consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader return to...you know, what made him famous in the first place.
Nader told us that his longtime favorite pens, Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens Medium Point (0.7 mm), had started drying out too quickly.
He wanted to know why. Nader needed answers.
[...]
“For years I’ve been using felt pens, mostly red and black but sometimes purple, to mark up The New York Times,” Nader told me in a phone interview last year. “I go through every page of the Times, and I mark up different articles and send them to different people. And I do that with The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.”
When Nader says years, he means years. We found a black-and-white photo of him using what appears to be a Paper Mate Flair in 1972.
He recognizes that pen quality is a small-fry issue. But if your pen frustrates you, it can cause unnecessary annoyance to bleed into your day.
“Of all the problems in the world, this is small, but we have to deal with the small problems, too,” he said.
The Times, however, seems not to like the Paper Mate Flair nor did Mr. Nader much like the pens that he tried out for the Times; none of which I am even familiar with save for Mr. Nader’s favorite.
I believe I may have done an open thread on this before but...I got addicted to my favorite pen that to working for a dental insurance company in the late 1990’s.
2) Kelly Servick of Science magazine looks at some of the latest research on loneliness.
“For too long, the power of social connection has been overlooked and undervalued in medicine and policy making,” a joint statement by the U.S., Japanese, Moroccan, Swedish, Kenyan, and Chilean governments declared in January. Last fall, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched a commission to analyze the evidence for various interventions to improve social connection.
The global agency has held up strategies such as joining clubs or pursuing hobbies. But the reality is that “we don’t know what works for which person,” says Samia Akhter-Khan, a psychologist and Ph.D. candidate studying loneliness, aging, and global mental health at King’s College London. The field of possible interventions for loneliness is vast: It includes resources for individuals—from chat services and support groups to social skills training and robotic pets—and broader policy changes such as increasing transportation access or creating shared public space. But few approaches have been rigorously tested, Coll-Planas says, and even when interventions have undergone randomized trials, most have been small and not statistically robust. [...]
Older adults are thought to be at high risk of both isolation and loneliness in part because they are more likely to have lost loved ones, live alone, and face disability or chronic illness. But researchers are increasingly concerned about adolescents and young adults, too. Young people generally aren’t at the same risk of objective isolation; they tend to live with family and get daily social interaction from school, for example. And yet in a school-based survey of 13- to 17-year-olds conducted in 70 countries between 2003 to 2018, 11.7% reported feeling lonely “most of the time” or “always” in the past year. Other factors, such as facing difficult decisions or life changes or experiencing discrimination, might help explain loneliness in those who aren’t isolated. Reliance on social media as a source of connection has also been implicated in loneliness in some studies, though the evidence is mixed.
I’m not isolated but I do find myself lonely sometimes.
And it would not be a Chitown Kev Top Comments Open Thread without...the stars!
Comments below the fold.
TOP COMMENTS
Brillig's ObDisclaimer: The decision to publish each nomination lies with the evening's Diarist and/or Comment Formatter. My evenings at the helm, I try reeeeallllyy hard to publish everything without regard to content. I really do, even when I disagree personally with any given nomination. "TopCommentness" lies in the eyes of the nominator and of you, the reader - I leave the decision to you. I do not publish self-nominations (ie your own comments) and if I ruled the world, we'd all build community, supporting and uplifting instead of tearing our fellow Kossacks down. Please remember that comment inclusion in Top Comments does not constitute support or endorsement by diarist, formatter, Top Comments writers or DailyKos. Questions, complaints or comments? Contact brillig.
No nominations or highlights tonight.
TOP MOJO
Top Mojo for yesterday, Thursday, April 25, 2024, first comments and tip jars excluded. Thank you mik for the mojo magic! For those of you interested in How Top Mojo Works, please see his diary on FAQing Top Mojo.
TOP PICTURES
Top Pictures for yesterday, Thursday, April 25, 2024. Click any picture to be taken to the full comment or picture. Thank you to the wonderful dKos staff who made it possible to continue this feature in memory of jotter!