Health & Training · Week of September 17, 2026
Context, repair, and limits in an age of algorithmic attention
- Social Media Is Shifting Values and Rewarding Self-Defeating Media ChoicesAsk a room whether social media is bad for us and you will get a fight about mood. Depression rates. Anxiety scales. Suicide trends. Whether the effect size is enormous or laughable.
- Medical Error Disclosure After Catastrophic Harm: Apology, Blame, and Clinician CopingMore than three-quarters of physicians agree that doctors should be required to disclose medical errors to patients or their families. In practice, retrospective self-report surveys suggest fewer than a quarter actually …
- Polarization Persists Because Groups Overestimate How Different They AreThe most common explanation for political polarization is also the most comforting: that the other side has simply become more extreme. It suggests a clear problem with a clear location—out there, among them.
- Duckworth's Situated: Behavior Change Depends on People and Places, Not WillpowerAngela Duckworth built a career on the argument that perseverance — grit, willpower sustained over years — predicts success better than IQ. Her 2016 bestseller sold that idea to schools and earned her a MacArthur grant.
- Wendell Berry's Death Renews the Case for Place-Bound, Deliberate LivingThe senior faculty member called him into the office to make one last appeal. Berry was twenty-nine, with a bachelor's and a master's from the University of Kentucky behind him, a Stanford creative writing fellowship, a …
Threads we are following
- Whether effort-reward design audits can distinguish persistence-rewarding platforms from rapid-switching loops.
- Whether health systems will create confidential, nonpunitive clinician support pathways after harmful errors.
- Whether scalable meta-perception interventions can durably reduce real-world polarization outside lab settings.
- Whether the physiological and belief-based explanations of willpower can be reconciled in a single intervention design.
- Whether deliberate, place-bound living can be measured as a behavioral outcome rather than a personal ethos.
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