Back in 2008, environmental activists saw two possible paths to pressure the U.S. government on carbon emissions. The international climate talks at Copenhagen, the 15th time leaders had met to discuss the issues issues, posed an opportunity for a real agreement to restrict greenhouse gases. It also seemed possible that Congress would pass a cap-and-trade bill that would put a price on carbon and de-incentivize its use.
Now we know that neither path resulted in an agreement to cut down on carbon emissions and begin to address climate change. Activists began reconsidering their strategy, asking themselves what they could do in the absence of government action. In the fall of 2010, leaders including writer and climate campaign Bill McKibben and the Rainforest Action Network’s Becky Tarbotton came up with one answer: “Mass direct action must play a bigger role in this movement,” they wrote.
This past weekend, they made their first big push in that direction. Starting on Saturday, protesters camped out in front of the White House in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, which will pump tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, down to Texas refineries. Extracting and processing tar sands oil produces dramatically more carbon than conventional oil production: a Canadian environmental agency has estimated that in the next decade, carbon emissions from tar sands production will be equivalent to twice the country’s total carbon savings. Protesters plan to sit outside the White House every day for two weeks in hopes of persuading President Obama to stop the pipeline. Over the weekend, 110 people were arrested, and 2,000 people in total have committed to risking arrest over the course of the protest.
The protest organizers say part of the goal of the protest is “reclaiming civil disobedience,” says Jamie Henn, who works with McKibben at 350.org and is acting as a spokesperson for the event. “Breaking the law for something you believe in has become something it seems only far-out radicals or professional activists engage in,” Henn wrote to GOOD.
The tar sands protest is meant to demonstrate that people fighting against climate change aren’t members of fringe groups, but average citizens. Organizers asked participants to wear business clothes in order to set the tone for the protest.
The arrests over the weekend showed that authorities are taking this action more seriously than a routine protest. The U.S. Park Police originally told organizers that anyone who was arrested would be fined $100 and released, as per usual procedures, but dozens of protesters arrested on Saturday remained in jail on Monday morning, waiting for a 2 p.m. hearing.
Over the next two weeks, more groups of unconventional protesters will take their turn at civil disobedience. Today, landowners and farmers in Nebraska, who would see the tar sands oil pipeline cut through their home state, will risk arrest. Activists from Montana, Appalachia, and the Gulf Coast are slated to protest as well. At the end of the two weeks, organizers are planning a larger rally for people who’d rather not risk arrest. As activists’ frustration with government leaders mounts, “we think a mass sit-in like this is the most pragmatic thing we can do,” Henn says. And given the overall goals that McKibben and Tarbotton have outlined, the Keystone XL protest may well be the first of many.
The case against social media has gotten so well rehearsed that most people can easily merge it into ordinary conversation: It makes people lonely. It sorts them into camps. It hands them a room full of people who already agree with them and calls that a community.
I’ve given this speech myself, with feeling, having read my phone notifications in the host’s powder room 11 minutes earlier.
Simply put, our dependency on social media creates a deficiency disease. It’s not something toxic we’re ingesting; it is something our lives online have stopped us from receiving.
I figured out that cost while standing in a field in Harford Park with a dog leash wrapped around my ankles.
The author sits with Chaz, his soft-coated Wheaten Terrier.Kevin B. Johnson, CC BY-NC-SA
I go most afternoons. So do the same 15 or 20 people, which is how I ended up tangled in someone else’s very long leash on a Tuesday, concentrating hard enough on my own feet that I stopped talking and just listened.
Two conversations were running at once. In one, a regular who is having a rough year was getting gently harassed about the weight he’d put on against his doctors’ advice — first by me, then by three other people who piled on uninvited. In the other, someone was arguing about Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the regulars chimed in on both sides. Gossip, complaints and dogs greeting dogs became the backdrop.
As I worked to free my ankles, it clicked: The dog park, like the local knitting club or the Saturday pickleball group, does the job a corner bar used to do. There are regulars and running jokes, and once a person is known, a spot in the conversation is reserved for them.
What makes these places work is that a shared focus on one small part of a life opens into something fuller. Regulars may share a taste in dog breeds or beer, but they are not colleagues, political soulmates or relatives. They differ on favorite restaurants, income, age, religion, values and beliefs. They are together because a golden retriever and a nervous rescue mutt need to run in the morning, and there is a field nearby.
Chance encounters can increase empathy
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg called places like this third places and defined them as “public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” Oldenburg noted the erosion of places that once manufactured accidental encounters, such as main streets, neighborhood pubs, general stores and even the drugstore soda fountain.
The park is not a utopia. It’s a corner bar without the booze.
Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp’s meta-analysis of 515 studies provides the best evidence for why these accidental connections matter. They found that contact between groups generally reduces prejudice, but the quality and circumstances of that contact matter. The more interesting finding came later, when they tested how it works: The effect runs less through learning facts about the other group than through reduced anxiety, more empathy and more perspective.
That is exactly what the park does. The man I disagree with about nearly everything hasn’t changed his mind, and neither have I. What changed is that his politics is now maybe the eighth thing I know and appreciate about him, behind his dog’s bad hip, his sense of humor, the awful year he had and his love of what Philadelphians call “wooder ice.”
That shift, from opinions to a person, is why “just show people the other side” keeps failing online. When sociologist Christopher Bail and colleagues paid Republicans and Democrats to follow bots representing the views of the opposite party on Twitter, the Republicans came out substantially more conservative than they went in. Democrats shifted slightly left, though not significantly. Exposure to opinions is not the same thing as exposure to a person. The feed gave people arguments. The corner bar gives people other people.
A dog park is a third place, like the neighborhood corner bar, where dogs instead of alcohol serve as a social lubricant. Kevin B. Johnson
Making room for tolerance and trust
If the places people gather shape their health, as a growing body of research suggests, then the shift from communities set by geography to communities assembled by algorithm creates a slow burn of intolerance and mistrust.
There are now decades of research on social media and anxiety, and a growing body of experimental work about what algorithmic curation does to what people see. Almost none of it treats the encounter pattern as a health exposure.
Social platforms have mastered what German American sociologist Herbert Gans called selective homogeneity. They sort people by interests, identities, tastes and grievances, then make it easy to stay among people who feel familiar.
They are like virtual Levittowns – the postwar suburban developments outside Philadelphia, among other places in the Northeast, where thousands of identical houses went up on farmland and were sold to buyers screened by price. In early Levittowns, covenants barred Black families outright.
In 1958, Gans moved into a Levittown in New Jersey and stayed two years doing research on its residents. He found that although original settlers and those who moved in by choice were happy, their rebellious teenage offspring, who had the fewest places to go and the least to do in those communities, were not.
This was an early, real-life sorting of the type that algorithms would make all too common 60 years later.
By contrast, repeated, low-stakes, in-person contact like the interactions between regulars at a dog park or corner bar creates room for tolerance and trust. People come back. They notice an absence. They share attention around a task, a place or a dog, rather than around presenting themselves or defending a position.
Deficiency diseases are easily treatable. Nothing has to be taken away; instead, something has to be given back.
Paying college students about US$5 a night to sleep seven hours got them a quarter more nights of adequate sleep – and better grades.
That is what we found in a study we published in July 2026.
We gave more than 1,100 undergraduates at University of Pittsburgh a Fitbit – a wearable activity tracker that looks similar to a watch – and an app that sent bedtime reminders and morning feedback. We randomly chose 468 students and paid them about $5 for every night they slept at least seven hours, over the course of four weeks. We verified how much they slept using the device they wore.
The students were about 19 years old, on average, and half of them were first-year students. Roughly 72% of them were women. About 55% were white, 28% Asian, 9% Black and 4% Hispanic.
Our study shows that offering an immediate financial reward can help students meet a seven-hour sleep goal, and that those effects can persist up to a month beyond when the students are paid.
Half were going to bed after 1 a.m. on average – a quarter after 2 a.m.
Students got the recommended seven hours of sleep on a typical weeknight on only 43% of their nights, and more than 85% fell short at least once a week.
They also did not know how much sleep they were getting. Two-thirds told us they usually slept seven hours – the trackers showed only about one-third of students slept that much on even three nights out of five.
And 94% said their ideal night of sleep was longer than the one they were getting.
What the money bought
The 468 students we offered nightly payments reached seven hours of sleep on 26% more nights than 380 students who were not offered the money. That is a large shift for a group in which fewer than half were hitting the mark to begin with.
Students receiving the monetary incentive slept 19 more minutes per school night, roughly the difference between closing the laptop at 11:40 p.m. or at midnight.
Among students receiving the payment incentive, their GPA rose by about 0.08 points that semester – roughly a quarter of the gap between students who arrived with above-average and below-average high school grades.
Once the payments stopped after four weeks, students who had received the money were still sleeping about eight minutes longer per night for the remaining three to four weeks of the study. The effect was smaller than during our study, but our findings suggest that some of the change in sleep habits persisted for up to a month after the end of the incentive.
The effects of the intervention on sleep and GPA were largest among first-term freshmen, whose routines are not yet necessarily fixed.
Rewards work – if they come right away
Timing mattered too: Delivering the payment as a lump sum at the end of the semester, rather than every morning, produced only about two-thirds of the effect on sleep.
The effects of the intervention on GPA faded over a couple of academic terms. Grades remained higher in the following semester, but two semesters later we could no longer detect an effect.
Bedtime reminders and morning feedback on their own – with no money attached – had little effect. Students who received them slept only marginally more. The problem was not motivation: Nearly all said they wanted more sleep than they were getting. The challenge was following through on that intention night after night.
Investing in sleep
Our results show that universities should look at how the environment they create fosters or discourages good sleep habits.
Late evening deadlines to submit assignments and early classes can both make it harder for students to get enough sleep. Changing some of these features costs little compared with many academic support programs, and it may be worth testing alongside other interventions aimed directly at students.
Reminders and feedback might also work better if they change over time, rather than becoming familiar and easy to tune out.
Very few universities or students treat sleep as part of an investment in education, or ask whether the schedules and incentives schools create make adequate sleep harder. Our results suggest they should.
Squinting through my binoculars, I scanned the dense branches of a black spruce, trying my best to catch a glimpse of the thin legs of a small black, white and yellow songbird. I was on the hunt for a yellow-rumped warbler – a bird affectionately called “butter-butt” by bird-watchers after the distinctive buttery yellow patch of feathers above its tail.
Stephanie Szarmach holds a yellow-rumped warbler that was banded as part of a study.Johanna Beam
Once I spotted a flash of red on one of the bird’s legs, I knew that this individual was special – in fact, it was one that I already knew well. That’s because I had placed identifying bands on it the previous year as part of my Ph.D. research, and it was carrying a very important piece of new technology.
I played the high pitched “warble” of its song through a speaker placed below a mist net of fine, nearly invisible mesh. Thinking another male had intruded on his territory, the bird quickly descended. My tactic worked – he got caught in the net. As I gently removed him, I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the Tic Tac-size device sitting on his back.
A yellow-rumped warbler wears a multisensor geolocator backpack.Stephanie Szarmach
Over the past year, this warbler carried a multisensor geolocator backpack throughout his migratory journey, recording the long trek from his breeding grounds in Anchorage, Alaska, to a yet unknown winter refuge and back again. Working with my Ph.D. adviser, evolutionary biologist David Toews, I deployed dozens of these cutting-edge tags to illuminate the migratory journeys of these high-latitude breeding warblers at a scale not previously possible for small birds.
Now, after a year of waiting, I finally had the data in hand.
How can scientists track small birds?
Researchers began tracking the movements of migrating birds in the late 1960s using radio telemetry, a technique that requires tagged birds to be physically followed with receiver equipment, sometimes aided by a small aircraft.
Then, as GPS became more widely available in the early 2000s, satellite tags let researchers accurately track birds remotely. However, GPS transmitters are hefty – even just the battery that powers them is too heavy to be carried by the majority of small migratory songbirds, which often weigh less than a spoonful of sugar.
To address this problem, researchers developed ingenious little light-level geolocators. These miniature tags minimize weight by containing only a tiny battery, clock, computer chip and light sensor. They store data internally rather than transmitting it – hence my need to recapture tagged birds a year later. Researchers infer a bird’s locations from the timing of sunrise and sunset, which vary predictably across the globe and throughout the year.
Light-level geolocators have openednew windows into themigrations of small birds, but they also have limitations: Their estimated locations can err by hundreds of miles, and this uncertainty becomes impractically high around the equinoxes, when day length is the same worldwide.
Each harness loop of the multisensor geolocator goes around one of the bird’s legs and the tag sits on the bird’s lower back.Stephanie Szarmach
More recently, researchers developed a newer method of geolocation that uses atmospheric pressure to circumvent these limitations. When a bird ascends during a migratory flight, a barometric geolocator records a steep drop in air pressure, capturing the timing of departure and arrival for every stop along a bird’s migration route. In between flights, the pressure the tag records reflects the elevation at the bird’s position.
Knowing the bird’s elevation helps to narrow down possible locations, which researchers can then refine further by comparing the change in pressure over time recorded by the tag to global weather data using the computer program GeoPressureR. The unique pattern of rises and falls in pressure acts as a kind of pressure fingerprint for a specific location. Including light and wind data in the model of the bird’s movements can increase precision even more.
Atmospheric pressure data collected from a multisensor geolocator carried by a yellow-rumped warbler over five days in spring. When the bird is stationary, such as when resting at a stopover site, the measured pressure remains steady. During migratory flights, when the bird ascends into the sky, the pressure drops and fluctuates dramatically.Stephanie Szarmach
New tech answers an old question
We used these new multisensor backpacks to study the migration patterns of myrtle warblers, the northern subspecies of yellow-rumped warbler, which breed across North America’s boreal forest. Myrtle warblers in the northeast are known to winter along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, but where northwestern populations migrate has been more of a mystery. In 1899, ornithologist Richard McGregor observed myrtle warblers wintering in coastal California, and hypothesized that these birds might breed in Alaska and British Columbia.
Using these new tags allowed us to test whether warblers breeding in Anchorage, Alaska, actually followed the shortest migration route to winter in California. To our surprise – and probably to McGregor’s as well, if he were still alive – we found that all the birds we tracked traveled east across the boreal forest of Canada before shifting south to the Gulf Coast – certainly not the Pacific Coast route we expected.
All told, this 6,800-mile (10,900-kilometer) round-trip journey was much longer than we anticipated for a species commonly considered a short- or medium-distance migrant.
Researchers tracked the routes six myrtle warblers flew on their fall migration southeast from Anchorage, Alaska.Figure by Stephanie Szarmach. Warbler illustration by Emily Griffith
Why take such a circuitous route?
The long, seemingly suboptimal route taken by our Alaskan myrtle warblers is actually mirrored by some other songbird species tracked from northwestern North America, including blackpoll warblers and Swainson’sthrushes.
Part of this pattern may relate back to the glaciations that isolated ancient populations of birds millions of years ago. The thinking goes that as these glaciers spread, they squashed the ranges of formerly northern species into the south. Then, as the glaciers slowly receded, the forests gradually reexpanded.
As more land opened up, birds moved farther north and west into that habitat. Each season some birds went a little farther as the forest available in their northern breeding grounds expanded. For migratory species such as myrtle warblers, the farther north and west their breeding range expanded, the longer the migration to their southern wintering ground became.
Scientists think migration routes are genetically encoded. The birds’ genes may have traced this expansion front, like Hansel and Gretel putting down breadcrumbs as they journeyed deeper and deeper into the forest. Today’s migration routes still trace that incrementally expanded path, even though the glaciers that shaped the original boundaries are long gone.
We’re still not sure exactly where the California-wintering myrtle warblers spotted in the 1800s are breeding. We suspect that a small proportion of the Anchorage-breeding birds may migrate to California, but that most of them travel from more distant, unstudied regions of Alaska or Yukon. Future research, potentially tagging myrtle warblers directly on the California wintering grounds, will shed more light on this population and why certain individuals follow a different migration route.
Barometric geolocation provides new data
Today, this new geolocation approach improves scientists’ ability to study the migrations of small birds and supports more effective conservation actions across the course of the entire year. More precise location estimates help researchers identify key stopover and wintering sites in need of protection and better understand the threats birds face throughout their journeys. These geolocators also reveal the altitude of migratory flights, which is important for understanding the risk of birds colliding with buildings or wind turbines.
Because these new tags capture pressure data for every migratory flight, they’re especially valuable for studying migration timing. Researchers have combined data from over 50 bird species to understand at what time of day or night different birds migrate. Now, as a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, I am integrating multisensor geolocator data with satellite imagery to investigate how arrival and departure decisions throughout a bird’s migratory journey relate to seasonal changes in plant growth.
Scientists have now tracked dozens of bird species with multisensor geolocators, and that number increases every year. Each mapped migratory journey improves our understanding of how small birds migrate, what factors shape their movements and how best to protect them.
