The decision process typically follows one of two approaches; “intuitive” decision-making or “analytical” decision-making.【C1】________which approach people follow, the decision-making process helps to get them where they want to be.

Recent research, however, offers an entirely new perspective.【C2】_____viewing decision-making as a chore, psychologists suggest that the【C3】__of making a choice may be intrinsically pleasurable and could increase people’s【C4】_____.

The study produced several surprising results. Firstly, people’s happiness ratings increased after they made a choice. It【C5】_____appeared that decision-making improved people’s moods. Additionally, the findings showed some interesting differences in the【C6】__of intuitive gut choices and analytical head choices. The emotional【C7】__of decision-making was greater if participants had made their choice quickly using their gut. Also, people were more likely to【C8】_____a decision if they had used an intuitive approach.

There are several potential reasons for the surprising benefits of intuitive choices. First, efficiency and【C9】_____help to get things done, thereby playing into inherent human preferences for completing tasks. Also, the subjective ease experienced during instinctive decision-making could【C10】__positive emotions. Finally, the process of turning【C11】__and listening to one’s gut may increase personal insights and help to【C12】_____with the subconscious.

Research indicates that gut decisions are most frequent【C13】_____people make choices about leisure activities and social relationships. Yet,【C14】__exists to increase the role of intuitive judgments in other areas of life—for example, in the【C15】__of health-related decision-making. Despite the【C16】_____emotional benefits of gut decision-making, some caution may be warranted when making major life choices.

Gut decisions are inherently【C17】_____to reasoning errors and【C18】__, meaning that not all quick choices render optimal results. Sometimes, being a slow thinker can be beneficial. Big decisions with life-changing consequences【C19】__may require a more【C20】_____approach.

In the 1990s, Congress offered federally funded job training under a law, now known as the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) , to help laid-off workers and poor parents find a new source of income. It made sense in theory. In practice, it was a failure.

In 2022, the U.S. Department of Labor published a comprehensive study of the WIOA and a host of similarly structured federal job-training initiatives. The programs did manage to put a lot of people through training, the researchers found. And many of those people were then hired in so-called in-demand jobs. But in the first three years after training, their wages increased only 6 percent compared with those of similar workers who didn’t receive training and the effect didn’t last. In the long term, their relative wages didn’t increase at all.

This poor track record is often attributed to ever-growing skill requirements for jobs in the fast-paced global economy. In fact, the programs fail because they’re designed with potential employers rather than employees in mind. In the case of the WIOA, the local workforce boards that decide which jobs qualify as “ in-demand,” and therefore which are eligible for federal funding, are dominated by business interests—and what business wants is a steady stream of low-wage workers trained by someone else.

“In-demand” jobs aren’t necessarily good jobs. They might be the opposite, because, from an employer’s perspective, “in-demand” is another way of saying “lots of vacancies” , and sometimes employers can’t fill jobs because they expect grinding, potentially dangerous work in exchange for bad pay, meager benefits, and little room for advancement.

Unfortunately, Congress is currently considering a pair of bipartisan updates to federal job-training that would double down on the WIOA’s shortcomings. In April, the House of Representatives passed a new version of the law by a 378-26 vote, giving a bipartisan stamp of approval to the failed status quo. Meanwhile, a Senate bill introduced by Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Braun, with dozens of co-sponsors, would allow federal Pell grants for low-income students to be spent on short, WIOA-style training programs instead of on traditional college degrees. Taken together, the bills, if they become law, seem poised to expand the federal government’s investment in fitting unemployed workers into low-wage, high-turnover jobs.

If Congress wanted to actually fix the broken system, it would make sure that federal training programs prepare workers for jobs with living wages, benefits, and the opportunity for career advancement. California’s state-funded High Road Training Partnerships initiative, for example, matches workers with employers who meet standards for wages and job quality, and who commit to collaborating with workers in the design of their training programs.

Labor unions are the one force that might be able to persuade Congress to reform the WIOA system instead of doubling down on it. The Biden administration has pushed an expansive agenda to support unions, expand antitrust enforcement, and give workers more power to demand better wages and benefits. A newer, better WIOA could bring job training in line with those ideals.

A decade ago, TV accounted for almost half of the display ad spending in the UK, and online about an eighth. Today, online is more than half and TV is about a quarter. The shift is being driven by viewing moving online, as young people in particular spend more time using video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, and subscription on-demand services such as Netflix. Channel 4 has always sought a younger audience, yet live TV represents only 16% of the viewing of those between 16 and 34, compared to 36% five years ago.

To combat the problem, Channel 4’s leadership have announced Fast Forward, a strategy to become a “ genuinely digital-first public service streamer by 2030”. But it faces an unenviable challenge; competing for digital ad revenue with Google and Meta, whose scale and capabilities are far beyond UK broadcasters, and competing for subscribers in an increasingly crowded streaming market with Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Disney, whose content budgets dwarf Channel 4’s.

But even if tech companies weren’t increasingly dominating the ad market, advertising is still the wrong way to fund Channel 4. There has always been a basic contradiction between the channel’s reliance on advertising and its public service mission, which requires it to champion unheard voices, innovate and take risks, contribute to citizenship and debate, and make films. But the need to make ad revenue pushes it in totally the opposite direction; towards commissioning programmes—reality TV, gameshows and other cheaper formats—that will reliably deliver high ratings at a low cost per viewer.

Worse, advertising can have a censoring effect; biasing commissioning towards programmes that attract the viewers advertisers care most about (typically the “upmarket” ones with higher incomes) , and away from genres or topics less likely to promote a “ consuming” mood in the viewer. This leads to a situation where the revenue generated by more commercial shows cross-subsidises mission-focused work, like Channel 4 News and Film4.

There is a solution, though. Borrowing an idea from Sweden, which introduced a 6% tax on print advertising in the 1970s to subsidise its local newspapers, we could do something similar in the UK: a 6% tax on advertising across all formats, including online, would generate about ￡2.2bn a year. That would more than solve Channel 4’s funding problems, almost doubling revenue for 2022.

The benefits would be enormous. Channel 4 could eliminate ads across TV and online. Its commissioning could aim simply at fulfilling its mission: making high quality, innovative, risk-taking programmes and films that promote unheard perspectives—and therefore doing what its more commercial rivals are too risk-averse to do.

With greater funding at its disposal, the channel could also make more big-budget drama and comedy series, and win back some of the young people abandoning British broadcasters for US imports. And it would be able to do all this safe in the knowledge that its funding is future-proof; as ad spending goes up, so will Channel 4’s funding, and with no need to periodically ask the government for funding increases.

“Classically British” literature involves an inventory of our peculiarities and habits. But it has taken us 20 years to decide to submit our favourite habits and traditions to the world’s official register, Unesco’s intangible cultural heritage list, so that they can be properly preserved. The government will this year send some of them—Carol singing, basket weaving, wreath-making and cheese rolling, to name a few—to the UN, which will decide whether they deserve a place on the list.

It’s hard to argue against money for culture when anything helps, but is Unesco’s project really the solution? Unesco’s aims are noble, but we were right to be sceptical of the project. Is a global approach to culture really the best way to ward off the effects of globalisation?

How to choose what goes on the list? There is barely a thing humans do that can’t be categorised as “ culture”. Unesco’ s programme draws much inspiration from organisations that protect the natural world; but, unlike those, it has no scientific principles on which to decide the value of one item over another.

One of the criteria is that the custom must be endangered—but this doesn’t quite match to the list so far, which includes the French loaf baguette, Italian opera, Neapolitan pizza making and the Mediterranean diet. Are these really at risk? Or are they instead world famous and commercially viable? And there’s also the opposite risk, of course; that money will be wasted keeping almost-dead traditions on life support when the community around them has become indifferent. Plays will be performed and songs sung by people who have ceased to remember why, in a culture that has moved on.

But Unesco can end up actually harming the traditions it decides to protect. Unleashing a mob of tourists, with the attendant litter and chain restaurants, is not always the best way to conserve. Traditions and practices can be even more fragile than buildings once visitors arrive with cameras.

Unesco is careful with its wording—it wants to preserve “evolving” heritage. Still, not everyone reads the small print on the UN website, and there is a danger that the new fame might freeze a culture; locals performing Disneyfied versions for international tourists. If we are going to join the project, we should submit some healthy British scepticism along with our entries.

Cheaper app subscriptions. Greater freedom for app developers on the App Store. More consumer choice. Those are some of the possibilities that consumer advocates hope will come to pass for users of Apple products if the U.S. Department of Justice wins its long-awaited antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, accuses Apple of stifling competition and leveraging its influence and ownership of the popular App Store to increase prices for customers. If the DOJ succeeds in its case, the implications for Apple’s business could be significant.

For years, the Apple App Store has taken up to 30% of revenue from app subscriptions or in-app purchases from third-party developers. Developers have said this cut makes it difficult to keep their businesses viable, so they pass that charge on to consumers. Unlike Google’s Android operating system, which runs on Google phones as well as other devices such as Samsung’s, Apple products operate only through its own software, iOS. The only way that third-party developers can get their app onto Apple’s App Store is by following the iPhone maker’s rules. If they don’t, they risk losing out on millions of customers.

Apple has long argued that its business model of creating a tightly controlled ecosystem of software and hardware benefits its customers. “If successful, it would hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple—where hardware, software, and services intersect,” Apple said. “It would also set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people’s technology.” Apple’s App Store ecosystem generated $1.1 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2022, according to Analysis Group. Apple asserted that more than 90% of billings and sales went to developers and businesses without any commission given to Apple.

But some analysts say that Apple’s competitors make smaller profits but still provide a level of security and service that protects consumers—and therefore, Apple should be less restrictive. Apple’s margins are much larger than the rest of the industry. When a company has what appears to be excessive margin, it raises the potential of an abuse of monopoly power.

Critics say that Apple abuses its position as a gatekeeper for the App Store, launching similar Apple products that directly compete against rivals and put them at a disadvantage. Apple is not the best at everything and there are numerous examples of apps out there where Apple has had it pushed or made its own version, and it’s not as high quality as what third parties have developed. By (Apple) constantly putting itself at the forefront, it’s often making it so that consumers don’t have a choice of the best option.

Many analysts see similarities to the Department of Justice lawsuit and settlement with Microsoft over antitrust practices in 2002. It set the tone for the whole internet age. If Microsoft had been allowed to dominate that market, we would never have the proliferation of companies that came about with innovative products. If Microsoft could have forced everyone who had a Windows operating system to use their browser, then there’d be no Google.

Social media are undergoing a profound but little-noticed transformation. Status updates from friends have given way to videos from strangers that resemble a hyperactive TV. Public posting is increasingly migrating to closed groups, rather like email. What Mr Zuckerberg calls the digital “town square” is being rebuilt—and posing problems.

The striking feature of the new social media is that they are no longer very social. Inspired by TikTok, apps like Facebook increasingly serve a diet of clips selected by artificial intelligence according to a user’s viewing behaviour, not their social connections.【G1】____________________________Debate is moving to closed platforms, such as WhatsApp and Telegram.

The lights have gone out in the town square. Social media have always been opaque, since every feed is different.【G2】________________________Private messaging groups are often fully encoded. Some of the consequences of this are welcome. Posts on messaging apps are ordered chronologically, not by an engagement-maximising algorithm, reducing the incentive to sensationalise. In particular, closed groups may be better for the mental health of teenagers, who struggled when their private lives were analyzed in public.

In the hyperactive half of social media, behaviour-based algorithms will bring you posts from beyond your community. Social networks can still act as “echo chambers” of self-reinforcing material. But a feed that takes content from anywhere at least has the potential to spread the best

ideas farthest. Yet this new world of social-media brings its own problems.【G3】________________________But Telegram’s groups of 200,000 are more like unregulated broadcasts than conversations.

As people move to closed groups, the open networks left behind are less useful because of the decline in public posting.【G4】________________________Today those conversations are disappearing or moving to closed channels, slowing the spread of ideas.

What’s more, the open-network algorithms driven by users’ behaviour seem primed to spread the spiciest videos. For something to go viral on a social network, people had to choose to share it. Now they endorse it simply by watching, as the algorithm rewards content that attracts the most engagement. Deliberate arrangement has been replaced by a system that taps straight into the ID. Provocateurs stand to benefit, as do misinformation merchants.

【G5】________________________But since the network’s pivot to entertainment, news makes up only 3% of what people see on it. Across social media only 19% of adults share news stories weekly. Publications like BuzzFeed News, which relied on social distribution, have perished. That is their lookout (and ours). But it is everyone’s problem when nearly half of young people say that social media are their main source of news.

Some people argue that social networks’ defects can be fixed by better governance, clever coding or a different business model. Such things can help. But the problems raised by the new generation of apps suggest that social media’s flaws are also the result of the balancing acts built into human communication. When people escape their echo chambers, they may well face more extreme content. When users embrace harmless entertainment, they see less news. As social networks decline, platform operators and users should devote less time to the old battles and more to contend with the new.

[A] During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists and doctors contributed to an online debate which contained real insight as well as misinformation.

[B] Meanwhile, people are posting less. The share of Americans who say they enjoy documenting their life online has fallen from 40% to 28% since 2020.

[C] However, Instagram has launched new tools to increase transparency, allowing users to see how their data is used and how posts are recommended.

[D] Messaging apps are largely unsupervised. For small groups, that is good; platforms should no more police direct messages than phone companies should monitor calls.

[E] More urgent even than the rise of fake news is a lack of the real sort. Mr Zuckerberg once said he wanted Facebook to be like a personalised newspaper.

[F] Despite the surge in user-generated content, there’s an increasing demand for verified, high-quality journalism on social media platforms.

[G] But TikTok is a black box to researchers. Twitter, rebranded as X, has published some of its code but tightened access to data about which tweets are seen.

History, of course, is filled with anecdotes of highly accomplished persons being chastened by unsuccess. We are accustomed to recounting stories of Joyce receiving dozens of rejection letters before finding a publisher for Ulysses and Einstein failing high school math. We find it inspirational to learn that Beatrix Potter had to use her own money to publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit and that Jane Eyre was dismissed by an early critic as “sheer rudeness and vulgarity.“【T1】We marvel at the perseverance of Nietzsche, whose masterpiece Beyond Good and Evil sold a mere 114 copies in its first year in print, and the perception of George Sand who had to adopt a man’s name as her pen name to see her work published in a male-dominated literary culture.

Yet we tend to interpret such setbacks not on their own terms, but in light of their author’s future acclaim.【T2】That is, we see them as setbacks and not failures, detours on the road to success and not the destruction of the road itself. These are tales told to inspire resilience, not humility; determination, not an awareness of one’s weakness.

【T3】That we insist upon turning stories of loss into stories of gain is no doubt rooted in our preference for happy endings. We need to believe that any fate can be surmounted as long as we are strong enough to surmount it. And in the face of a chaotic and often crushing existence, such notions are not negotiable. They are necessities that must be treated as true if one is going to accomplish the difficult feat of getting out of bed and facing the new day.

The only problem is that nothing could be further from the truth.【T4】As we all know, human existence is full of suffering that resists explanation and obstacles that cannot be overcome. To be human means to be continuously confronted with failure, both one’s own and the numerous failures of the world around us. What then is one to do? How ought we to cope with the struggles and shortcomings inherent in every aspect of our lives?

In his recent book, In Praise of Failure, the contemporary philosopher Costica Bradatan suggests that we stop striving for success and instead embrace life’s failures.【T5】Noting that failure “lies at the core of who we are” and that “Failing is essential to what we are as human beings,” the philosopher praises the benefits of coming to terms with our imperfections and accepting the instability of human existence. Doing so, he claims, will humble us and enable us to see ourselves honestly, stripped of the disguise that success seems to provide.