TODAY'S WORD: CONNIPTION
DEFINITION: a fit of rage or hysterics

I'll use it in a sentence:

Trump is having a conniption on Truth Social, posting repetitively, often in ALL CAPS, that he did nothing wrong, and being forced to pay a bond before an appeal is NOT HOW IT WORKS!

Something’s changed in the past few decades. After the 1970s, American dynamism declined. Americans moved less from place to place. They stopped showing up at their churches and temples. In the 1990s, the sociologist Robert Putnam recognized that America’s social metabolism was slowing down. In the book Bowling Alone, he gathered reams of statistical evidence to prove that America’s penchant for starting and joining associations appeared to be in free fall. Book clubs and bowling leagues were going bust.

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I don’t think hanging out more will solve every problem. But I do think every social crisis in the U.S. could be helped somewhat if people spent a little more time with other people and a little less time gazing into digital content that’s designed to make us anxious and despondent about the world. This young century, Americans have collectively submitted to a national experiment to deprive ourselves of camaraderie in the world of flesh and steel, choosing instead to grow (and grow and grow) the time we spend by ourselves, gazing into screens, wherein actors and influencers often engage in the very acts of physical proximity that we deny ourselves. It’s been a weird experiment. And the results haven’t been pretty.

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The hang-out depression is particularly bad for teenagers. According to the ATUS, teens and young adults saw by far the largest dip in socializing, especially since 2010. In fact, it is genuinely difficult to find any category of play that isn’t experiencing some kind of Mayday! Mayday! descent among this group. Teens are dating less, playing fewer youth sports, spending less time with their friends, and making fewer friends to begin with. In the late 1970s, more than half of 12th graders got together with their buddies almost every day. By 2017, only 28 percent did. “There’s very clearly been a striking decline in in-person socializing among teens and young adults, whether it’s going to parties, driving around in cars, going to the mall, or just about anything that has to do with getting together in person,” says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University.

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One can imagine a similar framework to explain the deterioration of America’s social fitness. We come into this world craving the presence of others. But a few modern trends—a sprawling built environment, the decline of church, social mobility that moves people away from friends and family—spread us out as adults in a way that invites disconnection. Meanwhile, as an evolutionary hangover from a more dangerous world, we are exquisitely engineered to pay attention to spectacle and catastrophe. But screens have replaced a chunk of our physical-world experience with a digital simulacrum that has enough spectacle and catastrophe to capture hours of our greedy attention. These devices so absorb us that it’s very difficult to engage with them and be present with other people.

The first ever MP3 was the a cappella version of "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega. Karlheinz Brandenburg, who worked on the MP3 format, used the song as a benchmark to see how the compression algorithm would handle the human voice.

Instrumental music had been easier to compress, but Vega's voice sounded distorted and unnatural in early versions of the format. Brandenburg would end up making hundreds of tweaks to the MP3 compression algorithm to make Vega's voice clearer. He would later even get to meet Suzanne Vega and hear the song performed live.

The sold-out crowd was here to see what’s truly a mind-blowing 4K restoration, overseen by Harrison and set to be rereleased in theaters by A24 on Sept. 29. But the main attraction was a Q&A moderated by Spike Lee and featuring all four of the Talking Heads, together for the first time in 21 years. “Talking Heads was such a good band,” Frantz said early on, gesturing to the three musicians sitting next to him. “Excuse me for blowing our horn, but I’m so happy to be here with my bandmates.”