New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 12, 2026 Jacob Cooper, LCSW, holds a Master of Social Work (MSW) degree and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Reiki Master, Certified Hypnotherapist, and specializes in Regression Therapy. He is author of Life After Breath: How a Brush with Fatality Gave Me a Glimpse of Immortality and The Wisdom of Jacob’s Ladder. He is host The Wisdom of Jacob’s Ladder podcast. Jacob synthesizes his mental health background and his spiritual experiences to assist others in their own transformations. His website is jacoblcooper.com. Jacob describes his profound near-death experience at age three, while on a playground, where he was given a choice of returning to his life. He offers that the spiritual realm is close by and that we are here to create heaven on earth. By living in contrast on earth, we can develop the power of love, service to others, and trust in infinite life. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:32 Jacob’s near-death experience (NDE) 00:12:27 Spiritual and angelic realm 00:19:16 Jacob’s life review and previous incarnations 00:32:06 Shining in the darkness 00:37:43 Purpose for being on earth 00:49:40 Features of NDEs 00:53:47 Post-traumatic spiritual growth 01:00:48 Integration of NDEs and mental well-being 01:08:56 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is a licensed occupational therapist, intuitive healer and coach, and spiritual guide based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Emmy is the founder of the Intuitive Connections and Holistic OT communities. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com (Recorded on March 9, 2026)

One May 11, 2026 

How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

How does a democracy die?
What can we do to save our own?
What lessons does history teach us?

In the 21st century democracy is threatened like never before. Drawing insightful lessons from across history – from Pinochet’s murderous Chilean regime to Erdogan’s quiet dismantling in Turkey – Levitsky and Ziblatt explain why democracies fail, how leaders like Trump subvert them today and what each of us can do to protect our democratic rights.

(An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

About the author

Steven Levitsky

Steven Levitsky is an American political scientist and Professor of Government at Harvard University. A comparative political scientist, his research interests focus on Latin America and include political parties and party systems, authoritarianism and democratization, and weak and informal institutions.

“In order to discover new lands, one must be willing to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” Andrew Gide (1869 – !951) French Writer

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Thomas in 1937^[1]

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

~ Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet, writer, and radio playwright. Known for his lyrical and evocative style, he’s often considered one of the 20th century’s greatest British poets. His work is characterized by rich imagery, unique rhetoric, and themes of nature, childhood, and spiritual exploration. His best-known works include the poems “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “And death shall have no dominion”, and the “play for voices” Under Milk Wood. 

Born October 27, 1914, Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom

Died November 9, 1953 (age 39 years), Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center, New York, NY

By Robert Lea published yesterday (Space.com)

“The only reason for this flyby is to get a little help from Mars to speed us up and tilt our trajectory in the direction of the asteroid Psyche.”

NASA’s asteroid-bound Psyche mission is headed for an encounter with Mars on Friday (May 15). The spacecraft, which is on its way to an asteroid also called Psyche, will come within around 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) of the Red Planet during the flyby.

The aim of this flyby is to utilize the gravity of Mars to give Psyche a boost to its already impressive speed of 12,333 miles per hour (19,848 kph). This will enable the spacecraft to adjust its trajectory towards the 173-mile-wide (280 km) metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche, (or just Psyche) which sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The Psyche spacecraft, which launched in October 2023, is expected to reach its target namesake asteroid in 2029, offering scientists an opportunity to study a very unique object. 16 Psyche is thought to be an early solar system planetesimal, a body from which planets formed, that has had its outer layers stripped away by billions of years of collisions. Thus, its exposed nickel-iron core represents a rare chance to study the usually hidden cores of rocky planets.

But the Psyche spacecraft won’t just use the gravity of Mars to get a boost that will help it save its xenon gas propellant; the Red Planet flyby will also offer Psyche a chance to test and calibrate the instruments it will be using when it gets to the main asteroid belt.

In order to do that, Psyche’s multispectral imager will be used to capture thousands of observations of Mars. This process began earlier this month.You may like

• A car-sized asteroid is heading toward Earth for a flyby later tonight: Here’s what you need to know
• Like ‘accelerating from stationary to supersonic flight’: Europe’s Hera probe boosts speed, stays on course for November asteroid rendezvous
• Bus-sized asteroid will fly past Earth tonight mere days after being discovered. Here’s what to expect

Psyche’s operators first began prepping the spacecraft’s Mars encounter by performing a trajectory correction maneuver on Feb. 23. This involved firing the spacecraft’s thrusters for 12 hours, increasing Psyche’s speed, and refining its approach to the Red Planet.

“We are now exactly on target for the flyby, and we’ve programmed the flight computer with everything that the spacecraft will do throughout May,” Sarah Bairstow, Psyche’s mission planning lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a NASA statement. “This is our first opportunity in flight to calibrate Psyche’s imager with something bigger than a few pixels, and we’ll also make observations with the mission’s other science instruments.”

The team thinks that the Psyche probe may observe a faint dusty ring, or torus, around Mars, which is thought to exist as a result of tiny space rocks, or “micrometeorites,” striking the surfaces of the planet’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos, and ejecting dust particles into space.

The alignment between the sun, Psyche, and Mars could result in this dusty material scattering sunlight, making it visible to the spacecraft’s instruments.

The team will also use Psyche to search for tiny satellites around Mars, a practice that will benefit the mission when the spacecraft hunts for “moonlets” around Psyche when it arrives at the asteroid in three years or so.

“If all our instruments are powered up, and we can do important testing and calibration of the science instruments, that would be the icing on the cake,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for Psyche at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anna Brailovsky (Translator), Joseph Frank (Introduction) …more

Returning to Russia from a sanitarium in Switzerland, the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin finds himself enmeshed in a tangle of love, torn between two women—the notorious kept woman Nastasya and the pure Aglaia—both involved, in turn, with the corrupt, money-hungry Ganya. In the end, Myshkin’s honesty, goodness, and integrity are shown to be unequal to the moral emptiness of those around him. In her revision of the Garnett translation, Anna Brailovsky has corrected inaccuracies wrought by Garnett’s drastic anglicization of the novel, restoring as much as possible the syntactical structure of the original story.

About the author

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский (Russian)

Works, such as the novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), of Russian writer Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky or Dostoevski combine religious mysticism with profound psychological insight.

Very influential writings of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin included Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Works (1929),

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky composed short stories, essays, and journals. His literature explores humans in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century and engages with a variety of philosophies and themes. People most acclaimed his Demons(1872) .

Many literary critics rate him among the greatest authors of world literature and consider multiple books written by him to be highly influential masterpieces. They consider his Notes from Underground of the first existentialist literature. He is also well regarded as a philosopher and theologian.

(Russian: Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский) (see also Fiodor Dostoïevski)

“I’m talking to my computer all the time now.”

By Frank Landymore

Published May 12, 2026 (Futurism.com)

In a trend that sounds like it was engineered in a lab to send chills down the spine of beleaguered librarians everywhere, it looks like more people are ditching typing in favor of mumbling into their devices, according to new Wall Street Journal reporting.

While dictation tools are no doubt convenient and obviously a godsend for accessibility issues, it’s also an example of how tech is eroding basic social etiquette — like how people think it’s fine to blast brainrot videos from their phone speakers while riding public transportation, or don’t give a second thought to the ethics of recording a stranger in public before uploading an video of them online.

And yes, AI does figure into this.

Take Mollie Amkraut Mueller, whose husband became alarmed at her constant whispering at night. Traditionally, this was meant to be quiet time after putting the toddler to bed. But she had recently begun talking into her laptop using an AI-powered dictation app called Wispr Flow, which she paired with AI tools like Claude Code. (Did we mention Amkraut Mueller runs her own AI startup?)

Eventually her husband confronted her about this, and love did not win. Rather than go back to typing, Amkraut Mueller agreed that they should sit apart. “If we need to get something done at night, one of us will stay in our office,” she told the WSJ.

She’s far from alone. As her background suggests, the practice is taking AI-hype-addicted tech workers by storm. In the tech industry — and those adjacent — each new trend isn’t just a way to be part of the hip crowd in your multimillion dollar, mostly empty office. It’s also a technological revolution.

Per the WSJ, engineers at the credit card startup Ramp wear gaming headsets at their desk so they can talk to the AI assistants. Edward Kim, the cofounder of the human resources company Gusto, said he encouraged his workers to experiment with dictation tools, promising that the office of the future will sound “more like a sales floor.”

“I’m talking to my computer all the time now,” Kim told the WSJ.

The flipside of this is that in public, you may look rude, or possibly unbalanced. At home, “you kind of feel like Tony Stark talking to Jarvis,” Kim added. But at the office, “it’s just a little awkward.” 

Wispr, the company that builds the dictation app, is now valued at around $700 million. Its website provides tips for “discreet dictation” in environments like an open office, a coffee shop, and even a packed train. Naturally, everyone there is hooked on dictation, too.

“They just walk around the office talking to their computer,” founder Tanay Kothari told the WSJ. “They don’t have to do their thinking sitting in front of a desk anymore.”

More on devices: Man Wearing Smart Glasses Secretly Records Woman, Demands Money to Delete Video From His Socials

Frank Landymore

Contributing Writer

I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.

Oops.

By Krystle Vermes

Published May 12, 2026 (Futurism.com)

As AI continues to weave its way into every corner of daily life, one of the public’s chief fears is what it will mean in the workplace.

They’re not irrational to worry. Many name-brand big tech companies have already sacked thousands of workers in favor of the technology, from Meta to Square — a trend that sets up a natural experiment: are these AI layoffs actually resulting in positive business outcomes?

That’s why a new study from Gartner immediately caught our eye. As Fortune reports, the research and advisory firm surveyed 350 global business executives whose companies are pulling in at least $1 billion annually to investigate whether all these AI layoffs are paying off in the real world.

The first takeaway is that the trend is real, with a total of 80 percent admitted to trimming their human staff to make investments in AI or autonomous technology. But they say they had no idea if AI would actually generate any benefits — they were simply buying into the promise of automation via AI.

That’s where things get interesting. The Gartner survey found that execs who slashed staff to invest in AI have seen the same financial gains as those who held onto their employees. In othe words, attempting to replace workers with AI isn’t showing any detectable returns for these companies. And to make matters worse, many of these businesses specifically reduced their headcount to free up the cash needed for AI technology, meaning they sacrificed valuable institutional knowledge and employee goodwill for nothing.

The findings aren’t entirely surprising. An MIT study last year found that AI is failing to generate meaningful revenue growth at the vast majority of companies that embrace it.

Still, not everyone believes that all investment in AI is destined to backfire. Gartner analyst Helen Poitevin told Fortune that these seemingly drastic moves by execs may simply be attempts to trial AI, not to structurally reset the whole company.

“It seems to us to be a kind of one-time exercise by many in small amounts, but not what translates to getting full ROI from their AI investment,” Poitevin told Fortune.

So which companies are seeing an actual bump from AI?

The Gartner survey found that companies leveraging AI as a form of “people amplification” — meaning they give their employees AI tools to boost efficiency, instead of replacing them outright — are seeing the most significant gains. Even that strategy is fraught, though: previous research has suggested that the majority of employees aren’t keen on using AI just yet, with one survey revealing 54 percent avoid using in-house AI tools altogether.

More on labor: Tech Workers Are in Deep, Deep Trouble

Krystle Vermes

Contributor

Published: May 12, 2026 (TheOnion.com)

CHICAGO—Plunged into sudden disarray and confusion, pedestrians on Augusta Boulevard were reportedly left frightened and wandering helplessly Monday after encountering a bright orange “Sidewalk Closed” sign. According to witnesses, a growing crowd of disoriented commuters were milling anxiously in front of the sign, with one woman sobbing quietly into her hands and saying, “But this is the sidewalk,” while several others began drifting aimlessly into yards, bushes, and even the street. With no instruction on where to walk instead, over a dozen of the stranded pedestrians were seen retracing their steps to ensure they hadn’t accidentally veered from their route, but this only resulted in them circling back to the impasse again and again in a panicked looping pattern. Sources confirmed the crowd eventually swelled to over 60, with many agreeing to simply lie down on the ground and try to remain calm until authorities could arrive to guide them to safety.

• 

by Jim Terr (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition

See all formats and editions

Erhard Seminars Training, sometimes known as EST, was a vehicle for self-actualization and a better life for over one million people in the 1970s and 80s. New Mexico author and record producer Jim Terr stumbled by in 1975 and got very involved, and herein he tells his story. Filled with laughs, tears, and numerous digressions, this chronicle provides a brief, personal overview of a powerful, eye-opening experience.

“Whatever you may think of Werner Erhard and est, Jim’s very personal account has remarkable depth and richness — especially for such a short book. It contains many valuable insights about life, family, and relationships. And hiding in the middle of the book is a fairly radical economic/political proposal which, if widely adopted, could transform life on earth! All told with remarkable frankness and vulnerability; highly recommended.”
-Thom Hartmann, radio host and author

“Jim was right in the middle of that early era of the human potential movement — not from the sidelines, but fully immersed — and his stories bring a unique, personal lens to a movement that has influenced so much of what we see today in personal development. Jim’s reflections and short stories capture something real, raw, and worth exploring. If you’re curious about where a lot of today’s personal growth ideas originated, this is a great place to start.
P.S. A fun fact about Jim: he wrote and performed the song ‘Sing a Song of Snapple’ which I remember hearing as kid in the early 90s on Snapple drink commercials.”
-Ryan Lilly, human potential historian

“I find myself going back to your book. It’s rewarding in detail and in general. The mixture between est and personal stuff works beautifully.”
-Eileen Aronson Ireland, poet, “Spoken Flares, Sun Beacons”

“Werner and Me is a rare memoir — funny, honest, and surprisingly moving. Jim Terr doesn’t pretend to have all the answers about est or enlightenment; instead he gives you something better: the unvarnished story of a young man stumbling into adulthood through one of the most fascinating social experiments of the 1970s. The personal digressions are the best part — each one a small gem of self-awareness and humor.”
— Ryan Lilly, human potential historian (back cover review)

(Amazon.com)