Lisa G

Have you ever read something a million times only to one day, for no apparent reason, think “Wait, what is that?” This happened to me the other day for “the vagus nerve.”

I kept coming across it in relation to deep breathing and mental calmness: “Breathing deeply,” Katie Brindle writes in her new book Yang Sheng: The Art of Chinese Self-Healing, “immediately relaxes the body because it stimulates the vagus nerve, which runs from the neck to the abdomen and is in charge of turning off the ‘fight or flight’ reflex.” Also: “Stimulating the vagus nerve,” per a recent Harvard Health blog post, “activates your relaxation response, reducing your heart rate and blood pressure.” And: Deep breathing “turns on the vagus nerve enough that it acts as a brake on the stress response,” as an integrative medicine researcher told the Cut last year.

I liked this idea that we have something like a secret piano key, under our skin, to press internally to calm us down. Or like a musical string to pluck. At this point I was envisioning the vagus nerve as a single inner cord, stretching from the head to the stomach. In reality, the vagus nerve is a squiggly, shaggy, branching nerve connecting most of the major organs between the brain and colon, like a system of roots or cables. It is the longest nerve in the body, and technically it comes as a pair of two vagus nerves, one for the right side of the body and one for the left. It’s called “vagus” because it wanders, like a vagrant, among the organs. The vagus nerve has been described as “largely responsible for the mind-body connection,” for its role as a mediator between thinking and feeling, and I’m tempted to think of it as something like a physical manifestation of the soul. Also: “When people say ‘trust your gut,’” as one Psychology Today writer put it several years ago, “they really mean ‘trust your vagus nerve.’”

I became increasingly enchanted with this nerve, even as it felt like I understood it less and less. How does this all work? How does activating a nerve calm us down? Is this why I get so needlessly upset about things?

“Stimulating the vagus nerve to the heart has a really powerful effect on slowing the heart rate,” said Lucy Norcliffe-Kaufmann, associate professor of neurology at NYU-Langone. And this, specifically, is what relaxes us. The vagus nerve is basically listening to the way we breathe, and it sends the brain and the heart whatever message our breath indicates. Breathing slowly, for instance, reduces the oxygen demands of the heart muscle (the myocardium), and our heart rate drops.

The vagus nerve is essentially the queen of the parasympathetic nervous system — a.k.a. the “rest and digest,” or the “chill out” one — so the more we do things that “stimulate” or activate it, like deep breathing, the more we banish the effects of the sympathetic nervous system — a.k.a. the “fight or flight,” or the “do something!” stress-releasing adrenaline/cortisol one.

Put another way, “Your body senses your breathing and adapts its heart rate in response,” Norcliffe-Kaufmann told me. When we breathe in, she explained, the sensory nodes on our lungs (“lung stretch receptors”) send information up through the vagus nerve and into the brain, and when we breathe out, the brain sends information back down through the vagus nerve to slow down or speed up the heart. So when we breathe slowly, the heart slows, and we relax. Conversely, when we breathe quickly, our heart speeds up, and we feel amped, or anxious.

I was surprised by the idea that it’s specifically the exhale that triggers the relaxation response, but Norcliffe-Kaufmann confirmed: “Vagal activity is highest, and heart rate lowest, when you’re exhaling.” She mentioned that the ideal, most calming way to breathe is six times a minute: five seconds in, five seconds out. She also noted that in the study that determined this rate, researchers found that this style of slow breathing is also what practitioners naturally lapse into during meditation with mantras, and during the Ave Maria prayer with rosaries. “Each time you do either the rosary prayer or a meditation mantra,” Norcliffe-Kaufmann said, “it naturally synchronizes your breathing at six times per minute.” (“That’s fascinating,” I said. “It is!” she said.)

It made me wonder if there are ways of measuring the quality of the vagus nerve, or “vagal tone,” as Norcliffe-Kaufmann described it. This is basically how healthy, strong, and functional the nerve is. One way, she said, is to measure heart rate variability (HRV) — it’s a sort of “surrogate” for measuring actual vagal tone (barring open chest surgery). Heart rate variability is the amount that the heart rate fluctuates between a breath in (when it naturally speeds up) and a breath out (when it naturally slows down). That is, heart rate rises on the inhale and falls on the exhale, and the difference between those two rates essentially measures vagal tone. Athletes are known to have higher vagal tone, for example, whereas people who experience extended periods of bed rest — and astronauts in no-gravity situations — are known to have lower vagal tone. (How quickly your heart rate slows after exercising is also a good marker of vagal tone.) Vagus nerve stimulation has also been proposed as a way to treat addiction (some heavy drinkers, for instance, have low vagal tone).

Certain devices measure HRV — and I’ve personally tried a chest strap and a wristband, but I got stumped on what to do with the data — although Norcliffe-Kaufmann is skeptical about their reliability. “Those technologies are coming,” she said, “but it’s more important to focus on breathing and feeling calm and balanced, rather than on a number.” Some other practices believed to improve vagal tone (beyond deep, slow breathing) include laughing, singing, humming, yoga, acupuncture, and splashing the face with cold water — or having a full-body cold rinse. (Stimulation of the vagus nerve, both manually and with electricity, has also been used to control seizures in epilepsy patients, reduce inflammation, and treat clinical depression.)

Writing this story, and after talking with Norcliffe-Kaufmann, I found myself breathing more slowly and feeling calmer. Not necessarily happy, but steady. Slow breathing is boring, but it’s almost sad how effective it is. I’d usually rather spend hundreds of dollars to get a gadget to track myself than do this free and more-effective thing.

“If you’re in a stressful situation,” Norcliffe-Kaufmann said, “and you’re like, How do I respond, how do I respond? — if you consciously slow down your breathing just for one minute, or even a few seconds, you can put yourself in a calmer state, to be able to better communicate.”

Photo: Shutterstock (pigeons)

Depending on how you count, I’m in between four and 18 active group chats, across half a dozen different apps that occupy most of my time on my phone. Right now, I’m in a one called “Ramius’s Boys,” which is devoted to sharing quotes from the film The Hunt for Red October and submarine-related links; another called “News and Politics Discussion Group,” for arranging Mario Kart matches and, most important, talking shit; and a third, “No More Furry Nudes I Promise” — though, to be fair, that one probably shouldn’t be counted as “active” because no one trusted the promise its creator made in the title. One friend described to me a group chat she’s in with one “overriding rule”: The only thing allowed is GIFs of the Hulk. Another friend told me she’s in a group chat dedicated to sharing photographs of Cobb salads called, naturally, “COBB COBB.”

In some ways, group chat feels like a return to the halcyon era of AOL Instant Messenger, once the most widespread method of messing around with your friends on the internet. But in my life, group chats — on Apple’s iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, or any number of other apps or platforms — aren’t simply additional modes of socialization, drawing on the IM conversation or the chat room. They’re an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network. For me, at least, group chats aren’t the new AIM. They’re the new Facebook.

Like Facebook at its best, they’re pocket sources of interpersonal nourishment. Some of my group chats were created for utilitarian reasons, like planning a bachelor party, but have since outgrown the limiting stricture of “having a particular reason to exist.” Most have been freewheeling and themeless since their inception, cast haphazardly and sustained by gossip and boredom and the opportunity to make fun of someone else’s typos. The paradigmatic message of the group chat is one my friend Sam sent recently: “Wanna see something mildly funny?” In group chats, the answer is always “yes.”

It’s easy to forget, 15 years, 2 billion users, and an ethnic-cleansing controversy or two later, that Facebook was a place for this kind of purposeless sociality before it was a place for repeatedly blocking and reporting your step-cousin. More than that, it was a piece of essential social infrastructure — a new layer of life that efficiently, and aggressively, reorganized social existence, describing and enabling friendships, cliques, parties, and even memories, formalized as they would eventually be by Facebook photo albums uploaded on hungover Sunday afternoons.

As it happens, Facebook’s mandate was never to facilitate social life. It was to draw new users in and keep them there, even in alienating and potentially antisocial ways. Over the years it grew beyond the original, limited social contexts in which it began, and chased user engagement at the expense of its users’ well-being. The arrival of parents and bosses into the same social space as college friends, and the introduction of the implicitly competitive News Feed, with its opaque multi-metric ranking system, created the sense that this once-friendly space had turned against us. But by the measurements important to investors, it was successful, and the endlessly updating, always-available feed was adopted as the model for all social networks. The result was, depending whom you talk to, either every single bad thing that’s happened in the last five years, or just most of them.

As feeds grew hostile, though, the rise of the smartphone, with its full-screen keyboard and its array of free messaging options, gave us a new, context-specific, decentralized social network: the group chat. Over the last few years, I and most of the people I know have slowly attempted to extricate our social lives from Facebook. Now it’s the group chat that structures and enables my social life. I learn personal news about friends from group chats more often than I do on Facebook; I see more photos of my friends through group chats than I do on Instagram; I have better and less self-conscious conversations in group chats than I do on Twitter. I’m not alone: The Avengers are in a group chat; the actresses of Big Little Lies are in a group chat; Beyoncé is in a group chat with her mother and Solange. (Jay-Z was apparently not invited.) Group chats have become so fundamental to daily life, in some cases, that they are the first place people turn for help: During the shooting at the STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, on May 7, BuzzFeed News reported that students took to group chats to share moment-to-moment updates.

And Facebook knows it. “The future is private,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told developers at the company’s annual F8 conference on April 30. “Over time, I believe that a private social platform will be even more important to our lives than our digital town squares.” He unveiled a new design for the Facebook homepage that emphasized private, user-created Facebook Groups, rather than the default-public News Feed, and announced to the crowd: “This is about building the kind of future we want to live in.” I doubt everyone is as invested in group chats as I am. But if Facebook has its way, they soon will be — on Facebook.

To me, the reorientation of Facebook around private groups feels less like the company “building the kind of future we want” and more like its attempt to force itself back into a social life I’d rescued from its feed. Last year, the technology writer Navneet Alang wondered in a column in the Globe and Mail if it would be possible “to save social media from Facebook.” That is, could we extricate from the globe-spanning behemoth that is Facebook, Inc., the many uses and experiences that can make Facebook, the website and app, so enjoyable? The flowering of group chats points us in one direction. In almost all ways, I find the group chat an improvement over the machine-sorted feed. Freed from the pressure to stand out from thousands of other posts, conversations on group chats tend to be comfortably subdued — even appealingly boring — in a way that Facebook status updates or tweets never can be. Because most group chats exist on platforms or apps that don’t rely on advertising money or user engagement to support themselves, they’re only as addicting or exploitative as any social interaction might be.

You don’t “check” chats the way you check an endless feed: Conversation flows when enough people want to have it, but there’s no algorithm to find and surface an unseen chat message that you might engage with. What you get instead is distraction the old-fashioned way: with intention. The feed, at its worst, is a passive and slack-jawed experience. The group chat requires some level of active engagement. Whatever conditioning has led us to seek validation from the glass-and-metal rectangles in our pockets is obviously at play in the group chat as it is on other social platforms. But it occurs at human scale, with distinct reactions from a handful of friends for a minorly funny joke, rather than at the alien scale of behemoth platforms, with likes endlessly mounting for a Facebook post in which you dunk on the president.

Like any social network, the group chat has its own social mores and prerogatives. Every group chat contains recognizable archetypes — the out-of-it person who asks “wait, what?” about every conversation; the (psychologically self-actualized and professionally successful) member who keeps the group chat on mute, meaning they don’t get alerted every time someone sees a Cobb salad — and undergoes regular cycles of high and low activity, depending on the schedules and time zones of participants. Every group chat has smaller orbiting sub-chats featuring new constellations of the original group’s members, created to plan surprise parties, or, worse, to complain about the guy who keeps asking “what, what?”

Which is another way of saying that group chats aren’t always beautiful and healthy expressions of friendship. The distraction of the group chat may feel more fulfilling than the distraction of Instagram, but it’s still a distraction — sometimes even from fulfilling in-person socializing. Orienting your social infrastructure around sharply circumscribed friend groups might help avoid the dreaded collapsing of social contexts that occurs on Facebook, but it can also reinforce cruel in-group/out-group dynamics. (Though, in their defense, because group chats can’t be crashed by angry strangers or malicious trolls, they’re only ever toxic in the familiar and reassuring ways that friend groups have been since middle school.) Private group chats can create echo chambers as distorting as the decontextualized noise of a public social feed.

Nor are any of the many companies whose products I use to talk to friends particularly benevolent. Apple’s iMessage, my most frequent group-chat app, ties my phone number up in difficult-to-extricate ways with its proprietary system, and splits friends in two tiers — blue and green. (My friend Dan became so incensed at being left out of iMessage group chats that he rigged a home server so he could receive iMessages chats on his Android.) WhatsApp is routinely accused of being a vector of misinformation in India, where it’s been linked to mob violence, and in Brazil, where it’s a source of far-right “fake news.” (Not surprisingly, WhatsApp is also the most “frictionless” of any chat platform, and it’s telling that the first step in reducing the flow of misinformation on the app is to disable the “forwarding” button.) It’s also owned by Facebook, the very company I took to group chats to get away from.

But even if most of these corporations are untrustworthy, at least there are many of them. The key advantage of the group chat is that “social graph” of your friend network exists in your head, and not only on a server in Iceland, which means you can easily abandon one platform for another without any trouble — or, as most of us do, occupy many platforms at once. The result, as Facebook knows all too well, is an internet much closer to the one we might want. “The only thing I still enjoy doing online/with technology is texting,” Sam, the friend who wanted to share something mildly amusing, told me. “All of the rest of it is torture/agony/hell. But I fucking love iMessage.”

*A version of this article appears in the May 13, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

Five teenage girls have died and one man was seriously injured after a fire broke out at an “escape room” interactive game location, in the northern Polish city of Koszalin, officials said.

“The victims of this tragedy are 15-year-old children, girls celebrating a birthday,” interior minister Joachim Brudziński told broadcaster TVN24.

Fire spokesman Tomasz Kubiak confirmed that the dead were women, and told AFP that “one man with severe burns was taken to an intensive care unit”.

Investigators in Poland on Saturday blamed a gas leak in a heating system for the fire. Prosecutors said that carbon monoxide inhalation was the likely cause of the deaths.

A 26-year-old man employed at the location was taken to hospital with burns.

The Koszalin prosecutor Ryszard Gasiorowski said a leak in the bottled gas heating system at the location was a probable cause of the fire. Earlier, firefighters blamed faulty electric wiring and substandard security procedures.

Gasiorowski said the fire probably broke out in the reception room and blocked the employee’s way to evacuate the girls. Autopsies will be carried out to confirm the cause of the deaths.

He said firefighters who put out the blaze and other witnesses were being questioned. The condition of the injured employee did not immediately allow for him to be questioned.

Poland’s interior minister has ordered fire safety inspections at more than 1,000 escape room locations across the country. The first inspections were being held Saturday, the interior ministry said. Previously, there was no official requirement for fire safety certificates at such locations.

Escape rooms are popular around the world and offer a live-action experience in which players are locked in a room with one hour to figure out a series of clues and riddles to get out.

Jung Joon-Young and Seungri. Photo: Getty Images

On March 12, a news story broke that rocked the world of K-pop: Seungri, who rose to fame as a member of the wildly popular and influential group Big Bang, was accused of “supplying prostitutes” to VIP customers at a night club in Seoul. Within a day, the probe had widened to include Jung Joon-young, a singer and TV personality, when police discovered a group chat he was in with Seungri and several other men, in which Joon-young reportedly shared footage he had taken of women during sex without their consent. Other stars, such as Yong Jun-hyung of the band Highlight and Lee Jong-hyun of the rock band CNBLUE, have recently made confessions regarding the group’s existence.

The Burning Sun scandal, as it’s been called, comes in the midst of a national conversation about misogyny and power — as well as spy-camera porn epidemic — and the momentum behind it has the potential to dramatically transform Korean society, or at least put several powerful men in serious legal trouble. When asked of the implications of this scandal in comparison to others that the industry has weathered, K-pop expert and Billboard columnist Tamar Herman told the Cut that this is “on a whole other scale.”

“This isn’t just a scandal,” she said. “This is a reckoning.”

Below, here’s a guide to the scandal.

It all goes back to Lee Seung-hyun, popularly known as Seungri, who was once nicknamed “the Great Gatsby of Korea” for his opulent lifestyle. But per authorities, the Big Bang star’s lifestyle was not simply luxurious — it was criminal.

In late January, police began investigating the Burning Sun nightclub in Seoul’s affluent Gangnam district, where Seungri was an executive director, after a video of a sexual assault on the property started to circulated online. Per South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, authorities believed staff members were drugging women and providing them to VIP clients to sexually assault. On February 15, they raided the business; two days later, the club closed and is currently being investigated.

From the beginning, Seungri has denied the allegations. But at the end of February, more incriminating evidence surfaced: a series of text messages exchanged in a Kakaotalk group chat in 2015, where he and around nine others discussed providing sex workers to investors and shared hidden video footage and photos of men sexually assaulting drugged and intoxicated women.

On March 11, Seungri was booked and charged with “supplying prostitutes,” which carries a three-year jail sentence; that same day, he announced via Instagram that he was retiring from the business.

“This scandal is too big,” he wrote. “As for the ongoing investigation, I will take it seriously to clear myself of all the allegations.”

Per K-pop website Soompi, when K-pop star Jung Joon-young — one of the men involved in the Kakaotalk chat — took his phone to a repair shop, a staffer discovered the chat and sent the messages to the Anti Corruption and Civil Rights Commission, which Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency investigated.

In one chat, reported by broadcaster SBS, Joon-young wrote, “Let’s all get together online, hit the strip bar and rape them in the car.” In response, an unidentified person reportedly said, “Our lives are like a movie. We have done so many things that could put us in jail. We just haven’t killed anyone.”

In mid-March, Joon-young accused of filming ten women in non-consenting sex acts and of later sharing the videos of the encounters, which he admitted to before being arrested on March 21.

“I am truly sorry,” he said, per The Straits Times. “I admit to all charges against me. I bow my head in apology to the females who were victimized by my actions.”

(It’s worth noting that this wasn’t Joon-young’s first run-in with the police over sex crimes: In August 2016, his ex-girlfriend accused him of filming her during sex without her consent. However, Soompi reports that the woman withdrew her sexual-assault charge one month after filing it; she has not spoken to press about her reasoning behind this decision.)

Police have confirmed that Choi Jong-hoon of the rock band F.T. Island (who also retired amid the sex-video scandal) was also in the group chat that illegally shared the videos, though the nature of his involvement is yet unknown. On March 21, police booked him for bribery; per another officer’s testimony who came forward during the current Burning Sun scandal, Jong-hong tried to offer him 2 million won (approximately $1,778) after being pulled over for drunk driving in 2016. Jong-hong reportedly discussed what happened in the KakaoTalk chat. “The chrome hearts [handcuffs] were pretty painful,” he wrote, SBS’s 8 O’Clock News reports. “Anyone who hasn’t worn them before can’t talk.”

Yoo In Suk, the COO of Yuri Holdings, was in the KakaoTalk chat, and has since resigned. Per All K-Pop, it is suspected that he used his ties to the Seoul police department to help cover up Jong-hoon’s DUI. However, he claims that all the messages shared in the group chat were “jokes or just false.”

Furthermore, two band members have admitted to being involved with the group chat: Lee Jong-hyun of the rock band CNBLUE, who confessed through his management company, FNC Entertainment, that “he deserves criticism for watching videos on KakaoTalk, disparaging women and having improper conversations about sex,” and Yong Junh-yung of the band Highlight, who voluntarily admitted that he knew of the group chat’s existence, per E! Online — though he denies any involvement. He too resigned from his K-pop group.

As previously stated, authorities say there about 10 people in the chat.

South Korea’s major sex-video scandal in K-Pop likely couldn’t have happened at any other time in the country. In the past few years, South Koreans have meanwhile been grappling with a widespread spycam epidemic and #MeToo. Therefore, when these reports emerged, the scandal wasn’t swept under the rug.

“The industry in Korea … is a boys’ club,” Jang Yun-mi, a spokeswoman for the Korean Women Lawyers Association, recently told Bloomberg, and in that world, women are expected to portray either highly sexualized or highly innocent images. Indeed, when the government’s Ministry of Gender Equality recently attempted to crack down on “the problem of … uniformity among singers,” the government faced so much criticism it withdrew the guidelines.

And while those for women are higher, all K-pop stars are held to extremely high standards — both by fans and managers. This scandal, however, has shaken the public’s view. Seungri’s agency, YG Entertainment, and Jong-hyun’s agency, FNC Entertainment, are in PR crisis mode, and their stocks have dipped; furthermore, the former is being audited.

The implications of this scandal go well outside the world of K-Pop. On March 19, South Korean President Moon Jae-in called for a serious investigation not only into Burning Sun sex crimes, but also into another, older case: the 2009 suicide of actress Jang Ja-yeon, who wrote in notes that she had been sexually and physically abused multiple prominent entertainment executives, but whose death was met with an investigation that the public deemed inadequate. While Ja-yeon reportedly named prominent figures who assaulted her in the notes, prosecutors did not charge any of them, citing lack of credibility as the reason.

“The common factor is that [the cases concern] developments that took place among the privileged, and there is circumstantial evidence suggesting that the prosecutors and police purposely conducted incomplete investigations and actively prevented the truth from being revealed,” Moon said. “If the truth is not revealed, we cannot say it’s a just society.”

In response to the current sex-video scandal, some stars, such as Ku Hye Sun, have posted tributes to Ja-yeon. “Rest peacefully in heaven,” her caption reads. “You are a beautiful soul.”

As the scandal grows in scope and scale, it’s likely that it will have a ripple effect across the entire country, Herman says.

“I think this has less to do with the immediate effect on the K-pop industry and more the immediate effect on how prominent men use their power in South Korea, and hopefully will spur discourse and even legal changes in the country,” she said.

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