Over President Trump’s first year in office, the U.S. underwent some changes that he would probably cheer. The economy continued strengthening (including, yes, the stock market, as the president likes to emphasize) and the number of people apprehended while trying to enter the country illegally fell sharply. However, some changes are less promising: The nation’s carbon dioxide emissions rose, and the amount of student debt grew by $47 billion.

We have put together a wide variety of statistics to show how the U.S. has changed in the past year.

Although we’re looking at how the country is changing throughout the Trump presidency, this isn’t to say that the president created these outcomes. Wages, for example, are determined more by worker supply and demand than by the ripple effects of who is in the White House. Still, having a firm picture of the world the president is governing in and the direction it is moving is important for understanding the context in which he makes some of the most important decisions in the world.

Economy

The economy has continued to improve under Trump, with the unemployment rate falling from 4.8 percent to 4.1 percent, and GDP growth ticking upward. The stock market has likewise risen quickly (though those gains largely go to richer Americans). However, wage growth remains middling and has caused some economists to wonder why a tightening labor market hasn’t budged this number much yet.

Environment

The global environment continues to trouble climate scientists and experts. Projected U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are nearly 15 million metric tons higher than they were a year ago. And while the global temperature average isn’t as above the 20th century average as it was in 2016, it still indicates that the world has warmed considerably in recent years.

International affairs

There were a few bright spots on the foreign policy front in 2017: The United States and Russia both dialed back their numbers of nuclear weapons, bringing the global total down, and the number of “free” countries (as scored by nonprofit Freedom House) increased by one. However, North Korea also conducted another nuclear test, and the number of forcibly displaced people increased.

Health policy

Trump never got to sign a health care overhaul bill that repealed the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare). But he did sign a tax bill that eliminated the penalty for not having insurance — the mechanism for enforcing one of Obamacare’s most important parts, the individual mandate. That won’t go into effect until 2019, and it could mean millions more uninsured in the coming years, according one estimate. However, the health care picture in America already is less than rosy — premiums continue to rise, as do the shares of those premiums that workers have to pay.

Health outcomes

Many health outcome indicators (like life expectancy and the obesity rate) lag by a few years, so we can’t tell how Americans fared on those in the first year of Trump’s presidency. But a few of the stats we do have show that America’s kids are, at least in two areas, engaging in fewer risky behaviors than in 2016. The share of teens who have ever been drunk or smoked a cigarette dipped in 2017, though the share who have used illicit drugs climbed slightly.

Politics

2017 was an off year, so there are no major changes in the numbers of Republicans in office. But some of those small changes came with big attention — the number of Republicans in the Senate ticked down by one this year, with Alabama Democrat Doug Jones replacing Republican Jeff Sessions, who left the seat to become attorney general. Meanwhile, the resignations of three House Republicans and one Democrat shifted the numbers slightly in that chamber (many more have announced their intention to retire in 2018). Meanwhile, data suggest that Americans became slightly less Republican this year and slightly more Democratic and independent.

Immigration

One of Trump’s main campaign promises was to crack down on immigration, and on two counts, immigration has fallen. Trump reduced the number of refugees admitted, bringing that figure down significantly in 2017 from one year prior. And the number of apprehensions of people entering the country illegally at the southwestern border has fallen off in a huge way. That’s in part because the Trump administration has focused heavily on enforcement. In addition, improved economies in Latin America give fewer people with reasons to leave, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

NPR’s Rebecca Hersher, Hannah Bloch, Alison Kodjak, Joel Rose and Richard Gonzales contributed to this report.

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Facebook is rolling out a major change to its News Feed: pushing up news articles that come from “high quality” sources, and pushing down the others. The move signals that, in an effort to combat the problem of fake news, the social media giant is willing to play a kind of editorial role — making decisions based on substance, not just how viral a headline may be.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post to his Facebook page:

“There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today. Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them. That’s why it’s important that News Feed promotes high quality news that helps build a sense of common ground.”

The company asserts that its own executives will not pick and choose favorites. Rather, they’ll let the users decide what counts as a trusted source.

Spokesman Todd Breasseale says in an email: “As part of our ongoing quality surveys, we asked a diverse and representative sample of Facebook users across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, sources of news. A source’s broad trust is one of many signals that determine stories’ ranking in News Feed. We boost links from sources with high trust scores and demote links from sources with low trust scores.”

The Internet has plenty to say in response to the announcement. On Twitter:

Facebook recently announced other reforms that, the company estimates, will result in less news in the News Feed overall — from the current 5 percent down to an estimated 4 percent.

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It wouldn’t make any sense to send a French-speaking refugee to a German-speaking town in Switzerland.

But under Switzerland’s current system of placing refugees, that’s a situation that can easily happen. This problem isn’t unique to Switzerland, and it’s not the only kind of mismatch that might happen.

The solution, says a new study from Stanford University’s Immigration Policy Lab and ETH Zurich, is the creation of an “algorithm” — in layman’s terms, the set of rules given to a computer that will enable it to reach a specific goal. The algorithm described in the study, published online Thursday in the journal Science, uses data to predict where a refugee — or one person in a family of refugees — has the best chance of getting a job.

It’s especially important to improve the placement process now, during the biggest refugee crisis since World War II, says Jens Hainmueller, a Stanford professor and one of the study’s lead authors.

“There are big questions about how you can facilitate the integration of refugees into host countries, set them up for success and make sure they become productive contributors to the host country’s economy and society,” he says. “It’s a significant challenge for governments that are facing these increasing numbers of refugees.”

Using the algorithm in the U.S. would have improved the employment rates of about 900 refugees by an expected 40 percent, the authors found. Their sample of refugees were those who arrived to the U.S. in the third quarter of 2016 (the most recent data available) who were free to be assigned to any location. They also did a separate test using data from refugees in Switzerland, finding that it would have improved refugee employment rates there by about 70 percent.

To create the algorithm, researchers entered data about refugees who had already been resettled, including their country of origin, language skills, age, resettlement location and employment status. They used that data to create a model that can predict the place within the host country where a refugee (or one person in a family of refugees) awaiting resettlement has the best chance of getting a job. Using those insights, the algorithm then makes recommendations for refugee placements that take into account limitations such as the number of available spots at each location.

“What we focus on is the probability that at least one person in the family finds a job, which makes sense from a family self-sufficiency standpoint,” Hainmueller says.

And the researchers say their inability to point to any one variable as the key to determining refugees’ success in finding a job seems to show that the algorithm is taking advantage of sometimes subtle interactions between variables that humans might not be able to pinpoint.

“There are some places that are just better for refugees in general. They might have stronger labor markets that make it more likely for any refugees to find employment,” he says. “We also found that certain places ended up being a better fit for certain types of refugees depending on their characteristics, things like their age, their gender, their language skills or the ethnic network,” says Kirk Bansak, one of the study’s lead authors. He’s a doctoral candidate at Stanford and a data scientist at the Immigration Policy Lab.

The idea for the algorithm came from workshops the authors had with refugee resettlement agencies in the U.S. and the Department of State about potentially improving the process of deciding where refugees are placed. (They collaborated with one agency on the study but declined to name it.)

“We had heard about all these other potential interventions, like cash assistance or training programs, but our attention very much focused initially on these [resettlement] allocations because we figured out pretty quickly that where you send refugees is a really important driver of their potential integration success,” Hainmueller says.

At the end of 2016, there were 22.5 million refugees around the world, according to the U.N.’s refugee agency. This year, the U.S. will resettle up to 45,000 refugees (in fiscal year 2018) — about half as many as it admitted in 2016.

The way the system works now is that placement officers consider factors such as medical conditions, the availability of interpreters and the location of other family members in the U.S. to help determine where a refugee will live in the U.S.

For refugees who don’t have existing ties in the U.S., placement officers at the International Rescue Committee, one of nine resettlement agencies in the U.S., look at factors such as employment rates and public transportation systems within cities, explains Robin Dunn Marcos. She’s the senior director of resettlement and processing at the International Rescue Committee.

Marcos sees this algorithm as a potential complement to the agency’s placement process.

“Many of the variables that would feed into the algorithm are things that we’ve been using for placement decisions,” she says. “The algorithm definitely seems like a valuable addition to our current approach.”

And as new data is added to the algorithm, it adapts to changing conditions, the researchers say. For example, if an agency adds data that shows newly-resettled refugees aren’t getting jobs in a certain city, the algorithm will be less likely to recommend they be placed there.

Cindy Huang, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development who wasn’t involved in the study, says this algorithm is an example of how innovation can help vulnerable people. (One of the study’s co-authors, Jeremy Weinstein, is a non-resident fellow at CGD.) And it’s an improvement on other ideas she’s seen that involve attempts to use existing technology, like e-learning platforms, to help refugees — but that aren’t cost-effective because they weren’t designed with refugees in mind.

“What the study shows is that you can improve employment outcomes, which are critical to longer-term integration,” she says. “More refugees should be resettled, but this is a way to do more with the number that have already been accepted into a country.”

But since the findings from the algorithm are based on historical data, she cautions that it’s still unproven in a practical setting.

“To validate the findings and see how it works in the messy world, the next step is a trial to see how it performs in the field,” Huang says.

Bansak and his colleagues hope to create user-friendly software and data integration that would allow resettlement agencies to use the algorithm. They’ll need about $100,000 to make that happen, Bansak says.

Marcos sees a potential wrinkle in putting this algorithm into practice in the U.S.: current policies on refugee resettlement.

“When they first started looking at this, it was in the last administration when we were bringing in a much higher number of refugees,” she says. “Not only has the ceiling been slashed in half, but the additional bureaucratic steps that have been put in place have slowed everything down.”

Courtney Columbus is a multimedia journalist based in the Washington, D.C. area. She covers science, global health and consumer health. Her past work has appeared in the Arizona Republic and on Arizona PBS. Contact her @cmcolumbus11.

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Lawmakers in the United Kingdom are debating a new tax on disposable cups in an effort to cut down on waste.

While the so-called “latte levy” is controversial, the goal is to replicate the success of Britain’s tax on plastic bags; their use has declined by 80 percent since the tax was introduced in 2015. Proponents of the tax say it would encourage people to carry around their own reusable cups rather than use disposable ones, which in their current form are difficult to recycle.

Simon Ellin, chief executive of The Recycling Association, tells Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson that the law is designed to shift consumer behavior towards the cheaper, more environmentally friendly option, though he admits the proposal does have its limitations.

“Human nature says if it’s going to cost you more, then you would take the cheaper option and that would be for you to bring your own mug,” he says. “I’m probably as guilty as anybody when I’m catching a train or on the road, I probably would always have a [disposable] coffee cup with me.” But the point of the tax, he says, is “changing the way that the general public [perceives] waste and recycling.”

The British Parliament issued a report earlier this month proposing a 34-cent (25-pence) tax, which would amount to about 10 percent on every cup sold. By comparison, the British tax on plastic bags is 7 cents (5 pence) per bag.

According to the report, 2.5 billion disposable cups are tossed out each year in Britain alone, and that number is expected to rise given the growth of coffee shops in the U.K. in recent years. (There are more than four times as many coffee shops today as there were in 2000.)

Disposable cups have a plastic lining that makes them waterproof, which means they cannot be processed by most recycling facilities, the report notes. As a result, most of them end up in landfills or are incinerated.

The report also points out that many people mistakenly think coffee cups are recycled when they are disposed of in recycling bins. As The New York Times notes:

“A 2011 consumer survey cited by the lawmakers found that eight in 10 consumers were laboring under the misconception that disposable cups were being recycled, and that most consumers tried to discard their cups in recycling bins. The report found that fewer than one cup in 400, or 0.25 percent, gets recycled.”

Right now, Britain is home to just two facilities capable of recycling disposable cups by stripping the plastic from the paper, Ellin says. He says many to-go cups contain drink residue that makes them difficult to recycle.

“Just because you design a recyclable coffee cup doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be recycled,” he says.

And if drink residue in a disposable cup spills over onto other containers in a recycling bin, it can make them harder to recycle, too, Ellin says.

Earlier this month, Starbucks said it would experiment with a 5-pence paper cup charge in 25 London stores starting in February. The company already offers a discount for customers who use reusable cups, as do other coffee chains.

And McDonald’s recently announced it will produce all of its packaging from recycled or sustainable materials by 2025.

“One of the things we’re looking at is cups,” says Francesca DeBiase, the fast-food giant’s chief sustainability officer. “There’s been a lot of work in the industry related to cups and finding a cup for cold drinks that lasts as long as our customers may want to keep their cup in their car throughout the day. That’s been a challenge for us.”

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This year, trucks and other heavy-duty motors in America will burn some 3 billion gallons of diesel fuel that was made from soybean oil. They’re doing it, though, not because it’s cheaper or better, but because they’re required to, by law.

The law is the Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS. For some, especially Midwestern farmers, it’s the key to creating clean energy from American soil and sun. For others — like many economists — it’s a wasteful misuse of resources.

And the most wasteful part of the RFS, according to some, is biodiesel. It’s different from ethanol, a fuel that’s made from corn and mixed into gasoline, also as required by the RFS. In fact, gasoline companies probably would use ethanol even if there were no law requiring it, because ethanol is a useful fuel additive. That’s not true of biodiesel.

“This is an easy one, economically. Biodiesel is very expensive, relative to petroleum diesel,” says Scott Irwin, an economist at the University of Illinois, who follows biofuel markets closely. He calculates that the extra cost for biodiesel comes to about $1.80 per gallon right now, meaning that the biofuel law is costing Americans about $5.4 billion a year.

Irwin explains that use of biodiesel is driven by three different parts of the Renewable Fuel Standard. The law includes a quota for biodiesel use, but in addition to that, biodiesel also is used in order to meet the law’s demand for “advanced biofuels.” Finally, there’s an overall quota for biofuels of all sorts, and companies are using biodiesel to meet that quota as well because they’ve run into limits on their ability to blend ethanol into gasoline.

Defenders of biodiesel insist that it’s a much cleaner fuel than regular diesel, because it doesn’t come from the ground, but from soybean plants that capture carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. In fact, by the EPA’s calculations, replacing petroleum-based fuel with biodiesel will cut greenhouse emissions at least in half.

A growing number of environmentalists, however, say that this calculation is dead wrong. They say that if more soybeans are needed to make fuel in addition to food, it inevitably means that people somewhere on Earth will have to plow up grasslands or cut down forests in order to grow that additional supply — and clearing such land releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Two environmental groups — ActionAid USA and Mighty Earth — just released a report connecting America’s biodiesel demands directly to deforestation in Argentina.

Investigators from the two groups documented widespread clearing of Argentine forests in order to expand cultivation of soybeans. Simultaneously, Argentina expanded its exports of soybean-derived biodiesel to the United States. In 2016, in fact, Argentina shipped more than 400 million gallons of biodiesel to the U.S., equivalent to almost 15 percent of all the biodiesel that Americans consumed.

The story, however, is more complicated than it seems. For one thing, that boom in Argentine biodiesel exports is over, at least for now. Last summer, the the United States accused Argentina of subsidizing its biodiesel producers and “dumping” cheap biodiesel on the world market. In retaliation, the U.S. imposed hefty taxes on on all biodiesel from Argentina. Overnight, those imports ceased. Americans now will have to rely on biodiesel produced here in the U.S. — which also is more expensive. (In a way, Argentina was doing the U.S. a favor, helping it satisfy its biodiesel demands more cheaply.)

In addition, the most powerful factor driving demand for soybeans these days is China’s appetite for soy meal, to feed its pigs and chickens, rather than America’s need for soy oil to make fuel.

“The big story is China’s demand,” says Irwin of the University of Illinois. “If anything is related to tearing up pastures in Argentina to grow soybeans, it’s China and not biodiesel.”

In fact, China wants so much soy meal that it’s boosted global supplies of soy oil, because soybeans, when they’re crushed, yield both meal and oil. By satisfying China’s demand for meal, soy processors inevitably end up with plenty of oil to sell, too. (Interestingly, this is a reversal of the situation a century ago, when soybeans were mainly grown for their oil, and producers struggled to find uses for the meal.)

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The hubbub over the Republican tax plan has died down some since it passed, but the bill isn’t forgotten — not by a long shot.

Many Americans will see the effects already this year, when the IRS gives employers new guidance on how much money to withhold from people’s paychecks. And you can bet it will be a major talking point in the 2018 midterm elections, supplemented by regular presidential tweets touting new hiring and higher stock prices.

Against that backdrop, we received a wave of listener inquiries that boil down to one basic question: Will the recently passed Republican tax plan grow the economy? We decided to try to give these listeners a (relatively) simple answer.

You may already know where this is going. This question asks for a prediction, but also about economics. So a simple yes or no is impossible.

But we can make some educated guesses, based on what smart people have said about this tax plan.

A bump, then a lull

Fortunately, someone has already asked a version of this question to a whole mess of economists at once. The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business often polls top mainstream economists on issues of the day. And on this question, those economists leaned heavily away from saying that the bill would create long-term economic growth.

The Booth School asked economists in November whether they agreed that tax plans “similar to those currently moving through the House and Senate” (this was before the tax bill was passed, remember) would leave GDP growth “substantially higher a decade from now than under the status quo.”

Of the 42 economists, just over half (52 percent) disagreed — that is, they don’t believe the plan would lead to faster economic growth. Thirty-six percent were uncertain. Only 2 percent agreed. (The remainder did not answer.)

So they weren’t unanimous, but almost none of them had confidence that the tax plan will lead to “substantial” economic growth.

This runs counter to Republican messaging during the tax fight that it could boost GDP by an average of 0.4 percent per year over the next decade. While the bill was being crafted, multiple expert analyses of the tax plan agreed that it would fall far short of that kind of growth.

But let’s start at square one. The idea that tax cuts would create growth isn’t at all wrongheaded. It makes sense that giving people (or businesses) some extra dollars through the tax code would lead them to spend more, speeding up the economy.

And different tax cuts affect the economy in different ways. In a 2012 report, Mark Zandi, chief economist at economics research firm Moody’s Analytics, estimated the effects of various policies.

At that time, he found that a temporary child tax credit passed in 2009, for example, boosted GDP by $1.38 for every dollar in revenue lost on that tax cut. A payroll tax holiday came in at $1.27. Meanwhile, extending the Bush tax cuts came in at 35 cents for every revenue dollar lost, and cutting corporate taxes came in at just 32 cents.

So what does Zandi think of this tax plan — will it create growth?

“Not much,” he said. “It’s a pretty costly way to not go very far.”

In his view, the tax plan will create a temporary sugar high that will taper off after a couple of years.

“The economy will experience stronger near-term growth in 2018 and 2019 with the stimulus created by deficit-financed long-term tax cuts,” he said. “That will generate temporary growth. But it will also result in higher interest rates.”

There are a few reasons why that growth will fall off. One, as Zandi suggested, are those higher interest rates. What he’s saying is that if and when the tax plan creates that new growth, the Fed will raise interest rates, which they took down to near-zero in the Great Recession to boost the economy. Since then, central bankers have slowly inched that rate upward, though it’s still well below where it was pre-recession.

All of which is to say that the Fed is already carefully weighing when to tighten policy, and a burst of new growth from the tax plan could mean the central bank would want to tighten Fed policy sooner.

On top of that, the job market looks good, the stock market looks good, GDP growth has been solid recently — there’s just not a lot of room for improvement. And that initial burst of new demand in the economy won’t last — it will fall off. Other boosts — say, in labor supply or investment — won’t make up for it, according to a report from the Tax Policy Center, a D.C.-based think tank that has been critical of the tax plan.

“I expect it to be beneficial,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and a director of the Congressional Budget Office under George W. Bush. “I don’t expect it to be very long-lasting, because there’s not very much room to grow there.”

Figures from the Tax Policy Center square with that, predicting that the new tax regime will boost GDP in 2018 by an additional 0.8 percent. But then after that, it would eventually taper off — by 2027, the bill would provide no additional growth.

That drop-off toward the end of the 10-year window is in large part because many of the bill’s provisions expire at the end of 2025.

Were Congress to extend those provisions — assuming there were even the political will in eight years to do that — it could boost the economy. But then, that would cost money. And that cost would come on top of an already steep price tag.

Currently, the plan is projected to cost around $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Adding that much or more to the debt, some economists fear, will hurt the economy by bumping up interest rates. The idea here is that higher interest rates would mean less borrowing and spending throughout the economy.

“The problem with making it permanent is it’s really going to help you in years 9 and 10, but it’s actually going to really hurt you in years 30 through 32,” said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates for smaller deficits and debt. “If you make it permanent, instead of adding $1.5 trillion to the debt this decade, it’s going to add $2 trillion to the debt this decade and then another $2 or $3 or $4 trillion next decade and another $2 or $3 or $4 trillion the decade after that.”

So there’s a good case to be made that there will be initial growth, but that it will disappear — or nearly disappear — in the medium-term.

The tax bill wasn’t just about rates

But there’s more to the tax bill than just tax cuts, Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum stresses.

“The more lasting and important contribution are the reforms, as opposed to pure tax cuts,” he said. “The most important thing the bill does is change dramatically the way the U.S. taxes business activity.”

The plan drastically lowers the corporate tax rate — down from a top rate of 35 percent to 21 percent. But there’s another big change it makes on the corporate side: It changes the U.S. from a worldwide system, one in which a company’s foreign and domestic earnings alike are taxed, to a territorial corporate taxation system, in which just domestic earnings are taxed.

This brings the U.S. more in line with other major world economies. Proponents of this policy believe that this helps level the playing field with other countries and encourages more companies to be based in the U.S., among other benefits.

To Holtz-Eakin, this is more important for sustained economic strength than the tax cuts. He believes it will mean modest, but meaningful and lasting growth that will compound over time — well beyond the 10-year budget window.

Still, it’s not clear to everyone that it will be that meaningful.

“Moving to a territorial system is a good idea, but that is really on the margin,” Zandi said. “When they’re making investment decisions, they’re looking at lots of different factors.”

He points to trade and energy policy, as well as where businesses can find the workers they need. In addition, he notes that other nations might find ways to change their tax systems in turn to compete with the U.S.

Put all of this together, and there’s no way to give a firm yes or no that answers this question fully.

The best answer to this question seems to be a highly qualified yes. Yes, the tax bill will likely spur some economic growth. But there’s good reason to think that 1: that growth will be heavily front-loaded, and 2: the longer-term growth change over what the U.S. would have had without the tax plan will be modest, or even minimal.

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In the world of streaming workout videos, Shawn T is like Jay-Z or Mick Jagger. He’s a superstar. Millions of people have done his workout programs. One is called “Insanity.” Another, “Focus T25,” aims to get you in shape in just 25 minutes a day without leaving your house.

In our ever more digital world there are all kinds of apps and other quick ways to fit fitness into your life. But you still have to do the exercise. And in his new book, T is for Transformation, Shaun T tells the story of his life and the lessons he’s learned about finding that motivation.

With his sculpted muscles and abs, Shaun T is the picture of fitness. In his workout videos he’s funny and happy. But it wasn’t always like this.

“The first thing I remember as a kid was being washed in the sink of our west Philadelphia apartment,” Shaun T says. Back then, 40 years ago, he was a toddler named Shaun Thompson. “I was so small, but I soon began to realize that where we lived wasn’t necessarily the best place in the world.”

Shaun T grew up poor and had a rough childhood in a violent neighborhood. The family was on food stamps. And they had so little food he’d sneak bread into his underwear and eat it at night in bed.

Being hungry stays with you. And when he got a scholarship to a state college, that came with a dining hall meal plan card, which meant free food.

“When you give someone who grew up on food stamps a meal card, I could just go and eat and eat. And then when I found out that you can use this food card at Domino’s, late night cravings became a whole new thing. I was like, ‘Whhhhaaat?’ ”

Shaun T gained 50 pounds his freshman year. He didn’t like that. But he says he was too embarrassed to go to the gym, even though he ran track in high school. “I was extremely unhappy with the way that I looked and the way that I felt,” he says.

But he finally got on the treadmill. And he took some dance fitness classes. And as soon as he’d lost just a few pounds, he says he loved how that made him feel. So much so that he switched his major to sports science. And then he went to the manager of the school rec center and told her, “I want to teach a class.”

Shaun T had no experience. But his fellow students liked him. And 90 of them signed up for his first class in the rec center. He turned on the hip-hop song “Space Jam,” from the 1996 movie with Michael Jordan, put it on repeat, and got everyone doing his halfway-thought-out hip hop aerobics routine. The students loved it.

“I was like are you kidding me? This is the most amazing thing. I could teach and have fun, and all of these people are not only doing what I’m doing but most of them were afraid to dance and they’re actually doing it and they’re stepping outside their comfort zone. And I’m looking at these people and I’m like, ‘This is it. I want to do this for the rest of my life.’ ”

And that’s what Shaun T has done. First classes, at small workout studios. He taught a class for workers at a nuclear power plant in New Jersey. He’d teach anywhere he could. Later he moved to LA and started doing videos. Today, the company that distributes his workouts, Beachbody LLC, says Shaun T has sold more than $1 billion worth of fitness videos.

Shaun T says to stay motivated, it can help to mix it up. For example, sign up for a dance class or a basketball league. He does his own workouts, “but I also play tennis. But I also get my friends I’m like, ‘Yo, let’s play volleyball today.’ It doesn’t always have to be the same thing. Like create it for yourself and it will be so much fun.”

And he says, focus on the fun, not about how much you weigh. “My goal for people out there is just just do things that make you feel good. ‘Cause the weight will come off but the happiness is what’s most important.”

Of course, it can often be more complicated than that for people, including Shaun T. Growing up in that violent neighborhood, he says he suffered abuse from his stepfather and went through things that, later in life, it took him years of therapy to really work through and understand. He encourages others to consider doing the same if they think they might have unresolved baggage holding them back from their health and fitness goals, or other goals for that matter.

“You get stronger by unpacking the baggage, not by packing it into the closet,” he says. But he adds, “It’s just really important for people to understand that your biggest struggles are also the motivators to your biggest strengths.”

Shaun T’s struggles back then got him to do something that took courage when he was 14 years old and about to start high school. He decided to leave his family and go live with his grandparents in New Jersey. His grandfather was a former boxer and a minister and this family was stable and loving. It was a big change and it made a big difference. “I didn’t start living until I was 14 years old,” Shaun T says. “From that point forward my grandparents were my angels, they were just like the best ever.”

In his book, Shaun T says even if it’s in a less dramatic way, changing the people around you can make a difference. If most of your friends are couch potatoes, he recommends spending more time with people who exercise and who will support you and encourage you to live a healthier life.

On a more counterintuitive note, he says, “selfishness gets a bad rap.” He says some people spend so much time doing things for other people — their family, their friends — and they feel guilty taking any time at all just to take care of themselves. He says obviously don’t abandon your loved ones, but you’ll be a happier person if you take time the time you need. He says it’s usually OK to take 25 minutes to do that workout. “Be selfish, because all the people in your life will benefit if you are,” he says.

Of course when it comes to health and fitness, what you eat is important too. Shaun T says one of those giant sugar-frosted cinnamon buns has so many calories you’d have to work out like a maniac for two hours to burn it off. But there too he says, enjoy yourself. Eat healthy 85 percent of the time and enjoy some pizza or a doughnut the rest of the time. But, he says, cut the doughnut in half.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that the social media giant would begin emphasizing more “meaningful” content on users’ feeds – giving greater weight to posts from friends and family and less to businesses, brands and media.

In a long Facebook post of his own, Zuckerberg stressed that the social media platform — which has more than two billion active users worldwide — was created “to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us.”

While the move was anticipated, Thursday’s announcement filled in more of the details.

“The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long term measures of happiness and health,” Zuckerberg wrote. “On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos — even if they’re entertaining or informative — may not be as good.”

The changes come as the company has faced increased criticism for the way its algorithms have allowed the spread of targeted disinformation aimed at disrupting U.S. elections, as well as more general criticisms that over-use of social media can contribute to depression.

Zuckerberg writes that he’s directed the company’s product teams to shift “from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”

As Wired notes, “The upshot: The newsfeed algorithm will now give less weight to the popularity of posts and more weight to posts that encourage users to interact and comment. One of the big criticisms of Facebook in the past 18 months is that the content we see in the newsfeed is driven too much by Facebook’s obsession with persuading people to spend as much time as possible on Facebook. The more time people spend in the newsfeed, the more ad revenue Facebook makes. That may be good for Facebook, but, according to an increasingly loud chorus of critics, it’s not so good for humanity.”

According to The Associated Press, “The move will not affect advertisements – users will continue to see the same ads they have before, ‘meaningful’ or not. But businesses that use Facebook to connect with their customers without paying for ads will also feel the pain.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)