Big Food wants you to eat three meals a day, but there’s little evidence that this practice is good for you. And, as Amanda Mull writes for The Atlantic, the pandemic has exposed how nebulous this widely accepted ritual of consumption really is. While the first 34 years of her life were spent eating three meals at roughly the same time each day, in 2020 Mull settled into an at-home routine of intermittent snacking punctuated by one large meal. “Our old eating schedules are no more natural than sitting in a cubicle for 10 hours a day,” Mull writes.

Black Americans consistently face worse medical outcomes than whites in the face of a racist health system, as OZY documented in a “Real Talk, Real Change” special edition of The Carlos Watson Show. In addition to better medical policy and education, what if part of the solution were at the barbershop? Michael DeVore won an OZY Genius Award in 2017 as a student at Claflin University for his idea to create an app connecting students with cheap haircuts. Today, his company, Live Chair, is jumping into healthcare — with barbers persuading Black customers to get their blood pressure checked and other medical screenings. It’s a simple step toward preventive care for a population that needs it.

Should a doctor performing a surgery in Brownsville, Texas, receive significantly more compensation than a doctor doing the same procedure a mile away in Matamoros, Mexico? Given the attention focused on gender or racial pay disparities, international pay equity deserves a look, too. Many international workers are paid less than Americans and those from other affluent nations … even when working for the same companies in the same jobs. It’s time for economists to focus on the nationality gap (after adjusting for cost of living). As pandemic-fueled remote work goes global, it’s an increasingly urgent question.

Business owners around the world struggle to find people to take over their profitable enterprises, and some even die without finding a suitable heir. Governments could create programs to pair proven entrepreneurs from disadvantaged communities with owners looking to exit. It’s a different kind of wealth redistribution for communities of color, and a model that has already seen success in Cincinnati, Ohio.

They already lift your boxes; why not have them carry your emotional burden? Artificial intelligence doesn’t have the greatest track record in avoiding discrimination, but if it’s not the sole algorithmic arbiter behind decisions, AI can make it easier for employees to report workplace harassment and discrimination. Companies are using chatbots like Spot and Callisto to get human biases out of the reporting process, while Botler AI is helping explain to people in the U.S. and Canada whether a crime has been committed against them. Corporations could find it easier to improve company culture as a result.

The loan crisis is real, yet the value of a college degree is dwindling even as it burdens students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. One solution? Eliminate the first two years of college, which, at many universities, is spent on general education before students pursue a major. You should get the basics in high school, and the cost of college could be spent on professional preparedness rather than remedial courses that studies suggest deliver little in terms of academic gains. It’s also essential to find extra support for underserved K-12 students, who are disproportionately kids of color.

Bankruptcy can be a maddeningly complex process, all but indecipherable to those who need to escape a crushing burden of debt. Rohan Pavuluri’s solution: a free TurboTax-like service to navigate the legal hurdles and paperwork. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Pavuluri won an OZY Genius Award, and now his organization Upsolve has since grown to become the largest bankruptcy nonprofit in America. He’s hoping to expand to serve low-income folks in other areas of the law, too.

A blockchain company paid $95,000 for a signed 2009 Banksy original and then livestreamed setting it aflame on the Twitter account @BurntBanksy last year. The most stunning part? They actually made money on the deal before striking the match, by converting the original into a digital “non-fungible token” (NFT), which they sold for a cool $380,000 — a nearly 400-percent return on their red-hot investment. As the BurntBanksy collective explained, the elimination of the physical shifted its value to the digital. Which makes us wonder how high a token of the Mona Lisa, with an estimated worth of $54.5 billion, could go if the Louvre fixture went up in flames.

In 2016, reporter Rachel Swarns received a tip that Jesuit priests sold 272 people in 1838 to save Georgetown University … a historical fact that, while known to scholars, had received little attention. Swarns launched a New York Times investigation, and within three years, Georgetown announced plans to raise $400,000 annually to benefit the descendants of the people they sold, while also offering them preferential admission. It’s the first major university to offer reparations, and was a precursor to the Catholic Church’s effort to address its role in slavery: a plan to raise $100 million to support racial healing projects. “There’s a reckoning happening,” Swarns says, as Christian groups from Virginia to New York to Texas follow suit.

In recent decades, American politics and media — not to mention our food — have become increasingly nationalized, while technology allows us to bridge any distance and makes us more mobile than ever. It’s come at a cost for our sense of community, however, and it may take a new localism to tame America’s vicious polarization. Think about it: The ties that bind you to the Atlanta Falcons or a city arts festival transcend political affiliation, and local governments tend to be more pragmatic and less ideological than national ones (or at least they used to be). At a time when globalism is often seen as the ticket to open-mindedness, this approach flips conventional wisdom on its head.

What if you were represented by more than one U.S. House member? Not long ago, this was common: Multi-member districts were outlawed in 1967, as they were often used to dilute Black political power. But a growing number of advocates and leaders think bringing back this practice, if coupled with ranked-choice voting, could help reduce the temperature in a House riven by extremes. How? If you could rank several candidates over a wider area, with, say, the top three finishers in a district going to Washington, aspiring reps would have to appeal to a broader swath of voters. This would also create an opportunity for red-state Democrats and blue-state Republicans.

In the U.S., presidencies have a tendency to become cults of personality. But what if we followed the example set south of the border? Mexico limits its presidents to one six-year term. Their policies might remain, but few remember much about Enrique Peña Nieto or Vicente Fox today. This rule could help American presidents avoid breaking the law in pursuit of re-election and sidestep the second-term scandal.

An Indonesian direct-payment program to lift rural residents out of poverty had a delicious side effect — it reduced deforestation by 30 percent, say researchers who examined the impact of the program on about 7,500 forest villages from 2008 to 2012. That’s because villagers no longer felt a desperate need to increase their area of cultivation to reduce the risks of low crop yields. Could a universal basic income help elsewhere? In the U.S., think tanks are begging policymakers to incorporate farmers and rural Americans in their climate-mitigation plans, given the integral role they can play.

Step aside, artificial intelligence: Meet artificial photosynthesis. The process in which plants convert sunlight and water into oxygen — while absorbing carbon dioxide — could soon be within reach for machines, too. Such work is being pioneered by Yale University and other institutions, funded in part by a recent $6.25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense. A major breakthrough was a tabletop device that could operate on sunlight alone for more than 3,000 hours without degradation, converting methane into benzene and reducing nitrogen into ammonia, an important element for fertilizer. Using light to fuel chemical processes could be crucial to pushing renewable energy forward.

The Museum of the Future in Dubai has gotten a little wild while imagining the future of cities. One idea: harnessing the natural desalinating energy of jellyfish to create a city-wide, saltwater-converting jelly that could ease water scarcity concerns, particularly in the parched Middle East. Another? Converting parking garages, which could soon become woefully outdated with the arrival of self-driving cars, into hubs for growing and delivering fresh food.

Which of these ideas would affect you and/or your community?  Share your thoughts with us at OzyCommunity@Ozy.com.