Weekend Reading

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  • Public Place Meditation Exercise
    Excited to share my all-time favorite thing to do on the subway, or other public transportation. It’s also one of the best empathy exercises I’ve thought of and really helps to remind me to feel the moments of love and pain we all go through.
    Tried this a few days this week (identify the person and you can close your eyes or look away, staring is creepy!) and… it kinda works.

  • Turkish Delight
    For all the haters. Turkish Delight is a thing of wonder.

  • Who has time for that?
    Above: art-making advice from our 40-year-old ovens.
    You always have more time than you think.

  • Twenty years ago, Netflix.com launched. The movie business has never been the same.
    Moviegoers once devoted substantial chunks of their Friday evenings to perusing the aisles of video stores. You’d go in with one movie in mind, but the latest releases had been picked over.
    Place your bets now on the next 20 (I vote for big-screen streaming events become the norm, vote for your fav and watch it at the cinema).

  • What smartphone photography is doing to our memories
    Though they may appear crystal clear in our minds, our memories are not a carbon copy of the events we witnessed. Every time we recall a memory, we may accidentally alter it or diminish its accuracy. Even trivial memories are easily corrupted with mere suggestions.
    …. and I had THE BEST comment on this article… ummmmm….

  • Hating Sundays
    I’ve lived alone for 6 years now and in that time I’ve realised how much I hate Sundays. There’s just something about them. I never want to do too much else I’ll end up knackered for the week ahead but that means that more often than not I end up not making plans at all.
    For those that read my ‘Sunday Mornings’ piece, you are not alone!

  • Malcolm Gladwell Explains Where His Ideas Come From
    For many readers out there, the publication of a new Malcolm Gladwell article ranks as an event demanding immediate attention.
    I always enjoy his writing, even if I don’t agree with it all. Stories are where the humanity lies.

  • The Hague bans marijuana smoking in city centre
    The Hague has become the first Dutch city to ban the smoking of marijuana around its city centre, central railway station and major shopping areas. Flyers are to be distributed at cannabis-selling coffee shops and homeless shelters to warn of fines for those caught breaching the ban.
    Have to say, glad to hear this. Barcelona was beautiful but too often *cough* that smell.. bleuch.

  • Plastic recycling: Why are 99.75% of coffee cups not recycled?
    It’s gradually becoming common knowledge that it’s not as easy to recycle your takeaway coffee cup as people may have thought. The mixture of paper and plastic in their inner lining – designed to make them both heat and leakproof – makes them difficult to recycle.
    There has to be a compromise.

  • 10 Ways To Have A Better Conversation
    I definitely will take this talk by Celeste Headlee to heart. Time to take an honest look at how I ‘listen’.
    For those who struggle to make small talk, try listening better (some good tips I hadn’t heard before in this little video).

  • From Madonna to Janelle Monáe: how female sexuality progressed in pop
    In 1997, Aerosmith released an ode to the female anatomy, simply titled Pink, in which Steven Tyler famously brayed about his tremendous love of a woman’s vagina.
    I’d say Monáe for next US President but know the Beyonce fans would win that vote… Monáe for VP?

  • Joy Neville: ‘Coping in a male-dominated world? I don’t know anything else’
    Joy Neville never wanted to be a referee.
    Here’s hoping it’s easier for the next non-male rugby referees to come through.

  • The Ladies Who Were Famous for Wanting to Be Left Alone
    On the night of Monday, March 30, 1778, an Anglo-Irish lady named Sarah Ponsonby, age twenty-three, the unmarried dependent of well-placed relatives (her parents long dead), slipped out of her guardians’ Georgian mansion in Woodstock, Kilkenny, the rest of the house asleep.
    It shouldn’t be a surprise that history is littered with amazing women. I’m glad these stories are coming to the fore.

  • Against marriage
    What distinguishes marriage from other relationships? It is not set apart by its durability: unmarried partnerships can be more permanent than married ones.
    File under: YMMV. (note: I’m divorced but I’m not against marriage).

  • How a Liberal Scholar of Conspiracy Theories Became the Subject of a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory
    In 2010, Marc Estrin, a novelist and far-left activist from Vermont, found an online version of a paper by Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and the most frequently cited legal scholar in the world.
    What goes around comes around?

  • Disneyflix Is Coming. And Netflix Should Be Scared.
    Will Disney destroy the movie theater? No company has been more responsible for shaping the modern entertainment landscape than Walt Disney. In 1937, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, its first feature film, Disney invented the family blockbuster.
    And, in the midst of all this, us poor schmucks who’ll end up shelling out another monthly fee….

  • Your Eyes Aren’t Windows Into Your Soul
    To understand the expressive range of the human face, nothing beats watching a colleague scream his head off in slow motion. When my lab began to study protective reflexes in the early 2000s, the video cameras came out and the place became a scare factory.
    Ha, like I have a soul…

  • Trailblazing Scottish Mountaineer and Poet Nan Shepherd on the Transcendent Rewards of Walking and What Makes for an Ideal Walking Companion
    To place one foot in front of the other in a steady rhythm is to allow self and world to cohere, to set the mind itself into motion. We walk for different reasons and to different ends — for Thoreau, every walk was “a sort of crusade”; for artist Maira Kalman, it is “the glory of life.”
    I do love walking, solo. I also like walking with some people but not others. Some of the reasons are in this article.

  • The Boston Marathon Had Two Shocking Winners
    You will read, and in fact are reading right now, that Desi Linden and Yuki Kawauchi’s times (2:39:54 and 2:15:58) were the slowest winning times in the Boston Marathon in 40 and 42 years, respectively.
    Bonkers. Aren’t humans constantly fascinating.

  • Scrivener for Blogging
    This blog post was written in Scrivener. I think you’re all well-aware of my Scrivener addiction by now. I’ve posted reviews of both the mac version and the iOS app, and a YouTube series devoted to the topic is in the works.
    Posting more for myself and my decade long search for a ‘workflow’ that ‘works’.

  • Evangelism
    LOLz

  • Elon Musk’s advice for when you’re dragged into useless meetings
    Yes.

  • Three kinds of meetings
    Meetings are marketing in real time with real people. (A conference is not a meeting. A conference is a chance for a circle of people to interact). PLEASE don’t confuse them. Confused meeting types are the number one source of meeting ennui.
    Yes to this also.

  • What Amazon learned by having employees write stories instead of doing PowerPoints
    And whilst we are at it, this too.

  • The calmness of airplane pilots
    Yesterday a Southwest flight from NYC to Dallas experienced an in-flight engine explosion and had to make an emergency landing in Philadelphia. The explosion tore a hole in the fuselage and a passenger started to get sucked out of the hole before being pulled back in (she subsequently died).
    The audio of this is utterly engrossing.

  • Actually, Table Salt Rules
    For years, I politely declined to keep the pedestrian substance known as table salt in my pantry.
    Are YOU a salt snob?

  • How to Get Minesweeper on Your Mac
    If you’ve been a die-hard Apple fan since you first put your fingers to a keyboard, there’s a chance you’ve never experienced the thrill of Minesweeper—one of the two classic games that used to be found on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
    I didn’t realise how much I missed Minesweeper until now. (note: turns out, not that much…)

  • The Scientific Case for a Big Breakfast
    The big thing in sports nutrition in the 1990s was the “window of opportunity.” Down some carbs immediately after a workout, a notable 1988 study found, and you’ll replenish your fuel stores 75 percent more quickly than if you down the same carbs two hours later.
    No, not Chris Evans… ALL THE FOOD!!

  • TOO MANY MEN
    Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.
    I think the headline says it all (and in ALL CAPS too).

  • What Comes After The Social Media Empires
    The intense political battles over Facebook and the other giant social media companies mark the end of the empire-building phase of those companies’ history. Now they’re a mid-20th-century European power, agonizing over the inevitable loss of the colonies and trying to stomp out insurgencies.
    I’m gonna guess it’s not silence and the end of trolls.

  • Why restaurants became so loud — and how to fight back
    When the Line Hotel opened in Washington, DC, last December, the cocktail bars, gourmet coffee shops, and restaurants that fill its cavernous lobby drew a lot of buzz. Housed in a century-old church, the space was also reputedly beautiful.
    And where America leads, the UK shall follow (see the last point, ugh (also, not ALL etc etc))