It’s too much work to change our minds.
Read it here. If you care enough.
Category: Reading
Books, & links to all kinds of stuff I found interesting
[Link]: Kieran Healy speculates What Happened
Who needs fiction when you have the last few days of the Trump Administration? Kieran Healy’s speculation of the Capitol attack makes for a great read.
[Link]: Ed Yong, How Science Beat the Virus
Long read from one of the best science writers.
[Lifehacks]: Google Calendar Search by Date
Thanks to Kevin Kelly in the weekly Recommendo newsletter
A really useful, but non-obvious, shortcut to search Google calendar for a particular date is simply to hit the letter G while on the calendar page. Instead of scrolling back month by month, you hit < g > and then enter the date you want.
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[Link]: In praise of the humble products all around us
Tim Harford shines a light on the astounding resourcefulness required for the products around us we don’t give even the slightest thought to.
[Link]: Quote of the Day: Scott Galloway
Mark Zuckerberg is what happens when you replace civics with computer science.
Prof. Scott Galloway. Definitely read the whole thing here.
[Link]: Wendy Grossman, The Most Dangerous Game
An under-discussed aspect of the gap between politics – Beltway or Westminster – and life as ordinary people know it is that for many politicians and media, making preposterous claims they don’t really believe is a game.
…All these posturers score against each other from comfortable berths and comfortably assume they are beyond repercussions. It’s the same dynamic as the one at work among the advocates of letting the virus rip through the population at large, as if infection is for the little people and our desperately overstressed, traumatized health care workers are replaceable parts rather than a precious resource.
Read in full here
The 7 Day Habit Challenge [NYT]
“The friction you set up or remove in the environment is going to have an effect long after you’ve gotten discouraged and are less excited about the new behavior,” said Wendy Wood, a research psychologist at the University of Southern California and author of “Good Habits, Bad Habits.” “That’s why friction is so powerful. It persists.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/well/mind/healthy-habits.html
Medicine studies Meditation
Reasons To Be Cheerful: 2020 in Review
Amidst the damage wreaked by a virus, it’s easy to get buried under tons of bad news hitting us from everywhere.
Reasons To Be Cheerful was one of the better finds online for me. This recent posts from the good folks there chronicles 112 uplifting stories from 2020.
Here’s a few that I found fascinating:
Young writers produced over 1,000 publications through the help of youth writing organizations.
More than two-thirds of all the money being invested in energy is now going to renewables.
Lesotho’s Premier League club is the first in the world to fund its men’s and women’s soccer teams equally.
Worth a scan at the very least.