IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.
This new trend has taken over in parts of Silicon Valley – and claims that if you cut yourself off from almost all stimulation for 24 hours, you’ll see benefits. Kirsty Grant gave it a try.
(BBC, approx 7 mins reading time)
I live with my parents and I’ve sat in a room away from my dad, so he can watch TV. All I can hear in this room is a ticking clock, which is already annoying. Though it’s good I can use it to tell the time now I’m awake. And each tick means I’m one second closer to being able to eat a meal. Yep, the hunger has already kicked in after 13 hours.
2. The empty promises of minimalism?
You might be thinking about paring back your life in 2020 – but will it have benefits?
(The Guardian, approx 18 mins reading time)
What the bloggers collectively called minimalism amounted to a kind of enlightened simplicity, a moral message combined with a particularly austere visual style. This style was displayed primarily on Instagram and Pinterest. Certain hallmarks of minimalist imagery emerged: clean white subway tiles, furniture in the style of Scandinavian midcentury modern, and clothing made of organic fabrics from brands that promised you would only ever need to buy one of each piece.
3. Improving ourselves to death
Another article about whether it’s good to be all ‘new year, new me’. What can self-help gurus tell us about the times we live in?
(The New Yorker, approx 18 mins reading time)
In our current era of non-stop technological innovation, fuzzy wishful thinking has yielded to the hard doctrine of personal optimization. Self-help gurus need not be charlatans peddling snake oil. Many are psychologists with impressive academic pedigrees and a commitment to scientific methodologies, or tech entrepreneurs with enviable records of success in life and business. What they’re selling is metrics. It’s no longer enough to imagine our way to a better state of body or mind. We must now chart our progress, count our steps, log our sleep rhythms, tweak our diets, record our negative thoughts—then analyze the data, recalibrate, and repeat.
This story has been doing the rounds for a while, but the BBC has taken another look at it: what happened to the nine people found dead while on a trek up the Ural Mountains?
(BBC, approx 29 mins reading time)
“We had gone about 500 metres when on the left I saw the tent,” says Sharavin. “Part of the canvas was poking out but the rest was covered in snow. I used an ice pick lying nearby to uncover the entrance.” Inside, he and another rescuer found a blanket and some rucksacks lined up neatly and a pile of boots in one corner. There was also the route map, official papers, money, and a flask of alcohol.
5. Martin Scorsese is letting go
The legendary director on his career in 2019.
(New York Times, approx mins reading time)
Scorsese has equally vivid memories of his childhood, growing up in Little Italy where his formative influences included his parents, his Catholic priests and the local hoodlums who would inspire films like “Mean Streets.” If his past movies tended to glamorize criminals and the violence they perpetrate, Scorsese said, “Well, it is glamorous and attractive, is it not? It’s glamorous at first if you’re young and stupid, which a lot of people are. I was.”
There was an outpouring of shock when the death of Marian Finucane was announced on Thursday. Here is a look at how she changed radio in Ireland.
(TheJournal.ie, approx 6 mins reading time)
In her book ‘Inside RTE’, Betty Purcell wrote that Women Today mirrored the subject matter of the Women’s Movement. “It gave a platform to women who had been isolated in their homes and to others who had been put upon in their workplaces. It popularised the technique of using the voices of real people on the phone to talk about subjects that were hitherto taboo or hushed.”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Also keeping things topical – the long search for a hangover cure.
(The New Yorker, approx 20 mins reading time)
A hangover peaks when alcohol that has been poured into the body is finally eliminated from it—that is, when the blood-alcohol level returns to zero. The toxin is now gone, but the damage it has done is not. By fairly common consent, a hangover will involve some combination of headache, upset stomach, thirst, food aversion, nausea, diarrhea, tremulousness, fatigue, and a general feeling of wretchedness. Scientists haven’t yet found all the reasons for this network of woes, but they have proposed various causes.
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