Posted on by amowpnas1

La vida

Notícies

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/homesick-for-place-you-have-never-been-reader-responses fernweh, nostàlgia per anar (ja que no tornar) a un lloc on mai no hem estat. En el meu cas els sequoies, o llargues carreteres desertes

http://lifefaker.com/ un servei per simular una vida perfecta: Life isn’t perfect.
Your profile should be.
Look At My Holiday And Cry
My Sexy Girlfriend/Boyfriend
I Just Happen To Live Here
I Can Be Arty And Deep
My Unachievable Body
I Own All The Things
I Found Love And Babies
My Weekend Was Amazing Thanks
Look What I Had For LunchI’m Happy By Myself
My Girls Are Just So Incredible
Yeah My Job Lets Me Travel
Even My Cat/Dog Is Happier
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mothers-day-lies mentides que les mares diuen als seus fills
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-promise-of-vaping-and-the-rise-of-juul fumar amb vaporitzadors que dispensne nicotina sense les substàncies col·laterals del càncer
https://www.fs.blog/general-thinking-tools/ 9 maneres de pensar més creatives
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/coopers-hill-cheeserolling cursa empaitant un formatge [i la cursa carregant la dona en que el premi és el sue pes en cervesa
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-came-home l’espia de la CIA que va decidir servir de policia a la seva comunitat a Savannah, sobre la intercació humana per desescalar conflictes
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/preventable-tragedies els suicidis d’Anthony Bourdain i Kate Spade. L’efecte crida, la notícia del suïcidi de Robin Williams va provocar un augment del 10%
why you should take a nap instead of meditating
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/how-mr-rogers-made-fantasy-familiar  the life and work of Fred Rogers, who took the radical position that children’s feelings were as important as those of adults.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr-rogers-neighborhood-talking-to-kids/562352/ l’esforç del creador d’un programa per a nens per tal que el llenguatge fos entenedor
BBC BIG DREAMS SMALL SPACES   espai de jardineria
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-to-fight-crime-with-your-television quan fan coses distretes a la TV baixa l’índex de crims
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/this-meteorologist-created-the-perfect-road-trip un meteoròleg crea un viatge als USA per estar tot l’any a 70F
https://thewalrus.ca/the-new-old-age/ no estem preparats per tenir gent gran amb moltes malalties no mortals
https://www.toilettwinning.org/ apadrina un water, per la salut del món
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-45561334 estudi de la BBC sobre la solitud
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-sordid-truth-degass-ballet-dancers l’explotació de les balalrines (la realitat rera els quadres de Degas)
Porcs en un camp amb cabanes a Escòcia, una vida digna
roba per filtrar pets: https://www.myshreddies.com/
2019
Tenir temps ens farà més feliços que no pas tenir diners (Happiness researcher) : https://hbr.org/cover-story/2019/01/time-for-happiness
https://dariusforoux.com/14-reminders/  14 coses a recordar cada dia, tot és provisional
http://nautil.us/issue/70/variables/how-designers-engineer-luck-into-video-games-rp  els dissenyadors de joc modifiquen els succesos a l’atzar per “Millorar” l’experiència del jugador, tenen dades per preveure quan abandonarà després de no ghuanyar durant molt estona, i li ofereixen “near msis” o petits premis per que segueixi gastant.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90342219/the-future-of-housing-looks-nothing-like-todays els americans consideren tornar a un mode de vida en que conviuen a casa amb els avis, però les vivendes actuals estan pensades per famílies, en suburbis on es necessita el cotxe
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-amazing-psychology-of-japanese-train-stations estratègies per fer la vida als trens més tranquila al Japó
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-case-for-rooms  cuina i menjador junt? o separat?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/the-presentation-on-egypt fiction Camille Bordas.  Danielle had been spending a lot of time thinking about lines of work lately, and how people ended up modelling their world view on whatever it was that they did for a living—how mathematicians thought everything was numbers, how writers thought everything was fiction. Even Armand had tried to convince her that checking strangers in and out of identical rooms mattered. “Life is a hotel lobby,” he’d say. She wondered whether garbagemen went around telling people that everything was waste, which would’ve been, to her mind, closer to the truth than anything else she’d heard.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-48885846 el sistema penitenciari de Noruega, que tracta els presoners com a persones, té menys reincidents. Potser només ho pot fer un país ric.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49690173 fotos còmiques d’animals
Now venture capitalists, excited by a report from IBISWorld which found that Americans spend $2.2 billion annually on “mystical services” (including palmistry, tarot reading, etc.), are funnelling money into the area. Co-Star is backed by six million dollars. Since its launch, in 2017, it has been downloaded six million times. Eighty per cent of users are female, and their average age is twenty-four.
Co-Star’s daily horoscopes appear under categories that are only slightly incomprehensible, such as “Mood Facilitating Responsibility” or “Identity Enhancing Emotional Stability.” The app generates content by pulling and recombining phrases that have been coded to correspond to astronomical phenomena. Currently, the company employs four people to write these “bits” of language—two poets, an editor, and an astrologer.
n “The Stars Down to Earth,” Theodor Adorno’s 1953 critique of a newspaper’s sun-sign column, he argued that astrology appealed to “persons who do not any longer feel that they are the self-determining subjects of their fate.” The mid-century citizen had been primed to accept magical thinking by systems of fascistic “opaqueness and inscrutability.” It’s easy to name our own opaque and inscrutable systems—surveillance capitalism, a byzantine health-insurance system—but to say that we are no longer the self-determining subjects of our fate is also to recognize the many ways that our lives are governed by circumstances outside our control. We know that our genetic codes predispose us to certain diseases, and that the income bracket we are born into can determine our future. “Fate” is another word for “circumstance.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/dementia-made-a-new-man-out-of-my-dad un home es torna més obert, capaç d’abraçar i de ballar.
It was a moment of pure delight. My dad got up from his recliner next to the big picture window in the sitting room of my parents’ house. The music that we always played caught his ear, and for some reason he closed his eyes and started to move to the music. “At first, I didn’t know what he was doing,” Mom said to me afterward. There he was, hands by his sides, smiling, and dancing slowly. Mom and I were thrilled. To say this was out of character for my dad would be quite an understatement.
“What?!” I thought. Here was someone who had never wanted me to take photographs of him, now asking for a photo shoot. Most of the time, I had to sneak around, maybe catch him off his guard. For him to actually pose and smile was almost unbelievable. Who is this person?
Suddenly, my father was openly willing to giving me hugs, and when he would meet new people, he’d greet them with a smile instead of avoiding eye contact altogether.
But because of the dementia, he sometimes forgot who we were. As many know, it comes with the territory. I remember my mom telling me about a conversation she had with Dad. He could not quite remember who Mom was; all he knew was, “You’re the person who takes care of me.” It was a touching sentiment, one that would have been impossible for my dad of old to express, someone for whom feelings of uncertainty were an ever-present barricade to his heart.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/grandma-s-dementia-made-her-forget-her-homophobia una àvia homòfoba que els accepta en tenir demència. Què és el jo?
https://youtu.be/tu5vgtEMyvM anunci targes Hallmark
I like to say that contemporary art consists of all art works, five thousand years or five minutes old, that physically exist in the present. We look at them with contemporary eyes, the only kinds of eyes that there ever are.
I retain, but suspend, my personal taste to deal with the panoply of the art I see. I have a trick for doing justice to an uncongenial work: “What would I like about this if I liked it?” I may come around; I may not. Failing that, I wonder, What must the people who like this be like? Anthropology.
assess art by quality and significance. The latter is most decisive for my choice of subjects, because I’m a journalist. There’s art I adore that I won’t write about, because I can’t imagine it mattering enough to general readers. It pertains to my private experience as a person, without which my activity as a critic would wither but which falls outside my critical mandate.
“Another great thing about believing in Santa—no thank-you notes!”Cartoon by Barbara Smaller
I write for readers and not for artists, who can buy the magazine and read me like anyone else if they’re interested. I didn’t always. When I was young, I had personal and coterie loyalties. Then I decided to see how responsible a critic I could be, open to ideas but never prescriptive or proscriptive. By academic measure, this makes me not a true critic at all. I can live with that.
•
Family and friends are being wonderful to me in my sickness. I’ve toiled all my life, in vain, to like myself. Now the task has been outsourced. I can’t go around telling everybody they’re idiots.
I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?
True story: a friend received a preliminary diagnosis suggesting advanced breast cancer. Normally shy, she took this as license to tell or show everyone in her circle how little she liked or respected them. False alarm. It was cat-scratch fever. She moved overseas.
“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” per Samuel Johnson.
“Why isn’t Schjeldahl’s copy in?” “He’s dead.” “Uh, O.K., then.”
The best excuse.
•
The most delicious poem about someone dying is Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939), with these lines:
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
I believe in God” is a false statement for me because it is voiced by my ego, which is compulsively skeptical. But the rest of me tends otherwise. Staying on an “as if” basis with “God,” for short, hugely improves my life. I regret my lack of the church and its gift of community. My ego is too fat to squeeze through the door.
God creeps in. Human minds are the universe’s only instruments for reflecting on itself. The fact of our existence suggests a cosmic approval of it. (Do we behave badly? We are gifted with the capacity to think so.) We may be accidents of matter and energy, but we can’t help circling back to the sense of a meaning that is unaccountable by the application of what we know. If God is a human invention, good for us! We had to come up with something.
Take death for a walk in your minds, folks. Either you’ll be glad you did or, keeling over suddenly, you won’t be out anything.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/gossiping-is-good el xafardeig hauria tingut un paper a l’hora de formar comunitats amb referents compartits
More beguiling to Chayka are artists who have no interest in directing the lives of others. He writes about Agnes Martin—who considered herself an Abstract Expressionist but whose poised, transcendent paintings have been claimed for Minimalism—and Walter De Maria, whose installation “The New York Earth Room,” a field of dirt in a mostly empty white space, has been quietly confounding people in SoHo since 1977. He visits Donald Judd’s “100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum,” in Marfa, Texas, which defies any attempt to ascribe emotional meaning to it—the aluminum boxes are “just there,” Chayka writes, “empty of content except for the sheer fact of their physical presence, obdurate and silent, explaining nothing and with nothing to explain.” Such a sculpture might sound “deathly boring, more math problem than artwork,” but, as you walk through the exhibit, with the desert sun setting the silvery containers alight, they become a “constant affirmation of the simple possibility of sensation.” Elsewhere in the book, he writes about the philosopher Keiji Nishitani, who described ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, as a practice that links beauty to ephemerality and death.
He does have moments of productive discomfort: outside the concert hall where John Cage débuted “4’33”,” he wanders for four and a half minutes of silence in honor of Cage’s blank composition, and finds himself disappointed by the mundane sounds of leaf blowers and airplanes, before becoming unexpectedly attuned to the gentle sound of a hidden stream. He goes to the Guggenheim to hear Erik Satie’s proto-minimalist composition “Vexations,” an experiment in extreme monotony, and it proves intolerable, creating a jarring awareness of the often inadequate here and now. But Chayka best conveys the unnerving existential confrontation that minimalism can create in his capsule biographies of figures such as Julius Eastman, the composer who used minimalist structures as a means of asserting personal dissonance. In the nineteen-eighties, Eastman began living, on and off, in Tompkins Square Park; he wrote music on the subway and gave his compositions away in bars. Explaining the titles of his pieces “Crazy Nigger” and “Evil Nigger,” Eastman said, “What I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a ‘basicness,’ a ‘fundamentalness,’ and eschews that thing which is superficial or, what can we say, elegant.”
True minimalism, Chayka insists, is “not about consuming the right things or throwing out the wrong; it’s about challenging your deepest beliefs in an attempt to engage with things as they are, to not shy away from reality or its lack of answers.” I suspect that some recent converts to minimalism have already come to this conclusion. Underneath the vision of “less” as an optimized life style lies the path to something stranger and more profound: a mode of living that strips away protective barriers and heightens the miracle of human presence, and the urgency, today, of what that miracle entails.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/02/modern-dating-odds-economy-apps-tinder-math/606982/ triem parelles a les aplicacions filtrant per característiques com si compressim un aparell.

ret
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-lazy-person-s-guide-to-happiness si preparem l’entorn adequat, vindrà sol:
In terms of choosing a place to live, people who live near water—whether it’s a lake or river or an ocean—are about 10 percent more likely to be happy than people who don’t. And people who live in medium-sized cities are more likely to be happy than the anonymity of a big city or perhaps the too in-your-face, limited-possibility environment of a tiny town. You’re more likely to be happy if your house has a sidewalk, and if you live in a bikeable place.
Financial security is also, obviously, huge. It really does deliver more happiness over time than most anything that money can be spent on—after your needs are taken care of and you maybe treat yourself occasionally. If you have money left over, you’re much better paying down your mortgage or buying insurance or signing up for an automatic savings plan than you are buying a new gadget or new pair of shoes.
[urbanisme de la felicitat
A great example of that is San Luis Obispo. In the 1970s, a mayor came in who was an architecture professor from [California Polytechnic State University]. He noticed a forest of signs downtown, and drive-through fast-food restaurants, and the highway coming through. He drove a push for aesthetics, social gathering places, and streets built for humans, not just cars. Today, San Luis Obispo routinely ranks in the top 10 happiest places in the country. It’s not a coincidence. You see the same features in Portland, Santa Cruz, Boulder—happiness is not a coincidence. There’s always an orchestration of common factors that come together to produce it.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/02/survivors-guilt-in-the-mountains  per sentir-nos vius, els esportistes i escaladors busquen l’adrenalina. Sobre el terapeuta new age dels esportistes esponsoritzats per North Face:
Mountain climbing is a modern curiosity, a bourgeois indulgence. It consists mostly of relatively well-to-do white people manufacturing danger for themselves. Having been spared war, starvation, mass violence, and oppression, its practitioners travel great distances and endure great sacrifices to test their bodies and minds, encounter beauty, and experience the precariousness of existence and the terror and whatever revelations, fleeting or otherwise, may come of it. Though the whole enterprise may seem crazy or stupid or pointless, to many people it represents a necessary extreme of human endeavor, that combination of excellence and aberrance which propels a sliver of the population to set about going to the moon or writing symphonies, or dropping out entirely, as latter-day hermits and monks.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-52412655 la netejadora que va reordenar els lllibres segons la mida
https://youtu.be/dCO0DXAc0tk confinament, vídeo i noies pegant-se
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-mystical-mind-sharing-lives-of-tulpamancers tulpamancy, desenvolupar “persones” fictícies dins nostre [ com dobe personalitat; Pessoa en el millor dels cassos ]
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-52927678 les dones grans nigerianes estan enganxades al whatsapp i reenvien dotzenes de vídeos als fills.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/our-ghost-kitchen-future la cuina post corona, entregues a casa, ja no hi ha restaurants de maó
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-did-fancy-restaurants-do-during-covid restaurant de luxe es reinventa per menjar a domicili
https://gearhomies.com/collections/history pijames i xandals d’uniformes
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200812-the-online-work-gyms-that-help-spur-productivity com que la gent no es concentra paguen per ser “vigilats” i fer torns de 50min sense distreure’s.
com embolicar paquets
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/evolution-made-really-smart-people-long-to-be-loners que la gent molt intel·ligent tendeix a estar més sola perquè els altres no els aporten tant [ ?? ]
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic-transformed-the-office-forever Ara que et sobra temps per llegir , un article on tracta de la història del workplace, des del cubicle, a l’openfloor, als models híbrids presencials i WHF (work from home), i com estan adaptant-se despatxos com Gensler, O+A, per fer espais que compleixin amb les mesures de seguretat. Es veu que hi ha una empresa que fa auditories d’edificis i els certifica com a segurs. Deixen descarregar-te un document de treball https://www.fitwel.org/resources/#vrmodule . Aquesta mena d’auditories són semblants a les que havia fet jo, de riscos laborals a oficines.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/03/making-people-happy-makes-you-happier-too/618190/ Quan estem malament, un manera de sortir-ne abans és fer veure que estem bé, fake it until you make it. Norman Rockwell que tant bé pintava la felicitat, va estar deprimit i en teràpia amb Erik Erikson la major part de la seva vida (acceptant encàrrecs per pagar les factures).
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210319-why-procrastination-can-help-fuel-creativity fer tasques de casa sense pensar ajuda més a la creativitat que no fer res o que estar concentrat en una altra cosa [ deu ser que vagi fent xup-xup]
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56598932 copanyies aèries ofereixen àpats dalt d’avions als aeroports (per 350€)
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35788050/dyson-sphere-digital-resurrection-immortality/ crear un duplicat digital i fer-ho viure en una simulació [ però no sentiria res …]
https://www.reddit.com/r/FridgeDetective/ la gent mira de dir coses sobre com és la gent en funció del que e sveu a la nevera https://slate.com/culture/2013/11/mark-menjivar-photographs-inside-peoples-refrigerators-for-his-series-you-are-what-you-eat.html mark menjivar en fa reportatges
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/10/smartphone-is-now-the-place-where-we-live-anthropologists-say el mòbil és on habitem, [ on rebem les visites, on tenim la finestra al món]
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57085557 una app on s’hi registren creadors i la gent paga per poder influir en decisions
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/what-deadlines-do-to-lifetimes un editor fa creure als escriptors la deadline un setmana abans. To Cox, John is a small success with a big lesson. We often summon the will to do our best work when we think we’re down to the buzzer—but by then it’s too late to actually do it. It’s only by mentally manipulating ourselves to act early and often that we can ever do spectacular things. Cox tells us that all his subjects “have learned how to work like it’s the last minute before the last minute.”
Mason Currey’s “Daily Rituals” books (which have been translated into more than half a dozen languages) impart the quotidian habits of creative types from Albert Einstein to Twyla Tharp. Benjamin Franklin started his day with “air baths”—reading and writing in the nude until he had something else to do—and Edith Wharton wrote longhand in bed, “on sheets of paper that she dropped onto the floor for her secretary to retrieve and type up.” All these glimpses into the lives of Highly Effective People can seem like recipes for success, but read enough of them and you may conclude that the secret ingredients are not much sleep and a lot of professional help.
This mellow approach comes in many guises. “Leave time for exposing yourself to randomness,” Newport suggests. Jenny Odell, an artist and an educator, has become one of the most popular fonts of time-management wisdom, perhaps because of her distinctive blend of aesthetic, political, and personal arguments for, well, chilling out. Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” (2019) was a potent manifesto for stopping to smell the roses (literally: she suggests routine floral appreciation), and her new short book, “Inhabiting the Negative Space,” based on a virtual commencement speech she gave at Harvard’s design school last year, brings us more exhortations to slow down.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/7/22457264/roblox-explainer-game-app-faq experiències en un món virtual roblox, fortnite minecraft
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/toilet-in-nature un water enmig de la natura al Japó
https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2021/08/10577988/tik-tok-dating-app-profile-feedback perquè les dones no troben interessants els homes que publiquen fotos amb molt de múscul
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-44053828 incels, involuntary celibate, els joves frustrats perquè no són atractius i no troben parella.
https://www.gq.com/story/californias-vanishing-hippie-utopias les utopies dels hippies, en decadència
El tipus de sexe que volem tenir, ens ve determinat i fixat, o pot ser quelcom flexible?     https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex
It is a relief when she moves from science to film and literature—that is, to fiction, where the most complex human truths are told [ com deia jo a la tesina ]
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20211007-the-service-roles-that-lead-to-burnout els empleats de cara al públic deixen la feina per la mala educació dels clients. Som febles i poca cosa i això ens fa ser desconsiderats. Potser la idea xinesa de vigilar els ciutadans i treure punts segons el seu civisme  no va tant desencaminada. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/great-resignation-accelerating/620382/ la gent que atén el públic deixa la feina.
On the back, the books are stamped “Made in Great Britain” and “Letts of London,” the trademark of a printing house and bookbindery established in 1796. Early editions of Charles Dickens’s novels contained advertisements for Letts diaries.
The stationery store has long since disappeared—at the moment, it’s being turned into a day-care center—but Letts is still in business. The company claims to be the inventor of the first commercially printed diary but says on its Web site, “We know how important it is for our products to evolve with the ever-changing times.” Some Letts diaries are now sold less for the planning of weeks than for the pursuit of wellness. “Self care for men should absolutely be a priority,” the company advises, marketing little books in which people can write about how they feel, not what they’re supposed to be doing.
[ https://es.lettsoflondon.com/our-stories.html ara depèn de filofax ]
The sun makes days, seasons, and years, and the moon makes months, but people invented weeks. What makes a Tuesday a Tuesday, and why does it come, so remorselessly, every seven days? A week is mostly made up. There’s got to be a reason for seven, but people like to argue about what it could possibly be. On the one hand, it seems as though it must be an attempt to reconcile the cycles of the sun and the moon; each of the four phases of the moon (full, waxing, half, and waning) lasts about seven days, though not exactly seven days. On the other hand, the number seven comes up in Genesis: God rested on the seventh day. Another reason for seven lies in the heavens. Many civilizations seem to have counted and named days of the week for the sun and the moon and the five planets that they knew about, a practice that eventually migrated to Rome. Norse as well as Roman gods survive in the English names, too: Thursday, for Thor; Saturday, for Saturn. In “The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are” (Yale), the historian David M. Henkin calls the heavenly version the astronomical week and the Genesis kind the dominical week. Lately, there’s also the pandemic week, every day a Blursday.
Very few things in America used to take place on a particular day of the week, Henkin says, aside from worship and, in some places, market days. In time, though, elections tended to be held on Mondays and Tuesdays, public feasts and weddings on Thursdays, and public executions on Fridays. Then came factory life and wages and paydays: Saturdays. Saturday night was a night out. Put that together with Sunday as a day of rest and you’ve got a weekend.
It wasn’t only laundry that got done weekly. Soon Catharine Beecher and other writers of treatises on housekeeping were advising women to plan all their household chores around a particular day of the week. Mend on Mondays, iron every Wednesday, sweep the floors on Friday, inspect the pantry every Saturday. Meanwhile, schools began to assign the teaching of different subjects across the days of the week, “to secure, first, the recurrence of each subject at certain intervals; and secondly, to indicate the manner in which its several parts should be taken up in successive lessons,” as one teaching manual recommended, “so as to avoid a desultory and confused method of teaching on the one hand, or the neglect of any material point on the other.”
People read newspapers and magazines that they called “weeklies.” And printers, not least Letts of London, began printing books, arranged by week, for recording attendance, and for making appointments. In the American countryside during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the mail came once a week, on the same day, providing a nice rhythm for epistolary romances and a chance to scold relatives.
What really convinced me of the importance of weeks, in those years, is an artifact that Henkin never mentions. If asked, as a ten-year-old, I’d have guessed that the seven-day week came from the menstrual cycle, which my mother always called “your monthlies” but which, inspecting boxes of contraceptives in medicine cabinets at houses where I babysat, I understood to be a weekly affair: twenty-eight pills in four rows of seven columns, each column labelled with a day of the week and each row for a different week: the week when you don’t have your period; the week you’d ordinarily ovulate, if you weren’t on the Pill; the week you can tell your period is coming; and the week it comes.
No one has ever really been able to topple the seven-day week. French revolutionaries tried to institute a ten-day week. Bolsheviks aimed for a five-day week. No one tried harder than Miss Elisabeth Achelis, a New York socialite, heir to the American Hard Rubber Company fortune, and an admirer of Melvil Dewey, he of the Dewey decimal system and simplified spelling.
Moses B. Cotsworth, an Englishman who worked as a statistician for a British railway company, began pondering the possibility of a more efficient calendar, one that would make it easier to compare revenues from month to month and week to week. He devised the International Fixed Calendar, which consisted of thirteen months of twenty-eight days each, with one extra day following the last day of December and one more, at the end of June, in leap years.
Achelis endorsed a calendar of twelve months made up of four equal quarters of thirteen weeks, or ninety-one days. “Each year begins on Sunday, January 1,” she explained; every quarter begins on a Sunday, and ends on a Saturday. “Every year is comparable to every other year; and what is of utmost importance, days and dates always agree.” If you were born on a Friday, your birthday would always fall on a Friday.
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt, citing a study reporting that most German workers “prefer monotonous tasks,” suggests factory workers, like the early Christians, prefer repetitive manual labor because it requires little attention and allows for contemplation. (She quotes the German economist Karl Bücher: “rhythmic labor is highly spiritual labor.”)
For the past two decades, this rhetoric has hinged  on a definition of “routine” established in a 2003 paper by the  economists David Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard Murnane, which has come  to be known as the ALM hypothesis.
According to the paper, a task is considered routine if it can be  reduced to a set of clearly defined rules that can be programmed into a  machine. This includes manual tasks, such as moving a car windshield  into place on an assembly line, as well as cognitive work like  bookkeeping and accounting. The definition proves a bit confusing for  those who take routine to mean simply actions that are performed  frequently—which often cannot be explained in a series of clear steps, relying as they do on tacit knowledge.
But even as workplace technologies promise to liberate us from routine, the tools we use in our private lives threaten to make us more rigid and habitual. This is particularly true of “lifestyle automation,” those apps and algorithms that have routinized our media consumption (not to mention intimate activities such as sleep, exercise, and sex) and that prompt us to take actions we’ve taken in the past, or buy products similar to those we’ve bought before. Social-media platforms rely on operant conditioning and other forms of psychological manipulation to habituate us to the unthinking cycle of cues and rewards (likes, notifications, retweets) characteristic of all addictive patterns. Roose recalls the moment he realized that his reliance on Gmail autoreplies, Netflix recommendations, and algorithmically curated news feeds was turning him into a person “with more fixed routines and patterns of thought, and an almost robotic predictability in my daily life.” He offers his readers a short quiz to determine whether they’ve become victims of machine drift: “Lately, have certain parts of your life felt a little . . . predictable?” he asks. “Have you caught yourself coasting on mental autopilot—saying the obvious things, repeating the same activities, going through the motions without any variety or serendipity—for weeks or months at a time?” For those who answer yes, he advises opting out of automated solutions and incorporating more “surprising” actions into one’s daily life (“Bring home flowers for no reason”).
[ la gig economy en teoria menys rutinària, no ens fa més lliures ni més creatius, sinó més ansiosos]
The idea that digital technologies can free us from rigorous routines is true to the extent that they have made work arrangements more flexible, enabling the rise of remote work, gig work, and “outcome-based” management, trends that have allowed many employees to choose their own schedules and work partly or wholly from home. As welcome as these developments may be for some, they nevertheless clearly privilege the interests of corporations, which have seized on the opportunity to do away with employee benefits, stable contracts, and other safety nets. The rhetoric of flexibility, in other words, despite its existential promise to make us more human, frequently undergirds policies that make the lives of workers more precarious. And it’s far from clear that all workers welcome the liberation from routine work. In many cases, people are left structuring each day from scratch, becoming responsible for a host of decisions that were once codified into the rhythms of the workplace.
The Stoics called this feeling stultitia—“fickleness and  boredom and a continual shifting of purpose,” as Seneca put it. It  describes the never-ending hunger for novelty; the inability to stick to  commitments; the will’s imprisonment by competing desires. St. Benedict  describes something along these lines in his Rule, denouncing  itinerant monks who “never settle down, and are slaves to their own  wills and gross appetites.” It is the same problem that William James  identifies when he writes, in The Principles of Psychology, of the miserable person for whom
nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of  every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to  bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of  express volitional deliberation.
Neither Seneca, Benedict, nor James would have denied that  spontaneity is essential to our humanity. But in order to achieve  tranquility, this first nature had to be supplemented with a “second  nature,” the long-standing epithet for habit often attributed to  Aristotle. Rather than understanding habit as mechanistic, these earlier  thinkers saw repetition as a means of naturalizing a behavior such that  it approaches the fluidity of instinct. Thomas Aquinas wrote that habit  “makes the doing of something our own, as if natural to us, so to  speak, and therefore pleasurable.” For Aristotle, habit was an aid in  the quest for the virtuous life, a way of unifying the will and  directing it, through practice, toward what is good. While base people,  Aristotle writes in Nicomachean Ethics, “are at variance with  themselves and have appetite for one thing and wish for another,” the  virtuous person “remains consistent in his judgment, and he desires the  same objects with every part of his soul.”
Defenders of these technologies often reply that human decisions are just as unthinking: we, too, often function on autopilot; we, too, get stuck in feedback loops, making the same decisions we’ve made in the past, not realizing that we are spurred by simple familiarity. But even the most ingrained human behaviors are accompanied by sensations that prompt us to pause and recalibrate when something goes wrong—a truth well known to anyone who has caught themselves driving home to a previous residence or gagging on the hemorrhoid cream they’ve mistaken for toothpaste. Ravaisson calls habit the “moving middle term,” a disposition that slides along the continuum between rote mechanism and reflective freedom. Weil, who similarly saw habit as a continuum, believed that we should strive to remain on the reflective side of that spectrum. The Stoics advised nightly meditation, so as to judge the virtue of the actions they’d taken that day, and Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of pragmatism, noted that in cases where habits have begun to work against a person’s interests, “reflection upon the state of the case will overcome these habits, and he ought to allow reflection its full weight.” It is this connection to thought that allows habits to remain fluid and flexible in a way that machines are not. Habits are bound up with the brain’s plasticity, a term James describes as “a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.” Unlike algorithms, which lock in patterns and remain beyond our understanding, habits allow us to negotiate a livable equilibrium between thought and action, maintaining, as Weil puts it, “a certain balance between the mind and the object to which it is being applied.”
[ si no tens una rutina no pots trencar-la]
In the first chapter of the ancient Daoist masterpiece the Zhuangzi (attributed to Zhuang Zhou, c369-286 BCE) there is a parade of marvellous animals and plants: a fish named Roe, measuring thousands of miles in length, who turns into a magnificent bird named Peng, with a wingspan thousands of miles across, and a caterpillar and a rose of Sharon that both live for thousands of years. The chapter concludes with a discussion of another wonder of nature: an immense, gnarled, wart-ridden tree – so twisted and knotted as to make its wood unusable for carpenters.
Huizi, a logically minded thinker, censures the tree as ‘big and useless, and so everyone alike spurns [it]!’ But his friend Zhuangzi responds in defence of the crooked tree:
plant it in Not-Even-Anything Village, or the field of Broad-and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it.
Zhuangzi argued that we can reclaim our lives, and be happier and more fulfilled, if we become more useless. In this, he went against many influential thinkers of his time, such as the Mohists. These followers of Master Mo (c470-391 BCE) prized efficiency and welfare above all. They insisted on cutting away all ‘useless’ parts of life – art, luxury, ritual, culture, leisure, even the expression of emotions – and instead focused on ensuring that people across the social classes receive essential material resources.
A useless life is free and easy wandering
The title to the first chapter of the Zhuangzi, ‘Free and Easy Wandering’, can be read as a proposal for how to live such a free and easy life, one that rejects the very idea of use, and instead suggests we consider a life of wandering or ‘play’. Throughout the book, Zhuangzi places the notions of freedom and play in opposition to usefulness – and thereby suggest what a life spent wandering with the Dao might look like, a life not guided by the static categories of usefulness and uselessness.
One example is a story in Book 17, where the King of Chu sent two officials to ask Zhuangzi to become his chief administrator, a position of wealth and prestige. Zhuangzi sits fishing and doesn’t even turn around. He says:
    I have heard that there is a sacred tortoise in Chu that has been dead for 3,000 years. The king keeps it wrapped in cloth and boxed, and stores it in the ancestral temple. Now would this tortoise rather be dead and have its bones left behind and honoured? Or would it rather be alive and dragging its tail in the mud?
The officials agree it would rather be alive, so Zhuangzi concludes: ‘Go away! I’ll drag my tail in the mud!’ Infinitely better to drag your tail in the mud than to be a fancy official, unless being a fancy official is your way to hook into the Dao.
We don’t always need to be useful; it’s good to simply enjoy yourself. In our society, as in Zhuangzi’s, usefulness is often presented as the measuring rod, the bottom line against which we should gauge all policies and life decisions. Zhuangzi shows that this mindset traps us in a calculus in which we end up seeing ourselves and people around us as a means to an end. This prevents us from enjoying our own lives, and the things around us, on their own terms.
[jo deia, tot el que serveix, serveix per a una altra cosa, que serveix per a una altra cosa, fins que arribem a una cosa que no serveix per a res, que ja val per ella mateixa.]
A useless life is free and easy wandering. By letting go of our concern over whether we (or things in our lives) are useful, we can become happier by being more in line with nature, we can celebrate the wondrous diversity and difference of people and of things as good in their own right, without thinking of some bottom line. You are not a mere tool, but a glorious part of a wild and diverse Universe.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-time-hack-everyone-should-know/ Que malament fem servir el temps lliure que tenim! The average American spends 22 minutes a day participating in sports, exercise, and recreation; 32 minutes per day socializing or communicating; and 26 minutes per day relaxing or thinking. In contrast, they spend 211 minutes per day watching TV. That’s 2.6 times more time watching TV than exercising, relaxing, and socializing combined.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60854153 el president de Goldman Sachs fa de DJ
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-60251156 un home va tenir un atac d’ansietat quan a l’empresa li van fer una festa d’aniversari tant sí com no. Ha guanyat 450m en un judici. Per què obliguem la gent a fer el que no vol innecessàriament?
https://www.vox.com/even-better/23280546/end-of-life-doula-making-time-death doula pel final de la vida aprendre a identificar el que més ens omple i viure plenament
A Dinamarca, Alemanya i França la gent anava despullada de manera natural. Ara sembla que va de baixa potser prquè a l’era d’Instagram voldríem tenir uns cossos perfectes
https://www.wired.com/story/date-me-google-docs-and-the-hyper-optimized-quest-for-love/ en lloc de triar per una foto, escriuen sobre ells en profunditat.
https://www.mic.com/impact/green-mosul-trees-isis una bona notícia, replantant arbres a Mosul, ciutat d’Irak devastada per Isis.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-63390161 una netejadora professional finlandesa neteja cases de gent amb problemes mentals gratuitament un cop a la setmana
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/ten-surprising-facts-about-everyday-household-objects sobre l’origen d’objectes quotidians, la forquilla, els llits, els bastonets chopsticks (antigament els grecs menjaven com ara a etiòpia)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-64624991 a la Índia es poden contractar “entrenadors” de cites que fan simulacions per donar confiança i corregir errors.  To  help Akansha become comfortable with dating women, Ms Seghetti went on  three dates with her – to an art gallery, on an outdoor walk and for  dinner. On  the dates, Ms Seghetti would give feedback to Akansha about her body  language, share tips on how to manage anxiety, and grooming and styling  advice.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64674140 a DInamarca es van evacuar uns edificis de 1950 per una tormenta amb vents de 145 km/h. A Turquia ha mort molta gent perquè se segueixen edificant sense mesures que previnguin terratrèmols. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64662602 edificis de luxe a Turquia que no han aguantat.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-tees-64902198 l’home que saludava els camionsçç
https://thebaffler.com/latest/heavenly-bodies-church enviar 1 gram de centres a l’espai per 3000$
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-64974346 augmenta la producció de cocaina
https://www.wired.com/story/algorithms-welfare-state-politics/  el frau en beneficis socials a Dinamarca du a vigilància digital
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ted-lasso-cast-visits-white-house-to-promote-mental-health/  el món és amable comparat amb la presó, un raig d’esperança
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/magazine/celine-chanel-gucci-superfake-handbags.html?utm_source=pocket_mylist bolsos de 10000$
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/21/when-trucks-fly i com s’han de muntar els circuits movent tones de terra
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231010-the-acute-suicide-crisis-among-veterinarians-youre-always-going-to-be-failing-somebody suicidis entre veterinaris per la pressió dels propietaris i les eutanàsies freqüents. Les nostres carències emocionals fan que busquem refugi en un company més fàcil que un humà i, egoistes, febles i mesquins que som, només ens preocupa el nostre benestar emocional i abusem dels veterinaris.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-67339137 un nen truca a emergències 911 perquè volia una abraçada.

 

 

març 2018
els llibres recomanats pels ambaixadors abans de visitar un país
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/21/the-rise-of-the-victims-rights-movement sobre com s’han de tractar les víctimes en els judicis. Interessant que en els cassos de violació es prohibeix interrogar la víctima sobre els seus costums sexuals: In New York, for instance, the campaign for victims’ rights was led by the longtime civil-rights activist Elizabeth Holtzman. As a member of Congress, Holtzman introduced a bill in 1976 to protect rape victims from cross-examination about their sexual history, and a Victims of Crime Act in 1979. Later, as a district attorney, she established a crime-victims counselling unit and introduced victim-impact statements at sentencing hearings. “For too long, the criminal-justice system ignored or mistreated victims,” Holtzman said in a speech before the New York City Task Force on Sexual Assault in 1987.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/25/the-reputation-laundering-firm-that-ruined-its-own-reputation Com treballen les cíniques agències de PR de rentar la imatge de dictadors
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/french-mustache-strike a França només la classe alta tenia dret a deixar-se bigoti, que era un símbol de status
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/opinion/sunday/men-parenting.html feminisme, els homes no es fan càrrec de la feina, i al pas que anem tardarem 75 anys.
https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-2020-people-making-things-better/  le gent que marca una diferència, ciència, art, tecnologia, projectes socials
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/07/is-staying-in-staying-safe la vida a l’interior, habitatges en els animals i les persones Jill LEPORE
The 999 Liberian men were split into four groups. Some received CBT, while others got $200 in cash. Another group got the CBT plus the cash, and finally, there was a control group that got neither. So it was a great surprise when, 10 years later, he tracked down the original men from the study and reevaluated them. Amazingly, crime and violence were still down by about 50 percent in the therapy-plus-cash group.
Brotherton has long argued that mainstream US policy is counterproductively coercive and punitive. His research has shown that helping at-risk people reintegrate into mainstream society — including by offering them cash — is much more effective at reducing violence.
To give one striking example from Brotherton’s research: In 2007, the crime-riddled nation of Ecuador legalized the gangs that had been the source of much of the violence. The country allowed the gangs to remake themselves as cultural associations that could register with the government, which in turn allowed them to qualify for grants and benefit from social programming.
https://www.hrw.org/feature/2022/09/13/how-do-states-measure-up-child-rights la mesura de compliment de la Convenció dels Drets de l’infant
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-64444530 es reconsidera el trasllat de transgender violents -amb anteedents de violació- a presons de dones
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-right-not-to-be-fun-at-work les empreses no han d’obligar els empleats a les activitats de team building

https://magazine.atavist.com/alone-at-the-edge-of-the-world-susie-goodall-sailing-golden-globe-race/?utm_source=pocket_mylist

https://lifehacker.com/health/how-to-dance-without-looking-awkward

Una història de la nostàlgia ny 2023/11/27

The actress Helen Hayes used to tell a story of how her young prospective husband poured some peanuts into her hand and said, “I wish they were emeralds.” Years later, when he was actually able to give her a little bag of emeralds, he did so saying, “I wish they were peanuts”, with whatever excess of sweetness

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/12/2/the-south-korean-woman-who-adopted-her-best-friend?utm_source=pocket_mylist

L’entrenament i disciplina dels passatgers van permetre una evacuació ràpida d’un avió accidentat.  BBC

2024

Homes pobres a la Índia cauen en l’estafa de pagar diners per una oferta  de feina que consistia en “impregnar” dones sense fills. BBC

https://hbr.org/2023/12/how-to-create-your-own-year-in-review?utm_source=pocket_mylist com fer el repàs de l’any

https://www.wired.com/story/extreme-dishwasher-loading-facebook-group/?utm_source=pocket_mylist

grup de FB sobre rentaplats

https://time.com/6837151/therapists-respond-insults/?utm_source=pocket_mylist com respondre als insults

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-25-designs-that-shape-our-world?utm_source=pocket_mylist

25 dissenys que van marcar el món

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/16/worst-paying-college-majors-five-years-after-graduation.html?utm_source=pocket_mylist

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1wpegrnrxo museu d’Austràlia només per a dones, esquivarà ordre judicial convertint-se en un lavabo on les obres hi estaran exposades. Els homes seran admesos els diumenges per aprendre a planxar.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-the-velvet-hammer-is-a-better-way-to-give-constructive-criticism?utm_source=pocket_mylist com fer una crítica constructiva

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/reddit-male-grooming-therapy?utm_source=pocket_mylist el grup on els homes demanen opinió sobre com arreglar-se

Bars on s’ha d’estar callat escoltant música vinils. Montecristo.

Smellmaxxing, nois adolescents amb colònies cares. Parents

 

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