Hello gorgeous friends, welcome to 💥BLAST! #53, and with a new year comes a new look. Thanks to those who fed in to help me understand your email-reading habits. These newsletter tools are heavy on data but light on insight, so it’s useful to hear what’s working.
🐀 Why don’t rats get the same ethical protections as primates? They are sentient beings with rich emotional lives, yet we subject them to experimental cruelty without conscience. Why?
📄 Obscure PDFs is Reddit at its finest: an esoteric collection ranging from a 100-year history of erotic art to the psychology of fascism and the CIA’s simple sabotage field manual.
🤪 ‘Fleabag,’ ‘You,’ and the rise of the delusional protagonist: From the messy heroines of Fleabag and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend to the delusional vigilantes of Mr. Robot and You, audiences can’t resist watching characters who are crazier and more chaotic than we are.
📖 25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them: Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.
🚨 How much of UK dance music history is real? Every era of British dance music has its myths and over-simplified narratives. A tendency towards selective documentation of dance music culture has led to a widespread acceptance of reductive narratives, which only tell a fraction of British dance music’s complex story.
🎧 If your new routine is leaving you wanting something to listen to, here’s 1,000 Free Audiobooks, and maybe it’s time to use that 30-day free trial at Audible.
🤯 How to Recover After Burnout: What to do when you feel as if you have no energy left.
🗺 Why real-life places still matter in the age of texting and Twitter: Interactions in physical spaces, whether around the watercooler or at the neighbourhood bar, are crucial to forming social ties.
Keeping older adults in mind
As the UK’s age profile rapidly changes, a report examining age-related stereotypes finds older people are widely demonised, being seen as incompetent, hostile or a burden. The communities we form for the good of both individual and group are subject to several tensions. For example, communities struggle to form in cities because the high cost of living causes unprecedented mobility.
An implication of ageing is a sharp rise in healthcare costs as the number of older people with more than one health condition expands. But when we’re ageist, we’re doomed to become that against which we are prejudiced. I wonder whether it’s a part of a more general narrowness, or narrowing of thought.
Ageing shouldn’t be thought of as a downward trajectory, since another study suggests happiness across our lifetime is U-shaped, bottoming out at just 47. Also we may be wrong to assume older people can’t learn as well as younger ones.
Don Norman, who wrote the book on user-centred design, says design fails older consumers. But it needn’t be this way. Things can be designed to be more easily legible and easier to use with older adults in mind. It’s not all about things, though. Many services are concerned only with moving stuff around, but the opportunity’s there to combine this with checking in on people’s welfare.
Age UK are holding an emergency appeal to enable services for older people in the COVID-19 crisis. Please consider making a donation as demand for their support increases.