Hello you. Hope you’re well. Yesterday I had a troublesome tooth removed. Getting in for dental surgery under current conditions is tough. Once there, you can be treated for the pain of the procedure itself, but the awkward ballet of temporary barriers, floor signage and socially-distanced seating brings new meaning to pulling teeth.

🥤 Germany bans single-use plastic from July 2021, dragging the country into line with an EU directive to reduce waste. Terrific. Now if only they’d ban the burning of coal.

🤗 Hugs to look forward to after the pandemic is over by cartoonist Eleanor Davis brought a smile to my face. See also: A love story about best friends.

🏢 Will Covid kill off the office? Privileged people who work in the kind of office environment that has been steadily worsening over the years are surprised to find that working from home works. This is an interesting piece about post-office culture but stops short of the higher-order objective: to make workplaces both physically and mentally healthy for people.

🏭 The Gas Industry Is Paying Instagram Influencers to Gush Over Gas Stoves is the kind of headline that is shocking for the first half-second before you realise that of course it is. Our taste in food is strongly influenced by marketing; so it seems is how we cook it.

🧘‍♀️ How To Remain Calm When The Rest Of The World Is Freaking Out: here are nine tips straight out of stoic philosophy.

🐶 Have You Seen This Dog? Now you have.

The other side of the screen

It wasn’t very long ago that we were all concerned about excess screen time. At this moment, it’s near-impossible to imagine cutting back on using internet-enabled devices to stay in touch.

I’m cautious of any talk of a return to ’normality’; we have an opportunity to examine real challenges and how we might influence them for the better. Do kids really spend too much time on screens, for example, or is this something we hear a lot on television? Is it perhaps that television is hostile to anything that gets in the way of people watching television?

In any case, I’m interested in the neologism doomscrolling, describing the act of relentlessly scrolling through dismal feeds of news about how terrible everything is, and feeling terrible as a result. It’s all too easy to do, and it’s eroding our mental health.

Many conclusions about the negative effect of screen time are wrong: the straightforward screens-are-bad narrative is way off. A more informed understanding of how screens are used is a better stance. For example, endless binging on bad news has had a positive effect too: it has galvanised resistance to police brutality.