Hey gorgeous email friends. No sooner I had marked a hundred uninterrupted weeks of writing and sending these here emails, something came along and interrupted. So if you noticed the break last week; sorry about that. I have shingles, and it’s as unpleasant as people say. The universe frowns upon tall poppies.
This week I’m back up and about in a limited way, thanks to a range of painkillers. And I’ve also had my first Covid vaccine, for which I’m extremely grateful. But hey, you didn’t come here to hear about my viruses; let’s get down to rooting out some interesting things, shall we?
📧 Email Is Making Us Miserable: A cracking place to start, wouldn’t you say? In this New Yorker article, Cal Newport posits that in an attempt to work more effectively, we’ve accidentally deployed an inhumane way to collaborate. The research into this sort of thing is interesting, but I’m certain if people were better at applying simple automation to their incoming mail (i.e. both better at writing rules, and with access to better rule-writing tools) then we’d all have much more comfortable relationships with our inboxes.
🍀 How to be lucky: Most of us think that luck just happens (or doesn’t) but everyone can learn to look for the unexpected and find serendipity. You might think of serendipity as passive luck that just happens to you, when actually it’s an active process of spotting and connecting the dots.
😴 Stanford study attempts to explain “Zoom Fatigue”: relentless videoconferencing is an alien and hostile environment. Unlike a real meeting, where participants are alternating between looking at the speaker and looking at their notes or the pigeons outside, in Zoom everyone stares at everyone and that, like it or not, is anxiety-inducing.
🧊 Iceberger lets you draw an iceberg and see how it’ll float. See also: How Antarctic bases went from wooden huts to sci-fi chic.
🚘 The underwhelming reality of driverless cars: Billions have been invested in the development of autonomous vehicle technology, and the industry is starting to accept that the outcomes aren’t really what anyone expected.
🎻 Symphosizer is the product of rebranding the San Francisco Symphony: a typeface that responds to sound. A work of utter genius. See the new brand in action.
🔴 Mars Photo Booth: put yourself on the surface of the first planet on which we’ve witnessed a spacecraft land, other than our own. See also: What Does a Sunrise-Sunset Look Like on Mars?
💣 How to Remember a Disaster Without Being Shattered by It: Margaret McKinnon survived a midair catastrophe, then became a major researcher of memory and trauma. Now she’s studying how the pandemic will haunt us.
😇 100 (Short) Rules for a Better Life from author and strategist Ryan Holiday. Some solid ones in here, even if it reads a little like Sunscreen.
Sometimes in life you gotta read the blurb before making an informed choice. And sometimes you just gotta dive right in. This is the Mystery Link: your chance to leap into the unknown. Proceed at your own risk, if you dare: