Greetings again lovely email friends. Many treats for you this week, including a couple I left out last week and they haunted me ever since. Here we go:
🤙 To be more tech-savvy, borrow these strategies from the Amish: According to Donald Kraybill, professor of Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, the Amish adopt technology selectively, hoping that the tools they use will build community rather than harm it. There’s a mindfulness to this strategy, from which anyone could learn by example. This intriguing article is fronted by an extraordinary photo by Dina Litovsky.
🎤 Sinead O’Connor Remembers Things Differently: The mainstream narrative, at least in the US, is that a pop star ripped up a photo of the pope on Saturday Night Live and derailed her life. What if the opposite were true?
🐶 My Quest to Make My Dog Internet Famous: What would it take for a one-eyed puppy to win the attention and adoration of the masses?
😼 What actually is catnip and is it safe for my cat? Catnip’s status as kitty kryptonite is due to a specific chemical compound called nepalacatlone that the plant naturally releases when its leaves or stem are bruised. This chemical is thought to bind to protein receptors within the cat’s nose which then stimulate sensory neurons that lead to changes in brain activity. See also: do cats land on their feet… in spaaaace?
♻️ The world’s first ‘infinite’ plastic: The way we normally recycle plastics is a downward spiral of waste and degraded materials, but there is another option – turning plastic back into the oil from which it was made.
🤪 What I’ve learnt about ‘madness’: Some people with experience of mental health problems are reclaiming the word ‘mad’ as a subversive act of self-empowerment. But in wider society, such labels are often still used casually with the effect, intended or not, of reducing complex human experiences to a two-dimensional ‘otherness’.
👍 Robotic ‘Third Thumb’ use can alter brain representation of the hand: A team led by researchers at UCL trained people to use a robotic extra thumb and found they could effectively carry out dextrous tasks, like building a tower of blocks, with one hand (now with two thumbs). The report in the journal Science Robotics that participants trained to use the thumb also increasingly felt like it was a part of their body.
☺️ What Introverts and Extroverts Can Do to Get Happier: Research published in the scientific journal PLOS One studied the impact of the pandemic on people with various personality characteristics. The authors found that mood worsened for extroverts but improved for introverts.
🗣 Tone of voice—a very important waste of time: Tone is a vital part of effective communication. An appropriate tone of voice disarms and captivates your audience. It’s as important as body language. You have to get it right. So the desire to precisely define and dictate tone of voice is entirely understandable. It’s also misguided.
🚙 Against car supremacy: An oldie but a goodie, looking at the all-pervasive car supremacy in the design of the American built environment. Skewed funding priorities, dysfunctional politics of rail construction and simple engineering of city centres make automobiles the only truly legitimate way for people to get around, and drivers entitled to priority. It’s time for a revolution in transport — not to abolish the use of cars altogether, but to place them as just one among many transportation options.
💢 Where Do Butts Come From? Bringing up the rear this week, the body’s most embarrassing organ is an evolutionary marvel, yet we have very little idea where anuses come from.