Good afternoon gorgeous email friends, and let me be among the stragglers to wish you a happy new year. This week I bring you a mix of optimism and geekery, but kicking off with a clash of titans.
🤺 Garry Shandling and Ricky Gervais’s Epic Sparring Match: I don’t recall why the masterful Garry Shandling drifted into my consciousness over the festive period, but I started rewatching The Larry Sanders Show as well as Judd Apatow’s The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling documentary. The latter is lengthy and heavily-populated with stories both of the subject’s talent and support for protégés. Then, late on, we’re shown a different side of Shandling as he finds Ricky Gervais in his kitchen: a man with a comedy career built upon antagonising people. Either spontaneously or by planning, Shandling is having none of it; instead allowing Gervais to reveal himself to the camera as shallow, insecure and vulnerable. Gervais would’ve done well to heed that old advice about not meeting his heroes.
👍 99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2021: When you think of the year just gone, the big things that come to mind were not so positive. Researchers would say it’s because of our negativity bias: we’re wired, apparently, to pay attention to and remember things that are shocking or scary. But what if there’s a simpler explanation? What if the reason we can’t remember any good news is because nobody reported it?
🤔 For the New Year, Try Imagining Your Best Possible Life: The trouble with your regular seasonal resolution is it’s subtractive. Giving things up is a fairly miserable business. This article suggests that reflecting on your ideal future helps you feel more optimistic and be intentional about what you want.
📈 100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying: You can’t start a new calendar without listicles, and this new year’s no different. Here’s a long list of possible life improvements. Don’t undertake them all, but there’ll be a couple in there that are worth you considering. Also interesting to see a major news outlet suggesting deleting Twitter for your mental welfare.
🖼 The Louvre’s Entire Collection Goes Online: View and Download 480,000 Works of Art: If like me you’ve ever stumbled around the Louvre unable to find somewhere to rest your weary back, then select your comfiest chair and prepare to enjoy the entire collection, including all those things not currently on show.
😷 N95 Respirator Cleaning and Reuse Methods Proposed by the Inventor of the N95 Mask Material: Geeky as this is, N95 masks can be prepared for reuse in various ways, according to the inventor of the material.
⌚️ Fitbit Wants To Predict Depression And Bipolar Disorder: This is the era of the assumption that any complex problem can be solved with enough data-points. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Google-owned wearables maker Fitbit has filed a new patent application for a technology that can analyse and predict the mental health of users, through physiological data.
🛢 The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing: Since the 1980s, fossil fuel firms have run ads touting climate denial messages – many of which they’d now like us to forget.
🔌 Untangling the Rat’s Nest of USB-C Standards and Cables: Connecting consumer tech products used to be complicated. Then with the introduction of USB, it became really easy. But then USB evolved in various directions—broadly similar but with different capabilities—that are barely distinguishable to the end-user.