The problem comes when we spend so long frantically chasing productivity, we refuse to take real breaks. We put off sleeping in, or going for a long walk, or reading by the window—and, even if we do manage time away from the grind, it comes with a looming awareness of the things we should be doing, and so the experience is weighed down by guilt.
The rising superpower has built up enormous holdings in poor, resource-rich African countries — but its business partners there aren’t always thrilled.
“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” Joan Didion observed in her classic meditation on loss. Abraham Lincoln, in his moving letter of consolation to a grief-stricken young woman, wrote of how time transmutes grief into “a sad sweet feeling in your heart.”
The BBC has been England’s (and the world’s) most reliable source of news for longer than any of us have been alive. One of the reasons it has stayed at the top is how the BBC updates itself over the ages. For the internet age, it dove into the world of interactive content.
White evangelicals are a formidable force in American politics. Republican candidates hustle for their votes. White evangelical leaders have befriended presidents of both parties. The group even gets its own separate question in presidential exit polls.
Heather Ferris, Elvira Isganaitis, & Florence Brown, The Washington Post
The truth is that fruit juice, even if it is freshly pressed, 100 percent juice, is little more than sugar water. Yet many Americans believe that juice is good for them. In one survey of parents of young children, 1 in 3 believed that juice was at least as healthy as fruit. We are inundated with the message that juice is healthy. Juice bars abound in gyms, spas and health food stores, while government programs supply large quantities of juice to low-income children and pregnant mothers.
Strava Inc., maker of a fitness tracking app that caters mostly to outdoor athletes, has just announced a new feature: “Athlete Posts,” a kind of blogging platform within its existing app that lets select athletes write extensive stories and publish photos. The move is clearly a part of Strava’s desire to turn the app, which for a long time was used predominantly by cyclists, into less of a niche fitness app and more of a social network by traditional social network standards.
We are trained by our modern world to organize our day into mutually exclusive chunks called ‘work’, ‘play’, and ‘sleep’. One is done at the office, the other two are not. We are not allowed to move fluidly between these chunks, or combine them in our 24 hour day. Lyndon Johnson got to nap at the office in the afternoon, likely because he was President and didn’t have to worry about what his boss was going to think. Most of us don’t have this option. And now in the open office debacle we can’t even have a quiet 10 minutes of rest in our cubicles.
