Our picks of the best of the internet, for every week we’re in lockdown.
New Zealand might be (semi) out of lockdown in a week, so quick! Do that dopamine fast you’ve been meaning to get around to. What’s dopamine fasting? It’s refraining from doing anything pleasurable at all for several hours in a bid to destroy your addiction to fruitlessly scrolling Instagram for ever-more aspirational interiors, fitspo or the ultimate meal. Lockdown is already forcing you to abstain from so many wonderful things; here’s your chance to make them even more wonderful when you can finally do them again.
nytimes.com/2019/11/07/style/dopamine-fasting.html
“When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity.” At a time where we feel poised in transition, neither the same as we were before, nor knowing what we’ll be in days to come, the wonderful Rebecca Solnit offers a meditation on hope.
theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit
It’s all in the way you tell the story. If you’re aching from the lack of live sports coverage lately, tune in to this riveting 75 seconds of commentary from BBC sportscaster Andrew Cotter in which a showdown match between two evenly equipped competitors (Labradors Olive and Mabel, appropriately clad in opposite-coloured coats) ends in a nail-biting victory won on solid strategy.
twitter.com/MrAndrewCotter/status/1248313303270596610
Our Office Gen-Zer recommends Shit You Should Care About, a fun and friendly website that does exactly what it says on the box, launched by three 21-year-olds from Blenheim. With a plurality of smart, fresh voices and clear news-you-can-use articles about everything from how to give a compliment well and buy condoms with pride (that’s two different articles, but if you follow the advice of the first one you might have cause to follow the advice of the second) to antibiotic resistance and climate change. This round-up of solid places to get good info from is highly bookmarkable. Plus, they’ve just added a podcast.
