Welcome to Xanadu
Idyllic, exotic, beautiful: This is what Xanadu promises - a far cry from where many of us find ourselves IRL. So, take a moment to dive into to this week's oasis of guidance, inspiration and fun.
Let’s kick off this week with a roller-disco. Got to be better than checking your emails, right? Look out for a glittering Gene Kelly, as well as the shimmering Olivia Newton-John. This week’s issue is dedicated to her effervescence. Let her sparkle lift the rest of your week and beam you back to the summer of 1980 (the song starts at 3.18: terrible but so-bad-its-good film, amazing soundtrack).
By the way, if you’re relatively new around here - welcome. And if you’ve been in this community a while now, thanks for sticking around. Maybe take a second to introduce yourself here.
Effective Altruism: What is it, how can we think about kindness and better longtermism?
Effective altruism is an interesting movement, though sometimes seems to get itself somewhat tangled in moral knots. For example, movement adherents have encouraged others not to work for charities, but instead work for financial companies and donate their higher salaries to others.
Effective altruism, which used to be a loose, Internet-enabled affiliation of the like-minded, is now a broadly influential faction, especially in Silicon Valley, and controls philanthropic resources on the order of thirty billion dollars.
Find out more about how a modern take on Peter Singer’s original theory that any expenditure beyond basic survival was akin to letting someone die, is working out now, and for futurists like Elon Musk.
Strap in: Climate impacts have worsened vast range of human diseases
Climate impacts are not just about the weather system creating direct hazards. Indirect impacts are starting to cascade too.
More than half of human diseases caused by pathogens have been aggravated by hazards associated with climate change.
Diseases such as Zika, malaria, dengue, chikungunya and even Covid-19 have been aggravated by climate impacts such as heatwaves, wildfires, extreme rainfall and floods, the paper found. In all, there are more than 1,000 different pathways for these various impacts to worsen the spread of disease, a cavalcade of threats “too numerous for comprehensive societal adaptations”, the researchers wrote.
What home comforts do you take with you when you go away?
If you saw my article from earlier this week, you’ll know that I value quality tea and coffee. I’ll most often take these away with me - even on a two day work trip - including various brewing instruments to get the most out of them. But here’s a few more unusual items that people take away on holiday with them.
What do you take away with you when you’re away from home for a few days?
How did we become so angry?
This story focuses on the British experience, but I’ve seen this in New Zealand too, and read about it elsewhere. Read through to the end of the article for ideas on how we can re-awaken lapsed empathy.
Shopworkers, GP surgeries and call centres have all reported an alarming rise in abusive behaviour directed toward them. How can we calm this trans-national rage?
Muthukrishna’s guess is that we’re “in for a tough few years”. But we are not powerless as individuals to mitigate the rise of rage. The more prepared we are for change, the smoother the ride will be. “If you create situations where people’s expectations are not met, you trigger zero-sum psychology,” he says. A great human strength is that we can adapt to different levels of comfort, but it’s the change, he says, “that triggers people”. Being prepared for the circumstances ahead, he suggests, “might go some way towards creating some solidarity, making people realise that we’re all in this together now. Where that’s not true, because of things like inequality, then you have to address those underlying things.” - Michael Muthukrishna, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics
Ungated, free pre-print copy of the paper in the above tweet here.
Just 2 minutes of walking after a meal is surprisingly good for you
In a meta-analysis, recently published in the journal Sports Medicine, investigators found that light walking after a meal, in increments of as little as two to five minutes, had a significant impact in moderating blood sugar levels.
From the abstract of the paper - standing was good, light walking was better:
Frequent short interruptions of standing significantly attenuated postprandial glucose compared to prolonged sitting; however, light-intensity walking was found to represent a superior physical activity break.
Here’s a write up from the New York Times, made available free for Noise Reduction readers.
The bubble barrier extracting plastic from a Dutch river
Technology applied to the Oude Rijn river helps stop plastic pollution reaching the sea.
“We place a perforated tube on the bottom of the waterway, at an angle, and then pump through compressed air: the rising air bubbles create an upward current that will lift plastic from the water column to the surface, and then at the surface – together with the flow of the river – it is all pushed to one side,” explains Philip Ehrhorn, the chief technology officer at the Dutch startup The Great Bubble Barrier. “Here, we get the flow from the pumping station, or the wind can also push trash into the catchment system.”
Watching, reading, listening …
Watching: We’ve just started watching Pachinko on AppleTV+ Published as a novel to some acclaim in 2017, it’s been on my reding list for a long time now. But since I’d heard good things about the TV adaptation, we decided to give it a go. A sweeping saga that spans four generations of a Koren-immigrant family, with all the hopes and dreams this entails. Two episodes in, and the storytelling is brilliant, the production, fabulous.
Not much time to read this week with so many family events, but I have been listening to The Rest is History podcast - if you’re into ancient history, I suspect you may enjoy it. The episode below is the start of a mini-series on Byzantium, and is fascinating.