A set of things to take your mind off of the One Thing:
How can we protect the American prairie? It's an amazing place, and deserves our protection. This piece suggests some small steps towards securing the small bits that are left from the farmland invasion, and perhaps, in a century or so, going on the offensive again and "re-wilding" a great deal of it. One can only hope.
Quitting Facebook. A large study by economists suggests that it makes you mildly less up-to-date on what’s going on in the world, but it has these good effects:
“Deactivating Facebook freed up 60 minutes per day for the average person in our Treatment group.”
“Deactivation caused small but significant improvements in well-being, and in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety.”
“Deactivation significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues and a measure of exposure to polarizing news.”
The apostrophe is in crisis! Maybe it's always been in crisis. It's a complicated bit of punctuation, anyway. Here's a piece that explains why.
OK review about what sounds like an interesting book about traveling philosophers:
In essence, though, the travel experience offers something perennial. It is not a pre-requisite for understanding — Socrates and Kant hardly budged at all. But for all those who do set off — be they scientist, explorer or backpacker — an immersion in the unfamiliar is invariably rewarding. Thomas distinguishes between such trips and commuting or tourism: ‘The difference between everyday journeys and travel journeys lies in how much otherness the traveller experiences.’ Otherness is the object of such travel and its own reward. …But going to far-off places has another effect. Travel reduces the significance of home. As you travel further, your native habitat grows smaller. The ultimate example is the 1968 Earthrise image, taken from Apollo 8: the furthest that anyone had ever travelled revealed the cosmic frailty of our planet in a picture that has been described as the ‘most influential environmental photograph ever taken’.
He's not just a psychologist, this guy who wants to tell us about irony. He's also apparently a dean. Hmm.
A new copy of the first edition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica has been found, in a library in Corsica.
Wash those hands!