We want to know, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on.
But we never can.
1️⃣ Chris Rock Tried to Warn Us
“You’ve been telling audiences for years that racism isn’t going away and remains a potent force in America. Do you feel like you’ve seen circumstances improve at all?”
“It’s real. It’s not going away. I said this before, but Obama becoming the president, it’s progress for white people. It’s not progress for Black people. It’s the Jackie Robinson thing. It’s written like he broke a barrier, as if there weren’t Black people that could play before him. And that’s how white people have learned about racism. They think, when these people work hard enough, they’ll be like Jackie. And the real narrative should be that these people, the Black people, are being abused by a group of people that are mentally handicapped. And we’re trying to get them past their mental handicaps to see that all people are equal.”
How does the financial system work?
2️⃣ John Cleese Discusses Creativity, Political Correctness, Monty Python, and Artichokes
“Some might see a guide to creativity as an oxymoron. Do you believe it can be learned?”
“You can learn the circumstances in which you are likely to become more creative. A professor of psychology said to me once, “If you’re sad, you have sad thoughts. If you’re angry, you have angry thoughts.” So, to be creative, you have to have creative thoughts. You need to be in a creative mood. How do you get in a creative mood? Well, a creative mood, by definition, is a playful one. Why can children play so naturally? Because the parents are minding the shop. The kids don’t have to worry about who’s making dinner. So, if you want to play as an adult, you have to create a space where you get away from the ordinary responsibilities of everyday life.”
The Dark Knight: "What do you believe in?"
3️⃣ The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist
“Araujo had a crazy idea, and he shared it with his friend Sebastián García Bolster. This was a few years after the botched Ramallo heist had lodged itself in Araujo's brain. It would be crazy to rob a bank but not leave, he mentioned to Bolster. To disappear through a hole. Bolster had been friends with Araujo since high school, and he agreed: That did sound like a wild way to rob a bank. But he assumed it was just some lark; his pal Araujo smoked a lot of weed.”
Chris Paul Scores 61 Points in High School for His Grandfather
4️⃣ Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life
“The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. As the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood, much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future. We want to know, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on. But we never can.”
Jacques Pépin Makes a Delicious Fried Egg
5️⃣ The Limitless Potential of Zion Williamson
“As much as Williamson provides, it never seems to be enough for anyone else. We wanted a college career capped off with him cutting down the nets. We wanted an inaugural NBA season in which he played every national television date and won Rookie of the Year. We want to hear more from him. We want all of those things immediately, on our schedule, not on his or the Pelicans’.”
Elaine's Cool Boyfriend
6️⃣ 'I'm extremely controversial': the psychologist rethinking human emotion
“Chief among these misconceptions is the view that feelings are innate and universal, and can be consistently measured. So, anger, for example, is thought of as a fundamental building block of human nature with a tell-tale physiological “fingerprint”; all we’ve done is gone and named it. But that idea is categorically untrue, Barrett says, and reams of scientific data now back her up.
“Anger” is a cultural concept that we apply to hugely divergent patterns of change in the body, and there’s no single facial expression reliably associated with it, even in the same person. (Some cultures don’t have a concept that corresponds to “anger”, such as the Utku Inuit of Canada’s Northwest Territories.) The same is true, astonishingly, of “happiness”, “excitement”, “disappointment”, you name it. No emotion is tied to a single, objective state in the body. Rather, emotions are cultural artefacts.”
Lane 8 - Essential Mix
7️⃣ Being Known Is Being Loved
“My reality is that I can’t buy my own bullshit/sell my soul enough to tweet out tech proverbs or repurpose old parables for likes. My reality is that I don’t have the skill to transactionally aggressively network and I can’t sustain the energy from social interactions to exponentially scale deep connections to the tune of 25+ meetings/week I care about. So instead, my only option to be loved is to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known. To wear my heart on my digital sleeve, a proverbial sleeve that’s threads are made up of a sum of all of my writing, social media accounts, in-person interactions, and more, not just a curated feed of minimum viable story filled with dopamine-inducing 280 character lines.”