A long list of good reads
Sex/Love:
- What’s worse than ‘ghosting’? ‘Zombieing’, of course! Refinery29 has the new made-up term for bad dating behaviour.
- What makes a first date a total nightmare? Bustle asked a bunch of millennials the same question, and it makes for a fun watch.
- Have you checked out India Love Project? The Insta handle tells and celebrates real-life love stories that break stifling norms.
Culture:
- Tanuj Solanki in Huffington Post offers a unique and must-read meditation on what it feels like to read fiction in a learned language—in this case, English—as opposed to your mother tongue.
- NXIVM is a notorious sex cult that enslaved women. The founder was a man, but it was run and operated by well educated, wealthy women. Paris Review has a must-read on how corporate feminism has spawned a toxic version of female empowerment.
- Do you imagine hearing truly momentous news—of death or birth—on a cellphone or on a landline? Marcia Aldrich in LongReads pens a lovely essay on why cell phones—light and brittle—feel inadequate for phone calls that truly matter.
- Bloomberg News has a lovely weekend read on how past pandemics gave birth to Mumbai’s Art Deco architecture.
The pandemic:
- The numbers are higher than ever—and may climb even further—and yet people are less cautious now than at the beginning of the pandemic. Inverse offers two reasons why.
- The pandemic has brought with it a new but less-noticed peril: ‘epistemic trespassing’—where experts in entirely unrelated fields have suddenly become Covid experts. Professor of Philosophy Nathan Ballantyne explains why this is a serious problem.
- When will we be able to do things we used to be able to do before—eat out, jump on a plane, walk out the door without a mask? BBC News pulls together the likely timeline of our Covid future.
Economics: Manavi Kapur in Quartz explains how behavioural economics can offer solutions to cut stubble burning—and save all our lungs.
Useful to know: How do you know whether you are suffering from mental fatigue? And how can you cope? Fast Company offers a useful checklist and guide. Inverse explains what makes our pooches happy—which is always useful gyaan for dog owners.
