Hey all. A lot has happened in the last week, but that’s all news. We’re back again to divert your attention. Keep scrolling…
What to Read
Optimizing Love
When you’re single in a city, you may feel overwhelmed with dating options. (If not, Tinder consultants can help you out.) Wouldn’t it be great if you could spend less time obsessing over the number of exclamation points in “Hey!!” and find your life partner?
Meet people who treat relationships like management consultants: quantifying compatibility in spreadsheets, conquering emotions, and optimizing love.
A fascinating piece from The Economist’s 1843 Magazine:
Today, optimisation is regularly applied closer to home in exercise, sleep and diet. If these can now be tracked, quantified and streamlined, perhaps love and sex can be too. Aren’t relationships simply interactions that, with tweaking, could become more efficient and less prone to friction? In other words, aren’t they just a business problem?
Interestingly, these people often settle on non-traditional, non-monogamous relationships. Even if we can’t hack our feelings, maybe we don’t have to think about relationships in just one way.
Online Streaming and Cultural Fragmentation
When’s the last time you actually watched a show premiere on TV? How often do you ask someone if they watch x show, and hear “no”?
Today, there’s a ton of media, and even when something’s popular we don’t all watch it at the same time. That leads to cultural fragmentation—lots of different subcultures on different platforms, but fewer broadly shared cultural experiences.
So says this Vox piece:
With streaming platforms like Netflix or Spotify, you never really know how many people are watching, hearing, or following the same things you are, so you’re never sure which media experiences are shared in common and which are not. That leaves us consumers feeling adrift.
It’s a classically Very Concerned Vox thinkpiece, but there are some good nuggets in here about tech platforms’ role in curating culture.
Millennial Nuns
Wait, what? Actually, that question is the impetus of the article. As more and more young Americans disassociate from religion, more and more young women are deciding to pledge their lives to the Catholic church.
The Huffington Post profiles some of these women to get at answers:
“There is nothing consistent in the secular world,” Rachael reflected. Catholicism, by contrast, taught that “truth is a fact.” Your obligations to other people and God couldn’t be trumped by your “personal truth.”
But this is 2020, so you can find aspiring nuns mixing food Instagramming with “tweets like ‘You die unprepared without the sacraments.’”
What to Stream
Sex Education (Netflix)
Most of the time, I try and pretend like my awkward high-school years never existed. Then there are shows like Sex Education that I can’t look away from. A sweet but awkward kid named Otis (aka Charlie in high school) ends up establishing an underground sex therapy clinic at his high school based on zero personal experience (similarities continue)—just what he has heard from his sex therapist mother. Hysterical, heartfelt, and refreshingly open and honest.
Fleabag (Amazon Prime)
Admittedly, I only watched this after Obama put it on his best shows to watch list but I of course then binged the whole thing. With short episodes and really clever writing, “Fleabag is a touching, wildly inventive comedy about a complicated young woman navigating the aftermath of trauma”—I copied it straight from Rotten Tomatoes because it has a 100% rating.
Podcasts to Binge
The Habitat
Six people volunteer to work as imitation astronauts on a remote mountain for an entire year to help NASA understand what life might be like for astronauts on Mars. This means (1) space food, (2) wearing space suits outside, (3) interacting with the same people every day. Don’t you feel better already? (I guess NASA was cool with their subjects having a podcast side hustle?)
Hardcore History
Sometimes something is so good that you have to recommend it even though it’s definitely not for everyone. Absolutely gripping and deeply researched narration of history’s biggest stories. OK, here’s the caveat: episodes can be 4+ hours. Just split them up.
What to Eat/Drink
Grilled Cheese (but from Bon Appétit and therefore excellent)
Sometimes it just feels like a grilled cheese kind of week. And yes, they use mayonnaise and it is a whole new world (but totally optional).
Salted Watermelon Margarita
For when your vacation plans get replaced with an airline voucher, I say call in the watermelon margarita. I would usually say fresh watermelon juice is a bit out of my normal food shopping scope but unique times call for beautifully colored margaritas.
See you next week!
This was probably my favorite group of news headlines of all the newsletters. Feel free to send something our way if you think it deserves a broad audience.
—Charlie, Meital & the North American Board