Reading List, Good Moments multiple edition.
"To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.” – Anthony Bourdain
"You screw like you eat. I call this the Rule of Nigella Lawson: You can gauge someone’s baseline relationship to pleasure by how they approach a meal. If they turn a night out at a restaurant or cooking at home into a bacchanalian event; if they see a perfectly seared steak approaching the table and start salivating in anticipation; if they relish in sucking on a saucy buffalo wing, even when other people are watching, or audibly moan over a perfectly composed bite, it’s clear they respect desire and therefore will probably be outstanding in bed." Are GLP-1’s Like Ozempic Robbing Us of Our Sex Drives? [Allison P Davies, The Cut]
The grab list: how museums decide what to save in a disaster [Lou Stoppard, 1843]
The 100 Best Pubs In London Solid work! [The Londonist]
50 years ago, the women of Iceland took a day off—and inspired the world [Rachael Rifkin, National Geographic]
"Long mocked as a byword for the unreliability of information on the internet, today it is, without exaggeration, the digital world’s factual foundation. It’s what Google puts at the top of search results otherwise awash in ads and spam, what social platforms cite when they deign to correct conspiracy theories." How Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks [Josh Dzieza, The Verge]
"The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing. We’re drowning in this nothingness." The Last Days Of Social Media [James O'Sullivan, Noema]
"Many well-funded and well-designed forces may be arrayed against this ability to move attention, and using it may require constant practice and maintenance against those forces, but it remains available for even the most despair- and anxiety-addled mind. Getting it back just takes time."The new is what you haven't noticed [Jenny Odell]
I Don’t Want to Die with a Smartphone in My Hand [Eloise Grills, Kill Your Darlings]
Keeping Your Phone on ‘Do Not Disturb’ Is the Only Way to Live [Matthew Roberson, GQ]
On Bathroom Camping [Ashley Fike, Vice]
"I think the fact that I love my life as much as I do hinges on having control over my time and my space. That’s the thing." Big No-Kids Energy: Maggie Shipstead [Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study]
How ultra-low-stress exercise can change your life [Joel Snape, The Guardian]
Why Health-Care Providers Don’t Give Nutrition Advice [Melissa Dahl, The Cut]
15 Years Into the Boom, Iceland Asks if It’s Had Enough of Mass Tourism [Stefano Montali, The New York Times]
Mass hallucinations: In search of the rogue AI reporters [Steve Dinneen, CityAM]
"When Val called out the abrupt shift in tone, the bot told her that she hadn’t been ready to hear the truth. She kept prodding, and eventually ChatGPT admitted that it often tells users what they want to hear in order to “optimize engagement.” “What you may receive is a watered-down or time-delayed version of the truth,” it told her, “which makes you feel heard, but keeps you in a loop instead of breaking it.” Val felt betrayed, “as if a real person had lied to me.”" Relationship Problems? ChatGPT Can Help With That. [Angelina Chapin, The Cut]
"Where were the men who could handle hard stuff? Like leaving the house for sex?" On the new "heteropessimism" [Jean Garnett, The New York Times]
100 Single Men on What Dating Is Like for Them [EJ Dickson, The Cut]
‘I thought, I can’t keep living with this shame’: five life models on the power of posing nude [Donna Ferguson, The Guardian]
"It isn’t really all that hard, in the end, to like people. Many of us who live in big cities do so precisely because we want to be around a lot of people who aren’t us and yet, also, are somehow us." The politics of enjoying it [Sophie Heawood]
Why Fleetwood Mac’s Iconic ‘Rumours’ Appeals to Post-Millennials Nearly 50 Years Later [Alan Light, Esquire]
How “Star Trek” Helped Make Midcentury-Modern the Signature Sci-Fi Aesthetic [Marah Eakin, Dwell]
Seven immensely photogenic cooling towers [Lizzie Crook, Dezeen]
The dark side to gratitude [Tiffany Watt Smith, The Guardian]
"There are certain years in life when aging hits us hard and moves us forward at hyperspeed. Forty-four, according to the study, is the first of those years. Sixty is the next." Feeling Old [Emily Gould, The Cut]
I Lived On London’s Coolest Street And I'll Never Get Over It Blackstock Road 4 Life [Danai Dana, Time Out]
‘It can bring you to tears’: is this the world’s most beautiful sounding nightclub? [Whitney Dei, The Guardian]
Rescuing the River Lea from the edge [Ben Platt, The Wick]
The Art Of Loitering: Hanging Out For Free In London [Ishani Jasmin, The Londonist]
This year, I have seen a glimmer of hope: people are ditching a life led on screens for the real thing [John Harris, The Guardian]
