Substrate

I was teaching writing all day but not writing myself, and on twitter so many people I knew were starting tinyletters, sending small paragraphs of heart-rending, un-pitch-able prose, family stories and recipes and album recommendations and lowkey erotica in little forward-marching scrolls of text that I’d read curled around my phone late at night while I couldn’t sleep. I was jealous of my students and I was jealous of everyone starting tinyletters and of everyone publishing essays, and of the world going on one bright achievement after another all around me. I wrote some paragraphs quickly, without looking, like muttering under my breath, told myself I didn’t have to edit it because no one would read it anyway, and hit send. The whole college application is a murderously hopeful document, and hope is the most mercenary emotion, the struck-match trick of salespeople and con artists and politicians, leaving the door unlocked at night, risking everything in a game to which no one told us the rules.

The final emoji list for 2019 has now been approved by the Unicode Consortium and includes a total of 230 new emojis coming to major platforms this year. Additions include previously drafted candidates such as a Flamingo, Otter, and Guide Dog, as well as a Waffle, Hindu Temple, Sari, Sloth,

New research is zeroing in on a biochemical basis for the placebo effect — possibly opening a Pandora’s box for Western medicine.

One is that a placebo doesn’t change a person’s underlying biology related to the condition. Instead, it affects how the person experiences or reacts to an illness. In some settings, placebos can trigger the brain’s reward system,” Jeremy Howick of the University of Oxford, who is working on ways to maximize the placebo effect, told Quartz. “It releases chemicals that changes how people feel.” Another theory, from Nicholas Humphreys, a retired psychologist formerly at the London School of Economics, is that placebos are just a way of triggering the immune system. From a biological perspective, immune systems are a huge expense and may drain an animal’s energy reserve. So perhaps placebos act as a signal to get the immune system going. But none of those theories explain why the placebo effect is getting stronger. One explanation is advertising. The US and New Zealand are the only two countries where direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs is legal. The fact that more people are believing that pills work, means the stronger the placebo effect.

FindTheLongestIdentifierNameInCocoaFramework. Contribute to Quotation/LongestCocoa development by creating an account on GitHub.

Reactive Programming in Swift. Contribute to ReactiveX/RxSwift development by creating an account on GitHub.

@rob_rix Sometimes we to have to shave a few yaks to figure out what "better" is. If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be "research."— Chris Parker (@ctp) February 13, 2014

The night of the election, at 3am, New York was the quietest I had ever heard it, absolutely silent, but it didn’t feel at all like being alone. The silence was stuffed to bursting with presence, built out of all the other people awake and not making noise, people standing in the nowhere of a moment further into the future than they thought they’d ever have to get, the sound of thousands of champagne corks stuffed firm in their bottles, un-propelled. Pulling yourself out of the maelstrom and observing, for once a spectator rather than an actor, briefly relieved of consequence, as though you could pass ghostlike through the mass and volume of bodies and no one would feel a thing. No one could embrace you and walls couldn’t hold you. A pet is the image of a more merciful world, a life made only of tenderness. I always tell him, because another one of the reasons to have a cat, to care for an animal, is to get to say things that sappy and awful, to be allowed to be un-nuanced and unsophisticated, to love in an absolutely uncritical and un-rigorous way.

—with that eager, amateur’s love. Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them. Or it might even be in actual school. In my classes, I ask the students to find a poem they like and to get it by heart. To see someone in their late teens or early twenties, often by gender or ethnicity different from the author, shaping his or her mouth around those sounds created by somebody who is perhaps long dead, or perhaps thousands of miles away, and the students bringing their own experience to it, changing it with their own sensibility, so that they’re both possessed and possessing—those moments have been very moving to me.

Reading the news doesn't make us informed, just the opposite. And our obsession with being informed makes it hard to think long term.

The distaste for telephony is especially acute among Millennials, who have come of age in a world of AIM and texting, then gchat and iMessage, but it’s hardly limited to young people. When  asked , people with a distaste for phone calls argue that they are presumptuous and intrusive, especi

At the service, I read the eulogy below, which tried to explain why he was special to so many of us. Writing it was easy, at least in part because he wrote the best bits himself. The hard part was reading it. He was unabashedly silly. He laughed at his own jokes and at yours. He made it very easy to love him.

One of my favorite joke Twitter accounts is @wacnt. It tweets things Wolfram|Alpha can’t answer. I’ve asked Facebook M to figure out a few of them...

Recently, I replaced the headphones I've had for a long time with some new ones. I've used Beyerdynamic DT 770 for years (now discontinued). On a...

Y’all, I love it when nerds nerd out. If you love something and you share a bit of it with the world, that’s so cool.— Ricky Mondello (@rmondello) February 6, 2019

Depending on who you ask, “remote” working is either gaining steam in the tech industry or still a coveted-but-rare perk for the lucky few. A pattern that seems to be emerging is this: Tech giants …

What emoji do you send when you make a bad pun in a workplace Slack and then want to make a non-apology apology?— Jane Solomon (@janesolomon) February 5, 2019

Weak technologies adapt to the world as it currently exists. Strong technologies adapt the world to themselves. Progress depends on strong technologies.

Yes, the person who is on the slope requires a box or two to stand on, but it is only because they are on lower ground to start — not because they are shorter to begin with. As useful as the picture was in starting conversations around “Equality vs. Equity,” we are basically blaming the person for being short, when in reality, we aren’t standing on a level playing field to start. We aren’t *allowed* to stand on a level playing field.

“I finally wrote a little about Secret Dunny Box: a bathroom installation that lets you listen to a secret message left for you by the previous visitor, but only if you leave a message for the next person. https://t.co/CzXiRYKl5R”

This domain may be for sale!

Of course, there are downsides to each model of relationship. People whose friendships primarily consist of sporadic deep dives probably feel a higher degree of loneliness day-to-day during dry spells in-between the deep dive nourishment. (If you’re in an intimate romantic relationship, this can be okay because you tend to share minutia/quick hits with your spouse so don’t need to lean on friends as much for this.) People whose friendships primarily consist of regular quick check-ins and texts and workday lunches probably feel some lack of depth with some of their so-called “close friends.” They realize that after years of “how was your day?” conversations and staying up to speed on the real time relationship drama or work battles that will someday be easily forgotten — they realize that they’ve never explored life’s deeper questions with their friend.