Quote of the day
Washed and ready-to-eat salads: “Cleaned” by sloshing around in tap water dosed with chlorine, often with powdered or liquid fruit acids to inhibit bacterial growth. The same tank of treated water is often used for 8 hours at a time.
~JOANNA BLYTHMAN, author of Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets
MOTIVATION
The trolls inside, Seth’s Blog | Tweet
The worst troll is in your head.
→What To Do When It’s Your Turn (and it’s always your turn)
FOOD
Inside the food industry: the surprising truth about what you eat, The Guardian | Tweet
Think you eat only healthy, unprocessed foods? Think again. Joanna Blythman went undercover and discovered that even your fruit salad is not what it seems.
→Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets
HEALTH
Meditation booms as people seek a way to slow down, LA Times | Tweet
One hundred fifty people sat in the big meeting room, hands on laps, eyes closed, feet flat on the floor. Buddhists? Old hippies? New Agers? Nope. The room was full of hospital executives and managers in lab coats and scrubs, jeans and sports coats at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. And the teacher was Marturano, once a top executive at General Mills.
→… And I Breathed: My Journey from a Life of Matter to a Life That Matters
THE BRAIN
Trying to be less stupid: The hard work of Brain Science, National Geographic | Tweet
Michael Gazzaniga was still a graduate student when he helped make one of the most intriguing discoveries of modern neuroscience: that the two hemispheres of the brain not only have different functions, but also operate independently—the so-called split-brain phenomenon.
→Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience
Your brain is primed to reach false conclusions, Five Thirty Eight | Tweet
Psychologists have a name for the cognitive bias that makes us prone to assigning a causal relationship to two events simply because they happened one after the other: the “illusion of causality.”
→Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All
TIME MANAGEMENT
The difference between work-life integration and workaholism, Fortune | Tweet
It’s a matter of perspective, and much of it comes down to how passionate you are about your job.
TECHNOLOGY
How technology is tricking you into tipping more, Tech Crunch | Tweet
A recent Iowa State study cites a mobile payment company that effectively “nudges consumers” into tipping. Study author Kam Leung Yeung, writes, “Upon swiping their credit or debit card, consumers then need to choose among … preloaded tip amounts (e.g. 15 percent 20 percent, or 25 percent), or to enter their customized tip amount, or decide not to tip at all.” This simple interface “increased the proportion of tipping by 38 percent.”
→Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
ENTERTAINMENT
The Oscars in six charts and maps, The Washington Post | Tweet
The 87th Academy Awards take place tonight. Here are six graphics that explain what you need to know about the award show — from Best Picture locations and the Best Actress dress to the Best Actor’s height.
WRITING
Most writers love words. This one loves letters, The Washington Post | Tweet
If you’ve ever chanted the alphabet song or taught it to a child, you’ve lied there at the end. You don’t know your ABCs — not even close. Sure, you know the order of the letters; congratulations. But do you know when we started using capital letters? Or how a wavy line with five peaks in a 4,000-year-old Egyptian hieroglyph became our M?
→Alphabetical: How every letter tells a story
Do you know the 6 must-have elements of a ‘wow’ story premise?, Helping Writers Become Authors | Tweet
Story premise is the foundation of all good books. It’s the fundamental kernel of the beginning idea. But it’s more than that. If you can craft a solid story premise right from the beginning of your writing process, you will be able to capture all the concrete details necessary to bring your story to life.
