James' World 2

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The pandemic has ruined our sleep

“In one study conducted across 49 countries in March and April 2020, 40 percent of people said their sleep was worse than before the pandemic. Participants’ use of sleeping pills increased by 20 percent,” reports a horrifying but hardly surprising Vox article detailing the virus’s toll on the nation’s sleep. 

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If you’re looking to reduce your body fat, you’ve probably heard that you should have frequent, small meals, because it’s “good for the metabolism”.

However, as with a lot of topics in the sphere of nutrition, this is a complicated matter, and the current literature is leaning towards avoiding snacks if we want to reduce our body fat. Frequent snacking leads to greater fat gain due to the body remaining in fat-making mode from the constant influx of food. Therefore, for optimal health, we want to avoid eating between meals. This allows our fat-making processes to switch off and our bodies to start burning stored fat.

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

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For a long time, I believed that my only hope of becoming a professional writer was to find the perfect tool. A few months into my career as a book critic, I’d already run up against the limits of my productivity, and, like many others before me, I pinned the blame on Microsoft Word. Each time I opened a draft, I seemed to lose my bearings, scrolling from top to bottom and alighting on far-flung sentences at random. I found and replaced, wrote, and rewrote; the program made fiddling easy and finishing next to impossible.

I’d fallen into the trap that the philosopher Jacques Derrida identified in an interview from the mid-nineties. “With the computer, everything is rapid and so easy,” he complained. “An interminable revision, an infinite analysis is already on the horizon.” Derrida hadn’t even contended with the sirens of online life, which were driving writer friends to buy disconnected laptops or to quarantine their smartphones in storage bins with timed locks. Zadie Smith touted Freedom, a subscription service that cut off the user’s devices—a chastity belt for procrastinators.

I tried “distraction-free” writing apps that encouraged mindfulness, disabled the backspace key, or, in a few extreme cases, threatened to delete everything if I took my hands off the keyboard (Write or Die). Later, I tried coding my own writing tools, a hobby as rewarding as it was ineffective. The experiments gradually meshed into a literary Rube Goldberg machine, a teetering assemblage of Scriveners and SimpleTexts that left me perpetually uncertain of which thought I’d written down where. Longhand was a luxury I couldn’t afford: Wendell Berry boasted in Harper’s that he didn’t need a computer because he had a wife, but I was a mere urban freelancer, whose boyfriend had a job. So I continued the search for word processing’s Excalibur, a perfect union of consciousness and composition.

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An autodidact is someone who has learned a subject without a teacher or formal education. Famous examples of these self-taught maestros include Leonardo Da Vinci, master of 16 languages; Kató Lomb, a prolific Hungarian interpreter that knew at least 17 languages; and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Now, there may be a new entry on that list: the great cosmos. The universe could be constantly teaching itself how to evolve into a more stable state, according to new research that was recently published to the pre-print server arXiV (meaning the work has not yet been peer-reviewed).

The paper—authored by researchers at Microsoft and scientists at Brown University, among others—explains that all of the laws of physics we can see or measure today are laws that have worked themselves out over time. If we want to grasp how these laws of physics evolved, they say, we ought to apply Darwinian natural selection to cosmology.

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