I know I’m not the only one feeling this right now. It’s a sentiment I’ve been hearing a lot from friends and on social media, and it’s no surprise given the strange and stressful circumstances we find ourselves in. The unpredictability of the pandemic and the global economy, coupled with the strain of adjusting to new realities of work, childcare, and school, have almost everyone I know craving an escape.
Yet with travel restricted in many places, a carefree getaway isn’t in the cards for most people.
Still, vacations are an important part of well-being. One study, for example, showed that when men at risk for heart disease didn’t take annual vacations, they had a 32 percent higher risk of having a fatal heart attack than those who did. Likewise, a study of women showed that those who took vacation rarely — i.e., once every six years or less often — were eight times more likely to develop heart disease. Other studies have shown an increase in sleep quality and an improvement in reaction times of up to 80 percent after taking a vacation.
Still other research has shown that regular vacations are more important than money to overall well-being, so much that a regular vacationer making less than $24,000 a year might even be happier than a non-vacationer making more than $120,000 a year.
Many parents of young children struggle to introduce new foods into their kids’ diets. About half of American children are picky eaters by the age of two; they are, in the vernacular of nutritionists, “food neophobic.” Our pediatrician once told me that one of our sons, who was a fussy eater, would need to try new food at least six times before the taste would no longer fill him with fear and loathing. My wife and I wanted to fight our son’s food neophobia for some practical, nutritional reasons, but more fundamentally, we wanted him to eat adventurously so he could enjoy this part of life. Openness to a wide variety of tastes and smells enhances the pleasure of eating.
This is an instance of a larger truth: Openness to a wide variety of life experiences, from visiting interesting places to considering unusual political views, brings happiness. “Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet, “will himself sound the depths of his own being.”
Tortuguero is a village on the Northern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica in the Limón Province. The small village, which can be reached only by boat or airplane, is sustained almost entirely by eco-tourism. The population is estimated at around 1200-1500. Tortuguero can be translated as Land of Turtles and gave its name to the neighboring Tortuguero National Park. The village is situated on a sand bar island, separated from the mainland by Tortuguero River and bordering the Caribbean Sea. Tortuguero is renowned for its navigable canals that run through the rainforest in the national park, and has earned the nickname of ‘Central America’s Amazon’.
The beaches around Tortuguero are key nesting sites for four species of sea turtle, including two critically endangered species. The National Park is also host to an incredible biodiversity of insects, resident and migratory birds, and mammals, including jaguars and four species of monkey. Accordingly, there are four biological stations — the John H. Phipps Biological Field Station, the Caño Palma Biological Research Station, the ASVO station (Asociación de Voluntarios para Servicio en Areas Protegidas), and the GVI Jalova Biological Station — which operate from the area immediately around the village and concentrate on research and conservation of the local ecology, particularly the turtles. The ocean here can be dangerous to swim in due to rough surf and strong currents. Wikipedia
An image from Tortuguero Conservation Area Costa Rica
When Singaporean car dealer Keith Oh first read the Facebook message, he wasn’t sure it was real. A Chinese client ordered a S$1.1 million ($830,000) Bentley—sight unseen—over the social network.
“They just asked for the price and when we could do the delivery, that’s all,” he said. “It’s a million dollars to us but it’s probably nothing to them.”
The quick sale was the latest sign of a wider trend: Money is sloshing around Singapore like never before. As the coronavirus pandemic hammers Southeast Asia and political turmoil threatens Hong Kong, the city has become a safe harbor for some of the region’s wealthiest tycoons and their families.
For rich people “who can decide where they want to live and settle down, Singapore is a place of choice now,” said Stephan Repkow, who founded Wealth Management Alliance in 2015 after four years at Union Bancaire Privee. He said two of his foreign clients had become residents in the past 12 months and more are on the way.
Singapore has long been a draw for wealthy Chinese, Indonesians and Malaysians who would come for short trips to shop, play baccarat at the casino or get medical check-ups at world-class clinics. Mount Elizabeth Hospital Orchard, just steps from the flagship stores of Gucci and Rolex, features a UOB Privilege Banking Centre in the lobby.
The pandemic has changed all that, prompting many tycoons and their families to stay for months, in some cases seeking residency to ride out the storm. On a per-capita basis, the mortality rates in Malaysia and Indonesia are more than 10 and 30 times higher than in Singapore, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.
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Marina Bay in Singapore, on Jan. 28, 2021. Photographer: Lauryn Ishak/Bloomberg
The word “gerrymandering” prompts an image: district maps that look less like a tangible community than a Rorschach blot—perhaps one that suggests a “broken-winged pterodactyl,” as one federal judge referred to Maryland’s 3rd district. Read a line like that, and a certain intuition kicks in: There must be something wrong here.
The problem is that our intuition isn’t necessarily correct.
“While badly shaped districts are a fairly successful flag that somebody was trying to do something, they don’t really tell us what their agenda was, or whether it was nefarious or benign,” says Moon Duchin, a mathematician at Tufts University and an expert on gerrymandering. “Bad shapes are not necessarily bad, and good shapes are not necessarily good.”
For the past five years, Duchin has led Tufts’ Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group, a lab that has quietly upended conventional wisdom about how gerrymandering works by approaching the issue less as a political problem than a mathematical one. As the country sprints into a new redistricting cycle, understanding redistricting in those terms has taken on new importance—especially in light of a controversial change to the Census Bureau data that will be used to draw the new district maps.
It’s hard to remember a time when scrolling through Instagram was anything but a thoroughly exhausting experience.
Where once the social network was basically lunch and sunsets, it’s now a parade of strategically crafted life updates, career achievements, and public vows to spend less time online (usually made by people who earn money from social media)—all framed with the carefully selected language of a press release. Everyone is striving, so very hard.
And great for them, I guess. But sometimes one might pine for a less aspirational time, when the cool kids were smoking weed, eating junk food, and… you know, just chillin’.
Back in the 1990s, our heroes were slackers: the dudes and the clerks, the stick-it-to-the-man, stay-true-to-yourself burnouts we saw in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Slacker, and Reality Bites. In the latter, Winona Ryder’s character, Leilana, chooses the disillusioned musician (Ethan Hawke) over the TV exec (Ben Stiller), and it’s presented as an excellent choice. Nobody cool was trying to monetize their lifestyle back then or rake in the brand endorsements. Selling out (remember that?) was whack.
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Nirvana, patron saints of nineties slacker-dom. Photo by Getty Images/Mark and Colleen Haywar
I have a tenet that I follow when it comes to social media conflagrations: Don’t add your air to someone else’s fire.
This rule has saved my butt multiple times. For example, during one social media snafu, a writer responded to a post I made of an article I’d written, saying she wanted to discuss our opposing views—in a Facebook forum of thousands of people. The wording and tone of her comment showed she wasn’t interested in a real dialog, so I didn’t respond. Had I agreed to the requestor made a snarky comment like “Get your own damn articles published,” I would have been following her playbook to gain attention for herself and undermine me and my work. Should I have done something else? I figured I’d check with the experts.
“You did the right thing by not responding,” says Michele Borba, an educational psychologist and author of Thrivers. “No response is a great response, and often the most powerful response. The person wants the attention, and you are not giving it to them. She clearly wanted to use and undermine you by hijacking your platform. If you shamed her, you would have lost credibility and would be in a position of defending yourself.”
Tampa is a city on the Gulf Coast of the U.S. state of Florida. The city sits on Tampa Bay as the largest city in the Tampa Bay area and is the seat of Hillsborough County. With an estimated population of 399,700 in 2019, Tampa is the third-most populated city in Florida after Jacksonville and Miami, and the 47th most populated city in the United States.
Tampa functioned as a military center during the 19th century with the establishment of Fort Brooke. The cigar industry was also brought to the city by Vincente Martinez Ybor, after whom Ybor City is named. Tampa was formally reincorporated as a city in 1887, following the Civil War. Today, Tampa’s economy is driven by tourism, health care, finance, insurance, technology, construction, and the maritime industry. The bay’s port is the largest in the state, responsible for over $15 billion in economic impact.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Avalon Nuovo
JAN BUCHCZIK
![An illustration featuring "The Gerry-Mander" political cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale](https://static.politico.com/dims4/default/4592770/2147483647/resize/1160x%3E/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F2c%2F8b%2Fdce174ee4b5ba358a3200292afab%2Fgerrymandering-qa-illo.jpg "An illustration featuring "The Gerry-Mander" political cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale")
