Finding The Nostalgia Genuinely Painful Rather Than Heartwarming

The most popular link last week was Lena Dunham's (to me, baroque) file organisation system, with this piece about getting rid of willpower second.

1. Kate Wagner (of McMansion Hell fame) writes about how to write essays. It's all very sound advice. Beware hot takes, trust your curiosity, and be specific.
2. Examples of what young people are spending their "fun money" on.
3. Related: climate change is impeding Japan's ability to keep up with the demand for matcha.

4. Artist Sarah Ross designed these "archisuits" that are designed to make the deliberately inhospitable urban environment comfortable to inhabit again.
5. Researchers did the Prisoner's Dilemma experiment on different AI models and found that Google's Gemini was the most likely to snitch on a fellow detainee.
6. The story of the book stall that is, against the odds, still operating within the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.
7. If you would like to get more into classical music but aren't sure where to start, there are some great listening suggestions on this list.
8. Victorian mourning culture required that the bereaved spend months wearing dark garments that were often made of crape (crepe?) fabric, which wasn't waterproof and quickly discoloured in the rain. This is a survey of all the contemporary tips for fixing up your widow's weeds.
9. I am exactly the right age for this piece about rewatching The OC and finding the nostalgia genuinely painful rather than heartwarming (minus the observations about playing high school football, obviously I didn't do that).
10. What if technology doesn't end up abolishing work, but abolishing leisure? We're already halfway there, this writer argues, since we have made productivity an emotion rather than an external fact:

"Instead of being bound by time and space, productivity is feelings oriented. It’s hard to define exactly what counts as productive, because the answer is that which feels productive. If your attention span is fried to cinders, watching a movie — a sustained engagement with one piece of media over a longer period of time — does feel productive. Because it is feelings oriented, productivity is itself hyper-individual. It feels different for everyone — although, when we’re all consuming the same online content centred on self-optimisation, it increasingly feels the same. When you want to ‘hit your step count’, going for a walk feels productive. When you want to ‘reduce inflammation’, a six step morning routine, complete with morning yoga and lymphatic drainage massage, feels productive. When you want to ‘heal your trauma’, journalling and going to online therapy feels productive."

11. The poet Andrea Gibson died. This post by their wife is both moving and uplifting.
12. On "Peak Orthodontist Music". And a playlist.
13. Delving into the sketchbooks of women artists.