This is great. Some people think the goal of meditation is to maintain focus on one thing without getting distracted. It’s common, then, for a meditation practice to feel frustrating and discouraging; yet another activity for them to fail because they can’t stay focused. It might help to think of meditation as “practice of returning.” Through this lens we assume that we WILL get distracted, and once we notice we’ve gotten distracted, we practice returning to our breath/blank space, etc.

Thanks for writing this. I had zero idea what EVs mean for a mechanic.

I’m a licensed mental health professional but I don’t specialize in ADHD. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD and take stimulants every day.

ADHD is mostly genetic, but IMO the increase in diagnoses is partly due to the information overload from the digital age we’re living in. There are simply more things distracting us, more cognitive demands, such that even “normal” brains will struggle to keep up.

I want to point out, too, that the DSM has serious issues with validity and reliability. Some of the criteria are so subjective as to be useless, and two providers diagnosing the same person can arrive at very different disorders. Allen Frances, chair of the DSM-IV (we’re on DSM-5 now) wrote a book called Saving Normal where he criticizes the APA’s trend of pathologizing basic human experiences. With each DSM edition the diagnostic criteria get more broad, to the point that I can argue that any given person meets criteria for SOME disorder. If everyone is disordered, then what’s normal anymore? How is that helpful?

Most of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD describe someone who isn’t a “good student” or a “good employee.” It doesn’t consider context. If someone fucking hates their job, I’m not surprised they struggle to complete tasks that require sustained mental effort. Kids are reminded every day that the world is burning, so of course they’re distracted from their math homework. I’m not saying people aren’t suffering from what we call ADHD, I’m saying that it’s a normal human response to the state of the world right now, so why are we calling it a disorder?

Edit: a word

Frozen grapes. Once they’ve been out of the freezer for a couple minutes, they thaw into little slushie bubbles.

On Alone: Australia, one of the contestants was a biologist. She refused to eat any animal that “cares for its young.” I had never thought about differentiating that way.

This is pretty standard, according to a recent episode of the Team Deakins podcast. A makeup artist said it’s a major pain in the ass, because, for example, they can’t snap a quick photo of an actor’s makeup and send it to the lighting crew. He said many of them still do it, but they get in huge trouble if they get caught.

I agree that it’s a beautiful love story in a vacuum, but in the context of a larger society I think Nick Offerman’s character was a psychopath. With so many people suffering around him, he chose to hoard weapons and resources, and set up booby traps to avoid having to share with anyone. That’s essentially what the ultra-rich are doing today in response to the climate crisis, and nobody is romanticizing it.

Succession has some of the best screenwriting of any TV show or movie, IMO. S3E08 “Chiantishire” stands out to me. So much of the dialogue is passive-aggressive or euphemistic. S4E09 “Church and State” is also an absolute marvel, with the main scene being shot with 8 cameras simultaneously, and showing some of the most powerful performances in the series.

Same. My partner got an Apple watch and loved all the lifestyle tools, but she stopped wearing it because she couldn’t stand all the notifications. I said it would just take a couple minutes to turn off the ones she didn’t like, but she doesn’t have time for that!

On the Team Deakins podcast (which I HIGHLY recommend) Roger is notoriously pessimistic about the future of film. But they asked one of their guests - maybe Greig Fraser? - about AI and he basically said, “AI is here whether we like it or not. We as artists can either embrace it and lead the way in using it appropriately, or we can refuse and let big studios and big money ruin the industry by using AI without input from the artists.”

Do you have EDS?

“Nuance Trolling”: The insistence that some major beneficial development like single-payer healthcare, ending wars and bombing campaigns, or the mitigation, even cessation, of climate change is impossible because the situation is too nuanced, the plan too lacking in detail, the goal too hard to achieve, the public isn’t behind it or some other bad faith “concern” that makes bold action an impossibility.

-Citations Needed podcast Ep. 201

In general I don’t support buying cheap shit on Amazon, but I’ve bought $100 bidets and I’ve bought $20 ones, and they all do the same thing - spray water on your butt. I had one model that had a hot water input, but my plumbing could never warm up the water in time. So cheap, cold water bidets for me.

Ha, I had the same experience doing lemon tek with my wife. It was my first time trying it too. She didn’t hold it against me afterwards but she did think I over-served on purpose.

I’m not an audiologist but I go to a lot of shows and bars and I care about my hearing. I swear by Flare Earshades and I recommend them all the time.

I’ve tried Etymotics, Loops, Vibes, Earasers, and a couple other brands, and none of them have the clarity and quality of the Flares. I’ve worn them comfortably for 8 hours, and music sounds so good I forget I’m wearing them.

This is just my experience, and you’ll find lots of positive reviews for other brands, but I wanted to share mine.

If I asked you to describe the candidates to me, and you started with Trump, I would say, “I don’t need to hear who the other candidates are. I’m voting against this guy.”

The Nate Silver special!

What are we looking at here?

That’s close to how it happens in the book. I believe there’s a single paragraph revealing that >!Moss was killed.!< Then the story moves along.

It was interesting, but not surprising, that he said both that Obamacare was a failure, and that they would protect all the parts of it that people enjoy.