I have tons to share with you guys, but for this time, I'll share great readings in this week. Before going deeper, here's the audio for the latest issue on Universal Education. If you prefer on Spotify, go check this link:
Lots of my readings come from great mediums, like Vox, NYT, Paris Review, The Atlantic and Substack. Substack is home for great writers and for those who always need intellectual stimuli every time.
Happy Reading.
How the self-care industry made us so lonely
How much time did you spend a day to do a self-care routine? This article presents the idea of loneliness epidemic and the correlation with the self-care routines. The internet life captured the idea of self-care something like doing a skincare, body care routine in which boosts the industry's sales. The idea behind all of this is to reach the high levels of well-being, but with only engaging with yourself. However, according to Audre Lorde, the high level of well-being is happened when we spend time with friends, romantic partners, and children. To short, we need a healthy interaction.
Where were you the first time you heard the words “bath bomb?” What about “10-step skin care routine?” Perhaps you have, at some point, canceled plans in order to “unplug,” drink some tea, and take a bit of “me time.” Maybe you’ve ordered an assortment of candles meant to combat anxiety and stress or booked a rage room to exorcise your demons.
From: Vox.
Why are we so obsessed with morning routines?
Morning routine always related to productivity. Marcus Aurelius on his book, The Meditations, has instilled in our world today. He said to himself, "In the morning when you rise unwillingly, let his thought be present - I am rising to the work of human being." I know, that lying in bed seems more pleasant, but we have to get to work or study. Human has their own choice to treat their morning routine, meditating, breakfast, create a to-do list, running, and other things. Those are not wrong because it shows what you value the most in life. Go for that beautiful and peaceful morning routine.
Of all the pillars of internet content, surely one of the strongest is the genre where people outline their morning routine in grave and sanctimonious detail. They exist in every medium, in every platform, among every internet subculture. TikTok has its Get Ready With Mes, where influencers chat over their plethora of skin-nourishing unguents and artful makeup products. Beauty YouTube has the more glamorous cousin, Vogue Beauty Secrets, in which dewy-skinned celebrities walk us through the many things they do to their faces every morning.
From: Vox.
Is it ever okay to film strangers in public?
Filming strangers seems not harmful back then, right now, it seems like ruining stranger's privacy. I've seen tons of video on Tiktoks about people who just casually do their work and the title seems a little bit sentinent. The video converys the value of expressing gratitude because others probably can't have the same privilege as you. Probably, there are tons of video made just for fun. This is an irony, which is objectively worse to sneakily take a photo of someone or a group of people just to get the main goal: driving engagement and for popularity. Have you ever caught someone filming other people without their consent?
The experience of realizing you are being surreptitiously filmed by a stranger is now a relatively common one, but this is how it happened for Mitchell Clark: The 25-year-old was working a shift at his Atlanta Target when someone propped up a phone nearby. “I thought it was for some dumb prank channel,” he says. It wasn’t until a young woman bent over directly in front of him, her dress short enough to expose her entire bare bottom, that he realized what was going on. The resulting video captures his shock — his eyes widen and his hands grasp his chest, agog — and later ended up on the OnlyFans model’s Instagram account.
From: Vox
Actually, Gossiping Has Its Benefits. So Why Are Women Ridiculed for It?
Some of men and boys I've met in life always said that women loves to share other secrets, they normally refer this to gossip, as if they are the best secret keeper in this universe. It's not because the number of words woman said every single day. Research has confirmed that no significant difference between the number of words and gossip behavior. And the idea that women talk more than men is another stereotype, another country has expression to translate this thing, "one man, one word - one woman, one dictionary."
Katie explained beautifully how gossips change and transform overtime in this article. From the form of female friendship to idle talk associated with immorality. Gossips has ability to pass the story from generations to generations, somehow gossip can be a survival kit to act better in front of your enemies. Gossip surely can be good and bad. Those toxic gossip is better left because it's harmful. We gossip because we need story to tie our world together, at least for connection and entertainment.
Last week, Pope Francis, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, allegedly scolded a group of young priests against ‘badmouthing’ in parishes and congregations because ‘gossip is a women’s thing.’ He then added, ‘we wear the trousers, we have to say things.’ (Well, you actually wear dresses, so by your own logic, you shouldn’t be saying things.) Just a few days before that, a Republican man who is now running for Senate in Minnesota complained in an interview that ‘women have become too mouthy.’
From: Katie Jgln
Fathers and daughters
I love this article, just too beautiful. The father's parenting to a daughter is really a scaffolding for the girls who will soon run their world. Once a dad underestimates their daughter's opinion, it will ruin their confidence to show themselves in public. I believe that the foundation of confidence is shaped by how the parents teach or treat them. And please, don't underestimate the bond between a father and a daughter.
It's scorching hot today. Sunset won’t arrive until 8:30 PM, which is a small luxury. I’m sitting inside an Ethiopian restaurant in Oakland. The lentil samussas just came out of the fryer and landed on my table on a white plate. Three crispy triangles. They are hot and spicy and too delicious for me to wait very long before taking a bite. The burn makes it all the tastier. Eating hot food on a hot day is a one-of-a-kind experience. It brings you closer to your fragile humanness. It's tantalizing, even erotic, to feel both hot on the outside and on the inside.
From: Amani Hope.
Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul
How higher education should teach their students? School eras mean many things for me, especially teaching me on how to think. Thinking needs a lot of energy, in order to form an opinion, human should dig deeper to the issue and read a lot just to make a clear side point. Through reading. Reading is a powerful tool which can uncover the hidden knowledge, humbling ourself because the more we read, the less we know. Students should learn on how to deep read.
In this article, William explained that school and universities right now are abandoning traditional universities for self-fashioned liberal arts programms. Today's education is more about creating, collaborating, rather than reading and writing. They are more directed to specific purposes and more student-centered.
And that is the second complaint that graduates tend to express: that they finished college without the feeling that they had learned anything, in this essential sense. That they hadn’t been touched. That they hadn’t been changed. That there is a treasure out there—call it the Great Books or just great books, the wisdom of the ages or the best that has been thought and said—that its purpose is to activate the treasure inside them, that they had come to one of these splendid institutions (whose architecture speaks of culture, whose age gives earnest of depth) to be initiated into it, but that they had been denied, deprived. For unclear reasons, cheated.
From: William Deresiewicz
What Will Life Really Be Like After The Internet Gets Incinerated?
The internet world has became more and more wild than ever. Cyber bully, blackmail, the widespread lying, misinformation and many other thing. Although internet has lots of wonderful thing, like free library, ability to connect with other people, information, and many things, we, sometimes lost the idea of true connection and true knowledge. This article is brilliant.
So the aftermath of the Internet exploding is inevitably going to come with ambivalent, and even bittersweet, feelings. Many of us are probably going to miss the amazing sense of connection we have with people all around the globe and the book recommendations, free recipes and gardening tips, but, to no less an extent, are probably going to be extremely relieved to no longer be quite so pressured by corporations to be rampantly interested in our own surfaces or be beset by the constant lingering sense that we are arguing with people we’ve never met about a version of ourselves that doesn’t exist.
From: Tom Cox.
Appreciate you reading,
Melva Bintang.
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