Via the Radio 4 blog, what the editor rightly describes as a very lovely thing - Rebecca Dalzell is a New Yorker, writing about going about her life punctuated by the sound of Radio 4.
She perfectly sums us up by saying:
Listen to Radio 4 and the country that emerges is witty and engaging, well-read if parochial, always up for a walk to the pub down the lane. Watch Channel 5 on TV and you see a nation obsessed with home repairs, footballers, and the Botoxed winners of Big Brother. Radio gave me the England I’d gotten to know reading Evelyn Waugh, and that I half-expected to find.
There is no sensible way for me to explain this, so I will say only that if you are in need of some laughter, you must check out Antonia's video.
This is a clear example of not knowing that you wanted something until you get it - how could I have known that a woman and her daughter in hastily improvised beards, yearning for the sea, would be the thing to make me laugh til I cried?
Guardian readers can be a bolshy lot, so it's a brave company that submits to their ethical blog Q&A. Howies dealt with it pretty gracefully when they were turned over, but you'd have thought it would have given Neal's Yard Remedies some idea of what they might be in for. Apparently not...
It's impossible to say at what point they decided this had all been a terrible idea - was it when a reader asked:
Do you see no problem with trying to be 'ethical' while at the same time selling snake oil for a living?
or perhaps:
I was wondering what your policy was on dealing with the situation of one of your stocked alternative medicines actually being proven to work. Would you discontinue it? After all, it wouldn't be alternative any more, just medicine.
or maybe:
I've been soaking a £20 note in a bathfull of water for the last few days, is it ok to pay for an order using my new homeopathic money? I now seem to have rather a lot of it.
We'll never know.
I still haven't given in to the lure of twitter, but stories like this make it ever more appealing - #Radio4minus1letter. After all, who wouldn't want to listen to
The Sipping Forecast. Nice cup of tea. Milk, veering. Sugar, 1 or 2. Biscuits later. Good.
or
Desert Island Diss (a program about insulting people stranded on desert islands)
Life at the moment is busy in way that involves racing from one thing to the next without a chance to settle and look at what just happened, or space to stop and just breathe.
This makes me feel much better.
Oliver Burkeman has a great column on homophily - our "tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us".
I've been thinking about this a lot lately - for many of us, we spend much of our social time with people who hold similar views and like the same things; we read books, newspapers and blogs that support our opinions and we watch programmes and films that dovetail with our tastes.
However open-minded they might consider themselves to be, I'm guessing most people probably don't spend a lot of time seeking out people and ideas that will challenge them. If you're lucky, you might have friends who are happy to engage you in a challenging, possibly-slightly-heated-but-mostly-civilised, debate. Sometimes they might even change your mind. But certainly in my case, if I'm not careful, I find this is the exception rather than the rule. So, what's wrong with that? Well,
...as the Harvard media researcher Ethan Zuckerman puts it, "Homophily causes ignorance." (It also makes us more extreme, studies show: a group of conservatives, given the chance to discuss politics among themselves, will grow more conservative.)
However, I have noticed that there is one area of my life that doesn't display this comforting effect - and that's work. At work I don't necessarily choose who is in my team, or who I collaborate with on a project - and that can be a refreshing change. Having to work with someone whose views I don't share, or whose way of working I don't understand can be frustrating or occasionally downright infuriating - but the creative tension sometimes produces much better results, and certainly does its bit to prevent complacency. In short, it's good for me.
Burkeman agrees:
The unspoken assumption here is that you know what you like - that satisfying your existing preferences, and maybe expanding them a little around the edges, is the path to fulfilment. But if happiness research has taught us anything, it's that we're terrible at predicting what will bring us pleasure. Might we end up happier by exposing ourselves more often to serendipity, or even, specifically, to the people and things we don't think we'd like?
He suggests:
... Facebook could easily offer a list of the People You're Least Likely To Know; imagine what that could do for cross-cultural understanding. And I love the Unsuggester, a feature of the books site LibraryThing.com: enter a book you've recently read, and it'll provide a list of titles least likely to appear alongside it on other people's bookshelves. Tell it you're a fan of Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason, and it'll suggest you read Confessions Of A Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. And maybe you should.
Maybe I will.
In this Saturday's Guardian Weekend magazine, various celebrities were interviewed by children. It makes for a fantastic read - full set here. They got some much more interesting answers out of the interviewees than many celeb profilers usually manage, and I also found myself warming to people I don't usually expect to like.
I particularly enjoyed Richard Hammond being interviewed by 7 year old Kirsty Stark. I would also have loved to hear the answers to some of the questions they didn't get to ask.
After all, who hasn't wanted to ask Lewis Hamilton "What do you do if you need a wee while you're racing?" or Roger Federer "Is Gillette really the best a man can get?".
Gorgeous video series from Crush + Lovely, who visited Brooklyn and asked fifty people the same question - where would you like to wake up tomorrow?
They've also carried out the project in London.
Exactitudes is a series of photographs by Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek. They've been working together since 1994 to document the styles and informal dress codes shared by social groups. I find this fascinating, not least because a person's clothes always make a statement about them; even if that statement is I don't care about clothes as my mind is on higher things.
I would probably fit best into this set, although sadly with slightly less Pariessiene chic...
(via yes and yes)
Great piece from Cory Doctorow on how to avoid distraction and just get on with writing. I particularly liked:
Don't be ceremonious
Forget advice about finding the right atmosphere to coax your muse into the room. Forget candles, music, silence, a good chair, a cigarette, or putting the kids to sleep. It's nice to have all your physical needs met before you write, but if you convince yourself that you can only write in a perfect world, you compound the problem of finding 20 free minutes with the problem of finding the right environment at the same time. When the time is available, just put fingers to keyboard and write. You can put up with noise/silence/kids/discomfort/hunger for 20 minutes.
(via Lifehacker)
on They know the colours that go together