meeting in the aisle

Weekend Reader - links I loved

I know it’s not the weekend, but I felt like bringing you some link love anyway. Here’s the seven links I loved most last week:

* Liberia, When Darkness Falls is an astonishing account of the war in Liberia by photojournalist Gregory Stemn. Be warned, the images are confronting.

* It’s official, sleep is more important than food. This is not news for someone like me who struggles to catch enough Zzzzs on a regular basis:

“even small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our health, our mood, our cognitive capacity and our productivity.

Many of the effects we suffer are invisible. Insufficient sleep, for example, deeply impairs our ability to consolidate and stabilize learning that occurs during the waking day. In other words, it wreaks havoc on our memory.” - Tony Schwarz.

* If you had to guess the most generous country towards refugees in the world, who would you pick? - Chris Blattman.

* Now that I’m standing in front of classrooms full of students on a regular basis as part of my day job, I take my hat off to teachers who do it all the time, and I have a whole lot of empathy for the incredible hours teachers can work - Amy Letter.

* Every time I buy bottled water a little bit more of my self respect dies. Particularly after I’ve reminded myself, again, why bottled water sucks:

“some 2.7 million tons of petroleum-derived plastic are used to bottle water around the world every year” - Scientific American

* I recently rewatched Walk the Line and fell back in love with Johnny Cash, not that we’d ever really been estranged. But it is a good time to discover Johnny Cash’s cover of The Beatle’s “In My Life” - Something Changed.

* I didn’t like it the first time I saw it, and I still don’t like it after a second, but you might. This is what the most typical person on earth looks like today - National Geographic.

[image: St Kilda in the dying sunshine]