01 May The Weekend Starts Here...
It looks as though restrictions will start to ease in the coming weeks. It will be lovely to be able to venture further from home for exercise or just a leisurely stroll, meet up with friends again (we will be limited here to groups of no more than 10) and start on the road back to something approaching normal. In preparation, our mayor has galvanised the village into action this week with 17 kind ladies volunteering to make reusable face masks from the many donations of material from villagers. Every person in the commune will have at least one mask come 11th May.
Which leads me to my first piece this week. I sometimes wonder what effect the evening news would have if reporters were restricted to only reporting good news. Tim Harford has looked into this and has found that We’re actually decent people in a crisis – and stories claiming otherwise do harm [3 min read]
The Pentagon released videos of possible UFOs this week [1:17 video]
The US stock market has just had its best month since 1987. In the midst of a global pandemic. This can seem puzzling, but the stock market is not the economy and what we’re experiencing now is not unusual. Making Sense of a Stock Market That Doesn’t Make Any Sense [ Ben Carlson 3 min read]
About 18 months ago I read Michael Lewis’s book, The Fifth Risk. It’s one of the scariest books I’ve ever read, and I remember thinking after finishing it ‘I hope this administration never has to face a serious crisis’. The Guardian has been re-publishing some of its long reads and this week, they chose an extract from the book. If you don’t understand why the US administration’s reaction to the pandemic has been so lame, this will tell you all you need to know [10 min read]
“The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising.” [ Morgan Housel 3 min read]
And finally. What happens when half a billion Monarch butterflies awake from hibernation [3:07 video] and what happens when dolphins go swimming in bioluminescence [0:59]? In spite of everything that’s going on, the world is still a beautiful, awe-inspiring place.
Whatever you’re up to this weekend, I hope it’s a good one.
Carolyn