R&R & ads

This week: A collection of stories on downtime activities and selling things (both goods and points of view)

This week’s top 10:

1. Rethinking downtime: “We yearn to ‘make the most of’ our free time, so we are constantly giving our evenings, weekends, and vacations over to our self-advancement. … Pure leisure now feels like pure indulgence.” There’s a lot of post-pandemic opinions about how work should, well, work. This Atlantic piece suggests not legislating any new approach too tightly, lest we miss out on the desired results of true downtime.

2. How Mario trains your mind: The art of speed running in old video games isn’t just good for Twitch subscriptions. It can also be good for your brain.

3. One song, decades of hostilities: An Israeli military officer-turned-educator and a Palestinian rapper/actor lay out their sides’ grievances in a music video that doubles as a call for understanding.

4. Jaw-dropper: The New Yorker publishes a few I-can’t-believe-someone-let-that-happen stories a year. This epic – on how German foster children were purposefully paired with pedophile caretakers as a years-long, state-sanctioned experiment – is one of them.

5. Algorithm hacking: WSJ breaks down how TikTok quickly figures out what video to serve you next.

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6. Robo-taxis are coming: Ford, Lyft and Argo are pushing to get them on the street ASAP.

7. The ad game: There won’t be fans in the stands, but very few advertisers are skipping the Olympics. Meanwhile, ads for February’s Super Bowl are nearly sold out.

8. What happened to ‘Black Widow’?: The 67 percent week-over-week box office drop has spawned several theories, from release strategy questions to piracy concerns to a hypothesis that people’s appetites for Marvel’s stout catalog may be waning.

   Paul Chelimo🇺🇸🥈🥉 @Paulchelimo

   Beds to be installed in Tokyo Olympic Village will be made of cardboard, this is aimed at avoiding intimacy among athletes Beds will be able to withstand the weight of a single person to avoid situations beyond sports. I see no problem for distance runners,even 4 of us can do😂

   

   

9. Boxed out: Funny tweets aside (and there are a ton, gloriously catalogued in this story), the cardboard bed frames in the athletes’ quarters at the Olympic Village were not constructed to discourage sex.

10. If you could write your own obituary: A journalist with 60 years in the trade reflects on life after receiving a terminal diagnosis.

See you next Thursday.