The Monday Mix (17/01/2022)
Hi friends,
January is a slow month and this January has been no exception. I’ve been getting into a routine now Christmas is over and will look to plan a few trips in the next few months once Omicron has died down here.
It’s kind of hard to believe we’re into the fourth year of the pandemic, but here we are. Whether this is because of the virulence of the virus, poor decision-making from our leaders or a combination of the two, will probably be determined by the historians of the future. All I know is that it feels like we’ve been living through this forever now.
Hopefully, the end is in sight.
Wordle
I’m sure most of you have heard of this word game by now. If you haven’t, I’m sharing it with you this week. It’s a simple word game that requires you to guess a random five-letter word in six turns, with a new word released every day. The beauty of the game is that everyone who plays has to find the same word and it's a good brain teaser that takes up 5 to 10 minutes of your day.
As a former teacher of English as a foreign language, if English isn’t your first language and you want a fun way of learning new words, Worlde is a great way to do so. I wish I had when I was a teacher!
Archealogy’s Gender Secrets
A fascinating article on how recent advances in archaeology could overturn decades of long-held beliefs regarding gender and sex. One of the puzzling things about modern life is how certain we are of our own beliefs. Yet, the past has a funny way of proving us wrong.
Fundamentalists, such as those who decry same-sex relationships, like to think they are reflecting a human truth. Yet, this research suggests same-sex relationships may have been more common than we think. Then we have famous words in ancient Greece, such as Plato’s Symposium, where same-sex relationships were regularly elaborated on.
What this article shows is that despite thinking we have all the answers and can use the past to back us up, our understanding of it is tenuous at best.
Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren
This article written in 1930 by the influential economist John Maynard Keynes is a fascinating insight into what he believed the future would look like. In this essay, he predicts we’d be working 15 hours a week now to economic growth.
Yet, here we are in 2022 and we are nowhere near this vision of the future. The question we have to ask is, what went wrong? Why are we working 40 hours a week when our forebears believed we’d be working significantly less. Coming out of the pandemic, we need new ideas for society.
Going back to the ways things were simply isn’t good enough. More than ever, we need to engage with ideas such as the one Keynes espoused here and see if we can implement them.
Book I’m reading - Heroic Failure by Fintan O’Toole
A book on the folly of Brexit from an Irish perspective. It’s an illuminating read on what motivated those behind Brexit and the consequences of the decision, not least for Ireland, with whom Britain shares a land border. Reading this book reminds me of how stupid a decision this was and makes me hope we’ll make our way back to the EU soon.
Quote I’m pondering: "Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom." – Simone de Beauvoir
That’s all for this week.
Until next time,
Tom