When It Comes to Love, Is Three (or More) a Crowd?

Cultures around the world fear unrequited love. One strategy to avoid the pain of rejection might be to spread your love around—but does that work?

Passionate love between two people is a pervasive human theme. Humans as a species may not be sexually monogamous, but they do seem to be emotionally monogamous; it is very difficult to passionately love two people at the same time. In the end, it seems to me, everyone who desires being in love discovers, for better or worse, that it’s a two-person job.

- Sapiens

Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s greatest minds, was an inspiration for atheists

Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest minds on earth. After dying at the age 76, as fellow physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “his passing has left an intellectual vacuum in his wake.”

There was one point where religious advocates tried to use a quote from A Brief History Of Time to suggest his belief in God: “It would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.” However, if it wasn’t clear to people that he was an atheist, in his 2010 book The Grand Design he clarified that it was a metaphorical comment. He later told El Mundo in no uncertain terms: “What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God. Which there isn’t. I’m an atheist.”

- Quartz

Être possédé par ses possessions

Après la méditation, le nettoyage du microbiote et le jeûne, la tendance d’épuration continue à déferler sur un Occident repentant aux dépotoirs gavés, et dont la devise tenait sur un t-shirt fabriqué en Chine : Shop till you drop ! Même les Chinois ne veulent plus de nos déchets, c’est dire.

Les artistes ont toujours devancé le troupeau dans ce domaine, car le mouvement d’ascétisme matériel englobe à la fois la spiritualité, l’écologie, les finances personnelles, la liberté pure et simple, le refus d’être esclave. On assiste de mille manières à un réel quin toé, pied de nez à un système qui n’a de cesse de nous rentrer la « croissance » dans la gorge et le PIB par l’autre extrémité, tout en jugulant avec un taux d’endettement de 170 %. Nous croulons sous nos bébelles.

- Le Devoir

The Man Who Knew Too Little

At first, the experiment didn’t have a name. Right after the election, Erik Hagerman decided he’d take a break from reading about the hoopla of politics. Donald Trump’s victory shook him. Badly. And so Mr. Hagerman developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan. He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016. “It was draconian and complete,” he said. “It’s not like I wanted to just steer away from Trump or shift the conversation. It was like I was a vampire and any photon of Trump would turn me to dust.”

It takes meticulous planning to find boredom. Mr. Hagerman commits as hard as a method actor, and his self-imposed regimen — white-noise tapes at the coffee shop, awkward scolding of friends, a ban on social media — has reshaped much of his life.

- NY Times

The Future of Leisure

It is past time we rediscover the lost art of leisure. Doing so, however, will also mean teaching people how to find fulfillment in their free time.

Over the past few years, publications, consulting companies, and think tanks have been wringing their hands with increasing urgency over the “the future of work.” Politico Magazine recently dedicated an issue to it, whereas Quartz has dedicated an entire vertical. McKinsey and Co. routinely releases new reports about it. Even Nature has published a series of essays on the topic. For two years running, The Atlantic has convened an annual “Future of Work Summit,” and it has now been joined by The New York Times, which hosted a swanky “New Work Summit” at a Ritz Carlton in California last month. It would seem that we have the future of work covered. The future of leisure? Not so much.

- Democracy

A ghost island in the middle of the Indian Ocean

Ross Island, an abandoned British settlement in the remote Andaman archipelago, is being taken over by its rightful owner: nature.

Situated in the Bay of Bengal, India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands are an isolated group of 572 tropical islands, of which only 38 are currently inhabited. Nautically located closer to South East Asia than India, they are known for stunning beaches, thriving marine life, rich coral reefs and largely undisturbed primary forests. But beyond the idyllic views lie a dark past.

- BBC

How to Become Less Afraid of Death

Death, in the view of many theorists, is a good thing, at least for a society that aspires to be creative. When you’re on the clock, you accomplish more. Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, author of The Denial of Death, called mortality “a mainspring of human activity.” If you want to invent a light bulb or paint a Mona Lisa, you’d best get started, because checkout time is coming.

- Time

BURNING OUT: WHAT REALLY HAPPENS INSIDE A CREMATORIUM

Rosehill Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, is awash in small-town trappings: tree-lined roads, rolling lawns, and street signs at every corner. On this Wednesday midsummer morning, the familiar routine of loss plays out across the acres. A yellow taxi waits at the end of a row of graves for someone paying their respects. Men and women clad in church clothes line up their cars along the curb and make their way to a grave site. A backhoe digs out some earth, another spot for another resident.

This is the textbook way we treat our dead. Someone passes, they’re buried, a headstone marks their place out among the rows in the borough of the departed. But today I’m bound for a different part of the cemetery, one fewer people see—though that fact is rapidly changing.

- Popular Mechanics

What Happens When a Married Woman Goes on Tinder? It started as an experiment. What I found made me want more

On a recent evening, I was having drinks with a male friend — a single and actively-looking-for-a-long-term-relationship friend — when he asked me why there seemed to be so many married women on Tinder. According to him, they appeared on the app, boldly describing themselves as “married” or “in an open marriage.” Were they actively looking for sex, he wondered? Did they just want to flirt?

- The Cut

«M.I.L.F.»: Manifeste de la femme-mère désirante

« Ça a été une belle leçon d’humilité et un rappel à l’ordre quant à la façon de dresser le portrait de femmes qui sont défavorisées économiquement, mais qui ne sont pas épaisses pour autant. Écoute, je me suis inscrite à des groupes BDSM sur Facebook. Des préposées aux bénéficiaires qui participent à des lundis d’orgies, ça te brasse les préjugés que t’as sur la vie sexuelle des gens. »

Les phrases que prononce Marjolaine Beauchamp pendant qu’elle fume une cigarette et vous raconte sa vie ressemblent parfois, lumineusement, à certains de ses poèmes. « J’ai eu le goût de partir vite, j’ai planté des arbres, j’ai menti dans mes CV, je n’ai jamais voyagé super loin, mais je me suis promenée en criss », débite-t-elle par exemple à propos des années de bourlingue de la fin de son adolescence, alors qu’il lui fallait quitter, comme on fuit une maison en feu, son Buckingham natal. Ne suffirait-il pas de placer des sauts de ligne entre chacune des parties de cette citation pour obtenir une page digne de son plus récent recueil, Fourrer le feu (L’Écrou, 2016) ?

- Le Devoir