Seth’s blog

A few days ago the New Yorker website added magazine-quality material to only the website. Stuff just as good as the stuff in the magazine, but not in the magazine. This is a first for The New Yorker and perhaps for any magazine. The never-before-broken rule has been that the website-only stuff is inferior or at least subsidiary to the printed stuff.

The particular item is humor by James Collins, who used to write for Spy. Brilliant writer. I read his pieces over and over. I especially liked one about friendship (”The Nature of Friendship Today”). “My social life was paying off,” it began.

The New Yorker website doesn’t have a good place for Collins’s piece on the home page. It is listed under “Shouts & Murmurs” but there is no indication that, unlike the other Shouts & Murmurs links, which precede and follow it, it is online only. Well, yes, Jackie Robinson was a first baseman, but to describe Jackie Robinson as a first baseman is incomplete.

I suspect my old editor, Susan Morrison, is behind this just like I think she was behind the New Yorker line-crossing a few weeks ago. Incidentally, the printed Shouts & Murmurs (about a creative astronaut) is very good.

Dr. Erika Schwartz, a New York internist, rightly chastises the New York Times for a long article about stroke (part of a series on major causes of death) that says nothing about prevention. Schwartz attributes the over-emphasis on treatment to relative cost: Treatment is far more expensive than prevention. Memo to Gina Kolata: Don’t follow the money.

This is a genuine problem with self-experimentation: It costs almost nothing. No status-enhancing grant is required to do it. One of many ways that science is at odds with human nature.

The collection of Google Talks at YouTube is the best collection of stuff I’ve found to listen to while I look in the mirror every morning. The best (so far) of the best:

Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics:

Jessica Livingston, author of Founders at Work:

Reed Hundt, author of In China’s Shadow:

Jane Jacobs said dozens of things that impressed me, this most of all:

You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. You can’t prescribe decently for something you despair in. . . . I think people [who] give prescriptions, who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.

She had noticed that people who hate cities or who despair of cities make bad prescriptions for them.

It was a long time before I realized this comment applied to me. I used self-experimentation to improve my sleep and mood and to lose weight. Unlike most health researchers, I wasn’t trying to solve other people’s problems — I was trying to solve my own. No wonder I persisted in spite of many failures.

Similar advice. Another example.

Yesterday I deliberately spent almost all day indoors. I didn’t change anything else. This morning I woke up feeling less refreshed than usual. Here are the last three days:

Day 1: Try to spend lots of time outdoors (in the shade). Result: Wake up feeling more refreshed than usual.

Day 2: Try to spend lots of time outdoors (in the shade). Result: Wake up feeling more refreshed than usual.

Day 3: Try to spend as little time outdoors as possible. Result: Wake up feeling less refreshed than usual.

My belief is increasing. Via Google I found this:

Person 1: During the warm months of the year, I swim …a lot! . . . The amount I sleep during swimming season can increase by 1-2 hours.

Person 2: Your probably sleeping longer due to all the extra calories and physical exerction you use by swimming.

Person 1: Nah, it’s the same physical exertion year round for me. I exercise year round. But in the warm months, my exercise takes me outside where I am exposed to sunlight instead of artificial indoor light. That’s how I know it’s the sunlight that helps me sleep better.

I also found this:

We have found that people who are outdoors more have fewer sleep problems.

From an interesting mini-book about the dangers of sleeping pills (apparently the new ones cause cancer). I haven’t yet found the study it refers to.