Happy Saturday everyone! If you’re looking for some interesting things to read or watch while you kick back and relax, look no further, here are my favorite things from around the web this week:
1. “I’m just a guy who’s had 21 years worth of anxiety fixes tried on him by doctors and cognitive behavioral therapists. I’d like to share with you which ones have worked for me over the next 30 days.” — 30 Practical Tactics to Decrease Your Anxiety (Intro) // CJ Chilvers
2. “Our energies are overwhelmingly directed toward material, scientific, and technical subjects and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at math; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage.” — Alain de Botton on Existential Maturity and What Emotional Intelligence Really Means // Brain Pickings
3. “Neurosymphony explores three distinct perspectives on the brain, using videos of the scans made freely available by the NICC. The video pairs the imagery with an excerpt from the album Chapel by the US electronic musician and music-cognition researcher Grace Leslie, in which she converts her brainwaves into music.” — Neurosymphony // Aeon
4. “Training is based on deep-dive EI activities, such as mindfulness and meditation, as well as empathy and compassion exercises to strengthen their relationship with guests. Employees are entrusted to make on-the-spot decisions to improve a client’s experience.” — New research suggests this is the best way to teach emotional intelligence // Fast Company
5. “There is an overflowing pipeline of “feel-good” stories traveling from local to national news, showcasing inspirational tales about adversity and how community members support each other in times of need. However, these pieces, seemingly easy to report out because of their surface-level levity, often eclipse overarching, unexplored narratives about labor, health care, education, and more, indicated by the lack of public or private support detailed in these stories themselves.” — Beware of the feel-good news story // Vox
6. In absolutely sickening news: “A bill to ban abortion introduced in the Ohio state legislature requires doctors to ‘reimplant an ectopic pregnancy’ into a woman’s uterus–a procedure that does not exist in medical science–or face charges of ‘abortion murder’.” — The Guardian
7. “A general view shows a statue among abandoned items and debris in an entry area for the canteen inside Hong Kong Polytechnic University on November 20, 2019.” — Photos of the Week // The Atlantic
8. “Maybe you’ve heard Biden talk about his boyhood stutter. A non-stutterer might not notice when he appears to get caught on words as an adult, because he usually maneuvers out of those moments quickly and expertly. But on other occasions, like that night in Detroit, Biden’s lingering stutter is hard to miss.” — What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say // The Atlantic
Bonus: More notes on stuttering // Austin Kleon
9. “You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.” — The Wisdom Your Body Knows // The New York Times
10. A re-aired episode of The Ezra Klein Show I missed from last year with Lilliana Mason. From the synopsis “…Mason offers one of the best primers I’ve read on how little it takes to activate a sense of group identity in human beings, and how far-reaching the cognitive and social implications are once that group identity takes hold.”
Bonus: Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity
Have you read, watched, written, or posted an interesting or inspiring thing this week? Has something on the internet made you feel strongly, think deeply, or see the world in a new light? If so, drop a link in the comments, we’d love to check it out!
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash
Lisa Marie Blair 
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