Unpopular opinion: When people use the wrong “your,” I think it’s kinda cute. Your welcome!

1. Sleep Needs, HelpGuide. This is my new, very extremely boring hobby. Apparently six hours of sleep is not enough for most people. Look at the list of signs you’re sleep deprived — they’re things I thought everyone was experiencing! Needing an alarm to wake up in the morning, using your snooze button, feeling sluggish in the afternoons are all signs of sleep deprivation?! Mama needs to sleep. “There is a big difference between the amount of sleep you can get by on and the amount you need to function optimally. According to the National Institutes of Health, the average adult sleeps less than seven hours per night. In today’s fast-paced society, six or seven hours of sleep may sound pretty good. In reality, though, it’s a recipe for chronic sleep deprivation. Just because you’re able to operate on six or seven hours of sleep doesn’t mean you wouldn’t feel a lot better and get more done if you spent an extra hour or two in bed. While sleep requirements vary slightly from person to person, most healthy adults need between 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night to function at their best.”
2. Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the US, Scientific American. I’ve been seeing this resource linked around the internet this week, and as far as I can tell it offers some sane, practical advice for feeling prepared for this potential health crisis. My takeaway was not the impulse to hoard supplies and turn my basement into a bunker, but to consider the ways that caring for myself and my family can help reduce the healthcare burden in my community. “Community-wide isolation,” a strategy used to reduce the spread of the disease, can also be thought of as snuggling up at home with board games or FaceTime.
3. How not to get sick at the library, Librarian Shipwreck. “Here’s a game for you to play, don’t touch your mouth or your face. This is a challenging game! After all, you probably weren’t even thinking about touching your mouth or your face, but now you can’t think of anything else! It’s like saying “whatever you do, don’t think of pirates wearing magenta!” What are you thinking about? Probably, pirates wearing magenta. But, hey, at least it got you to momentarily stop thinking about how you should avoid touching your mouth and your face. This is just another one of those pieces of general health advice that you want to abide by in times of heightened anxiety about viruses. Luckily, libraries provide a really excellent way of ensuring that you aren’t touching your mouth or your face. Namely: books. Grab a stack of books, ideally carefully selected books that you plan on checking out of the library, and carry them. As you are carrying them you will not be able to touch your face. If you reach up a hand to touch your face you’ll wind up hitting yourself in the face with the stack of books you are holding. Problem solved.” This made me laugh, kinda. As much as anything about COVID-19 that stresses me out but I can’t help but read. But for real, wash ya hands. Also, this post reminded me that there’s a lot of unreliable information about this virus online, and from what I can tell the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) websites are the most credible.
4. My Trip to Vietnam, Singapore, and Qatar, Kottke. “The more places I go, the less obviously free the US feels to me in many ways, even though our country’s baseline freedom remains high (for some at least). But the main observation I came home with after this trip is this: America is a rich country that feels like a poor country. If you look at the investment in and the care put into infrastructure, common areas, and the experience of being in public in places like Singapore, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin and compare it to American cities, the difference is quite stark. Individual wealth in America is valued over collective wealth and it shows.” I thought this was really thoughtful travel writing, and in particular that line about America being a rich country that feels like a poor country struck me.
5. Jennifer 8. Lee: Why 1.5 billion people eat with chopsticks, TedTalk. This is just a lil mini talk, but I dug it. “chopsticks reflect the communal nature of eating food. You’ll have these dishes that you put in the middle, it’s very family style. You go in with your chopsticks, and you put it on your rice, and then you eat individually. There’s actually a famous sort of legend where everyone has these really, really long chopsticks, like way too long for them to feed themselves. And so in hell, everyone starves, because they can’t pick up food and put it in their mouths. But in heaven, people take the same chopsticks and then feed each other.”

Bonus features:

• Giant Panda Cam – live stream from China – Highly recommend!
• “Well, well, well” (Instagram)