#5SmartReads - October 5, 2021

Hitha on Facebook, the healing power of plants, and banana pudding

October 05, 2021

With Facebook being down yesterday, the daily #5SmartReads newsletter will be delivered to all subscribers for the rest of the week. And more on Facebook later…

"The segregation of our metropolitan areas today leads ... to stagnant inequality, because families are much less able to be upwardly mobile when they're living in segregated neighborhoods where opportunity is absent," he says. "If we want greater equality in this society, if we want a lowering of the hostility between police and young African-American men, we need to take steps to desegregate."

No words. Just please read this (and listen to the full episode).

Scott Gottlieb has been a rare voice of calm and caution throughout the entire pandemic. And he’s very good at Twitter.

Because I’m a masochist, I have been reading his new book (it’s excellent if you can handle more pandemic content) and am in complete agreement that we need a new agency that acts proactively in pandemics.

Also, props to the reporters who conducted this interview who asked how he juggled it all. Normalize asking men this, or stop asking it of women please.

trigger warning - abuse, domestic violence

“The plants brought me intimate pleasure to counter the intimate violence of my story. I emerged from writing the book feeling stronger than before, but talking about it over and over again to the press sunk me into a depression. I was partially humiliated by what had happened to me.”

This essay will bring you to tears and have you on The Sill’s website looking for your own plant friend. All of us have our own burdens and trauma to bear. And I do find some comfort that plants can help us, even just a little bit.

I’ll be sending and sharing #5SmartReads’ daily newsletter to all subscribers for the rest of the week (and if you like it, please consider upgrading your subscription or reaching out to me if it’s not in your budget).

And I’m very much thinking about how to move more of this community off IG and onto a non-Facebook owned one. And it’s not because of yesterday’s outage, but it’s because of what I learned in An Ugly Truth and in Sunday’s 60 Minutes report.

Go read/watch this. I’m not telling you to delete your Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp accounts…but it’s worth reconsidering the role they play in your life.

Because everything is bad. But banana pudding is good. And far more complex than you may originally have realized…

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