Pressing RESTART
I am a tab hoarder, which is ironic because I don’t hoard anything else. My kids will tell you that I am the queen of reorg and the deep clean, a lifelong minimalist, one for whom Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up was far from revelatory (though I loved the read!). So it’s fairly ironic that on any given day, my screen is cluttered with a slew of open tabs – sometimes as many as two dozen. The chrome browser square is home to beloved articles and unread ones waiting patiently for my eyeballs, an array of simultaneously inviting and stress-inducing rounded rectangles staring back at me from across the top of my monitor.
About once a year, and always unexpectedly, my computer wipes itself clean. On these days, I plop down in front of my screen to find a blank slate. Gone are the links that I was certain I needed to share – completely gone, as in not-refreshable gone. Missing and not recreatable because, in searching through my history, I am always reminded of how many sites I visit in a day (the number is ridiculous) and have no way of identifying what I opened for a nanosecond versus what I was holding on to. Each time this erasure happens, I promise myself that I will kick my bad tab habit, instead keeping the number of open links down to something reasonable, maybe three of four… okay, half a dozen at most. But within days, the teeny index-shaped dividers multiply, each tab becoming teenier to accommodate for more neighbors.
Because the start of a new school year can feel a bit like the beginning of a calendar year with its resolutions, this week I took the opportunity to vow, once again, to keep my browser clutter to a minimum. Clean desk, clean mind I always tell my kids; this year, for me, it’s clean desktop, clean mind. Last weekend marked the annual accidental tab purge, and gone were the links to pieces I wanted to share with you. Below are the links I held onto over the past few days, just long enough to pass along.
Masks are in the news. Yes, again. This week Joe Biden called for a 3-month national mask mandate, which I would be wildly in favor of even if I didn’t have a company selling masks. It seems as though, until the majority of Americans get the message, mask stories are going to continue to dominate the news. Here’s this week’s new twist: masks work, though not all equally well… and bandanas really barely at all. P.S. Shameless plug: the OOMASK is 3 layers, cotton jersey on the outside and a poly filter lining – out of the 15 types tested in the study linked above, that combo ranks third best, only behind N95s and surgical masks.
Now on to the debate around returning to school, another recurrent theme in the headlines, this time with a focus on physical education. PE is both the hardest class to reinvent in the era of coronavirus and, some say, among the first in-person classes that should take place on campus. Routinizing daily exercise, not to mention providing social bonding and learning to strive together as a team, are just a few of the reasons why PE shouldn’t get short shrift.
Speaking of exercise, this week saw a dramatic shutdown across college sports, the NCAA and perhaps most notably Big Ten and Pac-12 football. One big driver behind the decision: the risk for long term heart muscle damage resulting from COVID-related myocarditis.
Now to the opposite of working out: smoking and vaping. It took longer than I anticipated, but this week saw the publication of data tying together nicotine and COVID risk. This study of more than 4,300 tweens, teens and 20-somethings (ages 13 – 24) showed that the risk of getting sick with COVID increased by 5-7 times among people who vaped or smoked.
And finally, a story of innovation. Is there such a thing as inhalable PPE? A group of UCSF researchers say yes, and they’ve named it AeroNabs.
