🏋️ Beautiful week.
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I got back to running and started going to the gym again this week, and it feels nice.
One thing about fitness generally is that it just humbles you.
You may have benched 60 kgs (~130 lbs) or ran a marathon, but once you stop, you’re back to zero. There might be a bit of muscle memory for strength training, but aerobic fitness? Getting back sucks.
I now dream of running a 5K under 30 minutes again, but that’s a distant goal. Hope to keep this consistency!
Also, I had planned to mention this last week, but the week before we went to a screening of an Iraqi movie called The President’s Cake. What a movie!
It’s set in 1990s Iraq, where a 9-year-old girl is chosen by her school to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein’s birthday, and her search for basic ingredients like eggs, flour, and sugar becomes this incredible journey.
It’s been a while since I’ve cried watching a movie, but this one just hit hard, considering all the turmoil happening in this corner of the world. Please do watch it if you get time.
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
🧘 How to Exist: In this simple yet thought-provoking post, David Cain writes about how humans are weirdly allergic to just existing. Try sitting still for three minutes doing nothing and you'll feel the urge to fidget, scroll, or think about something else almost immediately. His fix is simple: practice being okay with existence one breath at a time.
🌍 Any Human Ever: This cool project lets you draw a random life from the 100+ billion humans who have ever lived. Each life is built from real demographic data, showing you a birth year, place, family, diet, and cause of death. Most lives turn out short, poor, and Asian, a humbling reminder of how statistically weird our current lives are.
✉️ 56 People: Sasha Chapin wrote an honest, unsent paragraph to each of 56 people in his life. Some are tender, some are brutal, one just says "can we get lunch?! Just beautiful, honest writing.
✍️ Voice Memories: In this beautiful essay, Ian Wang writes about how he recorded 44 hours of his parents' stories on his phone during Covid lockdowns. He's barely listened back to any of it and probably never will, but he can't delete them either. A deeply honest piece about trying to hold onto time.
🎨 How Colour Drained from Our Furniture: In case you haven't noticed, the world is moving more pastel and more minimal. Toon Vos did an interesting visual experiment where they compiled every couch from IKEA's catalogues from 1960 to 2021, all 3,500 of them. The colours really did fade over the decades, peaking grey in the 2010s.
✨ Things That Are Good to Do: I love short curated lists! This one by Quarter Mile is a long, simple collection of things like "call your parents," "sharpen your knives," "put the cart away," and "celebrate Tuesday." Simple stuff but it hits.
📚 Repair Revolution: I've loved fixing things since I was a kid, and I was fascinated when Repair Cafe folks came to my uni in Edinburgh. I spotted this book last week and couldn't resist picking it up. It's about the community side of repairing and why our throwaway culture makes it harder than it should be. If you're into fixing stuff or recycling, you'll love this one.
💻 The Death of the Button: In this piece by Carrie Webster, she explores how web design is shifting from clicking through menus, forms, and dropdowns to just telling the software what you want. Instead of ten clicks to book a flight, you describe your intent and the AI handles the rest. Interesting read on where interfaces are heading.
🌿 Marsh Arabs: After watching The President's Cake, I went down a rabbit hole and learned about the Mesopotamian Marshes in southern Iraq. For thousands of years, the Marsh Arabs have lived there building reed houses and herding water buffalo in these massive wetlands. Saddam drained 90% of the marshes in the 1990s to punish them, and they've only partially recovered since.
📷 Deadpan Photography: If you don't know, deadpan photography is a style where everything looks flat, neutral, and unedited, as if the photographer just stepped aside and let the camera do the work. In this piece, Cedric explores how that neutrality is actually a carefully built performance, and why we enjoy playing along with it. Great read if you're into photography.
📺 Battery-Free Remote: This short video by Zack D. Films shows how the Zenith Space Command remote worked in the 1950s. Each button released a tiny hammer that struck a metal rod at a unique ultrasonic frequency, and a microphone inside the TV picked up the tone as a command. The whole thing ran on the force of your finger press.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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With Love,
Rishi
“The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall."
~ Mitch Hedberg