Today in Reasons to Curl Up in your Safe Room
I haven’t had my coffee yet, and already Donald Trump has been cut off by Joe Scarborough after he wouldn’t take a breath for questions as he defended his plan to ban an entire religious group from entering the country. The delicate diplomacy Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski engaged in before they cut to commercial - I’m amazed she was able to get in what she did - and escalating glances of fear and disbelief perfectly capture the crappy quagmire we’ve all found ourselves in with him. As the Huffington Post said yesterday, this is no longer entertainment. This is hate speech, and it’s been stoked for years.
A new study shows that medical marijuana laws (MML) may lead to lower obesity rates. While there are so many munchies jokes to be made - so many munchies jokes - the Washington Post points to marijuana’s reduction of chronic pain and alcohol consumption as healthy habit contributors. Amongst younger adults, MMLs led to a “4.8 percent reduction in binge drinking.”
Vox has an excellent piece on partisan bias, including stats that "49 percent of Republicans, and 33 percent of Democrats” would be uncomfortable if their son or daughter married someone from the opposite party. Take the nifty political bias psych test, which revealed that I have a significant liberal lean, much more so than I had assumed. A reminder that everyone thinks they are the most rational person in the room.
Join Ozy as they pull back the curtain on the mystical world of Silicon Valley CEO coaches. I’m all for mindfulness, and self-improvement, and an industry-wide acknowledgment that many young CEOs are not naturally adept at leadership, but I’m not for this idea it’s an SF-specific innovation. I believe it’s been called therapy for a pretty long time, and even us normals can benefit immensely from it.
And finally, Farrah Penn at BuzzFeed spent the week removing “gendered language” from her work vocabulary, including emoticons, exclamation points and the word awesome. While I heartily agree that there are verbal and written choices one can make in order to present oneself in the best way possible - Mum, you've asked what I do for a living? - I’m not a fan of women in the workplace having one more damn thing to fret about in their day-to-day work lives. Be conscious of your language, but let’s not focus so much on hahahahahahas that we overlook other workplaces inequities. Also, awesome is the best word ever and I use it like punctuation.
Godspeed, sweethearts. Try and have a great day.