As toilet paper madness dominates Australian headlines, it’s good to remember that more than 750 million people in China are currently under some sort of travel restriction. This comic about finding relief from Coronavirus lockdown in the kitchen is a wonderful window into that world
Our podcast rec of the week comes courtesy of Lizzie, who’s obsessed with We Crashed, a totally bonkers story about the rise and fall of WeWork. If you liked The Missing Cryptoqueen and The Dropout, this has your name all over it
Good lord, Japan is selling sheets of mayonnaise now
Maybe boring is really good
Four ideas for how to solve the problem of your birthday (“Doing nice things for other people to ring in your big day is rewarding because the day isn’t just about who showed up, or what you did or didn’t get for your birthday. It becomes about the impact you make and the ripple it creates.”)
When Deb Perelman from Smitten Kitchen tells you she’s perfected the vegetable lasagne, there’s only one thing to do and that involves buying ricotta and noodles immediately
Chaotic housemate stories, feat. dungeon masters, ant farms, and violin YouTube tutorials (scroll down to the comments for more gold)
Ever wondered what happens to the slivers of soap you leave behind at hotels? Ponder no longer: we were stoked to learn there’s a non-profit organisation called Clean the World that recycles used soap into new, sanitised soap that’s given to people who need it. To date, they’ve saved 20 million pounds of waste (!!) from being discarded at hotels like Hilton, Hyatt and Marriot. This video of how it all works is dorkily fascinating
This week we stumbled across this GENIUS website that instantly gives you a new, unused e-mail so you can sign up to shit without cluttering your inbox. We’re never giving out our email again.
A Modern Love essay from rom-com director Nancy Meyers, who now finds herself attending weddings with her ex-husband.
Over on Twitter, people are sharing the worst mistake they’ve ever made at work and there’s some real doozies, including a woman who left a cell in a spreadsheet empty instead of inserting a "1", which led to eight million dollars being spent drilling an oil well in the North Sea that shouldn't have been drilled 👏
Ah, so THIS is why we wait 10 days to do something that takes us 10 minutes (“According to psychology professor Joseph Ferrari, there are two distinct types of people who have a problem completing household chores in a timely manner: task delayers and chronic procrastinators.”)
We nodded furiously all the way through this excellent article on the tyranny of the crowd-pleasing, risk-adverse millennial aesthetic (“Upon the terrazzo nougat of the coffee table, there’s a glass tray trimmed in brass. It holds a succulent in a lumpy ceramic pot, a scented candle with a matte-pink label. A fiddle-leaf fig somewhere looms. Above a bookshelf, a poster advises you to WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE. You sense — in a way you could neither articulate nor explain — the presence of a mail-order foam mattress somewhere close at hand.”)
This tortellini soup with Italian sausage and kale is the Friday night dinner of your dreams
