Ben White

Folding Clothing: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

10.19.15 // Miscellany, Reading

Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up was arguably the biggest ‘self-help’ book of the year (i.e. NYTimes #1 bestseller). The book’s central premise is something that I think everyone deep down knows and that that my wife and I rediscovered for ourselves while preparing for the birth of our first child. Organizational schemas are great, but nothing you do makes a difference if you have too much stuff. Doesn’t matter how you organize if there are more things that you can physically see or get to.

The KonMari method states that if something doesn’t spark joy, then you get rid of it. It doesn’t matter if it’s in perfect shape or if you bought it with every intention of wearing it but never did. The better condition it is, the happier you will make someone else who will have a chance to use it if you don’t need it.1

One of my favorite parts of the book is how she describes a better way to fold your clothing. Her method is one that is so awesome and simple that I can’t believe it’s not simply the default. It’s genius, and it essentially boils down to folding your clothing down tighter than you would otherwise expect, and in doing so, you can arrange your clothing almost like book shelf so that you can see everything contained within the drawer instead of having stacks where the items on the bottom never get worn because they never get seen. Goop has the illustrated guide here.

Oliver Sacks’ last essays

09.08.15 // Miscellany, Reading

Oliver Sacks, writer of “neurological novels” and one of my favorite authors, died on August 30 from metastatic ocular melanoma. His last three essays are now available, “Sabbath” in the New York Times, “Urge” in the New York Review of Books, and “Filter Fish” in the New Yorker.

Longform has links to 11 of his best essays, including the titular works from An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He was a titan of medical and compassionate writing.

Oh, the late night snacking is why we’re fat

09.06.15 // Miscellany

The Washington Post recently ran “Why eating late at night may be particularly bad for you and your diet,” which discusses emerging research that after dinner snacking is bad for you. The thrust of the article is that calories consumed at night result in more weight gain than the same number of calories consumed earlier in the day. Likewise, even on a calorie-controlled weight loss diet, subjects lost more weight if they didn’t eat before bed. Proposed reasons are multi-factorial, of course.

There sorts of data always make for great popular science reading. If making this one change is the first step someone can use to finally make a positive impact in their health, that’s great. But otherwise, it’s just another in the ever-growing list of “things we do wrong” including eating processed food, salt, gluten, not enough protein, “GMO,” insufficiently paleo, blah blah blah. How does a normal person know when to start? Especially when as a country we conflate eating “healthy” with losing weight, and most of the discussion in the media and online is total BS.2 Eating healthy is great. Being a healthy weight is great. Exercise is also independently great. These things don’t necessarily go together.

I for one would probably never change my gluttonous meal to be lunch instead of dinner.2 And the ability to maintain a change is much more important than the power of the change itself.

 

Prime Day is here

07.15.15 // Miscellany

Prime Day is here, and while Wal-Mart is copying the idea, I think only Amazon can make a national news story by unilaterally promoting a sale. And while good discounts on some Kindles, other miscellany, and fabled “lightning” deals every 10 minutes may generate some revenue, I have no doubt that the main thrust of the promotion is to drive new Prime memberships. After all, you can still join Prime and experience the fun with a free 30-day trial (or Amazon Student for 6 months free with a .edu address), and Amazon believes that once you go Prime, you never go back.

The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison

04.02.15 // Linked, Miscellany

Ragnar Kristoffersen, an anthropologist who trains Norway’s correctional officers, quoted in a fascinating NYTimes piece about a different kind of maximum security prison:

He leaned back in his chair and went on. “We like to think that treating inmates nicely, humanely, is good for the rehabilitation. And I’m not arguing against it. I’m saying two things. There are poor evidence saying that treating people nicely will keep them from committing new crimes. Very poor evidence.”

He paused. “But then again, my second point would be,” he said, “if you treat people badly, it’s a reflection on yourself.”

Paul Kalinithi, writing to his infant daughter in his last op-ed before succumbing to lung cancer:

That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

It’s a rare thing for us to write to the ones we love before we go, let alone to share such poignancy in order to touch others as well. We don’t write meaningfully to each other very much anymore, especially when it counts most. We could do better.

// 03.14.15

Alto’s Adventure

03.03.15 // Miscellany

This past week, as Dallas was intermittently “covered” in ice and snow, the hospital was intermittently quiet enough to download and play Alto’s Adventure a bit a lot on my iPhone, a new snowboarding-theme one-touch endless runner with a beautiful, relaxing visual and musical design. Come for the backflips and wingsuit, stay for watching the sunrise over a well-crafted winter mountainscape.

Though decidedly a more zen game, I’ve been reminded of playing its spiritual prequels in my medical past, like Tiny Wings, which helped make a neurology sub-I tolerable during fourth year, and when the frenetic Canabalt helped me ignore the basic sciences.

Oliver Sacks learns he has terminal cancer

02.25.15 // Linked, Miscellany

Oliver Sacks, in his moving NYTimes op-ed about learning that his ocular melanoma has metastasized to his liver:

I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.

This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night.

Sacks’ version of “live like you were dying” is exactly what you’d hope/expect, showing his depth and ability to turn his careful consideration and clinical acumen internally, just as he did in his New Yorker essay about prosopagnosia (face blindness). Read the whole op-ed (and the essay too).

“Sudden clear focus and perspective” seem harder and harder to come by in the contemporary era, but I’m adding tacking it on late to the resolution list this year. I still remember first reading and being inspired by Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in high school, probably the two books which most shaped my early interest in neuroscience and medicine. He’ll leave a tremendous legacy.

 

In which Amazon realizes that I’m not a student anymore

11.23.14 // Miscellany

It couldn’t last forever, and so today is the end of a personal era: Amazon figured out that I’m not a student anymore. Which is too bad, because now I’ll have to pay full price for Amazon Prime. I spent the last year of medical school (and two bonus years to hit three of the maximum total of four) thoroughly enjoying/using the “Amazon Student” service, which is Amazon Prime for half the cost, including their (nowhere near as good as Netflix) bundled video streaming service, free Kindle books, and tons of two day shipping. I first signed up for the six month free trial when I needed some holiday gifts quickly, and I haven’t cancelled since.

Upon receiving the email notification that my student membership was expiring and that I was going to be automatically “upgraded” to Prime, I immediately checked to see if there was a way to use an .edu address or student ID to continue being a student. My choices to confirm my “student” status were:

  • A transcript or class list for the current term (must include the date/term)
  • A copy or picture of your student ID (must include an expiration date or term)
  • A tuition bill for the current term (must include the date/term)
  • An official acceptance letter for the upcoming term (must include the matriculation date)

Er, so yeah. They thought this all out. None of that is going to happen.

Amazon may have some questionable/bizarre hardware efforts, but on the retail side, they figured out long ago that if they get you to sign up for prime, you get hooked/spoiled by unlimited two day shipping and then buy basically everything through Amazon.