1. Allez Les Bleues
If you’ve watched as much football as I have, at some point you’ll figure out what’s happening in this video. It still made me cry a bit.
It also made me notice the massive role that crowds have to play in our experience of spectator sport.
The more supporters there are in the stadium, the bigger the occasion, the higher we rate the skills of the players on show.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise: a big part of the reason we laugh at comedians on stage more than we laugh at random show-offs in the street is because there is an audience there, laughing along with us.
We are infectiously social animals. It’s been wonderful to see a flourishing enthusiasm for another side of the beautiful game spread over the past few years.
As well as being generally badass, this video also reminds me to appreciate the more neglected moments, the moments where the cameras aren’t rolling, where the crowds aren’t already cheering.
An overhead kick at the under-8s down the park is as good as one from the boot of Sam Kerr.
2. The Biggest Problem With Journalism Today
A couple of weeks ago, Future Crunch ran an experiment to see what kind of stories ‘humanity’s prime information-gathering apparatus’ are telling.
It wasn’t good news:
The news is supposed to tell us what’s happening in the world. It doesn’t. Instead, thanks to a combination of commercial pressures, cognitive biases and cultural habits, news organisations have become modern-day doom machines, showcasing the absolute worst of humanity. There isn’t even a pretence at balance.
That’s why we think the biggest problem with journalism today isn’t fake news, or filter bubbles, or polarisation, or elitism, or the ongoing obsession with the website formerly known as Twitter. The biggest problem is bad news.
You can subscribe to Future Crunch immediately here.
3. Energy Makes Time
Here’s a nice piece from Mandy Brown on Everything Changes:
We all know that time can be stretchy or compressed—we’ve experienced hours that plodded along interminably and those that whisked by in a few breaths. We’ve had days in which we got so much done we surprised ourselves and days where we got into a staring contest with the to-do list and the to-do list didn’t blink.
And we’ve also had days that left us puddled on the floor and days that left us pumped up, practically leaping out of our chairs. What differentiates these experiences isn’t the number of hours in the day but the energy we get from the work. Energy makes time.