What I'm Reading (Jan. 26)

By Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA — Jan 26, 2023
Let’s put an end to doomscrolling for our own sake Abandon ship! Pizza boxes Another lesson from trees
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

“Being attached to the firehose of the 24/7 news cycle is anxiety-inducing and literally bad for your health. How do we stop doomscrolling when it seems like the bad news just won’t stop coming?”

Five key thoughts to reduce the risk of doomscrolling and the misinformation and anxiety it creates. From Forbes, How To Stop Doomscrolling In A Chaotic News Cycle

 

“Although our MS Seascape is a hypothetical ship, its situation is far from uncommon. In 2021, 54 large vessels either sank, ran aground or went up in flames and these behemoths are more likely to cause catastrophe when things go wrong. …Abandoning the ships is rarely an option.”

Today, these ships do not go to the bottom of the ocean to lie there eternally, like the Titanic. What actually do we do? Salvage and recycle. From the Guardian, What happens when a huge ship sinks? A step-by-step guide to averting disaster

 

Two years ago, amid the Pandemic, I chose to learn how to make pizza while others worked on their sourdough starter. I acquired an outdoor pizza oven, thank you, Ooni, and after incinerating the first few (the oven does heat to 900), I got the hang of it. So this story, and especially its opening paragraph about my beloved Ooni, caught my eye. Leaving homemade pizza behind, it delves into a ubiquitous part of fast food culture, the pizza box.

“Pizza delivery, it turns out, is based on a fundamental lie. The most iconic delivery food of all time is bad at surviving delivery, and the pizza box is to blame. “I don’t like putting any pizza in a box,” Andrew Bellucci, a legendary New York City pizza maker of Andrew Bellucci’s Pizzeria, told me. “That’s just it, really. The pizza degrades as soon as it goes inside,” turning into a swampy mess.”

From The Atlantic, You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is

 

“When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is.”

Can we apply the same lack of judgment to ourselves and others? A thought by Ram Dass by way of Marginalia, Ram Dass on the Spiritual Lessons of Tree

Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA

Director of Medicine

Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.

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