Health

Big screen, medium screen, little screen, no rest

There's a difference between resting and just sitting still.

All day at the medium screen, you dream of the big screen. Then you get home, press play, and spend the whole evening hunched over the littlest screen of all, thumb going, while the big one plays to an empty room. It isn’t what you meant to do, but hey, at least it’s sort of relaxing. Actually, not according to your brain. To your gray matter, it is just more of the same inputs, same alert state, same drain. That's why you crawl into bed after a full night of "relaxing" feeling like a chewed pen cap.

It's what Robin Pickering, a public health professor who studies why good intentions go sideways, discovered when a concussion got her prescribed two months with no TV, no email, no texting, and no scrolling. She braced for misery. Instead, she got better sleep, a longer attention span, and a mental quiet she hadn't felt in years. The thing she'd been calling recovery was actually keeping her wired. As she puts it, "It may look like downtime, but it doesn't create the biological conditions for restoration."

Her fix isn't a new routine, an app, or a lake to throw your phone into. It's four subtractions, all free, and you are almost certainly violating the first one right now.

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And what did we learn?

On Friday we shared a delightful story about doctors prescribing pets.

I wanted to know what your pet does for your health. Over half of you need the cuddle to take the edge off the day, and I’m right there with you. Nothing seems so bad when you have a dog’s head in your lap.

• Gets me up and moving with those adorable eyes (35.7%)

• Cuddles the savage right out of a bad day (53.1%)

• Spikes my blood pressure with the pillow chewing (4.1%)

• Nothing yet, but will my insurance cover one? (7.1%)

Wholesome | Courtesy of Upworthy

Society

10 questions that make a stranger forget they hate small talk

The science of what to say after hello.

So, what's the most interesting thing you've been working on lately? Feel that? That little tickle in your brain as you start to actually think about the answer? That's what makes a good conversation starter, and it's exactly what "What do you do?" has never once produced. The conversations we assume will be boring usually just had a bad opener.

In this story by Jeff Clemishaw, communication researchers sort 10 better openers into the three situations where small talk tends to hurt most: networking, parties, and first dates. Harvard found that speed daters who asked more questions were measurably more likely to get a second date, but there's one specific way of asking that quietly cancels the whole effect. It's common enough that psychologists finally gave it a name. And it's a close cousin of the five conversational habits that make people slowly stop returning your texts.

On August 24, 1975, Queen walked into Rockfield Studios, a converted farm in the Welsh countryside, and started recording "Bohemian Rhapsody." Nobody involved could have easily described what it was. It had a ballad, a mock opera, a hard rock stretch, and no chorus whatsoever, and Freddie Mercury had much of the whole thing mapped out in his head before anyone hit record.

What followed was three weeks of glorious excess. Mercury, Brian May, and Roger Taylor sang their parts for 10 to 12 hours a day, stacking as many as 180 overdubs as the song moved through multiple studios. The tape got so worn from being bounced and rebounced that Brian May later recalled holding it up to the light and seeing through it.

Then the record company heard it and balked. Nearly six minutes was radio suicide. So Mercury got a copy to DJ Kenny Everett, who played it 14 times over one weekend on London's Capital Radio, and the buzz exploded. The resistance didn't last. Released on Halloween, it spent nine weeks at No. 1 in Britain.

Fifty-one years after Queen first hit record, it's still the song the entire bar sings. 

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