🌮 the sunday set
Poems about flip phones, glass cutting ASMR, how to have a better relationship with your teen, math with Sydney Sweeney....
Really excited about this week’s line-up. Some bangers on both team human and team ai - designed for idle curiosity and delight and conversation.
Keep all the wonderful feedback coming. If you come across something you think would be great to share, send it over!
💕 The Human
👩🏾🎨 Play: all my friends and i talk about is getting rid of our phones - sometimes play is just reading something that holds you in a moment and delights you. This poem was that for me - nostalgic and piercing and honest.
👨🏼🌾 Do: 4 Ways to Trick Yourself Into Taking a Walk - during covid, daily walks became a lifeline. Traversing the same routes but noticing new things every time. I understood then the power of a simple walk to get the mind and body moving. But since? It’s like anything that requires effort - it’s too easy to justify away. These little tricks are a great way to jumpstart a habit. I’ll add that creating a regular slot for “walk and talks” with friends is also a new fav.
👩🏽🍳 Make: Spicy Turkey Stir-Fry With Crisp Garlic and Ginger - this recipe has been a mainstay for our family for years. Super easy to make and packed with flavor you can deconstruct it and assemble in lots of ways so everyone is happy. Protip - make the rice with coconut milk so it’s coconut rice.
👩🏻🎓Read: Want a Better Relationship With Your Teen Children? Exercise With Them - like most families I know, we’d fallen into the expectation that J and I had “workout time” - classes, biking, running - and the kids had their sports. But since we’ve moved to the sunshine of California and had the chance to rethink our activities, we've found ourselves looking forward to active time together - whether it’s playing doubles tennis or swimming.
It helps that the girls are now 10 and 13 but I’m certain we could have started a couple years ago. I’ve found it can be as simple as a every Saturday morning, 15 minutes run together. Sure they grumble but it’s now a ritual that makes us all feel great after.
But I hadn’t thought about it more deeply than just trying to find a way for all of us to spend time together until I read this perspective from a mom whose family makes working out together a core part of their family. Definitely excited to implement this more fully with my family.
👨🏾🏫 Learn: Dads are spending more time with their kids - I came across a couple of studies showing one way covid has had a positively impact - the time dads spend with kids - either on care or in play. I can’t help but see it in my own family - where my husband is equal on all of these measures and the natural impact that has had on our girls. One of the coolest things I see is just how the vibe is different when the guys are caring for the kids and the natural evolution of how care can be done in lots of different ways.
✨ Bonus: For all of those summer spreads….
⚡️ The AI
👩🏾🎨 Play: Glass ASMR - apparently this is a thing? but these videos of cutting glass are mesmerizing both for the visual and audio aspects…. here’s a whole thread of them. You’re welcome.
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👨🏼🌾 Do: Warmer, colder - I loved this execution of a local maps app where instead of showing a detailed map it just shows in color if you’re getting closer (green) or further (red) from your destination. A really cool example where we can have tech that helps but in a way that can still use and cultivate our human intuition.
👩🏽🍳 Make: Studio Ghibli style - this trend took the internet by storm a couple of months ago but it’s still a fun one if you haven’t tried it. If you have a paid version of ChatGPT (or a friend who does), upload your photo and use the prompt: "restyle image in studio ghibli style, keep all details".
👩🏻🎓Read: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task - a small initial study out of MIT looking at the impact of using ChatGPT in a college setting.
This post summarizes the key findings but for me, the most important points are:
1. Order matters - eg. using self then GPT has greater brain activity than GPT then self.
2. We're building less robust learning pathways in our brains when we don't make them do the work of working things out for ourselves... this is really obvious when you think about it but has huge implications even on how I see my girls using Claude/ChatGPT.
3. Cognitive debt accumulates - like the frog slowly boiling we don't even notice the changes in our attention or reasoning until it's really hard to recover.
Of course we’re so early that much remains to be seen but these finding also follow intuition and are help me guide how I have my daughter use/experiment with it.
Another great listen on the topic:
👨🏾🏫 Learn: Learn Math with Sydney Sweeney and Drake - I’m conflicted on the use of celebrities via these AI generated videos but the impact is undeniable. Onlock learning is making all sorts of tricky math concepts easy and accessible and that feels like a good thing.
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✨ Bonus: Inspiring kids with “if you can see it, you can be it” - a teacher in Brazil asked her class what they wanted to be when they grew up and then generated images of those dreams realized. I can’t help but think I would have loved that when I was a kid - to give me something tangible to see and believe in even if I didn’t see those examples in the real world.
