A weekly newsletter for all your intellectual, spiritual, and physical needs
Hi all. Welcome to Volume 178 of Dovi’s Digest.
It’s been a hard week, and I’ve gone backwards and forwards on to whether I should write and publish a Digest. A few weeks ago I landed in Israel to celebrate the end of the High Holy Days and the birth of a new niece. I’m still here, and sirens are sounding every few hours, sending everyone running for bomb shelters. It’s eerily quiet aside from that.
This week is a bit of a mix. For those of you looking for some feel good, there’s some of that. There’re also a few articles on trauma and how to deal with it. And then there are one or two usual ones.
There won’t be a cartoon, a tweet, or a headline this week either.
With love,
D.
Do you enjoy the Digest? Would you like it to get better? Then please consider sharing it, as the more articles I’m sent, the better it is. It only takes a few seconds, and all you need to do is click here 👇. Thank you!
There were THREE correct answers to last week’s brainteaser, Well done to Chaim Ehrlich, Ryan Subotzky, and Ariel Subotzky! The answer and this week’s puzzle are below.
Keep those articles (and everything else) coming.
Have a great weekend,
Dovi
How To Defuse Catastrophic Thoughts
Do you often fear the worst is going to happen? Use these therapeutic techniques to think more rationally and calmly.
Nostalgia for the Slaughterhouse
A new documentary about the making of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ evokes wonder at our idealisation of a past that wasn’t very nice.
Moonwalker
In Houston's airport, a cow is properly equipped to jump over the moon.
The Greatest Hospitality Story Ever
While my uncle was dying from a rare cancer, he found solace in a hotel whose staff became a surrogate family.
Tell Me Why It Hurts
How Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives.
How They Tried to Kill Me
I want to live.
In 2022, n+1 published four reports (1, 2, 3, 4) from the war in Ukraine by the Russian journalist Elena Kostyuchenko. In the following essay, Kostyuchenko describes—for the first time—why she fled Ukraine and reveals that she was poisoned last fall in Munich.
How Did One Man Steal $2 Billion in Art?
He stuffed paintings down his pants. He hid them under his coat. Sometimes he'd swipe art while on a museum tour. Stéphane Breitwieser snatched hundreds of works from museums all over Europe—often making it look easier than you might think.
Quote of the Week:
“In nuclear war, all men are cremated equal.” – Dexter Gordon
Word of the Week:
Weltschmerz
Welt·schmerz /ˈveltˌSHmerts/
Noun
a feeling of melancholy and world-weariness.
mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.
Facts of the Week:
Wolves are more intelligent than dogs.
Artificial intelligence can beat 99% of humans in fantasy football.
Two tech billionaires who think we live in a computer simulation have hired a team to work on how to break out of it.
Disney has filed a patent for huggable robots.
The surname Disney was originally d’Isney and meant someone who came from Isigny in Normandy.
Yen Sid, the sorcerer in Fantasia, is Disney backwards.
Brainteaser of the Week:
Find a number less than 100 that is increased by one-fifth of its value when its digits are reversed.
Last Week’s Brainteaser and Answer:
Arrange the numbers from 1 to 15 in a row such that the sum of every two adjacent numbers is a square number. (A square number is 1, 4, 9, 16, etc.—just any number multiplied by itself.)
Answer:
9, 7, 2, 14, 11, 5, 4, 12, 13, 3, 6, 10, 15, 1, 8 or vice versa.
Thanks for reading Dovi’s Digest!