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Happy Ring is a ring, doesn’t make you happy
Man, I read this article three times now and my reaction is still the same. It is as follows: “Fucking WHAT?”
So the founder of Tinder, Sean Rad…
Wait, that’s his.. his name is Sean… RAD?
Sean Rad is running this company that makes a ring. A ring. A ring? Yep. A ring. And the ring monitors when you sweat and then that tells you about your mental health. Or fucking SOMETHING?
Happy Ring makes no claims of being a diagnostic tool. Rather, the company believes it has cracked the code of monitoring wearers’ progress, in a kind of mental health analog to fitness trackers like Apple Watch and Oura. Much like those products, it purports to be a method for monitoring those vital readings and presenting actionable data to help get the wearer back on track.
“If you’re public speaking, you’re going on a first date, you’re interviewing for a job, you hands start to sweat a little bit,” explains Freckleton. “That is the emotional sweat response. There are evolutionary reasons why that occurs. The EDA sensor is specifically designed to pick up those tiny changes that occur as a result of micro sweats on the skin and are a result of the activation of the autonomic nervous system.”
Happy Ring requires a $20 a month membership, which is a lot for a mood ring.
Are workplaces becoming less stigmatized about mental health?
The BBC has an article about that and the answer is… KINDA.
In the US in 2021, more American companies offered extra paid time off (55% increase), mental-health days (41% increase) and mental-health training for executives or staff (33% increase) compared to 2019, according to Mind Share Partners, a non-profit organisation that provides mental-health training and strategy to global companies.
Although these services are more prolific, and employees are increasingly requesting them, it’s unclear whether employees are actually using them frequently. Some data shows that just more than a tenth of UK workers used their EAP in 2021. It’s a jump of several percentage points on the year before, yet barely touches the share of people struggling with mental-health issues.
It’s possible the lack of uptake may be linked to the fear of being stigmatised at work, if employers know who is utilising these benefits, say experts. Employees worry these services are not truly confidential, says Kelly Greenwood, founder and CEO of Mind Share Partners. Research has long shown that workers have been reluctant to use available counselling services if they believed it would jeopardise future career opportunities.
I think it’s great that more companies are making a real effort to address mental health. It’s good for humanity and it’s a good business strategy. Everyone wins. I’m sad and not surprised that workers are reluctant to take advantage of that. In these days of collapsing privacy and corporations being assholes, why should anyone automatically trust that their use of mental health services won’t be used against them?
Lola Kirke on the pod on Monday
My wife is a human IMDb. Every movie or tv show we watch, she recognizes most if not all of the actors from something else. She polite enough to not to shout it out. Me, I never know anyone from anything, I just buy into the character as being the only person present. For instance, I had no idea it was Jamie Lee Curtis in Everything Everywhere All at Once until the credits. I just thought it was an IRS lady.
Similarly, when I was approached about interviewing Lola Kirke, the name didn’t ring a bell. Then I looked her up and found that I had seen her in a bunch of things already, like the Noah Baumbach film Mistress America, starring Lola and Greta Gerwig.
She was also the lead in Mozart in the Jungle and a major character in Gone Girl.
I remain very disappointed that Mozart in the Jungle is not about a young Mozart becoming friends with Tarzan.
Anyway, during covid, Lola had a very happy life in Nashville with her partner. And in that happiness, she put on a few pounds and now she can’t get acting work. She also put out a new album of music she’s proud of but it didn’t make the big splash she wanted it to. She was in a pretty bad place in mental health terms for a while there because of how petty and uncertain the entertainment industry can be. So we talk about that.
I do one of these threads every year because I am determined to make something good happen
Grimes and Misdemeanors
13 years ago, Claire Boucher’s Mississippi River voyage was an epic fiasco. She and her boyfriend called themselves Veruschka and Zelda Xox.
Boucher, who's from Vancouver, B.C., and Gratz, from Tennessee, met at school in Montreal. The idea for the river journey was hatched last fall. After months of Internet research, they made the 25-hour trip to Bemidji, Minn., where a friend allowed them to build the boat on his property. For more than a month, they toiled over the engineering of the 20-foot boat to make sure it floated. They installed accordion folding doors, glass windows, pink shutters and painted murals in black, white and red paint of fantastical creatures on the sides. Strangers gave them bikes, a mattress and the sewing machine (powered by on-board batteries). They got a copy of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which neither of them had read.
"I always wanted to live on a boat," Boucher said. "We both wanted to go south and live on it when we got to New Orleans."
They hauled it to north Minneapolis and shoved off from land the first week of June. Moments later, their engine began to sputter and gurgle. They made it to the other side of the river and tied the boat to a tree, determined to repair the motor and be on their way again in a few days.
Today, we know her as Grimes. The journey is commemorated in crop art by Jill Moe at the 2022 Minnesota State Fair: