Watching
Football! It’s the World Cup! Football football football!
Reading
It’s the World Cup! Reading about football! The Players Tribune are posting some in depth pieces on various footballers, and whether you like football or not, they’re great reads. This one with Romelu Lukaku is quite something. As is this one with Gabriel Jesus. Such a fantastic insight into what they’ve been through to go from almost nothing to the absolute top of their profession. Football!
The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy. I realise how this could come across; sharing an article from The Guardian about going vegetarian. But, I’m so on board with encouraging people to eat less meat. I’m down to 1 or 2 meat based meals a week – the rest being substitutes or vegetables – and consequently I think everyone should do the same as me. Really though, it’s much easier than you might think and it’s surely not sustainable for humans to carry on as they are…
… while some kinds of meat and dairy production are more damaging than others, all are more harmful to the living world than growing plant protein. It shows that animal farming takes up 83% of the world’s agricultural land, but delivers only 18% of our calories. A plant-based diet cuts the use of land by 76% and halves the greenhouse gases and other pollution that are caused by food production.
Listening to
99% Invisible 312: Post-Narco Urbanism. All about how the Medellin in Colombia went from the most dangerous city in the world to one that’s safer than a lot of US ones. I, and many many other people have this distorted view of Medellin because of Pablo Escobar (and recently, via Narcos), but common sense tells you there’s so much more to it than what you read about or watch on Netflix. It looks like a really interesting place to visit – away from the 'Narco-Tourism’ – and this story explains some of the lengths city officials have gone to in order to make it a more welcoming place. Public transport, libraries, health clinics… they’ve changed the way people live, and it’s great to see.
