Magazine Reader's Digest

RD TALKSIES

OUR STOCRASTS AS POD

LAUGH Yourself Smarter!

PAGE 30

Drama in Real Life INTO THE JAWS OF A HURRICANE PAGE 114

Australia’s Rare TREE KANGAROO PAGE 24

8

Truths About YOUR METABOLISM PAGE 66

H

to t

LAUGH

Available now, everywhere

Yourself Smarter!

Drama in Real Life INTO THE JAWS OF A HURRICANE Australia’s Rare TREE KANGAROO

8

8

Truths About YOUR METABOLISM

CONTENTS APRIL 2020

Features

24

making a difference

Tree Kangaroo Mum It takes a special person to help raise these unusual treedwelling marsupials.

42

CATH JOHNSEN

30

mental health

Laugh Yourself Smarter Finding things funny launches a cascade of meaningful brain activity. ADAM PIORE

COVER IMAGE: GETT Y IMAGES

30

42

56

Adult Autism

Metronomics

health

art of living

While autism is usually diagnosed in childhood, some people only receive a diagnosis much later.

You’ll run into all sorts of weird and wonderful people travelling by commuter train.

LISA FIELDS

VANYA LOCHAN

52

66

Walnuts – A Great Food for Thought

8 Truths About How We Burn Kilojoules

food on your plate

health

These tempting crunchy nuts have some serious health benefits, too.

There are a lot of myths about the impact metabolism has on your health, especially when it comes to weight loss.

KATE LOWENSTEIN AND DANIEL GRITZER

JULIA BELLUZ FROM VOX

ON THE COVER: LAUGH YOURSELF SMARTER – PAGE 30

1

CONTENTS APRIL 2020

72

language

Word Sleuth

92

Here’s a clue: these plot devices will help you solve mysteries.

SAPTAK CHOUDHURY

76

photo feature

Tight Spaces

Packed in like a sardine? Crowds and overcrowded places are an increasing fact of everyday life.

CORNELIA KUMFERT

82

100

Let’s Stop Wasting Food

Prediction Addiction

profile

When Selina Juul dedicated her life to the fight against food waste, she started a movement that’s changing a country.

Fantastic forecasts of personal and consumer gadgets that have since become reality.

TIM HULSE

106

92

2

april 2020

ANDY SIMMONS

travel

animal kingdom

Back Roads of Japan

New Zealand locals are scaling up efforts to safeguard kiwi in their natural habitat from threats.

Exploring the historic villages and rural beauty of alpine Japan by hire car is less complicated than you may think.

STÉPHANIE VERGE

DIANE GODLEY

Rare Bird

72

technology

134 114

Departments the digest 18 Pets 20 Health 23 News From the World of Medicine 129 RD Recommends regulars 4 Editor’s Note 6 Letters 10 News Worth Sharing 12 My Story 16 Smart Animals 55 That’s Outrageous 60 Look Twice 103 13 Things 113 Quotable Quotes

114

bonus read

Into the Teeth of a Hurricane A recording from the bridge tells the story of a cargo ship, El Faro, with 33 crew aboard as it sails into an intensifying hurricane.

humour 50 Life’s Like That 64 Laughter, the Best Medicine 90 All in a Day’s Work the genius section 134 Wake Up Your Brain 137 Family Fun 138 Puzzles 140 Trivia 141 Word Power

20

16

WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE FROM VANITY FAIR

3

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

EDITOR’S NOTE

Laugh Yourself Healthy I ENJOY SEEING THE FUNNY SIDE OF LIFE. Perhaps it’s a necessary survival tool as the mother of three teens and one pre-teen. But science can back my hunch that having a quiet chuckle and a jolly giggle is genuinely good for my sanity – and my brain. In ‘Laugh Yourself Smarter’ (page 30) we meet a neuroscientist who is also a stand-up comedian (an interesting mix!). His research, both in the laboratory and on the stage, has revealed that laughing g boosts our physical and mental wellbeing.

In a nutshell, laughing is the perffect workout for your brain.

On a more serious note, in ‘Rarre Bird’ (page 92) we meet a team of volunteers ay whose work in New Zealand’s Ba of Plenty region is helping to prottect the iconic kiwi, which is facing serious decline. I hope you enjoy this issue.

LOUISE WATERSON Editor-in-Chief

4

april 2020

RD LKS

TA ORIES OUR STDCASTS AS PO

Vol. 198 No. 1179 April 2020

ow to

LAUGH Yourself Smarter!

PAGE 30

EDITORIAL Editor-in-Chief Louise Waterson Managing Editor Zoë Meunier Chief Subeditor Melanie Egan Art Director Hugh Hanson Senior Art Designer Adele Burley Senior Editor Diane Godley Associate Editor Victoria Polzot DIGITAL Head of Digital Content Greg Barton ADVERTISING Group Advertising & Retail Sales Director Sheron White Account Manager Darlene Delaney, Sales Support Manager Conor Hillis REGIONAL ADVERTISING CONTACTS

Australia/Asia Sheron White sheron.white@readersdigest.com.au New Zealand Yulia McKenzie, yulia@hawkhurst.co.nz PUBLISHED UNDER LICENCE

BY DIRECT PUBLISHING PTY LTD CUSTOMER INQUIRIES Online www.readersdigest.com.au www.readersdigest.co.nz www.rdasia.com

Drama in Real Life INTO THE JAWS OF A HURRICANE PAGE 114

Australia’s Rare TREE KANGAROO PAGE 24

8

Truths About YOUR METABOLISM PAGE 66

SAVE$$ DISCOUNT SAVINGS OFF TOTAL COVER PRICE

PLUS

+SPECIAL FREE GIFT +FREE DELIVERY Already a subscriber?

You can take advantage of this great offer to renew your subscription.

Moving? PLEASE NOTIFY US OF YOUR CHANGE OF ADDRESS SIX WEEKS BEFORE YOU MOVE.

TO SERVE YOU BETTER – OUR PRIVACY STATEMENT DIRECT PUBLISHING PTY LTD COLLECTS YOUR INFORMATION TO PROVIDE OUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES AND MAY ALSO USE YOUR INFORMATION FOR THE MARKETING PURPOSES OF RD AND/OR SELECTED CORPORATE PARTNERS. IF THE INFORMATION IS NOT PROVIDED YOU WILL BE UNABLE TO ACCESS OUR PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. OUR PRIVACY POLICY THE READER’S DIGEST WEBSITE IN YOUR REGION CONTAINS FULL DETAILS ON HOW YOUR INFORMATION IS USED (INCLUDING HOW WE MAY SHARE YOUR INFORMATION WITH OUR AFFILIATE COMPANIES IN THE US OR OTHER OVERSEAS ENTITIES), HOW YOU MAY ACCESS OR CORRECT INFORMATION HELD AND OUR PRIVACY COMPLAINTS PROCESS.

TO SUBSCRIBE:

Asia: rdasia.com/subscribe Australia: readersdigest.com.au subscribe New Zealand: readersdigest.co.nz/ subscribe

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

LETTERS Reader’s Comments And Opinions

Got It Covered!

Today I spotted the January 2020 magazine in a local bookshop.

I haven’t read Reader’s Digest for a long time but I was drawn to the creative and spectacular cover.

I was very quickly caught up in the production and presentation of the articles. The Dorothy Dix story (‘Dear Miss Dix – This is My Problem’) and accompanying photo is priceless. All in all, I am very pleased I bought a copy.

ROB GERMON

Sharing Their Story With Us I always look forward to reading each month’s My Story. The writers you choose and their stories are a great and varied mix. I really enjoyed ‘A Sign From Above’ (My Story, February), Richard Whitaker’s journey from an 11-year-old boy to well-respected meteorologist was not only informative but entertaining and, like all the stories

you include, well written. I will look forward to the next one.

ELLENA PERSINE

Foods That Heal ‘18 Foods Proven to Heal’ (February) was particularly interesting to me. I appreciate that you’ve listed each of the foods with their particular healing properties.

The foods that made the list are

Let us know if you are moved – or provoked – by any item in the magazine, share your thoughts. See page 8 for how to join the discussion.

6

april 2020

Letters also foods that are readily available and easy to add to your diet.

MAXINE MATTHEWS

Strange Creatures I just loved ‘Stranger Things’ (February), it was the perfect article to share with my nine-year-old grandson. He was amazed that I would read the sorts of articles he enjoyed. His favourite?

The bombardier beetle. Mine, the Eurasian roller bird.

It was wonderful to see his enthusiasm as we read about these formidable creatures together.

MAUREEN COLBY

Runs in the Family Thank you for delivering my granddaughter’s first copy of Reader’s Digest. She has just turned

WIN A PILOT CAPLESS FOUNTAIN PEN The best letter each month will win a Pilot Capless Fountain Pen, valued at over $200. The Capless is the perfect combination of luxury and ingenious technology, featuring a one-of-a-kind retractable fountain pen nib, durable metal body, beautiful rhodium accents and a 14K gold nib. Congratulations to this month’s winner, Maureen Colby.

RETURN TO SENDER

We asked you to think up a clever caption for this photo.

Jack in the box.

Also Tom, Dick and Harry.

CHRIS RAMOS

Box office seats.

MERRAN TOONE

Talking Heads box set.

MICHAEL GOATHAM

Male Order.

HELEN WONG

New kids on the block.

SUSHA BHASKARAN

Congratulations to this month’s winner, Chris Ramos.

WIN!

CAPTION CONTEST Come up with the funniest caption for the above photo and you could win $100. To enter, see email details for your region on page 8.

readersdigest.co.nz

7

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

ten and I gave her a subscription as a gift. I started reading Reader’s Digest when I was about 14 and have never stopped. It quickened my brain and sharpened my tongue. I was considered very witty and popular at parties and the girls loved me! Wit was certainly an ice breaker. I kept a little black book in which I noted material which I could draw on at any given moment.

Reader’s Digest has given me tremendous pleasure particularly when I was recuperating after a serious accident. I keenly await each issue. Keep up the good work.

The world needs Reader’s Digest.

SITHAMPAR AM SIVALINGAM

Wild Horses I’m sure I’ll never go to Iceland, but Tori Bilski’s adventure (‘Wild Horses’, December) took me right there. I could sense her exhilaration of a lifelong dream being fulfilled.

EUL ALIE HOLMAN

Acts of Love and Kindness Kindness can come in many forms, a sister donating a kidney to save her sibling’s life, a child giving away his beloved pet to be trained as a guide dog, or someone passing on a bicycle to a refugee (News Worth Sharing, February). All of these acts of kindness have one thing in common, they are acts of love.

MICHAEL WOUTERS

8

April 2020

RD SHOP For quality products, book sales and more, visit Readersdigest.com.au/shop and Readersdigest.co.nz/shop

CONTRIBUTE Anecdotes and jokes Send in your real-life laugh for Life’s Like That or All in a Day’s Work.

Got a joke? Send it in for Laughter is the Best Medicine!

Smart Animals Share antics of unique pets or wildlife in up to 300 words.

Reminisce Share the tales of an event from your past that made a huge impact in 100–500 words.

My Story Do you have an inspiring or lifechanging tale to tell? Submissions must be true, unpublished, original and 800–1000 words – see website for more information.

Letters to the editor, caption competitions and other reader submissions ONLINE Follow the ‘Contribute’ link at the RD website in your region. www.readersdigest.com.au www.readersdigest.co.nz www.rdasia.com EMAIL AU: editor@readersdigest.com.au NZ: nzeditor@readersdigest.com.au ASIA: asiaeditor@readersdigest.com.au WE MAY EDIT LETTERS AND USE THEM IN ALL MEDIA. SEE WEBSITE FOR FULL TERMS AND CONDITIONS. PRINTED BY OVATO LIMITED, 8 PRIDDLE ST, WARWICK FARM, NSW 2170, FOR THE PROPRIETORS, DIRECT PUBLISHING PTY LTD, 431 WARRINGAH ROAD, FRENCHS FOREST, NSW 2086. © 2020 DIRECT PUBLISHING PTY LTD (ABN 81000565471). ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. REPRODUCTION IN ANY MANNER IN WHOLE OR PART IN ENGLISH OR OTHER LANGUAGES PROHIBITED

ONLINE FIND THESE UNIQUE READS AT

Your local RD website HOME

11 organisational tricks that can save you tons of money From planning the week ahead to keeping an eye on what’s in the fridge, here’s how to get organised – and save.

ADVICE + RELATIONSHIPS

40 romantic ideas to say ‘I love you’ These romantic ideas are perfect if you’re looking for something to show your significant other how much you care about them.

PETS

PHOTOS: SHUT TERSTOCK

30

AWESOME DOG BREEDS YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF

Some of these unusual dog breeds have been around for thousands of years, while others have come onto the scene a lot more recently.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION! PLUS SIGN UP TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER FOR MORE HOT OFFERS, TOP STORIES AND PRIZES!

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

NEWS WO WORTH SHARING Fake Fur Receives Royal Approval

COMPILED BY VICTORIA POLZOT

10

april 2020

PHOTOS: GET T Y IMAGES

A

t the age of 93, Queen Elizabeth II has made a notable sartorial statement by removing real fur from her day-today wardrobe.

The move was revealed by her senior dresser, Angela Kelly. “If Her Majesty is to attend an engagement in particularly cold weather, fake fur will be used to make sure she stays warm,” she says.

The Queen’s ceremonial robes will remain with their fur intact and she won’t get rid of anything she already owns.

Nonetheless, Claire Bass, of animal charity, Humane Society International, says the decision will send “a powerful message that fur is firmly out of fashion.”

News Worth Sharing

3D Street Art in the Philippines Promotes Roads Safety

W

ith the approval of the Public Works Department and the local government, the roads in Antipolo City, in the Philippines, have been painted with 3D murals of optical illusions to promote road safety and prevent pedestrian-related accidents.

TaskUs collaborated with local artist Albert Raqueno and Carbomedia Manila, an artist collective, to create art in pedestrian lanes in an effort to make the roads safer for vehicles and pedestrians. The bold artworks – which feature a brick wall, path to a castle and octopus tentacles climbing out of the road – are located along busy pedestrian areas such as sports arenas and high schools, to remind motorists to slow down and encourage pedestrians to cross in the lanes for their safety.

“Addressing social concerns can be fun and engaging while remaining purposeful at its core,” says Paul Garcia from TaskUs.

Stick Library for Dogs

‘FETCH’ may well be a

dog’s favourite game but when New Zealander Andrew Taylor noticed a lack of good fetching sticks at his local park, he knew just what to do.

The 59 year old from Kaiapoi had been chopping excess branches from trees in his yard and realised he could use them for a ‘stick library’ for the local pups. Several dozen branches were chopped into conveniently sized sticks, cleaned, sanded, placed into a custom-make box that was labelled ‘Stick Library: Please Return’ and brought to the local park.

With daughter Tayla, he organised a party attended by more than 50 dogs and their owners. Although it’s a simple idea, it is loved by both hounds and humans.

11

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

MY STORY

More Than Just a Passport That wrenching feeling of signing your nationality away

I

t was a hot day in May 2010 when I stopped being an Indian. Officially. It happened in a musty little office of the immigration and naturalisation authority in the German city that had come to be my home.

I was early for my 3pm appointment with the official responsible for Einbürgerung (naturalisation). As I waited to go in, I felt weighed down by the enormity of what was about to happen.

It had been a long road that had brought me to this door: a childhood and youth in India, through university and a 14-year stay in the US and finally to a life of 25 years in Germany. I’d been rooted and uprooted several times, but this is where I’d lived the longest – where

12

april 2020

I’d struggled to master a foreign language; where I’d found work and made new friends; where I’d brought up my son, largely on my own; and learnt to be truly independent.

Yet, in all those years, I’d hung on to my Indian citizenship, ambivalent about giving it up in spite of the difficulties I faced because of it – the inability to vote and the problems with international travel being the most important ones.

Now, approaching retirement, I realised I’d like to spend more time in India, where I also have a house, family and friends. I was afraid, though, that an absence of more than six months could result in a loss of my resident status in Germany, which over the years had come to be my home. Ambivalent though I was,

I L LU S T R AT I O N: PR I YA K U R I YA N

BY Rima Datta

My Story

I knew I couldn’t afford to let this door to Germany close forever and, given that dual citizenship was not permitted, I knew of no other way of keeping it open.

At 3pm I knocked gently on the door and went in. The official, an unsmiling middle-aged woman with greying hair and a raspy smoker’s voice, asked me to take a seat while she got my file out. I felt unaccountably tense as if I were there to be assessed once again. The mandatory written test was behind me, but I wasn’t sure if I’d have to Rima Datta divides her time between Goa and Germany. She loves nature and is saddened by the pace of urbanisation. Rima also enjoys writing poetry.

pass some sort of inspection to prove myself worthy of the citizenship that was about to be conferred upon me. I worried that I would fail. To control my nerves, I forced myself to look around the office. There were a few small plants and nondescript art prints.

The only picture that stood out was a face, round as a ball, by avant-garde artist Paul Klee called Marked Man, which is divided into variously coloured sections.

How appropriate, I thought!

A sectioned face, symbolic of the immigrants who sit in this chair, their souls broken into the colours of the cultures they come from, their multiple identities, their divided hearts.

I was surprised by her first question. “Have you brought your last salary statement?”

“No, I thought the salary statements from last year were enough.”

“Well, that was four months ago!” she said with a disapproving look, and I knew that I’d already failed, that I’d been found wanting.

“Should I come back some other day?” I asked quickly.

“No, no, that’s all right,” she said grudgingly, wanting to get the whole thing over with. “We can go on. Just make sure you bring it to me later.”

13

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

So, on we went.

She handed me a piece of paper and asked me to read it out loud. It was a half-page of text in German. I started reading it, but she interrupted me, saying, “Please read it all … including the place and date.” So I started again, stumbling inexplicably over words I knew well. It was an oath I was reading, swearing to be loyal to this country and to observe all the duties of a citizen.

Then, handing me her pen, she said, “Sign here,” tapping on the bottom of the page I’d just read.

And so, with one stroke of her pen, I signed my old nationality away.

My eyes were too full of tears to read the citizenship certificate she handed me. We shook hands to seal the deal. That was all the ceremony there was to it. No photograph, no fanfare – just a dry handshake. Trying to explain my tears I said, it was a huge schritt (step) in my life and, at the same time, a terrible schnitt (cut).

The lady looked surprised at that, but agreed that it was a very important step. “You must be willing to give something up to get something else,” she said sanctimoniously.

I watched sadly as she took my old Indian passport away and slipped it into a plastic envelope to be sent to the Indian consulate in Munich.

“Can I get it back after it’s been cancelled?” I asked.

“That’s something you’ll have to

14

April 2020

ask the Indian consulate,” she said.

“It’s their property, not ours. And certainly not yours!” This last bit was said with a certain amount of vehemence.

Earlier, I had taken my Indian passport out of my bag one last time and run my fingers over the golden emblem embossed on the dark blue cover and flipped through the muchstamped pages, curling slightly at the edges. All the countries I’d been to – the US, Switzerland, South Africa, Lesotho, Bhutan, Mexico – all with their own visas, entry and departure stamps in different colours.

This passport had confirmed my identity as an Indian national. It’s what I’d held in my hands when I’d stood in various consulate lines to get visas, in lines at airports, while Germans, Americans, British citizens, just walked through with the breezy confidence of ‘first-world’ citizens.

There would be none of that anymore, now that I had joined their ranks. Like them, I could live in Germany indefinitely, vote, go in and out of Europe and travel to most countries around the world without needing a visa. I, too, had become a first-world citizen!

Why then, instead of rejoicing, did I feel so sad?

Do you have a tale to tell? We’ll pay cash for any original and unpublished story we print. See page 8 for details on how to contribute.

TA L K S

What’s New in RD Talks

Sit back and enjoy the audio versions of the most engaging stories to have appeared in Reader’s Digest magazine.

DEADLY DOSE – THE ROSE PETAL MURDER

MILLY’S LAST WALTZ

Kristin Rossum’s husband was found dead, surrounded by rose petals. But how exactly did he die?

THE RIGHT IDEA Success starts with the right idea and the conviction to stick to that idea – something property developer Harry Triguboff understands well.

Both inspirational and touchingly sad, this is the story of a flea-ridden and aged little stray dog that came to stay a while.

SURGERY UNDER THE SNOW With amateur helpers and homemade instruments, a medical student had to perform an eye operation on a fellow Antarctic explorer.

T O LISTEN GO TO:

w ersdigest.com.au/podcasts www.readersdigest.co.nz/podcasts www.rdasia.com/podcasts

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

SMART ANIMALS

Foster Mum DYAN SENEVIRATNE

In 2015, my nephew, his wife and their two small children moved to Nawala, a suburb in Colombo, Sri Lanka. As their natural love of animals – and birds in particular – remained, my nephew had an internal courtyard built next to their new living room with a fish pond, trees and creepers – mimicking the jungle they’d left behind.

Returning home after a weekend away, the kids noticed that a pair of red-vented bulbuls had created a nest of leaves and twigs in a precarious space between a painting and the wall inside the

16

april 2020

house adjacent to the courtyard.

Soon there were three little hatchlings. Sadly, about a week after they had hatched, tragedy struck.

Despite rules that no one should disturb the bird family, a ceiling fan close to the nest was inadvertently switched on. When the mama bird decided to take flight she fell to her death. The question then was how to feed the little brood.

My nephew and his kids decided to feed the young ones with whatever morsels of food they could come You could earn cash by telling us about the antics of unique pets or wildlife. Turn to page 8 for details on how to contribute.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S: G E T T Y I M AG E S

If they are not entertaining us, they are astounding us

Smart Animals by, but no one could replicate the delicate art of a mother bird feeding her young via a pointed beak. It was impossible to gently place scraps of food into the open mouths of the baby birds and a day passed without any food making its way into the starving babies.

When my nephew’s family had almost given up hope, the papa bird appeared. He checked out the nest, perhaps realising that his mate and the mother of his babies was

Perceptive Pooch KATHERINE LOW

As each year passes, my nineyear-old Maltese-shih tzu, Dexter, becomes more perceptive to my moods, my actions and my energy. When I feel fragile, Dexter’s movements are gentle,

missing, then flew away. A few hours passed and the papa bird returned accompanied by another bird.

She went straight to the nest and fed the hungry babies with food she had concealed in her beak.

The new female red-vented bulbul became their foster mother. She continued to perform the duties of a mother, protecting and feeding the fledglings, until the chicks had sufficient strength to crawl out and gingerly fly away.

his eyes more affectionate and he’s always close by. When the bounce returns to my step, he knows he can have his ‘me’ time and rumbles with his smelly, broken toys, taking them for happy laps up and down the hallway, shaking the imaginary life out of them.

He knows there’s room to be naughty, like breaking into the neighbouring construction site and executing crazy-eyed, mad dashes around the joint, knowing full well that he’s not supposed to be in there.

I never knew I could feel annoyed while dying of laughter at the same time. He always seems to know what to do and when to do it. No amount of gratitude will equal the magic my little buddy sprinkles into my daily life.

17

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

PETS

Caring for Senior Dogs and Cats Thoughtful changes can improve the quality of life

BY Dr Katrina Warren

DIET Seniors need a balanced diet that is lower in kilojoules, protein and fat but higher in fibre. Dry kibble can sometimes be too hard for older pets to chew. If your pet is having difficulties, consider switching to a softer food, wetting kibble with water or broth or perhaps cooking a homemade diet. Be sure to discuss your ageing pet’s dietary needs with your vet.

EXERCISE AND WEIGHT It’s important for dogs to remain active and undertake gentle exercise in keeping with their health and ability. Your four-legged buddy that once enjoyed an energetic outing might be happier with short and slower strolls. It’s not unusual for dogs and cats to gain or lose weight as they age.

18

april 2020

PHOTOS: GET T Y IMAGES

Our regular pet columnist, Dr Katrina Warren, is an established and trusted animal expert.

IN MUCH THE SAME WAY the lifespan of humans is increasing, our dogs and cats are also living longer, largely due to improved nutrition and health care.

Cats and dogs are generally considered to be seniors from around eight years of age. Large and giant breeds of dogs are considered senior at a younger age, generally from five to seven years. Recognising your pet is a senior is the first step to managing their health and comfort. Veterinarian Dr Katrina Warren shares her expert tips on how to best care for older pets.

Pets Extra weight can predispose them to heart disease and diaabetes as well as contributing to osteoarthritis.

Keep an eye on their weight and advise your vet of any significant changes.

CHANGES IN BEHAVI OUR AND HEALTH Pets inevvitably slow down as they age but these changes can sometimes be symptom ms of underlying issues. Watch for changes such as excessive thirst and/or urination and loss of housetraining, difficulty getting up, climbing stairs or getting into the car. Also, the appearance of lumps or bumps, bad breath and bleeding gums, diarrhoea or vomiting, as well as changes in sleep patterns can all be reasons for concern.

Pets can suffer from dementia-like illnesses as they age. If your pet appears confused, forgets basics like toilet training, starts to bark or howl or becomes aggressive, a vet checkup should be your first step.

Older dogs and d cats require adjustments to their daily regime

GENERAL COMFORT Elderly dogs are less able to cope with extremes of temperature, so take care to keep them comfortable on hot days and away from damp and draughts in cold weather. Grooming remains important and is also an ideal opportunity to check for any unusual lumps or bumps, fleas, skin problems or pressure sores. Your vet will be able to recommend a diet and treatments to ensure your ‘best friend’ enjoys a comfortable life.

HOW TO MAKE OLDER PETS MORE COMFORTABLE Ask your vet about medication to relieve the discomfort of aching joints and stiff muscles.

Buy a ramp to assist your dog with mobility

issues to get in and out of the car.

Place pieces of carpet or bedding where your dog rests to help them rise from slippery floors.

Help cats with

grooming, particularly beneath their tails and around hind leg areas.

Check toenails, they may not wear down due to reduced activity and may need trimming.

19

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

HEALTH

5

Clear Signs You Might Have an Unhealthy Gut

BY Colette Harris

Y

our gastrointestinal tract is inhabited by microbes collectively called the microbiome, which includes bacteria, fungi and even viruses.

Although it sounds gross and even unhealthy, it’s in fact, the complete opposite. Gut bacteria perform many important functions in the body, including aiding the immune system, producing the feel-good

20

april 2020

brain chemical serotonin, making energy available to the body from the food we eat, and disposing of foreign substances and toxins, according to dietitian Lisa Dreher. Though most of us have a mixture of good and bad bacteria, sometimes the bad guys get the upper hand, causing dysbiosis, or an imbalance in gut bacteria, which can play a role in a number of health conditions. So, how do you know

I L LU S T R AT I O N: G E T T Y I M AG E S; S O U RC E: R D.CO M

You need the right balance of bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract to maintain good health

Health when you have an imbalance? These signs point to a dysbiosis that has the potential to make you sick.

YOUR STOMACH DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT Diarrhoea, constipation, bloating, nausea and heartburn are classic symptoms of problems with gut health. “Gastrointestinal discomfort – especially after eating carbohydrate-rich meals – can be the result of poor digestion and absorption of carbohydrates,” Dreher says. Reflux, inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome and colitis have all been linked to an imbalance in the microbiome.

YOU CRAVE SWEET THINGS Craving food, especially sweets and sugar, can mean you have an imbalance of gut bacteria. Although unproven, some experts believe that if there’s an overgrowth of yeast in the system, which might happen after a course or two of antibiotics where you wipe out all the good bacteria, then that overgrowth of yeast can actually cause you to crave more sugar.

THE SCALE IS GOING UP OR DOWN Certain types of gut bacteria can cause either weight loss or weight gain, especially when they colonise in the small intestine, a condition called SIBO (short for small intestine bacterial overgrowth). Too many microbes in the small intestines can mess with gut health by interfering

with absorption of vitamins, minerals and fat. “If you’re not able to digest and absorb fat normally, you can actually see some weight loss,” Dreher says. Other types of bacteria have been linked to weight gain.

YOU’RE ANXIOUS OR FEELING BLUE Roughly 80 to 90 per cent of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that affects mood, social behaviour, sleep, appetite, memory, and even libido, is produced in the gut. When less serotonin is produced, it can negatively impact mood. “Gut imbalances of the microbiome can trigger depressive symptoms,” says Dr Todd LePine, who specialises in internal medicine.

YOU’RE NOT SLEEPING WELL Not having enough serotonin can lead to bouts of insomnia or difficulty getting to sleep, according to Dreher.

HOW TO BUILD A HEALTHIER GUT Eating right is the first step in improving gut health. In fact, the types of foods we eat can change our microbiome in as little as 24 hours, according to Professor Ali Keshavarzian, who specialises in digestive diseases and nutrition.

To feed your good bacteria swap out processed foods, bread and pasta for plants, fruit, seeds and nuts. And consider adding yoghurt or drinks containing probiotics, or healthy bacteria, to your diet.

21

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

HEALTH

Ways You’re Flossing All Wrong

BY Liesa Goins

gum disease, and researchers have linked the bacteria that ride along with periodontitis (the official name for gum disease) to an increased risk of stroke, heart disease, some cancers, and even Alzheimer’s disease.

YOU’RE NOT FLOSSING ENOUGH “My preference is twice a day,” says dentist Chris Strandburg. “When it comes to oral hygiene, bacteria are the enemy,” he explains. Since we eat three times a day, we’re constantly adding debris and bacteria to the spaces between our teeth and gums, so removing those threats frequently will keep your mouth healthier.

YOU’RE NOT FLOSSING AT THE RIGHT TIME Flossing is an integral part of oral hygiene because brushing does not remove all particles of food and plaque on its

22

april 2020

own, wn says dental professor Dr Elliott Maser. “Saliva flow decreases when one sleeps, so food material left on the teeth overnight have a great chance of starting a bacterial breakdown process or causing gum inflammation,” he explains. For that reason, you should make sure you floss before bed to remove bacteria and food particles.

YOU’RE NOT FLOSSING THE WHOLE TOOTH You have to wrap the side surface of the tooth with the floss and use the strand as a tool to clean the entire area, not just between the teeth, Dr Strandburg explains. You’ll want to contour the floss around the tooth in a C shape and slide it up and down, making sure you rub the back of the tooth as well. “The string should also be carried below the gumline two to three millimetres to remove bacteria,” he says.

PHOTO; GE T T Y IM AGES; SOURCE: RD.COM

FLOSSING seems to help prevent

News From the

WORLD OF MEDICINE

PHOTO: ADAM VOORHES

HYPERTENSION CONTROL AS A GROUP EFFORT Many attempts to treat hypertension involve only two people: the patient and his or her doctor. A trial conducted in Malaysia and Colombia asked what would happen if more people were added to the equation. In half of the participating communities, busy doctors shared some of their tasks (eg, counselling patients, monitoring treatment) with non-doctor health workers. The trial also recruited ‘treatment supporters’ (friends or family members) to accompany patients to health appointments and encourage them to take their medication and follow lifestyle advice. By the end of a year, the patients who’d received this attention saw a much greater reduction in their blood pressure compared to patients getting the usual care. And, their overall cardiovascular risk score went down by almost twice as much.

MEAT SUBSTITUTES HIGH IN SALT According to a recent British survey of meat-free burgers, ham, sausages and other

vegetarian or vegan meat substitutes, 28 per cent of the products exceeded maximum recommended salt levels.

VIEW OF GREEN SPACES CURBS CRAVINGS It’s well known that being in nature confers a host of physical and mental health benefits. A new study suggests that simply seeing green spaces can help reduce unhealthy cravings. Of 149 participants, those whose views from their homes featured more than 25 per cent green space reported fewer and less intense urges for junk food, alcohol and cigarettes.

HEALTHY FOOD MOTIVATION Australian researchers analysed the diet of 12,000 people to measure life satisfaction and happiness, and found that they both increased within two years in people who changed their diet to include more fruit and vegetables – with eight servings daily being optimum. “Eating fruit and vegetables apparently boosts our happiness far more quickly than it improves human health,” said study co-author Redzo Mujcic.

23

TREE KANGAROO MUM I hops like a kangaroo, It eats leaves like a koala and climbs like a possum‌ the little-known Australian tree kangaroo is as old as time itself, but in more recent years, the species has found a dedicated protector in Karen Coombes

BY Cath Johnsen

24

april 2020

P H O T O S : ( T R E E K A N G A R O O ) A L I S O N W R I G H T; ( L E A V E S ) G E T T Y I M A G E S

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

25

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

K

aren Coombes rolls over sleepily in the bed of her Malanda home in North Queensland and opens her eyes. Sun streams into the room and she sees a tree kangaroo joey perched on the bed next to her, munching hungrily on a branch of leaves while staring intently at her.

A second joey snuggles under the covers, while yet another sleeps soundly on top of her, encouraging Karen to lie in bed a little longer. A fourth joey, an early riser, has hopped off the bed and is exploring the bedroom.

“People will think I’m nuts but yes I wake up to four tree kangaroos each day, often trying to clean my arms and face and talk to me,” Karen chuckles. “They love human warmth and interaction when they’re little and they thrive better by sleeping in bed with me because normally they’d be in a pouch 24 hours per day and have the constant heartbeat and warmth of their mothers,” she explains.

W hile many people have never even heard of tree kangaroos, a unique Australian marsupial found only in small pockets of rainforest in North Queensland, Karen has dedicated her life to rescuing and rehabilitating sick, orphaned and injured tree ‘roos’.

After she playfully wrestles the joeys out of her bed, Karen takes the younger babies out to the lounge

26

April 2020

room for their first bottles of special macropod formula for the day, while she sips on a steaming cup of tea.

“When they’re very young, I do three- or four-hourly feeds throughout the night,” Karen explains. “If I do occasionally have a couple of nights off and someone else is caring for them, I’m worried about them and can’t sleep. I need to have a tree kangaroo to cuddle up to … no offence to my husband,” she laughs.

Karen, a veterinar y nurse, and husband Neil, a carpenter, moved to Malanda 20 years ago and built their home on a sprawling 65-hectare property, much of it lush rainforest teeming with cassowaries, possums, pademelons and, of course, tree kangaroos.

Shortly after settling in the Malanda area, located 90 minutes southwest of Cairns, a local wildlife carer introduced them to the native species of tree kangaroos, known as the Lumholtz’s tree kangaroo. A second species, the Bennett’s tree kangaroo, lives further north still in the idyllic Daintree Rainforest.

For Karen, it was love at first sight

Tree Kangaroo Mum several outdoor enclosures as well as a small hospital, while Karen monitored the ongoing care of the animals and set up the Tree Roo Rescue and Conservation Centre – a not-for-prof it organisation that would allow her to raise much-needed funds.

W H E N I A R R I V E to meet

Lillie, a blind tree kangaroo in Karen Coombes’ care, gets her daily cuddle

and she immediately began taking in rescued tree roos that had been hit by cars or mauled by dogs, but she was surprised at the lack of information available about the animal.

“Many Australians don’t even know tree kangaroos exist,” Karen says, who completed a PhD in 2005 at James Cook University, documenting the ecology of the Lumholtz’s tree kangaroo species. “When I started my PhD, I even had one family member say, ‘I think you’ve been sitting in the rainforest smoking too much dope!’ Well, I don’t smoke dope,” Karen laughs.

“And then I got the usual ‘Oh, aren’t they drop bears?’ kind of comments.”

As the couple became known in the area and demand grew, Neil built

Karen, she’s busy unloading a ute load of leafy branches, which she tells me is only one day’s supply of food for the 16 tree roos currently in her care.

She beckons me into the hospital, which looks more like a holiday cottage, to meet one of her charges.

“This is Lillie, one of our big babies,” Karen says, bending to pick up a plump, eight-kilogram tree roo resting on an old couch. Looking rather like an oversized possum but with an extra-long tail, Lillie snuggles into Karen’s neck, clearly enjoying the cuddle.

“She came in as a youngster, blind and with eye damage,” Karen explains. “She’d been attacked by a dog and had a fractured ankle that turned into a bone infection. She comes in the house every day and is a star on our Facebook page. Neil brings her up about five in the morning, and she climbs on the ropes and shelves, that’s her playtime.”

With the hospital at capacity, Karen then leads me through her house

27

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

and into the laundry where a tree roo, recently hit by a car, sits lapping at a bowl of water.

Turning its dark face towards the door as we enter, it looks at us expectantly, but it’s clear from its misty eyes that this one is also blind.

“Because of the hotter and drier weather we’re having, the rainforest is stressed and so are the tree kangaroos,” Karen explains. “More and more we’re getting tree kangaroos coming in with central blindness and optic nerve damage, which may A tree kangaroo recovering in the outdoor be caused by increased toxins enclosure on Karen’s property in the rainforest leaves due to a lack of water.”

It’s just a theory at this stage, but their four resident tree roos.

“T hey ’re ver y i ntel l igent a nd Karen is working closely with pathologists at Charles Sturt University to quite cheeky animals so it’s nice to document and study the eye damage share that with our guests and edufrom eye tissue samples taken from cate people about the species,” says deceased tree kangaroos, and is Alana, who is involved in their daily hopeful of finding answers. care and training. “Guests get to She also works closely with Dream- give them a scratch or feed them world Wildlife Foundation’s wildlife the plants and f lowers that they super visor, Alana Legge, to help love, along with some treats such as rehome tree roos once they have chickpeas.” been rehabilitated, but are unable to Yet despite the attempts at public return to the wild, often because of education, Alana says that not a day permanent blindness. goes by without visitors scratching Dreamworld, on the Gold Coast, is their heads in puzzlement at the one of the few zoo environments in sight of the tree kangaroos – listed Australia where visitors can observe as near-threatened by the Nature Lumholtz’s tree kangaroos, and the Conservation Act. “We’ve had them only one in the world that offers an for five years at Dreamworld and we interactive experience with one of still hear the same question every

28

April 2020

Tree Kangaroo Mum day: what are they and where do they come from?”

UNFORTUNATELY, for those that

prefer to see animals in their natural habitat, the Lumholtz’s tree kangaroo is notoriously difficult to spot in the wild.

However, sightings are almost guaranteed at the Nerada Tea Estate at Malanda, not far from Karen’s property, where you can sip on a steaming brew of farm-fresh tea in the onsite café while watching a family of resident tree kangaroos deftly climbing the trees that fringe the tea plantation outside. “We’ve had tree kangaroos on the Nerada Tea Estate for a long time and some of the females have successfully produced quite a few young,” says plantation manager, Tony Poyner.

“Depending on where they are in the trees, you can sometimes see l it t le joe y s pop out of t he mum’s pouch, jump around on the

branches and have a great time.

They’re typical little kids and teenagers. They run up and down the trees and chase each other and it’s really quite special to see.”

Recently, Nerada Tea sponsored the construction of two new enclosures at Karen’s Tree Roo Rescue and Conservation Centre to help accommodate the growing number of rescues resulting from blindness and loss of habitat.

But despite the challenges facing the species, Karen remains an optimist.

“I think that every single person can do something to help our wildlife, regardless of what species it is,” she says, swinging a hefty male tree roo onto her shoulder. She turns to address him: “Hey, gorgeous! Can I pat you?

You’ve grown so big!” She looks back at me and smiles. “As for the Lumholtz’s tree kangaroo, I’d like to think we can save them, but I always say you can’t save a species if no one knows anything about them. So that’s what I’m all about, all the time.”

Technology Goes Old School Although Casio pioneered its electronic calculator in the 1950s, the abacus is still valued in Japan and often used by elderly cashiers. In fact, many Japanese believe the abacus can hone maths skills and manual dexterity, and there are several schools in the country teaching the skill. The government puts the number of learners taking advanced lessons in the abacus at 43,000. Practitioners who attain qualifications can even vie for abacus supremacy in national tournaments.

MONOCLE

29

MENTAL HEALTH

Laugh

Yourself

Smarter

Humour activates our brains and enhances our wellbeing perhaps more than anything else

BY Adam Piore

30

April 2020

E. B. White once wrote, “Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process.� That might not be true after all

31

B

y day, Ori Amir is a Amir likes to tell his audiences – mild-mannered 30-some- and occasionally his students – that thing university profes- his dream is to become a “professor. He teaches under- sional comedian and an amateur graduate psychology and neurosurgeon”. (“That way I could neuroscience classes, cut up brains for fun!”) In fact, he conducts sophisticated research into has already managed to combine how the brain functions, and keeps these seemingly unrelated passions. normal office hours on the leafy cam- Amir is one of the leading researchpus of Pomona College in Southern ers studying the way the brain creCalifornia. ates and understands humour.

But his students aren’t Unless you happen to be fooled. They’ve seen a neuroscientist who the YouTube videmoon l ig hts as a os, the ones that stand-up, that speAmir likes to tell his cialty might seem document his audiences that his not-s o -s e c r e t trivial compared other life. In one dream is to become a with other fields of them, Amir is professional comedian o f c o g n i t i o n . gripping a microBut the question and an amateur phone and standof why we f i nd neurosurgeon ing centre stage in things funny has a 1400-seat theatre fascinated philosowearing a striped rugphers for centuries. by shirt, faded blue jeans, This is a particularly exbattered construction boots and a citing time for Amir and his fellow ridiculously shaggy white fur coat. humour researchers. It has been It’s the second night of the Glendale only in the past few years that scanLaughs Comedy Festival, and Amir ning technologies, such as functional is grinning broadly at the audience magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), through his ample beard, looking have let us see how the brain works like a crazed 1.9 metre red-headed when it is processing information. It Fozzie Bear. turns out that joking, long dismissed “As you can tell by my accent, I’m by some as a frivolous diversion a neuroscientist,” says Amir. “They from the serious business of reality, tell the professors where I work to may make us smarter and healthier. dress ‘business casual’. This is the There is even some evidence that a best I can do. My wardrobe ranges sense of humour helps the human from very casual to inappropriate.” species survive.

32

April 2020

P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : M O L LY R I C H A R D S O N (P H O T O I L L U S T R AT I O N), M AT T H E W C O H E N (G L A S S E S), E R I C I S S E L E E /S H U T T E R S T O C K (O W L )

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

Laugh Yourself Smarter

PHOTO: MIQUEL GONZALES

Ori Amir takes his field of study seriously. When he’s not in the lab studying humour and the brain, he can be found performing stand-up comedy

T

o understand why humour is a kind of superfood for the brain, it helps to know what our brains crave in the first place.

You might think they’d prefer it when we sit alone in a room and stare at a blank wall – we don’t burn up much energy doing that. But the brain is like a muscle, and it needs exercise.

What gives the brain a workout? Information. When researchers asked

people to look at a series of pictures while their brains were being scanned in an fMRI machine, it was the more complex images – a work of art, a sprawling vista, a group of animals – that tickled the neurons in their heads most.

It’s the activation of those neurons – nerve cells, which, among other things, send and receive sensory information – that ‘lights up’ the

33

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

Laughter Facts Laughter has surprisingly little to do with jokes and humour: Most laughter does not come from listening to funny stories. Neuroscientist Robert Provine found that we’re 30 times more likely to laugh at something when we are talking to our friends, even if what they’re saying isn’t really funny.

In this instance, laughter helps communicate to our conversational partners that we like and empathise with them.

In other cases, we may use laughter to disguise our nervousness or to ease tension.

It’s not just the humour that makes a joke funny: People find jokes funnier when they are told by someone they know, especially if they consider that person funny. A clever cartoon seems even funnier “if

34

April 2020

there are also other variables we like, like the drawing is good, or the comedian is one we admire, or a person we don’t like is being put down,” explains Bob Mankoff, the humour and cartoon editor at Esquire.

It will not help you lose weight (sorry): While laughter has been shown to improve your health in many ways, it does not burn more kilojoules than going for a run, sadly.

Although laughing does raise a person’s energy expenditure and heart rate by about ten to 20 per cent, you would have to laugh solidly for up to three hours to burn off a bag of potato chips.

Humans aren’t the only ones who do it: Researchers in England who spent several months with captive chimpanzee colonies

found that the primates laughed all the time.

Usually, the laughter came from spontaneous reactions to physical contact, such as wrestling, chasing, tickling or just being surprised. Other researchers have found evidence that rats laugh – in a high-pitched, ultrasonic kind of way – though rat pups laugh far more often than the adults.

It’s a universal language: Laughter sounds basically the same in every culture, leading some researchers to believe that laughter and smiling somehow connected our human ancestors wherever they encountered each other. In fact, according to the University of Kentucky, the sound of laughter is so common and familiar that it can be recognised if played backwards.

Laugh Yourself Smarter f MRI scans in bright, almost psy- different ideas or elements. (To wit: chedelic colours. In fact, there is an a 1.9 metre neuroscientist in a fluffy almost drug-like effect taking place. fur coat and construction boots.)

The brain is filled with opioid re- When we first see or hear this mashceptors – yes, opioid, as in the drug. up, we’re confused. That’s the setup.

Made of specialised proteins, these The punch line is the resolution of receptors poke out of our neurons that confusion. (Oh, this is his idea like tiny radio antennas designed of business casual! Wocka-wocka.)

So in that sense, appreciating huto pick up passing signals. When mour is not unlike solving the right kind of molecule a puzzle, and it yields a bumps into a receptor similar kind of satis– perhaps one of the faction. Instead of bod y ’s nat u ra l l y an ‘aha’ moment, o c c u r r i n g o p iThe more neurons you get a ‘haha’ oids, such as an that are activated, moment. In fact, endorphin, or a more pleasure the sy nt het ic dr ug Biederman and we feel. In essence, designed to look Amir theorised like one, such as learning and problem that because humorphine – it can mour requires the solving get kick off a cascade bra i n to process us high of brain activity that lots of distinct types bathes the neurons in of information (What feel-good neurotransmitis considered appropriters and other chemicals. The more ate business attire? Is it ever OK to neurons that are activated (and the wear fur?), funny revelations would more activated they are), the more activate different and more dispapleasure we feel. In essence, learn- rate parts of the brain than unfunny ing and problem solving get us high. ones. This would excite the neurons Amir and his mentor, professor of even more, which would lead to the neuroscience and psychology Irving release of more neurotransmitters Biederman, suspected that humour and activation of the reward centres might feed the brain in much the of the brain.

To test their hypothesis, Amir and same way that complex information does. People who study humour gen- Biederman recruited 15 students erally agree that most jokes are built to view 200 simple line drawings around an incongruity – an inappro- during an fMRI scan. Each drawing priate, absurd, surprising or unusual came with two captions: an ‘obvious’ combination of two fundamentally description and an ‘interpretive’ one.

35

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

A picture with three Ts in a row, the this extra burst of brain activation at obvious caption read ‘thick T-shaped the moment we ‘get’ a joke that transjunctions’. An interpretive caption forms ‘aha’ into ‘haha’, Amir and might read ‘trumpet valves’, because Biederman concluded. What’s more, the three Ts resemble the finger but- the opioid receptors they were studying are located in the higher-level tons on a trumpet.

Some of the interpretive captions processing areas of the temporal lobes, where we store the memwere designed to be funny. On a ories and associations we drawing of two horizontal use to make sense of ovals wedged inside a the world. They also vertical one, the obhave connections vious caption read to neurons in the ‘two smaller horiIf appreciating basal ganglia, the zontal ellipses in humour is good reward centre of a larger vertical for our brains, exercise the brain. ellipse’. The inthen writing a joke “We had come t e r pr e t i v e de to think of these scription: ‘Closeis exercise perceptual systems up of a pig looking on steroids as relatively munat book titles in a dane structures meant library’. (Look at the simply to passively get us drawing below.) The subjects were asked to rate each information,” Biederman says. caption as ‘not funny’, ‘a little funny’, “But it turns out that getting new inor ‘funny’. formation is actually pleasurable.”

As expected, the interpretive capFrom there, the researchers took tions lit up more areas of the brain their analysis one step further. In a than their obvious counterparts – in follow-up study, Amir recruited peoline with the cognitive theory that ple to compose captions for a series insight in and of itself is pleasurable. of cartoons while he scanned their brains. When they T he s c a n s a l s o came up w it h a revealed that huIs this a picture of joke, the same remorous insights three ovals, or is it a gions of the brain activated the most pig looking at book that light up when regions. The funtitles on a library people appreciate nier the subjects shelf? The funnier humour were acrated a capt ion, caption activates tivated. And, as in the more neurons more of your brain. the first study, the were f ired. It is

36

April 2020

Laugh Yourself Smarter

This Is Your Brain on Humour These fMRI scans of the left and right halves of the brain show how it responds to different types of information. The yellow and orange represent greater activation than baseline brain function, while blue represents significantly lower activation than baseline. Scan A is of the brain looking at a cartoon with a nonhumorous caption. In scan B, the brain is looking at a cartoon with a humorous caption, which activates more neurons.

PHOTO: COURTESY ORI AMIR

A funnier the jokes, the more neurons fired in the jokers’ brains.

But the firing of the brain cells occurred on a different timeline, enhancing the process and making it all the more powerful. When we ‘get’ a joke, the neurons are activated in a quick burst. When we construct a joke, activity in the same brain regions increases slowly as we rack our brains for dissimilar elements that we can link. If appreciating humour is good exercise for our brains, then writing a joke is exercise on steroids.

H

umour helps our cognition in less obvious ways too. Laughter is a natural stress reliever, and our brains work better when they aren’t slowed down by a fog of worry. In 2014, researchers in California demonstrated that elderly subjects

B who watched a funny video experienced significant improvements in their ability to learn and retain new information, possibly because the feelings of mirth reduced levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that has been shown to hinder recall.

A good joke can function as a release valve for the whole body. “Humour can help reframe stressors, challenges, or difficulties that seem insurmountable to a person,” says social psychologist Tom Ford and co-author of The Psychology of Humour. “If one is able to make light of a stressor, then it doesn’t seem so big.

It seems more manageable.”

Researchers in Hong Kong, for instance, demonstrated that when nursing home patients with chronic pain enjoyed jokes, funny books, goof y singing and dancing on a

37

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

weekly basis, their perception of pain and loneliness decreased significantly. They also felt happier and more satisfied with life. Others have demonstrated that laughter can be associated with increased blood flow, improved immune response, lower blood sugar levels, and better sleep.

You don’t have to write a joke to reap

How to Be Funnier

the benefits. Merely experiencing humour will do the trick.

But there might be an even stronger reason that a sense of humour is hardwired into the human genome.

Not only does humour make us smarter and healthier, but it may also make us more attractive to the opposite sex.

Are you humour-challenged?

Do the witticisms not trickle off your tongue but clunk?

Experts share their tips on strengthening your funny bone

BY Andy Simmons

38

april 2020

Laugh Yourself Smarter

PHOTOGR APH BY MIQUEL GONZALEZ

“There’s a gigantic study,” Biederman notes, “that’s been done in 38 cultures. It turns out t hat in every culture, both males and females desire their potential mates to be bright. How do we know that someone’s intelligent?” In Western cultures, at least, it’s often by the person’s sense of humour.

Question everything Let the absurdities of everyday life be your muse. Jerry Seinfeld made his career wondering, “Why does this happen?” For example: “Why does moisture ruin leather?

Aren’t cows outside a lot of the time?”

Get the blood flowing Funny people tend to be more creative, according to brainpickings.org. To get their juices flowing, they move: “Dickens and Hugo were avid walkers during ideation; Burns often composed while ‘holding the plough’; Twain paced madly while dictating; Goethe composed on horseback; Mozart preferred the back of a carriage.”

Because creating and appreciating jokes require us to make connections between many discrete pieces of information, having a sense of humour demonstrates that we possess a wide breadth of knowledge and that we know how to think about it in novel and innovative ways.

A study of 400 university students

Don’t worry, be happy The myth of the morose comic notwithstanding, happy people are funnier, say Austrian researchers.

“Increased depression is associated with greater problems in the use of humour to cope with stressful events.”

Fortunately, humour can be contagious. The researchers also found that cheerful people tend to laugh more, which can help you feel funnier, even if you are prone to telling corny jokes such as this: Which side of a duck has the most feathers? The outside.

Make it snappy. “My building blocks are little jokes and short ideas,” says comedian Demetri Martin. Example: “The worst time to have a heart attack is during a game of charades.”

Surprises work “Lead the audience to assume one thing, then surprise them with something different,” comedy coach Jerry Corley writes on standupcomedyclinic. com. Example: “Never say anything bad about a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. By then he’s a mile away, you’ve got his shoes, and you can say whatever you want.”

Go easy on yourself If you’ve tried these tips and the room still isn’t erupting into laughter every time you open your mouth, fear not! While creating humour exercises your brain the most, simply appreciating a good joke or a funny story brings with it ample benefits for your health.

39

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

When comedy is pure gold: Charlie Chaplin’s classic The Gold Rush

Charlie Chaplin’s Good Humour Theory

found that those who scored highest on intelligence tests also scored high on humour ability – and they reported having more sex. This confirmed a wide body of literature that suggests that “humour is not just a reliable intelligence indicator ... but may be one of the most important traits for seeking human mates.”

40

april 2020

Being funny ensures that only the cleverest, fittest and most creative people procreate, helping safeguard the survival of the human race.

If a healthy sense of humour can make you smarter, sexier and happier, then one thing is clear: finding time in your day for a good joke or two is no laughing matter.

PHOTO: GET T Y IMAGES

In a 1920 prototype of Reader’s Digest, film legend Charlie Chaplin shared the surprising minimalist craft that went into his Hollywood hits. “To make an audience roar is the ambition of many actors, but I prefer to spread the laughs out. It is much better when there is a continual ripple of amusement, with one or two big ‘stomach laughs’, than when an audience ‘explodes’ every minute or two.

‘Restraint’ is a great word, not only for actors. Restraint of tempers, appetites, desires, bad habits, and so on, is a mighty good thing to cultivate.”

ONLINE FIND THESE UNIQUE READS AT

Your local RD website DIET + WEIGHTLOSS

50 unhealthy foods at the supermarket Not everything that comes in a box or bag is bad, but a lot of it is. From powdered coffee creamer to coated chocolates, nutrition experts reveal 50 unhealthy supermarket foods.

MENTAL HEALTH

How to be happy: 40+ secrets to a happier life

PHOTOS: SHUT TERS TOCK; (M AN) GE T T Y IM AGES

From owning a dog to wearing sunglasses, these tips can boost your mood – and your wellbeing.

14

PETS

COMMON ‘FACTS’ ABOUT CATS THAT ARE ACTUALLY FALSE

Most cat lovers would do anything to defend their favourite pet, but cats can still be very misunderstood.

We debunk some popular myths.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION! PLUS SIGN UP TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER FOR MORE HOT OFFERS, TOP STORIES AND PRIZES!

Adult Autism:

IN

42

april 2020

HEALTH

SIGHT Sometimes the condition is not diagnosed until well into adulthood. The news can be both a shock and a relief

BY Lisa Fields

43

44

april 2020

of his behaviour, such as insisting that things had to be in a certain place and turning off the lights in a particular order. “Very quickly, it made sense,” he says. “It was a relief.”

ABOUT AUTISM Autism is a developmental disability that impacts the way that people interact and communicate with others throughout their lifetimes. Experts are not sure what causes the condition, but people may have a genetic predisposition towards autism, which sometimes runs in families. Autism is also more common among people who have sensory processing disorders, which makes people abnormally sensitive to things that affect any of their five senses, such as loud noises.

Autism was once believed to be rare, but it is now thought to affect about one in 160 children worldwide.

Males are more likely to be diagnosed than females, although experts aren’t sure why. Some theorise that females may be less likely to inherit the condition, while others hold that autism presents differently in females, leading to underdiagnosis.

“It seems that there might be a ‘female autism phenotype’, which doesn’t fit with the profile usually associated with men and boys on which assessment tools are usually based,” says Aurélie Baranger, director of Autism-Europe, an advocacy group.

Symptoms include a wide range of disabilities, which appear early

I L LU S T R AT I O N (PR E V I O U S S PR E A D): S H U T T ER S TO C K

fter a particularly stressful day at work three years a go, en g i ne er Jo Bervoets, 51, headed home, only to discovn was noisier and er the trai more chaotic than usual.

“I was already a little bit lost in my head before I went to the train station,” says Bervoets. He had recently started a new job, and the fact that he couldn’t connect with his new colleagues had left him feeling anxious.

W hen the train pulled into his station, Ber voets headed for the shared-bike station where he usually grabbed a bicycle to pedal to his neighbourhood, but there was none available. Feeling overwhelmed, he suddenly realised that he didn’t know how to get home.

“I phoned my wife, and somehow I got home,” Bervoets says. After three months at his new job, he’d burned out. “I completely crashed, and it was black.” He says his memory is still fuzzy about what happened that day.

Too upset to return to work the next day, Bervoets consulted a psychiatrist. She decided to send him to another specialist for testing. After two months of evaluation, he received a formal diagnosis: autism.

“It was a surprise,” says Bervoets.

He and his wife, Els, did some online research and quickly realised that the diagnosis explained some

PHOTO: JOHANNES VAN ASSEM

in childhood, with diagnosis after the age of four, on average. Doctors use the term ‘autism spectrum disorder’ to encompass everyone who’s been diagnosed. At one end of the spectrum, symptoms are so severe that people who don’t get the right support are unable to communicate, and require lifelong assistance. At the other end of the spectrum, people have such subtle symptoms that they may function like anyone else (perhaps with some odd habits), and their autism may go undetected well into adulthood.

People with autism may follow strict routines and focus on their own narrow interests. But this is not true for everyone with the condition.

“I don’t think you can generalise anything with regards to autism, but many have this idea of hypersensitivity and the world being too much,” says autism researcher Kristien Hens.

“The world is too fast and they have to take more time to process the information that they receive.”

Although everyone with autism experiences the condition differently, people may have certain traits in common. Many, for example, have trouble making decisions, are confused by facial expressions, and have trouble navigating social situations.

“Many autistic people have difficulty with executive functioning,” says Baranger. “They may have trouble with certain skills such as planning, staying organised, sequencing

Engineer Diederik Weve: “Accepting it gave me a new perspective on life”

information, and self-regulating emotions. It can have a significant impact on their daily life.”

BLENDING IN Autism awareness has become more widespread this century, and greater numbers of children with subtle symptoms are now diagnosed at young ages. But decades ago, doctors rarely diagnosed people towards the subtler end of the spectrum.

“Fifty years ago, nobody would call autism what we call autism today – they would just be considered quirk y,” says Hens. “We no longer see autism as this kind of condition where children are completely locked up in themselves and have no

45

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

contact; it has become a condition with a very wide definition.”

Those who were diagnosed as adults often blended into society during childhood.

“They were able to manage daily life by learning social rules through observing others and using logic and reasoning to develop ‘scripts’ or ‘formulas,’” says psychology researcher Victoria Russ. “This method of learning social behaviour helps individuals to develop strategies to fit in.”

Autism awareness has become more widespread this century

Imitating the behaviour of their peers is often effective, says Dr Bojan Mirkovic, a psychiatrist who studies Asperger’s syndrome. But, he adds, “It involves a very large cognitive effort that may become exhausting and lead to depression.” Asperger’s is an autism condition characterised by the desire to focus conversations on specific intellectual interests.

Current practice is to phase out the

46

april 2020

diagnosis of Asperger’s in favour of autism spectrum disorder.

It can be exhausting, says Bervoets.

“You go to receptions, and you need to think about how many kisses are given, where to stand, when to make eye contact. All of these things normal people don’t have to think about, we need to think about.”

REACHING MILESTONES Many people graduate from university, have meaningful careers, get married and become parents before learning, in middle age or beyond, that they’re on the autism spectrum.

“A career which harnesses an indiv idua l’s st reng t hs, and one which creates a level of predictability, routine and structure to life, can enable someone to have a fulfilling and successful life,” Russ says.

Diederik Weve, 62, an engineer, sought a diagnosis ten years ago after friends recognised similar behaviours in a friend’s autistic child.

He received an Asperger’s diagnosis.

“The autism fitted me,” he says.

“Accepting it gave me a new perspective on life.”

Before he even knew he had it, Weve says, autism shaped his career “in a way”. He recognised that he functioned best when he was able to solve things on his own. “I always found in my career that it was best to be a specialist in a niche area so that people would come to me rather than the other way around.”

PHOTO: JOHN BENTLEY

IN THE WORKPLACE Although many autistic people find jobs that suit them, the condition is associated with underemployment.

Some people take positions beneath their abilities because they can’t handle the stress of too much responsibility or because depression, anxiety or autism-related disabilities may prove too challenging.

Peter Street, 71, was diagnosed with autism at age 64. His problems started in childhood. “I couldn’t do English, maths – couldn’t do anything in the classroom, really,” he says. “I’d end up with ink all over me, and I kept wondering why the other children could do things – simple things – and I couldn’t.”

He was held back twice during school, then dropped out at age 15. He worked as a gravedigger for years, then became a gardener and later a forester. He didn’t become literate for years. In 1982, Street was hospitalised after an accident and befriended a fellow patient, a literature teacher, who tutored him and encouraged him to write. Street has since published four volumes of poetry and a memoir.

Inability to connect meaningfully with colleagues or go with the flow may limit people’s upward mobility or earning potential, even if they’re successful professors or engineers.

A 2017 British survey of 2471 people, published in the journal Molecular

Peter Street didn't do well at school.

He is now a published author

Autism, found that autistic traits were negatively related to income.

“Although there are some roles where technical sk ills are paramount, it is hard to imagine a workplace or role for which it is not also useful to be skilled at processing social information,” says study author William Skylark, senior lecturer in psychology at Cambridge University.

Researchers have also found that autistic adults are less empathetic, which may limit their success in social or professional situations. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders studied 173 adults who were sent for autism assessments. It found that those who received an autism diagnosis tended to have lower scores on a questionnaire that measured how well someone understands others’ feelings.

Research has demonstrated that people with autism also have difficulties with understanding what one person thinks about another person’s

47

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

Were these famous people on the spectrum?

Long before autism was recognised, notable historic figures were busy contributing to maths, science, philosophy, art and literature while exhibiting autistic traits. Michael Fitzgerald, adjunct professor of psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, has studied the lives of prominent historic figures and suggested that several may have had autism.

CHARLES DARWIN was obsessed with his interests, rarely swayed from his daily routine, and reportedly had a lack of empathy.

THOMAS JEFFERSON was socially awkward, lacked empathy, had strict routines, and obsessively focused on his interests.

ISAAC NEWTON couldn’t interact with his peers, was hyperfocused on his work and couldn’t understand facial expressions or body language.

GREGOR MENDEL

followed strict daily routines, was utterly obsessed with his work

thoughts, understanding non-literal expressions and the meanings of indirect remarks or sarcasm.

Empathy is a core skill needed for social interactions; without it, people may have trouble making friends or dating. Street is glad to have met his wife of 50 years through a friend.

“Dating was an absolute nightmare for me,” Street says. “I hadn’t a clue about it.”

DIAGNOSIS Some adults, like Bervoets, are diagnosed after seeing a mental-health professional. Others seek diagnoses because they recognise autistic qualities in themselves after learning about the condition. “They can discover that they are on the autism spectrum when

48

April 2020

in the science of genetics and was socially awkward.

Their enduring achievements stand as a testament to their ability to accomplish great things despite – or perhaps because of – their condition.

their own children are being diagnosed,” Baranger says.

The news comes as a relief for many adults, who suddenly understand why they’ve always felt differently than others. “For some people,” Baranger says, “it alleviates the sense of guilt that they have experienced throughout their life, notably because they have been blamed for their behaviours since childhood.”

Bervoets’ diagnosis helped him realise that he’d rather study philosophy, a lifelong passion, than continue working as an engineer. He’s now working towards his PhD. Diagnoses may help people redefine previous experiences. “They finally manage to explain why… they have often messed up their job

Adult Autism: Hidden In Plain Sight

Autism-friendly day for shopping centres?

Kathrine Peereboom, founder and CEO of not-for-profit Spectrum Support, is a proud mother of three boys. All are non-verbal and are on the spectrum, ranging from high needs to high functioning. As such, she has a good understanding of the highs and lows of living with autism on a daily basis and is calling on shopping centres across Australia to make one day a week an autismfriendly, sensory day.

“People with autism and other disabilities find loud and chaotic environments extremely intimidating,” says Peereboom.

“A sensory day would not just benefit people with autism, but a whole range of conditions in which sensory overload is a problem,” such as ADHD, Asperger’s, epilepsy and schizophrenia. “When you add them all up, it’s a significant portion of the population that could benefit,” she says.

It wouldn’t be difficult or inconvenient for major shopping centres to agree to adopting a sensory day either. Peereboom is simply asking shopping centres to dim the li hts, turn the music down, and ligh ganise store events on another org daay. “It’s a small price to pay for what w would help a lot of people.

We W thought Tuesday would be a good day because it is not typically a shop’s busiest trading day.” Diane Godley

interviews or why they are accused of failing to express their emotions or understand jokes,” Dr Mirkovic says.

“This is an essential step towards improved wellbeing.”

Street’s belated diagnosis provided a much-needed explanation of his youth. “When I was diagnosed, I started crying happy tears,” Street says. “It made me realise that none of it was my fault.”

SOCIAL SUPPORT When children are diagnosed with autism, they may receive social support to help them fit into society more readily. Similar services may not always be available to help newly diagnosed adults.

“What follows the diagnosis is very variable depending on the impact the disorder has,” Dr Mirkovic says.

“Some will need to undertake behavioural psychotherapy to help them find compensation strategies, while others will need to work on social skills or on a career reorientation.”

Some people are set in their ways, content with the lives that they have.

Bervoets and his wife accept that the condition is, and always was, a part of their lives. “I’m a philosopher now,” Bervoets says. “I’m an engineer. I’m a father. I’m a good husband, I think. I’m a lot of things. I’m also autistic, and I’m proud to be autistic. But focusing only on autism diminishes the horizon you have on the world.”

49

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

LIFE’S LIKE THAT

Cracking a Cold One Many years ago, my husband and dad were fishing in a river while shooting the breeze and drinking beer. My husband was about to go on a beer run when he noticed a fish in the water below him. On his second cast, he snagged and reeled in what turned out to be the best fishing story

50

april 2020

they would ever share: a six-pack of beer dangled from the end of his line – five cans of which were still drinkable! SUBMIT TED BY JUDITH SPINDA

Losing It I was catching up with my mother on the phone the other day, and I told her I’d lost a lot of weight.

CARTOON: MIKE SHELL

Seeing the Funny Side

I don’t think she was paying very much attention to our conversation because she asked me, “Have you tried retracing your steps yet?”

SUBMITTED BY K AYLA JORDAN

Fast Fashion Me: I am competent and capable of planning things in advance.

Also me: Maybe I can buy something at the train station that will be appropriate to wear to this wedding.

ALEXANDRA PETRI, JOURNALIST

Grounds for Complaint A DIY expert on one of those home improvement TV shows suggested putting coffee granules into pale beige paint to give it a ‘kick’.

My bathroom wall looked great, but for weeks afterward, whenever we took a shower, the steam caused thick black coffee to run down the walls to the floor.

SUBMITTED BY GLORIA LEWIS

THE GREAT TWEET OFF: EASTER EGG EDITION Sweet tweets from the chocolate-lovers of Twitter.

EASTER TIP: Tell your kids you hid

an egg with $50 in it in the backyard but you don’t remember where.

Enjoy a quiet day indoors. @CHEESEBOY22

CHILD: “Dad, the Easter Bunny

should know that I don’t like Rolos but he puts them in my basket every year.”

ME: (eating a Rolo) Yeah, that’s weird. @SIMONCHOLLAND

Nephew just whispered something into a Cadbury Easter Bunny’s ears, then broke off its head.

I’m sleeping with the lights on. @WOODYLUVSCOFFEE

In the Way My husband’s favourite place to stand is right in front of whatever cupboard I need. @SIXFOOTCANDY

SHRINKAGE My girlfriend has started calling my hair ‘the economy’ because it’s begun showing strong signs of a recession. @REALHAMONWRY

No, sweetie, you can’t have your giant chocolate bunny for breakfast, that’s not healthy and also Mummy ate it for dinner last night. @LURKATHOMEMOM

My eight year old said that he hopes the Easter Egg Hunt is more of a challenge this year so I’m buying a bunch of mouse traps. @BRIANHOPECOMEDY

I don’t like who I become when Easter chocolate is 75% off. @THECATWHISPRER

51

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

FOOD ON YOUR PLATE

I Am Walnuts ...

A Great Food for Thought

BY Kate Lowenstein AND Daniel Gritzer

52

april 2020

I

PHOTO: SPA XIA X/SHUT TERS TOCK

I Am the

n the 16th century, a harebrained health theory circulated widely among doctors in Europe: foods that resembled body parts, they believed, were especially beneficial for the health of those parts. A firefly for night vision, red coral to help with your blood, and little old me for the most important organ of all, the powerful human brain.

It’s true that even the most unobser vant of humans couldn’t miss the resemblance, with my meat y folded hemispheres tucked into a protective, skull-like shell. And in the end, misguided as their theory proved to be, those scientists got lucky about me. My plent i f u l polyand monounsaturated fats, along with my enviably high level of omega-3s (I’m the only nut with significant amounts of them), really are essential for cognitive health.

For the record, I’m also a star when it comes to your digestion, given that I’m high in fibre. But humans fell in love with me before science gave me such serious health-food cred. My sweet, quintessentially nutty f lavour and delicate texture long ago found me a place among your most delicious comfort foods, dotting your biscuits and cakes, strewn atop sundaes, nestled in brittle or chocolate, and toasted in butter and coated with sugar and spices. I’m no stranger to

savoury indulgences, either, whether puréed into soups and pestos or sprinkled on fresh salads. My light, buttery crunch (which is all the more delightful if you toast me until I’m fragrant) allows me to add just enough texture to a dish to make it interesting without creating a strain on your jaw. You can’t say that about almonds!

Speaking of my more popular (but some might say less fabulous) colleague, you may be interested to know that neither of us are botanically nuts at all – nor are pistachios or cashews, for that matter. A nut features a seed sealed inside a hard outer shell with no flesh on the outside. Think acorns, chestnuts and hazelnuts.

However, if you were to pick me off the tree instead of off the store shelf, you’d see I am the pit inside the green, fleshy layer of my fruit. And the soft stuff you eat is actually the seed inside that pit. If you’ve ever cracked open a peach pit and found an almond-shaped seed inside, you’ll know what I’m getting at.

As tough as my shell can get, delicate oils found within the lobes can go rancid fairly easily. If I’m bitter or lingeringly musty, then we’d best go our separate ways. If you’re not going to eat me right away, put me in the fridge or even in the freezer in a well-sealed, airtight bag.

If you pick my fruit early, before the pit has fully hardened, you can do rather unexpected things. In Britain they pickle me, brining me whole in salt water and preserving me in a brown-sugar-and-spice syrup. With that I become delicate and soft; you can slice clean through me and see the seed, the proto-shell, and the rim of fruit flesh. But what’s really fascinating is the colour of a pickled walnut: black. That’s because my clear, milky juice turns dark when it’s exposed to air.

Young walnut fruit prov ide t hat sa me inky colour to nocino, the Italian after-dinner drink made by m ac er at i ng me i n high-proof liquor with sugar and spices. In ancient Rome t hey would combine my tinted sap with leeches, ashes and charred things to make dark hair dye. My juice was also used to make walnut ink, which Rembrandt, Leonardo and Rubens are said to have used for some of their sketches.

The Encyclopedia of Hair will tell you that in 17th-century England, the oil expressed from my seed was used as a depilatory, thinning the eyebrows and hairlines of women when that look was in fashion. Now, inexplicably, walnut oil is touted as a baldness cure. Suffice it to say you might be better off not using

“I’M ALSO A STAR WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR DIGESTION, GIVEN THAT I’M HIGH IN FIBRE”

53

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

Kate Lowenstein is a health editor currently at Vice; Daniel Gritzer is the culinary director of the cooking site Serious Eats.

SPICEDD WALNUUTS In a small bowl, her stir togeth gar, ½ cup sug ons 2 teaspoo coarse sallt, on g ground cinnamon, ¾ teaspoo ⅛ teaspoon ground ginger, and one large pinch each of freshly grated nutmeg and ground cloves.

In a separate medium bowl, whisk 1 large egg white until lightly foamy. Whisk in dry ingredients along with ½ teaspoon vanilla extract until a smooth batter forms.

Using a rubber spatula, fold in 4 cups shelled walnut halves (about 500 grams) until evenly coated.

Spread glazed walnuts in a single even layer on a tray lined with baking paper and bake at 150°C until nuts are lightly toasted, around 25 minutes. Let cool, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. Break up any remaining clumps, then serve.

Outfoxed!

The UK Parliament witnessed a scene of even more cunning than usual in February after a fox snuck past high-vis-clad police officers. The crafty critter climbed an escalator onto the fourth floor of Portcullis House where MPs’ offices are located, before it was eventually caught and removed in a box. SKY NEWS

54

april 2020

PH OTO: M AT T H E W CO H EN

me for hair-related purposes. But you humans have found countless other applications for me, including employing my shells as an abrasive cleaning agent, used to this day.

This was not always a good idea: in 1982, a US Army Chinook helicopter crashed because of g r it t y wa lnut-shell residue that had blocked the oil jets lubricating the copter’s transmission.

My favourite inedible function, though, is as an investment vehicle and status sy mbol. The Chinese regard the finest examples of me the way you might regard jewels or fancy pottery. I can fetch wild sums of money in Asia, where swirling a pair of me in your palm is said to stimulate blood circulation. Matching sets can go for more than $30,000 – the larger, older and of better shape I am, the more I’m worth. Think of that the next time you pop a handful of me into your mouth as a snack.

THAT’S OUTRAGEOUS!

BY Nathaniel Basen

WHAT A STEAL In July 2018, three men entered the San Antonio aquarium in Texas with a baby stroller. They left with a new passenger: a 40-centimetre horn shark named Miss Helen. The men, led by 38-year-old Anthony Shannon, walked towards a pond before scooping up the animal and placing it into the stroller.

Police used security footage to trace their car, catching up soon after at a house. That’s where they found Miss Helen swimming in a professional-level aquarium. The shark is valuable, but it appears Shannon was simply an avid collector. He was charged with felony theft.

I L LU S T R AT I O N: PI ER R E LO R A N G ER

TUBER TRANSGRESSIONS Jordan Lewis of Jackson, Mississippi, woke up on an April morning, walked to her car and found a surprise: a styrofoam bowl on top of its roof. Inside, a helping of creamy potatoes. She posted her tale to social media, and about a dozen strangers mentioned they’d also received surprise spuds.

Theories abounded, from a prank to a sinister animal-poisoning ploy. The dish had been served in the school cafeteria the previous day, but it didn’t look quite the same – Lewis’s gift more closely resembled potato salad. Lewis has accepted a simple answer: “Weird things happen here,” she says. No need, it seems, to hash it out further.

CRIME SUCKS A man was housesitting for his nephew when he heard troubling noises coming from the bathroom. He called emergency and three police officers, a detective and two canine officers were dispatched to the house near Portland, Oregon. The officers approached, rifles ready, and announced their presence. To their surprise, they didn’t find a lurking criminal. Instead, the home’s robotic vacuum had become confused and was banging itself against the wall. Everyone there was relieved, if a little embarrassed.

The upside: the bathroom tiles were spotless.

55

METRONOM

The People You Meet on 56

April 2020

ART OF LIVING

Train travel can be strange: it’s a hotbed of personality types you get to rub shoulders with on a daily basis.

I L LU S T R AT I O N: G E T T Y I M AG E S

BY Vanya Lochan

ICS

the Train

I

f you’re like me, whose life moves along the wheels of a train or metro-line, you would know the reason why I’m telling you this.

Travelling by train is easy on the pocket, usually saves you the trouble of being stuck in traffic, and if you are a people-watcher (or even if you aren’t), you are bound to run into all kinds of personality types.

W hile it’s usually t he seat-offering-good-Samaritan I hope to encounter, the co-travellers I prefer not to meet I’ve curated into a list after 1280 days and 1500 hours of travelling to work by rail.

Read this and spot them on your next ride, dear commuter, and make a mundane trip a lot more fun by

57

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

play ing ‘met ronomics’. Because sometimes you just have to see the humour in it all.

1 The Opportunist Equipped with the keenest set of eyes and the sprightliest set of Hermes’s sandals (no, not the brand, I mean the winged sandals that f lew the Greek god as swiftly as a bird), the opportunist can make even the most athletic sprinter nervous. Standing slyly in the corner, they have their eyes everywhere – closing of books, dismembering of earphones, locking and putting away of phones – they are watching and listening.

And in the blink of an eye, they are found victoriously perched upon the just-vacated seat.

2 The DJ/Soloist I mean, who doesn’t want to listen to other people’s music, right? However, what’s more interesting than listening to other’s music is listening to them crooning along while they are lost in the sound of the music on their earphones. Writer’s advice: run!

3 The Seat-Offering-

Samaritan

The train can seem nothing less than a jungle – people hunching hungrily for the next empty seat or staring endlessly, as if gauging the degree of threat you might pose, but that does not mean that kindness is dead. Big love to people who actually look out

58

April 2020

for senior co-passengers, pregnant gentlewomen, or those with weary shoulders, tired eyes, heavy-looking baggage, or maybe a child and, smiling, offer their laboriously acquired seat to them.

4 The Elbow Charger Beware of these people! All eyes on the door, they strategically stand in the centre of the train to land the first empty seat. Blinkers on, they clutch their handbags or fold their arms in a perpendicular fashion, literally elbowing their way into the train and onto the nearest seat. The trick in avoiding them is to spot them on the platform before the train arrives and secure your place exactly behind them – never ahead, and definitely never on the side.

5 The Loudspeaker If you are into eavesdropping, the animated commuters attached to their phones could be your pals.

However, if you don’t want to know why x-friend has been stealing their university notes, or how y-friend will not be able to meet them because he got sick after a night out, once again: scram!

6 The Video Freeloader If you are not new to having people watch your Netflix program over your shoulder, you may be tolerant of this one. Imagine this – you are watching the latest episode of Brooklyn

Metronomics Nine-Nine and suddenly you hear a sigh followed by a ‘wow!’ Who could that be? You check your earphones; snugly plugged in. You look left; nah, she is busy texting. You look right; bingo! A curious set of eyes are glued to your phone/tablet reading the subtitles and laughing along! What to do, you ask? Try sharing a few giggles and tell us how that went.

7 The Prohibitor Have you ever strategically planned your entry so that you managed to nudge The Elbow Charger, stepped away from the Loudspeaker, followed

The Opportunist to grab a similar opportunity, but just as you were about to lay your glorious hindquarters onto the seat, you were blocked by someone prohibiting you from sitting because they were saving that seat for their friend?

Beware, The Prohibitor is t he crusher of your derriere dreams.

She/he is hard to identify if you are not paying close attention. How do you spot them? Notice two or three passengers close together giggling, chatting or just nodding at each other and KNOW that they are going to want to sit together.

Quite a Mouthful An American dentist who holds the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of toothpaste tubes has announced his collection has grown to about 3000 tubes. Dr Val Kolpakov of Peach State Dentistry in Alpharetta, Georgia, said his toothpaste collection began when he was trying for a very different Guinness record – the largest collection of pulled teeth. “When I started my dental career, I was pulling hundreds of teeth, then I remembered there was a Guinness record for number of teeth pulled,” he told the media. Kolapakov said he still has his collection of hundreds of extracted teeth, but he ended up finding information on toothpaste collecting instead and decided to change his focus.

He was first awarded the record in 2012, when his collection stood at 2037 different tubes. “My patients are pretty excited when I show them some unusual flavours that I have,” he says. “And if they travel to certain countries, they bring me toothpaste from there.” UPI When my kids assure me they will clean up their mess, I know how my dentist must feel when I assure him I will floss. @PARENTNORMAL

59

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

60

April 2020

SEE Turn THEtheWORLD... page ››

61

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

...DIFFERENTLY

As if Paris, France, wasn’t vibrant enough already, over several months of 2019 Rue Crémieux in the Le Village Royal open-air shopping passage was brought to life with a stunning art installation consisting of 800 colourful suspended umbrellas.

Entitled ‘Umbrella Sky Project’, it was born in Portugal in 2011 by Portuguese artist Patricia Cunha, where it first appeared as part of the famous annual Agitagueda Art Festival.

Since then, the project has brightened the streets of several cities around the world, including Tokyo and Seoul. A stunning colourful display that also protects pedestrians from the sun and rain? That’s our kind of artwork!

P H O T O S : C H E S N O T/G E T T Y I M A G E S

62

april 2020

63

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

LAUGHTER The Best Medicine

Choose Wisely GENIE: What is your first wish?

JOE: I want to be rich.

GENIE: Granted. And what is your

second wish?

RICH: I want lots of money.

@fro_vo

Bite of the Apple The CEO of a large corporation was giving advice to a junior executive. “I was young, married and out of work,” he lectured. “I took the last five cents I had and bought an apple. I polished it

64

april 2020

and sold it for ten cents. The next day I bought two apples, polished them, and sold them for ten cents each.”

“I see,” said the junior executive.

“You reinvested your money and grew a big business.”

“No,” said the CEO. “Then my wife’s father died and left me a fortune.” jewel993.com

Never Say Never Never answer an anonymous letter.

YOGI BERR A, BASEBALL PL AYER

CARTOON: MIKE SHAPIRO

“The WiFi password is: ‘buysomethingorgetout’.”

Laughter

Finding the Right Fit A husband and wife who own a circus walk into an adoption agency looking to adopt a child.

“Are you sure the circus is the best place for a child?” asks the social worker. “I mean, all those dangerous animals, the constant travelling ...”

“The animals are trained,” says the wife. “And we have a state-ofthe-art 16-metre motorhome that is equipped with a large nursery.”

“How will you educate your child?”

“We’ve arranged for a fulltime tutor to teach all the regular subjects, as well as Mandarin and computer programming,” explains the husband.

“And the nanny is certified in paediatric care, child welfare and nutrition,” the wife adds.

The social worker is impressed.

“Well, you do seem perfect. What age were you looking to adopt?”

The husband says, “It doesn’t really matter, as long as they fit in the cannon.”

Planet Proctor

BEST BEFORE After a man spent a year eating foods past their expiration dates – including mouldy butter – to prove that those dates are arbitrary, The Week asked its readers to think of titles for an outdated-foods cookbook.

Here are the most appetising:

Green Eggs and Ham and Cheese and Salami Eat. Pray. Live?

Pasta Its Prima Gone Appétit Mouldies but Goodies Baking Bad Better Ate Than Never The Stale-eo Diet

BUUNNY FUN Q: How do you know the Easter Bunny is really smart?

A: Because he’s an egghead.

Q: Why couldn’t the rabbit fly home for Easter?

A: He didn’t have the hare fare.

65

HEALTH

8 Truths

Kilojoules A key element in weight management is understanding your metabolism – the body’s way of getting the energy it needs from food

BY Julia Belluz F R O M V O X

66

April 2020

I L LU S T R AT I O N: G E T T Y I M AG E S

About How We Burn

67

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

1

YOUR METABOLISM IS IN EVERY CELL IN YOUR BODY

A lot of people talk about their metabolism as if it’s a muscle or organ they can somehow control. But in reality, the term refers to a series of chemical processes in each cell that turn the kilojoules you eat into fuel to keep you alive. “It’s the culmination of different tissues with different needs and how many kilojoules it takes to keep them functioning,” says Dr Michael D. Jensen, a physician-scientist who studies obesity and metabolism.

The body’s major organs – the brain, liver, kidneys and heart – account for over half of the energy burned at rest, while fat, the digestive system and especially the body’s muscles account for the remainder.

2

MOST OF THE ENERGY YOU BURN IS FROM YOUR RESTING METABOLISM

There are three main ways you burn energy: a) the basal metabolism, which is the energy used for your body’s basic functioning while at rest; b) the energy used to break down food, also known as the thermic effect of food; and c) the energy used in physical activity. One very underappreciated fact about the body is that your resting metabolism accounts for a huge amount of the total kilojoules you burn each day. Physical activity, on the other hand, accounts for a tiny

68

April 2020

part of your total energy expenditure – about ten to 30 per cent (unless you’re a professional athlete or have a highly physically demanding job). Digesting food accounts for about ten per cent.

“It’s generally accepted that for most people, the basal metabolic rate accounts for 60 to 80 per cent of total energy expenditure,” says neuroscientist and obesity researcher Alexxai Kravitz.

“This is why it’s not so surprising that exercise leads to [statistically] significant, but small, changes in weight,” Kravitz adds. “It’s not nothing, but it’s not nearly equal to food intake.”

3

METABOLISM CAN VARY A LOT BETWEEN PEOPLE, AND RESEARCHERS DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY

It’s true that two people with the same size and body composition can have different metabolic rates.

One can consume a huge meal and gain no weight, while the other has to count kilojoules.

But why this is remains a ‘black box’, says professor of physiolog y Will Wong. “We don’t understand the mechanism that controls a person’s metabolic rate.”

Researchers have been able to find some predictors of how fast a person’s metabolism will be. These include: the amount of lean muscle and fat tissue in the body, age and genetics (though researchers don’t know

Eight Truths About How We Burn Kilojoules why some families have higher or lower metabolic rates). Gender also matters, since women with any given body composition and age burn fewer kilojoules than comparable men.

You can’t easily measure your resting metabolic rate in a precise way. There are some commercially available tests, but the best measu rement s c ome f rom re s ea rc h studies that use expensive equipment. However, you can get a rough estimate of your resting metabolic rate by plugging some basic variables into online calculators, such as age, height and weight. These will tell you how many kilojoules you’re expected to burn each day, and if you eat that many and your weight stays the same, it’s probably correct.

4

ANOTHER THING THAT SLOWS DOWN THE METABOLISM: GETTING OLDER

The effect happens gradually, even if you have the same amount of fat and muscle tissue. So if you’re 60, you’ll burn fewer kilojoules at rest than you did when you were 20.

Dr Jensen says t his cont inua l decline starts in young adulthood – and why this happens is another metabolism question researchers haven’t answered. “Why do your energy needs go down as you age, even if you keep everything else pretty much the same? That’s one of the bigger mysteries.”

5

YOU CAN’T REALLY SPEED UP YOUR METABOLISM FOR WEIGHT LOSS

There’s a lot of hype around ‘speeding up your metabolism’ and losing weight by exercising more to build muscle, eating different foods or taking supplements. But it’s a myth.

While there are certain foods – like coffee, chilli and other spices – that may increase the basal metabolic rate just a little, Dr Jensen says the change is so negligible and short-lived, it would never have an impact on your waistline.

Building more muscles, however, can be more helpful. Here’s why: one of the variables that affects your resting metabolic rate is the amount of lean body mass you have. At any given weight, the more muscle on your body, the higher your metabolic rate. That’s because muscle uses a lot more energy than fat while at rest.

So the logic is, if you can build up your muscle, you’ll have a higher resting metabolism and will burn the fuel in your body more quickly. But there’s a caveat.

According to professor of medicine Michael Rosenbaum, who studies weight loss and metabolism: “If you have more muscle, it burns fuel more rapidly. But that’s only half the question.” If you do gain more muscle and effectively speed up your metabolism, “You have to fight the natural tendency to [want to] eat more as a

69

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

result of your higher metabolism.”

Dr Jensen also notes that it’s difficult for people to sustain the workouts required to keep the muscle mass they gained. “For most, it’s kind of impractical,” he adds.

Overall, he says, “There’s not any part of the resting metabolism that you have a huge amount of control over.”

6

DIETING CAN SLOW DOWN YOUR METABOLISM

While it’s extremely hard to speed up the metabolic rate, researchers have found there are things that can slow it down – like drastic weight-loss. “[Crash diets] probably have the biggest effect on resting metabolism,” says Dr Jensen. But not in a good way.

For years, researchers have been documenting a phenomenon called ‘metabolic adaptation’. As people lose weight, their basal metabolic rate actually slows down to a greater degree than would be expected from the weight loss. To be clear, it makes sense that losing weight will slow down metabolism. Slimming dow n generally involves muscle loss, which, in turn, means the body doesn’t have to work as hard to keep running. But the slowdown after weight loss, researchers have found, often appears to be substantially greater than makes sense for a person’s new weight.

Neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt, author of the book Why Diets Make

70

April 2020

Us Fat, believes this may be the body’s way of vigorously defending a certain weight range, called the set point.

Once you gain weight and keep the weight on for a period of time, the body can get used to its new, larger size. When that weight drops, a bunch of subtle changes kick in – to the hormone levels, the brain – slowing the resting metabolism and having the effect of increasing hunger and decreasing satiety from food, all in a seeming conspiracy to get the body back up to that set point of weight.

“I don’t think most people appreciate how big these metabolic changes can be when they lose a lot of weight,” Aamodt says. “Weight gain and loss are not symmetrical: the body fights much more strongly to keep weight from dropping than it does to keep weight from increasing.”

7

RESEARCHERS DON’T FULLY UNDERSTAND WHY THIS METABOLIC SLOWDOWN HAPPENS

There are some interesting hypotheses, however. One of the most persistent is an evolutionary explanation.

“Over hundreds of millennia, we evolved in an environment where we had to confront frequent periods of undernutrition,” Professor Rosenbaum says. “So you would predict that human DNA would be full of genes that favour the storage of extra kilojoules as fat. That ability would to some extent increase our ability

Eight Truths About How We Burn Kilojoules to survive during periods of undernutrition and increase our ability to reproduce – genetic survival.”

Today, the thinking goes, this inability to lose weight is our body defending against periods of undernutrition, even though those are now much rarer.

But not all researchers agree with this so-called ‘thrifty gene’ hypothesis. As epigeneticist John Speakman wrote in a 2013 Annual Review of Nutrition analysis, one issue with the hypothesis is that not everybody in modern society is overweight.

And, Professor Rosenbaum adds, “The evolution of our genetic predisposition to store fat is complex. It involves a frequently changing environment, interactions of specific genes with that environment, and even interactions between genes.” This interplay of factors is still a mystery.

A SLOWER METABOLISM DOESN’T MEAN KEEPING WEIGHT OFF IS FUTILE

8

In trials, “15 per cent of people, on average, manage to lose ten per cent of their weight or more and keep it off,”

Professor Rosenbaum says. So weight loss is possible.

For any would-be weight loser, he says the key is finding lifestyle changes you can stick to over a long period of time.

He points to the National Weight Control Registry, a study that has a na lysed t he t ra its, habits a nd behaviours of adults who have lost at least 13 kilograms and kept it off for a minimum of one year – as an example of how they do that. The people who have had success in losing weight have a few things in common: they weigh themselves at least once a week. They exercise regularly at varying degrees of intensity, with the most common exercise being walking. They restrict their kilojoule intake, stay away from high-fat foods and watch their portion sizes. They also tend to eat breakfast.

But there’s a tonne of diversity as to what makes up their meals. (So there is no ‘best’ diet or fad diet that did the trick.) And they count kilojoules.

“They made huge changes to their diet and exercise plans to keep it off,” he says. “It’s hard.” © 2018, JULIA BELLUZ. FROM VOX (SEPTEMBER 4, 2018), VOX.COM

Marriage Saviour To the great relief of an errant husband, Birmingham police dog Odin was able to sniff out a missing wedding ring after its owner had tossed it away following a row with his wife. SKY NEWS

71

WORD SLEUTH

10 Terms Every CrimeFiction Fan Should Know

72

april 2020

LANGUAGE

The crime-fiction vocabulary can be as exciting as the stories themselves

I L LU S T R AT I O N S: G E T T Y I M AG E S

BY Saptak Choudhury

Very few things can outmatch the thrill of a bone-chilling, coldblooded murder mystery, especially on a rainy evening. We dig into the best of crime and detective fiction and unravel vocabulary that brings alive twisted plots and tropes – and help readers understand whodunnit and how.

Crime Fiction vs Detective Fiction CRIME FICTION: A broad overarching genre, it is used to describe any work of fiction that details an act of a crime being committed.

It does not necessa r i ly requ i re the presence of a detective for its

execution – it may even be a fictional autobiography of criminals and their thrilling escapades.

DETECTIVE FICTION: This is a narrower categor y w it h a strong focus on detectives. Irrespective of whether they have been thrust into the role accidentally or not, the detective is expected to expose the guilt y part y and their evil machinations by the end.

ALIBI: A ny piece of circumstant ia l, test i mon ia l e v idenc e or a plot development that directly or accidentally ‘proves’ a particular person was elsewhere at the time of t he crime. Of ten, t he culprits are shown to depend on testimonies of the cast to vindicate their innocence, while t he detect ives must break them down. Think of a culprit who moves the hands of all the clocks in a house to falsif y

73

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

the time of death, or someone who stores a cor pse in a f reezer and then ‘discovers’ it at a convenient time – estimating the time of death by checking for rigor mortis will be inaccurate and provide the perpetrator an alibi.

TRICK: Suppose a group of people see a person plu m met to deat h from the seventh f loor of a highrise building, but they see no one else on t he balcony. Adding t wo and t wo toget her, t hey conclude that the person committed suicide.

However, they may have failed to notice the wily trick or setup the real culprit used to disg uise t he murder as a suicide. A trick, then, is a craft y, elaborate mechanism that allows a criminal to commit their deeds while fooling investigators and witnesses alike.

RED HERRING: The criminal understands that the detective is closing i n on t hem. T hei r escape pla ns have long failed, and t he façade cannot be maintained any longer.

As a last resort, they hit upon the devious plan of leaving false, misleading hints that w ill implicate innocent members of the cast, and allow themselves to make a getaway. These false clues or hints are red herrings.

Funnily enough, if an over-perceptive detective misinterprets a clue and is led to a wrong solution

74

april 2020

without the culprit’s interference, it can also qualify as a red herring.

DYING MESSAGE: A pa r t ic u la rly favou r ite t rope a mong my ster y aut hors, t h is ca n ta ke d i f ferent for m s: a sc raw l on t he f loor, a bloodied piece of paper w ith letter s/c odes, or t he d i rec t ion i n which their fingers point.

D y i ng messages of fer va r ious plot possibilities: a murderer may decide to alter the message if they spot it, the investigators may misinterpret it, or a character may decide not to reveal the meaning of the message, even if they realise it.

FALSE/FAKE SOLUTION: T his is a scenar io where detect ives show off their knowledge by presenting d if ferent solut ions to t he cr ime

Word Sleuth for the readers and the characters – usually all variations except the correct one. W hile this is usually a humorous trope, in special circumstances, this can be cleverly used by a private eye to lull t he criminal into a false sense of security, leading them to make a mistake, leaving damning evidence.

IMPOSSIBLE CRIME: This is an oxymoron really, since a crime once c om m it ted i s c lea rl y pos sible.

Yet, it is used to describe an outré crime that, at first glance, seems absolutely impossible. Think of a theft at a bank vault with the latest foolproof anti-burglary traps or a train-jacking where a compartment disappears between two stations.

LOCKED ROOM: I f a n aut hor decides to have a character killed in a room w it h all t he entr y points closed, know then that they have be en s ac r i f ic e d at t he a lt a r of one of the most f iendish literar y dev ices ever invented. A lockedroom scenario (in other words, a hermetically-sealed chamber) is a sinister situation in which a crime i s successf u l l y com m it ted at a scene with absolutely no means of entry or egress.

The size and scale of the locked room may var y – it could even be an island cut off from the outside world, where it’s evident that only one of the occupants could have

committed the crime. Devising a successful locked-room stratagem requires special care, inspired imagination and special attention to detail. No wonder this device has a place of pride among t he best crime fiction.

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR: Aut hors bestow unique powers to this figure – they may distort facts, hide details or manipulate events subtly while maintaining the façade of being an impartial chronicler of what eventually transpires.

RULE NO. 1: Never t rust a narrator unless you want to be nastily shocked later. This trope is rarely used w ith transparency. Hints about t he unreliable nature of a narrator, usually presented in the first person, can appear as impercept ible revelat ions about t heir state of mind, the words they may have spoken or even mannerisms, behavioural itches and character traits.

A great example of this is Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story In a Bamboo Grove (one of the inspirations behind Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon) where witnesses provide equally sincere, but contradictory, first-hand accounts of a murder – later dubbed the Rashomon effect.

Akutagawa’s story lets readers decide for themselves the authenticity of the incident.

75

76

april 2020

PHOTO FEATURE

Man or animal, sometimes there are simply too many of us

BY Cornelia Kumfert

PHOTO: TRINITY MIRROR/ M I R R O R P I X /A L A M Y S T O C K P H O T O

77

 Elton John, Queen, U2, Phil Collins, David Bowie – the number of top music stars who took to the stage at the Live Aid concert in 1985 was huge.

But it was nothing compared to the massive number of people in the audience. In London’s Wembley Stadium alone 70,000 people attended what at the time was the biggest rock festival ever held. An astonishing 1.5 billion people around the world watched the spectacle on their TVs. The organisers hoped to raise $30 million for aid in Africa.

The final figure, however, turned out to be more than $150 million.  Sardines travel the world’s oceans in gigantic shoals measuring up to 15 kilometres long and one-and-a-half kilometres wide. Moving in such massive groups helps protect them from predators such as tuna and mackerel, but sharks aren’t so easily deceived. They simply swim through the shoal with their jaws open, ingesting anything that comes into their mouths. Bangladeshis go to great lengths to celebrate Eid al-Fitr – the Muslim festival marking the end of fasting – with their families. More people descend on the railway stations than the trains can hold, leaving many sitting on their roofs.

78

April 2020

Tight Spaces

P H O T O S: (S A R D I N E S) G E T T Y I M AG E S/S T O C K T R E K I M AG E S; ( T R A I N ) R E H M A N A S A D/ B A R C R O F T M E D I A V I A G E T T Y I M A G E S

79

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

 Anyone wanting to climb the summit of one of the world’s highest mountains will more than likely be slowed by some congestion first. Ever more people travel to Nepal to climb Mount Everest. However, accomplishing this dangerous feat is only possible between extreme weather conditions, mostly between May and June, which means there is frequent congestion at bottlenecks, and sometimes queues of more than 200 people waiting to get through.  Santorini, Greece’s most popular island, is characterised by its clusters of white-washed houses, some of which are partially dug into the volcanic rock while others teeter precariously on the edge of cliffs or plunge higgledypiggledy down the cliffsides. With the island hugely popular among tourists, locals are pushing authorities to deal with the huge influxes of daytrippers who clog up the already tight spaces.  Female squirrels often have five young in a litter, which makes for a tight squeeze in the drey [squirrel nest]. That’s surely what these four squirrels were thinking when they all decided to take a peek at the outside world. Luckily for them, the fifth sibling was napping.

80

April 2020

Tight Spaces

P H O T O S : ( M O U N T E V E R E S T ) R O B E R T H A R D I N G /A L A M Y S T O C K P H O T O ; ( S Q U I R R E L S ) H I R O S H I T A K E D A /A C T I O N P R E S S ; ( S A N T O R I N I ) G E T T Y I M A G E S

Food is precious, says food-waste campaigner Selina Juul

82

April 2020

PROFILE

LET’S STOP WASTING FOOD PHOTO; ANDREAS MIKKEL HANSEN

Growing up in Soviet Russia taught Selina Juul never to take food for granted. Today, she heads a fast-growing movement to eliminate food waste from society

O

BY Tim Hulse

ctober 2019. Selina Juul is sitting in the third row of the auditorium at Copenhagen’s Tivoli Congress Hall when former American Vice President Al Gore enters the sweeping, curved stage. He is here to give a keynote address on the climate crisis. Thanks to his years of environmental campaigning, Gore is introduced as a “global climate superstar”. “This is our generation’s life or death battle,” he says. There

83

are only three queswasting their money tions left to discuss: and they’re wasting “Mu s t w e c h a n ge? resources. Today, alCan we change? Will most one billion peowe change?” ple on this planet are Fo r Ju u l , G o r e ’s going hungry, and at words have particular the same time there significance. Fourteen is enough food lost or years ago, his docuwasted that could feed mentar y, An Incontwo billion.” venient Truth, changed Juul cuts a striking her life and inspired f ig u re, d ressed a l l her, in her own way, in black, with platito tr y to change the num-blonde hair. As world. she talks, her arms Before Gore’s speech wave around, fingers she had an opportunisplayed, as if miming A selfie with Al Gore, who ty to tell him this and the importance and inspired Juul’s campaign to explain how she has urgency of her cause. founded a movement, Stop Spild Af “If we can solve this, it will be one Mad (Stop Wasting Food), which has of the keys to achieving world peace,” had a huge impact in Denmark. Their she says. “If every child, woman and meeting is reported on Denmark’s man has enough to eat, many of the evening TV bulletins: Russian-born world’s conflicts will cease.”

Juul is a national figure in her adopted country, and what she says and ince Juu l lau nched Stop does makes news.

Wasting Food in 2008, it’s “It was a great honour to meet est imated t hat Denmark him,” says Juul, proudly displaying has cut its food waste by the selfie on her phone. She’s a warm, more than a quarter, and Juul can empathetic character, who favours a take much of the credit. It’s fair to hug over a handshake and who talks say that her cause is pretty much her articulately and passionately about life, and today is just another day in a the subject closest to her heart. typically hectic week that began with Her ambition is that wasting food a speech at a school in Jutland – four will one day be seen to be as socially hours west of Copenhagen. unacceptable as smoking indoors.

It will also include time spent “Seeing people wasting food makes planning a trip to the Vatican, where me ver y sad,” she says. “They’re she has been invited to speak at a

S

84

April 2020

PHOTO: COURTESY OF SELINA JUUL

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

PHOTO; MINISTRY OF ENVIRONMENT AND FOOD OF DENMARK

With supporters at a food club event in Copenhagen in 2016

conference on food waste, as well as making arrangements for a dinner at Copenhagen’s Swedish Embassy, where inf luential Swedes and international decision-makers will be given a meal made from surplus food and hopefully be inspired to put food waste on the political agenda.

The International Stop Wasting Food Dinner has become an annual event for Juul. Last year she organised one at the Dutch embassy, and next year it will be the turn of the French.

The week will end at Juul’s publishers, where she will see for the first time a copy of her new book, Mad Med Respekt (Food With Respect),

which features her advice for families on how to avoid wasting food and 80 leftover-friendly recipes from a variety of Danish and French food luminaries, as well as HRH Princess Marie, daughter-in-law of Denmark’s ruling monarch. A percentage of sales from the book will go to DanChurchAid to help hungry children in Africa.

Juu l i s pa r t ic ularly excited by the involvement of the Princess. It’s a sign that her campaign against food waste has moved beyond the realms of niche activism and into the mainstream of Danish society. “The Princess is the sweetest person and she really has her heart in it,” says Juul. “She’s a great

“IF WE CAN SOLVE THIS, IT WILL BE ONE OF THE KEYS TO ACHIEVING WORLD PEACE”

85

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

ambassador for the whole movement against food waste.”

W it h more t ha n 200 projects launched over the last decade, Juul has certainly made a difference, and yet the position she now finds herself in, as she approaches 40, is not something she ever imagined earlier in her career as a graphic designer.

“I would never, ever have believed that I would be doing this today,” she says, laughing. “I’m not a food person or a politician.”

T

he seeds of Juul’s activism were planted very early on in life – as a child in Soviet Russia. The late 1980s saw the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness]. Soviet society was becoming more liberal, but at the same time the country was facing an

86

April 2020

economic crisis.

Growing up in a Moscow apartment with her parents and grandparents, Juul experienced first hand the privations brought about by a system in terminal decline.

“Communism collapsed and suddenly there was no food in the supermarkets,” she recalls. “The joke about the Russian supermarket is that you go inside and there’s no food. That’s what happened in the 1980s. My grandma was the one who did the shopping and looked after the household, and I remember her saying that we shouldn’t waste anything because we don’t know if there’s going to be food tomorrow.

“It’s a scary feeling. More than once she came back from the supermarket with nothing. She did everything to make the food last so we could still have food on our table. She’s my

PHOTO: NORDIC BUSINESS FORUM

Addressing the Nordic Business Forum on food waste in Helsinki in 2017

Let’s Stop Wasting Food

greatest hero because she’s the one who really taught me about that.”

Things got so bad that Russian families began to receive food aid from the West. “It was basically Spam,” Juul laughs. “We didn’t know a ny bet ter, so we thought, ‘Wow, this is food from the West, it must be very good!’

My g ra nd mot her sa id, ‘We mu st n’t waste it. We must eat it in very small pieces, it’s very delicious food’.”

Not long afterwards, 13-year-old Juul moved to Copenhagen with her scientist mother, who had landed a job at the university. (Her parents were divorced by this time.) When she told her new classmates the Spam story, they were incredulous.

But Juul was equally amazed at the casual way her classmates would waste food. “People’s parents would make them packed lunches, which they would toss in the bin before going to McDonald’s,” she recalls.

W hen Juu l f i r s t v isited a Da nish s u p e r m a r k e t , s he was astonished by the amount of food on display. Spending time as an intern at a bakery, she was taken aback to see the bread left over at the end of each day put in bags and thrown out.

When she finished school, Juul went to college, where she studied journalism and graphic design, and then began working as a freelance illustrator with her own graphic design company. “Then I saw An

A THIRD OF THE WORLD’S FOOD PRODUCTION IS SIMPLY THROWN AWAY

87

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

FOOD WASTAGE AND HOW TO REDUCE IT IN THE HOME

•One third of all food produced for human consumption ends up being uneaten and discarded every year –around 1.3 billion tonnes of food – costing the global economy close to $940 billion.

•Fruit and vegetables, including roots and tubers, have the highest wastage rates.

WHAT CAN YOU DO? •Most people tend to buy more food than they need. Check the fridge before you shop.

•Plan your meals. It saves time, money and reduces food waste.

• Check date labels and know the difference between: ‘Use by’– food has to go.

‘Best before’– food is at its best and can be eaten after this date as long as it has been stored correctly.

‘Display until’– a stock control message for retailers.

• Get creative with leftovers.

• Ask for smaller portions or a ‘doggy bag’ when eating out.

SOURCES: WWF.ORG.AU; FAO

88

April 2020

Inconvenient Truth,” she says. “And I woke up.”

J

uly 2008. It’s the final evening of a holiday in Croatia for Juul and her boyfriend, Jakob, and they’re sitting eating dinner on the terrace of their hotel just outside the picturesque coastal city of Sibenik. It’s two years since Juul saw An Inconvenient Truth and decided that she needed to do something to make a difference. This evening the answer suddenly comes to her from nowhere.

Why is no one focusing on food waste?

After all, food production is the third highest producer of CO2 in the world.

“That night, I was too excited to sleep,” she says. She sits making notes and even quickly draws a logo for the movement that’s taking shape in her head: simple red and white words on a black square. The next day, when she gets back to Copenhagen, there’s a story in one of the newspapers saying that the Danes waste an average 63 kilograms of food per person every year.

“It was a sign,” she says.

She starts a Stop Wasting Food Facebook group the same day. People join. Momentum builds. Within two weeks, Juul is attracting the attention of the Danish media and giving interviews about food waste. And then she gets a call from Anders Jensen, the buying and marketing director of REMA 1000, the biggest discount supermarket chain in Denmark.

Let’s Stop Wasting Food The pair met at a café in Copenhagen and agreed that it was insane that a third of the world’s food production is simply thrown away. Jensen said he had never been fond of bulk discounts, such as three for two offers. He felt it just encouraged waste.

Juul agreed. Following their meeting, REMA 1000 announced that it would no longer offer bulk discounts.

“And it was like a bomb exploded,” says Jensen with a laugh. “It was big news. All our competitors said it was totally crazy.” He says he knew that, at least initially, his stores would sell less. “But we crossed our fingers that in the long run more people would come, because nobody likes to throw out food.

“Fortunately now, we have more and more satisfied customers,” says Jensen. Maybe the margins are a little less but we are selling more. It takes time before people get used to it.”

F

or Juul this was just the beginning. Over the last 11 years, she has proved to be a shrewd media operator, launching campaigns that catch the public imagination: persuading supermarkets to sell ‘ugly vegetables’, for example, encouraging the use of doggy bags at restaurants, or popularising the concept of UFOs – as in ‘unidentified frozen objects’. These are the leftovers we put in our freezer and then forget about. Juul suggests that every second month we should have a ‘UFO week’ and eat all the food we’ve stored away.

At home, Juul puts her ideas into practice. She lives with Jakob (they’ve now been together for more than 18 years) and both are pescatarians. They keep any waste from preparing vegetables in a pot in the fridge and once a week they turn it into stock, which they then freeze in small portions and use for making new dishes.

What’s in a Name?

William Williams knows how you’re going to react to his name, because he’s heard it all before. When people ask “Are you for real? Are you really William Williams?” the 27-year-old New Yorker replies, “My parents didn’t have a choice.”

That’s because he’s the tenth consecutive William Henry Williams, a name that has been shared by men in his family dating back to 18th-century Wales. William Williams X has the family keepsakes to prove it — including a Bible from 1854 inscribed with the name of William Williams IV. X notes that his forebears all led esteemed and proud lives, with policemen and judges in the family tree.

NYPOST.COM

89

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

ALL IN A DAY’S WORK Humour on the Job

A job application asked me to list three references. I wrote in Wikipedia, Google and the Oxford English Dictionary. I didn’t get the job.

SUBMITTED BY SUSAN FLYNN

People Person A friend and I had a small temporarystaffing service. Our agency did mandatory background checks on all candidates. One day after a round of interviews, my colleague was entering information from a young man’s application into the computer.

She called me over to show me that

90

april 2020

he had noted a previous conviction of manslaughter. Below that, on the line listing his skills, he had written, “Good with people”.

SUBMITTED BY JANA R AHRIG

Freudian Slip Most days in the clinic where I used to work, the phones rang a lot.

One very hectic day, when the phones had been particularly busy, I got a bit confused when answering a line that had been waiting: “Thanks for helping, how can I hold you?”

SUBMITTED BY DIANE STIFT

CARTOON BY HARLEY SCHWADRON

Just Ask Them

All In a Day’s Work

Tech Speak I was describing my job as an engineer to some school pupils when I mentioned that “one of my colleagues and I designed a medical instrument for measuring human muscle tone.” Later, I added, “another colleague and I designed a system to allow shopkeepers to print coupons at the cash register.” Thinking that all this technical talk was confusing, I asked if there were any questions.

There was one: “What’s a colleague?”

SUBMITTED BY JAMES HAHN

Rosy Hopes A man came through my lane at the supermarket with a bottle of wine and a bouquet of roses. But before paying, he set the two items aside and said, “I’ll be right back.” He ran off, only to return a minute later with a second bottle of wine and another bouquet of roses.

“Two girlfriends?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Just one really angry one.”

I L LU S T R AT I O N S: G E T T Y I M AG E S

SUBMITTED BY JOHN H. FLYNN

THE WORST MISTAKE I’VE MADE AT WORK …

“This guy came into my department store loading zone, put on a high-vis vest, picked up the biggest TV, and while putting it on a trolley, dropped it, and then asked me to help lift it.

The guy thanked me and left with his brand-new TV that I’d helped him steal.” reddit.com “I once sent a company-wide virus warning by forwarding an email so people could see what it looked like should they receive one and forgetting to remove the infected @Entropy72 attachment.”

“On my first day of work, I accidentally called my boss ‘Daddy’.” coburgbanks.co.uk

91

ANIMAL KINGDOM

The plan to save the iconic kiwi from extinction – one fluffy chick at a time

BY Stéphanie Verge

92

April 2020

93

S

he should have found the hatchling by now.

With her right arm deep in the burrow, Bridget Palmer has been groping around for a few minutes already. Her colleague, John Black, hiking boots dug into the hillside to keep from sliding in the mud, searched the burrow, too, but came up empty. The pair, volunteers with the Whakata–ne Kiwi Trust on New Zealand’s North Island, are two of only six people in the organisation trained to handle live kiwi. But as Palmer is about to discover on this overcast November morning, there’s nothing for them here.

A ranger with New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC), 44-year-old Palmer pulls clumps of humid leaves out of the nest, located – in Ohope Scenic Reserve. She’s looking for eggshells, a sign that a bird has hatched. Soon, she finds a beak, feathers. Yet there’s no cause for joy – Palmer is cradling a chick’s corpse, flattened in a wad of leaves.

“Hatch death,” she murmurs.

Palmer buries the chick. After incubating for about 85 days, it became exhausted, then stuck, trying to chip its way out of the egg, which can take three to five days. The chick suffocated before being able to break free.

Its sibling, Kikorangi, born two weeks earlier, and their father, equipped with a transmitter and given the name

94

April 2020

Pea, have fled the nest, probably due to the smell. Still, Palmer hopes Pea will use this burrow again. (It’s the female North Island brown kiwi that lays the eggs, but it’s the male that sits on them for three months.) At half a metre deep under sturdy tree roots, it’s a good nest.

– Ohope is one of the country’s largest remaining forests of po– hutukawa, an evergreen once used for shipbuilding and called the New Zealand Christmas bush in Australia for its crimson flowers. The reserve is also – -i , a dark rich in birds, such as the tu honeyeater with white throat tufts; the melodious korimako (bellbird); and the piwakawaka, which deploys its tail in a fan shape to change directions.

New Zealanders are proud of their birds, but they especially love the kiwi.

“The chick is like a big tennis ball with pouf,” says Palmer. Black describes it as “a bundle of cuteness on legs.” The kiwi is the country’s most famous emblem – even hobbits can’t dethrone it. But it’s in trouble.

Extinction rates for birds in New Zealand are high. According to the DOC, 34 per cent of endemic land and freshwater birds and five per cent of sea birds have already been lost.

Today, more than a third of bird species are considered threatened – one step away from endangered. Among them: the chicken-sized North Island brown kiwi, the most common of five recognised kiwi species and the one that lives nearest humans, mainly in

– (PR E V I O U S S PR E A D) CO U R T E S Y O F N G A I TA H U TO U RI S M

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

C O U R T E S Y O F M É L A N I E D E V E AU LT

Rare Bird low-slung coastal areas. Also facing precarity are its cousins, the rowi (the rarest, it lives mostly in the Okarito kiwi sanctuary on the South Island), the tokoeka (also called the southern brown, it resembles its northern counterpart), the great spotted kiwi (large and rugged, it prefers mountains) and the little spotted kiwi (grey and mottled, it’s the size of a bantam hen).

They all have hair-like feathers, cat-like whiskers for navigating in the dark and a strong sense of smell thanks to a long, sensitive beak with nostrils at the tip. And although they can run quickly, kiwi are anything but stealthy: the birds’ footfall sounds almost human-like as they stomp and crash through the bush. These adorable creatures are the closest thing New Zealand has to a cuddly mascot.

In total, only some 68,000 of them remain.

Many of the country’s feathered flocks evolved to live on the ground; their predators came from the sky, like the giant Haast’s eagle, now extinct. Without the gift of f light, earthbound birds like the kiwi are often defenceless against attacks from ground-dwelling animals. That wasn’t a problem until European whalers, sealers and traders began stopping by in the late 1700s, about 500 years after the Ma– ori arrived from Polynesia. With the Europeans came rodents and the kiwis’ enemy No. 1, the weasel-like stoat, introduced in the late 1800s to control

Bridget Palmer with a kiwi chick – in Ohope

the new but already booming rabbit population.

Of the five kiwi, the North Island browns are disappearing the fastest, largely due to deforestation. Add to that stoats, car collisions, dog and cat attacks, possum traps and the fact that nearly one-third of eggs are infertile or don’t hatch. Of the ones that do hatch, only five chicks in every 100 survive to reach the stoat-proof weight of one kilogram. Without protection, there would be a two per cent decline in population annually, and within 50 years, the North Island brown would be gone.

95

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

That’s why Palmer, Black and a group of 130 volunteers are putting in over 5000 hours a year to save the kiwi. Established in 2006, the Whakata– ne Kiwi Trust monitors the birds for research purposes, helps the DOC with predator control and offers education in schools and to the general public. Black, a computer programmer, has even created the WebApp that allows volunteers to record all things kiwi related, from hours and trapping to tracking and mapping. It’s being considered as the model for a national database.

– When the DOC surveyed Ohope in 1999, it counted only four pairs of kiwi. Thirteen years after the trust’s founding, there were over 300 birds in total, thanks in part to the removal of more than 13,000 predators, including 1,000-plus stoats and 300-plus weasels.

But the group’s trackers – nicknamed ‘chick pingers’ for the sound their antennas make when they pick up a bird’s transmitter signal – and trappers face a quick-thinking, quick-breeding foe. From July 2017 to – July 2018, a family of stoats in Ohope was unwilling to approach a trap even for salted rabbit; the female was teaching her kits to avoid the trap and the bait, killing kiwi chicks instead. All four of Pea’s offspring that year died, which is one reason the volunteers are particularly invested in his new clutch.

Pea has long been a favourite of Palmer’s; she named the bird after

96

April 2020

her mother and now sponsors him, paying $335 per year for his transmitter, which has a battery life of 12 months. With 22 adult males and 16 chicks to track annually across three reserves, the trust attracts sponsors by promising face time with the birds in their natural habitat. Most New Zealanders have never seen their nocturnal national animal. Pea is also a local celebrity: he is the first chick to hatch and grow up in the wild as part of the Whakata–ne Kiwi Project.

Prior to 2011, when Pea was born, the trust was working with Operation Nest Egg (ONE), an initiative involving the DOC, community conservation groups, Ma–ori, researchers and rearing facilities. Through ONE, kiwi eggs and chicks are removed from their burrows and raised in captivity until they weigh at least one kilogram, as the odds of surviving stoat attacks before reaching this milestone weight are zero. It takes about six months before they can be returned to their former territory.

After years of using ONE’s services, the Whakata–ne Kiwi Project wanted to help the birds in situ by monitoring the chicks from hatch. Some seasons have been more successful than others. Palmer is disappointed by Pea’s second chick’s failure to hatch but prefers that to death by stoat. “In my mind, this is Mother Nature taking its course,” she says.

Rainbow Springs Nature Park may differ from the trust’s workspace,

– CO U R T E S Y O F N G A I TA H U TO U RI S M

Rare Bird but its goal is the same: t he continuation of t he kiwi. Located in the city of Rotorua, an hour-and-15minute drive inland from coasta l Whakata– ne, it’s home to the National Kiwi Hatcher y Aotearoa, t he world’s largest of its kind.

Emma Bean, 38, is the kiwi husbandry manager there.

She and her staff of seven hatch and release an average of 130 chicks each year (the average hatching rate is 95 per cent).

A two-day-old kiwi chick with many of its silvery She knows that success feather sheaths still attached is somewhat artificial, but until kiwi habitat is free of introduced piercing for a male, raspy for a female. predators, humans need to intervene. It’s made after sunset, then repeated “If eggs arrive at 3am, we’re all ready ten to 25 times. “A couple of years ago, to be here,” she says, adding that with- a chick cracked open its shell and, still in five days of birth, chicks know how wet, did a massive call, followed by to probe for insects with their long nine more,” says Bean. “Most kiwi are bill and are ready to wander. Brown too shattered after the exertion to do kiwi often leave their dad’s nest after that. But this little one was yelling, ‘I’m a week, while other species tend to here. Yes, I need your help, but I’m not going extinct. Listen to me call.’” hang around for a bit longer.

You can hear these calls at ZealanThough she’s worked at the hatchery for more than a decade, Bean re- dia. An eco-sanctuary in the counmains fascinated by her charges. “Kiwi try’s capital, Wellington, its 500-year are biologically significant,” she says. goal is to restore the valley’s forest Unlike most other birds, they have two and freshwater ecosystems to their ovaries, not one. Their temperature is prehuman-contact state. Just two more like that of humans: 38°C rather kilometres from the city’s core, the than 40 or 42. Their bones aren’t hol- 225-hectare conservation project shellow; they contain marrow. And they ters over 20 animal species that have been reintroduced to the valley since can live for 50 years or more.

Kiwi also have a distinctive call, Zealandia’s 1999 opening. Some, like

97

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

the tuatara – a reptile that resembles a lizard but whose closest relative is an animal that was around at the time of the dinosaurs – had been extinct on the North and South Islands for over a century. (Small populations survived on offshore islands.)

Over the course of one evening here, you can see a trio of tuatara; Cook Strait giant we– ta– s, cricket-like vegetarian insects the size of a gerbil; luminous glow worms blanketing rock faces; and any one of 40 native birds – all behind an 8.6-kilometre fence that keeps out mammalian predators. But nothing causes quite the ruckus, literally and figuratively, as the heavy-footed little spotted kiwi, the sight of which sends a torch-wielding tour group scurrying after it through the bush.

Palmer and Black drive to the op– posite side of the 490-hectare Ohope Scenic Reserve, jump out of their truck, and tramp into the forest.

They’re heading for the nest belonging to Pouraiti, one of Black’s two beneficiaries. In addition to sponsoring this bird, Black has spent the better part of several nights trying to intercept his chick. Tracking is a game of patience and luck. “We’d rather wait until Dad is out,” says

Palmer. “If we put our hands in there during the day, we run the risk of him abandoning his second egg.”

Thanks to a transmitter on Pouraiti’s leg, Black and Palmer know how much time he spends on and off the nest and when the egg is close to hatching. That combined with the ‘candling’ they conducted five days prior – a kind of ultrasound performed by shining a flashlight across the top of the shell – makes the search low-risk. They’re going in.

Palmer and Black smile at each other; they’re relieved to find a fluffy day-old chick rather than reliving the sadness they felt earlier at Pea’s nest.

Black lifts the edge of the sleeve on his jacket so the squeaking newborn can plunge itself into darkness. As Black keeps a tight grip on the bird’s already fearsome claws, Palmer teases him about losing track of Chick One, which is still too small to wear a transmitter. “You know kids,” Black retorts. “Always leaving without telling you where they’re going.”

For now, at least they know Chick Two is alive. And they will be back, to name and study the young – and gather new stories to inspire others to protect New Zealand’s tenacious icon.

On Fine Art I dropped a box of spaghetti on the ground and accidentally graduated from Art School. @MR_DRINKSONME

98

april 2020

SUPER SAVINGS ON RETAIL PRICES D KS

TORIES CASTS

RD S TASLTKORIES

S S

L

ealth

OUR ODCASTS AS P

EAT

LAUsGelfH

f A ibiotic nce

Your er!

Smart

AMAZIN ANIMALSG You Nev Knew Ex er isted

OODS HE A L Eats

PA GE 70

perts

E and the House se

PA GE 30

Real Life Drama inE JAWS INTO THURRICANE OF A H

NC C

PA GE 114

er

a’s Rare AustraliANGAROO TREE K PA GE 24

?

8

SPECIAL REPO Why SleRT ep Matters PA GE 46

bout Truths AOLISM B TA E M R YOU PA GE 66

Every issue of Reader’s Digest offers only the best original writing on issues that matter to you. Real-life dramas and uplifting stories, amazing health discoveries and human adventure. Long reads mixed with short stories.

PLUS exclusive book excerpts.

PLUS

z A SPECIAL FREE GIFT

z DELIVERY INCLUDED EVERY MONTH

ASIA: rdasia.com subscribe AUSTRALIA: readersdigest com.au subscribe NEW ZEALAND readersdigest.co.nz subscribe

TO ORDER:

TECHNOLOGY

Prediction

ADDICTION

We often hear about new predictions and prophecies for the future, most of which turn out to be wrong. You know who gets them right? A few good books (and movies)

BY Andy Simmons ILLUSTRATIONS BY Ryan Inzana

Hoverboard Sure, the DeLorean sports car in the Back to the Future movies was a cool time traveller, but it had nothing on the levitating skateboard that Marty McFly – played by Michael J. Fox – hopped on to escape a bunch of thugs. Three decades later, a 40-year-old French inventor proved the scriptwriters’ foresight by hovering across the English Channel. Franky Zapata strapped his boots to a board connected to five small turbine engines (right) and made the 35-kilometre trip from France in 22 minutes. Unlike Marty, Zapata was smart enough to wear a helmet.

100

april 2020

Bluetooth In his futuristic 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury anticipated Bluetooth, describing wireless earphones that allowed for ‘an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk’ to be transmitted through the air.

Imagine how thrilled he would have been with a Bluetooth toaster! That was the idea behind the Connected Toaster, which alerted you via smartphone when your toast was done. At $100, this baby cost a lot of bread, which may be why it was discontinued just two years after its launch.

101

The Smart Watch The Apple Watch lets you chat, play games and watch videos on a device strapped to your wrist.

Cool, huh? The Jetsons thought so ... over 53 years before the Apple Watch was released.

Wi-Fi Nikola Tesla called it! In 1909, the famed electrical engineer told The New York Times, “It will soon be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world so simply that any individual can carry and operate his own apparatus.”

No doubt he was thinking of the Kérastase Hair Coach brush, which measured brushing speed and employed a microphone to listen to your hair, all to compute an overall hairquality score sent to your smartphone.

(Alas, it too is gone.)

102

April 2020

GPS Writer Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) saw a world in which no one got lost. In 1956, he wrote that satellites “could make possible a position-finding grid whereby anyone could locate himself by means of a couple of dials on an instrument about the size of a watch.” Clarke didn’t mention that his system might also track another person, such as a criminal. Last year, New York police nabbed a burglar who was wearing a GPS ankle monitor – because he was still on probation for a prior conviction.

WHO KNEW?

9 Things That Could Happen

PHOTOS: GE T T Y IM AGES. SOURCE: RD.COM

If Dinosaurs Were Still Alive How different would our world be if terrifying lizards still walked among us? asks Lela Nargi

WELL, FOR STARTERS, THEY ARE.

That’s right, dinosaurs do still exist, and they are everywhere – in the form of birds. That adorable little sparrow on your windowsill? Dinosaur.

The noisy cockatoo disturbing your morning coffee? Dinosaur. Pigeons, geese, hawks, you name it – they’re all descendants of large, two-legged,

non-avian dinosaurs called theropods. Theropods, “whose members include the towering Tyrannosaurus rex and the smaller Velociraptors,” adapted certain existing dino features (such as feathers) into the birds we see today. Dinosaur extinction is just one myth scientists wish people would unlearn.

103

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

WE WOULDN’T HAVE RECOGNISED THEM Say that species-extinction asteroid hadn’t hit Mexico 66 million years ago and life on Earth had continued apace. Well-known dinosaurs like the Triceratops “would be totally different than anything we know from the fossil record,” science writer Brian Switek wrote in The Guardian. Why? They, too, would have continued to adapt. “There might even be new groups of dinosaurs that didn’t exist during the Mesozoic era.” But even extinct dinosaurs looked nothing like what most people believed when they were kids.

IN FACT, WE MIGHT NEVER HAVE SEEN THEM AT ALL Why? It’s likely that, with dinosaurs remaining on our planet, humans and many other mammals would not have had the chance to evolve into existence. “Even though mammals thrived in the shadow of the dinosaurs, they did so at small sizes,” writes Switek. “And even though the very first primates had evolved by the end of the dinosaurian reign, they had more in common with a tree shrew than with you or me.”

IT WOULD NOT LOOK LIKE JURASSIC PARK The movie took a lot of liberties with the possible, wrote biologist Ben Waggoner in Forbes. “Dilophosaurus, the critter that spits poison in Wayne

104

April 2020

Some or all dinosaurs may have grown into smaller animals Knight’s face, lived about 120 million years and 10,000 kilometres away from Velociraptor, the critters that ate Bob Peck.” So if all the extinct dinosaurs suddenly started roaming the Earth together at the same time … well, you’d have utter ecological chaos.

PART OF THE CHAOS? DEAD HERBIVORES Plant eaters like Edmontosaurus, snacking on the diversity of flowering plants that exist today, would likely have gotten sick and perhaps even died. At the very least, wrote Waggoner, they might have just spent their whole lives hallucinating. The chemical makeup of modern plants isn’t anything like what dinosaur biology was meant to handle. More palatable plants might have been completely decimated by the hungry creatures.

If Dinosaurs Were Still Alive

HAPPY TIMES FOR CARNIVORES! All those dead and dying herbivores lying around – poisoned by flowering grasses and other plants their systems couldn’t handle – would have presented a total feeding bonanza for Tyrannosaurus rex, for example, and other partial scavengers, according to Forbes. Easy pickings!

BUT THAT BOUNTY WOULD HAVE BEEN SHORT-LIVED That’s because the dead animals would run out. And when that happened, what would T. rex and friends eat? “There were mammals alive at the same time and place as T. rex, but none very big – and for all we know, modern mammal flesh might be unpalatable,” wrote Waggoner.

CLIMATE CHANGE WOULD HAVE MIXED THINGS UP “An event known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago, saw average global temperatures reach eight degrees Celcius hotter than today’s temperatures, and rainforests spanning much of the planet,” according to BBC Future.

“In this hothouse world with abundant vegetation, perhaps many longnecked sauropods might have grown more rapidly, breeding at a younger age and shrinking in size; several ‘dwarf’ sauropods (some little bigger than a cow) were already known in the late Cretaceous [era].”

SO WOULD FRUIT Many modern birds have adapted to eating fruit and drinking the nectar of flowering plants – in fact, these things co-evolved so that birds would disperse the plants’ seeds. Some nonbird vegetarian dinosaurs could have developed this ability as well. Some or all may have grown into gradually smaller animals thanks to the relative ease of digestion of fruit and flowering plants compared to the gymnosperms (such as cycads and conifers) of the Cretaceous, palaeontologist Matt -Bonnan told BBC Future.

ADAPTING TO GRASS In the absence of dinosaurs, mammals slowly evolved with the ability to eat grassland plants. Vertebrate paleontologist Darren Naish speculated that surviving dinosaurs would have evolved much quicker thanks to evolutionary advantages they’d already developed, like the 1000 teeth that hadrosaurs had in their jaws, which would have been extremely well-suited to grinding grass.

Physical changes to the heads and bodies of t hese grass munchers would eventually have evolved. As BBC Future pointed out, “Horses and cows have flattened muzzles useful for cropping tough, low-lying vegetation.” Grass-eating, duck-billed dinosaurs might have developed squaredoff snouts, and “sauropod necks might have shortened to aid grazing at their feet.”

105

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

Main: Happo One, Hakuba, Nagano. Insets: a shrine and waterfall near Takayama, Gifu

106

April 2020

TRAVEL

Back Roads of

JAPAN

At first glance, a self-driving holiday in bustling Japan might seem too much to conquer, but Diane Godley found having a car gave her and her family the freedom to explore treasures far from the usual tourist sights

PHOTOS: DIANE GODLEY

“H

ey, there’s a waterfall up there, shall we take a look?”

I ask when I see a signpost on the side of the road. My family and I are driving along Route 158, one of Japan’s national highways, headed for Hakuba located in the Japanese Alps in Nagano prefecture, on Honshu, the main island of Japan.

“Why not?,” was the general consensus. After all, we were not in a hurry.

We had less than 150 kilometres to drive to our alpine destination, and the mid-October autumn weather was overcast and drizzling lightly.

We turned up the side road surrounded by lush mountain forests, and just as we were approaching a corner, without warning, we were forced to stop. Wildlife on the road.

Now that’s something we didn’t expect to see in Japan.

“Do you think it’s a goat?” I ask.

“No, maybe a deer,” says someone in the back seat.

The four of us couldn’t agree what it was we were looking at before it high-tailed into the forest. W hat we did agree on was that it was a particularly unusual, dare I say ugly, specimen of nature.

107

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

Left to right: enjoying the mountain views from an outdoor onsen; breakfast of

TYPHOON WARNING We picked up our hire car in Takayama – an historic v illage in the Gifu Prefecture and the gateway to the Japanese Alps – on the day a typhoon was to hit Japan’s main island of Honshu. We’d spent the previous day wandering through its narrow streets. Lined with wooden merchants’ houses and latticed windows, the buildings date back to the Edo Period (1603-1868) and are safeguarded against future development by a Traditional Buildings Preservation Area law.

Many of these historic houses have been converted into museums and shops, which sell all manner of handicrafts and delicacies from the local Hida area, such as gyuuman (beef in soft dough buns); mitarashi dango (gelatinous rice formed into little round dumplings); matcha (green tea) ice cream, sake and craft beer. The most famous food from this area is Hida beef, a breed of Japanese black cattle farmed in the clean mountainous region. Traditionally,

108

April 2020

strips of the marbled meat are cooked over a flame at your table, at around the princely sum of $50 for 100 grams.

Our hire car was a little (but welcoming) metal box on wheels. Most Japanese cars seemed to be in this cube style (no doubt to fit on the narrow roads), and although ours looked small from the outside, there was plenty of room inside for my husband and I and our two lanky teenagers. The boot was another story. Fortunately for us, we had this in mind when we packed our suitcases back in Australia, exchanging a couple of large cases for four carry-on sized bags. These fitted perfectly and gave us a little extra room to buy a bag for all our souvenirs.

As our friends and family back home kept a nervous vigil on reports of the escalating scale of the typhoon, it heralded its arrival in Takayama with just a bit of drizzle. However, the rain didn’t dampen our spirits. As we had a car we could drive to some of the attractions on the outskirts of town and stay dry, plus we’d just had

Back Roads of Japan

ramen and mitarashi dango (rice dumplings); reflections in the pond at Happo One

ten glorious hot days in the south of Honshu.

The cancellation of the morning markets along the Miyagawa River that runs through the centre of town should have given us some indication of how seriously the Japanese take their weather warnings. We headed out of town to the Hida Folk Village, but it was closed. Museum Hida, closed. Even the Teddy Bear Eco Village had shut up shop. Everything was quiet. In fact, there were no locals on the street at all, just Western tourists like us wondering whether we should be more worried. So we spent the afternoon driving through the narrow streets exploring. Sometimes the roads led to a shrine, sometimes dead ends, and once the start of a forest walk where we saw a flyer warning tourists, in four languages, that bears had been seen in the these woods.

Bears?

In Japan?

How did we not know that there was still wildlife roaming around pockets of Japanese wilderness?

MOUNTAIN SPA Apart from strong winds overnight, we woke to find Takayama was pretty much untouched by the typhoon, although unfortunately other areas of Japan weren’t so lucky. By the following day the rain had set in. One of the items on my bucket list while in the Japanese Alps was to visit an onsen (hot spring), so we couldn’t think of a better outing on a drizzly day than to head up into the mountains where onsens are aplenty.

T here a re t wo way s to d r ive through the mountains in Japan: the high road (the longer, scenic route), or the low road (through tunnels, the quick way). With low-lying clouds, on this occasion we took the quick route, as visibility was getting poorer the higher we drove.

The first of our many hot spring experiences was an open-air onsen located on the side of a river and ensconced under a pedestrian bridge.

Being a public onsen, there was only an honesty box to collect our money. And, as this was a rather misty

109

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

From left: a mountain shrine; enjoying a hot spring foot spa; the Bear Ranch

morning, we had it all to ourselves.

As beautiful as the location was, the water temperature was a little tepid and we soon got dressed and went looking for a more established facility.

We found another onsen about ten minutes up the road. It had separate bathing areas for men and women and a variety of pools at different temperatures where we soaked up the mineral salts for as long as we could handle the mostly very hot water. With the exception of our 16-year-old son, who found the nudity too confronting, we all loved the experience and vowed to repeat it as many times we could while in the alps. And at around $10 a pop, this is one of the few things in Japan that is very affordable.

On our way back to Takayama we saw a sign for a Bear Ranch. Piqued by the sign we’d seen the day before fluttering in the wind, we couldn’t

110

April 2020

resist taking a look. We paid our entry fee and bought a bag of dried fruit to feed the bears.

Like other Asiatic black bears, the Japanese black bear (Ursus thibetanus japonicus) has a pale yellow crescent marking on its chest. Standing between one metre to 1.5 metres and weighing up to 120 kilograms, it is considered small among bear species.

Extinct in many regions of Japan due to the rapid loss of habitat after World War II, the population of black bears on Honshu is considered healthy.

No road trip is complete without a pit stop. Unlike anywhere else I’ve travelled in the world, you can be assured wherever you stop in Japan the toilets will be immaculately clean. I wouldn’t be going too far in saying that stopping at a public convenience in Japan was a pleasure: warm water to wash your nether

Back Roads of Japan regions, many with air-drying facilities, plus never once did I find a toilet roll holder empty.

The next day we headed further into the alps to our next destination: Hakuba, the village that hosted the Japan 1998 Winter Olympics. We figured it would only take a couple of hours to get there so we made regular sightseeing stops along the way – the first being the waterfall where we saw the odd creature on the road, which we later discovered was a Japanese serow, described in Wikipedia as “a Japanese goat-antelope”.

If we’d been driving in Australia, the sign to the waterfall would have been just a blur as we sped past. In Japan, however, there is a very good reason why we didn’t miss the turn off and why we avoided hitting the serow; the speed limit. At 50km/h on regional roads and 40km/h in villages (80km/h on motorways), you can enjoy a leisurely drive through the provinces and visit out-of-the-way places not on shinkansen (bullet train) routes. Thanks to this year’s Summer Olympics, a lot of road signs are now written in English as well as Japanese.

They also drive on the left. In fact, the hardest part about driving in Japan is keeping under the speed limit!

Although still misty, the views of the mountains were spectacular; forested hillsides in burnt autumn hues threaded with long wispy clouds. They looked just like a Japanese landscape painting. We took a short trek along

a river and stopped at Asahi Dam, but the goal for the day was to visit Kamikochi, a nature reserve in the Azusa River Valley said to offer Japan’s most spectacular mountain scenery.

Unfortunately, the drizzle had turned to steady rain and clouds were very low by the time we got there, so we opted to press on and visit one of the many free foot spas dotted around this part of the country instead.

HAKUBA TREK We arrived at our apartment, Hakuba Ski Condos, in a fog of cloud. But according to the weather forecast, the following day looked favourable and we told Bob, the friendly Canadian manager, of our intentions to get up early to walk up the most popular mountain, Happo One (pronounced On-ay). The next morning, we had two surprises in store for us; a view of the mountain from our living room, and a picnic basket at our front door with all the ingredients to make waffles for breakfast. Bob was one special manager. We were ecstatic! We’d been in Japan for nearly two weeks and, frankly, we were hankering after Western food. Our moods lifted.

It took one gondola and two ski lifts to get to the start of the walking track for Happo One. We were starting at an altitude of 1800 metres. Today’s goal was to walk to Happo-ike Pond at 2080 metres. Anyone attempting to trek further was required to have proper mountaineering equipment.

111

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

With the Japanese trekkers decked out in the latest hiking gear and boots, and bells jingling on their backpacks to scare away bears, we felt like amateurs. For me, the 280-metre trek to the pond was tough going. Not only did the thin-ish air make it hard on my lungs, but loose rocks underfoot where the boardwalks ended made it hard work – less so for my teens.

Like everyone else, we stopped at Happo-ike Pond to take photos of the three mountain peaks reflected in the mirror-like water. The clouds were well beneath us and the sun bright and high, creating the perfect setting to photograph the mountains soaring nearly 3000 metres into the sky.

This is where I left my gang, who had decided to press on up the mountain – without one scrap of mountaineering gear between them, but with all the food. I walked back at my own pace, ending a hard day’s climb with a bowl of ramen and a soak in an onsen.

Hiring a car in Japan gave us the freedom to roam where we wanted, when we wanted. It allowed us to stumble upon places and have little adventures that you won’t find in i any guide books – and avoid gettin ng wet when it rained. We travelled to locations not on the rail route and roads less travelled by international to ourists – giving us a more authentic cu ultural experience. And, the price we paaid for a week’s car hire (plus petrol and d tolls) was comparable to a seven-day shinkansen pass for the four of us.

112

april 2020

HIRING A CAR IN JAPAN

Driving in Japan is pretty straightforward: they drive on the left-hand side and from a leisurely 40km/h in villages to 80km/h on motorways. Plus signage is clear and easy to understand.

• There are numerous car hire companies in Japan, both international and local (Toyota Rentacar, Nippon Rentacar, Orix Rentacar, Times Car Rental, Nissan Rentacar and Ekiren). All charge similar prices. We chose Toyota (www.rent.toyota.co.jp) because we weren’t required to provide credit card details up front, and it was easy to organise different locations for car pick-up and drop-off.

• We recommend organising your car hire before you leave, which can be done up to three months before your trip.

• To drive in Japan you’ll need an International Driving Permit.

• Our car hire for eight days cost less than the seven-day JR Rail Pass cost for the four of us. Tolls are calculated by the car and paid with the car hire.

QUOTABLE QUOTES When you lead with your nice foot forward, you will win, every time.

It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but it comes back to you when you need it.

We live in an age of instant gratification, of immediate likes, and it is uncomfortable to have to wait to see the dividends of your kindness.

But I promise you it will appear exactly when you need it.

PHOTOS: GET T Y IMAGES

KRISTEN BELL, ACTOR

We know what people want to hear because when we play a Beatles song, all the mobile phones come on and it looks like a galaxy of stars, and when we do a new song, it looks like a black hole.

PAUL M C CARTNEY, MUSICIAN

If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d be a shortage of fishing rods.

DOUG L ARSON, JOURNALIST

I believe that when people die, they zoom into the people who love them.

This idea that it just ends and don’t speak of them – that’s wrong.

MARTIN SHORT, ACTOR

‘LIFE IS SHORT’ REALLY MEANS ‘DO SOMETHING.’ CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, AUTHOR

113

BONUS READ

WHY DID A CARGO SHIP WITH 33 CREW SAIL INTO A FEROCIOUS STORM? A REMARKABLE RECORDING SALVAGED FROM THE DOOMED VESSEL OFFERS

BY William Langewiesche FROM VANIT Y FAIR

Teeth of a 114

april 2020

Hurricane 115

In the darkness before dawn on October 1, 2015, an American merchant captain named Michael Davidson, 53, sailed a 241-metre USflagged cargo ship, El Faro, into the eye wall of a Category 3 hurricane near the Bahama Islands.

The hurricane, named Joaquin, overwhelmed and sank the ship. Davidson and the 32 others aboard drowned. El Faro should have been able to avoid the hurricane. Why didn’t it?

The story begins with the captain, Michael Davidson. He grew up in Portland, Maine, and at age 16 got a job on a local harbour ferry. He graduated from the Maine Maritime Academy in 1988, then began sailing on oil tankers between Alaska and West Coast ports, rising to the rank of chief mate.

The Gulf of Alaska is notoriously rough, and Davidson sailed through countless storms, some of hurricane

strength. He was a by-the-book mariner with a reputation for being unusually competent and organised.

By training and temperament he was a safety-first man.

He switched to dry-cargo ships on the East Coast, and eventually signed on with a shipping company called TOTE. He was given a weekly run from Jacksonville, Florida, to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and El Faro, a 241-metre US-flagged cargo ship, to command.

On Monday, September 28, 2015, the loading of El Faro, which means ‘the lighthouse’ in Spanish, started in Jacksonville at 1pm and continued on Tuesday until shortly after sundown.

The weather was balmy, with light winds and mostly overcast skies.

Far out in the AtlanCaptain Michael Davidson (left) and seaman tic, a tropical depression Frank Hamm struggled to get off the bridge had been intensifying as El Faro went down and progressing towards

116

April 2020

PH OTO I L LU S T R AT I O N, PR E V I O U S S PR E A D: S H U T T ER S TO C K .

P H O T O S T H I S PA G E : (L E F T ) C O U R T E S Y O F D AV I D S O N FA M I LY (R I G H T ) C O U R T E S Y O F R O C H E L L E H A M M

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

Into the Teeth of a Hurricane the Bahamas on an unusual southwesterly heading rather than hooking back to the north, as the meteorological models kept expecting it to do. A day before El Faro’s departure, the tropical depression had become a tropical storm named Joaquin.

Davidson, who had been monitoring the forecasts, had The El Faro: the 241-metre cargo ship stood little two routes available to him. chance against the raging hurricane The first was a straight southeast heading past the Bahamas for two the Bahamian chain, and was slowly and a half days and 2035 kilometres moving in that direction. directly to San Juan.

T he s e c ond route r a n sout h through the Florida Straits, then east At 5.56am on September 30, the along Cuba through a sinewy nar- morning after departure, the digital rows called the Old Bahama Chan- voyage data recorder first opens on nel. This route would have placed a the bridge. Davidson was conferring string of wave-breaking islands be- with the chief mate, Steven Schultz, tween the ship and the storm. The 54, at the chart table. An unlicensed problem was that it added 296 kilo- seaman, Frank Hamm III, 49, was at metres and more than six hours the helm, monitoring the autopilot. to the trip. The schedule would be The ship was rolling in swells apthrown out of whack. proaching from the left. Schultz Davidson opted for the straight said, “Got the swell,” and Davidson shot. The forecast indicated that he answered, “Oh yeah. Probably going could slip past the Bahamas before to get worse.”

Joaquin moved in.

Schultz suggested moving south El Faro cast off at 8.07 on Tuesday of the direct track line to San Juan, evening, carrying 391 containers and giving the storm a bit more space. But 267 trailers and cars. Six hours later then he said, “I would wait. Get more Joaquin became a Category 1 hurri- information.” cane, with sustained winds greater For marine weather, El Faro’s crew than 119 kilometres per hour. The eye had multiple options but used primarlay 394 kilometres east-northeast of ily two. The first was an Inmarsat C San Salvador, the outermost island of satellite receiver that fed US National

P H O T O : W I L L I A M H O E Y/ M A R I N E T R A F F I C

“A Good Little Plan”

117

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

Hurricane Center reports to a printer on the bridge. These so-called sat-C reports arrived in text form and required the plotting of Joaquin’s forecasted positions on a chart. The Hurricane Center’s mathematical predictive tools were having an unusually difficult time getting a handle on Joaquin’s forecasted positions. The resulting uncertainty was expressed emphatically in the forecasts, and Davidson was aware of it.

The second source for weather information was a subscription service called the Bon Voyage System (BVS) that processed global weather data to produce its own forecast, primarily in the form of colourful weather maps, which could be animated and over which a ship’s course could be laid. By the time the data was processed, it was up to six hours old, which in the context of Joaquin was obsolete. The BVS map gave no indication of the age of the raw data.

Davidson knew that all the forecasts were uncertain, and that they sometimes disagreed. But how aware was he that when he looked at the BVS maps he was looking into the past?

He went to his stateroom, and when he returned to the bridge he said, “All right, I just sent up the latest weather.”

Schultz opened the BVS program at the chart table. Because of a software glitch, the map that appeared was the very same map that had come in with the previous download, six hours earlier, according to the National Transportation Safety Board report on the disaster. The raw data on which it was based was at least 12 hours old.

Davidson and Schultz decided that the storm would be a little too close for comfort when the time came to cross its bow. Working with a GPSbased plotter, they made a slight right turn, creating a gentle dogleg that would pass 16 kilometres outside San Salvador Island and put them 80 kilometres from the hurricane’s eye. Davidson said, “I think that’s a good little plan, chief mate.”

It was 6.40 in the morning, and the sun was coming up. Davidson said, “Oh, look at that red sky over there.

Red in the morning, sailors take warning.”

Davidson left the bridge and a fresh helmsman and the third mate showed up to stand the next fourhour watch. Schultz briefed t he third mate, Jeremie Riehm, on the weather and the diversion; if worse came to worst, he explained, they could turn behind the outer islands and escape through one of several

RIEHM STUDIED THE WEATHER. "WE'RE GONNA GET SLAMMED TONIGHT," HE SAID

118

April 2020

Into the Teeth of a Hurricane

P H O T O S ( L E F T T O R I G H T ) C O U R T E S Y O F : S C H U LT Z F A M I LY; L A U R I E B O B I L O T T; C A R L A N E W K I R K

Left to right: chief mate Steven Schultz, second mate Danielle Randolph, helmsman Larry Davis

deepwater gaps to reach the Old Bahama Channel.

After Schultz left the bridge, Riehm continued to study the weather. He said to the helmsman, “We’re gonna get slammed tonight.”

Stacked high with containers, the massive ship rolled with a slow rhythm through swells coming in from the east. The sky was mostly clear. The wind was warm and slowly increasing.

When Davidson returned to the bridge, his mind was on the storm. He said, “Just gotta keep the speed up so we get goin’ down. And who knows?

Maybe this low will just stall … Just enough for us to duck underneath.”

But the opposite happened.

Category 3 Shortly before noon, the second mate, Danielle Randolph, 34, arrived with a relief helmsman, Larry Davis, 63, to stand the next watch. Randolph was from Rockland, Maine, and like Davidson and three others aboard was a graduate of the Maine Maritime Academy. Riehm briefed her on the

navigation plan. Speaking of the captain, she said, “He’s telling everyone down there, ‘Ohhh, it’s not a bad storm. It’s not so bad. It’s not even that windy out. Seen worse.’”

Now alone on the bridge with Davis, Randolph returned to the subject of Davidson. She mimicked him. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing!” She backed off the mockery and said, “If it’s nothing, then why the hell are we going on a different track line?”

Davis said, “We’re getting sea swells now.”

The swells slowed the ship. In his stateroom Davidson sent a report to the TOTE office giving an ETA for San Juan of 8am on Friday, 44 hours ahead. Then he came to the bridge and said, “Damn, we’re getting killed with this speed.”

Randolph answered him a little rebelliously: “I think now it’s not a matter of speed. It’s ‘When we get there, we get there,’ as long as we arrive in one piece.”

A gulf seemed to be opening between Davidson and the crew on

119

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

El Faro actual route RID A

El Faro planned route

CUB

A

Alternative route (rejected)

Captain Davidson thought El Faro, heading southeast, could avoid Hurricane Joaquin, heading southwest

the bridge. He may not have noticed it.

L a t e r, D a v i d s o n i n s t r u c t e d Randolph to start keeping hourly logs of the weather. Wind direction and force, barometer. The wind would have to be estimated because the ship’s anemometer had been in disrepair for weeks.

The wind was increasing, the sea was covered with whitecaps, and the swells from the east were rising.

Around 4pm, the sky started clouding over. Schultz, the chief mate, and Hamm, his helmsman, came onto the bridge to take the next watch.

At 4.46pm, Randolph and Davis returned to allow Schultz and Hamm to go to dinner. The sat-C printer delivered the latest weather, and Randolph began to plot it out at the chart table. This information from the

120

April 2020

Staying the Course Schultz and Hamm returned from dinner, and Davidson showed up around sundown. To Schultz he said, “I just sent you the latest weather.” It was the BVS product depicting a forecast based on old data, with additional errors cranked in due to forecasting models. It was not exactly a fiction, but it was a poor tool for attempting a close pass across the bow of a hurricane.

They decided to turn the ship ten degrees to the right, widening away from the storm for a second time. The new course would take them to the west of San Salvador Island, which for a while would offer some protection from the hurricane’s waves. They made the turn at 7.03pm.

With its engine running at near

PHOTO COURTESY NOA A

FLO

N

National Hurricane Center got the current location of the eye about right.

She said, “So at two in the morning … it should be right here.”

She indicated a position just outside of San Salvador Island.

Randolph did some calculations and began to chuckle. “We’re going to be right there with it. Looks like the storm is coming right for us.”

Into the Teeth of a Hurricane maximum speed, El Faro was riding comfortably through large swells coming in from the northeast. Davidson was pleased. For the next 45 minutes, he and Schultz calculated GPS waypoints and courses, and laid out a tidy plan for the rest of the trip, including a strong left turn in the open waters beyond San Salvador Island, and a straight shot across the bow of the hurricane.

Riehm and his helmsman appeared on the bridge for their 8pm-to-midnight. Schultz gave Riehm a quick briefing.

Later Riehm invited the helmsman over to look at the BVS. He said, “Let’s see how this thing goes. We can’t outrun it, you know. It’s more powerful than we thought. This is supposed to hook right here. It’s supposed to make this stop. What if it doesn’t?”

“What if we get close?” the helmsman asked. “We get jammed in those islands there, and it starts comin’ at us?”

Riehm responded, “That’s what I’m thinking. Maybe I’m just being a Chicken Little. I don’t know.”

At 10.54pm the sat-C printer delivered the latest from the National Hurricane Center. Joaquin had exploded into a Category 3 with maximum sustained winds of 185 km/h, and gusts

to 220. It was moving south-southwest at nine kph. By eight in the morning, it was expected to be sustaining winds of 200 km/h, with gusts to 250.

Riehm plotted the storm’s predicted position and looked at the escape route, which would involve a strong right turn to the south into the passage past Crooked Island and on to the Old Bahama Channel beyond. He called Davidson and said, “So at 0400 we’ll be 35 kilometres from the centre, with max winds 185 km/h and gusts to 220 and strengthening.” The option that we do have – from what I can see – is at 0200 we could head south, and that would open it up some.”

D av i d s o n d i s missed the plan and did not come to the bridge. Evidence suggests that he was still showing a preference for the animated BVS graphics, which indicated the storm progressing more slowly.

The swell was growing; the ship was moving more heavily now. At one point Riehm said, “We don’t have any options. We got nowhere to go.”

RANDOLPH PROPOSED THE ESCAPE ROUTE TO THE SOUTH. DAVIDSON REJECTED IT

“Hello, Joaquin” Just before midnight, Randolph arrived with Davis to stand watch. In the partial shelter offered by San Salvador Island, about 32 kilometres to the east, the ship was moving more

121

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

easily. Riehm explained the situation.

As always, Randolph tried to keep things light. She said, “This is the second time we changed our route, and it just keeps coming for us.”

At 1.18am, the ship started to pitch more violently. Davis recommended slowing down. They were approaching the waypoint where Davidson’s route plan called for the significant turn to the left, taking the ship, as the captain believed, across the path of the hurricane a safe distance from the eye.

Randolph did not want to do it. She called Davidson on the house phone and proposed the escape route to the south and a smooth sail on to San Juan.

He rej e cte d her suggestion. Despite the uncertainties in the forecast, he was convinced of his strategy. He had not yet downloaded the latest BVS package, emailed to his computer at 11pm.

When Randolph got off the phone, she said to Davis, “He said to run it.”

She meant the course as planned.

She said, “Hold on to your ass!” and laughed.

El Faro entered a squall. Over the next hour, the conditions deteriorated, and the ship began to labour, unable to exceed 30 km/h. By now, the stresses on the ship were enormous. Objects exposed to the wind were banging,

breaking and flying away. On Deck 2, below the main deck where the containers were stacked, water began washing in through openings on the sides, swirling around the wheels of the cargo trailers secured there and washing out just as fast. This was no reason for concern because the deck was sealed off from the engine room and the cargo holds below.

The ship kept smashing ahead. At 1.55 Randolph said, “Wooo! That was a good wave. Definitely lost some speed.”

Davis said, “Damn sure don’t wa nt to lose t he plant.” He meant the ship’s engine.

The captain wanted full speed in order to cross the storm a good distance from the eye. In the Northern Hemisphere, the circulation around hurricanes runs counterclockwise. The winds right now were northerly and coming at the ship from the left side. If the BVS map was correct, the eye lay ahead and well to the left. According to that model, the winds would become northwesterly (directly astern) as El Faro passed abeam the eye, and would shift to southwesterly and then southerly (on the right side) as the ship steamed beyond it. But this never happened – the ship was

THE FIRST OF THE REALLY BIG WAVES REARED. “OH MY GOD!” RANDOLPH SAID

122

April 2020

Into the Teeth of a Hurricane heading towards the storm, not away from it.

Up on the bridge at 2.42am, Randolph had to sit to keep from falling down. Then the first of the really big waves reared just ahead. Randolph said, “Oh, my God! Ahhh!” Solid water – green water – was coming over the bow.

The ship kept getting knocked off coarse. A steering alarm would sound, and the autopilot would slowly regain control.

At 3.20am a wave clobbered the stern. The ship veered briefly out of control.

The helmsman said, “We’re getting into it now.”

Randolph said, “Hello, Joaquin.”

Rule of Thumb At 3.45am, Chief Mate Schultz arrived for the next watch. He said, “So you can’t see a thing?”

Davis answered, “Yeah. If anybody’s out there, they gotta be a damn fool.”

The ship was drifting south of the track line. Schultz ordered a heading correction to the left. Hamm showed up for his turn at the helm. Schultz said, “Don’t like this.”

A huge wave reared up. Hamm said, “Hold on!” The ship slewed when it was hit, and the steering alarm sounded. The waves were coming about every 13 seconds, and the autopilot was having a hard time keeping up.

Hamm said, “How much longer of this?” and Schultz answered, “Hours.”

Not long afterwards, Davidson entered the bridge. He said, “There’s nothing bad about this ride … I was sleepin’ like a baby.”

Schultz said, “Not me.”

Davidson said, “Well, this is every day in Alaska. This is what it’s like.”

Speaking of the wind, Schultz said, “Can’t tell the direction. Our forecast had it coming around to starboard.”

“It will,” Davidson said. “Eventually.”

Here’s a rule of thumb for the Northern Hemisphere: whether you are travelling by ship, plane, car or horse, if you have a wind from the left you are moving towards lower atmospheric pressure – and that means moving towards worsening weather.

Davidson left the bridge to check on the galley. Immediately afterwards the sat-C printer spat out the latest missive from the National Hurricane Center. It contained a reasonably accurate report on the eye’s current position. Schultz retrieved the page but did not have time to plot the coordinates.

The house phone rang. It is not clear who the caller was, but the conversation was about problems with cargo on the second deck – the one the seas were sweeping through. The ship was listing to starboard, which was mentioned as a factor. Schultz did not seem too concerned, and said he would inform the captain.

No sooner had he hung up than the phone rang again. This time it was the chief engineer down in the

123

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

engine room. The conversation was brief. Schultz rang the captain in the galley. “The chief engineer just called … Something about the list and oil levels.”

The time was 4.41am. The hurricane was raging. Davidson returned and got on the phone to the engine room. After he got off he said, “Gonna steer right up into it. Wants to take the list off.” He intended to feel his way upwind until the aerodynamic pressures were sufficiently reduced that the ship would come closer to level.

Beyond the windows all was blackness and driving spray. He did not know the wind’s direction except that it was coming from the left.

Hamm started a slow turn into the wind. Davidson had been on the phone again with the engine room.

When he got off, he said, “Just the list.

The sumps are actin’ up. To be expected.” The sumps had pumps that supplied lubrication to the main engine.

They had turned 35 degrees to the left. Hamm was now doggedly steering to the northeast. The sea conditions were atrocious. They were no longer normal for Alaska.

The ship was pointed almost directly into the wind, but Davidson had no way of knowing it. On a clean upwind direction, any list caused by the winds should have come to an end; the list, however, continued and, if anything, was steeper than before, suggesting that something besides wind was causing it – such as flooding.

124

April 2020

Hamm was having a hard time keeping his place at the helm. Davidson said, “Stand up. Hold on to that handle. Just relax, everything’s gonna be just fine.”

The recording was difficult to make out, but Schultz then appears to have reported the list at 18 degrees. Think of the angle of a wheelchair ramp and then multiply by four.

Flooding in Three-Hold It is unlikely that Davidson ever fully understood that he had sailed into the eye wall of Joaquin, but he must have realised by now that he had come much too close.

At 5.43am, the seriousness of their predicament suddenly became clear.

Up on the bridge the house phone rang. Davidson answered and listened for 15 seconds. He hung up and said to Schultz. “Go down to three-hold and start the pumping right now. Water.”

Three-hold was a vast space below the second deck, just in front of the engine room. It was loaded with cars. The problem was a series of scuttles – heavy watertight hatches – that allowed access from the second deck to the cargo holds below. The crew had secured them the day before, in preparation for the storm. But if one had been overlooked or had failed, the flooding would be severe.

The house phone rang. Davidson answered. It was an engineer calling in. The bilge pump was not keeping up – water was continuing to rise. The

Into the Teeth of a Hurricane source of the water was unknown.

El Faro had a closed system of two interconnected ballast tanks – one on the left, one on the right – that were used to balance the ship during cargo-loading operations by means of water transfers. Davidson ordered the engine room to start transferring water from the starboard tank to the port tank in order to lessen the list, thereby distributing the flood waters more evenly.

Five minutes later the chief engineer rang with the news that the source did indeed appear to be an open scuttle on the starboard side.

Access would be difficult unless the flood waters could be lowered. Davidson said, “I’m going to turn the ship and get the wind on the starboard side, get everything on the starboard side, give us a port list, and see if we’ll have a better look at it.”

It was an audacious plan. In a badly wounded ship, he was going to use the hurricane itself as a tool for damage control. He said to Hamm, “Put your rudder left 20.” El Faro began to turn.

The winds had further intensified. The seas were mountainous.

The hurricane shoved El Faro into a port-side list. Water was now pouring out of the open scuttle. When it stopped, members of the crew would

get it closed. Randolph showed up on the bridge. Davidson said “Hi!” with a rising inflection. He was obviously pleased to see her there.

Before long, Davidson got word that the scuttle had been secured. But the ship continued to list badly – now to the left. Water must still be coming in from somewhere.

Then, suddenly at 6.13am, the ever-present tremors of the ship’s propulsion stopped. Davidson said, “I think we just lost the plant.” Three minutes later, the chief engineer called. The problem was with lubrication-oil pressure at this angle of list.

He said they were trying to bring the engine back online.

Meanwhile, the ship had plenty of standby power for running the pumps and electrics.

It was mor n i ng t w i l ig ht, a nd the scene slowly coming into sight was calamitous, with huge breaki ng waves, chu r n i ng foa m a nd wind-driven rain and spray. The hull lay below the bridge, taking a pounding from the storm. There was a sound of multiple thuds in rapid succession. Davidson said, “That’s why I don’t go out there … That’s a piece of handrail, right?”

Randolph decided that this was the time to grind some gourmet coffee.

IT WAS MORNING TWILIGHT, AND THE SCENE COMING INTO SIGHT WAS CALAMITOUS

125

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

She said, “Coffee? Cream and sugar?”

She added, “Sugar is fine with the captain, right?” Hamm said, “Give me the Splenda, not the regular sugar.”

In reply to a question, Davidson said, “Should get better all the time.

Right now we’re on the back side of it. OK? But they were not on the back side of the storm, and conditions were not going to improve. They were in the northern eye wall, and getting pushed to the southwest. Joaquin, meanwhile, was intensifying into a Category 4 hurricane.

Davidson called the engine room.

The chief engineer explained that he would not be able to get the lubrication pumps going until El Faro gained more of an even keel.

Full daylight had come. The chief engineer called, and Randolph told him there was nothing more that could be done from the bridge about the list. Davidson instructed her to send an emergency message to the Coast Guard and the company via the security alert system.

Speaking of the outside world, he said in an urgent tone, “Wake everybody up! Wake ’em up!”

starboard sides, open to the sky, extremely difficult if not impossible to launch from a listing ship in hurricane-force winds, and certain to capsize in breaking waves. It also had five inflatable life rafts that were easier to launch but more difficult to board, and nearly as vulnerable in the storm. The only hope was to take to the life rafts.

Davidson radioed to Schultz, who was somewhere on the ship trying to monitor the flooding. He said, “Just a heads-up. I’m gonna ring the general alarm. Get your muster while you’re down there. Muster all, mate.”

Schultz answered, “Roger.”

Davidson called the engine room and got a junior officer. He said, “Just want to let you know I am going to ring the general alarm. You don’t have to abandon ship or anything just yet.

All right, we’re gonna stay with it.”

When he got off the phone, Davidson shouted loudly, “Ring it!” A high-frequency bell could be heard everywhere.

Schultz called Davidson on the radio. He said, “Everybody starboard side.” The starboard side was the high side, to windward.

Davidson answered, “All understood.”

Hamm was trying to climb the

A LOW RUMBLING BEGAN. IT WAS THE SOUND OF EL FARO GOING DOWN

“Everybody Get Off!” El Faro had two outdated lifeboats hung from davits on its port and

126

April 2020

Into the Teeth of a Hurricane slanted deck of the bridge, but he was exhausted from steering. He said, “Can’t come back over!”

Davidson said, “Hold on a sec. Take it easy there.”

A radio call came in, possibly from Riehm. “Cap’n, you gettin’ ready to abandon ship?”

“Yeah. What I’d like to make sure everybody has their immersion suits and, uh, stand by. Get a good head count.” The radio said, “Mustered, sir.”

Randolph yelled, “All right, I got containers in the water!”

Davidson said, “Ring the abandon ship.” The bell sounded: seven pulses followed by an eight-second ring.

Davidson said, “Bow is down. Bow is down.”

Davidson radioed, “Everybody get off! Get off the ship! Stay together!”

Hamm said, “Cap! Cap!” He was having a hard time climbing the deck Clinging to the high side, unable to reach Hamm, Davidson kept urging him to try.

Hamm said, “You gonna leave me?”

Davidson answered firmly, “I’m not leaving you. Let’s go.”

A low rumbling began and did not

let up. It was the sound of El Faro going down. The last words heard on the bridge are Davidson’s. He is crying out to Hamm: “It’s time to come this way!”

FROM VANITY FAIR (APRIL 2018), © 2018

BY WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE

The sinking of El Faro, 685 kilometres southeast of Miami, was the worst US maritime disaster in three decades. A massive search over the following week turned up life rafts, immersion suits and other debris from El Faro, but no bodies were ever recovered. The ship was found resting 4695 metres beneath the surface and the data recorder was eventually retrieved.

A US National Transportation Safety Board investigation concluded that a combination of factors contributed to the catastrophe, including Captain Davidson’s reliance on outdated weather reports, the failure of crew members to assert their concerns about the ship’s course, and lack of adequate safety training for crew members by the shipping company.

Word Play An aptronym is a name especially suited to the profession of its owner. Real-life examples include barber Dan Druff, Felicity Foote for a dance teacher, James Bugg for an exterminator, and meteorologists Dallas Raine, Sara Blizzard and Amy Freeze. More famously, we have William Wordsworth, the poet. WWW.WORDSMITH.ORG

127

TA L K S

What’s New in RD Talks

Sit back and enjoy the audio versions of the most engaging stories to have appeared in Reader’s Digest magazine.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

THE MAN WHO WILL NOT FORGET

Often called ‘The Lady of the Lamp’, this indomitable woman pioneered modern nursing, cleaner hospitals and better care in the midst of war.

Believing passionately that justice should know “no limits in time or distance”, Simon Wiesenthal ferreted out more than 1000 Nazi war criminals.

TICKET TO A MURDER

WHAT LIFE INSIDE ALCATRAZ WAS REALLY LIKE

Nearly a thousand leads had turned up nothing to solve a shocking crime. Then the detective got an unexpected call about a lottery ticket.

This is the story of a prisoner at the infamous Alcatraz maximum security prison off San Francisco.

T O LISTEN GO TO:

w dersdigest.com.au/podcasts www.readersdigest.co.nz/podcasts www.rdasia.com/podcasts

RD RECOMM RECOMME ECOMMENDS

Movies

Y

The Secret Garden

ou’d be right in thinking the name of this film sounds familiar. Written

by Frances Hodgson Burnett in 1911, many people would have read this book as a child – or an adult, as I did. The Secret Garden tells the story of ten-year-old Mary Lennox (Dixie Egerickx). Born in India, she is sent to live with her reclusive

Family

uncle (Colin Firth) on a remote country estate in Yorkshire after she avoids the cholera epidemic that kills her wealthy British parents. When she discovers her sickly cousin (Edan Hayhurst), who has been shut away, the two oddballs discover a magical secret garden that will change their lives.

Also starring Julie Walters as the head housekeeper.

COMPILED BY DIANE GODLEY

readersdigest.co.nz

129

RE RA E DER’S A DER’S DIGE DIGE STST

B

Misbehaviour

ased on the controversies surrounding the 1970s Miss World pageant – at the time the most watched television show around the world – Misbehaviour tells two stories: that of a group of women’s liberation activists led by Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley)

Drama

who try their hardest to disrupt the beauty competition – including the live broadcast – and black contestant Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). That year was the first time black contestants were entered in the pageant. An uplifting movie for women everywhere.

No Time to Die N

Spy Thriller

aniel Craig is back playing the debonair spy in the latest James Bond thriller. His mission: to rescue a kidnapped scientist. However, when Bond discovers the mysterious villain is armed with dangerous new technology, the w ask ends up being far more treacherous ta han expected. Set in numerous stunning th ocations around the world, including lo amaica, Norway, London and Italy, this Ja atest in the 007 series provides plenty of la shoot ’em ups, amazing stunts and hairaising car chases around breathtakingly ra beautiful narrow village streets. b

Books The Art of Language Lonely Planet

For anyone who has ever travelled to a country where the Latin alphabet isn’t used, you understand how lost and frustrating it can feel.

This book won’t help you read any of the 26 exotic scripts featured here, but you will discover their enigmatic shapes and mysteries.

According to Tim Brookes, founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project, 85 per cent of the world’s indigenous alphabets are on the verge of extinction, hence the need to preserve them.

This book provides an insight into 26 languages, and tutorials on writing a local roverb in calligraphy. o

Quick and Delicious Gordon Ramsay HACHETTE

Perhaps best known for his potty mouth, TV personality Gordon Ramsay is a multi-Michelinstarred chef, writer and food critic. Over course of his career, he h has h learnt l t how h w ho to create dishes that not only taste great, but can be made in even the most trying of circumstances. Now, 100 of his recipes can be created in your own kitchen in less than 30 minutes, thanks to his latest cookbook.

Featuring meat, fish and meat-free mains, using ingredients that are mostly available in your supermarket, it includes his own tips to make cooking a breeze.

Cauliflower Soup with Brown Butter and Cheesy Toast

131

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

We Need to Talk About Mum & Dad Jean Kittson PAN MACMILLAN

The Wandering Intan Paramaditha PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

Bored with life, the female character in this story is desperate to escape Jakarta and travel the world. So she does a deal with the devil who gives her a pair of red shoes – and a curse. As the reader, you choose where she travels (by turning to certain pages). The decisions you make may mean she lives the life of an international tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or murderer. By one of Indonesia’s most talented new fiction writers, The Wandering explores the privileges of travel and desire.

132

april 2020

A little wit can go a long way in making difficult subjects a joy to read. Following her enlightening and very funny book You’re Still Hot to Me (about menopause), the queen of laughs brings us this warm and witty practical guide to help us support ageing loved ones. With parents in their 90s, this is something Kittson has first-hand experience of. Full of expert advice, her razor-sharp humour and cartoons, this book takes the edge off the difficult topics that surround parenting our ageing parents.

I Am C C-3PO: 3PO: The Inside Story Anthony Daniels PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

Who could not but love Star Wars’ overanxious golden droid?

I Am C-3PO: The Inside Story is a personal narrative by actor Anthony Daniels, who was cast as the droid in his debut acting role and appeared in every single one of the Star Wars movies.

Full of heart-warming memories with cast members such as Carrie Fisher and Alec Guinness, Daniels also provides humorous anecdotes, including the first time he put on all 19 pieces of the original E-3PO suit.

RD Recommends

Podcas

RD Talks: Second Gift of Life

Where Should We Begin?

The New York Times:

Desperate to save their daughter’s life with a kidney transplant, a couple becomes detectives – following every lead across the country to track down a stranger.

An inspiring story about choices and second chances.

Renowned therapist Esther Perel takes a deep dive into real relationships in real time. The guests are couples dealing with loss, intimacy issues and divorce and they turn to Esther for the tools to navigate their relationship problems.

This is what the news should sound like.

Hosted by political journalist Michael Barbaro, episodes are based on The New York Times’ reporting of the day with interviews of journalists from the respected newspaper.

The Daily

HOW TO GET PODCASTS To listen on the web: Google the website for ‘Where Should We Begin?’, for example, and click on the play button. To download: Download an app such as Podcatchers or iTunes on your phone or tablet and simply search by title.

TO LISTEN TO RD TALKS GO TO www.readersdigest.com.au/podcasts, or www.readersdigest.co.nz/podcasts or www.rdasia.co.nz/podcasts and click on the play button.

Puzzle Answers See page 138 THE GOOD LIFE

THE RAINBOW GAME

Luca is taking a nap, Ginger is getting her ears scratched, Nutmeg is going for a walk, Pepper is burying a chew toy and Bear is playing catch.

1/28.

A-TO-L FIT-IN

J L F E H C I B K A G D

SUDOKU

9 1 6 7 2 3 5 4 8

5 7 2 1 4 8 9 3 6

3 8 4 5 6 9 1 7 2

4 3 8 9 7 2 6 5 1

1 2 5 4 3 6 7 8 9

6 9 7 8 5 1 4 2 3

8 5 1 3 9 7 2 6 4

2 4 9 6 8 5 3 1 7

7 6 3 2 1 4 8 9 5

133

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

THE GENIUS SECTION

Sharpen Your Mind

The secret to keeping everyday life from becoming boring is surprisingly easy

BY Juli Fraga

A D A P T E D F R O M T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S

134

april 2020

PH OTO S: M AT T H E W CO H EN

WAKE UP YOUR BRAIN

L

ast spring, I started a new exercise class. As someone who dislikes doing jumping jacks, burpees and push-ups, I found the workouts surprisingly enjoyable, at least for a while.

But after several months, my hobby began to feel like watching the same episode of a sitcom on repeat. I was overly familiar with the class routine, and my excitement had been replaced with boredom.

A 2016 study estimated that 63 per cent of us suffer from boredom regularly. A nd research shows t hat chronically bored people are more prone to depression, substance use and anxiety.

Even though we all feel apathetic from time to time, according to Mary Mann, author of Yawn: Adventures in Boredom, it’s often seen as being self-inflicted. ‘Only boring people get bored’ is a popular belief.

But boredom isn’t a character flaw.

It’s a state brought on by something called hedonic adaptation, or the tendency to get used to things over time. This explains why activities – and even relationships – that were initially gratifying can sometimes lose their lustre.

Humans are remarkably good at growing accustomed to changes in our lives, both positive and negative, according to psychology Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky. This is a good thing when we are faced

The Genius Section with adjusting to adversities such as losing a loved one or a job. But becoming immune to positive events can prove detrimental. Think about the last time you received a pay increase, bought a car or moved house.

At first, these experiences can bring immense joy. But over time, they become part of the routine. We are ready for the next new thing to excite us. Think of it as a hedonic treadmill.

W hile boredom can be a downer when it drains the pleasure from our lives, it can provide a sort of service.

“If our emotional reactions didn’t weaken with time, we couldn’t recognise novel changes that may signal rewards or threats,” Lyubomirsky says. In other words, we’d overlook cues signalling us to make important decisions about our relationships and safety.

It’s not unlike how our reactions change when we fall in love or experience loss. Being caught in the glow of happiness or the web of sadness can make us distracted or forgetful.

We may miss signals that indicate whether we’re about to make a smart move – or a disastrous one. The good news is that understanding the connection between hedonic adaptation and boredom can help us manoeuvre.

A study published in 2018 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin showed that finding quirky ways to interact with familiar people, places and things can make everyday experiences feel exciting. In other

135

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

words, sometimes you’ve just got to shake things up! Need some fresh ideas for keeping life fresh? Read on.

While you’re working Spending too much time in the same environment can keep us from achieving ‘flow’ – being immersed in an activity with full energy and enjoyment. Changes don’t have to be big to make an impact, according to leadership coach Rachel Loock. Buy some flowers for your desk, she suggests.

Move your home office to the library or a coffee shop a few days a week.

Approach a routine task in a new way.

For instance, if you’re charged with leading a Monday meeting, try starting it with meditation or a discussion that’s not work-related.

With your partner “Boredom is an emotional state and happens when couples stop taking the opportunity to grow and deeply connect with each other,” says Dr Venus Nicolino. Look for new challenges to take on together. Try mixing up different sets of friends to do something creative, such as a group cooking lesson or a themed dinner.

Instead of “How was your day?” try asking “What are you looking forward to today?” or “Is there anything I can help you with this week?”

Our curiosity can remind people that we’re interested in who they are, and that’s the key to maintaining intimacy. Studies show that being curi-

136

April 2020

The same old, same old is a sure path to boredom. Try mixing things up

ous about others can make us more engaging to be around, too.

When you’re eating Eating foods in unconventional ways, such as using chopsticks to pick up kernels of popcorn, can respark the excitement we feel when something is brand new. Consider the chopsticks a metaphor for shaking up any familiar habit.

During your commute If you drive, take a different route or listen to a new podcast. If you walk or use public t ranspor t, g reet a stranger or put away your phone and do some people watching. “Simply observing one’s surroundings may seem boring, but done mindfully, it can become interesting and even potentially profound,” says Dr Tim Lomas, a lecturer in positive psychology. Just remember, whatever you do to quell boredom today, try something different tomorrow – and the day after that.

NEW YORK TIMES (MARCH 29, 2019), © 2019 BY NEW YORK TIMES, NYTIMES.COM.

The Genius Section

FAMILY FUN Spot the Difference There are seven differences. Can you find them?

Around in Circles Around and around goes the maze. Can you find your way to the centre?

V

Entry

Check your answers for Family Fun on page 142.

137

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

PUZZLES Challenge yourself by solving these puzzles and mind stretchers, then check your answers on page 133.

Five neighbourhood dogs are each enjoying one of their favourite activities. Based on the clues, can you figure out which pet is doing what?

DOGS LUCA GINGER NUTMEG PEPPER BEAR

ACTIVITIES Getting ears scratched Playing catch Taking a nap Burying a chew toy Going for a walk

CLUES: • Pepper is either playing catch or burying a chew toy.

• Neither Ginger, Luca nor Bear is on a walk.

• One of the dogs named for a spice is getting her ears scratched (and loving it).

• A dog who is not named for a spice is playing catch.

• Bear is getting some exercise.

The Rainbow Game Difficult I shuffle eight cards: one with each of the six main colours of the rainbow and two grey. I lay them out face down. You select cards one by one. If you can pick all the colours of the rainbow before you pick a grey card, then you win.

What’s the probability of winning?

138

april 2020

(THE R AINBOW GAME) DARREN RIGBY

The Good Life Easy

( A -T O - L F I T- I N) F R A S E R S I M P S O N; ( T H E G O O D L I F E ) S U E D O H R I N; (D O G I M A G E S) I S T O C K .C O M/ U F I M T S E VAV

BR AI N POWE R

5 3 4 6 1 8 2 6 5 3 8 3 2 4 8 1 9 2 5 7 4 8 6 9 3 4 7 1 Sudoku To Solve This Puzzle Put a number from 1 to 9 in each empty square so that: every horizontal row and vertical column contains all nine numbers (1-9) without repeating any of them; each of the outlined 3 x 3 boxes has all nine numbers, none repeated.

J E H C A-to-L Fit-In Moderately difficult Insert the letters from A to L, one per square, so that no two consecutive letters in alphabetical order are in squares that touch, not even at a corner. Four letters have been placed to get you started.

brought to you by

Now available in

0.4mm and 0.5mm

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

TRIVIA Test Your General Knowledge

2 points

2. Which European country technically shares a border with Brazil, because one of its ‘overseas departments’ does? 2 points 3. What ‘finger-lickin’ good’ company piloted a chicken-flavoured nail polish? 1 point 4. In printing, it’s the colour black.

In chemistry, it’s potassium.

Which letter is it? 2 points 5. Samuel Tilden, Grover Cleveland, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton share what distinction among US presidential candidates?

2 points

6. What Indian mausoleum was called a “teardrop ... on the cheek of time” by Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Rabindranath Tagore? 1 point 16-20 Gold medal

7. What Scottish poet’s works inspired the book titles Of Mice and Men and Catcher in the Rye? 2 points

8. In a 2010 study, people found more mistakes when they marked essays with a pen of what colour?

1 point

9. Name the South Korean film awarded best picture at this year’s Oscars, becoming the first nonEnglish language film to take the top prize. 1 point 10. Which has more landmass: Antarctica or Canada? 1 point 11. In Swedish, a skvader is a fictional rabbit with what unusual feature?

13. In 2017, the

site Bachtrack.com determined the ten most performed ballets in the world. What composer gave us three of them, including the first?

2 points

2 points

12. At least 40 bottles of sunscreen per month were needed to protect what popular 1990s TV show’s cast from sunburns?

1 point

11-15 Silver medal 6-10 Bronze medal 0-5 Wooden spoon

ANSWERS: 1. The Blue Lagoon. 2. France, because of French Guiana. 3. KFC. 4. K. 5. They won the popular vote but lost the electoral college vote. 6. The Taj Mahal.

7. Robert Burns. 8. Red. 9. Parasite. 10. Antarctica. 11. Wings. 12. Baywatch. 13. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Number one was The Nutcracker.

140

april 2020

PHOTO: IS TOCK.COM/JFMDESIGN

1. What geothermal Icelandic site has the same name as a 1980 movie?

The Genius Section

WORD POWER A Bug’s Life

Terms from the fascinating world of insects

BY Linda Besner

1. proboscis – A: reproduction by laying eggs. B: ability to skate on water. C: tubular feeding organ.

8. nocturnal – A: burrowing.

B: active at night. C: able to live on water or land.

2. pheromone – A: Egyptian scarab beetle. B: sticky exterior of a chrysalis. C: chemical secretion prompting a response from others.

9. apiarist – A: creature capable of camouflage. B: insect collector.

C: beekeeper.

3. entomophagy – A: practice of eating insects. B: releasing one species to control the population of another. C: dye made from cochineal bugs.

4. myrmecologist – A: insectcall expert. B: mealworm glue manufacturer. C: ant expert.

5. biomass – A: network of biological interactions. B: total mass of organisms present. C: weight a creature can lift divided by its own weight.

6. arachnophobia – A: fear of spiders.

B: fear of home infestation. C: fear of being stung.

7. alate – A: covered in scales.

B: born in springtime. C: having wings.

10. larva – A: liquid secreted by aphids as they feed. B: immature, recently hatched form of an insect.

C: nest of rotten leaves.

11. metamorphosis – A: rapid transformation into an adult form.

B: habit of feeding on fungi.

C: mosquito-borne malady.

12. sericulture – A: social order organised around a queen.

B: shedding an exoskeleton.

C: silkworm farming.

13. beetling – A: scurrying like a beetle. B: identifying beetles.

C: making beetle-like clicking noises.

14. histamine – A: compound released during inflammatory reactions. B: mating season.

C: travelling in swarms.

141

R E A DER’S DIGE ST

Answers 1. proboscis – C: tubular feeding organ. The butterfly used its proboscis to suck nectar from the garden’s flowers.

2. pheromone – C: chemical secretion prompting a response from others.

Bolas spiders trick male moths into approaching by producing pheromones that resemble those of female moths.

3. entomophagy – A: practice of eating insects. Entomophagy is catching on in Germany, with stores offering insect-based foods.

4. myrmecologist – C: ant expert.

Pulitzer Prize–winning sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson began as a myrmecologist.

5. biomass – B: total mass of organisms present. Since the 1970s, the biomass of insects in Puerto Rico’s tropical rainforest has plummeted.

6. arachnophobia – A: fear of spiders.

Claudette’s arachnophobia made her hesitant to travel to Australia.

7. alate – C: having wings. Alate termites aren’t strong flyers and can travel only short distances.

8. nocturnal – B: active at night. The nocturnal habits of fireflies produce romantic glimmers on summer evenings.

9. apiarist – C: beekeeper. Amateur apiarists are well advised to wear protective gear.

10. larva – B: immature, recently

hatched form of an insect. The Hercules beetle larva can grow up to 11 centimetres long.

11. metamorphosis – A: rapid transformation into an adult form.

The metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly is fascinating.

12. sericulture – C: silkworm farming.

In China, where silk cloth was first developed, sericulture is still an important industry.

13. beetling – A: scurrying like a beetle. The toddler was beetling along the footpath after her parents.

14. histamine – A: compound released during inflammatory reactions. Mosquito bites are itchy because the body is trying to defend itself with histamines.

Family Fun Answers See Page 137

VOCABULARY RATINGS 5-8: Fair 9–10: Good 11–14: Word Power Wizard

142

APRIL 2020

SUPER SAVINGS ON RETAIL PRICES D KS

TORIES CASTS

RD S TASLTKORIES

S S

L

ealth

OUR ODCASTS AS P

EAT

LAUsGelfH

f A ibiotic nce

Your er!

Smart

AMAZIN ANIMALSG You Nev Knew Ex er isted

OODS HE A L Eats

PA GE 70

perts

E and the House se

PA GE 30

Real Life Drama inE JAWS INTO THURRICANE OF A H

NC C

PA GE 114

er

a’s Rare AustraliANGAROO TREE K PA GE 24

?

8

SPECIAL REPO Why SleRT ep Matters PA GE 46

bout Truths AOLISM B TA E M R YOU PA GE 66

Every issue of Reader’s Digest offers only the best original writing on issues that matter to you. Real-life dramas and uplifting stories, amazing health discoveries and human adventure. Long reads mixed with short stories.

PLUS exclusive book excerpts.

PLUS

z A SPECIAL FREE GIFT

z DELIVERY INCLUDED EVERY MONTH

ASIA: rdasia.com subscribe AUSTRALIA: readersdigest com.au subscribe NEW ZEALAND readersdigest.co.nz subscribe

TO ORDER:

H

to t

LAUGH

Available now, everywhere

Yourself Smarter!

Drama in Real Life INTO THE JAWS OF A HURRICANE Australia’s Rare TREE KANGAROO

8

8

Truths About YOUR METABOLISM