A List of Good Things

It’s August, and many of you are on holiday. (Many of us are, too!) And so we thought we’d give you something a little different on August Fridays, news permitting. There is a whole bunch of newsletters written by my colleagues that set aside war and disaster and focus on all the good stuff instead — music, happiness, wellness, inspiration and more. We thought you might enjoy a taste.

We’ll start you off with one of the most delightful. The Good List, hosted by my colleague Melissa Kirsch. You’re in for a treat!

Hi, I’m Melissa. Each week, in The Good List, I assemble a bunch of ideas, rituals, activities and provocations for adding meaning to your days. Here are a few recent items I thought you might appreciate.

How to forget yourself

On a recent weekend, absorbed in the meditative task of arranging flowers, I noticed that my thoughts had gone almost completely quiet. I’d been so deeply invested in stripping leaves and cutting stems that my usually chaotic brain chatter had disappeared. I was thrilled to learn the term “meaningful self-forgetfulness” in this article on the rise of “grandma hobbies” like quilting and needlepoint. It’s a coinage of Anne Kirketerp, a Danish psychologist and author of the book “Craft Psychology.”

“When we create something that requires full attention, the part of our brain called ‘default mode network’ is diminished,” Kirketerp told The Times. “The constant inner noise or negative ruminating thoughts are absent.”

It’s akin to flow states, those moments of peak mental acuity that the Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described as “those times when things seem to go just right, when you feel alive and fully attentive to what you are doing.” Meaningful self-forgetfulness is such a lovely term for such a lovely experience! In a world that tempts us with so much meaningless self-forgetfulness, let us seek out the meaningful kind.

Listen to forests

If you live someplace where you can hear the sounds of the breeze and the birds, I’m jealous, and I would like to offer up my services as a house sitter.

If you live in a louder or less nature-saturated locale and are longing for some peace from the traffic or the neighbors or the neighbors’ lawn mower, you might enjoy some sounds of forests from around the world. Check out this map to select a forest by location (I just listened to a Sichuan golden monkey whimpering in China), or call up a random forest via Tree.fm.

And if you are lucky enough to live in or to be visiting a real-life forest, you can submit the soundscape here.

Beethoven for elephants

I use certain YouTube videos for self-soothing in times of stress. The meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn’s body scans impart near-instant peace. The poet Joseph Brodsky’s readings of his work reconnect me to a softness that’s easy to forget. Doubly calming is watching the pianist Paul Barton play for elephants in a sanctuary in Thailand.

In one video, a restless elephant lies down and appears to relish some calming music. In another, a particularly solemn-looking creature named Mongkol stands very close while Barton plays the “Moonlight” Sonata in the darkness. Barton says that the elephants stop eating to listen to him play, and that their breathing slows down. Mine does, too.

Sand and tears up close

Magnified Sand is a strangely interesting catalog of the world’s beaches, photographed under a stereo microscope.

I love the shiny pink orbs in the photos of the sands in Cuba, and the sparkly black volcanic grains of Iceland. Are such colorful gemstone-like forms hiding in the apparently beige expanse of Rockaway Beach in Queens, my beloved summer getaway? Alas, the site is not (yet?) in the collection.

If I had access to a stereo microscope, I imagine I’d be magnifying everything I could think of. Who knows what shapes and patterns are lurking within the dust from the attic, or this salad dressing?

Have a look at this collection of magnified tears: a man named David’s reflex tear from cutting onions appears totally different from Natalie’s tear from looking directly into the sun without eye protection (be careful, Natalie!). Magnified tears look like strange organic terrains, both lush and severe! Things that seem unremarkable on the surface are more divinely complicated the closer you look.

WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING

The Chinese company Unitree Robotics is seeking $900 million in an I.P.O. that tests market interest in humanoid robots.
The C.I.A. has secretly established a Cuba task force, with the goal of creating fissures among the Cuban political elite.

TOP OF THE WORLD

The most clicked link in your newsletter yesterday was about the steak-and-sauerkraut diet.

SPORTS

FIFA: UEFA maintained its threat to boycott the World Cup despite an apology from Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, over a controversial investment plan.

NAME OF THE DAY

Typhoon Dim-sum

If you see a storm named Dim-sum forming in the Pacific this season, it’s not an error. The Hong Kong Observatory was inspired by local cuisine in June when it added that name to the forecasters’ list. It’s not the first time that Hong Kong has named a storm after a cultural symbol. Typhoon Dolphin, which is forecast to approach Japan and Taiwan this weekend, takes its name from a popular mascot.

MORNING READ

Crocs, one of the world’s most profitable shoemakers, sells its chunky clogs to 150 million customers across 100 countries every year. The company has its headquarters in Colorado, but come tax season, it has claimed that its global profits were earned in a two-person office in Malta.

That’s because Malta, the smallest country in the E.U., is a hot destination for U.S. companies seeking a tax haven. The number of Maltese subsidiaries established by U.S. companies has soared nearly 70 percent over the past three years. Read more about Malta’s tax appeal.

AROUND THE WORLD

Riding a ‘magical’ wave

Most waves give a surfer a few blissful seconds. In this hidden spot, the ride can go on for an hour.

Twice a day, the rising tide funnels into a narrowing channel, producing a fast-moving breaker known as a tidal bore. “One moment it’s still, and you’re looking up at the mountains and eagles and goats, and the next you feel like you have the entire ocean coming up behind you,” a surfer gushed. “It’s magical, man.”

But it can also be deadly — one man died trying to surf the wave in June, trapped by the current and mud.

Where is this? Click a link below with your best guess. The entire story is worth a read.

RECIPE

These just-for-one chocolate truffle cakes feel fancy but are easy to make. The chef Wolfgang Puck advises pulling each cake from the oven while the center is still soft, as “you want it to be a little underdone so the inside is creamy.”

BEFORE YOU GO …

When I was a child, my dad took me on cycling holidays around Germany. We’d sleep in youth hostels, swim a lot and play table tennis every night. And wherever we showed up, he’d force me to see one sight: a church, a castle or — this being Germany — a former concentration camp.

All that sightseeing was annoying at age 12. But it was a price worth paying for a week with my dad. It made me a lifelong cyclist. And after a 15-year-pause, owing to small children, I finally took my own kids on a ride from Prague to Dresden last week.

The biggest challenge was not my 10-year-old, who was fine riding 50-plus kilometers every day. It was my teenage daughters, who moaned and groaned and missed their phones a lot.

The first day was hard. But then the magic started to happen: long chats, spontaneous singing, shared laughs — the kind of wholesome and unrushed connection that can be hard to achieve in everyday life.

The sightseeing, though, was still deeply unpopular — until I tried something new. When we arrived in Dresden, we assigned each child a sight to research for our family walking tour. They’d be our tour guides. The kids got into it, and we all learned a lot. (I got an assignment, too: the Dresden bombing. Did you know that Kurt Vonnegut witnessed it as a 22-year-old prisoner of war and wrote “Slaughterhouse-Five” based on the experience?)

For my song of the week, here’s something a little different that I Shazamed in a bar in Prague on the first day of my holiday and have been obsessed with ever since: “The Look” by Metronomy.

Have a great weekend! — Katrin