A little food for though for the idle Sunday. Add beverage and comfy place of choice. Let’s imagine, alcoholic beverage in warm outdoors scenario (palm-trees and stuff?) or warm beverage in cosy indoors atmosphere (blankets?, fireplace?).

• The Guardian’s Bike jam and unwritten rules: a day with Amsterdam’s new ‘bicycle mayor’

Living in Amsterdam means being totally bike-dependent so any news on how the bike situation is developing over here, is followed closely.

“For Amsterdammers it’s frustrating,” says Anna. “Some parts of the city are just too busy – there are too many bikes, too many scooters, too many cars, too many pedestrians. There’s no space. It is a big source of conflict.”

• Man Repeller’s Are you happy? But like really, actually, truly?

I really reckoned with Leandra Medine’s words on happiness in metropolitan cities,”where it is stressful to merely exist” despite how regularly you meditate, exercise, eat veggies and have dinners at dusk in the East Villages of this world.

“No time like high summer will remind you with pestering persistence that if you don’t soak in the moment, you’re going to open your eyes and feel your limbs covered in snow.”

• Brain Pickings’ Against Self-Criticism: Adam Philips on How Our Internal Critics Enslaves Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations

This is no article for cynics (or actually exactly for them). The first paragraph of this article is pretty elucidatory:

“I have thought and continued to think a great deal about the relationship between critical thinking and cynicism — what is the tipping point past which critical thinking, that centerpiece of reason so vital to human progress and intellectual life, stops mobilizing our constructive impulses and topples over into the destructiveness of impotent complaint and embittered resignation, begetting cynicism? In giving a commencement address on the subject, I found myself contemplating anew this fine but firm line between critical thinking and cynical complaint. To cross it is to exile ourselves from the land of active reason and enter a limbo of resigned inaction.”

Happy reading!

Thoughts? Let me know in the comments.