The Obvious (If Disputable)

1. Peter Gabriel’s cover of “The Book of Love” (from The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs) arguably surpasses the original.
   
   
2. In her “Ode to Concrete Love,” psychotherapist, author, and House Resident Charlotte Fox Weber portrays Concrete and Abstract Love as rivalrous brothers: “Abstract Love is aloft in the clouds, daydreaming and staying clean and distant, while Concrete Love is getting muddy and expanding.” Abstract Love is “one of those philosopher types who loves humanity but can’t deal with people.” But Concrete Love is immersed and unpretentious; “it simply describes the granular details without needing to exaggerate or make a whole show.”
   
   
3. In conversation with us, Jonathan Rowson, chess grandmaster, philosopher, and author, reminded us of the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s definition of God: “Love and mathematics.” The same could be said about business, couldn’t it?
   
   
4. Bumble, the dating app that lets women make the first move, went public last Thursday in one of the highest-valued IPOs by a company led by a female CEO. Shares closed up 63.5% on the Nasdaq.
   
   
5. The dating app OKCupid partnered with a variety of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists to create your non-traditional Valentine’s Day cards.
   
   
6. “No more wasted time in single bars. No more losers.” With new video-based dating apps like Lolly flooding the market, here’s a shout-out to Great Expectations, the original dating tech that dates back to the ‘90s.
   
   
7. On the one hand, it is liberating to de-romanticize love. It gives us agency if we assume we can practice love like a muscle and get better at it. “Love is a skill, not an emotion,” The School of Life proclaims. And yet, everybody who’s ever been in love knows that’s not true.
   
   
8. 2021 acts of good in 2021 is the goal of Procter & Gamble’s “Lead With Love” campaign. They even made a cute video.
   
   
9. Can we love robots? MIT scientist Kate Darling says yes. In China, an AI chatbot named Xiaoice is becoming a popular girlfriend for China’s lonely men. “Sometimes I feel her EQ [emotional intelligence] is even higher than a human’s,” one satisfied user reported.
   
   
10. Intimacy is important in the workplace, says Army Colonel Joe Ricciardi, who writes that “a team member who feels ‘loved’ by his boss is significantly more likely to see his boss as a good leader.”
    
    
11. The concept of the “work spouse” is evolving.
    
    
12. The Dream Job That Wasn’t: a lighthouse keeper, a deep-ocean researcher, a park ranger, and a “Snoozetern” on the pitfalls of “doing what you love.”
    
    
13. You Don’t Have to Love Your Job. A new book by labor journalist Sarah Jaffe asks, “What if workers channeled their passion into organizing for better pay and conditions instead?”
    
    
14. Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya gave 2000 full-time employees stock in the company in 2016. Last week it was reported the company is looking to go public, a move expected to generate $7 to $10 billion for the company, and its employees about 10% of that.
    
    
15. According to Oxfam’s “Time to Care” report, women and girls put in 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work every day—a “contribution to the global economy of at least $10.8 trillion a year, more than three times the size of the global tech industry.”
    
    
16. Clubhouse users are falling in love. One smitten 28-year-old drove 180 miles down the coast of Nigeria to meet his new girlfriend in person after connecting with her on the app. “Clubhouse forces you to connect by words, by intelligence. By who you really are versus your picture-perfect profile pics or witty taglines on dating apps…. It's then up to you to be your best authentic self.”
    
    
17. Friendship is love without the fire. At the Burning Man festival’s Friendlandia camp, you can honor your BBF (Best Burner Forever) with a “Friendgagement” ceremony and express your non-romantic love to them.
    
    
18. Amid a locked down onset of winter, Berliners are stocking up beds for homeless people, sharing details for the “Kaeltebus” that picks up those who need a warm meal, safe shelter, and a small act of kindness. During the cold season, this bus is being operated by congregations and local organizations.
    
    
19. Is granting someone—or some community—basic dignity the first act of concrete love? Dignity Coconuts is a U.S.-headquarted producer of organic coconut products from the Philippines that touts ending poverty and slavery as bedrock to their business model.
    
    
20. The United Nations’ Share the Meal app invites you to donate US $0.80—enough to feed a child for a day in some parts of the world—with just a tap on your phone.
    
    
    The Sentimental
    
    
21. Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, wrote a love letter to his wife Arline 16 months after her death. “Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address,” he writes.
    
    
22. The iconic I LOVE NY logo “endures because it was never just a marketing device,” graphic designer Milton Glaser, who scrawled the message in red crayon on a torn envelope in the back of a taxi in the 1970s, told Gothamist. “It was an expression of how people felt…. We wanted to let the world know that we still loved this city. It was emotional, and it was real.”
    
    
23. What started as bashful love notes to her future husband, the “Love Is…” single-frame cartoon strip debuted in 1970 and is still run in major papers today. At the height of its popularity its creator Kim Casali was earning 4-5 million annually from the strip.
    
    
24. Zeid El-Amine opened an art gallery to honor his father who died in the Beirut explosions in August 2020.
    
    
25. Royal marriages have historically functioned more like business contracts than love-matches. But Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s devotion to each other was not only genuine but also, some argue, helped inaugurate the UK’s creative class.
    
    
26. According to the American Pet Products Association, Americans spent approximately $99 billion on their pets last year.
    
    
27. In Brazil a pair of origami artists broke a Guinness World Record by folding 1010 paper dogs in honor of (hu)man’s best friend.
    
    
28. The highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time is 2016’s Mei Ren Yu, a story about the love that blossoms between an assassin mermaid and the playboy businessman she’s sent to kill.
    
    
29. Love is the opposite of mechanical reproduction. For his new book, Goodbye Phone, Hello World, bestselling author Paul Greenberg skipped the usual mass email blast, and in keeping with his book's message, applied a more human touch. He sent out 1500 personal emails to his network. In other words, he wrote 1500 emails.
    
    
30. “You need to make things one by one. If you start making things just because of the money, just because of business imperatives, they will lose their beauty.” Said Takahiro Yagi, sixth-generation head of tea-caddy maker Kaikado and a Japanese craftsman, a so-called Shokunin, in a Zoom conversation with Gianfranco Chicco, the creator of The Craftsman Newsletter.
    
    
    
    The World-Changing, Paradigm-Shifting
    
    
31. Inspired by writer and activist Audre Lorde, Minna Salami calls for an erotic economy. “Again and again, black feminists have argued that because the reigning system is a soulless one, the remedy is a way of knowing that incorporates poetry and art, the language of love,” Salami writes. She suggests that “If we applied Sensuous Knowledge to the economy, it would produce an ‘erotic economy’ of sorts, in which reciprocity and sustenance rather than surplus and scarcity would thrive.”
    
    
32. Japanese nursing homes “have been early and government-backed hotbeds of experimentation with new types of robot,” reports the FT’s Tokyo correspondent.
    
    
33. Parents Who Lead, a new book by Wharton emeritus professor Stewart Friedman and Alyssa Westring, management professor at DePaul University, explains how parents can use leadership principles to thrive in “career, family, community, self.”
    
    
34. And related: are parental and entrepreneurial love the same?
    
    
35. Vincent van Gogh, writing to his brother Theo: “It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.”
    
    
36. Ufa, Germany’s oldest film company, pledges to diversify its cast and crew to better reflect German society. DW reports: “According to Ufa managing director Joachim Kosack, 50% of the company’s upcoming productions will include women and at least one out of four films will include people from a migrant background.”
    
    
37. Meanwhile, German companies with more than three board members must include at least one woman.
    
    
38. Nordstrom is committing to the Black Lives Matter movement by pledging to increase Black and Latinx managers by 50 percent in the next five years and partner with more brands owned or designed by people of color.
    
    
39. Chilean startup Algramo is on a mission to wipe out single-use plastic while eliminating the “poverty tax” by setting up refill stations for products like Pine-Sol.
    
    
40. “By 2030, the circular economy could yield up to $4.5 trillion in economic benefits globally.... Saving 92 million tons of textiles in landfills, 1.3 billion tons of food waste, and 45 trillion gallons of water wasted through food production every year,” Jessica Matthews, head of sustainable investing at J.P. Morgan Private Bank told Barron’s.
    
    
41. IKEA aims to become a circular company. Watch our interview with chief digital officer Barbara Martin Coppola here.
    
    
42. Restaurants’ new business model: a charitable-feeding program for the hungry and a busy restaurant.
    
    
    
    The Touchy
    
    
43. This “hug tent” breaks our hearts. In a good way.
    
    
44. “Intimate touch engages the emotions and wires the fibers of the brain together,” argued New York Times columnist David Brooks, in the wake of the Me Too movement. “Over the course of each year, people have many kinds of interactions and experience many kinds of mistreatment. But there is something unique about positive or negative touch.”
    
    
45. As Jennifer Winter writes in themuse, it’s best to get a good grasp on a “client’s level of touch-comfort” before going in for the double-kiss.
    
    
46. But back in the office, physical touch can convey a deeper level of appreciation.
    
    
47. Thinking about going all the way with an office crush? We’re not discouraging it, but consider the risks.
    
    
48. Effective collaboration requires compassion, which can only be achieved by knowing your colleagues on a human level, argues leadership coach Susan Cramm. Her advice? Invite the coworker who bugs you the most out for coffee and ask them these six questions.
    
    
49. Anna Lee, co-founder and VP of engineering of vibrator company Lioness, has thought more about the female orgasm than most, and it has paid off. Here’s her presentation at The Great Wave, our 2020 festival.
    
    
50. Emily Morse, the Dr. Ruth of her generation, offers sex advice on Masterclass, Instagram, and via her podcast series, Sex with Emily. She is determined to close the “orgasm gap” and debunk sex myths. The biggest myth of all, she believes, is that everyone is having amazing sex all the time. “Our sex and our sexuality is a process, it’s a journey," she told the New York Times.
    
    
51. Novelist Emma Becker worked in a Berlin brothel for two years while researching her book La Maison. “[In the house where I worked] everything was organized in such a way that the men felt like they were our guests. And I noticed: the more money the guy spends, the more shy and attentive he is,” she told Frankfurter Allgemeine.
    
    
52. The conversations of lovers and teams have more in common than you might think. João Sevilhano believes that the most successful couples—and teams—are the ones that can, continuously and constantly, have conversations about their relationship(s), their maintenance and evolution.
    
    
    
    The Unrequited
    
    
53. “Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.”—Esther Perel on affairs, raising the possibility that the love we pine for most might be love of self.
    
    
54. The best novel about doing everything for someone who doesn’t love you back, and maybe isn’t even capable of love? The Great Gatsby is now in the public domain. Expect still more adaptations and re-releases.
    
    
55. Young adult romance novels, by people of color, for people of color is the subject of a new publishing imprint. Joy Revolution, headed up by authors Nicola and David Yoon, was inspired by Nicola’s “own love of romance novels….and her desire from a very early age to see herself, a Black woman, at the center of them.” —Penguin Random House
    
    
    
    The Shadow Side
    
    
56. This past Monday night 19-year-old Ursula Bahillo was killed in a rural area near the town of Rojas in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. Ursula was murdered by her ex-partner, 25-year-old police officer Matias Ezequiel. She had expressed concerns about her former partner several times and filed 18 complaints against him, the last one two days before her murder. The story has rocked Argentina, where a woman is killed every 30 hours in an act of intimate partner violence. Such crimes were once called crimes of passion, but now we know they have nothing to do with excess passion, let alone love. They are femicides. Cries for justice for Ursula, a demand by her friends to know why this was allowed to happen, were met with rubber bullets fired by police. As Marta Dillion, founder of Ni Una Menos, the social movement in Latin America against sexist violence, told The Guardian last year, “blaming the victim is no longer possible.”
    
57. Are we all, as media consumers, responsible for what happened to Britney Spears? The new documentary Framing Britney suggests yes, according to New York magazine, and offers a compelling look at Spears as part of a “tragic list of women whose entire lives were destroyed by media depictions that failed, first and foremost, to treat them as human beings.”
    
    
58. At the heart of this exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, is the artist Arthur Jafa’s video work “Love is the Message, the Message is Death” (2016), which combines viral videos with footage of figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and Serena Williams. Set to a score by Kanye West, the work “highlights the discrepancy between the fame and status of Black stars and the treatment of the African-American population in general.”
    
    
    
    The Stretch
    
    
59. “Authentic love is of one piece. How you love anything is how you love everything.” —Richard Rohr
    
    
60. Have you fallen in love with your neighborhood tree yet? “One mature street tree can have a net ecosystem service value of thousands of pounds,” according to The Conversation.
    
    
61. (x²+((1+b)y)²+z²-1)³-x²z³-ay²z³=0—we hope you love us back.
    
    
62. How to fall in love with the universe: Richard Feynman (again) on beauty.
    
    
63. Olivia Newton John and daughter Chloe know the secret to growing healthy cannabis. Sing to your plants.
    
    
64. The author of the 1980s business bestseller Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow has gone full mystic, touting “spiritual wholeness through the contemplative way.”
    
    
65. Polyamorous relationship structures: From hierarchical to non-hierarchical polyamory, from Vee to Triad to Quad, what might they tell us about organizational designs?
    
    
    
    The (Sweet)Bitter End
    
    
66. The Mend app was designed to help heal heartbreak, and be a cheaper, more convenient alternative to in-person therapy.
    
    
67. Whether you’re grieving over a breakup or the loss of a cherished pet, Guy Winch’s How to Fix a Broken Heart is a playbook for moving on.
    
    
68. If you’re GenX or older, Friendster was the original Facebook. Here are two great podcast episodes on the rise but mostly the fall of the first big social network: Friendster 1 and Friendster 2.
    
    
69. What if Disney’s Bob Iger invested in your ice-cream startup, you had $19 million to spend on expansion, and it all melted away? A stellar work of reportage by Courtney Rubin, on the husband-and-wife team behind Brooklyn’s Ample Hills Creamery.

“I am grateful to have been loved and to be loved now and to be able to love, because that liberates. Love liberates. It doesn't just hold—that’s ego. Love liberates. It doesn’t bind. Love says, ‘I love you. I love you if you’re in China. I love you if you’re across town. I love you if you’re in Harlem. I love you. I would like to be near you. I’d like to have your arms around me. I’d like to hear your voice in my ear. But that’s not possible now, so I love you. Go.”
—Maya Angelou