What to Read: “Life Under Instant Replay,” and more

New app helps teens calm anxiety

“Anxiety disorders affect one in eight teens. There are medications and therapies that can help alleviate symptoms, and now there’s even an app that can help. The MindShift app aims to teach young adults how to combat everyday anxiety, panic, conflict and worry. Teens can input their symptoms and the app will create a plan to help reduce stress.”

Life Under Instant Replay, by Drew Denton, First Things

“Traditionalists, in both the baseball sense and the broader sense, have numerous reasons to lament the arrival of replay review. It interrupts the game’s liturgical pace—that ritually laden approximation of timelessness—with a series of committee meetings. It removes one more outpost of resistance to the global fetishizing of technology. By deferring to a system “so perfect no one will need to be good,” it undermines the authority of the umpires. It deadens the game’s acute sense of tragedy—a quality that baseball has done far more than Sophocles or Shakespeare to impart to our constitutionally comedic nation. But replay’s capital sins are philosophical, inasmuch as they ratify a morally treacherous method of ascertaining the truth.”

Learning from Bodies, by Nora Calhoun, First Things

“I have now spent a lot of time with other people’s bodies—very old bodies and very new bodies, severely disabled, sick, or just plain worn-out bodies, bodies in labor, bodies that are well and strong, and the bodies left behind by death. Looking back, I realize that changing my mind about abortion was actually one of the least significant steps toward becoming truly pro-life. There are things that can be learned—can be said—only in the language of bodies. There is a specific wisdom to be gained through the experience of being with actual people: their actual pregnancies, illnesses, births, and deaths. And many of the lessons that bodies teach can barely be translated into words.”

The Last Social Blogging Guide You Will Ever Need, by Mike Elgan, eWeek

“Over the past decade, I’ve read gigabytes of advice on how to “succeed” on social media and blogging, and I’ve never even once read a post or article that really nailed what social media and blogging are really all about—or how to “succeed” at it.

“So I finally decided to write that article, and here it is.

“This piece will challenge every canned precept you have ever read about creating content online, and transform your understanding of what people are doing right and wrong. But most importantly, I hope to inspire you to fully embrace the life-changing power of sharing yourself with the Internet.”

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