The Weekly Connection #07
Women in art, social media ≠ good mental health, return to office
Welcome to the Weekly Connection! Summer is here in the Côte d’Azur, with Fête de la Musique officially marking the start of the season. Time for ice cream and mosquito bites…
🍦Evelyne Axell, pop artist
Warhol, Waring, Hockney, Lichtenstein… The names roll off the tongue, but can you name a female pop artist? Meet Evelyne Axell, a trailblazing Belgian painter starting to get the recognition she deserves for her small but intense body of work.
“She acts as a historical bridge (between surrealism and pop art), and I think that’s something that’s dramatically unexplored.”
🏺 AWARE Women Artists
Similarly, I came across this fantastic resource, AWARE, highlighting talented female artists of the 19th and 20th centuries via profiles, podcasts and more. It’s also bilingual — presented in both French and English.
“The primary ambition of AWARE is to rewrite the history of art on an equal footing. Placing women on the same level as their male counterparts and making their works known is long overdue.”
🌿 Cutting back on social media reduces anxiety, depression, loneliness
Researchers have found that reducing social media use — shockingly — improves mental wellbeing. Undergraduate students from a large Midwestern university were assigned to one of two experimental conditions: either limit their social media usage to 30 minutes a day or use social media as usual. After two weeks of fasting, the self-monitored group significantly improved their psychological well-being. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, fear of missing out, and negative affects decreased while positive affects increased. Need something to do with all that free time? The Verge has some tongue-in-cheek suggestions.
📼 Comment ça va ?
An incredible resource for language learners: YouGlish takes the phrase of your choice and searches YouTube transcriptions for examples of it said aloud. You then watch the videos to hear (and see) the ptermin your target language. It is available in more than 19 languages, including signing!
🥐 The hottest new perk in tech is freedom
The return to office debate continues to rage, particularly at FAANGs, but small companies are finding agility, flexibility and indeed, happiness are still highly desired by workers.
“In the face of volatility and uncertainty, it is human nature to want to revert back to something that is a known quantity,” said Caitlin Duffy, a research director at Gartner, about the push to return to the office. “And so there might be some psychological things happening that may be overriding the evidence in front of them.”
Enjoy the week,
Amber