Googling Your Symptoms is Making You Sicker: Here’s What We’re Reading Today
The Daily 5 is Sharp’s essential reading list for what’s happening in the world today. Make sure to follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the Sharp Insider newsletter to stay up to date.
Here’s what we’re reading today:
1. Everything you want to know about Apple’s iPhone event
“New water-resistant iPhones, the end of headphone jacks, Nintendo comes to iOS, and more.” Read on BuzzFeed News.
2. A whole society of hypochondriacs
“You search online for ‘sore throat,’ for instance, and find yourself engrossed and horrified by descriptions of esophageal cancer. Your anxiety escalates.”
3. The 24-year-old Coca-Cola virgin
“Are humans more alike or more different? I try my best never to think about it, partly because the implications are far too terrifying, and partly because the evidence is too abstract and boring. The fuck can I do with the grand observation that all around the world, at any given time, people of all walks of life are feeling pleasure and pain? It’s easier to connect with a billion people by eating Big Macs than it is to conceptualize our common reckoning with death.”
For Eater, Jamie Lauren Keiles writes on her experience as a millennial who has never tried a coke, until now.
4. “The internet still thinks I’m pregnant”
“I hadn’t realized, however, that when I had entered my information into the pregnancy app, the company would then share it with marketing groups targeting new mothers. Although I logged my miscarriage into the app and stopped using it, that change in status apparently wasn’t passed along. Seven months after my miscarriage, mere weeks before my due date, I came home from work to find a package on my welcome mat. It was a box of baby formula bearing the note: ‘We may all do it differently, but the joy of parenthood is something we all share.'”
Amy Pittman, in the New York Times’ Modern Love column examines the emotional toll that big data can have after a couple miscarries.
5. The official Ikea food power rankings
“The long-awaited, airtight, totally comprehensive, foolproof, and 100 percent correct Ikea Food Power Rankings! The metrics of these rankings are, as ever, taste, as well as a completely arbitrary designation of value, or ‘bang’ for your proverbial ‘buck.'”
