At His Own Wake, Celebrating Life and the Gift of Death - NYTimes.com

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/world/canada/euthanasia-bill-john-shields-death.html

"No one knew what to expect from a living wake, not even Penny Allport, the life-cycle celebrant Mr. Shields had asked to help guide the party and preside over his death the next morning. She was trained and certified for funerals and weddings, but nothing like this.

Efforts had been made to convert what normally felt like a doctor's waiting room into a place worthy of the occasion. A pale green hospice blanket served as a tablecloth over two adjacent coffee tables, which were decorated with a vase of simple daisies and daffodils and strewn with cue cards, each of which bore one of Mr. Shields's favorite quotations in colored ink.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" – Mary Oliver

"There is nothing more mysterious than destiny — of a person, of our species, of our planet, or of the universe itself." — Brian Swimme"

A Terrorist’s Teenage Target

"I know there is nothing I can say right now to make the survivors of the Manchester bombing feel any better. The guilt for me began the day of the blast. Seeing Liana's mother is especially painful. I see her looking at me and I know she is imaging her daughter at my age. But I would tell the survivors to stay strong and focus on your recovery. You have to be very strong to recover."

A Terrorist's Teenage Target https://nyti.ms/2qX62GX

Germany's Outdoor Preschools

Running Free in Germany's Outdoor Preschools https://nyti.ms/2rvMeqY

""It's terrible that kids today know all about technology but nothing about the little bird outside their window," Peters said, gesturing out toward the woods and sounding like any number of quotable Germans, from Goethe to Beethoven to Bismarck, all of whom have rhapsodized on the psychic benefits of spending time in the forest.

After lunch, Baule showed me a photo album, filled mostly with pictures taken in the last couple of years. A few children got interested and came over to sit in her lap, excited to see themselves "as babies." One photograph captured the image of a towheaded boy of about 3, stripping bark off a stick with a jackknife. In another, a different boy was crushing walnuts with a log. A third picture depicted four children walking across a gravelly path, completely naked and covered with mud."

Shinrin-Yoku - Health Benefits of Walking Outside

http://www.oprah.com/spirit/shinrin-yoku-health-benefits-of-walking-outside

"By combining mindfulness and spending time in nature—two activities that have restorative properties on their own—shinrin-yoku can yield significant health advantages: A study conducted across 24 forests in Japan found that when people strolled in a wooded area, their levels of the stress hormone cortisol plummeted almost 16 percent more than when they walked in an urban environment. And the effects were quickly apparent: Subjects' blood pressure showed improvement after about 15 minutes of the practice. But one of the biggest benefits may come from breathing in chemicals called phytoncides, emitted by trees and plants. Women who logged two to four hours in a forest on two consecutive days saw a nearly 40 percent surge in the activity of cancer-fighting white blood cells, according to one study. "

‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It - NYTimes.com

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/technology/evan-williams-medium-twitter-internet.html

"I think the internet is broken," he says. He has believed this for a few years, actually. But things are getting worse. "And it's a lot more obvious to a lot of people that it's broken."

People are using Facebook to showcase suicides, beatings and murder, in real time. Twitter is a hive of trolling and abuse that it seems unable to stop. Fake news, whether created for ideology or profit, runs rampant. Four out of 10 adult internet users said in a Pew survey that they had been harassed online. And that was before the presidential campaign heated up last year.

"I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place," Mr. Williams says. "I was wrong about that."