I freely admit that my choice for this weekend’s read is a bit odd. I’ve chosen this piece over on Medium, about a marital argument about communication. It was written by Caitlin Shetterly.

This article fascinated me because of one sentence: “Maybe a third of those phone calls and texts had content that was constructive; the rest was all a big long fight about our communication.”

I don’t know how people who know each other can have an argument by text. Of course, I’ve read text message arguments that people post on Facebook and so forth, and I’ve even occasionally strongly disagreed with strangers in an irritated fashion online. I may even have sent the odd curt or sarcastic text message. But I don’t think I’ve ever actually argued via text message, and certainly not via a long series of messages.

I just don’t think text messaging is a medium that lends itself to argument: it’s too ambiguous and emotionally disconnected. To me, having an argument implies feeling and wanting to express a high level of emotion: yet how can anybody do that through text? It pretty much baffles me.

Anyway, the article is worth a read!

Hayley B Elkins wrote a blog post late last year following the shootings at a school in Sandy Hook. It’s not about the shootings, but rather about Hayley’s relationship with guns, and how it has changed over time. Looking on from the UK, I always find the US obsession with fire-arms difficult to understand. Yet this very personal piece was moving and informative in a way that’s utterly atypical of writing on this topic. It’s a truly brilliant read.

I really enjoyed this article from The Observer in which six famed British designers were asked to pick their favourite objects. The variety of choices is especially surprising. The article is by Megan Conner, Eva Wiseman, and Shahesta Shaitly.

Sarah Bee published this moving story earlier this week over at NSFWCORP. Just occasionally, I come across a story that stops me in my tracks, moves me, and makes me think a little bit differently about life and medicine. This powerfully personal article about Sarah Bee’s experience as she watched her own father die in an intensive care unit in London is one of those stories.

An article looking at the change at Weight Watchers from the Points programme to the ProPoints programme might seem a strange choice of weekend read. I’m not a Weight Watchers member, and I’ve always been slightly sceptical of the dependence and complex mystification around healthy eating that such schemes generate. But there is good evidence that Weight Watchers helps people lose weight (though I’m not sure what their longterm maintenance rates are like). So I found this peek behind the curtain, written by Jeffrey M O’Brien for Wired, fascinating.

This is one of the longer articles I’ve featured in this series so far. Chandler Phillips went undercover, taking up jobs at a couple of car dealerships in the US. I found his findings completely fascinating – though it’s difficult to know how well they translate to the UK market.

This is a fascinating Nesta blog by Stian Westlake describing the lack of inherent moral good or evil in innovative ideas. It’s quite short – if you’re looking for something related but longer, this discussion of Wonga’s business model by William Shaw in Wired is also very interesting (and, indeed, Westlake links to it in his article). So, two for the price of one this week!

My recommended read for this weekend has an educational slant: Jeevan Vagagar’s brilliant Guardian report on the day Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, visited Park View School in Birmingham.

This week’s recommendation is an absolutely brilliant article from Fast Company profiling Jeff Dunn, a former Coca Cola executive who swapped marketing sugar water for marketing carrots… with some success! The article’s by Douglas McGray.

This weekend, make yourself a coffee have a read of this brilliant article by Julian Baggini from Aeon Magazine, which describes a taste comparison between Nespresso and traditional coffee. But, more than that, it discusses where the real pleasure of coffee drinking lies – and whether risk of imperfection is necessary to achieve perfection. For once, it’s also worth venturing “below the fold” and reading some of the comments, too.