None of these exercise regimes would meet the physical activity guidelines issued by national and global bodies, which set out the amount of exercise “required” for physical and mental health. For adults aged 18-64, the latest World Health Organization (WHO) advice recommends “at least 150-300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity, or at least 75-150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity, or an equivalent combination throughout the week” – along with muscle strengthening activities that involve all major muscle groups at moderate or greater intensity at least twice a week.
But briefer or gentler bouts of activity can still have a positive impact on mental health. Some experts believe there is a risk that, faced with such rigorous and prescriptive guidelines, people experiencing mental health challenges may be put off being active at all. “Given that people with mental health issues are typically less active than the population average, it is even more important to present exercise as a positive, enjoyable and accessible option,” says Stuart Biddle, professor of physical activity and health at the University of Southern Queensland.
Just the other day, my ningaaq Edvard got on a plane and headed north from Nuuk to Upernavik, his hometown, that orange oblong buoy strapped onto his backpack. Johannes was in a nearby village, so Edvard gave the buoy to Johannes’s daughter. They took a picture together at the municipal office, beneath the Upernavik coat of arms, surrounded by a narwhal tusk, a muskox skull, a Greenlandic and a Danish flag, and a framed image of the queen of Denmark, the buoy held between them.
I think, overall, the first thing you’ll need is curiosity. The second thing you’ll need is a willingness to look around—to find small-press readers and writers on social media, to figure out who’s doing the work that you’re most interested in, and then to keep paying attention. It has always taken more legwork to find the artists working outside of the best-known systems. It has always been worth it.
Private Rites is a story of buoyancy in a world that longs to see one sink, a story of withheld forgiveness and the discovery of who one is in the company of those who have already decided. For fans of stories that challenge and grieve, Julia Armfield’s new work is one of great pleasure, pain, and polluted relationships that will stay with you long after reading.
On the Calculation of Volume’s premise could, in other hands, be reduced to a gimmick. But in Haveland’s rendering, Balle’s stripped-down prose has an understated clarity that lends philosophical resonance to this fantastical setup.
The Teller of Small Fortunes presents us with systems and people that are generally good—the world as we’d like it to be. Tao’s journey throughout this book is to learn that the people and institutions she has feared, the bogeymen of her childhood and her life as a traveling fortune-teller, are not as terrible as she thought. This will hit different readers differently, I suppose, but I found it comforting. The current real world is uglier and crueler than I hoped its inhabitants would choose to make it, and I found a true respite in spending some time in a world where the opposite is true. The Teller of Small Fortunes is sweet and silly and warm. If Leong’s goal was to offer heartfelt comfort to her readers, she’s achieved it in spades.
Almost twenty years after her death, Blackwood’s serial associations with distinguished men of art and letters still cling to her like flies to shit. Forever Vera, never Vladimir. Blackwood’s biographer, Nancy Schoenberger, christened her subject a “dangerous muse,” a phrase that doubles as the book’s unfortunate title, crystallizing Blackwood’s image as a woman pressed into the service of male genius. But the preoccupation with her extravagant entanglements is misleading, for Blackwood was in fact a writer of rare distinction, the author of wit-drenched books about the wages of class, women’s inhumanity to women, bitchiness, greed, abjection, family, monsters.