40

you’ve been ignoring is to read poetry. (Read other things, too!) And some people really don’t have any time. But you probably have more than you think. The work week needn’t wholly define the week; in the margins – around the edges of those forty-plus hours – there’s a second life to be lived as well.
    Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote

Forty Digits

    Angus Hyland, Partner, Pentagram. Designer of (amongst other things) The Myth Series; and The Pocket Canons

    Marion Deuchars, illustrator of Weight of The Myth of Atlas
and Heracles

How to Lose Your Self in Forty Weeks
    Over the course of forty weeks, you will begin to feel it all falling away from you, all your selves: the only child; the sad, reading teenager; the young woman who fell into love many times in a day, pyjamas to school, hair short, then long, banana-coloured coat for one particularly harsh New England winter; married; divorced; in love again; every one of you denser and harder to shift, but even later, the one who married again for the last time, and the writer you had always dreamed of
becoming, small hints of satisfaction entering your days,
settling into a routine, things you like to eat on cold mornings, dried cranberries with your porridge, driver’s license, bank
balance, the occasional good review, even this start to a
conclusion will vanish, because in the course of forty weeks, possession by another announcing itself day by day, mother is all that anyone will see, and all that you yourself will know of your self: one dimension, eagerly awaited, much-longed for and long denied, every other obliterated in its love-halo, its drunken, cruel wonder.
    Tahmima Anam, author of A Golden Age and The Good Muslim

Forty Medical Myths
    Every day we make decisions about our bodies – what to eat, whether to exercise, what to do when we notice something is wrong. As we grow up we develop ideas about causation informed by our families, teachers and friends. Some of them are backed up by evidence. Many are not. But how are we to know what to believe? Here are forty questions based on medical folklore.
    1. Does swimming straight after eating give you cramp?
    2. Do we only use 10% of our brains?
    3. Does skipping breakfast make you fat?
    4. Do mobile phones create serious electro-magnetic
disturbance in hospitals?

    5. Does eating standing up give you indigestion?
    6. Can stress turn your hair white overnight?
    7. Does sitting on cold surfaces give you piles?
    8. Does drinking cranberry juice prevent cystitis?
    9. Are bald men more virile?
    10. Does cracking your knuckles lead to arthritis?
    11. Can you tell the sex of a baby from the shape of the mother’s bump?
    12. Are sperm counts falling?

    13. Can you train yourself to get by on less sleep?
    14. Are there five stages of grief?
    15. Should you eat for two if you are pregnant?
    16. Does chocolate cause spots?
    17. Is everyone either a lark or an owl when it comes to the time they would prefer to go to bed and get up in the morning?
    18. Do hot baths reduce a man’s sperm count?
    19. Does listening to Mozart make children cleverer?
    20. Is it impossible to get pregnant standing up?
    21. Is everyone either left-brained or right-brained?
    22. Is cramp caused by a lack of salt?
    23. Should you hit a ganglion with a bible?
    24. Are people who talk about feeling suicidal less likely to try doing it?
    25. Is it dangerous to wake a sleepwalker?
    26. Does getting chilled give you a cold?
    27. Is it harmless to smoke a hookah pipe?
    28. Are there more suicides in winter?
    29. Does cheese give you nightmares?

    30. Does drinking plenty of water keep your skin young?
    31. Do flu vaccines give you flu?
    32. Does reading in the dark damage your eyesight?
    33. Is there any such thing as Blue Monday, the day in January when people feel lower than on any other day?
    34. Do your fingernails carry on growing after death?
    35. Does shaving make hair grow back thicker?
    36. Does exercise cure depression?
    37. Do full moons make people go mad?
    38. Can a strong cup of coffee sober you up?

    39. Does too much sugar make children hyper-active?
    40. If you swallow chewing gum does it take years to digest it?
    Although these ideas are well-known, surprisingly few have been tested through medical trials, but when you examine the evidence that is available there is a simple answer to every one of these questions – and that’s ‘no’.
    Claudia Hammond, author of Time Warped

Novel Cures for Turning