How do you switch off at the end of the day if there’s no journey involved? Gardening? Sex? Crisps?

If you’re reading this standing in a stationary train’s vestibule, squeezed between a furtive flosser and someone eating a keto breakfast of hard-boiled eggs and sardines, while everyone listens to Jolyon on speakerphone review the new draft pitch deck, take heart: commuting is good for you.

It’s the second outing I have spotted for this argument. In 2021, the Harvard Business Review asserted the value of commuting in setting and maintaining boundaries between work and home selves, thus avoiding burnout. Now the concept is back, with US researchers further exploring the role of the commute as a “liminal space” that allows for psychological detachment and recovery from work. There are psychological as well as physical and temporal dimensions to the commute, they argue, and “the experience of rolelessness” during it may create a mental space for “psychological role transition and recovery”.

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

Sad but expected news: Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos have shut down their excellent video series on film, Every Frame a Painting. They wrote about their decision in the form of the script for a final episode that never got made:

(TONY) As many of you have guessed, the channel more or less ended in September 2016 with the release of the “Marvel Symphonic Universe” video. For the last year, Taylor and I have tinkered behind-the-scenes to see if there was anything else we wanted to do with this YouTube channel.

(TAYLOR) But in the past year, we’ve both started new jobs and taken on other freelance work. Things started piling up and it took all our energy to get through the work we’d agreed to do.

When we started this YouTube project, we gave ourselves one simple rule: if we ever stopped enjoying the videos, we’d also stop making them. And one day, we woke up and felt it was time.

I was a huge fan of the series and posted many episodes on kottke.org. Here are a few particular favorites:

Cheers to Tony and Taylor…you made a great thing and knew when to quit (unlike some people).

P.S. Poking around, I found a mini Every Frame a Painting that Zhou and Ramos did for Criterion about The Breaking Point, posted to YouTube back in August:

Gah, that just makes me miss it even more!

The Road Movie, out in theaters in January, consists of nothing but videos taken from Russian dashboard cameras. There are car accidents, animal hijinks, fistfights, high/drunk people, meteors, and fires. The trailer is really entertaining…I’m curious to see the entire film to see how it’s stitched into something resembling a narrative that can sustain a viewer’s attention for more than 20 minutes.