making a conscious effort to read less twitter, and more news articles. I get maybe 15 articles emailed to me a day from Pocket and Flipboard, so intend to actually read more rather than saving to read later. now if only I could find an app where I could share the articles I find most interesting. I used to use google+ but that's no longer a thing so instead I list them here. it's pretty unwieldy tho, especially if I add quotations. =\
Late night, once upon a time in Hollywood, welcome to marwen [2018], sustainable [2016], nacho libre [2006]
Yello - How 2020 Democrats could rewrite the rules of political typography
Buzzfeed News - America’s Orthodox Jews Are Selling A Ton Of The Products You Buy On Amazon
Saveur - Meet Switzerland's Breakaway Cheesemakers
Fast Company - This company hired anyone who applied. Now it’s starting a movement
Nautilus - The Girl Who Smelled Pink
Gizmodo - When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life
Mental Floss - The Book So Big It Needed Its Own Furniture
Fast Company - There's a $218 billion design problem sitting in your fridge right now
Mental Floss - Home Sweet Homer: The Strange Saga of the Real-Life Simpsons House in Nevada
Harper's Bazaar - Why Fur Should Never Be Banned
US News - Extinct Bird Re-Evolved Itself Back Into Existence
Mental Floss - 19 Things You Might Not Know Were Invented by Women
Wall Street Journal - Dating Apps Are Making Marriages Stronger
Atlas Obscura - How Fish and Chips Migrated to Great Britain
The Atlantic - Amazon Ruined Online Shopping
AP News - Many US women say 1st sexual experience was forced in teens
"“Our culture teaches people not to be raped instead of teaching people not to rape,” he said."
"Almost 7 percent of women surveyed said their first sexual intercourse experience was involuntary; it happened at age 15 on average and the man was often several years older."
"Almost half of those women who said intercourse was involuntary said they were held down and slightly more than half of them said they were verbally pressured to have sex against their will."
The Guardian - California bans private prisons – including Ice detention centers
"As recently as 2016, private prisons locked up approximately 7,000 Californians, about 5% of the state’s total prison population, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics."
Atlas Obscura - The Forgotten History of New York's Bagel Famines
"In the 1950s, the Times often assumed that readers were unfamiliar with bagels; the paper offered pronunciation guides (“baygle”) and described it as “a form of Jewish baked goods sometimes described as a doughnut with rigor mortis.”
Mental Floss - 25 Things You Might Not Know About the Birds in Your Backyard
8. BASSIAN THRUSHES USE FARTS TO HUNT PREY.
Birds may not find toots as funny as humans do, but they still make use of them. The Australian Bassian thrush farts toward the ground, with the noxious smell helping to unearth worms and other insect prey.
25. THEY’LL NEVER BE MOVIE STARS.
American migratory bird species are hardly ever depicted in movies thanks to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act that prevents domestic birds from being bought or sold for commercial purposes. If you spot a backyard bird in film or on a show, it’s either an imported species or a computer effect. To see a jaybird, you’ll have to turn off the TV and look out a window.
The Guardian - Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
"The quest to master English in Korea is often called the yeongeo yeolpung or “English frenzy”. Although mostly confined to a mania for instruction and immersion, occasionally this “frenzy” spills over into medical intervention. As Sung-Yul Park relates: “An increasing number of parents in South Korea have their children undergo a form of surgery that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue … Most parents pay for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak English better; the surgery supposedly enables the child to pronounce the English retroflex consonant with ease, a sound that is considered to be particularly difficult for Koreans.”
There is no evidence to suggest that this surgery in any way improves English pronunciation. The willingness to engage in this useless surgical procedure strikes me, though, as a potent metaphor for English’s peculiar status in the modern world. It is no longer simply a tool suited to a particular task or set of tasks, as it was in the days of the Royal Navy or the International Commission for Air Navigation. It is now seen as the access code to the global elite. If you want your children to get ahead, then they better have English in their toolkit."
"Since publishing Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ has worked to put its dictates into practice. He renounced his baptismal name, James, and with it Christianity, and ceased to write fiction in English. Since the 1980s, he has written all his novels and plays in his native Gikuyu, only using English (and occasionally Kiswahili) for essays and polemics. This last decision is one that many people still question. As he said in a recent interview: “If I meet an English person, and he says, ‘I write in English,’ I don’t ask him, ‘Why are you writing in English?’ If I meet a French writer, I don’t ask him, ‘Why don’t you write in Vietnamese?’ But I am asked over and over again, ‘Why do you write in Gikuyu?’ For Africans, the view is there is something wrong about writing in an African language.”"
"Today it is estimated that the world loses a language every two weeks. Linguists have predicted that between 50 and 90% of the world’s 6,000 or so languages will go extinct in the coming century. For even a fraction of these to survive, we’re going to have to start thinking of smaller languages not as endangered species worth saving, but as equals worth learning."
Outside - This Is the Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry
"It takes 36,000 calories of feed to produce 1,000 calories of beef. In the process, it uses more than 430 gallons of water and 1,500 square feet of land, and it generates nearly ten kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions. In comparison, an Impossible Burger uses 87 percent less water, 96 percent less land, and produces 89 percent fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. Beyond Meat’s footprint is similarly svelte."
"But the core of each formula is very different. Beyond uses pea protein, while Impossible uses soy. Beyond gets its bloody color from beet juice; Impossible uses heme—the same molecule that makes our blood red—to achieve its meaty color and flavor. This is its killer app. Beef gets its beefiness from heme. When you cook heme, it produces the distinctive savory, metallic flavor of meat. Since heme is normally found in blood, no veggie concoction has ever used it. Soy plants do make microscopic amounts of it, but not enough to ever use. Impossible Foods’ breakthrough was to genetically engineer yeast to produce soy heme in a tank, like beer. This GMO process is a deal breaker for some people, but it makes all the difference. The Impossible Burger is incredible, the Beyond Burger merely passable."
The Guardian - Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze
"While a few large mining companies operate in Madagascar, more than 80% of crystals are mined “artisanally” – meaning by small groups and families, without regulation, who are paid rock-bottom prices."
"Would crystal consumers really be willing to pay more to guarantee safer, child labour-free mines, or a fair wage for miners? Schoen compared it to the organic food movement: if enough people wanted assurance of their products’ provenance, the supply systems would develop."
"Meanwhile, the $4.2tn wellness industry rolls on, bolstered by profits from cheap crystals and a generation looking for alternative modes of healing. Bajoras was confident his stones had healing power. After all, he said, if uranium could kill you, why shouldn’t lithium quartz be able to help cure your depression? And when you broke it down to an elemental level, he said, people are mostly minerals and water anyway. “You’re hydrated mineral powder,” he told me. “You are! You’re like Kool-Aid.”"
