flew to and from China so a lot of movies this month. thankfully, pocket also works in china! (mostly anyway, couldn't read articles from the NYT but everything else seemed to work)
yesterday, MIB: international, she's the man [2006], stockholm [2018], pride and prejudice [2005], avengers: age of ultron [2015], spider man: homecoming [2017], spider man: far from home [2019] (watched all but the last 30min)
Mental Floss - What Ever Happened To Waterbeds?
ProPublica - Gutting the IRS
Mental Floss - Do Certain Sounds Enrage You? Neurologists May Know Why
Fast Company - Why I hate living in my tiny house
Mental Floss - Dyslexia Doesn't Work the Way We Thought It Did
Narratively - Meet Ladybeard, the Crown Prince of Japan's Strangest Music Scene
Wired - Why Are Rich People So Mean?
NYT - The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You
SF Chronicle - Missing mail: As postcards celebrate 150 years, they're also disappearing
Taste - Do You Eat Dog?
Mukah Pages - Why People Always Tap Two Fingers On The Table While Eating Dim Sum
OC Register - Congestion kills, so why are politicians making it worse?
Child care Canada - The global legacy of Quebec's subsidized child daycare
NYT - As Homelessness Surges in California, So Does a Backlash
CNN - It's only $4.99. But Costco's rotisserie chicken comes at a huge price
The Atlantic - Why Do Americans Smile So Much?
"Last year, I wrote about why some countries seem to smile less than average—and mistrust those who do seem unusually peppy. A country’s level of instability, that study found, might be why people who seem happy for no reason in, say, Russia, are considered foolish... It turns out that countries with lots of immigration have historically relied more on nonverbal communication. Thus, people there might smile more.
Quartz - The strongest predictor of men’s well-being isn’t family or health
"The strongest predictor of men’s happiness and well-being is their job satisfaction, by a large margin—and the strongest predictor of job satisfaction is whether men feel they are making an impact on their companies’ success. This measure, the study finds, is influenced by whether men feel they are using their own unique talents at work, whether they are surrounded by a diverse set of perspectives, how easily and often they can chat with co-workers, whether they feel their opinions are valued, and whether they’re inspired by the people they work with."
The Atlantic - Men Don't Take Their Wife's Last Name at Marriage
"In medieval England, men who married women from wealthier, more prestigious families would sometimes take their wife’s last name, says Stephanie Coontz, a professor of marriage and family history at Evergreen State College. From the 12th to the 15th century, Coontz told me, in many “highly hierarchical societies” in England and France, “class outweighed gender.” It was common during this period for upper-class English families to take the name of their estates. If a bride-to-be was associated with a particularly flashy castle, the man, Coontz says, would want to benefit from the association. “Men dreamed of marrying a princess,” she says. “It wasn’t just women dreaming of marrying a prince.”"
