If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel joshworth.com

A tediously accurate map of the solar system

"It's All Downhill from Here": Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story hyperallergic.com

As cinema and culture at large present the wedding as the high-point of a relationship there’s often an underlying subtext that “it’s all downhill from here.” The focus devoted to a single day and a party is disconnected from the reality of marriage. If we were to move beyond the “happily ever after,” what would the marriages of films like My Big Fat Greek Wedding look like? Happy and eternal, or would they be doomed to fall into the same implosive patterns of Marriage Story and Scenes from a Marriage? 

Cloud Appreciation Society cloudappreciationsociety.org

We love clouds.

Nature’s Best Poetry of 2019: Clouds nytimes.com

Clouds, their manifesto says, are not signs of negativity and gloom, but rather “nature’s poetry” and “the most egalitarian of her displays.”

Irony hedgehogreview.com

We are confronted with the uncomfortable reality that we are always showing everyone who and what we are on the basis of what we love. Irony seems to offer an alternative. But if Lear—and Plato—are right, then this moment of distancing should serve as a prelude to deepening my relationship to the world and how I understand myself.

Bright Leaf nplusonemag.com

To have a cigarette is to step out of day-to-day existence and into a private, solitary existence. It’s just you and your cigarette. Hello, says the cigarette, You’ve come to visit me. And you say, Yes, hello—but really, you know that you’ve come to visit yourself. The cigarette is a method of being alone and listening to yourself, of having nobody but yourself to listen to or to be with. It’s also a way to stop time. Time spent smoking is not real time. Nothing else is happening. There is no progress. There is no trying to start something or complete something or even forget something. Since smokers have been excommunicated from indoor life, this contemplative aspect of smoking has come to the fore. I’m grateful that I can’t smoke inside anymore. Now, about once an hour, I can stop whatever I’m doing without making an excuse for stopping it, and go outside. Then I am with birds and trees, or with skyscrapers and trucks, or with rain, or with the sunset that is beginning, pink and streaky, over in the west. The whole world is there and I am also there, but I have nothing to do except watch it or ignore it and smoke my cigarette.

The evolution of reality iai.tv

Hoffman offers what he calls the ‘interface theory’ of perception: the idea that the world as we perceive it is like the user interface of a computer, a simplified representation of what we can do in the world and what might happen as a result.  As in a computer, what is really going on in the world – the quantum fields and so on – is far too complicated for us to understand, and would take far too long to understand even were we capable. Fortunately we don’t have to.

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius paulgraham.com

What rational person would decide that the way to write great novels was to begin by spending several years creating an imaginary elvish language, like Tolkien, or visiting every household in southwestern Britain, like Trollope? No one, including Tolkien and Trollope.

You're almost definitely more of a Jerk than you think you are lithub.com

Think of the aggressively rumpled scholar who can’t bear the thought that someone would waste her time getting a manicure. Or think of the manicured socialite who can’t see the value of dedicating one’s life to dusty Latin manuscripts. What-ever he’s into, the moralizing jerk exudes a continuous aura of disdain for everything else.

The efficiency-destroying magic of tidying up florentcrivello.com

This is because complex systems — like laws, cities, or corporate processes — are the products of a thousand factors, each pulling in a different direction. And even if each factor is tidy taken separately, things quickly get messy when they all merge together.

The Age of Instagram Face newyorker.com

Choice cannot make an unjust or exploitative practice or act somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative.

Sunshine, robots and 23 varieties: how to farm 150m brussels sprouts theguardian.com

Ian McLachlan is the farming director of Drysdales, the UK’s biggest grower of brussels sprouts – and sprouts supplier to Tesco for 30 years. McLachlan puts the boom in popularity down to, essentially, good breeding; farmers have bred out a compound called glucosinolates, responsible for the bitter flavour. This, coupled with better culinary knowledge, has transformed the diminutive green’s reputation.

Fridge light: a metaphor for subjective social reality twitter.com

Metaphor for subjective social reality: fridge light. Every time I open my fridge, there's light. Therefore, the fridge light is always on.

radicalcartography radicalcartography.net

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.

I'm going to tell you about the voice at Embankment Tube station twitter.com

And that is why today, even in 2019, if you go down to Embankment station in London, and sit on the northbound platform on Northern Line, you will here a COMPLETELY different voice say Mind the Gap to ANYWHERE else on the Underground.

All the Foreign Bodies That Got Stuck flowingdata.com

Below is a sample of all the things people get stuck, based on data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Miracle foreignpolicy.com

In 1997, the former Soviet leader needed money, and Pizza Hut needed a spokesman. Greatness ensued.

Solutions to waste and the problem of scalar mismatches discardstudies.com

Scale is not about being big or small. At different scales, different relationships matter.

Recycling as a Crisis of Meaning discardstudies.com

The commodity-sign shifts values from the social realm onto commodities, or in this case, onto the practice of recycling. Through recycling campaigns, “the original totality of the signified slips from view” and recycling becomes, first and foremost, a type of environmental activism rather than a form of waste management or an industrial process.

Modern Waste is an Economic Strategy discardstudies.com

Recycling is a far greater benefit to industry than to the environment. Recycling is an industrial process that produces waste, uses energy, requires virgin (non-recyclable) materials, and often results in down-cycling, where created products are less robust than their predecessors.

The what and the why of Discard Studies discardstudies.com

Structures, not behaviours, uphold norms and practices of waste and wasting. In sociology and other fields, there is a constant tension between agency–what individuals and groups of people are able and want to do– and structure, the cultural norms and values, institutions, infrastructures, and power relations that constrain and even determine that agency. Because of this, we’ve argued against awareness as an ideal method for creating changes around waste and wasting, instead arguing for changes in infrastructure and other scaled up systems. To help understand this tension, we use concepts of scale and scalar mismatch to argue that waste occurs differently within different structures at different scales, and that action must match up with these scales. For example, if we want to address pollution and waste, then focusing 90% of our activist efforts on household waste that makes up less than 3% of a nation’s waste is not going to be effective. Consumer and citizen behaviour cannot impact 97% of the waste that’s out there

The Politics of Measurement: Per Capita Waste and Previous Sewage Contamination discardstudies.com

The reason to take measurements seriously is that quantitative work creates things. Per capita waste creates wasteful individuals and naturalizes an impotent course of action, while Previous Sewage Contamination creates pollution where before there was none. Activism is all about intervening in material conditions, and Franklin knew his judgement, expressed as a measurement, would be extrapolated off the page to make things happen in the world of things.  Advocacy via measurement is not unique to activism–I would argue that per capita measurement is in the interest of industry, and it is not surprising to find that industry works to keep it as the measurement of choice in governance.

Salary and Occupation flowingdata.com

Salaries vary across occupations. The charts below show by how much for 800 of them.

The Weirdos of Russian Literature lithub.com

Tolstoy had to eat boiled pears to ease his digestive troubles. Bulgakov was obsessed with having enough pairs of socks. And Chekhov made his own creosote vapor inhalations.

Why is pop culture obsessed with battles between good and evil? aeon.co

Stories about good guys and bad guys that are implicitly moral – in the sense that they invest an individual’s entire social identity in him not changing his mind about a moral issue – perversely end up discouraging any moral deliberation. Instead of anguishing over multidimensional characters in conflict – as we find in The Iliad, or the Mahabharata or Hamlet – such stories rigidly categorise people according to the values they symbolise, flattening all the deliberation and imagination of ethical action into a single thumbs up or thumbs down. Either a person is acceptable for Team Good, or he belongs to Team Evil. [...] The one thing the good guys teach us is that people on the other team aren’t like us. In fact, they’re so bad, and the stakes are so high, that we have to forgive every transgression by our own team in order to win. [...] When we read, watch and tell stories of good guys warring against bad guys, we are essentially persuading ourselves that our opponents would not be fighting us, indeed they would not be on the other team at all, if they had any loyalty or valued human life. In short, we are rehearsing the idea that moral qualities belong to categories of people rather than individuals.

A million people are jailed at China's gulags haaretz.com

Meat was served on Fridays, but it was pork. The inmates were compelled to eat it, even if they were religiously observant and did not eat pork.

The Idler (1993) en.wikipedia.org

The Idler is a bi-monthly magazine, devoted to its ethos of 'idling'. Founded in 1993 by Tom Hodgkinson and Gavin Pretor-Pinney, the publication's intention is to return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject.

My Obsession With the Bon Appétit Cinematic Universe jezebel.com

There are these chefs who work at Bon Appétit, a legacy food publication you’ve probably flipped through in the checkout line of a grocery store that always features a single delicious-looking dish on the cover surrounded by headlines that can, for a few moments, convince you that your kitchen could get a Michelin star if only you start preparing your chicken breasts exactly like this and also if you embrace the bean this season.

Our Economic Problems Are in Sectors, Not the System nytimes.com

There is in fact a problem with stagnant wages in today’s developed economies. But in the United States for instance much of the problem lies in our low productivity health and education sectors, which raise the cost of living for everybody, plus the high cost of renting or buying in desirable urban areas and in good school districts.

Emperor Norton en.wikipedia.org

The announcement was first printed for humorous effect by the editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. Norton later added "Protector of Mexico" to this title, and thus began his whimsical 21-year "reign" over America.

English is not normal aeon.co

In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words.

Laughing OnLine pudding.cool

While lol started out indicating laughter, it quickly became aspirational, a way of showing your appreciation of a joke or defusing a slightly awkward situation even if you didn’t technically laugh at it.

Vandana Shiva’s Crusade Against Genetically Modified Crops newyorker.com

When Shiva writes that “Golden Rice will make the malnutrition crisis worse” and that it will kill people, she reinforces the worst fears of her largely Western audience. Much of what she says resonates with the many people who feel that profit-seeking corporations hold too much power over the food they eat. Theirs is an argument well worth making. But her statements are rarely supported by data, and her positions often seem more like those of an end-of-days mystic than like those of a scientist.

L'arte dell'autografo, per gli scrittori ilpost.it

11 scrittori giudicati solo ed esclusivamente sulla base del modo in cui mi hanno firmato un libro

For the Colonel, It Was Finger‐Lickin’ Bad nytimes.com

When Mr. Singleton explained that he first mixed boiling water into the instant powdered potatoes, the colonel interrupted. “And then you have wallpaper paste,” he said.

The great university con: how the British degree lost its value newstatesman.com

At Queen Mary last year, a memo issued by the university business school demanded that lecturers ensure at least 60 per cent of students were given a 2:1 or better in every assessment. This, it made clear, was not “an aspirational target for marks”, but rather a “minimum threshold” to ward off “further investigation”.

A Giant Volcano Could End Human Life on Earth as We Know It nytimes.com

Though asteroids get the press and the Michael Bay movies, existential risk experts largely agree that supervolcanoes — of which there are 20 scattered around the planet — are the natural threat that poses the highest probability of human extinction. But that’s not the same thing as high. The probability of a supereruption at Yellowstone in any given year is 1 in 730,000.

When Jim Crow Drank Coke nytimes.com

Pemberton went to work on a “temperance drink” with the same “medicinal” effects, and he introduced Coca-Cola in 1886. At the time, the soda fountains of Atlanta pharmacies had become fashionable gathering places for middle-class whites as an alternative to bars. Mixed with soda water, the drink quickly caught on as an “intellectual beverage” among well-off whites.

I assure you, medieval people bathed going-medieval.com

In fact, medieval people loved a bath and can in many ways be considered a bathing culture, much in the way that say, Japan is now. Medieval people also very much valued being clean generally in an almost religious way.

How Mosquitoes Changed Everything newyorker.com

It turns out that, if you’re looking for them, the words “mosquitoes,” “fever,” “ague,” and “death” are repeated to the point of nausea throughout human history. (And before: Winegard suggests that, when the asteroid hit, dinosaurs were already in decline from mosquito-borne diseases.) Malaria laid waste to prehistoric Africa to such a degree that people evolved sickle-shaped red blood cells to survive it. The disease killed the ancient Greeks and Romans—as well as the peoples who tried to conquer them—by the hundreds of thousands, playing a major role in the outcomes of their wars.

Sposerò Matteo Renzi mantellini.it

Non ricordo bene quando sia stato. Ricordo che un sabato io e Alessandra eravamo a Firenze a un evento – un barcamp credo, allora andavano di moda i barcamp – nello splendido Salone dei Cinquecento di Palazzo Vecchio e in mezzo a moltissima gente arrivò questo tizio giovane e ben vestito, che era una specie di padrone di casa. Molti del gruppetto di persone con le quali stavamo chiacchierando lui li conosceva già, così venne da me e da mia moglie (prima da lei che da me) a presentarsi: “Piacere, Matteo” disse. Alessandra sorrise. Ricordo che pensai che era un tipo molto affabile e che forse i politici bravi sono così.

Jeffrey Epstein en.wikipedia.org

The New York Times reported in August 2019 that Epstein had planned to "seed the human race with his DNA" by impregnating up to 20 women at a time using his New Mexico compound as a "baby ranch", where mothers would give birth to his offspring.

Can Britain’s Top Bookseller Save Barnes & Noble? nytimes.com

The first Daunt Books, which opened in 1990, dazzled patrons the moment they walked in, though not because of its country-centric arrangement. It was the store itself, the long-shuttered home of an antiquarian bookseller, constructed in the Edwardian age, its oak shelves, galleries, balcony and skylight all gloriously intact.

The New Ruins of the Melting Alps newrepublic.com

Climate change has left a graveyard of abandoned ski resorts on the Italian Alps

What is a Multi-Layer Dictionary? learnthesewordsfirst.com

A multi-layer dictionary, like Learn These Words First, is different: The definitions are arranged in layers so they can be understood by learners with different levels of vocabulary.

Tiny the Wonder en.wikipedia.org

Tiny the Wonder was an English Toy Terrier (Black & Tan) famous in the City of London in the mid-19th century for being able to kill 200 rats in an hour in the city's rat-baiting pits

While each acre of most tree species can capture and store 1.1 to 9.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, an acre of empress trees can absorb 103 bloomberg.com

“It’s a tree that grows like grass.”