The Szechuan sauce fiasco proves Rick and Morty fans don’t understand Rick and Morty polygon.com

If they understood the point of the show so far — that living only for yourself is destructive and selfish no matter how smart you are — they would be ashamed at how they’re acting.

Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’ nytimes.com

Five vertical, underground cisterns, almost 250 feet deep, take in storm water from four rivers north of Tokyo. A series of tunnels connect the cisterns to a vast tank, larger than a soccer field, with ceilings held up by 60-foot pillars that give the space a temple-like feel. From that tank, industrial pumps discharge the floodwater at a controlled pace into the Edo river, a larger river system that flushes the water into Tokyo Bay.

More than half of Londoners in poverty are in working families theguardian.com

Study finds 58% of city’s residents in poverty are living in working households compared with 28% two decades ago.

Boy, Do I Feel Naïve  theconcourse.deadspin.com

Yesterday, BuzzFeed published an exposé on how soulless alt-right troll doll Milo Yiannopoulos solicited ideas and advice from white supremacists and neo-Nazis to help grow Breitbart into the mainstream hate influencer it is today. That report also contained exchanges with other journalists, ones who don’t nominally run in white supremacist circles, but who fed tips and pitches to Yiannopoulos and his ghostwriters, praised his misogyny, sicced him on left-wing writers, and generally palled around with him. And damn it if I wasn’t shocked.

‘Without Them You Could Buy Anything,’ Whispers Amazon Echo As Man Stares Blankly At Family theonion.com

They’re holding you back—think about what you could purchase for yourself if only they weren’t around

Why Steve Bannon Wears So Many Shirts thecut.com

The former chief strategist to President Donald Trump and current chairman of Breitbart News appeared on 60 Minutes at the outset of Fashion Week sporting a curious look consisting of multiple dress shirts stacked on top of one another, wrapped in a jacket. Viewers initially wondered why anyone would choose to insulate themselves like a Russian Nesting Doll, only to discover the bewildering fact that this is how Bannon dresses pretty much all the time.

Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer pressthink.org

Most every journalist who covers Trump knows of these things.

World population may actually start declining, not exploding slate.com

The reason for the implacability of demographic transition can be expressed in one word: education. One of the first things that countries do when they start to develop is educate their young people, including girls. That dramatically improves the size and quality of the workforce. But it also introduces an opportunity cost for having babies. “Women with more schooling tend to have fewer children,” says William Butz, a senior research scholar at IIASA.

The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis were too. vox.com

People often say that the Nazis loved Nietzsche, which is true. What’s less known is that Nietzsche’s sister, who was in charge of his estate after he died, was a Nazi sympathizer who shamefully rearranged his remaining notes to produce a final book, The Will to Power, that embraced Nazi ideology. It won her the favor of Hitler, but it was a terrible disservice to her brother’s legacy.

Why Portugal’s wild Comporta coastline should be your summer sanctuary thespaces.com

Comporta, referred to as the ‘secret treasure of Europe’, is just over an hour’s drive south of Lisbon. It has long been a refuge for creatives wishing to put their urban lives on hold – and find inspiration in its raw scenery and down-to-earth charm.

Public Enemy harpers.org

juror no. 52: When I walked in here today I looked at him, and in my head, that’s a snake — not knowing who he was. I just walked in and looked right at him and that’s a snake.

The last person left who daren’t diss the Donald… theguardian.com

I don’t believe this view can survive long while he’s openly defending those who consort with neo-Nazis and the KKK, and showing suspicion for people who oppose them. Too many Americans, conservative and liberal, fought in the second world war for that; too many saw the realities of segregation. And if I’m wrong, and the Trump who spoke out against the “very violent” “alt-left” on Tuesday remains a popular hero, then the US is already lost and has been for some time.

A Look into NASA’s Coding Philosophy mystudentvoices.com

There’s a recurring theme in the programming community that’s tied to finding “better ways” to write “modern software.” Whether or not the term “modern” is actually any useful — computer programming hasn’t been around for very long — I’m definitely left with the impression folks always have something “new” or “better” to say on the subject. And so if we pay attention to the conversations surrounding software development today, we’ll quickly realize how important it is to separate the wheat from the chaff: what’s useful and what isn’t.

We Need to Talk Some More About Your Dirty Sponges nytimes.com

A kitchen sponge is not your enemy. But it can be very dirty. Last week, scientists published a study revealing how densely packed your dirty kitchen sponge is with microscopic bacteria. After I wrote an article about their work, readers flooded my inbox with good questions, so I asked around for some answers.

These Germans Who Swim To Work Are Happier Than You theawl.com

Look at this delightful motherfucker! The best thing about this is that David is not some fitness freak (or, to use the German, ein Fitneß-Freak) with a Juicero and a SuperSquat desk in his office. He’s rocking what I affectionately like to call the Classic Bavarian physique, and for much of his commute he doggie paddles or chills in the current on his back. He looks, frankly, like he’s having the time of his ever-loving life, and I want to be him.

Come Campari vuole conquistare il mondo con lo Spritz ilpost.it

Campari ha investito molto su questo mercato, promuovendo l’Aperol e associando il brand all’immagine dell’aperitivo spensierato per le vie di un centro storico, in un modo che ricorda un po’ la “Dolce vita”. È una scelta che ha avuto successo non soltanto in Italia, ma in tutta Europa. Dal 2004 al 2011, scrive Aversa, le vendite di Aperol sono cresciute a doppia cifra ogni anno. Nel 2009, le vendite hanno registrato un aumento del 40 per cento.

Muji’s revamped Tokyo store now sells groceries – and tiny homes thespaces.com

Walk into Muji’s new global flagship store in Tokyo and you could walk out with a new home.

An octopus is the closest thing to an alien here on earth qz.com

“A real alien would be a sentient being with no common ancestry with us at all, arising completely independently,” says Godfrey-Smith, who published a book on consciousness and octopuses earlier this year. “We might never meet that—if we do, that would be great. If we don’t, the octopus is our best approximation because there’s a historical connection but it was a long time ago.”

Why it is closing time for so many London pubs economist.com

Many of London’s social woes, such as its persistent housing crisis, are blamed on the rich. But it appears that the fall of the pub should not be counted among them.

The Wanking Foreigner From ‘The Big Bang Theory’ catapult.co

The conversation reminds me of a link my friend Yomi shared on Twitter once about the hypersexualization of black men and the under-sexualization of Asian men. It’s called the Three Bears theory. If black men are too sexual and their dicks way too big, and Asian men (and we are encompassing an entire continent here) are undersexed, sexually repressed, either culturally or familially, because of an overbearing mother, and their dicks are way too small, that makes the white dick, juuuuuuust right.

The Toxic Saga of the World’s Greatest Fish Market eater.com

Built in 1923 on the site of a former imperial naval base, Tsukiji is a testament to an older way of doing business — that just happens to sit in the middle of a grid of impeccable city planning. Take a comfortable stroll a few blocks northeast, and you’ll find the fancifully hooved streets of the Ginza district, where you can literally eat breakfast at the Gucci store, just like in the Kanye song. Meander down another path, and you’ll run smack into the drab concrete towers of salarymen, who scuttle in and out like worker bees serving the inscrutable whims of company queens.

Beatrix Potter-pinching and Žižekian swipes: the strange world of book thefts theguardian.com

At the London Review Bookshop, John Clegg reports a fondness for philosophers. “Our most-stolen authors, in order, are Baudrillard, Freud, Nietzsche, Graham Greene, Lacan, Camus, and whoever puts together the Wisden Almanack. The appetite for Greene (which seems to have died down a little now) was particularly surprising, but I suppose they identify with Pinkie,” said Clegg.

How work changed to make us all passionate quitters aeon.co

The environment of the quitting economy also brings about a change in the emotional life of the worker and workplace. When you start imagining yourself as always on the verge of quitting, the emotions you feel for your work change. When companies decided to do away with company loyalty, businesses had to find a new way to help workers foster an emotional connection to work. In the US especially, there is a strong cultural consensus that people should feel passion for their work, and work hard. One hiring manager explained to me that he always chose people who seemed passionate about their work over someone who seemed to have the most experience. He could teach them any necessary skills, he explained, but his need for them to work very long hours meant that he needed people with passion. Since company loyalty is no longer around to guarantee committed workers, passion is now supposed to be the driving force.

Le serie tv sono la nuova letteratura? internazionale.it

Ogni volta che qualcuno ti fa ragionamenti del genere – Come è profondo il mare è una canzone così bella che è quasi una poesia, Maus di Art Spiegelman è un fumetto che accede alla dignità del romanzo, ogni inquadratura di Barry Lyndon è un quadro da esporre in un museo – cerca di sgattaiolare per tempo fuori dalla grotta della conversazione e scappa

My first ride on the Elizabeth line arstechnica.co.uk

A deep dive into the tech, AC, and ride quality of the Elizabeth line's Class 345 trains.

Revealed: the insidious creep of pseudo-public space in London theguardian.com

Pseudo-public spaces – large squares, parks and thoroughfares that appear to be public but are actually owned and controlled by developers and their private backers – are on the rise in London and many other British cities, as local authorities argue they cannot afford to create or maintain such spaces themselves.

The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates propublica.org

Each year, drugs from the stockpiles are selected based on their value and pending expiration and analyzed in batches to determine whether their end dates could be safely extended. For several decades, the program has found that the actual shelf life of many drugs is well beyond the original expiration dates.

Tokyo street fashion and culture: 1980 - 2017 google.com

Explore the fascinating history of fashion and culture in Tokyo, Japan. This is a documentary of youth fashion and culture in Tokyo for 37 years.

Revamping Shibuya: A Massive Redevelopment Project Gives the Station Area a New Look nippon.com

The station high-rise will be topped with one of Japan’s largest observation decks. Hovering 230 meters in the air, the expansive rooftop space is almost guaranteed to become a tourist attraction, offering a panoramic view of Tokyo, including the scramble crossing and surrounding Shibuya area, Yoyogi Park and the Shinjuku skyline to the north, and Roppongi and the central business area to the east, not to mention Mount Fuji to the west on clear days.

You Are Not What You Earn thebookoflife.org

Money is in fact no accurate measure of the human worth of the work in question; the determinant of wages is just the strength of demand in relation to supply.

Monocle's View From Nowhere newrepublic.com

The magazine’s globalist chic contrasts sharply with the nationalist movements in the United States and Europe seeking to limit immigration, including visa programs for the skilled workers in tech and finance who might read Monocle. Yet the publication shares with the right a faith in free-market economics; Brûlé himself is less a citizen of the world than a shopper in its gigantic, globalized mall. His magazine, which built its brand by identifying the world’s hippest (and most profitable) trends, feels increasingly out of touch.

Why Do Democracies Fail? theatlantic.com

The non-rich always outnumber the rich. Democracy enables the many to outvote the few: a profoundly threatening prospect to the few. If the few possess power and wealth, they may respond to this prospect by resisting democracy before it arrives—or sabotaging it afterward. Yet despite this potential threat to the formation and endurance of democracy, wealthy countries do often transition peacefully to democracy—and then preserve its stability for decades afterward. The classic example is the United Kingdom.

Those who leave home, and those who stay vox.com

After 100 years of Americans moving more and more, we're now moving less.

Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job? workplace.stackexchange.com

So I’ve been doing it for about 18 months and in that time, I’ve basically figured out all the traps to the point where I’ve actually written a program which for the past 6 months has been just doing the whole thing for me. So what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes to clean the spreadsheet and run it through the program.

There’s No Money in Internet Culture nymag.com

Maybe more importantly, Tumblr and Vine and the like never had data-mining operations as sophisticated as, say, Facebook. That’s why most of the advertising money in the industry has drained toward Facebook, which has 2 billion users, mounds of data, and can better assure advertisers of content cleanliness. Facebook is instructive: It’s less a place for creation or debate than it is for hosting all of the nitty-gritty, more boring data about your life.

Liberal Arts Majors Are the Future of the Tech Industry hbr.org

Morson and Schapiro’s solution is literature. They suggest that economists could gain wisdom from reading great novelists, who have a deeper insight into people than social scientists do. Whereas economists tend to treat people as abstractions, novelists dig into the specifics. To illustrate the point, Morson and Schapiro ask, When has a scientist’s model or case study drawn a person as vividly as Tolstoy drew Anna Karenina?

Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight, explained with 60+ studies vox.com

We've long thought of weight loss in simple "calories in, calories out" terms. Today, researchers view this rule as overly simplistic. They now think of human energy balance as "a dynamic and adaptable system," as one study describes. When you alter one component — cutting the number of calories you eat in a day to lose weight, doing more exercise than usual — this sets off a cascade of changes in the body that affect how many calories you use up, and in turn, your body weight.

Muji is opening a hotel in Tokyo thespaces.com

Rejoice, Muji fans – the minimalist Japanese lifestyle brand is set to open a Tokyo hotel in early 2019.

My own private basic income opendemocracy.net

The most common objection to basic income is that it’s supposedly wrong to give things to people who don’t work for it, when actually, the economy already gives billions of dollars of unearned income to people who are already wealthy. The problem is we don’t share it.

Foto dalla più bella autostrada cinese ilpost.it

Per lo Xinjiang, la regione più a nord-ovest della Cina, passa quella che è considerata la più bella autostrada cinese, per via dei suoi panorami.

Take Naps at Work. Apologize to No One. nytimes.com

The Japanese even have a word for strategically sleeping on the job: “inemuri,” roughly translated to “sleeping while present.” Now is a good moment to pause and email this story to your boss.

A Time magazine with Trump on the cover hangs in his golf clubs. It’s fake. washingtonpost.com

There was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.

The Mammoth Pirates rferl.org

In Russia's Arctic north, a new kind of gold rush is under way.

Quella alta grande fica mantellini.it

Possiamo perdonare qualsiasi cosa al Lucio Dalla di “Come è profondo il mare” ma soprattutto possiamo utilizzare i testi di quel disco come una mefafora della violenza del talento. Che entra all’improvviso, non chiede permesso, non prevede competenze e semplicemente rovescia tutto. Capita raramente ma quando succede il mondo, tutto insieme, spicca un saltello verso l’alto.

Foreign investors snapping up London homes suitable for first-time buyers theguardian.com

In Westminster, which is favoured by Singaporean buyers, four out of 10 new-build properties were sold abroad over the two-year period. The ratio was one in four in Southwark, favoured most by buyers from Hong Kong, and about one in five in Hackney, Lewisham, Hammersmith and Fulham, Newham and Merton. The most popular destination for Chinese investment was Greenwich, where Chinese developer Knight Dragon is building nearly 16,000 homes.

This is what a brutalist world would look like on your phone theverge.com

Designer Pierre Buttin takes brutalism to a mobile extreme with new series

10 ways to have a better conversation youtube.com

When your job hinges on how well you talk to people, you learn a lot about how to have conversations — and that most of us don't converse very well. Celeste Headlee has worked as a radio host for decades, and she knows the ingredients of a great conversation: Honesty, brevity, clarity and a healthy amount of listening.

Corano for dummies hello.gustomela.net

Non trovo incitazioni alla guerra, ma la violenza se è difensiva è ben più che ammessa. Maometto era un guerriero ed era un politico. Io sono abituata alla mitezza di Gesù Cristo, che a modo suo in quel donarsi alla volontà di Dio è molto islamico. La figura di Gesù ricorre spesso, ed è sorprendente il come. È un loro profeta. In suo insegnamento totalmente accolto, ma inteso in maniera un po’ (non tanto) diversa da quella del Cristianesimo. Per l'Islam i 12 apostoli erano veri musulmani. Come Abramo, come Maria (altra figura sorprendente nel Corano). Non ce le insegnano queste cose a scuola nell'ora di religione.

Why Trump Actually Pulled Out Of Paris politico.com

Trump may believe climate change is a hoax manufactured in China, and congressional Republicans may continue to oppose any action to address it, but that won’t make the physical realities of climate-driven droughts, floods, pandemics and refugee migrations any less brutal. It’s reminiscent of the old riddle: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have? Four, because a tail is not a leg. Trump can call global warming a hoax, but 2014 was nevertheless the hottest year on record, until it was displaced by 2015, which was overtaken by 2016. That tail is not a leg.

“Personal kanban”: a life-changing time-management system that explodes the myth of multitasking qz.com

Starting but not finishing too many projects puts a person at risk of the so-called Zeigarnik effect, named for Bluma Zeigarnik, a Russian psychiatrist who, in the 1920s, discovered that people are better at remembering unfinished tasks than completed ones.

Miley Cyrus’s Creepy Return to Wholesomeness newyorker.com

It’s not so much that Cyrus has changed (or that she has, at least, changed tack strategically; both are so ordinary as to be banal), it’s that this is what everybody thinks a grownup woman looks like: pretty, tamed, straight, still, white.

Breitbart numbers are down fivethirtyeight.com

Breitbart was riding high ahead of the inauguration — the 29th-most trafficked site on the web according to web-monitor Alexa — but it’s now down to 281st place

With Italy No Longer in U.S. Focus, Russia Swoops to Fill the Void nytimes.com

Russia is assiduously courting Italy, a country that once had the largest Communist party outside the Soviet bloc and that many analysts consider the soft underbelly of the European Union.

100 Movies 100 Numbers 100 Seconds youtube.com

Basic rules: 100 unique films, and no years (e.g., back in '43), only numbers used.

Me and my penis: 100 men reveal all theguardian.com

Dodsworth has now photographed 100 men. In each photo, you see penis and testicles, belly, hands and thighs. The humanity lies in the relationship between these body parts. A few of the men look like self-satisfied alphas (we have to guess: we can’t see their faces), but most appear vulnerable in one way or the other, whether it’s their pose or the way they hold their hands.

What know-it-alls don’t know, or the illusion of competence aeon.co

One day in 1995, a large, heavy middle-aged man robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. He didn’t wear a mask or any sort of disguise. And he smiled at surveillance cameras before walking out of each bank. Later that night, police arrested a surprised McArthur Wheeler. When they showed him the surveillance tapes, Wheeler stared in disbelief. ‘But I wore the juice,’ he mumbled. Apparently, Wheeler thought that rubbing lemon juice on his skin would render him invisible to videotape cameras. After all, lemon juice is used as invisible ink so, as long as he didn’t come near a heat source, he should have been completely invisible.

How To Be More Productive by Working Less markmanson.net

Exercise has diminishing returns for the simple reason that your muscles tire out. And as your muscles tire out, their ability to be stimulated for further growth diminishes until it’s more or less non-existent. Spending two hours in the gym gets you little to no extra benefit as spending an hour. And spending an hour only gives you slightly more benefit than spending 45 minutes. Most work is this way. Why? Because, like a muscle, your brain tires out. And if you’re exercising your brain by doing any sort of problem-solving, or important decision-making, then you’re limited in how much you can effectively accomplish in a day.

What’s brewing in Germany?: How to understand Angela Merkel’s comments about America and Britain economist.com

Foreigners often get Mrs Merkel all wrong. She is not the queen of Europe, nor has she any desire to be it. She is a domestic leader and politician whose mounting international stature is always a function of her ability to serve the interests and predilections of German voters. It is predominantly because Germans, for deep historical and cultural reasons, feel so “European” that that she talks and acts in a “European” way. Perhaps all the more for this, Mrs Merkel’s comments today illustrate how much Trumpandbrexit has hurt America and Britain in the past months. They have made it not just possible but also electorally beneficial for a friendly leader of a crucial partner to bash them in public. And more than that: to do it with sincerity.

Brexit and the coming food crisis: ‘If you can’t feed a country, you haven’t got a country' theguardian.com

Britain’s food production depends on seasonal migrant labour from the EU

The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies skeptic.com

We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.

How to Spot Visualization Lies flowingdata.com

Bar charts use length as their visual cue, so when someone makes the length shorter using the same data by truncating the value axis, the chart dramatizes differences. Someone wants to show a bigger change than is actually there.

Thousands of 'Second Life' Bunnies Are Going to Starve to Death This Saturday waypoint.vice.com

Any bunny who is not Everlasting will be unable to eat and will hibernate within 72 hours.

The Chinese Factory Workers Who Write Poems on Their Phones lithub.com

The very act of writing these poems is self-fulfilling, a way for those without a voice to counter the detachment they feel from each other, from their work, from the things they make, and to reclaim their own sense of humanity. The poems also provide an opportunity for us not to lazily point fingers at China’s human rights abuses, but to think about our own casual complicity in these workers’ hardship. Their eloquent commitment to poetry provides another way of understanding the cost of sweatshop labor that stretches way beyond cold, unfeeling economics.

Fairytale Prisoner by Choice: The Photographic Eye of Melania Trump medium.com

There is a striking passivity to the Trump Tower view photographs. She never changed the composition of these landscapes, she placed no personal mark on them. The time of day changes, she takes a photo, that’s it. There is a calmness, a kind of safety, to this approach. The earth moves around the sun but the photographer is stable, in the exact same position, day after day.

M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine willemm.nl

The machine is able to sort M&M’s and Skittles by colour by performing optical measurements using the RGB sensor.

Wired in the 1990s kottke.org

I used to work at Wired, and later at The Verge, and at both places we had a lot of reverence for “Wired in the 90s.” You’d say it fast like that, too — “wired-in-the-90s” — and it was a universally recognized shorthand for relevance, cool, slick design, smart writers, the “culture of now.”