What “Things Going Wrong” Can Look Like medium.com

While I hope that most people are beyond the stage of saying “oh, this is all just campaign rhetoric,” I know that many people will still say that, and will probably keep saying that until the day something happens to them directly. But given that in his first eight days in office, Trump has proven himself quite honest on the campaign trail — going out and doing exactly the things he said he would, from ordering walls and detention camps built at the Mexican border to banning even legal permanent residents who are citizens of various Muslim countries (but only the Muslim ones) from entering the country — I’m hoping people are starting to realize that no, it wasn’t just a joke.

Japanese toilet industry agrees to standardize complex bidet controls theverge.com

The Japan Sanitary Equipment Industry Association, a consortium of companies producing plumbing products including Toto, Panasonic, and Toshiba, has agreed to unify the iconography used on the often baffling control panels for Japanese toilets.

Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art forward.com

As a photograph, it’s a rare achievement. As a cover, it’s a statement.

Definitive data on what poor people buy when they’re just given cash qz.com

A recently published research paper (paywall) by David Evans of the World Bank and Anna Popova of Stanford University shows that giving money to the poor has a negative effect on the consumption of tobacco and alcohol. Evans and Popova’s research is based on an examination of nineteen studies that assess the impact of cash transfers on expenditures of tobacco and alcohol. Not one of the 19 studies found that cash grants increase tobacco and alcohol consumption and many of them found that it leads to a reduction.