The Digital Nomads Did Not Prepare for This nytimes.com

Americans have never been especially good at vacation. Before Covid-19, they were leaving unused hundreds of millions of paid days off. They even created a work-vacation hybrid — the workation. The idea: Travel to a nice place, work during the day and then, in theory, enjoy the scenery in the off hours. In pandemic times, the digital nomads have simply made workation a permanent state.

Why Not Eat Octopus? newyorker.com

The real quandary here is, when we find them, what if aliens turn out to be delicious?

On the Pleasures of Not Reading theparisreview.org

I have for many years now actively enjoyed not reading Charles Bukowski. I want to say with conviction that Bukowski is not so much a voice from hell as a voice from Hell-Lite™, a kind of flimsy, adolescent imitation of true misanthropy—but I have no evidence to furnish in my case against him. How could I? I’ve never read him. All I know is that I’ve listened to a tepid Modest Mouse song about him; I have spoken to a stranger at a bar who told me she’d “snort his words off the page,” if she could; and I’ve sneered at the cover of Ham on Rye in a Park Slope Barnes and Noble. If you asked me to mount a cogent defense of my antipathy, I’d have to say something pretentious like “I find his role in the culture banal.”

How the First Gravitational Waves Were Found newyorker.com

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again.

The Depressive’s Guide to Getting Out of Bed theparisreview.org

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

The Loophole in the Hedonic Treadmill nautil.us

When Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, in The House of the Dead, that “Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything,” he was talking about the cruelties and deprivations of life in Siberian prison camp. But the human tendency to adapt or “get accustomed” to situations is more profound than even Dostoyevsky may have realized. […] We adapt. A great pleasure, repeated often enough, becomes routine, and it takes an even greater treat to give us the same enjoyment. When we get used to having more, it takes more to please us. (Conversely, when we get used to having less, it takes less to please us.) This is the known as the “hedonic treadmill.” It’s analogous to the well-known tendency to adapt to physical stress. When you first start lifting weights, for example, a relatively light weight might be all it takes to start putting on muscle. But once the body adapts to that exercise, heavier and heavier weights will be needed to keep getting stronger.

“Writing Is an Act of Pride”: A Conversation with Elena Ferrante newyorker.com

We should teach ourselves to look deeply at this interconnection—I call it a tangle, or, rather, frantumaglia—to give ourselves adequate tools to describe it. In the most absolute tranquility or in the midst of tumultuous events, in safety or danger, in innocence or corruption, we are a crowd of others. […] The others, in the broad meaning of the term, as I said, continually collide with us and we collide with them. Our singularity, our uniqueness, our identity are continually dying. When at the end of a long day we feel shattered, “in pieces,” there’s nothing more literally true. […] When shapes lose their contours, we see what most terrifies us, as in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and Clarice Lispector’s extraordinary “Passion According to G.H.” You don’t go beyond that; you have to take a step back and, to survive, reënter some good fiction. I don’t believe, however, that every fiction we orchestrate is good. I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions. I love unreal things when they show signs of firsthand knowledge of the terror, and hence an awareness that they are unreal, that they will not hold up for long against the collisions. Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening.

Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless thebaffler.com

Obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.” […] It would be nice to believe that all it takes to change your life is to repeat some affirmations and buy a planner, just as it was once comforting for many of us to trust that the hardships of this plane of existence would be rewarded by an eternity of bliss in heaven. There is a reason that the rituals of wellbeing and self-care are followed with the precision of a cult (do this and you will be saved; do this and you will be safe): It is a practice of faith. It’s worth remembering that Marx’s description of religion as the opiate of the masses is often misinterpreted—opium, at the time when Marx was writing, was not just known as an addictive drug, but as a painkiller, a solace when the work of survival became unbearable.

A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning meltingasphalt.com

The bigger reason to separate meaning from pleasure is that pleasure is a strictly subjective experience. You can close your eyes and bliss out as hard as you like, and the pleasure you experience will be no less valid because it’s “just in your mind.” Meaning, on the other hand, is entangled with external reality, making it possible to be wrong about it. And thus the pursuit of true meaning requires an outward orientation to the world.

Immortality Begins at Forty ribbonfarm.com

You begin to experience immortality the first time you recognize the transience of experiences you thought were permanent, and more subtly, the permanence of experiences you hoped were transient. This recognition generally ruins culture for you, since culture is built around the game of a meaningful search for eternal truths, timeless values and changeless habits of prowess. And, it goes without saying, transcendence of the unpleasantly transient. […] Culture is the necessary art of perpetuating the disturbing rumor that reality is meaningful. That beneath the pain and the pleasure, the cruelty and the compassion, the estranging and the connecting, the breaking and the making, the ugliness and the beauty, the losing and the winning, the dying and the living, there is Something More.™

Joy nybooks.com

Perhaps the first thing to say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day. I wonder if this is more than the usual amount? It was the same even in childhood when most people are miserable. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but rather that the small things go a long way. I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food, for example—any old food. An egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has the genuine power to turn my day around. Whatever is put in front of me, foodwise, will usually get a five-star review. […] The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth. And though it’s true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns, we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available, especially here in America. A pineapple popsicle. Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.

Reasonable Person Principle cs.cmu.edu

Everyone expects everyone else to be reasonable

Susan Sontag on the Creative Purpose of Boredom brainpickings.org

We should not expect art to entertain or divert any more. At least, not high art. Boredom is a function of attention. We are learning new modes of attention — say, favoring the ear more than the eye— but so long as we work within the old attention-frame we find X boring … e.g. listening for sense rather than sound (being too message-oriented). Possibly after repetition of the same single phrase or level of language or image for a long while — in a given written text or piece of music or film, if we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention. Or — maybe we are operating in one right frame, where we should be operating in two simultaneously, thus halving the load on each (as sense and sound).

The Power of Pettiness ribbonfarm.com

Here’s a major problem: the better you get at spotting hidden ignorance, the more you see ignorance and bullshit everywhere; you tend to lose the necessary overconfidence, the belief that you can figure things out. Your very tools turn to bullshit in your hands the closer you look at them. As you see more points of view within a scene, your ability to be horrified by wrongness decreases; the well of pettiness dries up. When you see your heroes making mistakes, you mellow out about the errors you’ve probably made. In other words, you grow up. It’s hard to remain curious, because all the processes of curiosity tend to inhibit each other; a precarious balance must be struck. Being curious requires an emotional sacrifice. That is how group values are negotiated socially, and that is what makes curiosity a virtue.

ISO 3103 en.wikipedia.org

ISO 3103 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (commonly referred to as ISO), specifying a standardized method for brewing tea, possibly sampled by the standardized methods described in ISO 1839. It was originally laid down in 1980 as BS 6008:1980 by the British Standards Institution.[1] It was produced by ISO Technical Committee 34 (Food products), Sub-Committee 8 (Tea).

Reality has a surprising amount of detail johnsalvatier.org

Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at? This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.

Barlow's principles of adult behaviour mail-archive.com

Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.

Pizza effect en.wikipedia.org

The pizza effect is a term used especially in religious studies and sociology for the phenomenon of elements of a nation or people’s culture being transformed or at least more fully embraced elsewhere, then re-imported back to their culture of origin, or the way in which a community’s self-understanding is influenced by (or imposed by, or imported from) foreign sources.

Who Did J.K. Rowling Become? thecut.com

Her fantasy was to be left alone in a world where she made the rules.

Tudor Networks tudornetworks.net

The Tudor government maintained a communication network that criss-crossed the globe. This visualisation brings together 123,850 letters connecting 20,424 people from the United Kingdom’s State Papers archive, dating from the accession of Henry VIII to the death of Elizabeth I (1509-1603).

COVID-19 and the Failure of Swedish Exceptionalism thedispatch.com

While there are many reasons, I believe a significant part of the answer lies in Swedish exceptionalism. Whereas American exceptionalism is about America’s unique place in the world, Swedish exceptionalism is about being immune to any disasters that may happen in the rest of the world. 

How Japanese People Stay Fit for Life, Without Ever Visiting a Gym kokumura.medium.com

Instead what this shows is that, like how eating healthfully doesn’t need to be eating only salads, healthful exercise doesn’t need to be only working out — the lifestyle fitness you need may just be in a bit more walking

Ignore all rules en.wikipedia.org

"Ignore all rules" (IAR) is a policy in the English Wikipedia. It reads: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it."

Micromort en.wikipedia.org

A micromort (from micro- and mortality) is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death

Leaf-cutter ants are coated in rocky crystal armor, never before seen in insects nationalgeographic.com

A new study shows that one Central American leaf-cutter ant species has natural armor that covers its exoskeleton. This shield-like coating is made of calcite with high levels of magnesium, a type found only in one other biological structure: sea urchin teeth, which can grind limestone.

The Data of Long-lived Institutions blog.longnow.org

In the West, most of the companies that have survived for a very long time are basically service companies. It’s a lot easier to reinvent yourself as a service-oriented company than it is as a commodity company when that particular commodity goes out of use.

La speranza della marmotta wittgenstein.it

La speranza è l’ultima a morire è una formula che siamo abituati a usare in positivo, una bella immagine promettente: quest’anno invece – dai ritardati lockdown di tutti i paesi del mondo da marzo in poi – sta assumendo il senso di una specie di mostro che non si riesce ad abbattere con la ragione, che non vuol saperne di morire. L’invincibile speranza che magari succederà qualcosa e le cose non andranno così, e non ci sarà bisogno. Che magari invece la sfanghiamo senza decisioni traumatiche immediate: è normale pensarlo, lo abbiamo già fatto otto mesi fa. È la speranza della marmotta.

What A Summer Of COVID-19 Taught Scientists About Indoor vs. Outdoor Transmission fivethirtyeight.com

Because human behavior and air circulation probably matter more than the weather itself, the upcoming holiday season won’t look the same in all parts of the country, Marr said. This isn’t about getting colder, it’s about spending more time inside sealed-up buildings

Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet atlasobscura.com

Citrus is a delightfully chaotic category of fruit. It hybridizes so easily that there are undoubtedly thousands, maybe more, separate varieties of citrus in the wild and in cultivation.

Re-discovering three-cornered notes collation.folger.edu

After seeing so many mentions of three-cornered and cocked-hat notes in quick succession, I now know why so few examples survive in archives: unlike letters, these messages were not meant to be kept. As far as I can tell, they were never sent through the post (if you know of any examples, please comment). They were just hand-delivered notes containing informal invitations, short apologies, brief questions, little flirtations, and so on. In the 20th century, their function was taken over by the phone call, and in the 21st century, by text messaging

Thingifying the world ldmce.wordpress.com

So: thingifying eliminates going-on, and at least moves in the direction of eliminating time. It re-locates what is going on in the world into the interior of things. It converts what is particular and concrete into something (sorry) abstract.

K: The Overlooked Variable That's Driving the Pandemic theatlantic.com

A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.

How to Escape From a Volcano Eruption wired.com

Let's say you were visiting the Roman town of Pompeii on the morning of August 24, 79 AD. And let’s say you arrived sometime between the hours of 9 and 10 am. That should give you enough time to explore the port town and maybe even grab a loaf of bread at the local bakery (see map below for directions). But it would also put you in Pompeii in time to experience a 5.9 magnitude earthquake, the first of many, and watch the black cloud rise from Mount Vesuvius as the mountain began to erupt 1.5 million tons of molten rock per second and release 100,000 times the thermal energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. All while you were standing a mere 6 miles away.

Aerial views of London: then and now theguardian.com

Marking the 15-year anniversary of the New London Architecture galleries, the Changing Face of London revisits its 2005 exhibition to capture the transformation of the city’s famous landmarks.

Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life theguardian.com

Major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. (Relatedly, don’t worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying, because now there’s only one direction to travel – forward into whatever choice you made.)

They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen? propublica.org

We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not. [...] When I reached Malcolm North, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who is based in Mammoth, California, and asked if there was any meaningful scientific dissent to the idea that we need to do more controlled burning, he said, “None that I know of.”

We won’t remember much of what we did in the pandemic timharford.com

The Covid-19 lockdown, after all, was full of new experiences. Some were grim: I lost a friend to the disease; I smashed my face up in an accident; we had to wear masks and avoid physical contact and worry about where the next roll of toilet paper was coming from. Some were more positive: the discovery of new pleasures, the honing of new skills, the overcoming of new challenges. But I doubt I am alone in finding that my memory of the lockdown months is rather thin. No matter how many new people or old friends you talk to on Zoom or Skype, they all start to smear together because the physical context is monotonous: the conversations take place while one sits in the same chair, in the same room, staring at the same computer screen.

The Battle to Invent the Automatic Rice Cooker atlasobscura.com

It would take a Toshiba salesman to make that happen. In the early 1950s, Shogo Yamada traveled Japan promoting Toshiba’s electric washing machine. Along the way, he asked housewives about their most onerous task. Their answer was cooking rice three times a day, which in some parts of the country was still undertaken with a kamado. When a down-on-his luck maker of water heaters, Yoshitada Minami, came to him looking for work, Yamada passed the project on to him. And since cooking rice was women’s work, Minami passed much of the research on to his wife, Fumiko.

What You Can No Longer Say in Hong Kong nytimes.com

They carry blank signs or ones with coded messages. They play protest songs but without lyrics.

It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up gothamist.com

I remember his aide, Sid Shapiro, who I spent a lot of time getting to talk to me, he finally talked to me. And he had this quote that I’ve never forgotten. He said Moses didn’t want poor people, particularly poor people of color, to use Jones Beach, so they had legislation passed forbidding the use of buses on parkways. Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.

The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple bbc.co.uk

By the 1770s, "a pineapple of the finest flavour" became a phrase used for anything that was the best of the best. It's played upon in Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals, when Mrs Malaprop confuses the word with "pinnacle" and exclaims: "He is the very pineapple of politeness!".

Oatly: The New Coke divinations.substack.com

“Plant-based,” “low in saturated fat,” “GMO-free,” these are all true things about Oatly, but they don’t mean it’s not bad for you. “we specifically chose rapeseed/canola oil for our products due to its great nutritional profile (low in saturated fats, rich in unsaturated fats, and higher in omega-3 fatty acids than most other oils).“ Those are all true things about canola oil, but they don’t mean it’s good for you.

Why Britain Failed Its Coronavirus Test theatlantic.com

“People will look back and say, ‘Could we have done it earlier?’ and with the power of retrospectroscope, which is an infinitely powerful instrument, the answer to that is, probably,” Mark Walport, who like Boyd sits on SAGE, told me. But Walport said this was not the fundamental issue of the crisis. “Many of the challenges that we’ve had are not, as it were, about policy advice or the science advice; they are questions about resilience.” […] If Britain is to solve them, it needs to up its game or be left behind; to realize it is no longer “world leading” in as many fields as it thinks, and that its problems run far deeper than whichever crop of politicians is in charge. “The really important question,” Boyd said, “is whether the state, in its current form, is structurally capable of delivering on the big-picture items that are coming, whether pandemics or climate change or anything else.”

The Four Quadrants of Conformism paulgraham.com

The ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest defenders. I'm biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customs we've evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protect the rest of us from them. In particular, the retirement of the concept of heresy and its replacement by the principle of freely debating all sorts of different ideas, even ones that are currently considered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who try them out to see if they work.

Crows are watching your language, literally corvidresearch.blog

As with the carrion crow study, when these crows were presented with playback of a more familiar acoustic style—in this case a Japanese speaker—they didn’t show a strong reaction. Play them what was likely a completely unfamiliar language—Dutch—and the crows were rapt. Or at least they acted more vigilant and positioned themselves closer to the speaker. In other words, large-billed crows were able to discriminate between human languages without any prior training!

How Giant Ships Are Built nytimes.com

As container ships go, the Matsonia is modest in size. But size is relative in shipping. Once it is seaworthy, likely by the end of the year, the Matsonia will stretch the length of more than two football fields and be capable of carrying thousands of 20-foot-long containers and 500 cars and trucks — as much as 57,400 tons of cargo in total.

Amid the George Floyd protests, imagining the nonviolent state vox.com

This is the often neglected heart of nonviolence: It is a strategic confrontation with other human beings. It takes as self-evident that we must continue to live in fellowship with one another. As such, it puts changing each other’s hearts at the center of political action, and then asks what kind of action is likeliest to bring about that transformation. That its answers are radical and demanding does not make them untrue. “King thinks human beings are sacred,” says Brandon Terry, a Harvard sociologist and co-author of a volume on King’s political philosophy. “We need, above all else, to avoid preventing them from changing for the better. That’s what the whole ethos is about: trying to see in other people what we see in ourselves — the capacity for growth, self-correction, and change.”

Functional fixedness en.wikipedia.org

For example, if someone needs a paperweight, but they only have a hammer, they may not see how the hammer can be used as a paperweight. Functional fixedness is this inability to see a hammer's use as anything other than for pounding nails; the person couldn't think to use the hammer in a way other than in its conventional function.

Jon Stewart is back to weigh in nytimes.com

The rally wasn’t about being civil. It was about being precise. The intention was not to suggest that negative things don’t exist or that you shouldn’t fight them, but to be as precise as you can.

A White Woman, Racism and a Poodle franklywrite.com

There were plenty of times black men pulled up next to me when Merlin was in the passenger seat and said, “Hey, a brother dog.” I should have known. John Steinbeck wrote in “Travels with Charley,” Charley was also a Poodle, that he had to be careful driving in the South. He got in trouble a few times because people thought Charlie was a black man. How could I be so stupid! I stood behind my van with Merlin in the passenger seat and could see how he was mistaken for a black man. I wish I had a photograph. This happened to me 5 times in the span of about a year. I cannot imagine having it happen several times a week my entire life. As a white woman, getting stopped by the police is scary; it makes my heart race and my stomach hurt. I’m sure a black person’s fear and rage is a hundred times greater.

The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System newyorker.com

The coming of global information networks deepened Taleb’s concern. [...] As Taleb told me, “The great danger has always been too much connectivity.” Proliferating global networks, both physical and virtual, inevitably incorporate more fat-tail risks into a more interdependent and “fragile” system: not only risks such as pathogens but also computer viruses, or the hacking of information networks, or reckless budgetary management by financial institutions or state governments, or spectacular acts of terror. Any negative event along these lines can create a rolling, widening collapse—a true black swan—in the same way that the failure of a single transformer can collapse an electricity grid.

How Italians Became ‘White’ nytimes.com

The federal holiday honoring the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus — celebrated on Monday — was central to the process through which Italian-Americans were fully ratified as white during the 20th century. The rationale for the holiday was steeped in myth, and allowed Italian-Americans to write a laudatory portrait of themselves into the civic record. Few who march in Columbus Day parades or recount the tale of Columbus’s voyage from Europe to the New World are aware of how the holiday came about or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 — in the wake of a bloody New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. The proclamation was part of a broader attempt to quiet outrage among Italian-Americans, and a diplomatic blowup over the murders that brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war.

Why Are the Police in Charge of Road Safety? marginalrevolution.com

Defunding the police, whatever that means, is a political non-starter. But we can unbundle the police.

How Apples Go Bad newyorker.com

The closer an apple is to rot, the more rot it spreads—one spoiling apple, in a crisper drawer or a fruit bowl, or a storage barrel or a cross-country shipping container, or even still hanging on the bough, speeds the rot of every apple it touches, and even of ones it doesn’t touch.

Are your tinned tomatoes picked by slave labour? theguardian.com

Inside the camp, there are shops selling everything: iPhone chargers, bracelets, sim cards, bread, crisps, hair extensions, bike pumps and shoes. Vendors are roasting pieces of meat coated in a thick marinade and heckling passers-by. There’s a group of men intently watching a game of draughts. Restaurants in shacks advertise their menus: “The best taste of The Gambia”. There’s a club lined with discoloured sofas and afrobeat blaring from the stereo. Another restaurant doubles as a brothel. But there is no running water or formal sanitation facilities anywhere.

Seeing Through Police nplusonemag.com

Perhaps police ought not to exist, thinking theoretically, since their behavior is inadequately supported by the democratic social order’s explicit justifications. Yet they must exist, practically — despite their errors — precisely because they have proved themselves in democracy as both “first responders” and a “last resort,” a mobilization of nondefinition and nonfixity for all sorts of situations. [...] Suppose we say this: Police are negotiators, but without access to contract, law, or eloquence. Their medium is not law. They do not always use memorable or wholly coherent words. Usually they confront situations of conflict they did not cause, but which they are required to enter as third parties. There, they become deliberately distracting, grandstanding observers, turning the attention of other parties away from each other and toward themselves. When you look at them this way, focusing on the middle range between space-holding inaction and violent attack, you can see how negotiating is actually what the police do unendingly, habitually — but unfamiliarly, because in some way they refuse to recognize or care about the original goals of the relevant parties. They bring a separate set of criteria to bear, and not always an appealing one. Is this chargeable? Should this person be removed or transported temporarily? How soon can I leave, and how do I scare these citizens a bit so they won’t come into conflict again and police won’t need to come back?

We often accuse the right of distorting science. But the left changed the coronavirus narrative overnight theguardian.com

Two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street. As a result of lockdowns and quarantines, many millions of people around the world have lost their jobs, depleted their savings, missed funerals of loved ones, postponed cancer screenings and generally put their lives on hold for the indefinite future. They accepted these sacrifices as awful but necessary when confronted by an otherwise unstoppable virus. Was this or wasn’t this all an exercise in futility?

The ‘greatest film-maker who ever lived’ bbc.com

Bergman associates a lack of love with a loss of meaning. When we are loveless, the world appears to us as dull and deformed; when our love is unrequited, it mutates into spite and contempt. For Bergman, love is a form of protective care, a balm that soothes and sustains. Love involves a partial abandonment of the self: the greatest privilege is “to be allowed to live for someone else”, in the words of Tomas’ longsuffering parishioner. [...] Bergman once remarked that death is “a very, very wise arrangement” – it offers a bookend to our lives, which we can infuse with meaning through love. There is suffering in the world, and we must try to comprehend it, even in its senselessness, but above all we must seek to mitigate it with mercy and generosity. Bergman would like us to remember Agnes’s diary entry: “I have received the best gift anyone could have in this life. The gift has many names: affinity, fellowship, human contact, affection. I believe this is what is called grace”.

Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag theparisreview.org

1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings. 2. I understood why people do not live on hope — there isn’t any hope. Nor can they survive by means of free will — what free will is there? They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal. 3. I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

Carcinisation: one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab en.wikipedia.org

Carcinisation (or carcinization) is an example of convergent evolution in which a crustacean evolves into a crab-like form from a non-crab-like form

Horseradish History horseradish.org

During the Renaissance, horseradish consumption spread from Central Europe northward to Scandinavia and westward to England. It wasn’t until 1640, however, that the British ate horseradish — and then it was consumed only by country folk and laborers. By the late 1600s, horseradish was the standard accompaniment for beef and oysters among all Englishmen. The English, in fact, grew the pungent root at inns and coach stations, to make cordials to revive exhausted travelers.

Identities write.as

We're connected to (literally) an entire world of people on the internet, an entirely new — yet not all that different — experience. Instead of having every online service expect us to socialize as our one “true” identity, it should be easy to have a distinct, private identity for each online situation. Your conversations with friends should be private enough that your family or boss doesn't see them. Your published thoughts should only be seen by who you want. You should be able to speak your mind.

The Coronavirus Quieted City Noise. Listen to What’s Left. nytimes.com

Days sound more like nights

Now Is the Time to Cherish the Little Things, by Jeff Bezos newyorker.com

I can’t tell you how good it felt to use my creativity to solve a problem and take up a new hobby. I mixed the dough together and was totally amazed at how the yeast kept expanding it. The longer it sat there, the more it grew, seemingly swallowing everything around it. For a minute, I thought it was getting way too big. LOL. Like that’s a thing. Then I baked it. It wasn’t the most perfect loaf—who among us has ever been in their kitchen?—but, hey, it was good enough. And that’s my message to you.

Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True? nytimes.com

We are living in an era of conspiracies and dangerous untruths — many pushed by President Trump, but others hyped by his enemies — that have lured ordinary Americans into passionately believing wild and unfounded theories and fiercely rejecting evidence to the contrary. The best reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with clarity and humility about what we don’t know. Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his publicity team are not even pretending to know if it’s true.

The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from? grist.org

Pedestrians have taken over city streets, people have almost entirely stopped flying, skies are blue (even in Los Angeles!) for the first time in decades, and global CO2 emissions are on-track to drop by … about 5.5 percent.

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice kk.org

I’m positive that in 100 years much of what I take to be true today will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embarrassingly wrong, and I try really hard to identify what it is that I am wrong about today.

Winston Churchill received a prescription for alcohol to get around American Prohibition twitter.com

The quantity is naturally infinite