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.”

Apollo 11 a Maiorca mantellini.it

"Purtroppo noi non abbiamo potuto partecipare, non avendo televisione, alla spedizione sulla luna, come avremmo voluto. Pur sempre i giornali che ricevo mi hanno dato un’idea e ti ringrazio per quello che mi hai spedito. Deve senz’altro fare grande effetto, in televisione, mentre invece quando non si può vedere niente, le cose sembrano troppo lontane ed estranee. (…) Certo che quando uno passa il fiore del proprio tempo in un torrido studio a dipingere mettiamo un bottone, come faccio io, allora il dubbio sorge d’essere una mummia, un uomo delle caverne, alienato dal proprio tempo. Ma è solo un dubbio, perché guardandosi in giro le cose ci rassicurano: all’uomo di oggi, all’uomo col quale mi intrattengo con la mia pittura, l’avventura spaziale è ancora profondamente estranea mentre il bottone, eh, il bottone è cucito solidamente al tessuto dell’esperienza d’ognuno."

Journalism In The Age of Populism and Polarisation lse.ac.uk

How should journalists adapt their editorial strategies to overcome extreme polarisation and the tactics of populist politicians? Over the past year LSE Arena worked on a unique project with the Italian Newspaper Corriere della Sera and the University of Venice. We analysed different approaches to writing about migration in Italy, a highly controversial topic in the country. How can one cover such issues in a way that promotes civil engagement, enhances trust and a fact-based discourse? In order to find an answer, Arena and our partners established a unique set of 'public service spirited' metrics and analysed thousands of online comments. The study was presented at a workshop in London with senior editors and journalists from the BBC, Observer, Financial Times and others.

Una risposta ai tweet di Salvini ilpost.it

Diversi nel comunicare. Perché dire le cose in quell’altro modo, tra caps lock e urla, è facile. Perché il linguaggio è il pensiero, e se noi iniziamo a dire meglio quello che pensiamo, a scriverlo meglio, stiamo pensando meglio. Il che evidentemente funziona, perché toglie le armi al tuo avversario, che toglie i tweet. Invece di demonizzarlo (vent’anni di Berlusconi hanno mostrato chiaramente che è inutile) o di usare le sue armi, usiamo le nostre. Anzi: ho sbagliato anche a usare la parola “armi”. Sono strumenti. Utensili. Attrezzi di comunicazione. Se dici “attrezzi”, stai pensando di costruire o riparare qualcosa: se usi “armi”, hai tutt’altro in mente. E con quegli attrezzi puoi fare. Fare qualcosa di diverso, di utile. Altri continueranno a urlare, ma tu starai lavorando: il rumore dei tuoi attrezzi renderà più lontano l’urlo, e tu sarai già occupato a costruire qualcosa. Non è il momento dell’invettiva: ce ne sono state fin troppe e non mi sembra abbiano portato a grandi trionfi. Sicuramente a me non servono. Portiamo la comunicazione da un’altra parte. Così, forse, si inizierà davvero a parlare d’altro: di cose da aggiustare e problemi da risolvere. Se butti via un po’ di retorica, di urlo, di incazzatura, di rancore, restano sul campo un sacco di cose da aggiustare. È “buonismo”, altra parola abusata, svuotata e resa inutile? No: è un’ammissione pragmatica. Il nostro discorso pubblico mi sembra un enorme magazzino pieno di macchinari inceppati: ferraglia che fa un gran rumore, un frastuono continuo che impedisce di capire cosa c’è sotto: e cioè un bel po’ di cose da mettere a posto. Proviamo a togliere la ferraglia linguistica e comunicativa che ci assorda: scriviamo, twittiamo, postiamo, ma iniziamo a farlo in modo diverso.

@mgurri twitter.com

Simply put, before national, real-time media like the telegraph or TV, it was impossible to maintain a polity the size of ours, with the present level of unity. The world was far more regional, for lack of viable alternatives.

Notes from a nameless conference thefifthwave.wordpress.com

We are living through the early stages of a colossal transformation:  from the industrial age to something that doesn’t yet have a name.  Many periods of history have been constrained by structural necessity.  This isn’t one of them.  Rather than a forking path, we face possibilities that radiate in every direction, like spokes from a hub.  Even the immediate future seems up for grabs.  We could see the formation of a hyper-connected liberal democracy, or plunge into nihilism and chaos – or we could contemplate arrangements and relations that are, at present, unimaginable.

How to Draw a Horse newyorker.com

There is a word I know. But I can't say it.

Let’s talk about The North Face defacing Wikipedia wikimediafoundation.org

When The North Face exploits the trust you have in Wikipedia to sell you more clothes, you should be angry. Adding content that is solely for commercial promotion goes directly against the policies, purpose and mission of Wikipedia to provide neutral, fact-based knowledge to the world.

**UPDATE** FOUND CAT - NEED OWNERS ASAP!! richmond.craigslist.org

Thank you to everyone who told me this is actually a WILD BOBCAT!!!🤯

Se tutti quelli che si dicono nemici del fascismo avessero votato lo stesso partito, il fascismo sarebbe stato sconfitto facebook.com

Se tutti quelli che si dicono nemici del fascismo avessero votato lo stesso partito, il fascismo sarebbe stato sconfitto. E il loro argomento è che sono d’accordo, certamente, ma che il partito da votare fosse dunque il loro, più giusto, più pulito, più originale, più. Che può essere. Ma la cosa invece più verosimile, e incidentalmente fattibile, è che una minoranza irrilevante, che ha gettato al macero ogni singolo voto che ha intercettato, si associasse ad una maggioranza relativa per portarla (apporto fondamentale) alla massa critica e vincere. Con minore sforzo di chiunque e massimizzando il potenziale di tutti, raggiungendo un obiettivo comune, singolarmente irraggiungibile.

Librerie mantellini.it

Osservare i particolari. Notare le piccole cose. Non so bene se considerarlo un tratto senile o una forma di inestricabile ossessività. Camminare per strada e notare l’enorme numero di piccole sciagure estetiche che si sarebbero potute evitare. Le macchie oleose sul marciapiede, le cartacce nelle aiuole, il palo della luce che l’amministrazione ha appena provveduto a sostituire semplicemente brutto a vedersi. Gli alberi abbandonati e le erbacce. Comunque, sia che si tratti di una corrosione interna legata agli anni, sia che tratteggi aspetti psicopatologici finalmente rivelati, la contabilità delle piccole imperfezioni del mondo è un modo come un altro per immaginare una geografia delle persone che lo abitano. La cartografia di mille piccoli segni di crisi e abbandono.

Libraries remain the only place where you can spend hours in a publicly-accessible building without being expected to spend money twitter.com

Libraries remain the only place where you can spend hours in a publicly-accessible building without being expected to spend money. Parents come to entertain their children for free on wet days. People in poverty come for a warm place to sit. Libraries are a haven.

Un'altra comicità è possibile? ilpost.it

Il nuovo cabaret che andò definendosi negli anni Ottanta – e soprattutto quello che poi fu portato in tv da Zelig negli anni Novanta e Duemila – consisteva in una serie di comici che “facevano dei personaggi”. Sul palco, cioè, indossavano delle maschere, talvolta letteralmente, e fondavano il proprio umorismo sulla finzione, sull’esagerazione e sulla ripetizione di ossessiva delle stesse battute, i cosiddetti “tormentoni”, una cosa che nella stand up comedy non accade praticamente mai.

Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons cambridge.org

The main hypothesis is that the growth and consolidation of the Sicilian mafia is strongly associated with an exogenous shock in the demand for lemons after 1800.

The lifespans of ancient civilisations bbc.com

In the graphic below, the University of Cambridge’s Luke Kemp compiled a list of civilisations to compare how long they lasted.

Chiedo spiegazioni mantellini.it

Di una cosa sarei invece abbastanza certo. Che i tempi siano cambiati. Che l’aria che si respira in questo Paese non sia la stessa di qualche anno fa. E che tutto questo ci dovrebbe suggerire maggior cautela e maggiore attivismo. Conterà la memoria (qui l’ultimi thread di Johannes Buckler sui partigiani uccisi a Forlì e appesi di fronte al balcone di Salvini), conterà la capacità di non lasciare nulla di intentato. Di chiedere spiegazioni. Di domandare chiarimenti.

Behind the Headlines (NHS) nhs.uk

Your guide to the science that makes the news