April 25, 2017
You can’t sell a box that stops people from trusting their daughters
Sarah Jeong in GQ: "We all know what it’s like to receive mass-mailed spam. But most people aren’t going to attract enough attention to merit being spearphished. What’s that like, anyway? And how is it different from regular phishing? To search for those answers, I went out and found someone to spearphish me. "
New Guinea Singing Dogs Are Not Extinct in the Wild
He Was Searching For Intersexual Pigs And Ended Up Finding The World’s Rarest Dog.
New Guinea singing dogs have been described as the world’s “most primitive” domesticated dog. Their forebears are thought to be closely related to the dingo, a wild canine in Australia, and may have been brought to New Guinea by humans about 6,000 years ago. ... The wild dog is believed to have been the only canine living in the New Guinea highlands, which meant the animal did not interbreed with other species. They’ve been called “living fossils” as a result — possibly a key evolutionary link between modern domesticated dogs and their wild canine ancestors.[more inside]
Trial by Pencil
Rosalie Ritz was a courtroom reporter and artist based out of San Francisco from the 1960s to 1980s. Almost two thousand of her trial sketches are online, including: Angela Davis; Patty Hearst and the Harris Trials (Symbionese Liberation Army); Huey Newton; Daniel Ellsberg; Sara Jane Moore (attempted assasin of Gerald Ford); Sirhan Sirhan; the San Quentin Six; and Dan White. [more inside]
Boldly going?
I am a great believer in half measures / Or no measures at all.
The Inertia Variations by John Tottenham: a series of poems about not getting shit done. Caution: may be depressing.
The Struggles of Writing About Chinese Food as a Chinese Person
Our food is still largely looked on upon from the sidelines as a mysterious cuisine of antiquity. Only certain dishes like noodles, dumplings, kebabs, and rice bowls have been normalized. The majority is still largely stigmatized because, bluntly put, white people have not decided they like it yet. Clarissa Wei writes 2500 words for Vice.com's Munchies section.
🌌🌅
Every day, our planet rotates 360°, right? Only if you mean a Sidereal Day. Solar days are 4 minutes longer on average. [more inside]
DepARTment of Corrections
I wish I was a spaceman, the fastest guy alive
Barry Gray composed all the music for Gerry Anderson productions up through the second season of Space: 1999. Nothing he wrote has resonated through the ages like a simple little tune based on 'ice cream changes': the closing theme for Anderson's second SF-based supermarionation television series -- Fireball Xl-5. [more inside]
Fixed stars, rotating Earth
Just a short video with the stars fixed while the Earth rotates (SLYT).
I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him and draw on him
It's probably not a good idea to leave your pet with kids. Or with your friends, apparently. (A bit of overlap, but not much.)
The longer the race, the stronger we become.
The longer the race, the stronger we become. From the article: "A growing pattern of race results suggests that the longer and more arduous the event, the better the chances women have of beating men."
Dion! You’re banned from the skating party until you start acting right.
Dion Waiters: The NBA Is Lucky I’m Home Doing Damn Articles: Y'all seen Casino, right?
You know, the one with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci in Vegas? Anyway — that one.
If you want to know what it’s like to meet Pat Riley, you need to watch that movie. [slPlayersTribune]
Think Globally; Pod Locally
Learn the Secret History of Your State With These Addictive Podcasts curated by Smithsonian.com: Talk of Alaska; Changing Denver; Idaho History; Past and Present (Kansas); Amplified Oklahoma; The Island Wave (Pacific Islanders in Utah); Memphis Type History; Wise about Texas; Brave Little State (Vermont) and more!
We came from somewhere out there.
Our grandparents and their grandparents were born in Kentucky, and my brother and I grew up in Louisville. Like many black people from the south, my family has been unable to trace our lineage beyond slavery, so we don't know where in Africa our ancestors from. Just that we came from somewhere out there. All we had to go on was an oral family history that maintained that we were, in the words of my grandmother, Tootsie, "black, white, and (American) Indian." This is the case for a lot of black families; the idea that we have "Indian in our family" is a bit of a cultural meme in black America at this point, and I've always wanted to examine how true that actually is.
The Philosemitic / Antisemitic Tchotchke Market
Prior to WWII, there were over 3 million Jews in Poland. Today, estimates of the number of Jews living there range from 7,000 to 200,000. Many Poles have never met a Jewish person. But "lucky Jew" (Żyd na szczęście) figurines and oil paintings depicting stereotypical Jews (often wearing black hats, holding money and sporting long noses and sideburns) are becoming popular. [more inside]
White Collar Crime Risk Zones
Modern life is fraught with perils, but thanks to The New Inquiry's new tool, you can know what your risk of being the victim of a financial crime is at any moment, anywhere in the US. Using state-of-the-art machine learning technology and predictive policing methods, combined with geospatial feature predictors and risk terrain modeling, you can see the risk to your livelihood presented block-by-block across the whole US. Using a database of people at a high risk to commit such crimes, the app even presents a generalized image of the potential perpetrator to allow you to be on the watch for anyone suspicious who may present a threat. [more inside]
Shooting people is stupid. Guns are stupid. THAT SAID...
Shea Serrano brings us an explanation of why movie shootouts are so awesome, a list of the best multi-person shootouts in movie history (if said history begins in 1980 and doesn't include war movies), and a quiz to determine whether you would survive such a gunfight. (Hint: Don't be a hero.) ((And watch out for those scuba tanks.))
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