Ground Control To Mr. Meline

James Ross Gardner | Seattle Met | 17th September 2013

Rob Meline was an elementary schoolteacher and a student favourite who made science fun for eleven-year-olds. When he was murdered by his troubled son, his students plunged into shock and grief. Scott Birdseye, his substitute, rallied the class to plan the perfect send-off. In 2013, the USS Meline, a shoebox-sized Styrofoam vessel attached to a weather balloon, was launched into space (6,800 words)

Sports Betting And Sports Media

Tommy Craggs | Bloomberg Business Week | 16th August 2024

The $10 billion sports betting industry has not just infiltrated sports media, it is the sports media. ESPN has a betting platform in its name; Deadspin is now a gambling referral site. Fans are treated first as bettors or potential bettors. The results are “oily and unlovely”: any oddity in a game — the fun stuff — is viewed with suspicion about a possible fix. Audiences watch sports like investors watch portfolios (2,800 words)

Podcast: I Loathe That For You | Myths And Legends. The Northumbrian legend of the laidly worm, or how to avoid being eaten by dragons (34m 6s)

Video: DONKS | YouTube | Felix Colgrave | 6m 37s

Ocean plastics and bottom feeders dance around, creating playful and psychedelic scenes, culminating in a submarine being stripped down to the bones. The work of an utterly unrestrained imagination.

Intellectual Menopause

Venkatesh Rao | Ribbonfarm | 15th August 2024 | U

“An individual disease that men of particular temperaments and age range (40-50) are vulnerable to. I see intellectual menopause everywhere I look, draining vitality in discourses, leading to predictably stale and lazy patterns of argumentation. I see a sheer lack of fun — and its substitution by a resentful and dolorous glee. You might even call what’s going on an early-onset intellectual pandemic” (6,400 words)

Lessons From Singapore

Eric Feigenbaum | 3 Quarks Daily | 16th August 2024 | U

In 1965, Singapore had a 27% homeownership rate. Founding father Lee Kuan Yew wanted to create a “home-owning society” where every citizen would have “a stake in the country and its future”. He adopted a three-pronged approach: create affordable housing; make financing available for all classes; help people gather down-payments. In three decades, 90% of all Singaporeans became homeowners (2,600 words)

Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?

Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 13th August 2024

Ozempic seems effective against an astonishing array of ailments — stroke, heart disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, drug addiction, and even behavioural addictions like shopping. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic tackle obesity by reducing people’s craving for food reward, an effect that could also treat addiction. Additionally, they seem to have anti-inflammatory properties that can arrest dementia (3,600 words)

McMillions

James Lee Hernandez & Brian Lazarte | CrimeReads | 12th August 2024

Book excerpt about the fraud behind McDonald’s promotional Monopoly games. Contestants could win up to a million dollars. Every time McDonald’s ran the game, they had a 40% jump in sales, unheard of in retail promotions. The FBI got suspicious when three winners seemed related to each other. The odds of three people from the same family or friend group winning the big prizes were 1 in 120 trillion (4,700 words)

The Faustian Bargain

Ed Simon | Next Big Idea | 8th August 2024

...And why it is compelling. The tale is an autobiography of every human. Mythical and transcendent it might be, but Faust’s story is also about paperwork — with a contract at its centre. Fascism is a Faustian bargain: the national soul exchanged for fantasies of making the nation great again. Faust holds up a mirror to modern society, with “the desire for power disguised as a thirst for knowledge” (2,000 words)

Creativity Is Not A Scarce Commodity

Howard S. Becker | 9th October 2017

On the contrary, it occurs everywhere, all the time. What’s scarce is the labelling of something as creative — “only the right kind of person, defined by the environing organisation as the kind of person who can be creative, can find creative solutions”. The informal codes around creativity demonstrate a parallel to sumptuary laws, which regulated what kinds of clothing different classes of people could wear (4,900 words)

The New Scramble For Africa

Adam Hanieh | Climate And Capitalism | 11th August 2024

Carbon offsetting commonly involves protecting land from deforestation, equating to a certain quantity of carbon “credits”. This is greenwashing. Buyers who purchase credits gain the right to pollute now; it takes hundreds of years for emissions to be reabsorbed. With a debt crisis, African countries are under pressure from international development organisations to commodify their land through offsets (2,900 words)

The Many Lives Of Null Island

Alan McConchie | Stamen | 23rd July 2024

Imaginary island at a real place: the coordinates of zero degree latitude and zero degree longitude, in the Atlantic Ocean off the African coast. It is a nuisance for cartographic work: anything from errors to missing data can send the coordinates to Null Island. A long-running inside joke among cartographers, it has inspired many whimsical histories — “the island that doesn’t exist but lives on maps” (5,500 words)

The Strange Saga Of Kowloon Walled City

James Crawford | Atlas Obscura | 6th January 2020

Excerpt from Fallen Glory. “The city’s many tall, narrow tower blocks were packed tight against each other — so tight as to make the whole place seem like one massive structure: part architecture, part organism. Entering the city meant leaving daylight behind. Hundreds of factories produced everything from fish balls to golf balls. There was no law to speak of. This was an anarchist society” (4,100 words)

Angels And Demons

Mark Baker | Inside Story | 8th August 2024

The RAF’s Bomber Command had the highest attrition rates in WWII: 44% of the aircrew were killed, and another 28% were injured or became prisoners of war. There were other sorts of casualties: each year saw 3000 cases of nervous breakdown. Leadership stigmatised those who refused operations with the designation — “Lack of Moral Fibre”, stamping their records with a large red “W” for “Waverer” (2,300 words)

The Colony Makes The World

Claire Evans | Wild Information | 4th August 2024

“Ants are 140 million years old, older than dinosaurs. Some farm fungus; some enslave other ants; some build leaf castles mortared with aphid spit; some build bridges from their own bodies; some work security for trees in exchange for nectar. Everything ants do, they do without central control — even though individual ants are dumb, mostly blind, and can’t remember anything for more than ten seconds” (1,800 words)

The Left Abandoned Venezuela

Myrna-Paula Corvalan | Caracas Chronicles | 3rd August 2024

Scathing indictment of the Left’s failure to hold authoritarian regimes in Venezuela accountable. They are trapped in “US-centred tunnel vision”, believing that the White House alone is responsible for the Venezuelan situation — a notion both Chavez and Maduro have exploited in their rhetoric. “How can the international Left claim to be behind a regime that embraced military rule as default?” (1,500 words)