Houston, Wrestling, Infinities, Unbderwear, Myanmar
If It Keeps On Raining
Micah Fields | Oxford American | 18th September 2017
A journey to Houston in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. “Water lapped at the floorboards. The Jeep could clear two feet easy, but on a few occasions, we looked in the mirror to watch the boat lift off its trailer and shimmy behind us, then ease back onto its carpeted runners. We entered neighborhoods of homes where floods had already come and gone, where people had started the process of mucking the unsalvageable remnants of their dwellings” (3,500 words)
RIP Bobby “The Brain” Heenan
David Shoemaker | Ringer | 18th September 2017
“If obituaries are prone to otherworldly praise, especially in the superhuman realm of pro wrestling, allow me to be plain: Nobody — nobody — played that role better than Bobby Heenan, and nobody ever will again. For the average viewer, Heenan was the Rosetta Stone that allowed us to really understanding wrestling. By denying the truth of what we were all seeing in the ring, he gave voice to the farce, and in doing so he gave it a subversive sort of legitimacy” (1,600 words)
Infinities Are Equal
Kevin Hartnett | Quanta | 12th September 2017
Cantor updated. Defying “decades of conventional wisdom”, mathematicians show that “two different variants of infinity are actually the same size”. The advance “touches on one of the most famous and intractable problems in mathematics: whether there exist infinities between the infinite size of the natural numbers and the larger infinite size of the real numbers”. But the new finding does not resolve the underlying problem. There may well be other infinities of different sizes (2,100 words)
When Every Bra Size Is Wrong
Mallory Ortberg | Shondaland | 18th September 2017
Underwear review: The GC2B black half-binder. “I cannot promise this will happen for you, but here is what happened for me: I put on a shirt over the binder and I saw a look on my own face I had never seen before. There was joy in it, and amazement, and utter delight. There were other things, too, that I do not yet have words for. I felt, at thirty years of age, a wholly new feeling about my own appearance” (1,600 words)
The Violence In Myanmar
Samira Shackle | New Humanist | 17th September 2017
Interview with journalist Francis Wade about the persecution of Rohingya in Myanmar, contradicting the Western stereotype of Buddhism as a peaceful religion. “You’d be hard pressed to find any justification for violence in the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism, which is what the majority in Myanmar practice. Those Buddhists who have perpetrated violence acted with the conviction that if Buddhism ceased to exist in Myanmar, the country would descend into anarchy” (2,440 words)
Video of the day: Björk: The Gate
What to expect:
Art by Andrew Thomas Huang, clothes by Alessandro Michele, music by Björk (6’47”)
Thought for the day
Keep the company of those who seek the truth; run from those who have found it
Václav Havel