I've been doing a poor job lately of providing actual content for the blog, so the least I can do is offer up some suggestions for important, cool and silly things to read elsewhere on the internet. This list was compiled over the past couple of months. Hopefully there's something here for everyone.
And stick with me, please, I promise there will be some new ephemera posts down the road.
Serious stuff
- The Atlantic: "A Brewing Problem" by James Hamblin (The terrifying cautionary tale of John Sylvan and the Keurig K-Cups. Almost 1 in 3 American homes now has a pod-based coffee machine. The cups are STILL not recyclable or biodegradable. Billions of them end up in landfills each year.)
- The Washington Post: "The terrible loneliness of growing up poor in Robert Putnam’s America" by Emily Badger
- Roads & Kingdoms: "To live, the oyster must die" by Oliver Bullough
- The Atlantic: "How Spelling Keeps Kids From Learning" by Luba Vangelova (Mastering English requires abilities that most children don’t develop until they're pre-teens.)
- Slate: "The United States of Megadrought: If you think that California is dry now, wait till the 2050s" by Eric Holthaus
- The Atlantic: "Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket" by Joe Pinsker (Most of Scandinavia determines fines based on income. Could such a system work in the U.S.? This story dovetails in some interesting and important ways with NPR's "Guilty and Charged" series.)
- The New York Times Magazine: "The wreck of the Kulluk" by McKenzie Funk
- The Hill: "'Father of the Internet' mounts defense of hard copies" by Elise Viebeck
- Narratively: "The last eco-warrior" by Aaron Kase
Not-so-serious stuff
- Grantland: "The Grantland Q&A: Errol Morris" by Alex Pappademas
- Huffington Post: "Vincent Van Gogh May Have Hidden 'The Last Supper' Within One Of His Most Famous Paintings" by Todd Van Luling
- The Atlantic: "1985: The Last Great Year in Film for Kids and Young Adults" by Garin Pirnia
- The Millions: "A Thousand Hands Will Grasp You with Warm Desire: On the Persistence of Physical Books" by Alix Christie
- The Spark: "Our Lacks, in the Shape of Fairy Tales" by Joel Hans
- Longreads: "The Holy Junk Heap" by Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole (Some 300,000 Jewish documents were hidden in a closet in Cairo for hundreds of years. They were discovered by the lady adventurer twins Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson and the legendary Rabbinical scholar Solomon Schechter.)
- LA Weekly: "Some Hollywood Extras Suffer, But Others Are Rolling In It" by Hillel Aron
- Tokyo Desu: "8 Hilariously Nonthreatening Monsters from Japanese Folklore"
- Gizmodo: "The Gorgeous Typeface That Drove Men Mad and Sparked a 100-Year Mystery" by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan
- LA Times: "REVIEW: It's game time for the history of Monopoly" by Heller McAlpin (Related post: Board for Parker Brothers' 1936 version of the game Finance)
- The Guardian: "The Great Moon Hoax and the Christian Philosopher" by Rebekah Higgitt
- The New York Times Magazine: "My Dad, the Pornographer" by Chris Offutt (Don't be put off by the subject matter. This is an amazing read.)
- ListVerse: "10 Disturbing Tales From Scandinavian Folklore" by Gregory Myers
- Vermicious: "Forgotten TV: Star Maidens" by John Seven (Excerpt: "The 1975-76 German/English co-production Star Maidens, without any doubt, is the worst science fiction television series ever made, no contest. This is not up for argument. If you think it is, you should step away, because you are wrong.")
- The Quill of Victory: "Marathon-on, Mr. Movie" (memories of Philadelphia late-night radio legend Steve Friedman) by Dan Weckerly