#FridayReads on current events, economy & the arts

On this soggy and strangely warm February Friday, here's my latest compilation of interesting links for you to tuck away for those moments, whatever they are, when you have an appetite to feed your mind.

Also, here's the latest rundown on books I'm currently reading and have finished recently:

• Cosmic Engineers, by Clifford D. Simak
• Little, Big, by John Crowley [currently stalled]
• Encyclopedia of Superstitions, by Edwin Radford, Mona A. Radford [my browsing book]
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson
• Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory [finished]
• Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution by David L. Craddock [finished]
• Saga, Volume 3, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples [finished]
• Plutona, by Jeff Lemire [finished, would not recommend]

News

• Vox: "What no politician wants to admit about gun control" by Dylan Matthews (Except: "Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners. Other countries have done exactly that.")
• The California Sunday Magazine: "A Kingdom from Dust" (about farmers, water and the transformation of landscape) by Mark Arax, Trent Davis Bailey and Denise Nestor
• NPR Parallels: "This Man Has Freed Hundreds Of Yazidis Captured By ISIS. Thousands Remain Missing" by Jane Arraf
• NPR Parallels: "How I Moved My Cat From Israel To Pakistan" by Diaa Hadid
• Nola.com: "The search for Jackie Wallace" by Ted Jackson
• The Atlantic: "How the Olympics Got Disneyfied" by Michael Weinreb [Michael and I attended Penn State together, and he's written some terrific books.]
• The Guardian: "'All of a sudden my world would flip': the woman who is permanently lost" by Helen Thomson
• The Guardian: "'London Bridge is down': the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death" by Sam Knight

Economy

• The Walrus: "What Being a Bike Courier Taught Me About Our Broken Economy" by Sam Riches
• Longreads: "The Human Cost of the Ghost Economy" by Melissa Chadburn
• The Atlantic: "What Amazon Does to Poor Cities" by Alana Semuels
• CityLab: "The Case for Putting Amazon's HQ2 in the Suburbs" by Amanda Kolson Hurley

History & technology

• Columbia Journalism Review: "How Tom Tryniski digitized nearly 50 million pages of newspapers in his living room" by Alexandria Neason
• Wired: "How Snapchat is sending #METOO down the memory hole" (Subtitle: "Disappearing-messaging apps may keep snoopers away — but they can also prevent us from preserving the past and finding justice in the future") by Felix Salmon

Arts

• Time: "The Revolutionary Power Of Black Panther" by Jamil Smith
• The Washington Post: "These kids started a book club for minority boys. It’s the most popular club in school." by Perry Stein
• FolkloreThursday: "Living at the Edge of the World: Austronesian, German and East Asian Roots of Taiwanese Folklore" by Jim YC Lin
• Playing at the World: "A Forgotten Variant: Sir Pellinore's Game" by Jon Peterson
• Earther: "These National Parks Could Be in Middle Earth" by Yessenia Funes
• The New York Times Magazine: "Joel Meyerowitz’s Career Is a Minihistory of Photography" by Teju Cole
• Smithsonian.com: "Who Really Composed NBC’s Olympic Theme? Not Who You Think" by Natasha Geiling

A rabbit hole I went down

• Motherboard: "Radio Ghosts Have Haunted the Airwaves for Nearly a Century" by Daniel Oberhaus
• Mysterious Universe: "We Now Interrupt This Broadcast: Mysterious Television Transmissions" by Brent Swancer

Hidden Story, 2014
You Jin#painting pic.twitter.com/C8NzLpfuOm

— Brindille (@Brindille_) February 7, 2018