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The latest links
It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.  mcsweeneys.net
Aw, shit. Hilary Mantel has died at the age of 70. The books in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy (Wolf Hall, etc.) were some of my favorite reads over the past 10 years.  nytimes.com
Gobsmacked at the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. #holyforkingshirtballs  nasa.gov
Roger Angell, who has been writing for the New Yorker since 1944, died Friday aged 101. Angell “lived long enough to see Babe Ruth, of the Yankees, at one end of his life and Shohei Ohtani, of the Angels, at the other”.  newyorker.com
Some, uh, "New Yorkers" are dropping the "the" from place names like "the East Village" and "the Lower East Side". Like: "Want to meet for dinner in East Village?" What the hell??  hellgatenyc.com
Fascinating typographic analysis of the PDF of the leaked Supreme Court opinion by designer and lawyer Matthew Butterick. "It seems that the printed PDF was unsta­pled and then rescanned. Why?"  matthewbutterick.com
May 6
Intuit Will Refund $141 Million to Low-Income TurboTax Users. They misled millions of Americans into thinking their tax software was free only to hit them with hidden fees. (Ok, now ban tax season!)  nytimes.com
Why hasn't Congress codified abortion rights? "The increasingly partisan nature of abortion politics represents a case of issue evolution driven by party elites and filtering down to the masses."  19thnews.org
Stop talking about coat hangers and start talking about misoprostol. "[Don't] use the coat hanger as a rallying cry, because that is the symbol of my era, a time when a pregnancy could only be ended with a procedure. The symbol for this era is a pill."  vajenda.substack.com
"The state has BEEN policing pregnancy and motherhood, mostly for Black families, poor families, and other marginalized families." A thread.  twitter.com
A study following 317 trans kids in the US and Canada shows that after 5 years, few of them (2.5%) change their minds and switch back to the gender they were assigned at birth.  nytimes.com
GOP Handmaid's Tale. Short but sobering view into what living in a conservative, theocratic police state might look like.  youtube.com
The "Original Sin" of the Religious Right. "It was school segregation, not abortion, that brought Christians together in prayer and a quest for political power."  slate.com
Of Course the Constitution Has Nothing to Say About Abortion. "Women are indeed missing from the Constitution, as Justice Samuel Alito's leaked draft opinion suggests. That's a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor."  newyorker.com
I'm from Wisconsin (far from it, har har) and I have somehow never heard of this local delicacy called the cannibal sandwich (raw ground beef and raw onions, sandwiched between two pieces of bread).  wpr.org
May 5
Today in weird Kickstarter projects: the Tandem Shower. "Up to now, showering together has always sucked." (Has it???)  kickstarter.com
An epidemiological take on abortion: banning abortions will not stop abortions. "With increased desperateness, the rate of illegal and unsafe abortions will start increasing, or people will be forced to have an unwanted pregnancy."  yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com
The WHO estimates that between 13.3 million and 16.6 million people have died because of the pandemic, in line with other such estimates and far exceeding the official death toll (~5.4 million).  who.int
Rebecca Solnit on how Americans can fight back to protect abortion rights. "They're building a broad constituency of opposition, and it is up to us to make that their fatal mistake."  theguardian.com
This study suggests that unvaccinated people raise the the health and safety risks in vaccinated people "in a manner disproportionate to the fraction of unvaccinated people in the population".  cmaj.ca
The case against the Supreme Court of the United States. "The Court was the midwife of Jim Crow, the right hand of union busters, and the dead hand of the Confederacy, and is now one of the chief architects of America's democratic decline."  vox.com
Good GQ profile of chef & philanthropist José Andrés. "If he could invent anything, what would it be? 'The pot that feeds the world.'"  gq.com
Another fantastic interactive explainer from Bartosz Ciechanowski about how mechanical watches work.  ciechanow.ski
May 4
Abortion is freedom. "There is nothing more holy in the world than choosing if, when, or how you create a family, which is why abortion is one of our most sacred rights."  prismreports.org
"A growing body of research shows that nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people, including improved attention, lower stress, better mood, reduced risk of psychiatric disorders and even upticks in empathy and cooperation."  npr.org
A Fundraising Email from the Galactic Senate Majority Leader. "By now you've heard the news that Senator Palpatine is trying to disband the Senate..."  mcsweeneys.net
"Our governing institutions have been avowedly antidemocratic and [Democrats have had] no plan, except to beg the electorate to give them governing majorities, which they then fail to use to reform the antidemocratic governing institutions."  theap.substack.com
It's Time to Rage. "I do not know where this retraction of civil rights will end, but I do know it will go down as a milestone in a decades-long conservative campaign to force a country of 330 million people to abide by a bigoted set of ideologies."  nytimes.com
Overturning Roe v Wade has been the fundamentalist Christian plan all along. "It's never been a secret. The plan has been shouted at rallies. Held up on signs. It's been plotted and spoken of and written about over and over."  lyz.substack.com
As the US Supreme Court moves to end abortion, is America still a free country? "There is no condition more essential to democratic citizenship than a person's control over her own body. We can't call ourselves a free country without it."  theguardian.com
A 100-year-old Brazilian man has set a world record for working for the longest amount of time for one company: 84 years.  guinnessworldrecords.com
This is fantastic little story about a cache of cassette tapes found in Fire Island. "In tragedy, music provided solace during the AIDS epidemic, and newly discovered cassette tapes captured two decades of parties and pain."  nytimes.com
May 3
Coming soon: a documentary about Gene Wilder.  variety.com
The Real Origins of the Religious Right. "They'll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record's clear: It was segregation."  politico.com
An extensive online up-to-the-minute life log from Felix Krause. Photos, location, diet, inbox status, sleep stats, steps, mood, heart rate, and many more things.  howisfelix.today
If the pretext is "this wasn't mentioned in the Constitution", then same-sex marriage may be next to go.  twitter.com
You Can Now Order Abortion Pills Before You're Pregnant in All 50 States. "Having pills in your medicine cabinet before you need them is one way to combat restrictive laws, though it won't fix the overall problem."  jezebel.com
MIT researchers have developed a portable desalinization device that can be powered by a small solar panel. "It automatically generates drinking water that exceeds World Health Organization quality standards."  news.mit.edu
Reminder: safe and effective medication for having an abortion is available via the mail. "Even in states with the strictest abortion laws, pregnant people have a safe, inexpensive option to terminate their pregnancies."  theatlantic.com
According to an initial draft, the Supreme Court is planning to overturn Roe vs. Wade, which has guaranteed the right to abortion for almost 50 years. America in retrograde – they are coming for everything not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.  politico.com
May 2
Kenji López-Alt answers cooking questions from Twitter on topics like woks, bad burgers, knife sharpening, and making perfect rice.  youtube.com
Richard Feynman on how play can provide the antidote for burnout. "The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."  asc.ohio-state.edu
Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Rams) has announced his next film: a documentary on Brian Eno, drawn from Eno's extensive private archive of materials.  hustwit.com · via @lia
April 29
Kung Fu Hustle 2? Yes!  screenrant.com
The Pudding needs your help to replicate a study about how we perceive randomness. Does a person’s ability to be random peak around 25 years old and decline after 60?  pudding.cool · via @waxy
The deadly accordion wars of Lesotho. "In 2004, after one Famo musician allegedly shot another, a cycle of revenge developed, fuelled by poisonous lyrics in songs."  bbc.com
April 28
Hailey Bieber had a stroke last month; in this video she explains what happened. Know your stroke symptoms, folks: F.A.S.T. (face drooping, arm weakness, speech difficulty, time to call 911).  instagram.com
Interesting thread about content moderation on social networks and why it's not censorship.  twitter.com
April 27
The results of a new study suggest "that virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation". In-person is better for the production of creative ideas.  nature.com
Always worth reading an interview with Werner Herzog. Of a Buster Keaton moment in a film, he says: "I rejoice for having seen that. It's one of the all-time best moments in a movie ever."  newyorker.com
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