1. How the Weather Gets Weaponized in Climate Change Messaging
“As battle lines harden between supporters and opponents of climate action, both are increasingly using bouts of extreme weather as a weapon to try to win people to their side. Weather, after all, is one of the easiest things for people to bond over or gripe about, a staple of small talk and shared experience that can make it a simple but powerful opportunity to discuss global warming.”
“Street trees planted decades — and in some cases, a century — ago were not ideal species for a paved environment and are now large, mature and in need of maintenance. With little soil available beneath the sidewalk, roots interfere with drainage systems, and buckle concrete. Utility companies aggressively prune tree limbs away from power lines, leaving awkward, and potentially unstable, V-shaped trees.”
“A good diet, it turns out, has to be individualized.”
4. The New ‘Dream Home’ Should Be a Condo
“What if there was a new American dream, not of auto-dependent suburbia, but walkable urbanism?”
5. The Life of a Comment Moderator for a Right-Wing Website
“I started my day at 8 a.m., and by then it was already bedlam. My first task was to go over the flagged comments, and ones from problem users, that had been held throughout the night. I have only anecdotal evidence to base this on, but anti-Semites and spambots, speaking generally, tend to be night owls.”
“What we need is not to disagree less, but to disagree better. And that starts when you turn away the rhetorical dope peddlers — the powerful people on your own side who are profiting from the culture of contempt. As satisfying as it can feel to hear that your foes are irredeemable, stupid and deviant, remember: When you find yourself hating something, someone is making money or winning elections or getting more famous and powerful. Unless a leader is actually teaching you something you didn’t know or expanding your worldview and moral outlook, you are being used.”
7. Michael Jackson Cast a Spell. ‘Leaving Neverland’ Breaks It.
“The mothers both mention an early limit they set. For Stephanie, it was refusing to let James sleep in Jackson’s room on that trip to Hawaii. And Joy recalls vehemently nixing Jackson’s request to abscond with Wade for a year. But Jackson ultimately wins, anyway. He gets his way, in part, because he could be as manipulative as he could be affectionate, but also because each woman feels, in her way, maternal toward him. He was, both women more or less say, a member of their families.”
8. 21 Savage’s Still-Bumpy Path to Freedom
“This American music, like so many American musics before it, wouldn’t sound the same without immigrants. A quick reminder: Almost all of hip-hop’s founder generation — Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Doug E. Fresh — was born in the Caribbean. The island influence continues through today: Last year, Nicki Minaj wrote on Instagram about coming to the United States as an undocumented immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago when she was 5.”
“A lot of 30-somethings are still getting financial help from their parents, if they are lucky enough to take advantage of it.”
10. Animal Care
“Instead of worrying about anthropomorphizing animals, we should fear making a far worse mistake, what de Waal calls ‘anthropodenial.’ When we deny the facts of evolution, when we pretend that only humans think, feel and know, ‘it stands in the way of a frank assessment of who we are as a species,’ he writes. An understanding of evolution demands that we recognize continuity across life-forms. And even more important, achieving realistic and compassionate relationships with the rest of the animate world requires that we honor these connections, which extend far and deep.”
11. Toni Morrison: First Lady of Letters
“The Source of Self-Regard is a book of essays, lectures and meditations, a reminder that the old music is still the best, that in this time of tumult and sadness and continuous war, where tawdry words are blasted about like junk food, and the nation staggers from one crisis to the next, led by a president with all the grace of a Cyclops and a brain the size of a full-grown pea, the mightiness, the stillness, the pure power and beauty of words delivered in thought, reason and discourse, still carry the unstoppable force of a thousand hammer blows, spreading the salve of righteousness that can heal our nation and restore the future our children deserve.”
12. Is the West Really the Best?
“In Sharman’s account, the dominance of the West (note Europe’s easy baton-pass to the United States), roughly from the Enlightenment to World War II, represents a historical blip in the last millennium. And, perhaps more important, today we seem to be on the cusp of a return to a more regular state of affairs, where the large states of Asia will again be the globe’s hegemons.”
13. Recoil Offgrid
“Among the contradictions, there is a more abstract form of comfort — a tacit acknowledgment that, though we may struggle mightily to influence fate, we can never entirely predict or control it.”
“Get close before you strike. Decide which shoulder you intend to hit the person with, and then keep the foot on that side planted on the ground — if you’re slamming with your left shoulder, for example, put your weight into the ball of your left foot as you make contact.”
15. Inside the Secret Sting Operations to Expose Celebrity Psychics
“There are nearly 95,000 psychic ‘businesses’ in America, generating some $2 billion in revenue in 2018. Lately, technology has changed the business of talking to the dead and created new kinds of openings for psychics to lure customers but also new ways for skeptics to flip that technology right back at them.”
16. The Man Who Designed Dean & Deluca, and the Look of Modern Kitchens
“In an era defined by shag carpeting, wicker baskets and macramé tapestries — the prevailing palette was, as Ceglic recalls, harvest gold and avocado green — he decided the corner storefront should instead be completely free of color or texture: a monochrome box that would contrast against, say, the crimson of sun-dried tomatoes. In keeping with the minimalist floor-through apartment that he and Dean resided in nearby (the current owner has kept it, museumlike, as one of the last examples of the period’s early ’80s loft style, all white columns and exposed piping), Ceglic built out Dean & DeLuca with bright white plaster walls, floors of matching white ceramic tile, butcher-block countertops in bleached maple and glass-and-stainless-steel cases to display the prepared foods and salads, a novel concept at the time.”
17. Jasper Johns, American Legend
“If Abstract Expressionism was a melodramatically psychological exercise, with each splash of paint communicating some anguished search for American identity in the midst of the Cold War’s atomic glow, here was something cool and detached, familiar and yet forever unknowable. It was as if Marlon Brando had driven his motorcycle onto the set of a Clark Gable movie.”
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