“Work, like the water I spend so much of my time in (or wishing I were in), quickly spreads and flows to fill spaces. Without the proper barriers to keep it in its place, water’s special qualities help it to find the path of least resistance, and before you know it, it has traveled into unwanted and unexpected spaces where it can erode and destabilize otherwise sound environments or structures.”
“Today, just 100 families own about 42 million acres across the country, a 65,000-square-mile expanse, according to the Land Report, a magazine that tracks large purchases. Researchers at the magazine have found that the amount of land owned by those 100 families has jumped 50 percent since 2007.”
3. Antitrust Regulators Size Up Tech Giants
“When Americans fear the future, they turn to antitrust action.”
4. Black People’s Land Was Stolen
“The history of black land-taking should be at the center of the reparations debate, not only because the scale of the loss was so great but also because it forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that American prosperity has not bypassed black Americans so much as it has come directly at their expense.”
5. Stonewall and the Myth of Self-Deliverance
“A minority group like the L.G.B.T. population (which by most estimates accounts for a percentage of the population in the low single digits) isn’t a colony that can rise up and overthrow the forces of oppression on its own. It needs the help of other people who recognize the struggle for equality as a moral one, universally binding.”
6. What’s Killing Pacific Whales?
“Events like this are often the first warning sign that something may be seriously amiss below the waves.”
7. The Land Where the Internet Ends
“Activists have already created ‘dark sky reserves’ to protect wilderness from artificial light. In the future, might we also create ‘privacy reserves’ where we can go to escape the ubiquitous internet?”
8. When Pollution Is a Way of Life
“Three chemicals cause a large majority of the elevated cancer risk from air pollution around the country: chloroprene, ethylene oxide and formaldehyde.”
9. How Will the Movies (As We Know Them) Survive the Next 10 Years?
“I was at a bar with a friend who directs big movies, and while we were in line for the bathroom, he was saying that movie theaters were going to go away. He was like, ‘Kids don’t watch movies, they watch YouTube.’ Which I thought was crazy. So he goes, ‘Watch this.’ There was a girl in front of us in line, and he said, ‘Hey, excuse me, what’s your favorite movie?’ And she said, ‘I don’t watch movies.’ Just randomly, he picked someone — and she was like 25, she wasn’t a child or anything. We were like, ‘Well, do any of your friends watch movies?’ And she said, ‘Not really.’”
10. Fifty Years Ago We Landed on the Moon. Why Should We Care Now?
“The lasting legacy of the voyage to the moon lies in the wonder of discovery, the joy of knowledge, not the gee-whizzery of machinery but the wisdom of beauty and the power of humility. A single photograph, the photograph of Earth taken from space by William Anders, on Apollo 8, in 1968, served as an icon for the entire environmental movement. People who’ve seen the Earth from space, not in a photograph but in real life, pretty much all report the same thing.”
11. Judge Judy Is Still Judging You
“Last year, Sheindlin was named the country’s highest-paid television host, making $47 million a year for 52 days of filming, or about two days a week every other week. Every three years, Sheindlin has dinner at the Grill on the Alley, in Beverly Hills, with the president of CBS Television Distribution to discuss her contract. Sheindlin writes down the salary she wants, seals it in an envelope and presents it at the end of the meal. Once, a president presented her with his own envelope, which she refused to open: ‘This isn’t a negotiation,’ she told him.”
Submitted For Your Perusal 