goodLongRead

Also includes links to their 'Best Of' going back to 2015. You can get lost for quite awhile here.

44 & 60

Award-winning director Michael Moore, who was mentioned by accused UnitedHealthcare assassin Luigi Mangione in his alleged manifesto, has vowed to “pour gasoline” on the public anger against insurance companies in the wake of the killing.

How did you go bankrupt?” one of the characters in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises asks another. The answer: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

More than a decade after the advent of the 3D-printed gun as an icon of libertarianism and a gun control nightmare, police say one of those homemade plastic weapons has now been found in the hands of perhaps the world’s most high-profile alleged killer. For the community of DIY gunsmiths who have spent years honing those printable firearms models, in fact, the handgun police claim Luigi Mangione used to fatally shoot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson is as recognizable as the now-famous alleged shooter himself—and shows just how practical and lethal those weapons have become.

Who gets to be a saint is not just about holiness; it is about identity, politics, economics and geography.

Behind the sweet exterior of chocolatiering is a sector facing serious headaches. Cocoa prices reached record highs in the 2023/2024 season, as difficult weather conditions and the rapid spread of black pod disease caused huge yield reductions in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana—the two biggest cocoa-supplying countries. Estimations published by the International Cocoa Organization expect the global sector to see a 14.2 percent reduction in yield this season because of it.

One week after paying $6.2 million for a duct-taped banana, crypto investor Justin Sun ate the pricey snack at a news conference in Hong Kong.

Greetings all —

For a 2,500-year-old religion, Buddhism seems remarkably compatible with our scientifically oriented culture, which may explain its surging popularity here in America. Over the last 15 years, the number of Buddhist centers in the United States has more than doubled, to well over 1,000. As many as 4 million Americans now practice Buddhism, surpassing the total of Episcopalians. Of these Buddhists, half have post-graduate degrees, according to one survey. Recently, convergences between science and Buddhism have been explored in a slew of books—including Zen and the Brain and The Psychology of Awakening—and scholarly meetings. Next fall Harvard will host a colloquium titled “Investigating the Mind,” where leading cognitive scientists will swap theories with the Dalai Lama. Just the other week the New York Times hailed the “rapprochement between modern science and ancient [Buddhist] wisdom.”

David Hill is in his ninth decade. In a touching tribute to his late friend, he challenges some myths about ‘old farts’.

On August 20, 2020, during a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, the Russian opposition leader and anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny thought he was dying––he was disoriented, and felt his body shutting down. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and Navalny was hospitalized. Two days later, thanks to the persistence of his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and international pressure, the Russian authorities allowed a German plane to take him to Berlin for treatment.

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Only one theory can account for all of the available evidence: the obesity epidemic is caused by one or more environmental contaminants, compounds in our water, food, air, at our jobs and in our homes, that change how our bodies regulate weight.

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Once upon a time, in US, there is a diner that only have vending machine (sound like Japanese)