Excellent Reads

The article has some interesting information about European passports, too.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/zm5LU

An exploration of the causes of the Irish Potato Famine, and how the British blindspots in the attitudes of their aristocracy failed to recognize, then failed to solve, a deadly famine and depopulation in their own geographical yard.

Reading Time: 12 - 15 minutes.

Wired is soft paywall, clear cookies, use reader mode, or something like bypasspaywallsclean

Reading Time: 20 - 25 minutes.

About intuition and practicing medicine and dddrugs. One of a most difficult proffesions- to make people sleep

Reading Time: 8 - 10 minutes.

Quite a long read about Rationalists and Zizians

"How noise complaints in a Manhattan co-op led to a $750,000 legal settlement and shattered a friendship.", but that doesn't quite sell the sheer craziness.

https://archive.ph/23ivb

Just thought of her today. Been a long time since she went quiet, was hoping her situation would have gotten better by now, but no such luck.

Around the world, progressive parties have come to see tight immigration restrictions as unnecessary, even cruel. What if they’re actually the only way for progressivism to flourish?

They’re in our blood, our livers, and our brains. What are they doing to our bodies?

Factory farming has made us think of chickens as mindless automata. But our downy friends know much more than we give them credit for.

While incarcerated, Alexei Navalny wrote extensively to journalists, politicians, scientists, activists, and people from all walks of life across the globe.

An investigation by CBC’s The Fifth Estate uncovered a key internal document that provides a minute-by-minute account of how authorities believe the 2023 gold heist at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport was planned and executed, alleging a highly organized group of individuals relied heavily on a well-placed insider.

Economists predict that, ultimately, consumers will bear the burden of the burgeoning trade dispute between the U.S., Canada, China, and Mexico. Here are a few ways consumers can prepare for the rising prices that could follow suit.

Cross-posted from "‘Our meth was so realistic it got stolen’: Breaking Bad, Industry and Euphoria’s makers on how TV does drugs" by @BrikoX@lemmy.zip in !showsandmovies@lemm.ee

The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.

From claims that Jews kill children to make matzo, to accusations that immigrants in Ohio are devouring neighbors’ pets, the myth of the blood libel is a nightmare that never ends. —Ákos Szegőfi

Many museums are reckoning with the colonial legacies of the human remains and cultural objects in their collections. Now anthropologists are advocating to pay similar respects to primates.

(...) My plea to policymakers is simple: employ the same evidence-based science you use for health issues towards drugs and problem drug use.

Researchers have been looking at what happened when rivers were granted status as legal persons. In New Zealand, they are seeing particularly promising developments in indigenous peoples’ rights and conditions.

Sumud is the Arabic word for resilience and steadfastness. It’s also the collective Palestinian cultural value that fuels the fight to end the Israeli occupation.

::: spoiler Abstract

Paying extra for service has inspired rebellions, swivelling iPads, and irritation from Trotsky and Larry David. Post-pandemic, the practice has entered a new stage.

Antikythera: For a new speculative philosophy of computation (which is to say of life, intelligence, automation, and the compositional evolution of planets)

The road switches back and forth again and again as it climbs into Montchavin, perched in the French Alps at 4,100 feet above sea level. The once-sleepy mountainside village, developed into a ski resort in the 1970s, is dotted with wooden chalet-style condo buildings and situated in the midst of a vast downhill complex known as Paradiski, one of the world’s largest.

Defenders of politically correct language claim that it is a civilizing influence on society, that it discourages the use of words that have negative or offensive connotations and thereby grants respect to people who are the victims of unfair stereotypes. In this view, the purpose and effect of politically correct language are to prevent bullying and offensive behavior and to replace terms loaded with offensive undertones with allegedly impartial words. So, for example, people are discouraged from referring to someone with a mental disability as “men- tally retarded” and instead encouraged to refer to him as being “differently abled” or as “having special needs.” Similarly, one can no longer refer to “garbagemen” or even the gender-neutral “garbage collectors”—no, they are “environmental service workers,” thank you very much!

The police couldn’t figure out how the perpetrator ripped off two banks at the same time. Until they discovered there wasn’t just one robber but a pair of them: identical twin brothers.

The Secret History of Risotto

Li Jianxiong is convinced he has lived two lives. His first began in 1984, when he was born to impoverished farmers in China’s Henan province. Ambitious and daring, he took full advantage of the new economic reality that unfolded after the cataclysms of the Mao years. By 2017, he had secured a family, a house in Beijing and a reputation as one of China’s most talented young marketing men. His success, however, came at a cost. By then, China had become notorious for its “996” work culture – 9am to 9pm, six days a week – but Li was working something closer to 007: 24 hours a day, every day. While managing an all-consuming media crisis for his employer, a major tutoring company, he developed insomnia, heart palpitations and a severe rash that doctors attributed to a flagging immune system. He wondered more than once whether he might actually work himself to death.

The yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts. After nine years in the country, you’d think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo-American internet, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being.

The British Museum is everybody’s idea of a museum, but at the same time, it is hardly like a museum at all. It is more like a little state. The rooms you visit on a day out are the least of it: the museum is not the contents of its display cases. It is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, a detective agency. “We’re not a warehouse, [or] a mausoleum,” its chair, the UK’s former chancellor George Osborne, told guests at the museum’s annual trustees’ dinner in November. On the contrary, it is both these things, and others beside.

https://archive.ph/Z81ga

The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof.

Archive link

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I don’t even care about Chicago’s sports teams but the pain was palpable from the writer/sportsfan.

Also this is another good article about the same topic: https://theconversation.com/suicide-for-democracy-what-is-bothsidesism-and-how-is-it-different-from-journalistic-objectivity-230894

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On the 19th of May 2016, an Airbus A320 en route from Paris to Cairo disappeared from radar at cruising altitude over the Mediterranean Sea, spiraling to its doom from 37,000 feet until it was dashed against the night-black water. What caused the loss of the EgyptAir flight and its 66 occupants should have been uncovered by a straightforward inquiry, but instead, the case quickly evolved into one of the more unnerving and unnecessary mysteries of 21st century aviation. The problem wasn’t that investigators couldn’t find the cause — it was that not all of them seemingly wanted to.

One story that we couldn’t keep out of the press and that contributed most to my decision to walk away from my career in 2008 involved Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old leukemia patient in California whose scheduled liver transplant was postponed at the last minute when Cigna told her surgeons it wouldn’t pay. Cigna’s medical director, 2,500 miles away from Ms. Sarkisyan, said she was too sick for the procedure. Her family stirred up so much media attention that Cigna relented, but it was too late. She died a few hours after Cigna’s change of heart.

https://archive.ph/vEoA7

"Eat What You Kill” Hailed as a savior upon his arrival in Helena, Dr. Thomas C. Weiner became a favorite of patients and his hospital’s highest earner. As the myth surrounding the high-profile oncologist grew, so did the trail of patient harm and suspicious deaths.

Heaven or High Water Selling Miami's last 50 years

The title doesn't do it justice; A history of the creation of competitive selective enrollment at educational institutions (not limited to the Ivies), and a discussion of its impacts on American society, as well as a consideration of possible alternatives.

By the time the entrees came, we’d reached the end of these “so what else is new” updates. I recognized that we were at a threshold — one I had been unable to cross so far without booze.

archive.today link

If you couldn't be bothered to read it: It was mainly protestant Germans from rural areas, as well as upper-middle-class districts.

Also available as a documentary style video essay on YouTube.

archive link

[We] have now fully turned in terms of public sentiment toward Big Tech. People have to use it because you can’t participate in society without it, but that’s not winning users. That’s coercion. We’re talking about lock-in, where other options have been foreclosed by state abandonment or monopoly. The demand for an alternative has never been stronger.

Archive link.

An exploration into the biggest challenge to the proposed Yucca Nuclear Waste Repository: Warning future beings against treating it as an Indiana Jones film set.

How Vavilov, the Mendelev of botany, was prosecuted for speaking out against Lamarckian pseudoevolution, and how his institute worked tirelessly and hugrily to preserve his seed bank during the Siege of Leningrad.

The German political establishment has abandoned the belief that the Holocaust gave it a responsibility to humanity and replaced it with a responsibility to Israel alone.

This is a surprisingly interesting thinkpiece for its length that ultimately arrives at no conclusion, but it's an important discussion to be having while we still can.

I first read this excellent article many years ago. With the Central Park Five recently making speeches at the DNC, it seems timely. I find that it exposes the superficiality of contemporary public and political discourse, especially when contrasted with the systematic, detail-oriented nature of the legal process.

Really cleverly and comedically written. "Summer is too hot, too boring, and too long."

I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known. Although I have worked abroad for many years, Israel is where I was born and raised. It is the place where my parents lived and are buried; it is where my son has established his own family and most of my oldest and best friends live. Knowing the country from the inside and having followed events even more closely than usual since 7 October, I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered on my return, but it was still profoundly disturbing.

Archive link for those who want it: https://archive.is/20240725152155/https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/07/usa-cricket-team-pakistan-win-t20-world-cup/679221/