November 28, 2019
These claims have not been demonstrated
An Open Letter to the Diplomats With "Havana Syndrome" [Robert Bartholomew in Psychology Today] [more inside]
9 charts to be thankful for this Thanksgiving
life expectancy and literacy are up, and global poverty is down. For most Americans, these feel like bleak times. We have a president whom a majority of Americans want impeached. Overt, old-fashioned racism is publicly visible and powerful in a way it wasn’t only five years ago. Climate change is exacerbating wildfires and other natural disasters and making air in states like California nearly unbreathable.
This is all real, and truly alarming. But it would be a mistake to view that as the sum total of the world in 2019. Under the radar, some aspects of life on Earth are getting dramatically better. Extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, and life expectancy is increasing in poor countries — and there are many more indices of improvement like that everywhere you turn. [more inside]
We are finding our way back home—“the seed remembers"
Like many heirloom treasures, Glass Gem corn has a name, a place, and a story. Its origin traces back to Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee farmer living in Oklahoma. Barnes had an uncanny knack for corn breeding. More specifically, he excelled at selecting and saving seed from those cobs that exhibited vivid, translucent colors. (Native Seeds blog) Barnes passed some seeds to Greg Schoen in 1995, and Shoen moved to New Mexico where he crossbred the corn with Pueblo popcorn, then passed some on to Belle Starr and Bill McDorman in Arizona, where they planted some with the Seeds Trust and posted photos to Facebook in 2010. About two years later, pictures went viral (ABC News), and they're popping up again as the poster child for the return to heirloom seeds (NPR). [more inside]
Thanksgiving Tradition
What's this? A piece of toast? A pretzel stick? Popcorn?
In the coming onslaught of Christmas music, the Vince Guaraldi Trio's "A Charlie Brown Christmas" figures large as both a popular and critical favorite. But Guaraldi doesn't get enough love for the equally excellent music of "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving," with its groovier early 70s sound. Here for your USian celebrating enjoyment are a few of the songs Guaraldi wrote for the 3rd animated TV special featuring Charlie Brown: Thanksgiving Theme, Little Birdie, Is It James or Charlie?, Charlie Brown Blues, and a sightly different setting of Linus and Lucy than the more familiar Christmas-special one. Or just set it and forget it with the complete soundtrack. [more inside]
expands canon in a way that only Mac and Me dared to do in the 1980s
The E.T. sequel finally happened ... in the form of a commercial [YouTube] “Thirty-seven years after Elliot (Henry Thomas) made contact with an extraterrestrial, took a magical bike ride through the skies, then sent the otherworldly being back on his way home, “E.T.” returns to Earth in a brand new sequel to Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film. [...] In the four-minute short, E.T. drops down in grown-up Elliot’s backyard and befriends his old pal’s kids just in time for Christmas. As a found family, they have dinner, resurrect dead plants, have snowball fights, play with the family VR headset — it’s 2019! — and introduce E.T. to the wonders of the internet. Specifically, Xfinity high-speed internet. Which kids love.” [via: Polygon]
"American optometrists spend a lot of money on lobbying"
The Great American Eye-Exam Scam
The ordeal led me to look into a fact that has puzzled me ever since I moved to the United States a dozen years ago. In every other country in which I’ve lived—Germany and Britain, France and Italy—it is far easier to buy glasses or contact lenses than it is here. In those countries, as in Peru, you can simply walk into an optician’s store and ask an employee to give you an eye test, likely free of charge.
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