Posts with Recent Comments
We Need To Talk About Trader Joe's
"According to these sources, Trader Joe’s commonly solicits product samples and even asks for potential recipe adjustments—a revealing and time-consuming exercise for bootstrapped founders—before inexplicably abandoning the negotiations and releasing its own private-label versions of similar products at lower prices." How Trader Joe's engages in shady tactics to copy products from independent, minority-owned brands.
A massive loss to the physics community
"Besides his outstanding contributions to particle physics, Peter was a very special person, a man of rare modesty, a great teacher and someone who explained physics in a very simple and profound way." [...] "His prediction of the existence of the particle that bears his name was a deep insight, and its discovery at Cern in 2012 was a crowning moment that confirmed his understanding of the way the Universe works." "Even though he didn’t much enjoy it, he felt a responsibility to use the public profile his achievements brought him for the good of science, and he did so many times. The particle that carries his name is perhaps the single most stunning example of how seemingly abstract mathematical ideas can make predictions which turn out to have huge physical consequences."Peter Higgs, physicist who proposed Higgs boson, dies aged 94 [more inside]
"When will I lose all of this?"
In Gaza, death seems to be closer than water - Maha Hussaini: 'During one of the relatively ‘safe’ times in Gaza, around the summer of 2022, I sat on a comfy couch, soft music playing in the background, a cup of cold fresh orange juice in my hand, and I thought: "When will I lose all of this?"' || Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism (by Raz Segal & Luigi Daniele) - The very different ways in which Holocaust scholars, on the one hand, and those working in Genocide Studies, on the other, have responded to the unfolding mass violence in Israel and Palestine after 7 October point to an unprecedented crisis in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. We argue that the crisis stems from the significant evidence for genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza, which has exposed the exceptional status accorded to Israel as a foundational element in the field, that is, the idea that Israel, the state of Holocaust survivors, can never perpetrate genocide || Killed in Gaza database (you can search either in English or in Arabic) || CNN visual presentation of dead children [more inside]
We had the Sex Pistols play here and you’re worse!
“I was 25,” she says. “I’d go for my mouth and nothing would come out. It started when I was pregnant with my eldest daughter, and I just put it down to the pregnancy, but it wasn’t a happy time in my life. I think my then-husband wasn’t that keen on having a baby, blah blah blah, it was a difficult time, which we got through, but I think it impacted on me a bit.”Folk legend Linda Thompson has been suffering from dysphonia since the early seventies, making it harder and harder for her to record new albums. For her latest, she got other people to sing her songs, called it Proxy Music and recreated the album cover from Roxy Music's eponymous debut. Alexis Petridis interviews her for The Guardian on the album and her personal history in folk.
Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, Found
The Incredible Machine
The Function of Colour in Schools & Hospital
The Function of Colour in Schools & Hospitals, 1930. Just some wonderful illustrations of those things. via.
For Linguistics Influencer Adam Aleksic, Language is Political
One of the Internet’s first and only “linguistics influencers,” Adam Aleksic, who works under the handle @etymologynerd, [Instagram / TikTok / YouTube] spends his time post-graduation traveling the world and creating videos about etymology for an audience of over 1.3 million across TikTok and Instagram. [more inside]
Online, we are all Girls.
blog post from molly soda. a really interesting collection of links: some abstract, some avant garde, some silly; all exploring concepts of girlhood from different angles. there's been a lot of talk online about "girls". what can that mean? maybe some of this will help! [more inside]
Bulldog Utterly Bowled Over
Videos from The Dodo are usually a bit sappy but always heartwarming. However, Bulldog Obsessed With Bowls Gets A Special Delivery [3m20s] is full of exactly the kind of WTF that leads me to post it here.
Rare turtles are making a comeback after a virus almost wiped them out
These rare turtles are making a comeback after a virus almost wiped them out. Nearly 100 captive-bred Bellinger River snapping turtles have been released into the wild, the biggest number yet for the breeding program after a virus nearly wiped them out in 2015.
Default fonts and quantum dingbats
Elle Cordova is a poet, singer, comedian, filker, science geek and more. She recently published three hilarious brief skits where she embodies 20 fonts hanging out and gossiping. Compiled with open captions 4:12 at this single YouTube link. With her former Raina del Cid persona previously and previouserly
Two tennis balls surgically removed from scrub python
Two tennis balls surgically removed from scrub python. A Far North Queensland wildlife carer says he has seen just about everything in his 20 years on the job until he was called about a surprise find in a Cooktown backyard.
“I’m so willing to die in shein clothes.”
Super Cute Please Like is a long, fascinating essay by Nicole Lipman in N+1 about fast fashion giant SHEIN, examining its clothes, business practices and history, but touching on fashion blogs, Sinophobia, the origins of fast fashion and gamification.
“Roaming the greenwood”
Now, the Boys are in Greece. It’s antiquity, but the emotions are American high school: The golden Boy is Achilles, essentially a Harvard-bound football senior, good at everything. He has curly hair and nice feet. He’s popular, in mythic proportions. He is a god training to be a killing machine in an epic war. The other Boy, Patroclus, averts his gaze when Achilles comes around. Patroclus is the narrator, and he is just a human, a curly-haired, olive-skinned boy (Achilles is, of course, blonde; the two genders of gay romance). He sees himself as weak and mortal. An exile with no family and no name. This is you, Patroclus, you worthless piece of shit. from Boy Meets Boy Meets Boys’ Love by Simon Wu [Spike]
Twilight of the phenomenally talented assholes
Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement. “Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company.Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane [The American Prospect] [more inside]
NYC Chicken Shop Replaces Cashier With Woman in Philippines On Zoom
The cashier at Sansan Chicken East Village in NYC is a woman from the Philippines who logs on via Zoom. A photo of this odd arrangement went viral on Twitter this weekend via a post by Brett Goldstein.
Is Super Mario Maker Beaten Yet?
Is Super Mario Marker beaten yet? Back in 2015, Nintendo released Super Mario Maker for the Wii U, which allowed users to create their own Mario levels and upload them for others to play. Over 8 million levels were created for the game. On March 31, 2021 Nintendo "discontinued" the game, which meant no new levels could be uploaded. Then the second shoe dropped: Nintendo announced the Wii U servers would be turned off forever on April 8, 2024, effectively removing all of these user levels from existence. Upon hearing this news, the Super Mario Maker community began to rally around a single goal: clear every single level uploaded to the servers before the shutdown date. [more inside]
Smallest measure of ordinary care
Jennifer and James Crumbley, parents of Michigan school shooter, sentenced to 10 to 15 years for manslaughter "Parents are not expected to be psychic, but these convictions are not about poor parenting. These convictions confirm repeated acts, or lack of acts, that could have halted an oncoming runaway train -- about repeatedly ignoring things that would make a reasonable person feel the hair on the back of their neck" (Judge) Matthews said.
Dear {Person's name}
The USPS declared April to be National Card and Letter Writing Month… 23 years ago. American Library Association has some ideas on epistolary fun within games. The Chicago Public Library has suggestions for epistolary novels. The Universal Postal Union has a letter writing competition for writers aged 9 to 15 on the theme: "Write a letter to future generations about the world you hope they inherit." The Smithsonian National Postal Museum has an epistolary fiction project which includes an extensive if not exhaustive list of novels, starting with Xenophon of Ephesus. [more inside]