Headlines from June 20, 2012
- List of countries said to be treating slavery victims as criminals or ignoring them entirely.
- Guatemalan vacation ruined by gang-bangers—how the War on Drugs sustains the drug problem.
- Assange takes refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden.
- Peruvian-made pisco attempting a comeback in America, where once it ruled San Francisco nights.
- Praising leisure: What it sounds like to call for an end to growth.
- Conclusion of long Andy Murray piece: Lendl coaches Murray in order to improve Lendl’s golf game.
- Profile of Mary Kom, world-champion boxer and India’s gold-medal hopeful. #longreads
- Behind the scenes at a McDonald’s food photo shoot. #video
- In many languages blue and green aren’t distinct—blue doesn’t appear in the Illiad, Odyssey, or original Hebrew Bible.
- Recent Radiolab episode on color. #audio
- Pictures show process behind a new Mark Schoening painting.
- Show to see near Boston: “Common Threads: Contemporary Photobooks.”
- Every one of us is either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet. Notes on the “little-known, poorly understood” philosophy that is Muppet Theory.
- Leaps in science sometimes depend on airport security allowing (or not) a trachea in a box to board a plane.
- Stanford guide to undergrad dating, with a foreward by Philip Zimbardo.
- Gossip found to be useful as social communication, unfortunately also as blackmail technique.
- The egaliatarian demand shouldn’t be that we need more black pop stars or female pop stars, but to question why we need elite superstars at all.
- The NPR intern post about never buying music that has everyone in music talking.
- In Pakistan, preference for boy babies has led to an alarmingly skewed gender ratio at birth and orphanages filled with girls.
- Interactive timeline tracks Obama administration’s drone death tolls, finds the claims don’t add up.
- Unlike previous fad intoxicants, the hysteria about bath salts seems well earned.
- As the art market becomes big business, art experts fearing lawsuits recuse themselves from offering scholarly opinions.
- Some local candidates in Texas agree to decide close elections with coin flips.
- Sale of dinosaur skeleton for $1 million halted after museum paleontology head raises suspicions of its origins.
- Your 185-millionth great-grandfather was a fish. Richard Dawkins explains why there was no first human being. via #video
- Finding a cool document in an archive exactly where it’s supposed to be is not a “discovery.” #opinion
- Physicists analyze new data to assess whether they may be on the right track to finding the Higgs boson, lost for 40 years.
- Related: “In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson.” #tmn
- Spanish scientists say time is decelerating and will stop completely, sometime.
- June 30 in New York: Catch TMN’s Pitchaya Sudbanthad host the Barbès Reading Series, featuring Jeffrey Rotter, John Wray, more.