The Morning News

A cute PSA, admittedly sponsored by a car company, on simple ways to reduce traffic on busy streets.

For Southern Californians, see also: "Could London-style toll zones reduce LA traffic?"

11h

"Saudi Arabia wasn't always this repressive. Now it's unbearable." Saudi journalist breaks iron silence.

Consider the amount of standard daily doses of opioids consumed in Japan. And then double it. And then double it again. And then double it again. And then double it again. And then double it a fifth time. That would make Japan No. 2 in the world, behind the United States.

One big misconception about opioids in America is that the US is at all normal at managing pain.

↩︎ Vox

13h

“You can make the argument that we are living in Peak Asshole,” says Stanford professor and expert on assholes.

↩︎ New York Magazine 13h

Maybe you can't dance about architecture, but artist Ben Johnson sure can paint it realistically.

↩︎ Ben Johnson 13h

Ways to cut crime that don't involve gun control—e.g., lead abatement, drug decriminalization, prison education.

↩︎ Bloomberg 13h

(Scary) headline of the day: "Death Wish Coffee recalls its Nitro Cold Brew over risk of deadly botulin toxin."

↩︎ The Washington Post 14h

“There is no backing down in the North Korean rule book,” Mr. Paik said. “It’s the very core of their leadership identity and motive.”

Mr. Kim calls Mr. Trump a “frightened dog” and a “mentally deranged US dotard” (aka, an “old beast lunatic”) .

↩︎ The New York Times

14h

Quebec's language watchdog says English terms like "grilled-cheese" and "cocktail" aren't so threatening anymore.

↩︎ CBC News 14h

My time in Barcelona taught me one thing: radicalization is a local phenomenon. It happens on soccer fields, in parks and cafes. Local authorities cannot investigate every person, but if someone is already suspected, the local officials should know about it.

Lessons learned from neuroscience experiments run on radicalized people in Spain.

↩︎ The New York Review of Books

1d

Amid an NBA boom, franchises sell for record highs, and yet half the league is losing money, says a new report.

↩︎ ESPN 1d

“I don’t know what the officers were thinking. They very well could not have heard everyone yelling around them.”

Oklahoma City police spokesman suggests two cops went deaf in the process of shooting an unarmed deaf man.

↩︎ Bustle

1d

North Carolina joins US Climate Alliance; 14 states—the world's third largest economy—are on track for Paris.

↩︎ InsideClimateNews 1d

A short film to watch while you're eating lunch at your desk today: "Full Circles," by Lily Cole, about dancer Carlos Acosta and his pledge to restore a ballet school in Cuba.

1d

Corporate pot doesn't respect older growers' intellectual property—a double whammy of dispossession and racism.

↩︎ The Baffler 1d

The people of airportsmokers.com look out for each other because they need to, but also because they want to.

Apparently the people-who-love-to-smoke community is the “most supportive and kindly corner of the internet.”

↩︎ The Outline

1d

Avril Lavigne is more likely than any other celebrity to have her name mentioned by ads that carry malware.

↩︎ Stereogum 1d

The algorithim behind Amazon's “frequently bought together” tool shows a quirk that's not terrific, optically: it can guide users to the chemical combinations for producing explosives.

Steel ball bearings often used as shrapnel in explosive devices, ignition systems, and remote detonators are also readily available.

1d

England says Oliver is the most popular boys' name for babies, unless you count different spellings of Muhammad.

↩︎ Quartz 1d

Throughout the 1980s, tech ads spread the (confused) notion of a parallelism between psychology and computing.

↩︎ Artists and Machine Intelligence by Google 1d