It's the Short List for the 2021 ToB!

Books, judges, zombies, oh my! Announcing the field for the 2021 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes

The Morning News
Why the next wave of boxers are influencers: everyone loves a sideshow, and boxing's always been about business.
↩︎ Sports Illustrated 10h

You may be sick of hearing about climate change, but if the planet becomes inhospitable to agriculture, it’ll be too late to reduce our cheeseburger consumption—we simply won’t live long enough for it to matter.

Mark Bittman: Small-scale farmers are already bearing the most acute consequences of climate change.
↩︎ The Bittman Project
10h
White paper of the week: Duke University goes to absurd lengths to block other people’s trademark applications.
↩︎ Marginal Revolution 10h
Stories from community healthcare facilities in rural Mississippi with deep ties to the civil rights movement.
↩︎ The Bitter Southerner 16h
Front offices across baseball swear by a book about cognitive psychology by a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics.
↩︎ The New York Times 16h

A secret message inside the Perseverance rover’s parachute.

A slogan of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Greater Los Angeles is "Dare Mighty Things," and a French student and his father figured out that it was encoded inside Perseverance's parachute.

A variation on the explanation:

17h

Britain’s four remaining coal-burning power plants are zombies, all but dead. Within a couple of years they will be closed and Britain will probably never burn coal for electricity again.

No coal was burned this summer to generate any portion of the UK’s energy supply, something that hasn’t happened since 1882.
↩︎ The Economist
17h
A sweeping new Covid-19 data platform offers access to more than 5 million anonymized records from 160 countries.
↩︎ STAT 17h
Expect to see this mail truck prowling your neighborhood in the next couple years.
↩︎ Jalopnik 17h
A photographic tribute to Tehran's rugged Alborz mountains.
↩︎ Manuel Diestro 17h
A report finds that high-profile crimes with Asian American victims in Oakland were more likely about opportunity than racism.
↩︎ Oaklandside 17h
"TikTok begins reading your soul like some sort of divine digital oracle." When algorithms know you're queer before you do.
↩︎ Mashable 17h
A heroin-using neuroscientist argues that science and the media pathologize drug use far beyond the evidence.
↩︎ Nautilus 17h
Paintings of icebergs from the summer of 1859 by American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church.
↩︎ Flashbak 1d
Some activists no longer see nuclear power as a threat, but as safer than fossil fuels and more effective than renewables.
↩︎ The New Yorker 1d
Postcards of restaurant exteriors.
↩︎ Flickr 1d
A botnet researchers have been following for two years began hiding one of its IP addresses in the bitcoin blockchain.
↩︎ Ars Technica 1d
A request for scientists: Please start drawing icebergs in their stable orientations.
↩︎ @GlacialMeg 1d
Lego brutalism by Arndt Schlaudraff.
↩︎ Instagram 1d
"I’ve never seen a human being put on eyeglasses the way he does." How Bowie inhabited The Man Who Fell to Earth.
↩︎ Pitchfork 1d