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The Morning News

Camp ToB 2019

Week 11: Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Five books down, one big, gory, complicated, shock-inducing book to go. This week, we discuss the first half of Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf.

by The Tournament of Books Staff
Amazon has removed thousands of unsafe items, amid recent judgments finding it's potentially liable for what it sells.
↩︎ The Guardian 18h
"It is really a pile of sloppily laid bricks." One-star reviews of the seven wonders of the world.
↩︎ The Washington Post 20h
Repeating patterns of objects, intricately illustrated by Paul Hallows.
↩︎ himHallows 20h
Tracking the trackers: One day of web browsing accumulates hundreds of data trackers, many talking to each other.
↩︎ The New York Times 20h
A study is using software to spy on teen phone usage in hopes of finding out why record numbers of kids are committing suicide.
↩︎ Science 20h
Placing the Amazon fires in their proper context as part of a settler-colonial project against indigenous people.
↩︎ The Intercept 20h

The point of music, and of Young, is to make people feel less lonely. I had taken him to a dark place that he didn’t want to go. “I really wish this interview hadn’t happened,” he later said.

On Neil Young and his ambition to bring fidelity to digitally distributed music.
↩︎ The New York Times
20h
More about this
The Editors' Longreads Picks
With little money or pull to prove wrongdoing, small and unsigned musicians lose out when fake or leaked music appears on Spotify.
↩︎ Pitchfork 20h

Exemptions to Trump’s China tariffs read like a laundry list of Republican favorites.

Such exemptions include salmon and cod (to protect Alaska's fishing industry), fracking chemicals (to protect America’s "energy dominance"), and Bibles:

Those volumes are already more expensive than the average beach read. Biblica, a nonprofit that gives Bibles away around the world, testified that a tariff on religious books would “dramatically affect” the number of Bibles it was able to donate, “impacting the religious freedom of individuals in countries where Bible access is limited and often nonexistent.”

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the 15.2 million member Southern Baptist Convention, wrote that a tariff on Bibles would require “higher prices incompatible with the high and consistent demand for Bibles in the United States” and affect “all Christians’ ability to exercise their religious freedom in the United States.”

22h

Here is something I hadn’t known when I was writing off kids as boring, needy time thieves: Children are naturally queer. They inhabit a world of formless possibility outside of cultural norms like “male” or “female” and “straight” or “gay.”

Michelle Tea on how her queerness and her parenthood support each other.
↩︎ BuzzFeed News
22h
Spectacularly detailed, scale-model miniatures of New York City storefronts, many of which are now gone, by Randy Hage.
↩︎ Booooooom 22h

The view from inside a massive new bicycle parking garage in Utrecht.

Via The Verge, this newly completed building has space for 12,500 bicycles:

And for the view from America, here's "How to Not Kill a Cyclist."

22h
Leaked documents from Bolsonaro's government reveal anti-conservation tactics include casting Amazon minorities as enemies.
↩︎ openDemocracy 22h
As far back as the 15th century, thrill-seeking Russians built massive ice slides—some reached up to 80 feet in the air.
↩︎ Atlas Obscura 22h
Caviar prices are mainly an index of rarity, not quality; it's expensive now because pollution killed sturgeon.
↩︎ Delancey Place 22h
A website is plagiarizing articles, sidestepping detection by running the content through an automated synonym generator.
↩︎ HuffPost 22h
Unexpected objects bound into actual books, such as a volume of 20 slices of American cheese, by Ben Denzer.
↩︎ Colossal 22h
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↩︎ TMN Membership 22h
The University of Oxford has a bell that’s been ringing almost continuously since 1840, about 10 billion rings so far.
↩︎ Futility Closet 1d