The Morning News

↩︎ Flashbak 3h

To understand Kawauchi’s genius, we need to think of him not as a racehorse, but as an intellectual. And to understand him as an intellectual, we need to understand the nature of self-coaching.

Some people say thought is the enemy of skill. Not so in the case of champion marathon runner Yuki Kawauchi.

↩︎ Aeon

3h

When Chinese money goes to an African country, it often flows heavily to the political leaders' home regions.

↩︎ Journal of Development Economics 3h

The world economy may still be "slowbalizing," where "global value chains" decline relative to world GDP.

↩︎ The Economist 3h

↩︎ TMN Newsletters 6h

For many of baseball's early decades, many people doubted "the very notion that a ball could curve."

↩︎ LitHub 7h

In 1999, John Peel visited British towns that spawned music trends. Here he is in Cornwall with Richard D. James (The Aphex Twin), David Hodge, a Cornish language poet, and Helen from In Watermelon Sugar.

8h

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary got 640 additions, including "stan," "bottom surgery," and "garbage time."

↩︎ Merriam-Webster 8h

Japan begins a new imperial era on May 1, requiring systems, calendars, and all government forms to reset their clocks.

↩︎ The New York Times 8h

More than 600 million Indians face acute water shortages. Climate change will be a "force multiplier" for the crisis.

↩︎ MIT Technology Review 8h

Greenland's ice is melting six times faster than it did in the 1980s. The ice losses are likely to get worse.

↩︎ The Washington Post 8h

He is old enough to begin imagining that he will someday get married, but at ten he is still convinced that the best thing about being married will be that he will be allowed to sleep in his clothes.

In 1992, Susan Orlean profiled a 10-year-old boy.

↩︎ Esquire

8h

Lévi-Strauss would write that his formative intellectual influences were, in order: geology, Freud, Marxism. What they share is a sense of a hidden order of reality.

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work wasn’t just academic. It was “the work of a man in exile, and the product of a world in crisis.”

↩︎ Boston Review

9h

Los Angeles has a shade problem: often understood as "a luxury amenity," on many blocks it's basically outlawed.

↩︎ Places 9h

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The Editors' Longreads Picks

Botanists found a rare hibiscus flower, Hibiscadelphus woodii, thought to be a extinct, by flying a drone down a cliff face in Kauai (skip to 00:58 for the goods).

They’d hiked 700 ft down from the top of the Kalalau Valley cliffs to get there, but couldn’t get farther down into the valley, so Nyberg flew a drone another 800 ft down to look at a particularly verdant patch. “It’s probably never been looked at,” he says.

9h

Black Room is an online narrative game about "falling asleep while on your computer, on the internet."

↩︎ Cassie McQuater 9h

I have been reading books about time: theoretical physics, evolution, parallel universes. Recently I realized that I was reading them because I wanted one to tell me how to go back in time—to before my wife died of cancer.

Matthew Salesses, “To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.”

↩︎ Longreads

1d

An interactive map shows how average temperatures have changed over time at a specific location, down to the street-address level.

↩︎ BuzzFeed News 1d

An audio tour of the leitmotifs in Wagner's "Ring" cycle.

↩︎ The New York Times 1d

So, what was it like to edit Oliver’s work without Oliver present? Well, aside from the most obvious—that we dearly missed him—it simply wasn’t as much fun. Writing gave Oliver such joy it was infectious to those around him.

On editing Oliver Sacks posthumously.

↩︎ Literary Hub

1d