The Morning News

Camp ToB 2019

Week Two: Bowlaway

Welcome back for the second week of Camp ToB 2019! Gather round for the conclusion of Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway.

↩︎ TMN Newsletters 15h

A good podcast episode demonstrates that big cities are bad calls, economically, for people lacking college degrees.

↩︎ Planet Money 1d

Darwin's "survival of the fittest" is often thought to suggest a brutal existence of fights and conquest. What he really meant was that we should be sympathetic to one another.

A free documentary for your evening downtime: one woman's journey to find her biological (sperm-donating) father.

↩︎ Thank You for Coming 1d

Ark of Taste is a catalog of "more than 200 delicious and culturally significant foods in danger of extinction."

↩︎ Slow Food USA 1d

From 2017: the hunt for *su filindeu*, possibly the world's rarest pasta, requires a march of 20 miles in the dark.

↩︎ Saveur 1d

Hearing this woman say it to my face, it shocked me. She said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I treated you as entertainment.”

Amanda Knox explains what it’s like to exist in the odd space of “involuntary public figuredom.”

↩︎ GEN

Celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow tout crystals for healing properties, with no idea if they're connected to human-rights abuses.

↩︎ The Guardian 1d

YIGBY, or “yes in God’s backyard,” refers to churches starting to build affordable housing on their properties.

↩︎ The Mercury News 1d

Why do people in LA use definite articles before their freeway names? Because they had freeways before everybody else.

↩︎ KCET 1d

A typical commute in Los Angeles from 1988, driving the 405 north at cruising speed at 6:15 p.m. on a Friday, with great radio, surrounded by great cars.

Mackerel migration, berries in season, the constellation of the month: a collection of natural facts about June.

↩︎ Unbound 1d

Another "hidden figure"—the woman whose actuarial insights, employed by the Census, were borrowed to pioneer life insurance.

↩︎ Census Stories, USA 1d

"Summer, even as an adult, is the time when I allow myself to be most susceptible to crushing on someone." A theory of crushes.

↩︎ The Paris Review 3d

Perhaps the secret to Robyn's "Dancing on My Own": six seconds of silence, eons in pop music, between each line on the verse.

↩︎ NPR 3d

Here, in this remote part of the Andes, the hopeful mission of saving the planet through electric cars is destroying a fragile ecosystem and depleting stores of drinking water.

Almost all lithium goes to electric car batteries; much comes from Chile’s Atacama Desert, now reeling from mining impacts.

↩︎ Bloomberg

There's a 13-year-old in America's premier women's soccer league.

↩︎ Sports Illustrated 3d

Three million US students don't have home broadband, and the effects show up in the form of lower test scores.

↩︎ AP 3d

Maybe the thing that defines Montrose is that you’re surrounded by other people who have to think about their finiteness too—and, for a little while, we just don’t. For a couple of hours, the neighborhood simply lets it slip from our minds.

Bryan Washington on Houston’s Montrose, which, like many other American gayborhoods, is under threat of gentrification.

↩︎ BuzzFeed News