The Morning News

A 16-year-old aspiring concert pianist performs "eight levels of Bach," with explanations as to what makes them increasingly difficult.

2d

Chenyue Yuan draws the stories of Chinese laborers who live and work in factories producing mass goods.

↩︎ It's Nice That 3d

“I love fables! I don’t take that as a critique.” What Anthony Doerr's been writing since All the Light We Cannot See.

↩︎ The New York Times 3d

McMansion Hell comes for the 1980s on Staten Island.

↩︎ McMansion Hell 3d

Populism is not uniquely responsible for polarization, but it is crucial to understand that its key strategy is polarization. Right-wing populism seeks to divide polities into homogeneous groups and then insinuates that some groups do not truly belong or are fundamentally illegitimate.

Jan-Werner Müller: Culture wars are a device used by the elite to stay elite.

↩︎ The New Statesman

3d

The debate over who deserves credit for pioneering mRNA technology is heating up. Hundreds have worked on it for decades.

↩︎ Nature 3d

From May, neuroscientist Tamar Makin explains how her lab trained people to use a third thumb.

↩︎ Scientific American 3d

Murals depicting western mythology photographed in their non-mythological surroundings, by Lucas Deshazer.

↩︎ Booooooom 3d

"It’s a vision of a masculinity I’ve never experienced before." On the gentle assurance of DIY YouTube dads.

↩︎ Men Yell at Me 3d

Tiny, fanciful signage installations in cities, by Michael Pederson.

↩︎ Colossal 3d

A right-wing group wants Texas teachers to say whether they're being asked to respect students' gender identity or teach CRT.

↩︎ them 3d

An incredibly detailed tool for calculating Covid risk for various activities based on location, vaccination status, and more.

↩︎ microCOVID 3d

Kudzanai Chiurai's "The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember" asks visitors to curate southern African art and history.

↩︎ The Conversation 3d

How music rights and interpolation work, and why it matters that Olivia Rodrigo shared a songwriting credit with Paramore.

↩︎ The Verge 3d

And here, perhaps, is why Norm Macdonald died less famous than he should have been. He cared about jokes too much, when the business of comedy is not actually about jokes so much as audience shares and sponsors and streams and tickets.

Norm Macdonald was a brilliant comedian, which is precisely why he was not massively famous.

↩︎ Gawker

3d

New Yorker archivist Erin Overbey unearths 30 years of the magazine's severe lack of byline diversity.

↩︎ Intelligencer 3d

The game developers that are making new titles for vintage consoles.

↩︎ The Guardian 3d

"We lived off social security and hotdogs." Cup of Jo's comments are what it looks like when real humans connect with each other.

↩︎ Kottke 3d

Miniature model-maker Studson Studio creates models inspired by Studio Ghibli, using recycled garbage.

↩︎ Spoon & Tamago 4d

Another virus to be aware of: the deadly Nipah virus returns to the southern Indian state of Kerala.

↩︎ NPR 4d