The Morning News

A short film to watch while you're eating lunch at your desk today: "Full Circles," by Lily Cole, about dancer Carlos Acosta and his pledge to restore a ballet school in Cuba.

19m

Corporate pot doesn't respect older growers' intellectual property—a double whammy of dispossession and racism.

↩︎ The Baffler 21m

The people of airportsmokers.com look out for each other because they need to, but also because they want to.

Apparently the people-who-love-to-smoke community is the “most supportive and kindly corner of the internet.”

↩︎ The Outline

1h

Avril Lavigne is more likely than any other celebrity to have her name mentioned by ads that carry malware.

↩︎ Stereogum 1h

The algorithim behind Amazon's “frequently bought together” tool shows a quirk that's not terrific, optically: it can guide users to the chemical combinations for producing explosives.

Steel ball bearings often used as shrapnel in explosive devices, ignition systems, and remote detonators are also readily available.

2h

England says Oliver is the most popular boys' name for babies, unless you count different spellings of Muhammad.

↩︎ Quartz 2h

Throughout the 1980s, tech ads spread the (confused) notion of a parallelism between psychology and computing.

↩︎ Artists and Machine Intelligence by Google 3h

Mexico and Japan have sophisticated earthquake warning systems. California's is years away, if not nixed by Trump.

↩︎ WIRED 3h

A fun, interesting profile of Max Maxey, Chance the Rapper's onstage translator for deaf and hard-of-hearing hip-hop fans (seen above signing Warren G's "Regulate").

Maxey's ASL interpretation is an explosive, code-switching mishmash of textbook American Sign Language, pantomime, and makeshift signs he's cobbled together for slang words native to hip-hop ("molly," for example, combines gestures for "pill" and "sex"); the way he signs is as worldly and wry and improvisational as he is.

3h

Equifax has been sending hacking victims to a fake website created to show the flaws in Equifax's security.

↩︎ The Verge 3h

The future of Stone Mountain, America's largest Confederate monument, roils Georgia's gubernatorial race.

↩︎ The Washington Post 3h

“Once we’re able to go outside, we’re going to find our island destroyed." Maria leaves Puerto Rico powerless.

↩︎ The Guardian 4h

Farmworkers "leave their kidneys in the fields" due to little protection against workplace heat sickness.

↩︎ Food and Environment Reporting Network 21h

When men pay women to rate their penises online, they tend to want "pure, unadulterated frankness," not adulation.

↩︎ MEL Magazine 21h

What I found, in writing my stories, is that it was always best if something goes wrong. I was never Superman. As my expeditionary friends will tell you, I’m sort of a doofus.

The great adventure writer Tim Cahill is back, only this time he actually dies—and returns to write again.

↩︎ Outside Magazine

1d

Somewhat fake news? The Republican Governors Association funds a news website that paraphrases its press releases.

↩︎ The New York Times 1d

Regarding yesterday's how-to guide for making your own inflatable tube man: Someone went to the trouble of figuring out the proper history of the obnoxious beasties, which includes a birth story beginning at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, ending with a not-so-cute patent/custody battle.

1d

"Just one of those situations that landed wrong," says athletic director after football player dies from tackle.

↩︎ Sporting News 1d

For India's Wikipedia, only 3% of its editors are women; the figure is 9% worldwide.

↩︎ Quartz 1d

Beyoncé fans recently got a surprise when vinyl copies of Lemonade were shipped with one side featuring songs by the Canadian punk band Zex, thanks to a factory error.

Zex, featured in the video above with their new song "No Sancturay," seems relatively cool with the attention. From an interview in Slate with Zex guitarist Jo Galipeau:

Slate: I noticed on your Facebook pages that you've tried to get your hands on some copies. What are you going to do with those?

Galipeau: Personally I have a copy coming to me. Some people have been writing to the band offering to sell their copy to us, at exorbitant prices, so we're not really that interested. Several record stores that have big orders of them have also contacted us. A large number of them seem to be in Australia for some reason.

Slate: And they’re trying to sell your own music to you?

Galipeau: In a way.

1d