It's the Short List for the 2021 ToB!

Books, judges, zombies, oh my! Announcing the field for the 2021 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes

The Morning News

To all the people Stanley Tucci has loved before.

It's a Stanley Tucci moment and we're not complaining. A second season of his new travel show, reasons to reminisce about his cocktail routines and lockdown cursing ("just fucking ate it"), so why not a review (admittedly, two years old) of his life's heartbreaks and fondnesses?

Via Laura Olin

1d
Researchers improve solar panels with capsaicin, whose extra electrons make your chilies hot and panels more efficient.
↩︎ The Conversation 1d

This is the era of late capitalism, where bigger is always necessarily better, without exception. To the true doom disciple, to listen to a song more times is to enjoy the song more deeply.

From 2015, an homage to playing the same song on repeat in a bar (e.g., “The Boys Are Back in Town”) until you get kicked out.
↩︎ VICE
1d
Indian Muslims are segregated by a decentralized network of police and brokers—and roommates who stereotype them as terrorists.
↩︎ Article 14 1d
Why the next wave of boxers are influencers: everyone loves a sideshow, and boxing's always been about business.
↩︎ Sports Illustrated 1d

You may be sick of hearing about climate change, but if the planet becomes inhospitable to agriculture, it’ll be too late to reduce our cheeseburger consumption—we simply won’t live long enough for it to matter.

Mark Bittman: Small-scale farmers are already bearing the most acute consequences of climate change.
↩︎ The Bittman Project
1d
White paper of the week: Duke University goes to absurd lengths to block other people’s trademark applications.
↩︎ Marginal Revolution 1d
Stories from community healthcare facilities in rural Mississippi with deep ties to the civil rights movement.
↩︎ The Bitter Southerner 2d
Front offices across baseball swear by a book about cognitive psychology by a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics.
↩︎ The New York Times 2d

A secret message inside the Perseverance rover’s parachute.

A slogan of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Greater Los Angeles is "Dare Mighty Things," and a French student and his father figured out that it was encoded inside Perseverance's parachute.

A variation on the explanation:

2d

Britain’s four remaining coal-burning power plants are zombies, all but dead. Within a couple of years they will be closed and Britain will probably never burn coal for electricity again.

No coal was burned this summer to generate any portion of the UK’s energy supply, something that hasn’t happened since 1882.
↩︎ The Economist
2d
A sweeping new Covid-19 data platform offers access to more than 5 million anonymized records from 160 countries.
↩︎ STAT 2d
Expect to see this mail truck prowling your neighborhood in the next couple years.
↩︎ Jalopnik 2d
A photographic tribute to Tehran's rugged Alborz mountains.
↩︎ Manuel Diestro 2d
A report finds that high-profile crimes with Asian American victims in Oakland were more likely about opportunity than racism.
↩︎ Oaklandside 2d
"TikTok begins reading your soul like some sort of divine digital oracle." When algorithms know you're queer before you do.
↩︎ Mashable 2d
A heroin-using neuroscientist argues that science and the media pathologize drug use far beyond the evidence.
↩︎ Nautilus 2d
Paintings of icebergs from the summer of 1859 by American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church.
↩︎ Flashbak 2d
Some activists no longer see nuclear power as a threat, but as safer than fossil fuels and more effective than renewables.
↩︎ The New Yorker 2d
Postcards of restaurant exteriors.
↩︎ Flickr 3d