August 12, 2013: Morning
- Idaho grocery chain WinCo called WalMart's "worst nightmare" because it provides health-care plans and pensions to most employees.
- Economist challenges conventional wisdom about pregnancy.
- Economists say with sad certainty that yes, first-born girls do cause divorce.
- Photo essay from a week in the life of a sex worker in small-town Pennsylvania, who commutes there from San Francisco for the money.
- Fascinating body-language guide to knowing exactly what Tiger Woods thinks of his shots.
- See also: Big pictures of California's wind-whipped Silver Fire.
- Attention, Steven Pinker: Science doesn't need defending from the humanities, nor should it replace them.
- Tech-savvy Reddit users list "the most mindblowing recent advancements most people still don't know about."
- Recent Russian law that requires a disclaimer about gays is nearly the same as a ban passed in Britain in 1987.
- Brief history of the children's menu, partially caused by Prohibition and initially heavy on the lamb chops.
- The Middle East now accounts for almost a third of the worldwide sales by volume of non-alcoholic beer.
- Paul Bowles essay for Holiday Magazine, 1963, about recording Moroccan music for the Library of Congress.
- Artist creates map of Manhattan using only handwritten directions from strangers.
- Builders of a 47-story Spanish skyscraper forgot to include a working elevator.
- "Send Me to Heaven" app exists to record how high you can toss your smartphone before possibly destroying it.
- Somewhat related: Luminous pictures of confessional booths.
- Boootube: All of YouTube's worst-rated videos compiled in a single location.