December 15, 2016

“I’d go around in Davao with a motorcycle, with a big bike around, and I would just patrol the streets, looking for trouble also. I was really looking for a confrontation so I could kill.” Duterte says he personally killed suspected criminals when he was mayor of a southern Philippine city to set an example for police. / Manila Times

Over a decade ago, unelected regulators at the Texas Education Agency set an arbitrary percentage for how many students should get enrolled in special education programs—8.5 percent. / houstonchronicle.com

“One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can’t, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls. The gate is open and yet so very far away.” Your Thursday mid-morning longread: “My President Was Black,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. / The Atlantic

Happening as we speak: Divers are swimming with sparkling, shimmering disco balls of sardines in the Philippines. / The New York Times

We’re talking roast receipes, old-fashioned latkes and new-fangled donuts, and Christmas morning cereal. / saveur.com, seriouseats.com, The New York Times

Fascinating article by Deborah Blum about how, prior to the regulation of the food industry, there was very little preventing us from eating poison. / Lapham’s Quarterly

“Tasting is fearful because it is pleasurable; it is described as ‘good’ in relation to the wider sense of food as undesired and dangerous, which is often articulated through discussions of feeling ‘too full,’ ‘sick,’ or ‘stretched’ after eating.” When sitting around a table with family isn’t calming: an accessible article/white paper on anorexia. / Gastronomica

What to get the foodie who has everything? How about utensils designed to eat bugs in the future? / Atlas Obscura

“I hope you like tartan, because it is the IN pattern this Christmas. Everything must be tartan this year: the cookware, the table linens, the ribbons, THE CHILDREN. Yes, you must dress the children in tartan frocks. And not cheapass tartan frocks, either. If it is not hand-appliquéd by a disaffected French factory worker who only shows up to work two days a week.” Always rewarding: This year’s edition of the “Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog.” / Adequate Man

Because there is a limit to the amount of times you can read “Twitter cut out of Trump tech meeting over failed emoji deal.” UPDATE: Or was it because Twitter went on the record that it wouldn’t help build a Muslim registry? / Politico, The Intercept

1. Claire Messud, “I Hate My Dogs (I Love My Dogs)” (Freeman’s Journal) / Literary Hub

2. Kathryn Jezer-Morton, “A Conversation With Martha Wainwright About Motherhood, On and Off the Tour Bus” (Jezebel) / Jezebel

3. Patti Smith on singing at Bob Dylan’s Nobel ceremony (The New Yorker) / The New Yorker

“If the cheeseburger is a quintessential part of America’s identity, Trump’s pledge to ‘make America great again’ suddenly appeared not very promising. (Presumably, Trump’s Great America tastes like an M.S.G.-flavored kitchen sponge lodged between two other sponges.)” Good to know: Don’t eat at the Trump Grill. / Vanity Fair

“Once at her apartment, Aunt Jane gave me a real bourbon ball, one she’d made using one hundred percent bourbon from her cupboard. It had the balsa-wood smell of the liquor I knew from sniffing my parents’ highballs, and the same clammy bite. But the bourbon stuck in my nose. Ever so gently did it burn the edges of my tightened throat.” How to win the cookie swap: with a kickass Kentucky bourbon ball. / Food52

A profile and interview with 74-year-old Larry Flynt, “the pervert who changed America.” / VICE

German photographer Philipp Ebeling captures London’s “forgotten” neighborhoods. / The Guardian

“When you read through Darwin’s Species Notebooks and see the struggle he went through, and then you compare his first and second attempts to present it coherently (in 1842 and 1844) with the Origin, I think it is equally plausible that some very different theory of evolution might have won the day.” Newton and Einstein could have died early and their contemporaries would have taken up the slack. But if not Darwin, who? / Nautilus