February 24, 2017

File under the curiously entertaining: A brief history of the laundry chute. / The Atlantic

Officials say the terrorist group has crossed a threshold with its use of unmanned aircraft, using them to drop bombs on Iraqi troops. / The Washington Post

“To use the Forex terminology, Trump is a cyclical correction of the market... It must be repeated that this is a long-standing American political tradition, deeply rooted in national mentality, which by chance drifted into the shadow after the Cold War.” A nuanced Russian view of Trump’s significance. “Russia actually wanted to see such a president in the United States, not Trump personally but his type, understandable and not overly disposed towards political correctness. The dream has come true.” / Global Affairs

While the stock market rose last year, college endowments dropped by two percent—largely because of a bad year by the hedge funds that schools increasingly shackle themselves to in hopes of capturing the same huge gains seen by endowments at Ivies with their own in-house funds. / chronicle.com

Since 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has deported hundreds of thousands of immigrants on chartered planes, effectively running its own airline, ICE Air Operations. / Quartz, ice.gov

“I only realized it was serious when I got to prison.” Profiles of Syrian teenagers who inadvertently sparked the country’s civil war with relatively innocuous political graffiti. / The Globe and Mail

Fascinating longread on the historical and intellectual holes in the tendency, by Japanese and Westerners, to think of the country as having a special relationship with nature, while obfuscating the industrial sources of environmental degradation. “If the current global environmental crisis is to be taken seriously, what is needed is neither cultural exceptionalism masquerading as environmentalism nor vitalism.” / apjjf.org

Against the new male American Girl doll (as previously discussed, ghosting/Mumford et al). / The New York Times

Double-click to launch the Black Death (PC only). / Vimeo

“We simply just experienced an election where the sexist and literally phallocentric subtext of American politics finally manifested as text...The cocks are both symbolic and real.” Every anthropologist knows Clifford Geertz’s “Notes on a Balinese Cockfight.” A lot of them saw the election in light of Geertz’s analysis as “a story we tell ourselves.” / Somatosphere

From the Rome Film Festival, Lois Patiño’s lovely Mountain in Shadow. / Vimeo

The photo shows “Stage 7” at the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, Calif.—“known as Lucky Seven, according to tour guide John Kourounis. That’s because three Warner Bros. best picture winners—The Life of Emile Zola, My Fair Lady, and Casablanca—and 10 best picture nominees were shot here.” / NPR