January 24, 2017
And just like that, we’re off: The CDC canceled a major climate change conference shortly after the election. / politics.blog.myajc.com
“‘Some MPs tend to become quite unpleasant if they have been drinking,’ said Danny Pieters, the committee chair, pointing out that free alcohol was not the norm in other workplaces.” Belgium retains its policy of providing lawmakers with free beer and wine, even if debate’s not always great with drunk MPs. / Politico
Cinnamon sticks are more expensive than ground cinnamon because of hand-selected tree bark, or something. As Kelly Conaboy writes, “But also it kind of seems to me like it’s just a bunch of bullshit that happens for no reason!!!” / theoutline.com
“Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in charge.” Lessons for Americans from life in Putin’s “hybrid regime.” / New York
Two sculptors, Cao Chang Xu and Sarath Chandrajeewa, sculpt each other at the same time in less than 10 minutes. / YouTube
The Kansas senator told his colleagues in a televised confirmation hearing that he was against the practice. Just a week later, he’s changed his tune to be pro-torture. / Mother Jones
In case you missed it (like us), from late December, an analysis of Manhattan’s worst martini, the Trumptini. / Harper’s
“I don’t think the people interviewing Kellyanne Conway know why they are doing that,” NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen told Recode. “The journalistic logic of it is growing dimmer with every interview.” / Recode
Announced this morning, the Los Angeles love story La La Land picked up 14 Academy Award nominations, tying the record shared by Titanic and All About Eve. / Los Angeles Times
Among the fascinating divergences tracked by the BBC: / BBC
Your Tuesday afternoon short film: MUXES, by Ivan Olita, shot in indigenous Mexican communities around the town of Juchitán, where “the world is not divided simply into males and females. The local Zapotec people have made room for a third category, which they call muxes—men who consider themselves women and live in a socially sanctioned limbo between the two genders.” / Vimeo
“In San Antonio, a 150-pound pet tortoise knocked over a lamp, igniting a mattress fire that spread to a neighbor’s home. ‘The fact that it’s a giant tortoise makes it extremely unusual,’ said a fire-department spokesperson.” Sometimes we forget how great the Harper’s Weekly Review can be. / Harper’s Weekly Review
“Boy! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our company was first to produce a cancer-free cigarette. What we could do to the competition!” The tobacco industry knew conclusively its products were deadly in the 1940s (and had an inkling long before then). Naturally, its response was to cover its tracks and smear those spreading the truth. / Tobacco Control
MSG, the base of umami, faced decades of false stigma and shunning on the part of Americans due to one 1968 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine about numbness-inducing “Chinese restaurant syndrome.” / BuzzFeed, nejm.org
“What percent of these papers replicate? I’ve been asked that so many times, but it’s not an easy question.” Two reproducibility studies on cancer studies show that they’re extremely difficult to replicate, calling reliability into question. / The Atlantic
From Errol Morris on the certainty of Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” quip, which was delivered at a press conference to get out of answering a question about his claims about Iraq’s WMDs: / The New York Times
Napping at work in Japan, known as “inemuri” (translated as “sleeping on duty”) is a sign of diligence, not indulgence; it means you’ve worked yourself to the bone. There’s even a book on the topic (of course there is). / amazon.de