May 20, 2016

• Oklahoma's legislation to outlaw abortions is so "blatantly unconstitutional" that it's hardly enforceable.
• McDonald's reports that higher pay and better benefits have boosted their bottom line.
• Verizon strike faces challenges indicative of labor's larger struggles.
• Colonialism is alive in Western Sahara; thousands live in camps while Morocco and UN stand off in decades-long debate over autonomy.
• Current Chinese immigrants, more likely to come from Mandarin-speaking upper classes, prefer suburbs to Chinatowns.
• An injured Roger Federer won't play at the French Open—the first Grand Slam he'll miss this century.
• "The pursuit of a perfectly called game may not be merely inconvenient, but it may also be fundamentally impossible."
• Streaming has been such a commercial dud for musicians that in 2015, they earned more from vinyl sales.
• Psychologists consistently find that we appreciate "natural" talents more deeply than those "earned" by practice.
• Because Earth is not a perfect sphere, Ecuador's Mount Chimborazo dwarfs Everest.
• From physics emerges a theory of bi-directional causality.
• We use our entire brain—and not just the temporal lobe, as once believed—to group words by meaning.
• America's first memory champion relies on visualization and narrative.
• Computers will soon not just remember, but learn, fundamentally altering user experience.
• Winner of the 2016 Commonwealth Prize for best short story from Africa just got published online: "The Pigeon."
• "She is a pixe­lated, auto­mated portrait of myself. She is my data doppelganger."
• Jennifer Berman tries to meet the Jennifer Bermans who've trumped her domain names and Gmail addresses.