May 28, 2015

• The silence of FIFA's sponsors shows that the big business of global soccer still outweighs bad press.
• Piers Morgan: Thank you, America, for bringing down one of the world's most "disgraced and disreputable" organizations.
• The only way self-government can re-emerge in Libya, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria is for all sides to accept “no victor/no vanquished.”
• Nebraska legislature abolishes death penalty in defiance of governor's veto.
• Charts and graphs visualize the 67 Justice Department investigations into local police departments since 1994.
• Research finds that the most cost-effective way to combat homelessness is to give homeless people homes.
• Starbucks, despite $14 billion in revenue, begins to close some New York stores because the rent is too high.
• Mexican drug cartels use CCTV to monitor civilians and law enforcement.
• Fighting back against condescension, one insult at a time.
• Hilary Mantel: People ask, "How does it feel to see your characters come to life?" I answer: "When were they dead?"
• Percentage of undernourished people in the developing world has fallen from 23.3% to 12.9% over the last quarter century.
• Netflix streaming consumes more bandwidth than YouTube, Amazon, and Hulu combined at peak periods.
• Kindle readers finally get typography that doesn't suck.
• The internet's love of fail videos is rooted in the evolutionary utility of schadenfreude.
• Related: Schadenfreude "doesn't square with America’s national obsession with the comeback story," but we love it anyway.
• William Finnegan on learning to surf and fight in '60s Hawaii.