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The Morning News

Chalk this up to things not widely known: America's first female mortician, Henrietta Duterte, turned her house into a stop on the Underground Railroad and used coffins to smuggle fugitives across Pennsylvania.

From an essay about Duterte by novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge: 

At 14, my deepest desire was to become an undertaker. This career choice was met with puzzled looks from my mother and exasperated sighs from my guidance counselor, but during a school-sponsored internship week, they agreed to let me try.

Nov 13, 2017
More Headlines

His partner was the one who was into the Royal Family. In 2016, they were both diagnosed with cancer. He recovered, she didn’t. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but almost everyone I speak to turns out to have recently lost someone, or something important.

A bit late to this, but a story about standing in line for 14 hours to see a coffin that is much less boring than it might be.
↩︎ GQ UK
6d
"Like every sport, hiking and camping have their totems." An essay on why people care if they look hot (or cool) in the woods.
↩︎ Outside 6d
The NFT market, generally having a very bad year, turns to the very cringey "phygital" art market for redemption.
↩︎ Artnet 6d

A new era of aviation? Someday. Maybe.

An all-electric airplane called "Alice" took its first flight on Tuesday, looking to become the first all-electric commercial airplane.

From the Seattle Times, the electric future remains a long way off, due to batteries:

It’s powered by just over 21,500 small Tesla-style battery cells that, at just over 4 tons, make up fully half the weight of the carbon composite airframe.

... In an interview in Moses Lake on the eve of first flight, Eviation CEO Greg Davis conceded that the prototype that took off Tuesday is not the design the company will build later. He said Eviation needs still-to-be-developed advances in battery technology to make its planes commercially viable.

“Are the batteries on the prototype aircraft capable of propelling the certification aircraft, capable of providing sufficient energy? The answer is no, absolutely not,” Davis said.

6d
An environmental activist has been murdered every two days over the past decade. Most of the killings are in Latin America.
↩︎ BBC News 6d
An audio/visual story drawn from the sonic codes and signatures of Mexico City street vendors.
↩︎ The Pudding 1w
While Putin's troops invaded Ukraine, a tech company in Kyiv was recreating Darth Vader's voice for Hollywood.
↩︎ Vanity Fair 1w

“An effort has been made to illustrate not only the death that occurred but the social and financial status of those involved, as well as their frame of mind at the time the death took place.”

The first female police captain in the US was known for her dioramas: crime scenes showing “cosy interiors combined with death.”
↩︎ Al Jazeera
2w
Scientists estimate the total mass of ants on Earth at about 12 megatons of dry carbon, or nearly 20 quadrillion ants.
↩︎ Business Insider 2w
With Brazil's government encouraging deforesting the Amazon, preservationists try to sell carbon offsets to protect land.
↩︎ Reuters 2w
Multiple things explain the difficulty of nabbing restaurant reservations right now. One big issue: wealthy people's workarounds.
↩︎ bon appétit 2w

An interview with one of the world’s leading nature sound recordists

Bandcamp has a nice feature about Chris Watson, previously a member of the band Cabaret Voltaire, now an expert in field recordings.

“There’s been a massive change in people’s interest in and desire for the natural world, and I think COVID-19 increased that desire exponentially. People want to soak it up, not just cathartically but as something that they find interesting and stimulating. So it’s a really exciting time to be a nature recordist.”

Some samples from his work:

2w

It may now be seen as a dystopian nightmare, the far-flung folly of an autocrat desperate for global approval, but the idea of building a self-contained linear city has preoccupied the imaginations of architects and planners for generations.

Will the world ever be ready for a linear metropolis? Oliver Wainwright traces the history of the city-in-a-canyon dream.
↩︎ The Guardian
2w

Traditional buildings and materials last not only because they are proven to possess beauty but also because they are answers to the unchanging needs of human nature.

Some thoughts on building homes to last a thousand years—by putting beauty first.
↩︎ Wrath of Gnon
2w
Thanks to advances in AI, scientists can create completely new proteins in seconds—a process that used to take months.
↩︎ Nature 2w

“Milne’s Pooh doesn’t really use long words, and never waxes explicitly philosophical—anything explicit about death or love ought to get you a bit suspicious.”

Tips on how to identify a genuine Winnie the Pooh quote “in the forgery-filled fleamarket of the internet.”
↩︎ Dirt
3w

This project sought to build upon Jason Scott-Warren and Claire M. L. Bourne’s discovery of John Milton’s copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio at the Free Library of Philadelphia, which gained significant media coverage worldwide.

Notes from an eight-week hunt for John Milton’s personal library. “In the end, I found very little.”
↩︎ Centre for Material Texts
3w
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