September 11, 2016

“It is a strange clash. These are workers without a workplace, striking against a company that does not employ them. They are managed not by people but by an algorithm that communicates with them via their smartphones. And what they are rebelling against is an app update.” Organizing fellow Uber Eats drivers proves tough when you don’t know who your coworkers are. Novel tactics from labor clashes rooted in the gig economy unfold in London. / Financial Times

“A high test score tells you only that a person has high ability and is a good match for that particular test at that point in time. A low test score tells you practically nothing.” Developmental psychologist Dona Matthews on raising the next generation of geniuses. / Nature

“Unlike many academics, the NLRB decision refuses to romanticize academe. This romanticization of academic labor is one of the most effective ways to obscure its actual costs. In contrast, the NLRB posits the equivalent of: ‘Hello! Would you please treat the academy as just another realm of economic life?!’ This is exactly what we should do.” A blow to academic workers’ egos is a boon for their organizing advantage. / Chronicle of Higher Education

“Unlike the rare and much-sought-after occult tools of yesteryear, this scrying device is a near-ubiquitous piece of equipment that lives in most people’s pockets or handbags.” Pokémon Go may have been the big gaming trend of the summer, but its design and popularity hearken to more esoteric themes: magic, the occult, seeing what’s not there, and the nature of reality itself. / The Daily Grail

NASA launches robotic spacecraft that will visit Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid the size of several city blocks with the hope of finding clues to the chaotic beginnings of our solar system—and a window to the origin of life. / csmonitor.com, venturebeat.com

“By the time the spacecraft arrives at Bennu in 2018, there will be no spacecraft visiting or en route to any of the outer planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—for the first time since 1979.” In a hostile funding environment, OSIRIS-REx’s launch is a bright spot in an otherwise dim picture for space exploration. / The Planetary Society

OSIRIS-REx lifts off aboard an Atlas V rocket. After a minute, it goes supersonic. After 90 seconds, it reaches peak stress due to the combination of velocity and remaining atmosphere. At two minutes, it is going 2,500 miles per hour, weighs half what it did at liftoff, and is headed for space. / YouTube

Principle investigator of OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu does the math to dispel rumors NASA mission is a last-ditch effort to save humanity—even if it hit Earth and caused a “major natural disaster,” it wouldn’t end society. / dslauretta.com

Related: Launch satellites into the sun, travel time, and save humanity in Spaceplan, a charming strategy game for the background of your browser. / YouTube

Related: Launch satellites into the sun, travel time, and save humanity in Spaceplan, a charming strategy game for the background of your browser. / jhollands.co.uk, The Verge

Amidst the Hollywood-heavy PR against the pipeline, mainstream media depict Sioux resistance as quaint and novel, but “the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline is part of a centuries-long indigenous struggle against dispossession and capitalist expansionism.” / ecowatch.com, Jacobin

The Dakota Access Pipeline has been blocked for a total review from the White House. / justice.gov

We clutch to “being rational” as a requirement for our politicians, but it wasn’t always so. Many early activists and feminists including Victoria Woodhull (who ran for president in 1872) were drawn in by the occult and spirits. / thebaffler.com

“‘The women joined arms, and we started saying ‘Water is life!’ A dog came up and bit my leg, and right after that a man came up to us and maced the whole front line,’ Young Bear said.” Journalist Amy Goodman was arrested for criminal trespassing after filming standoff at Native American grave site being dug up by pipeline company. / Indian Country Today

At first glance, BDSM and religion don’t seem to go together. This article is a look into how people reconcile the practice of Christian Domestic Discipline, a form of erotic religious submission that has been called “spanking of Jesus,” and the many misconceptions that frustrate those from practice, chief among them the idea that women who agree are “just brainwashed.” / Aeon

“What are we to make of the fact that one of history’s most successful (and brutal) empires, which held much of the globe in its control for four hundred years, and is responsible for the modern world, was masterminded by an alchemist who spoke to angels in a crystal ball?” Come for the story of how the real-life Gandalf masterminded the British empire, stay for the story of his ill-fated wife swap. / Boing Boing

The connections between anti-racism and climate change awareness are becoming more prominent globally. Last week, Black Lives Matter protesters in London shut down Heathrow, protesting “global environmental problems that are disproportionately confronting black communities.” / The Washington Post

Why do some languages die while other adapt, and what is the pattern to how they adapt? A fascinating interview with linguist Sarah Thomason on these questions and more. / The Paris Review

“It’s more correct to say, for instance, that people living in England developed a new accent than that Americans ‘lost’ their British way of speaking.” Where did the American-British divides originate when it comes to how we speak English? / Atlas Obscura

When did “fuck” go mainstream? The time was the morning of March 3, 1965. The place was Berkeley, Calif. Here’s the story about the moment when our favorite curse word really entered the lexicon. / stronglang.wordpress.com

“Her Láadan lexicon includes an elaborate vocabulary for specifically female bodily experiences: for instance, there’s a set of structurally related verbs with meanings like ‘to menstruate joyfully’, ‘to menstruate painfully’, ‘to menstruate early’ and ‘to menstruate for the first time.’” With all the debate around gendered language and terms, a linguist dives into the history of one of the original women-made languages. / Language: A Feminist Guide

Mental_floss magazine sends TMN’s Rosecrans Baldwin to California City, Calif., the third-largest city by area in America’s third-largest state, and yet most of it barely even qualifies as a ghost town. / Mental_floss

In honor of US Open singles wins this weekend by Angelique Kerber and Stan Wawrinka—surely the only champ to sport a Samuel Beckett tattoo—it’s fun to re-watch this bonkers-good, totally non-topical gem of tennis appreciation, William Klein’s documentary about the 1981 French Open, The French. / The Guardian, Tennis.com, The New York Times

See also: Jon Wertheim’s always valuable 50 parting thoughts, no matter the everything-is-horrible-why-is-it-becoming-more-horrible experience that is Sports Illustrated’s website. / Sports Illustrated

See also: Bienvenue, Racquet Mag! / racquetmag.com

“The cosmos is a hall of mirrors. There is no future out there, only an ancient and unfathomable past, its horizon receding ever faster.” Lovely essay (that’s even good for non-science folks) by Alan Burdick about exoplanets. / The New Yorker

Duke alum Ben Cohen uses statistics to prove wrong UNC’s Rasheed Wallace: apparently the ball does lie, because according to nerds at the Wall Street Journal’s sports desk, there is “virtually no difference in NBA players’ free-throw percentages after poor officiating.” / The Wall Street Journal

Kaepernick’s gesture finds muted but audible echo during 9/11 slate of Sunday NFL: “Two team-wide solidarity displays, only a handful of kneelers.” / ThinkProgress

Kaepernick’s gesture—kneeling, rather than standing at attention, during the national anthem—communicates in symbol, but it can also be understood literally. The anthem’s third and fourth verses, rarely sung, are widely held to indicate Francis Scott Key’s delight in the prospect that winning the War of 1812 would keep the institution of American slavery alive. / The Intercept

“In fact, sports are partially the reason that the national anthem is our national anthem at all. They played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ during the seventh-inning stretch of Game 1 of the 1918 World Series (the final year of World War I) and it became a growing baseball tradition afterwards. Then, in 1931, Herbert Hoover—one of the history’s worst presidents—signed that bill into law that made the official national anthem, thus giving your local sports team carte blanche to drive it into the ground.... They don’t play the anthem before a fucking movie.” The national anthem has become a rote, unnecessary ornament at sporting events. It’s time to ditch it anyways. / Deadspin

Kaepernick’s right to protest has its clear roots in Constitutional law. What’s more interesting is how the justice system shapes the attitude of reverence in American civil religion that Kaepernick and other protesters have violated. / HuffPost, Sports Illustrated

Last week, women’s national soccer team superstar Meghan Rapinoe said she would kneel for the anthem. Her protest was precluded when the owner of her opponent, the host Washington Spirit, ordered the anthem played while the teams were still in the locker room, a move members of the Spirit said they disagreed with and which Rapinoe attributed not only to his racism but also to his homophobia against her outspoken support of LGBT initiatives. / USA Today, dcist.com

Even accepting that, if Vladimir Putin were to design an ideal American presidential candidate, it would be Donald Trump, and that Russia’s soft power arms are strongly pushing a pro-Trump agenda, and that Russian élites have funded Trump’s business ventures for years (as it’s hard for him to get regular bank loans and has to go through the Russian élite’s money launderer of choice), and that many of Trump’s hires have personal ties to pro-Putin figures and organizations, and that Trump just defended Putin in an interview on state-funded Russian television, it is unlikely that Trump is a Russian plant in American politics; he likely would have had extensive successful business dealings with Moscow were that true. / Slate, Politico, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy