1. What even a little tiny bit of metadata can say.
"Mayer and his team showed that participants called public numbers of 'Alcoholics Anonymous, gun stores, NARAL Pro-Choice, labor unions, divorce lawyers, sexually transmitted disease clinics, a Canadian import pharmacy, strip clubs, and much more.' The researchers were even surprised that they had real-world results to support a classic nightmare scenario feared by many civil libertarians and privacy activists."
2. Playing Nabokov.
"This article considers different experiences available to the reader of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire by exploring the novel through concepts familiar from videogaming, such as the warp, the glitch, and the Let’s Play, developing particular parallels with the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. All of these potential modes of experience are comprised in the playerly text, which serves as a conduit linking together a work’s past, present, and future readers."
3. The Gervais Principle: The Office as Management Theory.
"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."
4. When food marketing was about getting people not to eat it.
"The Russian economy simply wasn’t equipped both to fight a war and feed its citizens. Young men left the countryside in droves after being conscripted into the army, severely cutting the available labor force and slowing agricultural production. Inflation as a result of the war then made it impossible for the remaining farmers to make a profit on their goods. No one could afford to grow food, and few could afford to buy enough of it. Food then became a prominent subject in Russian propaganda. The Harry Ransom Center is home to the diverse collection of Kuharet’s Russian World War I posters. A surprising number of these prints pertain to food: specifically food that has been personified as evil. Even the act of eating food is portrayed as unpleasant—something that would likely have been incomprehensible to the starving nation."
5. An attempt to ecologically engineer the Colorado delta back into existence.
"On 23 March, operators at the Morelos Dam along the US–Mexico border near Yuma, Arizona, will open the gates and begin releasing water downstream. The goal is to dampen broad swathes of the arid Colorado River delta for the first time in decades, allowing new cottonwood and willow trees to germinate and restore small patches of riparian habitat. The move, which follows bitter international battles over water rights, will mark the first time that the United States and Mexico have put water back into the parched riverbed for environmental purposes. It is both a practical and a symbolic victory for conservationists who have fought to restore what was once 800,000 hectares of lush wetlands, as well as a rare opportunity for ecologists worldwide to watch what happens."
Today's 1957 American English Usage Tip
averse, aversion. To insist on from as the only right preposition after these, in spite of the more general use of to (What cat's averse to fish?—Gray. He had been averse to extreme courses.—Macaulay. Nature has put into man an aversion to misery.—Locke) is one of the pedantries that spring of little knowledge. Although many of the older writers used from (Donne, Walton, Locke), to has also been used since the 17th c. (Walton, Boyle). In modern usage to is much more prevalent.
Sorry your newsletter is late! I had a big story that required all-day focus. The piece comes out tomorrow. It's kind of the history of a building, but it's also about what ghosts of the city will haunt the tech companies that set up shop in San Francisco.
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Such as the Warp, the Glitch, and the Let’s Play
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