You should read this for 12/8/2018:
Art and Film
Ricky Jay does closeup magic that flouts reality. But, rather than headline in Las Vegas, Jay prefers to live in the mysterious world of ancient mountebanks, eccentric entertainers, and sleight-of-hand artists, whose secrets he preserves with a scholarly passion, and who are his true peers in the realm of illusion.
Lara Feigel in The Guardian: How free is free love? How polyamory lost its allure
Getty museum must return 2,000-year-old statue, Italian court rules
Doctor Who backlash shows why it’s time to bin the phrase “politically correct”
Books, Writing, and Language
Education
Should Studying Literature Be Fun?
Food and Drink
Actor Tituss Burgess on His Pinot Noir
History and Archaeology
The boozy and violent story behind America’s Eggnog Riot
Buried among 77 other people from her village in western Sweden are the bones of a 20 year-old woman. Now an analysis of DNA extracted from her teeth reveals what likely killed her. An international team of researchers has discovered the woman, who died some 5,000 years ago, had the oldest known case of the plague.
Ava A Woman from Scotland 4,250 Years Ago
Science and Nature
“We’re sounding the alarm”: half of Canada’s chinook salmon endangered “Only one of the country’s 16 populations is believed to be stable.”
“The really big overarching stressor is climate change,” said Hill. “That’s creating less favourable conditions for our fish in the ocean and the freshwater – and that’s exacerbated by all these other stressors.”
Society
Australia cuts plastic bag use by 80% in 3 months after supermarket ban
It was a rocky start. But three months later Australia reports an 80 percent reduction in plastic bag consumption, a cut that kept as many as 1.5 plastic bags from entering the environment, according to Australia’s National Retail Association.
Technology
Apple Computer’s Tim Cook: ‘We won’t give a platform to violent conspiracy theorists’
The debate as to whether tech platforms should let hate groups or conspiracy theorists remain on their platforms reached a fever pitch this year. That’s when Apple made a statement about conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, removing his InfoWars podcast from iTunes and his app from the App Store.
SubEthaEdit 5 – Now free and open source!
Photolemur photo editor available Thursday in Klingon, reveals Apple leadership to be aliens
💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰
Women’s Work
Michelle Obama’s Take On “Lean In”? “That &#%! Doesn’t Work”
Pay It Forward and Make It Better
A Dutch church has been conducting religious services for 27 days to protect a refugee family
For the past 27 days, a small Protestant church in The Hague has been conducting round-the-clock religious services to protect an Armenian refugee family from deportation.
H/T @/_JDBurroughs_ Inexpensive Mylar blankets could save lives You can buy mylar blankets online very cheaply and they are small and easy to to carry around in a purse or bag to give to any rough sleepers you see.
It could save lives this winter.
Two Women Erased $1.5 Million of Strangers’ Medical Debt Just Because They Felt Like It I’ve posted about this before, but it’s still happening.
