(no subject)

[conuly]

New type of soft, growing robot created

On Teaching, but Not Loving, Jane Austen

The 19th-Century Lithuanians Who Smuggled Books to Save Their Language

When Young Chinese Ask, ‘What’s Your Sign?’ They Don’t Mean Dragon or Rat

How Checkers Was Solved

'Super Producer' Donates Gallons of Her Breast Milk to Feed Other People's Kids

Balls Out: The Weird Story of the Great Truck Nuts War

The Lonely Lives of Dolphin Lice

Lemon juice has long come in containers shaped like lemons.

When Girls Studied Planets and the Skies Had No Limits

A Search for the Flavor of a Beloved Childhood Medicine

North Dakota’s Norway Prison Experiment

What's It Really Like To Work In A Prison Goat Milk Farm? We Asked Inmates (The issue isn't the work, it's the pay. Pay them actual minimum wage. If you don't want them to use that money, require them to save most of it for when they are released. Even if you don't want to pay them, it seems obvious that not doing so drives down everybody else's wages.)

Cooling the tube – Engineering heat out of the Underground

The Kitten Rental Program is Saving Lives (It's all in the marketing ♥)

When New York City Rioted Over Hamlet Being Too British

Sean Spicer stole a mini-fridge from White House staffers (One can only hope they are now able to reclaim it.)

In South Sudan, a child soldier long thought dead comes back

Schumer, Gillibrand Co-Sponsor Senate Bill That Would Make Boycotting Israel A Felony (Oh, ffs. You can have a perfectly rational reason for criticizing specific policies taken by the Israeli government without hating or even disliking: Jews, Israelis, and/or the modern nation-state of Israel. And I voted for these people! Oh, uh... don't read the comments. Sheesh.)

Israel's struggle to integrate ultra-Orthodox and Arabs raises economic fears

Disabled and disdained: In rural America, some towns are divided between those who work and those who don’t

For Ethiopia’s Underemployed Youth, Life Can Center on a Leaf

How smugglers use trucks with sometimes deadly results

Protecting our children from climate change might take more than just cutting emissions

Comments

[luscious_purple]

I'm very proud of the book smugglers! I've no idea what role my Lithuanian ancestors played in it, but I'm grateful that Lithuania did not become extinct.

[conuly]

: )

[siderea]

On Teaching, but Not Loving, Jane Austen

As my research interests have changed, and as I’ve realized the scope of 19th-century texts that took up the question of transatlantic slavery and the movements to abolish it, I haven’t read Austen the same way. I can appreciate her skill but feel an urgent need to teach and write about these other stories. With Austen as, often, the primary literary lens into her time period, it can be all too easy to forget how deeply invested English culture was not only in curtailing women’s choices, but also in enslaving millions of people. No matter how sparkling the wit of Austen and her characters, no matter the pleasure of the familiar texts, I want to spend my time and energy elsewhere, in another historical Britain, with authors like Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, and Amelia Opie who grappled directly with the more pressing social issues of their time—not because I agree with or love the stories they tell, but because those stories show the fuller range of British culture in the 1800s.

*stands and applauds* OMG, this is the (okay, a) problem I had with Novik's Temeraire novels, which literally concern the ownership of sentient beings at the very time in British history abolition was a major political controversy, and she doesn't address it once (at least not through the third novel, which IIRC is the last one I read.)

[conuly]

And you'd think they would, being published now instead of then. I mean, it's something people expect to see in more-or-less sorta historical fiction, isn't it?

[stardreamer]

I noticed that David Ham, the asshole con-man in the truck nuts story, actually has a brother named Kenneth. Would that by any chance be the same Ken Ham who built the con-job "Creationist Museum"? If not that's a helluva coincidence.

[conuly]

Probably not? Ken Ham's Australian, isn't he?