On Fridays I suggest worthwhile weekend reading that’s guaranteed to improve your posture, your online dating prospects, and make you an all around better person. Read a dozen articles, lose five pounds.
First, our weekly photo quiz. Consider these five photos. You’d be right to think this looks pretty much like any ordinary European country. Clue: There’s one pretty big thing that sets it apart.
Can you name this country? Give it a guess, and the answer is at the end of this post.
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Now, a few suggestions for your weekend reading:
One October morning in 2004, a woman took the lift to the 21st floor of an office block in north-west London, bought a coffee in the cafe there – then opened a window and jumped out. No one knew who she was. The Wembley Point mystery: who was the woman who jumped to her death?
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Full of implicit rules and paradoxes, sulking is a marvellous example of intense communication without clear declaration. The joy of sulk
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Why does the quantum world behave in that strange, spooky way? Here’s our simple, four-step explanation (no magic needed). Untangling Entanglement
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“Like in Seoul, and Lima, everyone in Hanoi has a gig or two or three, hustling from here to there, hawking this or that. The guy who runs the cafe where I get my morning coffee, also sells parking spots for mopeds, sim cards for phones, and if a customer wants something that’s not on his menu, will dash to a nearby stand and get it.” Generosity, happiness, and spiritual emptiness. Walking Hanoi (part 1)
This article comes with lots and lots of pictures.
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Kraft Singles cannot legally be called American cheese, or even “cheese food,” due to being made with milk protein concentrate and consisting of less than 51 percent actual cheese. The company itself refers to the product as a “pasteurized prepared cheese product.” The founders of New School cheese say they are making the first “quality” American cheese. The Next Generation of American Cheese
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Paavo Erkki Arhinmäki is Helsinki Deputy Mayor for Culture and Leisure. The Helsinki mayor who got caught spraying graffiti: ‘I painted GCM – great career moves – which is ironic’
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An Excerpt from ‘Assignment China’ by Mike Chinoy Covering Tiananmen
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Only 2.1% of Northern Ireland's population was born in the South, and only 1.3% of the Republic of Ireland's population was born in the North. Five Lessons from the Partition of Ireland
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Over the last five decades, we’ve burned enough coal, gas and oil, cut down enough trees, and produced enough other emissions to trap some six billion Hiroshima bombs’ worth of heat inside the climate system. Shockingly, though, only 1 percent of that heat has ended up in the atmosphere. What’s Happening in the Ocean, and Why It Matters to You and Me
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Clever AI-aided Denmark tourism ad:
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Why was the technology that’s supposed to make tasks frictionless actually making everything more complicated and annoying, both for employees and for customers? Why were there perfectly nice, perfectly capable humans in front of me who couldn’t actually help me? This Summer Has Been a Travel Nightmare. Technology Isn’t Helping.
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During World War II, in the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history took place outside the small village of Prohorovka, Russia. About nine hundred Russian tanks attacked an equal number of German tanks fighting at close range. When Hitler ordered a cease-fire, 300 German tanks remained strewn over the battlefield. Is the Ukrainian offensive another Kursk?
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PHOTO QUIZ ANSWER: The one thing that sets this country apart is that it’s defending itself against invasion in the largest land war in Europe since World War II. The answer to this week’s photo quiz is Ukraine. The top two photos are the Dnieper River at Kyiv, then Kyiv’s Maidan, and the bottom two photos are from Odesa. The Kyiv photos are from 2019 and Odesa, 2013. There are quite a few more photos in the Ukraine Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Tomorrow we’ll look back at the week just past: some dirty business in Thailand, elections in England, what’s up with everybody’s favorite president, Serdar Berdymukhamedov, we’ve got climate and travel news and all sorts of other stuff. Here, tomorrow.
Happy weekend reading. See you then.
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