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. This is a place few people have ever been, so don’t fret about getting it right, just use the clues and give it a guess, and if you get it right, boast about it in the comments.
As to clues, as you’ll see, the US Air Force is there, so is the BBC, but clearly not very many people. First, the only town:
Can you name this place? 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:
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I don’t want to be grow up to be a podcast host. I don’t want a side hustle. I don’t aspire to write, host, or hear, anything travel related called “(choose a number) best (choose a tourist attraction) in (choose a place).” What I want to do is go places far away and just see what’s up. I have been some places, aspire to visit others, and I enjoy the writing of those who precede me to places off the beaten track. Like Matt Lakeman, whose stories I have been enjoying a lot this week. Try some of these:
Notes on The Gambia
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The story of how chatty underground forest fungal networks communicate has garnered much interest. Is any of it true? Where the ‘Wood-Wide Web’ Narrative Went Wrong
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This may sound odd. Facts are such a familiar part of our mental landscape today that it is difficult to grasp that to the premodern mind they were as alien as a filing cabinet. But the fact is a recent invention. What Was the Fact?
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The Tutti Frutti timepiece, which has no diamonds, is an outrageously expensive watch ($210,000). You would be excused for thinking that anyone who would deign to buy such an object was either a fool or, a more generous assessment, so rich that they like to play a game where they stumble blindfolded into a shopping mall with a tap-enabled credit card just to see what happens. An Earnest Exploration Of Hublot, The World’s Most Polarizing Watch Brand
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In auditory illusion tests, people perceive silence as a form of sound, just as Simon and Garfunkel suggested. Silence Is a ‘Sound’ You Hear, Study Suggests
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I hate the beach. My skin burns and blisters as soon as the sun touches it, I dislike sweating without exercising, and sand makes no sense at all to me—it’s just hot and gritty dirt that other people apparently enjoy rolling around in. So says Lauren Groff: Beware the Luxury Beach Resort
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Equal time: “Iran’s violations of the nuclear agreement are pertinent to the discussion of resolution 2231. However, Iran’s violations can only be understood in the context of U.S. violations of the deal. After all, it was the U.S. that unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018 and reimposed broad-based sanctions in violation of the JCPOA while Iran was in full compliance. Yet, if one listens to the rhetoric of the West — even the U.S. — that context is entirely absent from the discussion.”
A recent UN meeting about the Iran nuclear deal showed how Washington doesn’t live up to the standards it’s constantly preaching. The US and its faux ‘rules-based order’
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Air France-KLM CEO Ben Smith explains (very honestly) how previous management put galleys, bathrooms, and seats in the wrong places. He’s in a multi-year quest to fix these mistakes. The Art of Cabin Configuration
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Compared to Clarence Thomas’s gifts from the richest 1 percent of Nazi memorabilia enthusiasts, the sudden payment of Brett Kavanaugh’s extravagant credit card debts, or Samuel Alito’s propinquity to hedge fund billionaires, apparently the decision to take out loans to get an education is unforgivable. As so often, here the court is symptomatic of a wider elite trend. Don’t become a student, become a millionaire quarterback’s wellness company, because then the government will forgive your loans. The Unforgiven
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Penguins are black and white—everyone knows this—except when they aren’t, like in April, at a place called Punta Tombo. Punta Tombo is a gnarled peninsula in southern Argentina that hosts a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Every September, more than two hundred thousand of them come here to breed. … no matter the outcome of the breeding season, once March and April arrive, every single penguin molts. Magellanic penguins undergo what is called a catastrophic molt, which means they replace all their feathers at the same time. The Molt
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I’m a safecracker but not a criminal. A criminal safecracker needs different knowledge and skills, beyond the technical, that I don’t have or need. I don’t need to know how to avoid leaving evidence, circumvent an alarm system, plan a get-away, or fence-stolen goods. I just open safes. Ken Doyle, Safecracker
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In 1955 ”Rock Around the Clock” went to the top of the charts and turned Bill Haley into the king of rock and roll. Twenty-five years later, he was holed up in a pool house in Harlingen, drunk, lonely, paranoid, and dying. After three decades of silence, his widow and his children tell the story of his years in Texas and his sad final days. Falling Comet
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The answer to this week’s photo quiz is the very volcanic Ascension Island, in the south Atlantic Ocean, home of the BBC Atlantic relay station broadcasting to Africa and South America, and a joint US/British airbase known as Wideawake Airfield, named after a noisy colony of nearby birds.
There are no commercial flights to Ascension, but as of May 2023, scheduled military flights resumed via the South Atlantic Airbridge, which supplies the Falkland Islands, from Brize Norton Airbase near Oxford, England.
There are a few more photos in the Ascension Island Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
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We’ll wrap up the NATO summit, look at the Thai military’s latest power grab, and find out what else just happened, in tomorrow’s week in review.
Happy weekend reading. See you then.
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