-
Sarah Jessica Parker shares her experience as a Booker Prize judge
Sarah Jessica Parker shares her experience as a Booker Prize judge. As someone who reads a lot, this part is validating.
For me as a reader, the idea of not finishing a book, I just really, really struggle with. But with the Booker, you sort of have to adopt a brutality, because if you’re on Page 110 and you’re waiting for the book to rise ….
Occasionally when I would be reading something, I would reach out to Roddy [Doyle, the judging panel chairman] and say, “Have you touched on this book yet? Here are my feelings about it, but it’s possible I’m spot-on wrong.” And he would write back on WhatsApp and say, “You’re not, I just put that book down, too.”
-
100 years ago, an all-Black team beat the KKK on a baseball diamond
100 years ago, an all-Black team beat the KKK on a baseball diamond.
The Monrovians’ game against the KKK might have been set in motion by an open invitation that the Black team had announced in the Wichita Eagle three weeks earlier, saying they were “open for games with any team in Kansas,” according to a 2008 story by the Society of American Baseball Research.
The game, which took place 11 years before Jesse Owens would shatter the myth of white supremacy by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Nazi Olympics, provided a less-noticed dent, with the Monrovians winning, 10-8.
There was little coverage of it in the press. “Monrovians Beat K.K.K.,” ran the headline in the Wichita Eagle, in a story that was just two sentences long: “The Wichita Monrovians won from the K.K.K. team in a close and interesting baseball battle at Island Park, Sunday 10 to 8. A good sized crowd watched the colored team win the contest.”
-
Smoking on screen with Cigfluencers
While, it never went away completely, smoking in movies and television shows is making a comeback. Combined with social media “Cigfluencers”, GenZ appears to be romanticizing cigarette smoking.
Dua’s photos became the first post on “Cigfluencers,” which is dedicated to showcasing stars — in archival photos and current snapshots — with cigarettes in hand. Not every celeb who smokes makes the cut, though. Oviatt, who is 26, carefully curates the vibe of the Instagram grid to his taste. He says the account feels like an extension of a blog post he wrote, in which he asked: “Is smoking only cool if you’re hot?” just a few days before “Cigfluencers” launched.
Both that question and the account’s growth — it now has more than 450 posts and 82,000 followers — illustrate how smoking has quietly slipped back into Western pop culture in recent years and is gaining traction with Gen Z.
-
A roof paint blocks 97% of sunlight and pulls water from the air
A roof paint blocks 97% of sunlight and pulls water from the air.
Researchers at the University of Sydney and commercial start-up Dewpoint Innovations have created a nano-engineered polymer coating that not only reflects up to 97% of the sun’s rays, but also passively collects water. In tests, it was able to keep indoors up to 6 °C (~11 °F) cooler than the air outside.
That temperature differential results in water vapor condensing on the surface – like the fogging on a cold mirror – producing a steady trickle of droplets.
In trials on the roof of the Sydney Nanoscience Hub, the coating captured dew more than 30% of the year, generating as much as 390 mL of water per square meter (roughly 13 fluid ounces per 10.8 square feet) daily. This might not sound like a lot, but a 12-sq-m (about 129-sq-ft) section of treated roof could produce around 4.7 L (around 1.25 US gallons) of water per day under optimal conditions.
-
Clever use of light and dark mode
Almost any modern web application or desktop application offers near the ability to switch between light and dark mode. In Common With applies this in a clever way when displaying a page of lamps.
-
Defying roller coaster tycoon gravity
YouTuber, Tube Cody, created a video of a pair of roller coasters in Rollercoaster Tycoon synchronized to Wicked’s, Defying Gravity. Stick with it until at least a 2 1/2 minute mark.
-
Life in Russia isn’t all that great
Two American families moved to Russia, and are finding out it’s really not all that good of a place.
But things weren’t hunky dory. In videos since deleted but viewed by NBC News, the family was distraught when Huffman, instead of being able to use his welding skills in a special engineering division of the Russian army, was sent to the frontlines of the Russia-Ukraine war. At one point, a rumor spread online that Huffman had been killed. Last month, DeAnna Huffman, who took over the family’s YouTube channel while her husband was in the army, revealed that he had survived and returned from the frontlines. Derek Huffman uploaded a video of himself celebrating his daughter’s birthday and claimed he was on “vacation” from the Russian Army.
Right wing media is poison.
-
Inside the Great British Bake Off
During the next couple of months, I inched closer to the show. I cleared interviews with home economists who quizzed me on the finer points of baking technique—how to tell when a meringue was done cooking, or how to get a thin, shattering crust on a loaf of bread. Next were screen tests, a first date with the camera. Toward the end, in-person baking trials. These days, it’s not until the thousands of applicants have been whittled to a final hundred that anyone even tastes the bakes. “The best amateur bakers in the country” is the line, although I get the sense that even the producers don’t fully buy this. Throughout the process, we were encouraged to practice, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, to get up to speed with things outside the amateur repertoire of biscuits and cakes. If any of us were truly skilled at baking, it was often because we had sought out “Bake Off,” not the other way around.
