Reading

Hey, thanks so much for coming tonight. I’ve just checked with everyone else at the party, and we’re all in agreement that you behaved really normally and didn’t say anything weird or worrying at all.

Even though your face looks alarmingly like a mole’s in that picture I just tagged you in, at no point in the course of the evening did I look over at you and think, “Wow, she looks like a mole.”

It’s been on my mind and I need to apologize: I’m sorry I didn’t laugh at that joke you made about how your emails should be called “me-mails.” It’s because I was achingly jealous. And just to clarify, re: any other jokes I didn’t laugh at—I didn’t hear them. You were right to repeat the jokes twice.

Let’s hop on a video call this week so you can ask me any questions you have about my offhand comments. I can carve out forty-five minutes to explain what I really meant when I said that thing about your inner child.

[Reassuring platitude.] [Reassuring platitude.] [Reassuring platitude.]

The Bolivian salt flat long touted as a massive looking glass loses some of its shine

The post Earth’s Largest Mirror Shattered by Science appeared first on Nautilus.

Mimicking the charismatic insect’s trick for flashing iridescent blue allows devices to grow ever smaller

The post Butterfly Wings Inspire Barrier-Breaking Nanotech appeared first on Nautilus.

Paramjit Singh is going blind in ICE detention. DHS wants to deport him for a forgery conviction — but they’ve produced no record that one exists.

The post He Has a Green Card and a Brain Tumor. DHS Wants to Deport Him for Forgery With No Proof. appeared first on The Intercept.

Places Charles Johnson’s drawings appeared when he was a young cartoonist:

• A catalog for a magic company
• Mimeographed church bulletins
• The Daily Egyptian
• The Southern Illinoisan

For more than forty years, Charles Johnson has been a fixture on the literary scene in Seattle, along with two other African American writers, both transplants: the late Octavia Butler and the late August Wilson. Like they did, Johnson has produced work his own way, avoiding the expectations that many would impose on a Black writer. This journey of distinction for Johnson began in 1982, with his second published novel, Oxherding Tale, a quasi–slave narrative and rogue’s narrative steeped in both Eastern and Western philosophy. Johnson has since published twenty books, and has received numerous accolades for his work, including the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Middle Passage, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.