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Greetings! If you’re reading this semi-legible note, it means that you’ve royally ticked off King Stenkill the Merciless, and you now find yourself falling at a maximum speed of two hundred miles per hour. As the self-elected mayor and official greeter of this bottomless pit, let me be the first to say welcome to your new home.
Rest assured that the legend is true: the pit is, in fact, bottomless. You need not worry about a quickly approaching dungeon floor on which you’ll pop and splatter like a cantaloupe. Nor will you ever arrive in China, the liquid magma core of the earth, or even hell. Let’s put it this way: if there is a bottom to this thing, we still haven’t found it.
I bet you’re probably a bit peckish. Panic-inducing adrenaline flooding your nervous system will do that. So, feel free to try and grab some of the pigweeds growing out of the walls. Don’t let the name fool you—they taste terrible. Still, pigweed can grow without sunlight, so… win?
But avoid touching the bricks if you want to keep all your fingers.
Genealogy is fun, but it has never been an entirely innocent pastime. The establishment (or fabrication) of pedigrees has been essential to the policing of social and racial hierarchies. The Nazis, however, made it a murderous obsession. A banal family record could be a license for advancement or a death warrant. According to the historian […]
The post The Trouble with Ancestry appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
Like many ’90s kids, I lusted after the panoply of colorful, sugary cereals that were marketed to us in a never-ending parade of cartoon mascots, box-top sweepstakes, and jingles so catchy that, to this day, I remember them more vividly than anything I learned in graduate school. But my mom wasn’t keen on me starting my days with enough sugar to induce a diabetic coma. In our house, both the desperate rabbit and the kids would have been called “silly” for thinking a bowl of Trix constituted a meal.
As an adult, I’ve tried to embrace the wholesome charms of oatmeal, chia seeds, and bran-based cereal, whose primary selling point is its power to induce regular bowel movements. Alas, my true love remains a piping-cold bowl of violently sweet breakfast-in-a-box.
Enter Trader Joe’s Tiny Fruity Cuties. Call it a moment of weakness. Call it an attempt at a middle ground between the hedonist pleasures of General Mills and the bland virtues of Bob’s Red Mill. Just don’t call it a comeback.
My grandmother had the theory that, as we get older, our mind subconsciously cleanses our memories of a myriad misfortunes, leaving a sanitised version of the past for us to feel nostalgic about. The optimism of remembrance, she called it. Little did she know that her reasonable hypothesis would, one day, become the climate change […]
The post What’s behind this summer’s unnaturally huge Greek forest fires – UNHERD appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles staked their credibility on defeating dissent over AUKUS. It was not much of a gamble.
The post Labor conference endorses Albanese’s conservative agenda and military build-up first appeared on Solidarity Online.
Why we need to study the microbiology of disasters.
The post The Invisible Impacts of Calamities appeared first on Nautilus.
A young scientist’s quest to transform a dying way of life.
The post The Last of the Fungus appeared first on Nautilus.