I hope you all are having a restful start to the New Year. Here are a few stories that stood out to me in the past year. This is the sixteenth roundup — past editions can be view here: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The New York Times: A Victory Comes at Last for the World’s Worst Soccer Team

A brief and heartwarming sports moment — trivial but checked a few boxes of things I love.

Take a look at the men’s world soccer rankings. At the top, you will find the giants of the sport, Argentina, France and Spain.

Then descend, past good teams like the United States and Australia, past decent teams like Honduras and Armenia. Keep going, past Mongolia and Djibouti. Even past the tiny island nations like Guam and Anguilla. And at the very bottom, below all of them, you will find San Marino, ranked 210th and last.

When you are the worst team in soccer, you lose. A lot.

San Marino had not won a men’s soccer game since 2004. And that game was a friendly match. The team had been playing official competitive games since 1990 and had never won.

Until this week. San Marino beat Liechtenstein (ranked 199th) on Thursday, 1-0, finally getting a victory, which was played in San Marino before fewer than 1,000 fans.

“We had a great performance,” said Dante Rossi, 37, a defender for San Marino who had never before tasted the thrill of winning at this level. “To beat Liechtenstein has been an incredible joy. It is complicated to find the right words to describe the massive emotions we felt.”

4) University of California, Davis: Carnivorous Squirrels Documented in California

I, for one, welcome our new squirrel overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted photographer, I can be helpful in continuing to share their antics online.

A ground squirrel with cheeks stuffed with nuts, seeds or grains, is a common sight. But a new study provides the first evidence that California ground squirrels also hunt, kill and eat voles. The study, led by the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the University of California, Davis, is the first to chronicle widespread carnivorous behavior among squirrels.

Published in the Journal of Ethology, the study fundamentally changes our understanding of ground squirrels. It suggests that what was considered a granivorous species actually is an opportunistic omnivore and more flexible in its diet than previously assumed.

3) Associated Press: Montana man gets 6 months in prison for cloning giant sheep and breeding it

Just when you think you scratched the surface of the rich tapestry of the human experience, you learn there are people out there illegally creating giant sheep for trophy hunting.

An 81-year-old Montana man was sentenced Monday to six months in federal prison for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in Central Asia and the U.S. to create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris said he struggled to come up with a sentence for Arthur “Jack” Schubarth of Vaughn, Montana. He said he weighed Schubarth’s age and lack of a criminal record with a sentence that would deter anyone else from trying to “change the genetic makeup of the creatures” on the earth. […]

“I will have to work the rest of my life to repair everything I’ve done,” Schubarth told the judge just before sentencing.

Schubarth’s attorney, Jason Holden, said cloning the giant Marco Polo sheep hunted in Kyrgyzstan in 2013 has ruined his client’s “life, reputation and family.”

“I think this has broken him,” Holden said.

2) Associated Press: The benefits of a four-day workweek according to a champion of the trend

Brief and thought provoking interview about rethinking the standard work week and the potential to increase productivity by allowing people to rest and recover.

Q: What kinds of work could potentially be dropped to increase productivity?

A: Meetings. We are addicted to meetings. It’s just gotten worse and worse since the pandemic. I think a lot of that comes from a culture of indecisiveness. There’s a sense of not wanting to make decisions, and therefore delaying the process or involving many people in the process so that everyone has a responsibility, and thus no one has responsibility. And that is not good when it comes to the greater issue of productivity.

1) The New York Times: Dragons and Sharks on a Beach Near You: The Story of the Great Lego Spill

An exploration of the many facets and cascading effects of some shipping containers lost at sea. There’s whimsy, community and nostalgia. There is also a deeper issue of environmental pollution — what is out there when we’re not charmed by the plastic shapes and colors.

On a miserable, drizzly day in late June, Hayley Hardstaff, a marine biologist, took a walk along Portwrinkle Beach in Cornwall, England, and discovered a dragon. It was a Lego piece — black, plastic and missing its upper jaw.

Ms. Hardstaff, who grew up in Cornwall, had a long history of finding Lego pieces. As a child there, she collected them from the beach, puzzled about why so many children were forgetting their toys.

By the time she went walking last June, she knew much more, and quickly recognized the scaly head and neck poking out of the sand, “its entire dragonhood on display.”

Here’s the fifteenth of my roundup of my favorite stories from the past year.

Previous selections are here: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The New Yorker: When Trucks Fly

An exploration of the skill, culture and community around Monster Jam.

Eichelberger, in a truck named ThunderROARus, zoomed down the elevated dirt ramp and flew so far over the row of nine trucks that the vehicle rammed into a barrier at the edge of the field. Eichelberger was fine—he got out and saluted the crowd. Meents looked elated. I couldn’t help but feel a little underwhelmed. I’d seen a version of this a few times now—a big truck flying high and far. How quickly we desire more. This was Monster Jam’s trap: a never-before-seen trick can happen only once. Awe is a hard thing to maintain.

Maybe it was the premeditation. During the freestyle, a driver named Todd Leduc, who drove Megalodon, a truck that looks like a shark, took off for a ramp without warning and pulled the biggest backflip most people had ever seen. He went maybe fifty feet in the air. He seemed out of control. This wasn’t entirely true—when airborne, drivers can speed up their rotation by spinning the tires, or slow it down by pressing the brakes. “If we had wings, we’d fly out of the building,” Kenny told me. When Leduc reached his apex, I thought he would over-rotate and crash into the ground roof first. But he tapped the brakes, and slammed down flat on the tires. A guy in the stands turned shrill: “WHAT?!? HOLY MOTHERF****** S***!” This was what we’d come to see: we’d spent an entire day in the heat and the rain, a little bored, in the hope that a twelve-thousand-pound fibreglass shark might briefly ascend toward space. Who in the crowd could imagine what it felt like to be in Leduc’s seat?

4) Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville home filled with ‘explosive materials’ will be burned down after investigation

Not an uplifting tale, but one I could not look away from. A former chemist was arrested for hoarding dangerous chemicals in his home and the local government thought the “safest way to proceed” would be to burn everything down. [Fortunately the EPA intervened and carefully removed the chemicals instead of releasing them into the environment and community.]

Last week, Louisville Metro Police and federal agents investigated a Highview man’s home after being informed that he had homemade explosives. Now, city officials are taking additional action.

At a press conference Tuesday morning, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg declared a state of emergency as Metro Code Enforcement personnel prepare to demolish the home and its attached garage.

3) Read Max: True Life: For reasons I don’t fully understand I bought hundreds of Cold War-era military slides on eBay

An impeccable tale of one poor sap’s scanning odyssey in pursuit of America’s hidden military presentation history. It is worth viewing the full collection and I will tempt you to click with the solitary footnote:

The actual scanning process is elaborate and time-consuming as an occult rite. At first I had hoped the (very expensive) flatbed photo scanner at the local library, which could process 15 slides at a time and would cost me zero dollars to use, would be more than sufficient. This was foolish: I convinced myself the results were slightly blurry and unsuitable for my audience of completely imaginary people who cared about what I was up to. Instead, I opted to buy a used Plustek OpticFilm 7600i SE, a bread loaf-sized device made specifically for scanning mounted slides—one at a time. Before you even press a button, each requires a careful dusting with a brush, perhaps a puff of compressed air, and even a ginger microfiber rub-down. Although one archivist reassured me that I “won’t hurt the film physically unless you pour acid on it or light it on fire,” I handle each like a treasure. Once cleaned, the scanning software will, very, very slowly, turn the tiny photograph inside into a TIFF image file, a digital image format created back when some of these slides were. This required hours of carefully calibrating the scanning app’s settings, a process akin to communing with an angry spirit, sinking me into delirium as I tried to figure out whether I’m the first human in the history of the species to be able to tell the difference between a photo scanned at 3600 versus 4000 DPI. In search of answers, if not peace, I’ve scoured endless Reddit threads, long-forgotten early aughts message boards filled with Germans arguing about image sensors, memorized university library resources, and sat patiently through YouTube tutorials. But as tedious as this sounds, the tedium has only begun when you hit “scan.”

2) Bloomberg Businessweek: The Gambler Who Beat Roulette

I will be shocked if this isn’t turned into a feature film.

One spring evening, two men and a woman walked into the Ritz Club casino, an upmarket establishment in London’s West End. Security officers in a back room logged their entry and watched a grainy CCTV feed as the trio strolled past high gilded arches and oil paintings of gentlemen posing in hats. Casino workers greeted them with hushed reverence.

The security team paid particularly close attention to one of the three, their apparent leader. Niko Tosa, a Croatian with rimless glasses balanced on the narrow ridge of his nose, scanned the gaming floor, attentive as a hawk. He’d visited the Ritz half a dozen times over the previous two weeks, astounding staff with his knack for roulette and walking away with several thousand pounds each time. A manager would later say in a written statement that Tosa was the most successful player he’d witnessed in 25 years on the job. No one had any idea how Tosa did it. The casino inspected a wheel he’d played at for signs of tampering and found none.

1) Atmos Magazine: In the Dead of Night, a Deafening War

A wonderful deep dive into the brutal and beautiful evolutionary innovation of the 60 million year old war between bats and moths.

Corcoran, a biologist at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, just set the stage for one of nature’s oldest wars: bats versus moths. What’s to follow is a battle featuring echolocation, chemical defense, sonar jamming, stealth pursuit, and acoustic illusions, all piling on in an earsplitting, ultrasonic din—earsplitting, at least, if you have ultrasonic microphones to tune in.

“All this stuff is happening every night in everybody’s backyard,” said Dr. Nick Dowdy, a biologist at the Milwaukee Public Museum. “We just can’t hear it.”

Happy New Year! This is my fourteenth edition of my favorite stories from the previous year.

Previous selections are here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The New York Times: Love Triangle Challenges Reign of Japan’s Monkey Queen

A wonderful and brief window into some drama in a simian society.

​​The Japanese macaque, also known as the snow monkey, is a highly intelligent species native to Japan. It is well known for its beet-red bottom and affinity for soaking in hot springs.

While many animals, including bees, hyenas and elephants, live in female-led societies, a hostile takeover by a female “is very rare in Japanese macaque society, and only a few cases have been reported in the history of primatology,” Yu Kaigaishi, a research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, said in an email.

4) The Atlantic: The Economic Principle That Helps Me Order at Restaurants

An overly academic analysis of the reasoning to order many plates to share.

People with high levels of openness might be more into sharing food, so that they can sample more dishes. That is definitely me when I go to a restaurant—personally, what I truly want, and I am admittedly a weirdo, is two to three bites of everything on the menu.

Paul Freedman, a historian at Yale and the author of Ten Restaurants That Changed America, told me that centuries ago, Chinese emperors would occasionally have banquets in which a couple hundred dishes would be served, and that at one abundant royal feast in 15th-century England, dozens of species of fish were served. Those preposterous spreads are basically my dream, but because I cannot live like a monarch of old, I will settle for sharing a far more modest number of dishes with my dining companions. (An important clarification: I am not arguing in favor of what restaurants call small plates, which are invariably expensive and insubstantial. I want normal-size plates, and I want to share them.)

3) The Washington Post: How not to talk with Africa about climate change

The president of Nigeria shares a critical perspective for global climate discussions.

The Western countries are unable to take politically difficult decisions that hurt domestically. Instead, they move the problem offshore, essentially dictating that the developing world must swallow the pill too bitter for their own voters’ palates. Africa didn’t cause the mess, yet we pay the price. At this year’s COP, that should be the starting point for all negotiations.

2) The New York Times Magazine: Could I Survive the ‘Quietest Place on Earth’?

Caity Weaver is one of my favorite writers and I’m glad she checked this out so I don’t have to.

In a leafy Minneapolis neighborhood under a thick cloak of ivy stands a modest concrete building. Contained within the building is silence exceeding the bounds of human perception. This hush is preserved in a small room, expensively engineered to be echoless. Certain people find the promise of such quiet irresistible; it entices them, like a soundless siren call, to visit the building at great personal cost. The room of containment, technically an “anechoic chamber,” is the quietest place on the planet — according to some. According to others, it’s more like the second-quietest. It is quieter than any place most people will ever go, unless they make a point of going to multiple anechoic chambers over the course of a lifetime.

What happens to people inside the windowless steel room is the subject of wild and terrible speculation. Public fascination with the room exploded 10 years ago, with an article on The Daily Mail’s website. “The Longest Anyone Can Bear Earth’s Quietest Place is 45 Minutes,” The Mail declared. The story left readers to extrapolate their own conclusions about why this was so from the short, haunting observations of the room’s soft-spoken proprietor, Steven J. Orfield, of Orfield Laboratories.

1) The Washington Post: Cutting-edge tech made this tiny country a major exporter of food

An article on the incredible agricultural technology in Netherlands was my favorite in 2017 and I just can’t help but be fascinated again.

The rallying cry in the Netherlands started two decades ago, as concern mounted about its ability to feed its 17 million people: Produce twice as much food using half as many resources.

The country, which is a bit bigger than Maryland, not only accomplished this feat but also has become the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind the United States. Perhaps even more significant in the face of a warming planet: It is among the largest exporters of agricultural and food technology. The Dutch have pioneered cell-cultured meat, vertical farming, seed technology and robotics in milking and harvesting — spearheading innovations that focus on decreased water usage as well as reduced carbon and methane emissions.

Hello again and happy New Year!

My blog updates are now quite sparse since I have new responsibilities, but I’d like to at least continue one tradition: starting a new year with some stories that stuck with me from the old year.

Thank you for stopping by and you can read previous editions here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The Wall Street Journal: Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show

A maddening investigation showing the harmful impacts of social media design and Facebook’s refusal to address them — all based on internal research.

For the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.

“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.

“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.

4) The New York Times: Peter Warner, 90, Seafarer Who Discovered Shipwrecked Boys, Dies

I started reading more obituaries in 2021 and this fellow sounds like quite a character. I also wasn’t familiar with the (incredibly positive!) true story that inspired Lord of the Flies.

Peter Raymond Warner was born on Feb. 22, 1931, in Melbourne, Australia, to Arthur George Warner and Ethel (Wakefield) Warner. Arthur Warner was one of the country’s wealthiest men, having built a manufacturing and media empire, and he expected his son to follow him in the family business.

But Peter was uninterested; he preferred boxing and sailing, and at 17 he ran away from home to join a ship’s crew. When he returned a year later, his father made him go to law school at the University of Melbourne.

He lasted six weeks. He ran away again, this time to sail for three years on Swedish and Norwegian ships. Quick with languages, he learned enough Swedish to pass the master mariner’s exam, allowing him to captain even the largest seagoing vessels.

3) The New Yorker: Could the Teen Magazine Rise Again?

An interesting and hopeful read about the future of structured content for teens with a focus on community and the challenge of fighting algorithms that teach kids what’s trending is true.

[…] instead of hearing misinformation from a friend, teens are listening to strangers in California with millions of followers (and perceived credibility) on TikTok. At such a formative age, young people “need some really solid guidance, and the last place they want to get it is their parents,” she said. “Who are they turning to? For my child, it scares the shit out of me who she’s turning to.” During Rubenstein’s Seventeen years, she and the staff “wanted to make sure everything in the magazine was right, that it made sense,” she said. “It went through a really serious vetting process. That is gone. These children do not have access to any vetting, you know? No one’s vetting their TikTok videos.” (See: the nutmeg challenge.)

2) The New York Times: Man Gets 4 Years in $126 Million Printer Toner Fraud

I’m not surprised fraud festered in the printer toner market, which is already known for ludicrous pricing, but this story stuck with me due to the scale of the situation and the puns.

In announcing the arrest of Mr. Michaels and 20 other people accused of being connected to the scheme in 2016, the Huntington Beach Police Department in California called it “Operation Tone It Down.” The authorities said at the time that Mr. Michaels had previously received court warnings about deceptive telemarketing practices.

TonerNews.com, a website devoted to writing about printing supplies, called Mr. Michaels “the California toner pirate godfather” in a post on Sunday. Mr. Michaels’s lawyer scoffed at the moniker.

1) The New York Times: Paris Teenager’s New Gig: Would-Be Queen of Italy. A Nation Shrugs.

This story has everything. Regal altercations, a fencing romance, murder from a yacht, an LA food truck and a thoroughly disinterested Italian public.

While Vittoria’s father in Monte Carlo and mother in Paris were as delighted as her grandparents in Gstaad about her ascension to the top of Italy’s would-be royal family, a rival branch of Savoias were not pleased. Not at all.

“Totally illegitimate,” said Prince Aimone di Savoia Aosta, a cousin and rival claimant, who works as an executive for the Pirelli tire company in Moscow.

And so began the latest chapter in an ongoing dynastic dispute between the pretenders to Italy’s pretend throne. There are bitter feelings, thrown punches, warring noble committees, dukedom politics and as of last month, Vittoria’s ascending social media status.

What there is not is an actual crown to fight over.

Happy New Year!

While 2020 was one of my sparsest years of blog post production, I’m determined to improve in 2021. In that spirit, I’m keeping up my annual tradition of kicking off the year with a selection of my favorite stories from the past year. Thanks for reading and you can check out previous editions here: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) U.S. Energy Information Administration: U.S. renewable energy consumption surpasses coal for the first time in over 130 years

I must admit I’m not a regular reader of EIA.gov, but I was encouraged and interested when I saw this news about coal’s continued expiration. It’s certainly worth clicking through to see the charts and full methodology.

In 2019, U.S. annual energy consumption from renewable sources exceeded coal consumption for the first time since before 1885, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Monthly Energy Review. This outcome mainly reflects the continued decline in the amount of coal used for electricity generation over the past decade as well as growth in renewable energy, mostly from wind and solar. Compared with 2018, coal consumption in the United States decreased nearly 15%, and total renewable energy consumption grew by 1%.

Historically, wood was the main source of U.S. energy until the mid-1800s and was the only commercial-scale renewable source of energy in the United States until the first hydropower plants began producing electricity in the 1880s. Coal was used in the early 1800s as fuel for steam-powered boats and trains and making steel, and it was later used to generate electricity in the 1880s. EIA’s earliest energy estimates began in 1635.

4) The New York Times: Cookie Monster Mural Puzzles Artist and Enrages Property Owner

I love a mysterious and whimsical prank so this story pushed all the right buttons for me.

The man said his name was Nate and he wanted Mr. Hawkins, a local artist, to paint an enormous Soviet-style mural of Cookie Monster — the voracious, pastry-loving “Sesame Street” creature — and three Russian words on a commercial building in Peoria, Ill.

When the job was done over Thanksgiving weekend, the man paid in full and Mr. Hawkins, 33, proudly displayed the mural on his Facebook page.

But Mr. Hawkins learned C can also be for Caper.

3) ProPublica: The Black American Amputation Epidemic

A grim and gripping investigation about the racial disparities in amputations.

TWO MAPS EXPLAIN why Fakorede has stayed in the Mississippi Delta. One shows America’s amputations from vascular disease. The second shows the enslaved population before the Civil War; he saw it at a plantation museum and was stunned by how closely they tracked. On his phone, he pulls up the images, showing doctors, or history buffs, or anyone who will listen. “Look familiar?” he asks, toggling between the maps. He watches the realization set in that amputations are a form of racial oppression, dating back to slavery.

2) The New York Times: Who Was ‘El Padrino,’ Godfather to Drug Cartel? Mexico’s Defense Chief, U.S. Says

An incredible story of corruption at the very top of government. It’s a story that continues to unfold and the latest developments are just as wild.

American law enforcement agents were listening in as Mexican cartel members chattered on a wiretap, talking about a powerful, shadowy figure known as El Padrino, or The Godfather.

Agents had been closing in on him for months, suspecting that this central figure in the drug trade was a high-ranking official in the Mexican military.

All of a sudden, one of the people under surveillance told his fellow cartel members that El Padrino happened to be on television at that very moment. The agents quickly checked to see who it was — and found it was the Mexican secretary of defense, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, according to four American officials involved in the investigation.

1) The New York Times: He Was a Stick, She Was a Leaf; Together They Made History

My absolute favorite story of the year — a well-written and entertaining write-up of an easily-missed scientific breakthrough.

Even if someone could distinguish a leaf insect from its arboreal brethren, there is an almost zero chance the insect would be in the company of its mate, let alone in flagrante delicto. Whereas the winged males flit from tree to tree, the flightless females spend their entire lives high up in the canopy, out of reach and sight, swaying in the breeze as leaves will do. “By chance, one might be blown out of a tree,” Mr. Cumming said.

Here are a few of the articles from the past year that I found especially interesting. I’ve kept up this tradition for a while and you can catch up on previous editions here: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The Guardian: The Aldi effect: how one discount supermarket transformed the way Britain shops

The brothers had always kept a low profile, but the success of their business did not go unnoticed. In December 1971, while preparing to drive home from work, Theo was kidnapped at gunpoint. His abductors were an unlikely pair: a convicted burglar nicknamed Diamond Paul and his lawyer, who had gambling debts. At first they were unsure that the ordinary looking man in the ill-fitting suit was really their target, and demanded to see Theo’s identification documents. The men kept him hidden in a wardrobe in Dusseldorf for 17 days, during which time Theo haggled over his ransom of DM7m (£1.5m at the time), for many years the highest ransom paid in Germany. […] Theo later tried, unsuccessfully, to have the ransom written off as a business expense for tax purposes.

Following the media coverage of his release, he never permitted himself to be photographed again. He travelled to his office in an armoured car by a different route each day, and when checking into a hotel, ascertained the best escape route before even going to his room. But Theo continued to put in long hours at the office, managing even the smallest details in his quest to save money. He wore pencils down to the nubs and turned off the light when entering an office if he judged that his staff could see well enough without it. He once told his board to look at the thickness of the paper used for photocopies. Outside consultants and media interviews were banned, considered unnecessary expenditures or distractions. Asceticism was a virtue in life and business, he believed. “People live more on what they do not eat,” he once said. He wanted Aldi to be a place where “people who don’t hate their money can safely go shopping”.

4) The New York Times: These 4 New Yorkers Are Experts in Living. What Do They Know That We Don’t?

[I]t has been left to them to invent life at their age, without the guideposts or role models of their earlier years. As the British novelist Penelope Lively wrote when she was 80: “Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers.”

Having gotten old in an aging culture that still worships youth, they have done the unthinkable: gotten older.

“Did you ever meet anyone like me?” Ms. Moses asked one day at the Hebrew Home. “I’m special. A lot of people know me here. I don’t know them. They go, Hi, Helen.”

3) The Baffler: Consolation Prizes: The right’s bid to short-circuit inequality with cheap gizmos

The tendency for American capitalism to justify itself by the gadgets it is capable of making affordable is an old one. It was the basis of the notorious 1959 “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, which took place at an exhibition of American technological wizardry set up in the heart of Moscow. The American pavilion featured the latest in American time-saving household appliances, and the debate almost immediately took on a legendary character in the United States, where we told ourselves that Soviet citizens were entranced by our washing machines and Polaroid cameras. The Americans faked the automated kitchen, of course—there was a guy behind a two-way mirror making the proto-Roomba move and turning on the “automated” dishwasher, Joe Maxwell, one of the industrial designers responsible for the kitchen, told Gizmodo decades later—as part of the mission was to convince the Russians that things being marketed to middle-class Americans, including things that were years away from any sort of commercial viability, were commonplace in homes across the country.

2) The Atlantic: How a Stroke Turned a 63-Year-Old Into a Rap Legend

Dr. Sherman Hershfield woke up one morning and was surprised to find himself behind the wheel of his car. Somewhere between his Beverly Hills apartment and his practice in the San Fernando Valley, the silver-haired physician had blacked out. Somehow he’d avoided a crash, but this wasn’t the first time. “I didn’t know what was going on,” he admitted. […]

Doctors prescribed blood-thinning medication and forced Hershfield to quit driving, but he was still fit to practice medicine. Like many other survivors of stroke, he sometimes stuttered, and his speech became slurred. His personality also seemed to change. He suddenly became obsessed with reading and writing poetry. Soon Hershfield’s friends noticed another unusual side effect: He couldn’t stop speaking in rhyme. He finished everyday sentences with rhyming couplets, such as “Now I have to ride the bus. It’s enough to make me cuss.” And curiously, whenever he rhymed, his speech impediments disappeared.

1) The New York Times Magazine: There Is No Reason to Cross the U.S. by Train. But I Did It Anyway.

Contrary to multiple acquaintances’ declarations that I would encounter “some real weirdos” on the train, the first person I met on board my first sleeper car after boarding the train in Penn Station was a man in a sparkly cardigan and leather pants who breezily identified himself as “a prophet,” which is perhaps the world’s second-oldest profession. And forgive me if I find nothing “weird” about being gainfully employed under a supervisor with the kind of multinational name recognition God has.

As he doubtless expected, the prophet and I were in opposite Viewliner roomettes — private compartments Amtrak describes as “designed for one or two passengers,” although a roomette is both narrower and shorter than a standard porta potty. What Amtrak has managed to cram into this minuscule space is impressive: a fold-down sink, two cushioned benches that convert to a bed, a second premade bed that lowers from the ceiling, a tiny foldout table with an inset of alternating colored squares for checkers or chess, a coat hook, a luggage cubby, a large picture window and the largest variety of not-quite-matching shades of dark blue upholstery fabrics ever assembled. There is even a small metal toilet covered with a puce-colored lid, which invites the brainteaser: Is it more luxurious to have a private toilet inches away from your sleeping area, or a shared toilet elsewhere?

The prophet sat silently in his compartment with the curtains open.

I’m continuing my tradition of starting the new year by sharing a few of my favorite articles from the last year. Previous selections are available here: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008. Happy 2019 all!

5) Vox: This company may have solved one of the hardest problems in clean energy:

Beyond the hyperbolic title there’s a good explainer of recent developments with hydrogen technology, a facet of clean energy that I gave up on in favor of hydro, wind, solar and batteries, batteries and more batteries (of all types!). Of course, since this splashy coverage I haven’t heard much about this company’s successes. Still interesting to see new ideas to clean up existing diesel engines and I’m all for their eventual pivot to creating hydrogen batteries (again, yay big batteries!).

HyTech Power, based in Redmond, Washington, intends to introduce three products over the next year or two.

The first will use hydrogen to clean up existing diesel engines, increasing their fuel efficiency by a third and eliminating over half their air pollution, with an average nine-month payback, the company says. That’s a potentially enormous market with plenty of existing demand, which HyTech hopes will capitalize its second product, a retrofit that will transform any internal combustion vehicle into a zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) by enabling it to run on pure hydrogen. That will primarily be targeted at large fleets.

And that will tee up the third product — the one Johnson’s had his eye on from the beginning, the one that could revolutionize and decentralize the energy system — a stationary energy-storage product meant to compete with, and eventually outcompete, big batteries like Tesla’s Powerwall.

At least, that’s the plan.

4) Topic: Japan’s Vegetable-Eating Men

A long article about a Japanese man who transitioned to become a stay-at-home father in the early 2000s and the shifting norms around work, gender roles and society in Japan.

Wearing a suit while browsing produce, Shuichi was indistinguishable from any other salaryman setting about his daily business in the Tokyo streets. After two years, with his wife’s salary increasing, Shuichi made a decision. “I realized that we could increase our overall household ‘salary’ if I focused on supporting her instead of waiting to cure my disease, or forcing myself to go to work,” he says. To mark this turning point, Shuichi made his role as an outcast complete: he dyed his hair blond.

A Japanese man with bleached-blond hair wouldn’t necessarily stand out in most Western countries, or even in modern-day Tokyo, but at the time, Shuichi explains, it was a huge symbolic move. “Until then, my thought was to go back into the workforce and back to society,” Shuichi says. “But in the public eye, men with blond hair are not allowed to work or even permitted to search for jobs as a salaryman. I became defiant and that is when I basically declared myself a ‘househusband.’”

3) The New Yorker: The Prophets of Cryptocurrency Survey the Boom and Bust

A levelheaded piece looking at the insane world of crypocurrencies and blockchain technology, full of charlatans, dizzying swings of wealth and many many strongly held opinions.

Historically, records have been stored in one place—a temple, a courthouse, a server—and kept by whoever presided. If you distrust central authority, or are queasy about Google, this won’t do at all. With blockchains, the records, under a kind of cryptographic seal, are distributed to all and belong to no one. You can’t revise them, because everyone is watching, and because the software will reject it if you try. There is no Undo button. Each block is essentially a bundle of transactions, with a tracking notation, represented in a bit of cryptographic code known as a “hash,” of all the transactions in the past. Each new block in the chain contains all the information (or, really, via the hash, a secure reference to all the information) contained in the previous one, all the way back to the first one, the so-called genesis block.

There are other words that are sometimes included in the definition of blockchain, but they are slippery, and grounds for endless parsing, asterisking, and debate. One is “decentralized.” (Some blockchains are more decentralized than others.) Another is “immutable”—the idea that, in theory, the past record can’t be altered. (This is different from having your crypto stolen or hacked, when it’s stored in an online “wallet.” That happens all the time!) Then there’s “privacy.” The aspiration is for a digital coin to have the untraceability of cash. Because bitcoin was, at the outset, the dark Web’s go-to tender for the purchase of drugs, sex, weaponry, and such, many assumed that it was private. But it isn’t. Every transaction is there in the ledger for all to see. It is, fundamentally, anonymous (or pseudonymous, anyway), but there are many ways for that anonymity to be compromised.

The odds are high that someone, somewhere, has attempted to make an explanation like this one to you. The chain-splainer is a notorious date spoiler and cocktail-party pariah. Here he comes—you’re trapped. You should have known better than to ask about mining.

2) Grub Street: The Last Conversation You’ll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right

A frank and well done collection of answers to the “right” way to eat that dispels a number of commonly (and often, fanatically) held beliefs. I found it quite liberating because you don’t need to obsess over details. Move around regularly, eat mostly organic, whole plant foods and don’t freak out if you enjoy bread, wine and meat on occasion. Whew.

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that carbs are evil.
This is probably the silliest of all the silly, pop-culture propaganda about diet and health. All plant foods are carbohydrate sources.

Yeah, but: Carbs are evil.
Everything from lentils to lollipops, pinto beans to jelly beans, tree nuts to doughnuts, is a carbohydrate source. Most plant foods are mostly carbohydrate. So if “all carbs” are evil, then so are vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, and seeds.

Sure, but, I should still avoid carbs, right?
Exactly the opposite is true. You cannot have a complete or healthful diet without carbohydrate sources.

Why have I been led to believe that carbs are evil?
Highly processed grains and added sugar are bad, not because they are carbohydrate, but because they’ve been robbed of nutrients, they raise insulin levels, and they’re often high in added fats, sodium, and weird ingredients. Carbs are not evil; junk food is evil.

1) The Daily Beast: How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions

I don’t want to ruin this one by quoting too far into the article, but it’s worth your time and quite an American tale.

Dent’s investigation had started in 2000, when a mysterious informant called the FBI and claimed that McDonald’s games had been rigged by an insider known as “Uncle Jerry.” The person revealed that “winners” paid Uncle Jerry for stolen game pieces in various ways. The $1 million winners, for example, passed the first $50,000 installment to Uncle Jerry in cash. Sometimes Uncle Jerry would demand cash up front, requiring winners to mortgage their homes to come up with the money. According to the informant, members of one close-knit family in Jacksonville had claimed three $1 million prizes and a Dodge Viper.