Thought Provoking Reads
Provocative and interesting articles from around the web.
Collection by Charles Baldwin
Vox
Was Etsy too good to be true?
20+ min read · From 2019 · The people who built Etsy dreamed of remaking commerce with their bare hands. Fifteen years later, its sellers are being asked to compete with Amazon.
Longreads
In the Age of the Psychonauts
20+ min read · From 2019 · Three psycho-spiritual “events” of the 1970s — involving Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence and Dennis McKenna — had a strange synchronicity.
Phys.org
Complex quantum teleportation achieved for the first time
2 min read · From 2019 · Austrian and Chinese scientists have succeeded in teleporting three-dimensional quantum states for the first time. High-dimensional teleportation could play an important role in future quantum…
The New Yorker
Dangerous Minds | The New Yorker
20+ min read · From 2017 · Criminal profiling isn’t a Whodunit; it’s a Hedunit. But how useful are those profiles, really?
The Atlantic
What Happened to Aung San Suu Kyi?
20+ min read · From 2019 · A human-rights icon’s fall from grace in Myanmar
The Atlantic
The Media Erased Latinos From the Story
2 min read · From 2019 · It was the deadliest attack targeting Latinos in recent U.S. history. Why wasn’t that the headline?
The Wall Street Journal
The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda
6 min read · From 2016 · A middle-aged book collector in Mali helped keep the fabled city’s libraries, books and manuscripts safe from occupying jihadists.
The New York Times
The Problem With Greta Thunberg’s Climate Activism
5 min read · From 2019 · Her radical approach is at odds with democracy.
CJR
The complex case of Rui Pinto
~11 min read · From 2019 · In 2016, a man who called himself John gave Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, 1.9 terabytes of data, or the equivalent of 500,000 Bibles. The cache included emails, contracts, and other documents…
Aeon+Psyche
For a radical new perspective on immigration, picture the US as an ancient tree
2 min read · From 2019 · With the overheated rhetoric around immigration dominating the political sphere, an imaginative, historically rooted perspective can be something of a tonic. This short video from Pedro M Cruz, a data…
cathedral.org
Have We No Decency? A Response to President Trump
3 min read · From 2019 · What will it take for us all to say, with one voice, that we have had enough? The question is less about the president's sense of decency, but of ours.
Aeon+Psyche
Extremophiles and life in the most unlikely of places
9 min read · From 2019 · Human life is fragile but tardigrades and other extremophiles show that life itself is in little danger of disappearing
National Geographic
The Sahara buried this ancient Roman city—preserving it for centuries
From 2019 · Once a thriving North African military outpost, Thamugadi was forgotten under desert sands, until a Scottish explorer went looking for it centuries later.
Aeon+Psyche
Our ideas about what early movies looked like are all wrong
2 min read · From 2019 · ‘It’s not so much being seduced by a story. It’s the thrill of seeing in itself.’During the first film screenings in the 1890s, viewers marvelled at moving images that had an unprecedented power to…
The New Yorker
The Incredible Life and Tragic Death of Lyra McKee
~19 min read · From 2019 · When the the twenty-nine-year-old journalist was killed in a riot, in Creggan, Ireland, it was implied that somehow her death had happened in the pursuit of Irish freedom. But Lyra embodied Irish…
The New York Times
Trump’s Inhumanity Before a Victim of Rape
4 min read · From 2019 · In his boundless self-absorption, this president is capable of anything.
