Huge, massive roundup (with excerpts!)

The horrendous Central American human trafficking problem.

Historical horrors unearthed in Poland.

Unfathomable Soviet nostalgia in the Ukraine.

There's a correlation between pesticides and farmer suicides.

GMOs do not reduce soil loss.

Just don't even eat pork. Just don't.

Alzheimer's treatments?

Just imagine the nightmare adults that these coddled cubs will grow into.

The Nobel Prize in LEDs, explained.

Wow, I didn't realize things were so bad at AAAS.

I also had no idea that mapmakers used to willfully insert misinformation in order to catch plagiarizers.

Sigh; I feel like the Citizen Radio folks make the same mistake here of which they accuse MTV: underestimating their audience. No, I don't agree with them on everything; yes, I'm still reading. I'm not only willing but insistent upon considering disparate viewpoints. What they say about veganism and the liberal rejection of it, however, is spot on. For example, where is this you care more about animals than people coming from? Is caring about either, mutually exclusive?

Kilstein: "But what if you were on a desert island - " I'm not. I'm not. I'm never gonna be on a desert island. The bottom line is, when you look at why I'm vegan, it's climate change, it is the terrible labor practices of factory farms. It was the UN, not PETA or a Mercy For Animals zine, that talked about how factory farming is a bigger contributor to climate change than every mode of transportation put together. At the very least if you are a liberal and not vegan, you should be saying to your friends "Yeah, I know I should be" - and then go and eat your bacon burger or whatever. But we don't want to talk about it because it's a sacrifice.

On a quasi-related note: Roxane Gay's most recent book--which I haven't read but would like to--appears to be about doing what you can even if you can't do everything. She had a really good essay recently, on celebrity feminism... here it is. Key takeaway: "The idea of women moving through the world as freely as men should sell itself."

On another quasi-related note: social justice warrior fails as a slur, wins otherwise.

Fareed Zakaria on why Bill Maher and Sam Harris are wrong.

This does resonate: in retrospect, I'd have gone further in math had I not gotten so caught up in understanding everything.

Giraffes are more amazing than we thought.

I'm about a week behind on Carolyn but I love this:

One of the most important things to know about someone, if not the most, before you make a home together is how she handles people who get on her bad side. It’s just a clear, concise, extremely reliable measure of character.

Does she turn on people lightly or arbitrarily, or only on matters of substance and only when they present her with no other choice?

Does she stoop to silent treatments, duplicity, gossip, revenge and other emotional war crimes, or is she forthright and civil in choosing to keep her distance?

Does she close herself off permanently once crossed, or is she open to forgiveness based on the relative severity of the harm done to her and/or on the sincerity of efforts to make amends?

More brilliant advice-columnist wisdom here:

The reason the beauty-industrial complex kicks up an acidic taste of contempt in so many of our mouths is that it can never quite capture the intoxicating magic of real-life intrigue and attraction and romance... Real-life beauty is a blur of motion, a flash of disbelief, an assured gesture, a long sigh that sings with intelligence and self-acceptance. We can't capture in two dimensions, or reduce to a series of numbers, the feelings that real human beings experience in the company of a woman with the confidence to own exactly who she is, to show where she's been, to listen closely and understand completely. A woman who loves her life, who can laugh at herself, but whose head isn't crowded and noisy. A woman who can focus and make room — real space — for you, and bathe you in her generosity and her compassion...

The guy who won't sleep with you because you're overweight is not a far cry from the guy who will only sleep with you because you've got a hot body. Either way, you feel like the main event, the REAL YOU, is a footnote... Everyone wants to be seen and loved for who they really are. Or they should want that, even if they can't want it, deep down inside, because they don't love themselves enough to believe that they are enough. There's nothing like being loved for exactly who you are. This is not outside of your reach, or anybody's reach. Not to state the obvious, but men who like you for YOU roll with whatever you're serving up. Men like to be turned on (hello, understatement), and if they dig the cut of your jib, they are going to find something hot about you to focus on. They are not sitting at their desks with a copy of Photoshop, zooming in on problem areas. 

So don't go on a crash diet just to find love. Don’t tell yourself that you'll only deserve love once you starve yourself for a while. Even if you're wildly successful at losing weight and then wildly successful at finding a man, you'll still be at risk of wasting a decade dating men who have no interest in the real magic of you, beneath your rocking-hot ass.

Here's one practical thing I do want you to do: You need to exercise every day. That's my recommendation to you and every other person reading this, no matter what size they happen to be. Because people — especially very smart people — require exercise to stay sane. They do. Exercise will help you feel vibrant and relaxed and gorgeous in your own skin. Exercise will improve your chemistry and that will improve your view of yourself. You also need to remind yourself that you're up for a challenge, that you can do something hard, even when you're swamped with big projects and you feel like shit and you just don't want to. You need to give yourself that gift every day...

It's okay. Some people won't like you. Some people will reject you. That's fine. That happens to everyone. The goal is to adapt, to learn not to take it personally. You know in your heart that you're not looking for just anyone. You're looking for someone who is turned on by YOU — your charms and your flaws and all of the magic inside of you. Maybe there are only a few people out there who can really appreciate YOU. That's okay. You don't need to appeal to everyone, or even 90 percent of the guys out there. You're hunting a rare species. Most of us are. Recognize that and don't read into every rejection.

And while I'm excerpting: this is from a (LARB) review of Lena Dunham's book:

The hyphenated word “self-involved” describes any story that involves the self. Yet the term is wielded mostly against women with an interest in expressing their experiences in a direct manner, without filtering their reflections through layers of metaphor, or packing them into a serious historical context, or lacing them with literary references, or intellectualizing so relentlessly that every shred of emotion is ground to a fine dust. Women writers can’t tell a few simple stories — “Here’s what happened to me and here’s how it felt” — the way Chuck Klosterman or David Sedaris might, without inspiring the herd to pull out their poison pens and scrawl those same words: SELF-INVOLVED.

and

In one chapter, for instance, she explains that she somewhat recklessly assumed that she was smart enough, and practical enough, to endure the company of a guy who treated her badly. She figured she could maintain “a strong sense of self-respect” even while putting up with an overbearing, detached boyfriend. The resulting insights are deceptively simple, but they resonate, thanks to Dunham’s straightforward conversational style: 

When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done.

Wow.

 

I'm somewhere in the middle of the abstainer-moderator. I've become more of a moderator since I've stopped caring. Sometimes just a little bit of something is perfect.

 

OMG the womansplainer!

Chicago dude has a message for the ladies (of course, it includes "smile more").

Some people just don't know to handle women without husbands.

"Gone Girl" has launched many a conversation about the manipulative female prototype. I, too, wish I could watch things without bringing the entire sociopolitical context with me, but I can't.

The "cool girl" exists only in fiction.

I was reading the Times when I got an ad for this article:

Mullets: Are they so bad, they’re good?