Thursday roundup

The horrifying food waste you see is just the tip of the iceberg.

Factory farming is making UTIs harder to treat.

I rarely agree with Kathleen Parker on anything, but she's spot-on here: a Trump presidency would be brutal for animals.

Immigrants correlate with a reduction in crime.

FFS you can't change reality by not talking about it. Everyone else still knows it's there.

Critics worry that Mr. Obama’s statements undermine the United States’ image as an intrinsic force for good in the world — an image that, to them, is central to American identity and power.

Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said this idea, though widespread in the United States, is something of a fallacy. Only Americans believe that the United States’ power is inherently virtuous; elsewhere, people see this idea as not only false, but dangerous.

“The disjuncture in the way that this is seen abroad and at home is one of the huge problems in U.S. foreign policy,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is American. “This is an image that Americans have of themselves but is simply not shared, even by their allies.”

I studied linguistics as an undergrad and never bought into the Chomskian universal language stuff. That's a huge reason that I didn't pursue it further. Turns out I wasn't alone.

Dudes have dating issues, too. Including this one being clobbered on Twitter as we speak.

Words matter, but often there's no set of words that's harmless to everyone. Not everyone--within a given group--is going to agree on the connotations of terms. Ana Mardoll says it perfectly.

Did I already post this article on Alaska's Russian heritage?

Robin Givhan is a national treasure.