Excellent Reads

"How noise complaints in a Manhattan co-op led to a $750,000 legal settlement and shattered a friendship.", but that doesn't quite sell the sheer craziness.

https://archive.ph/23ivb

Just thought of her today. Been a long time since she went quiet, was hoping her situation would have gotten better by now, but no such luck.

Around the world, progressive parties have come to see tight immigration restrictions as unnecessary, even cruel. What if they’re actually the only way for progressivism to flourish?

That the era of low immigration was also the era of progressive triumph is no coincidence. [...] The United States felt more like a cohesive nation to many voters, with higher levels of social trust and national pride, and politicians were able to enact higher taxes on the rich and new benefits like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

They’re in our blood, our livers, and our brains. What are they doing to our bodies?

Factory farming has made us think of chickens as mindless automata. But our downy friends know much more than we give them credit for.

While incarcerated, Alexei Navalny wrote extensively to journalists, politicians, scientists, activists, and people from all walks of life across the globe.

Between the summer of 2022 and autumn 2023, when he was held in the IK-6 high-security prison near Vladimir, this was relatively straightforward thanks to Russia’s prison e-mail service, FSIN-Letter, which allowed for correspondence to be exchanged within days.

However, his transfer in December 2023 to the IK-3 maximum security prison in the tiny village of Kharp in the Russian Arctic, meant online services were unavailable, and all communication became paper-based, significantly slowing down delivery. Consequently, some of Navalny’s replies only reached their intended recipients after his death—weeks, and in some cases, months later.

Mediazona publishes a selection of these letters here, alongside accounts from those who received them.

An investigation by CBC’s The Fifth Estate uncovered a key internal document that provides a minute-by-minute account of how authorities believe the 2023 gold heist at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport was planned and executed, alleging a highly organized group of individuals relied heavily on a well-placed insider.

Economists predict that, ultimately, consumers will bear the burden of the burgeoning trade dispute between the U.S., Canada, China, and Mexico. Here are a few ways consumers can prepare for the rising prices that could follow suit.

Cross-posted from "‘Our meth was so realistic it got stolen’: Breaking Bad, Industry and Euphoria’s makers on how TV does drugs" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

Weed? Moss tied in thread. Crack? Organic shea butter. Cocaine bricks? Shrink-wrapped foam blocks. Designers reveal the secrets of faking drugs onscreen – from popping sugar pills to snorting vitamin D

The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.

From claims that Jews kill children to make matzo, to accusations that immigrants in Ohio are devouring neighbors’ pets, the myth of the blood libel is a nightmare that never ends. —Ákos Szegőfi

Many museums are reckoning with the colonial legacies of the human remains and cultural objects in their collections. Now anthropologists are advocating to pay similar respects to primates.