Excellent Reads

https://archive.ph/06OXT Pork accounts for more than a third of the world’s meat, making pigs among the planet’s most widely consumed animals. They are also widely reviled: For about two billion people, eating pork is explicitly prohibited. The Hebrew Bible and the Islamic Koran both forbid adherents from eating pig flesh, and this ban is one of humanity’s most deeply entrenched dietary restrictions. For centuries, scholars have struggled to find a satisfying explanation for this widespread taboo. “There are an amazing number of misconceptions people continue to have about pigs,” says archaeologist Max Price of Durham University, who is among a small group of scholars scouring both modern excavation reports and ancient tablets for clues about the rise and fall of pork consumption in the ancient Near East. “That makes this research both frustrating and fascinating.”

https://archive.ph/QroYA Dear Reader,

When I first approached James Murdoch in early 2024 to pitch him on a series of in-depth interviews, I figured it was a long shot. Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, the onetime heir apparent to the Murdoch media empire, almost never spoke to reporters. Still, I could only imagine the stories he had to tell.

In his 20 years working for the family business, he’d been inside rooms where decisions were made at the most powerful conservative-media empire in the world. He’d seen up close how his father’s British newspapers came to champion Brexit and how Fox News had helped deliver Donald Trump to the White House. There were signs that James had grown disillusioned with these aspects of how his family fortune had been made: In 2020, he’d abruptly resigned from News Corp’s board of directors with a cryptic letter citing “disagreements over certain editorial content.” Might he finally be willing to elaborate? Sometimes, as a reporter, all you can do is ask. What I didn’t know when we sat down for our first meeting was that the Murdochs were secretly fracturing. Rupert had decided, at age 94, to rewrite the irrevocable family trust to give sole control of the empire to his eldest son, Lachlan, rather than splitting it equally among his four oldest children as planned. A bitter (and not-yet-public) legal battle had commenced. James—liberated by what he saw as his father’s betrayal—decided, somewhat to my surprise, that he was ready to talk. The conversation that started that day ended up lasting a year. I met more than a dozen times with James and his wife, Kathryn, as they told me stories that would shock even the most devoted viewer of HBO’s Succession. These interviews were wide-ranging, filled with revelations that help explain how America got to this fraught political moment. But the stories that stayed with me most were the intensely personal ones about the unraveling of a family.

The article has some interesting information about European passports, too.

The rise of tourism in North America and Europe in the mid- to late 19th century caused difficulties for the existing passport and visa systems in Europe and in 1861, France abolished passports and visas, with the rest of Europe following suit.

By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, passport requirements were nonexistent nearly everywhere in Europe and the United States. The First World War brought new concerns for international security, prompting the requirement of passports and visas to travel abroad.
...
the U.S. passport requirement was only a war measure that officially ended when President Wilson left office in 1921. The U.S. was not a member of League of Nations – despite it being the brainchild of its aforementioned president – and did not require passports for international travel again until Nov. 29, 1941, mere days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/zm5LU

An exploration of the causes of the Irish Potato Famine, and how the British blindspots in the attitudes of their aristocracy failed to recognize, then failed to solve, a deadly famine and depopulation in their own geographical yard.

It is easy to draw parallels to today's US Washington elite attitudes towards homelessness, rural struggles, and environmental stress can unravel things before anyone at the top realizes what's happening.

New Yorker article, archived version

Wired is soft paywall, clear cookies, use reader mode, or something like bypasspaywallsclean

About intuition and practicing medicine and dddrugs. One of a most difficult proffesions- to make people sleep

Quite a long read about Rationalists and Zizians

"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.