This week: Nature’s false beauty / Lupita: The Mayan voice / Reading Thucydides in 2021 / When happy hour changed forever / How teeth evolved
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1. The Nature You See in Documentaries Is Beautiful and False
By Emma Marris | The Atlantic | April 2021
“Nature documentaries mislead viewers into thinking that there are lots of untouched landscapes left. There aren’t.”
2. In Appreciation of Rihanna Smoking Weed, and Looking Hot While Doing It
By Ernesto Macias | Interview | April 2021
“Being a bad girl isn’t easy, and Rihanna knows it”
3. Lupita
By Monica Wise | The Guardian | January 2021
“Twenty years after Lupita lost her family in the Acteal massacre in southern Mexico, she has become a spokesperson for her people and for a new generation of Mayan activists.”
4. America ruined my name for me
By Beth Nguyen | The New Yorker | April 2021
“I cannot detach the name Bich from people laughing at me, calling me a bitch, letting me know that I’m the punch line of my own joke.”
5. A Chinese ‘Auntie’ Went on a Solo Road Trip. Now, She’s a Feminist Icon
By Joy Dong and Vivian Wang | The New York Times | April 2021
“Her main appeal is not the scenic vistas she captures, though those are plentiful. It is the intimate revelations she mixes in with them, about her abusive marriage, dissatisfaction with domestic life and newfound freedom.”
6. What It’s Like to Read Thucydides in 2021
LitHub | April 2021
“How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today?”
7. Vesuvius eruption baked some people to death — and turned one brain to glass
By Robin George Andrews | National Geographic | January 2020
“A pair of studies reveals more details about what happened to the victims of the infamous event in A.D. 79.”
8. The 40 Acres During World War I
By Christopher Rose, Joan Neuberger and Henry Wiencek | 15 Minute History :: UT Department of History | 2014-2020
Also see: The Bolshevik Revolution at 100 | The History of Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy in the U.S. | Beatlemania and the 55th Anniversary of the First Beatles Tour to the US | The Legacy of World War I in Germany and Russia
9. Fifty Years Ago a Texan Changed Happy Hour Forever
By Patricia Sharpe | Texas Monthly | May 2021
“Here’s to Mariano Martinez, the inventor of the world’s first frozen margarita machine.”
10. The Evolution of Teeth
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2009-2019
Also see: Calculus | Sunni and Shia Islam | The Augustan Age | The Whale
stillness of heart 