Age-Coded Clothing, Airships, and Roundabouts

I hadn’t heard the term “age-coded clothing” before reading this piece on fast fashion and its impact on our capacity to project things about ourselves via what we wear, but it makes a lot of sense and does seem to be losing its potency as a result of the dominant manufacturing and economic norms in the fashion industry, these days.

FAA grants Google billionaire clearance to fly his airship (this is one of those technologies where I’m happy to let incredibly wealthy people pay for the up-front expense of demonstrating potential and risks, before a market blooms around it—and I truly do hope an airship markets emerges from this, as we could really use a better alternative to current long-haul cargo-carrying options):

The Times, asking the big questions: Do you really need to shower every day?

An arguably headier, more meta question: Do academic disciplines need to last forever? And if not, how does that work?

Why I dragged my husband to a nudist resort:

“To my surprise, it took only mild arm-twisting to persuade my husband to accompany me. Now he is behind the steering wheel, gliding up the highway ramp. “O-kay,” he says with the faux-cheer of a first-time skydiver. “Here we go.”

“Are you nervous yet?”

“My heart is racing, and my stomach’s upset, and I feel kind of jangled.”

“Honey, you don’t have to do this. We can turn around right now.”

“No,” he says, jaw clenched. “Doom doesn’t run.” That would be Dr. Doom, his favorite comic book character. Amazing, what a grown man will access for courage.”

On the “siren battles” trend in parts of New Zealand, which has led to Céline Dion’s music being blasted on car stereos late into the night (for a very regional sort of street cred).

The unexpected pleasure of being mediocre.

On the difficulties of manufacturing things in space (in this case, pharmaceuticals), largely because most satellites are designed to burn-up when they’ve outlived their usefulness, so it’s regulatorily tricky to bring something from orbit safely back to Earth.

On the perceived virtuousness of work and why it’s difficult to imagine a non-work state of affairs:

“For the vast majority, work fails to deliver on its promises. There’s a disconnect between their experience and what they believe work should offer. They don’t believe there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that is their job or some career. And that’s changing our conception of work dramatically, with political and social implications,” he says. “The failure to imagine a life centred outside of the workplace, on free time, on leisure, remains a great impediment. But as Keynes said, that change is going to come. And it’s in the realm of that freedom, not in work, that we can find the richest kinds of human experience.”

By many metrics, traffic roundabouts are better than intersections:

New CRISPR-ish thing just dropped.

The politics of punctuation.