Hopeful News
LA County to Dismiss Nearly 60,000 Marijuana-Related Convictions (Axios, 2 min.)
NASA Will Shoot Rocket at Asteroid to Test ‘Planetary Defense’ Strategy (The Washington Post, 4 min.)
Hydrogel Tablet Can Purify a Liter of River Water in an Hour (University of Texas at Austin, 5 min.)
Historic Go-Ahead for Malaria Vaccine to Protect African Children (James Gallagher, BBC News, 8 min.)
Woman Successfully Treated For Depression With Electrical Brain Implant (Hannah Devlin, The Guardian, 8 min.)
Digital Records From 19th Century Give Black Families a Glimpse of Their Ancestry (Curtis Bunn, NBC News, 12 min.)
How an 11-Foot-Tall 3-D Printer Is Helping to Create a Community (Debra Kamin, The New York Times, 12 min.)
Seattle Becomes Largest U.S. City To Decriminalize Psychedelics (Ben Adlin, Marijuana Moment, 20 min.)
‘It Was a Nice Break From Everything’: Two Men Rescued After 29 Days Lost at Sea (The Guardian, 5 min.)
Just a few hours into their journey, they encountered heavy rain and strong winds, which made it hard to see the coastline they were supposed to be following.
“When the bad weather came, it was bad, but it was worse and became scary when the GPS died,” he said. “We couldn’t see where we were going and so we just decided to stop the engine and wait, to save fuel.”
A Three-Day Work Week? One Startup Experiments to Draw Talent (Saritha Rai, Bloomberg, 6 min.)
Fintech company Slice is offering new hires a three-day week with salary at 80% of the going market rate. This is a win-win approach that frees the workers to pursue other passions or interests -- or other gigs -- while still locking in a steady pay and benefits from Slice, said Rajan Bajaj, the company’s founder.
Slice is betting that its approach will make it stand apart from the competition. The company has 450 employees and wants to recruit 1,000 engineers and product managers in the next three years.
“It’s the best of both worlds,” Bajaj said. “Workers can get salary and full benefits working a three-day week, and spend the rest of their time chasing a startup dream, looking for a co-founder or pursuing a non-work passion.”
True Stories
Gone (Oscar Lopez, Photographs by Fred Ramos, The New York Times, 8 min.)
In Mexico, nearly 100,000 people have disappeared. Mothers wander under the scorching sun, poking at the earth and sniffing for the tell-tale scent of decomposing flesh. Disappearance can be the cruelest blow. It deprives families of a body to mourn, of answers — even of the simple certainty, and the consolation, of death.
The Faker (Peter Ward and Sean Williams, Medium, 25 min.)
A prolific art forger meets his match in an intrepid FBI investigator, but the con is only just beginning. While Alfredo had reached the end of his forging rope, he already saw an opportunity for something different. Now that the faker was behind bars, he was about to pull the biggest scam of all.
White Riot (Laura Nahmias, New York Magazine: Intelligencer, 45 min.)
In 1992, thousands of furious, drunken New York City cops descended on City Hall.
Rudy Giuliani, who had run for mayor and lost in 1989, was seen as the riot’s chief inciter.
The Message: Why Should Hip Hop Have to Teach Us Anything? (Kelefa Saneh, The Guardian, 45 min.)
Hip-hop is obsessed with respect, and yet it has flourished and endured by shirking the demands of respectability. The best of it has often been deemed irresistible and indefensible, sometimes by the same listeners – sometimes even by the rappers themselves.
Videos
Archaeologists Extract 1,300-Year-Old Wooden Ski From Norwegian Ice (Smithsonian Magazine)
Watch Jon Stewart Demand Justice for Veterans Exposed to Burn Pits in New Show (Military.com)
The Truth About Redlining (Glenn Loury and David E. Kaiser)
The Cult of the Vaccine Neurotic (Matt Taibbi, The Hill: Rising)
Ideas & Insights
Fitting In is Human. Forcing Someone to Fit In is Oppression. (Arianna Falbo, Psyche, 12 min.)
Argue Better By Signalling Your Receptiveness With These Words (Michael Yeomans, Psyche, 20 min.)
How to Be a Man (Andrew Reiner, Psyche, 30 min.)
Catch ya on the flip side.