How to be a Tudor by Ruth Goodman

...craftspeople are rarities now, but imagine the streets of London in Tudor times. Every other doorway must have held a master of some craft: blacksmith, brewer, rope maker, dyer, tanner, painter, tailor, bookbinder. And heck, every good housewife had to know how to do a whole lot of stuff, from sewing to cheese making to brewing, and was a master of those crafts as a matter of course. How wonderful it would be to walk those streets and watch it al...

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How FilmLA Blocks Bike Lanes

...treet was a ghost town, it’s collection of handsome 1920s office buildings making it a convenient stand-in for New York. Now people live, work, shop and eat there and, increasingly, travel by foot, bike and scooters. The constant filming has, long since, become a nuisance. At the same time states and municipalities around the country compete to offer race-to-the-bottom incentives and tax breaks to lure film companies away from expensive cities lik...

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Saturday Linkages: We Are All Liars

...which the machine knows nothing. This production is not for the purpose of making meaning. It is for the purpose of producing effects on users that keep us hooked. It is for the purpose of making users the conduits of the machine’s power, keeping its effects in circulation. Faked celebrity deaths, trolling, porn clickbait, advertisements, flurries of food and animal pictures, thirst traps, the endless ticker tape of messages mean less than they pe...

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The Institute of the Present

...while your mouth is full of dental tools. But then I asked myself why am I making fun of people who work with their hands and minds for long hours in order to alleviate suffering? If anyone deserves good pay and days off to golf, it should be dentists. Instead I thought I’d discuss what should be an April Fools Day joke but isn’t. And that is Los Angeles’ mayor Eric Garcetti’s appearance at a party last week with Lyft executives to celebrate their...

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How’s the Sugar Free Experiment Going for Erik?

...t processed foods as a whole are what are making us unhealthy. But as I discovered in my own life, it’s difficult to avoid sugar. It’s in everything the big food companies make. Making time to cook from scratch and eating a diverse variety of foods looks like the only way out of the food mess we’re all in....

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