#106: Black Lives Matter
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Things to do
Understand why Singaporeans should care about #BlackLivesMatter
Read these resources on race relations
Watch Ayer Hitam: A Black History of Singapore (till 14 June)
How Iceland beat (?) the coronavirus
Iceland never imposed a lockdown. Only a few types of businesses—night clubs and hair salons, for example—were ever ordered closed. Hardly anyone in Reykjavík wears a mask. And yet, by mid-May, when I went to talk to Pálmason, the tracing team had almost no one left to track. During the previous week, in all of Iceland, only two new coronavirus cases had been confirmed. The country hadn’t just managed to flatten the curve; it had, it seemed, virtually eliminated it.
An 8-part deep dive into Apple's highly secretive culture
Cook’s Apple resembles a liberal China. It is devoted to enabling individual creative expression, but on its terms: it has become a highly centralised, hierarchical and secretive state.
Jaffa cake-flavoured gin is now a thing
Having trouble reading these days? That's because of stress
It’s important to dismantle the idea of the perfect reader. Oftentimes, we do things owing to strictures imposed in a capitalistic world that redeems things, or activities that are done in the pursuit of gains, whether, in terms of information or knowledge, new words learnt, or most numbers of books read.
The Instagram micro-niche of bassoon practice accounts
The accounts are a way for musicians to hold themselves accountable for consistent, productive practice and to receive feedback from other musicians. They are also an archival tool, a way to track progress over time. Practicing, long an activity completed in solitude, with only a metronome and tuner as company, has now become its own sort of performance.
Some Japanese whiskies aren't from Japan. Some aren't even whisky
The app disrupting traditional coffee fortune-telling in Turkey
Faladdin’s business model depends in no small part on irrational belief. It dances along the disappearing border between the unknown algorithms of new technologies and ancient prophetic traditions, teasing the possibility that it might just know something we don’t.
How an exodus of tech workers could reshape Silicon Valley
The tech workers in Silicon Valley know you want them gone. They knew it when you protested their buses. They knew it when you trashed their scooters. They definitely knew it when you scrawled “die techie scum” on the sidewalk. But guess what? They don’t even want to be here! In fact, they’re already packing their bags
The fascinating history of toilet paper
Although it may seem like a product that we’ve always been reliant upon, toilet paper has not actually been around very long, and may not be as essential as we think it is. Instead, it’s the product of very good marketing. For most of history, many would have thought it would be absurd to manufacture a product specifically for wiping after using the restroom because people used to use anything that was available.