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The Morning News

The Rooster

Announcing the 2022 Tournament of Books

Here are the shortlist, judges, and Zombie poll for the 2022 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes.

by The Tournament of Books Staff
A woman moves to San Francisco to rescue her addict daughter, who admits to overdosing on fentanyl "at least 50 times."
↩︎ The San Francisco Chronicle 7h
Interview with a woman who has cleaned nearly 60,000 hotel rooms. “The job keeps me confident.”
↩︎ AFAR 7h
An appreciation of TMN favorite artist Sophie Calle, with pictures from when she posed as a hotel maid to document rooms.
↩︎ The New Yorker 7h
Photographs from the Yellowstone Archive of people feeding bears in the 1950s and '60s.
↩︎ Flashbak 7h
Think piece of the week: A common, bad question to ask in science is "does x affect y?" Because the answer is always yes.
↩︎ The Eighteenth Elephant 7h
There's mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of emotions.
↩︎ BBC News 7h

Unless you’re a butcher or a sociopath it’s very intimidating to sink your knife into a piece of meat this big. It was actually more gruesome than I had imagined. 

Tammie Teclemariam acquired a salt-cured hind quarter of a pig from Costco and has been slicing it ever since.
↩︎ Gawker
7h
Dueling taco maps: One shows every business in Los Angeles that sells tacos, another shows places with "taco" in its name.
↩︎ L.A. Taco 7h
In 2021, a man used bogus suicide notes to escape the law. In 1318, a nun used a dummy crafted in her likeness.
↩︎ Lapham's Quarterly 7h
London teenagers explain their personal fashion. "My style in three words would be lost, expressionist, and spiralling."
↩︎ Dazed 2d
An overview of the shopping season's bigger trends. "The sweater-vest was one item we didn’t think we’d see back."
↩︎ Strategist 2d

The phrase ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ was invented by a police psychiatrist to discredit a female hostage in a 1973 bank heist who criticised the police.

Another year in the book: 52 things Tom Whitwell learned in 2021.
↩︎ Fluxx
2d
Did you TMN is also a newsletter? Six mornings a week. Sometimes mid-morning. Extra links for news. Very few exclamation points.
↩︎ TMN Newsletter 2d
"In My Head" paintings by Alvin Ong. "They progressively became a sort of visual diary, a constellation of my life."
↩︎ Booooooom 2d
A thoughtful interview—particularly about acupuncture informing his work—with Alvin Armstrong, one of Artsy's Vanguard 2021.
↩︎ Artsy 2d
A breakdown of procedures used to estimate the size of a political rally properly, from aerial photography to "the Jones method."
↩︎ The Conversation 2d

The Manhattan of the Middle Ages?

One of those "who knew?" educations experienced during morning coffee:

From Wikipedia:

Between the 12th and the 13th century, Bologna was a city full of towers. Almost all the towers were tall (the highest being 97m), defensive stone towers. Besides the towers, there are still some fortified gateways (torresotti) that correspond to the gates of the 12th-century city wall (Mura dei torresotti or Cerchia dei Mille), which itself has been almost completely destroyed. The reasons for the construction of so many towers are not clear. One hypothesis is that the richest families used them for offensive/defensive purposes during the period of the Investiture Controversy.

2d
Sustaining Members get 50% off at the TMN/ToB merch table. Winter 2022 collection now available!
↩︎ TMN Memberships 2d

"Most people think of robots as made of metals and ceramics but it's not so much what a robot is made from but what it does, which is act on its own on behalf of people."

The scientists who created the first living robots (known as xenobots) say they figured out a way for them to self-replicate.
↩︎ CNN
2d