James' World 2

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Nikki Smith, an IT worker from Columbus, Ohio, was excited to find the r/ZeroWaste subreddit. Always a bit of an environmentalist, in recent years she became more serious about doing everything she could to reduce her carbon footprint. She dove head first into the online community, eagerly adopting tips like making reusable cotton rounds out of old or ill-fitting clothes.

Beyond those gems, though, a certain kind of post has irked her.

“I kept seeing post after post after post of people sharing photos and info on ‘look at these zero-waste things I just bought!’” Smith says over email. “It just boiled me long enough that I had to speak up.”

So, after a few weeks of seeing more posts like this than usual — maybe due to more new folks recently joining the subreddit — she made a post urging people to stop buying zero-waste things, arguing that these purchases are part of the problem.

“A lot of these items were ordered online with unrecyclable packaging, and then [there’s] fuel emissions from shipping,” she says. “And a lot of these items I kept thinking probably could have been found second-hand somewhere. Water bottles especially! They’re everywhere.”

She’s not the only one on the subreddit with that sentiment. On posts where users show hauls of glass jars from big-box stores like Walmart, commenters chime in to suggest that next time they should check their local thrift stores first. One Redditor shared that they sewed their own drawstring bag for travel utensils and received particular praise. “See, this is nice,” the top comment reads. “You didn’t miss the whole point and buy fancy new bamboo cutlery when you already had metal stuff at home that would work perfectly well.”

The market for earth-friendly products is ever-growing. In 2018, the reusable water bottle market was valued at more than $8 billion, up 3 percent from 2017, and it’s expected to reach $10.4 billion by 2025. The global eco fiber market, like bamboo fabric and organic cotton harvested without the use of pesticides or other chemicals, is anticipated to reach $93 billion by 2025. The green packaging market — think reusable food containers, along with packaging made of recycled materials or materials that break down naturally — will reportedly grow to $215 billion by 2021.

Companies are now marketing to the green consumer, and though there are clear environmental benefits to this, some zero wasters are concerned that this push to buy green products ignores those other two Rs of the environmentalist mantra: reduce and reuse.

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Wooden cutlery, mason jars, and reusable cups are just a few of the zero-waste products on the market. Getty Images

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Welcome to Super Bowl LVIII week at The Ringer! In the days ahead, we’ll cover every aspect of the San Francisco 49ers–Kansas City Chiefs matchup in Las Vegas, Nevada. Let’s get started with a table setter: I’ve watched the film, crunched the numbers, and sorted through the noise to identify the 25 most important things you need to know about this game. Let’s get to it!

1. At the risk of jinxing it, I think we’re going to get a competitive Super Bowl for the third straight year. The 49ers finished the regular season second in total DVOA, and the Chiefs were fifth. Four teams finished in the top 10 of both offensive and defensive DVOA, and these are two of them (sorry, Cowboys and Ravens, hope you are enjoying Cancún).

The Chiefs are 88-25 with Patrick Mahomes as their starter. And among those 25 losses, just four have been by more than eight points. Let me say this a different way just to get the point across: In the 113 games that Mahomes has started, just four opponents—only 3.5 percent!—have managed to beat him by more than eight points. Now if you’re a hater, you can point to the fact that one of those losses came in the Super Bowl to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But you get the point. It doesn’t happen often.

2. Blowouts are rare for this iteration of the 49ers, too. They are 21-5 with Brock Purdy as their starter, and just three of those losses were by more than one possession. We saw it in the NFC championship game against the Lions. They can get down big (it was 24-7 in that game)—but because of how explosive the offense is, they can catch up in a hurry. Typically, when they’ve been in shoot-outs, they’ve won. Is there some randomness with the small sample? Sure. But the 49ers have not lost a game with Purdy (20-0) when they’ve scored at least 20 points.

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If you drive north from Khartoum along a narrow desert road toward the ancient city of Meroe, a breathtaking view emerges from beyond the mirage: dozens of steep pyramids piercing the horizon. No matter how many times you may visit, there is an awed sense of discovery. In Meroe itself, once the capital of the Kingdom of Kush, the road divides the city. To the east is the royal cemetery, packed with close to 50 sandstone and red brick pyramids of varying heights; many have broken tops, the legacy of 19th-century European looters. To the west is the royal city, which includes the ruins of a palace, a temple, and a royal bath. Each structure has distinctive architecture that draws on local, Egyptian and Greco-Roman decorative tastes—evidence of Meroe’s global connections.

Off the highway, men wearing Sudanese jalabiyas and turbans ride camels across the desert sands. Although the area is largely free of the trappings of modern tourism, a few local merchants on straw mats in the sand sell small clay replicas of the pyramids. As you approach the royal cemetery on foot, climbing large, rippled dunes, Meroe’s pyramids, lined neatly in rows, rise as high as 100 feet toward the sky. “It’s like opening a fairytale book,” a friend once said to me.

I first learned of Sudan’s extraordinary pyramids as a boy, in the British historian Basil Davidson’s 1984 documentary series “Africa.” As a Sudanese-American who was born and raised in the United States and the Middle East, I studied the history of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Levant, Persia, Greece, and Rome—but never that of ancient Nubia, the region surrounding the Nile River between Aswan in southern Egypt and Khartoum in central Sudan. Seeing the documentary pushed me to read as many books as I could about my homeland’s history, and during annual vacations with my family, I spent much of my time at Khartoum’s museums, viewing ancient artifacts and temples rescued from the waters of Lake Nasser when Egypt’s Aswan High Dam was built during the 1960s and ’70s. Later, I worked as a journalist in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, for close to eight years, reporting for the New York Times and other news outlets about Sudan’s fragile politics and wars. But every once in a while I got to write about Sudan’s rich and relatively little-known ancient history. It took me more than 25 years to see the pyramids in person, but when I finally visited Meroe, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of fulfilled longing for this place, which had given me a sense of dignity and a connection to global history. Like a long-lost relative, I wrapped my arms around a pyramid in a hug.

The land south of Egypt, beyond the first cataract of the Nile, was known to the ancient world by many names: Ta-Seti, or Land of the Bow, so named because the inhabitants were expert archers; Ta-Nehesi, or Land of Copper; Ethiopia, or Land of Burnt Faces, from the Greek; Nubia, possibly derived from an ancient Egyptian word for gold, which was plentiful; and Kush, the kingdom that dominated the region between roughly 2500 B.C. and A.D. 300. In some religious traditions, Kush was linked to the biblical Cush, son of Ham and grandson of Noah, whose descendants inhabited northeast Africa. tangie

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Meroe, 150 miles north of Khartoum, served as a necropolis for the kings and queens of Kush for close to 600 years. Matt Stirn Text by Isma’il Kushkush; Photographs by Matt Stirn

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If we want the people in our lives to put down their steak knives and seriously consider changing their diets, we need to change the conversations we’re having with them, says food innovator Bruce Friedrich. Here’s what to say — and what not to say.

We can’t stop eating meat. Global consumption averages 94.8 pounds per person a year, and it’s expected to increase as much as 76 percent by 2050. In steak- and burger-loving countries such as Australia and the US, the average person eats between 220 and 240 pounds of meat and poultry a year.

Yet at the same time, researchers are increasingly aware of the serious consequences of our carnivorous diets. “In 2019 … 30 of the world’s leading scientists released the results of a massive three-year study into global agriculture and declared that meat production is destroying our planet and jeopardizing global health,” said Bruce Friedrich, cofounder and executive director of the Good Food Institute, an organization that supports the creation of plant-based and cell-based meat, in a TED Talk.

What’s more, eating meat has been shown to have a negative impact on personal health. A large-scale analysis found that a long-term diet of high amounts of red meat, particularly processed meat, is associated with an increased risk of mortality, cardiovascular disease, colorectal cancer, and type 2 diabetes. In fact, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified processed meat as a human carcinogen due to its association with colorectal cancer, and WHO has classified red meat as “probably” carcinogenic because of its links to colorectal cancer.

Despite all the evidence, people aren’t putting down their double cheeseburgers, something that Friedrich, a TED Fellow, knows all too well. “Lots of people oppose the harms of industrial animal agriculture, but when they sit down to eat, they put their ethics to the side, and they eat what is delicious and orderable,” he says.

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Cari Vander Yacht

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The Tumblr sounds a bit like a college course: People of Color in European Art History.

And its goal is pretty ambitious. The blog’s author, Malisha Dewalt, says that her goal is to challenge the common perception that pre-Enlightenment Europe was all white, which she argues is a much more recent and deliberate invention.

“All too often, these works go unseen in museums, Art History classes, online galleries, and other venues because of retroactive whitewashing of Medieval Europe, Scandinavia, and Asia,” she writes. “[T]his blog is here to emphasize the modern racism that retroactively erases gigantic swaths of truth and beauty.”

And she means erased literally: While it was once the convention to depict one of the Magi — the fabled “three wise men” of the Christian folklore — as a dark-skinned black man, many dark-skinned people who appear in portraits of European royals were later painted white or simply cropped out when they were reproduced in textbooks.

Pamela Patton, a professor of art history who focuses on Iberia, says that artists from the Middle Ages “seem clearly interested in representing a diversity of ethnic variations, including different skin colors, hair textures, and facial features.”

She goes on. “It’s tempting to ask whether they were primed for this by the actual ethnic diversity of the medieval Iberian world, where there were Africans, Arabs, Jews, and other non-European groups in some numbers,” she says. tangie

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We all know the numbers by now. Industrial meat production is the single biggest cause of global deforestation.

It creates an estimated 14.5 percent of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions — more than the combined emissions from all forms of transport. In the face of these alarming numbers, there has been a groundswell of people attempting to eat zero, or less, meat.

But what about the little carnivores that share our homes, our beloved pets?

In the US alone, at least 70 percent of households own pets, according to the 2020-2021 APPA National Pet Owners Survey, and many of them are dogs. There are an estimated 77 million individual dogs in America — the highest number since the American Veterinary Medical Association began counting in 1982. Worldwide, more than 470 million dogs live with human families. 

But as the food packaging and poop baggies pile up, some owners have begun to wonder about the impact their furry friend is having on the planet. What do we know about dogs’ environmental paw print, and are there things we can do to mitigate it?

Far and away the biggest environmental impact our canine companions exert is through their diet. The global pet food market was worth almost $97 billion in 2020. More than one-third of that food was purchased in the US, with other large markets in the UK, France, Brazil, Russia, Germany, and Japan.

US dogs and cats snarf down more than 200 petajoules (a unit that measures the energy content of food) worth of food per year — roughly the same as the human population of France, according to Gregory Okin, a researcher at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “We’re talking about animals whose consumption is on the order of nations,” he says.

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Alamy

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Ever since the Rubik’s Cube was released, it’s taunted almost a half billion tinkerers who think they can crack its confounding mysteries, only to be stymied by its maddening secrets. Now, it’s time to unpack the puzzle once and for all—using some deep math. The cube’s literal insides are made of plastic, but its real guts are nothing but numbers. Let’s dive in

Breaking Apart the Blocks

Starting with some basics, a 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube has six faces, each a different color. The center of each face is attached to the core scaffold that holds the cube together, so they don’t move other than rotating in place. As a result, the same colors always end up opposite from each other; on a standard cube, white is opposite yellow, red opposite orange, and blue opposite green.

Bust open a Rubik’s Cube, and you’ll see it’s made of three types of building blocks. First, there’s that central scaffold, connecting the center of each face. Then there are the cubies—the nickname for the little 1x1x1 blocks. The corner cubies have three colored sides, and the edge cubies have two. A Rubik’s Cube has one core, eight corner cubies, and 12 edge cubies.

The immediate math to be done with those numbers is the total number of ways you can scramble a Rubik’s cube: 43,252,003,274,489,856,000. Written in a more mathematical way, that number is (3⁸8!)(2¹²12!)/12. Here’s how that comes together.

The first term, 3⁸, counts every way the eight-corner cubies can be rotated. A corner cubie can fit into its slot, rotated three different ways. That’s a factor of 3 for each of the eight corner cubies, so they multiply to 3⁸.

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Photo by  Andrew Spencer/Getty Images

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Lawns are a sign of prestige. Once a sign of upper-middle-class British wealth, over the past century, the traditional yard transformed into an element of the “American Dream”—owning a house of surrounded by a mini field of greenery.  It takes a significant amount of water, fertilizer, and labor to maintain a simple grass lawn—and even more resources for keeping sporting arenas, golf courses, and gigantic McMansions in top shape. 

Still, some eco-conscious people and landowners are swapping pristine green grass for a sustainable lawn. Plants still cover the ground and provide beautiful greenery, but take up less water to maintain. Some are even great for local pollinators and utilize different plants and grasses that are often native to an area instead—creating beautiful, unique landscapes that support local wildlife. And in a changing climate, there’s plenty of reasons to ditch the monotonous green grass lawn for something more resilent and resource-savvy. 

Native Grasses and Plants Use Way Less Water Than a Typical Lawn

According to the Natural Resource Defense Council, grass lawns consume nearly 3 trillion gallons of water a year, 200 million gallons of gas (for all that mowing), and 70 million pounds of pesticides. A challenge to maintain in some areas, considering that some rivers out west are facing historically low levels—it means water shortages for residents out in Western states. The U.S. has experienced a “megadrought” this year, and hot dry conditions are also worsening the incidence of forest fires in various states across the West Coast. 

Creeping herbs like thyme and oregano, ornamental grass, evergreen moss or even covering an area with rocks and then surrounding it with perennial native plants require less water and physical maintenance than regular grassy lawns but still make for a beautiful, colorful lawn.  

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Clover is a great plant to start with for making your lawn more environmentally-friendly. Couleur from Pixabay 

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Plenty of articles about gardening “hacks” assume that everyone has access to truckloads of nutritious soil and enough space for plenty of plants. This will not be one of them. We know these gardening staples aren’t always easy to come by, especially if you live in a city. Thankfully, there are some veggies that can regenerate using water and sunlight alone.

The premise behind regrowing vegetable scraps in water is simple: plants are generally built to harness energy from the sun and nutrients from the earth. A small glass or dish of water won’t provide the same nutrients as hearty soil, but plants can still use it to grow new tasty shoots or soil-ready roots.

Plants that will grow shoots

You can easily regrow the edible stems and leaves of some common kitchen veggies by simply placing their inedible base in water. For best results, position these stumps on a sunny windowsill and change the water frequently.

Lettuce and cabbage

Chances are, you usually discard that tough white chunk at the base of a head of cabbage or lettuce once you’ve torn off all its leaves for your salad. But by placing this part in water, you can coax out some new leaves. Put it in a wide mug or shallow bowl with an inch or two of water, leaf-side up, and check it often to make sure the outside isn’t getting slimy. Within a week or two, new baby leaves should start sprouting from the center of the stump. Your homegrown head won’t return to its full leafy glory, but this can be a great way to grow garnishes or supplement a larger dish.

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You might not get enough mint to sustain your mojito habit this way, but you can certainly grow some starter plants. DepositVad / Depositphotos

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