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Missed News 515
March 12, 2021
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Lake Geneva From the Shores of Lutry, Switzerland
March 11, 2021
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Lake Geneva is a deep lake on the north side of the Alps, shared between Switzerland and France. It is one of the largest lakes in Western Europe and the largest on the course of the Rhône. 60% (345.31 km2 or 133.32 sq mi) of the lake belongs to Switzerland (the cantons of Vaud, Geneva, and Valais), and 40% (234.71 km2 or 90.62 sq mi) to France (the department of Haute-Savoie).
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An image of Lake Geneva From the Shores of Lutry, Switzerland
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What a Korean Teenage Fashion Trend Reveals About the Culture of Mask-Wearing
March 11, 2021
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In 2009, you could immediately spot the cool kids at my middle school in Seoul based on a single item: face masks. The masks specifically had to be from Sakun, a Korean streetwear brand that became known for its black masks with teeth marks printed on the front. It was common all over Korea to see 15-year-olds with thick bangs and Sakun masks, only their eyes visible. The masks signaled that you were mysterious, trendy and a little intimidating—everything a middle-schooler wanted to be.
The trend first kicked off when a member of Big Bang, the most popular boy band in Korea at the time, wore a Sakun mask in a series of selfies in 2008. From there, ulzzangs—late 2000s influencers who built massive fan bases by posting flattering photos on social media—adopted the masks in their daily fashion. Until that point, face masks were occasionally worn by sick people in Korea, but now they started to go mainstream: as a way to cover pimples, block out air pollution and, eventually, protect wearers from getting or spreading airborne viruses.
So, when the Covid-19 outbreak hit, it wasn’t surprising that Koreans reached for their masks en masse even before the government required them to, or that the government began producing some 186 million masks each week for a country of 51.6 million people. Masks are a completely normal part of Korean life. Growing up, it was not uncommon to walk down the street in Seoul on a spring day and see gaggles of people emerging from subway stations with masks on. Even after the Sakun trend petered out, many kids, me included, still kept some kind of mask buried in the corner of our wardrobes. When a new epidemic hit, we knew what to do.
The same simply cannot be said for the United States, where states are battling cities over local face-covering requirements; congressional staffers have reported getting berated for wearing masks at work; and no shortage of politicians, including, for several months, the president himself, have resisted mask-wearing. Despite the scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of masks in minimizing viral transmission, the share of Americans who say they “always” wear a mask when they go out hovers around 50 percent in recent polls.
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People wearing masks sit out at a book store on May 11, 2020, in Seoul, South Korea. | Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images
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People slept on comfy grass beds 200,000 years ago | Ars Technica
March 11, 2021
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Fragments of glassy petrified grass and microscopic traces of plant material, dating to around 200,000 years ago, are all that’s left of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer’s bed in the back of Border Cave. In the same part of the rock shelter, archaeologists found layers of ash with more recent (as in only around 43,000 years old) and better-preserved leaves of dried grass laid on top, as if people had burned their old, dirty bedding and then laid fresh, clean sheaves of grass over the ashes—the rock shelter version of changing the sheets.
The finds shed light on an aspect of early human life that we rarely get to consider. Most of the artifacts that survive from more than a few thousand years ago are made of stone and bone; even wooden tools are rare. That means we tend to think of the Paleolithic in terms of hard, sharp stone tools and the bones of butchered animals. Through that lens, life looks very harsh—perhaps even harsher than it really was. Most of the human experience is missing from the archaeological record, including creature comforts like soft, clean beds.
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Working outside the cave
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Missed News 514
March 11, 2021
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Islamabad, Pakistan
March 10, 2021
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Islamabad is the capital city of Pakistan and is federally administered as part of the Islamabad Capital Territory. Islamabad is the ninth-largest city in Pakistan, while the larger Islamabad–Rawalpindi metropolitan area is the country’s fourth-largest with a population of about 3.1 million. Built as a planned city in the 1960s to replace Karachi as Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad is noted for its high standards of living, safety, and abundant greenery.
The city’s master plan, designed by Greek architect Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, divides the city into eight zones, including administrative, diplomatic enclave, residential areas, educational sectors, industrial sectors, commercial areas, and rural and green areas which are administered by the Islamabad Metropolitan Corporation, supported by the Capital Development Authority. The city is known for the presence of several parks and forests, including the Margalla Hills National Park and the Shakarparian. The city is home to several landmarks, with the most notable one being the Faisal Mosque − the largest mosque in South Asia and the fifth largest in the world. Other landmarks include the Pakistan National Monument and Democracy Square.
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An image from Islamabad, Pakistan
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The True-Life Horror That Inspired Moby-Dick
March 10, 2021
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In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, homeport of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out, and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined.
And on his last day on Nantucket, he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had inspired Melville’s novel. Captain George Pollard Jr. was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers. But when that shipwrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea—a “Jonah”—and no owner would trust a ship to him again. Pollard lived out his remaining years on land, as the village night watchman.
Melville had written about Pollard briefly in Moby-Dick, and only with regard to the whale sinking his ship. During his visit, Melville later wrote, the two merely “exchanged some words.” But Melville knew Pollard’s ordeal at sea did not end with the sinking of the Essex, and he was not about to evoke the horrific memories that the captain surely carried with him. “To the islanders, he was a nobody,” Melville wrote, “to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming, even humble—that I ever encountered.”
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Herman Melville drew inspiration for Moby-Dick from the 1820 whale attack on the Essex. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain.
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Congress passes $1.9T Covid relief bill, with $1,400 checks, in a major win for Biden
March 10, 2021
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The vote of 220 to 211 sends the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature, securing him his first legislative victory since taking office less than two months ago.
Biden will sign the bill on Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.\
The Senate passed the bill in a 50-49 vote Saturday after making changes to the original version passed by the House, including lowering unemployment benefits and reducing the number of people who will receive a stimulus check.
“This is a critical moment in our country’s history,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said before the vote, mentioning the more than 500,000 Americans who have died from the virus and the millions who have lost their jobs. “Today, we have a real opportunity for change.”
The bill passed with near-unanimous Democratic support and without any Republican votes, a sharp contrast that raises the political stakes of the measure.
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© Provided by NBC News
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Senate confirms Biden nominee Garland as U.S. attorney general
March 10, 2021
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The U.S. Senate on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to confirm Merrick Garland, President Joe Biden’s nominee for attorney general, as the federal appellate judge won the support even of the chamber’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, who played a key role in denying him a spot on the Supreme Court in 2016.
The bipartisan tally in the Democratic-led Senate was 70-30 to confirm Garland as the top U.S. law enforcement official, with a number of Republicans including McConnell and former Judiciary Committee chairmen Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley joining the chamber’s Democrats in support.
Garland, 68, will assume the post at a time of heightened concern about domestic extremism. He takes over a Justice Department that Republican former President Donald Trump repeatedly sought to bend to his will. The former federal prosecutor also inherits sensitive ongoing investigations including one involving the new Democratic president’s son.
“I’m voting to confirm Judge Garland because of his long reputation as a straight-shooter and legal expert,” McConnell said before the vote. “His left-of-center perspective has been within the legal mainstream.”
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Merrick Garland
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Remember People’s Names Once and for All — by Using This Technique From Memory Champs
March 10, 2021
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Imagine you’re at a social function — at a time when social functions are safe again — and you start talking to a stranger. The two of you chat for a while, but as the conversation winds down, the other person calls you by name and then says, “It was great to meet you.”
That’s when you realize you have no idea what their name is — and they told you just minutes ago.
How often has this happened to you? And what’s a person to do?
It seems you’ve got three main options: 1) mask the awkwardness by responding with an over-enthusiastic “So great!” or an overly toothy grin; 2) limit yourself to events where name tags are mandatory; or 3) shun society and embark on life as a recluse.
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Illustration by Raúl Soria.
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