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Thanks to Reader K. for pointing out this compelling selection of photos of Russia from 100+ years ago. The photo of Tolstoy isn’t even the most interesting! See also: the rest of the more than 2600 photos in the Prokudin-Gorskii Collection at the Library of Congress, a link from last year that leads with one of my favorite century-old color photos and, not quite as ancient but still amazing, Scenes Unseen: The Summer of ’78 (in NYC).
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Some fascinating background—and some litt words—in this “analysis of nearly one billion Tweets” that “maps the emergence of new words across the USA in unprecedented detail”.
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This is the Surface of a Comet! Thanks, Reader B.
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James Somers gets a bit deep in the weeds at times in this piece on reverse engineering Google Docs but the general idea of the “archaeology of writing” is one of the more intriguing in this time of living documents. You might remember Somers as purveyor of one of the greatest pieces of word advice for Mac users ever, featured here a few years ago.
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Behold how 19 other U.S. states could be packed into the state of Alaska!
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Quite a moving story of a teen who serendipitously rediscovered a book and, through it, her dead mother and herself.
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Dollar Street documents the lives of 264 families in 50 countries through more than 30,000 photographs. That’s cool enough, but the sorting by income makes the photos even more interesting.
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MSG gets a bad rap. And I’m not the only one who thinks so: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami.
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Multiple people shared the provocatively titled article “One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.” Except the research actually shows no such thing as the article itself clearly shows. Do I really need to spell this out? #DeathToTheDoubleSpace
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Today in 1907, author and playwright Daphne de Maurier is born in London to a prominent family of actors and authors. Her most famous work, the novel Rebecca, was an instant best-seller, though initially panned by critics. In addition to being the basis of the Oscar-winning Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name, Rebecca was also used as by the Nazis as a code key during World War II and the monstrous housekeeper Mrs. Danvers has infiltrated popular culture.