No.167 Asides

🇪🇸 ☕️ 📚 😍 Lovely idea, and a great selection too. News & Coffee Barcelona Third Wave Coffee and Independent Magazines. “Keep the newspapers [Barcelona’s ‘quioscos’], sure, but replace the tat with craft coffee, independent magazines, and a joie de vivre. With music pumping, friendly faces, and racks upon racks of eye candy, Pablo’s quiosco is a new beginning.” (Via Dan Hill.)
👍🏼 🧫 💉 Stanford Scientists Post mRNA Sequence for Moderna Vaccine on Github. “The documents the Stanford team published on Github include two pages of explanation and two pages containing the entire mRNA sequence for Moderna’s vaccine”
🗺 🦠 Missed this last June. Coronavirus Maps Show How the Pandemic Reshaped Our World and Homes. “Through homemade maps, readers shared perspectives and stories from a world transformed by the coronavirus pandemic.”
💪🏼 🚲 Cycling is ten times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities. “When we compared the life cycle of each travel mode, taking into account the carbon generated by making the vehicle, fuelling it and disposing of it, we found that emissions from cycling can be more than 30 times lower for each trip than driving a fossil fuel car, and about ten times lower than driving an electric one.”
⚓️ 🇪🇬 Trade chokepoint 🧵 by David Fickling. The blockage of chokepoints for global shipping has been an economic vulnerability that’s driven centuries of great power competition. Right now, it’s one of the key engines of rising tensions between Washington and Beijing, driving everything from China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Shorter version as an article for Bloomberg.
⚓️ 📚 🧵 by Charmaine Chua. Everyone is talking about the big ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal. Here’s a critical logistics reading list on the politics of how we got here -why ships are so huge, why there is a manmade canal cutting through a continent, why global supply chains seem so brittle, & more.
📚 How women invented book clubs, revolutionizing reading and their own lives. “Women may have been excluded from philosophical clubs and universities, but they found other ways of engaging with literature. Women’s chief role in founding the modern book club — a consequence of being marginalized from other intellectual spaces — has gone on to shape the book landscape in profound and unappreciated ways.” (Merci Clément!)
🔊 I haven’t listened yet but it starts with Newitz interviewing Malka Older so should be excellent. The Future of Democracy - Deep Futures. “Envisioning the future is a daunting yet exciting task. Annalee Newitz profiles fascinating people considering the next century (or even the next millennium). Escape into the distant future to learn what’s coming.”