conjuring

It’s always frustrating when I go to download an episode of Fresh Air with Terry Gross and end up summoning a demon. Is anyone else experiencing this? After this opening interlude, the show proceeded as normal—and we suspect that the currently available version has been duly exorcised—and was a really good one, in fact, with a profile of the performer and composer behind the quite timely School House Rock! number “I’m Just a Bill” and a captivating deconstruction of The Doors’ “Light my Fire.”

common parlance or twenty-three and me

My Modern Met shares an engrossing graphical representation from National Geographic’s senior editor that depicts the distribution and relative population size of the world’s twenty-three most spoken languages with a format of immediacy that teases out some interesting demographics and linguistic trivia. The criteria for inclusion was languages whose speakers numbered fifty million or above—and leaves out the over seven thousand extant minority ones. One fact that always strikes me is how a handful of majority languages are self-contained—like Japanese or Telugu—but others have broader representation. Acquaint yourself with more facts about language and the legend of the chart at the link up top.

that’s kind of a downer

Via Waxy, we’re acquainted with Inspirobot, whose purpose is to supply “unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes for the endless enrichment of otherwise pointless human existence,” and while the de-motivational posters the algorithm generates are not that dark—at least from a cursory interaction—I think we are privileged witnesses to the moment when the robots just took away the jobs of those seemingly employed to disseminate similarly snarky (or well-intended) content on social media. I’m guessing that the genuinely inspiring might present more of a challenge to construct but possibly not. Hang in there, baby!

5x5

honest trailer: funny property dedicated to celebrating the archness of paperback cover art, via Messy Nessy Chic

yōkai: imaginative illustrations of demon haunted foods, the same supernatural beings that inform the Pokédex but are distinct from tsukumogami

lollunteer: more profiles of the new activists

i fought the law: interesting photography project representing bizarre laws on the books in each of the fifty United States

bitéléphone: Monsieur Ernest Mercadier invented the earbud in 1891