Welcome to the Wednesday Walk Around the Web, where we weave & wind through weblinks weekly. Hopefully you will find the links on offer amusing, interesting, or, occasionally, profound. Views expressed in the Wednesday Walk do not necessarily reflect those of anyone but the writer.
- We still need your advice questions for Steve Wille’s guest appearances on the ol’ Spectacular — big or small, we’ll consider them all! Email us or go to our Ask.fm page to send your questions today. (Your name won’t be read on the show without permission (so tell us what to call you if anything), and Ask.fm allows anonymous submissions.)
- RIP Stephen Hawking.
- This Week in Journalism: The New York Times ended a headline with “¯\_(ツ)_/¯” and frankly I am HERE FOR THIS. Also, it really is the most accurate way to gauge how much it’s going to snow in New England in any given storm.
- There’s a renegade otter menacing river-goers in Florida, instead of hanging around on Grindr like the regular otters.
- This Week in History: The Luddites weren’t anti-technology radicals, they were early labor activists who shouldn’t be as easily discounted as they are.
- This Week in the Limits of Fads: The Jewish escape room where you have to evade a pogrom in 19th-century Russia seems like kind of a questionable idea. I don’t anticipate whiling away many days in a theme park version of my great-grandparents’ lives.
- This Week in Medical Frontiers: Fecal transplants are seeming like a better and better treatment for C. diff and other illnesses that infect a person’s gut bacteria.
- This Week in Art: Almost anything can be a canvas for your art. Enter the humble banana.
- The eradication of smallpox was supposed to be followed by that of polio more than fifteen years ago, but that’s been delayed not for scientific reasons but social and political ones.
- It’s important to know your types of goth these days.
- This Week in Religion: It has to be reinforced once in a while that the phrase “Judeo-Christian” is insulting ahistorical crap and y’all need to keep it out of your mouths.
- This Week in Deep History: The evolution of land-walking species might have been spurred by a stronger tidal force than we have today stranding ancient fish far from shore.
