RIP Rachel Held Evans, whom I honestly hadn’t heard of until recently, but the notes & tributes I’ve seen from people I do follow make it obvious that she was fighting the good fight in environments that make it extremely hard to do so, and that’s work worth honoring.
This Week in Our Modern Technological Dystopia: It bears repeating that when you invite an Amazon surveillance device into your house, there are people listening.
Liquid Death is water packaged in beer cans, so the straight-edge and otherwise sober crowd doesn’t feel left out of the fun of drinking out of beer cans, or the fun of importing Austrian water. This gets a million dollars of seed funding, while it remains pretty easy to get water that isn’t imported from Austria in a big silly can. It’s free at most bars! It’s very inexpensive at home, if you have decent municipal water and/or a filter!
This Week in Florida, Land of Gators: You’ve got to make an appointment, y’all.
This Week in Food History: Pad Thai actually is a Thai dish, so it’s got that leg up on other ethnic dishes that were invented by white folks in the west, but at the same time it was intentionally created as part of the nationalist movement that changed Siam to Thailand, based on a dish the leader happened to like.
This Week in Scholarly History: Massive amounts of medieval manuscripts and records were burned during the French Revolution, but it’s interesting to note that people weren’t just broadly destroying the past, they were often targeting particular records that the noble class was using to justify the brutal oppression of the underclass.