There's been a catastrophic earthquake in the Pacific Northwest every 243 years on average, and it has been 321 years since the last one. The San Andreas fault gets all the attention, but the Cascadia Subduction Zone is one we should be worrying about. The Really Big One - Kathryn Schulz / The New Yorker
The average price of an American funeral is over $9,000, and that doesn't even account for cemetery space or a cremation. How did "big funeral" make it so very expensive to expire? How ‘Big Funeral’ Made the Afterlife So Expensive - Eleanor Cummins / Wired
The internet is, slowly but surely, enabling a power shift away from institutions and towards individuals. With web3 and the rise of crypto, the speed of the shift is only increasing. Packy McCormick suggest we need a new philosophy for the age of individuals. Existential Optimism - Packy McCormick / Not Boring
More than a fifth of full-time federal judges have violated ethics codes and the law by ruling in cases in which they had a financial interest. This Wall Street Journal investigation revealed a laundry list of blatant violations from judges, and a similarly lengthy list of weak excuses & denials from those who hold lifetime appointments to be impartial dispensers of justice. 131 Federal Judges Broke the Law by Hearing Cases Where They Had a Financial Interest - James Grimaldi et al. / The Wall Street Journal
Is it really important to sleep 8 hours every night? Will sitting at your desk all day really send you to an early grave? No, I’m not about recommend a WebMD blog article. Evolutionary Biologist Daniel Lieberman thoroughly examines all of our most notorious myths about health and wellness in the modern age. Exercised - Daniel Lieberman
When ice sheets melt, sea level in the vicinity actually decreases. There are corresponding increases, but they occur pretty far away. One of the reasons this happens is that giant ice sheets actually have a gravitational pull on the water surrounding them. For more on that, and other wild things you might not have considered about geophysics, check in with this interview of Harvard's Jerry Mitrovica. Why Our Intuition About Sea-Level Rise Is Wrong - Daniel Grossman / Nautilus
Cash may be the most efficient vehicle for rendering aid to those in need. Studies show that when charities distribute cash to those in need (instead of goods and services), it tends to get spent on necessities like food and shelter. Additionally, those charities have far lower administrative overhead. The best antidote to poverty could be cold, hard cash - Bryan Walsh / Axios
Mandatory sunset viewing, mysterious investor-operators, and intrigue in an Italian castle; the long and circuitous history of the internet collective turned venture-backed startup couchsurfing.com has it all. This wave of decentralized organizations born of the web3 movement would do well to study couchsurfing.com and other non-traditional enterprises of old, because things didn’t really go as well as they could have. Paradise lost: The rise and ruin of couchsurfing.com - Andrew Fedorov / Input Magazine
AI is now able to create undetectable synthetic voices. Instead of voice actors recording dubbing tracks in different languages, filmmakers can now use AI to create digital clones of the original actor’s voice in whichever language they want. This, of course, comes with all the ethical quandaries we’re getting accustomed to with artificial intelligence. The Rise of the Robo-Voices - Ellen Gamerman / The Wall Street Journal