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Stickiness (Eleanor Morgan for Longreads)
Last summer, I began a tour of stickiness. I wanted to know how the human uses of stickiness linked with those of other animals. I visited laboratories that are researching the glues produced by sea anemones and barnacles. These animals are classed as “biofoulers” in that they readily stick themselves to the underside of boats, damaging hulls and slowing down shipping. For the animals, hitching a ride across the oceans enables them to colonize new areas.
Who killed the prime minister? The unsolved murder that still haunts Sweden (Imogen West-Knights for The Guardian)
To his fellow countrymen, Palme was more than a politician. For more than 16 years, he had led Sweden’s leftwing Social Democratic party, which was in power for much of the 20th century. The party was responsible for many of the policies that people typically associate with Sweden, including high taxes and a robust social welfare system. Palme had come to embody not only the party, but these values, too.
Behind Twitter’s Plan To Get People To Stop Yelling At One Another (Nicole Nguyen for Buzzfeed)
The twttr team began by testing what happens if the app more clearly shows who’s replying to whom. They also hid likes and retweet counts — Twitter’s primary incentives — behind a tap to put the primary focus on reply text. Now they were about to see, for the first time, what people thought.
Don’t Use My Family For Your True Crime Stories (Lilly Dancyger for Crimereads)
Nobody has tried to make entertainment out of Sabina’s story, but if they did, I would burn their podcast studio to the ground. I would call them every night at 3 a.m, and then again at 5, and when they started turning their phone off I would show up and ring the doorbell. I would dig up their most embarrassing secrets and use them as blackmail. I would do whatever I had to do to get them to give up on the project.
Underground Photos From New York’s Seediest Years (Miss Rosen for Vice)
Before gentrification erased all that had come before, Zownir captured New York’s seedy years when prostitutes walked the streets, movie theaters screened porn around the clock, live sex and peep shows took loose change, and the West Side piers were the ultimate destination for anonymous sex—but also art interventions by Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Peter Hujar in the years following Stonewall.
Photo: Tony Hisgett