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The Sun Is Stranger Than Astrophysicists Imagined (Natalie Wolchover for Quantum)
“We just kept finding surprising things,” said Annika Peter of Ohio State University, a co-author of a recent white paper summarizing several years of findings about the solar gamma-ray signal. “It’s definitely the most surprising thing I’ve ever worked on.”
The Instagram Obsession With Flowers Is Killing Them (Molly McHugh for The Ringer)
“I can only describe it as like a zombie apocalypse,” one of the family farmers said of the deluge of photo-wielding tourists. Also in 2018, a sunflower farmer in Nova Scotia reported a prized red sunflower had been stolen, among other crop damages. “My field gets beat down quite a bit anyways because people tend to go into the flowers when they’re not supposed to for photos,” said Jen Wilson. Yet another sunflower field, this one in Jakarta, suffered a similar fate in January.
Liberation: a Love Story (and a Reckoning) (Rebecca Wong for Longreads)
When I was 5, I remember asking him for the first time about the tattoo on his arm. By that time, the Providence store had been sold and my grandparents had moved to Pembroke Pines, Florida. Grandpa and I were sitting together in a flower print swivel club chair in the mirrored living room. (It was the early 80s.)
Species of Grief (Meghan Daum for Medium)
The arrangement was supposed to be temporary, but within hours of her arrival, Phoebe made it clear she’d be staying. She lay under my desk all day while I worked, allowing me to rest my toes on her hindquarters like a slobbering, snorting footstool. She used the dog door like a pro, refrained from chewing on the furniture, and never stole food even if it was at eye level — which our dinners nearly always were, given our habit of eating off the coffee table while watching one of the cable dramas we used as a substitute for emotional intimacy.
Canada’s new far right: A trove of private chat room messages reveals an extremist subculture (Shannon Carranco and Jon Milton for the Globe and Mail)
The discussions celebrate Nazism and joke about the Holocaust. They contain boasts of racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour on the part of participants. Many of the in-jokes and memes the members share resemble those propagated by the far right in the United States and Europe.
Photo: Rafael Saldaña
