Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, don’t miss our most popular post last week…Júlia Roth’s expose of ‘gratitude money,’ the supposedly voluntary payments Hungarian patients are expected to fork over to their doctors if they want high-quality health care.
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The Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Very Litigious Bikini (Katherine Rosman for the New York Times)
An upscale twist on a classic swim garment became iconic…and the story behind it is more complicated than you might imagine.
The bikini was featured on Vogue.com, and in Vogue UK and Women’s Health magazine. There were Elle Italia, the style magazine of The Sunday Times of London, the Coveteur. In June 2014, People magazine called it “the hottest bikini this summer.” That December, it appeared on the U.K. cover of Condé Nast Traveller. A few months later, the company announced that the bikini was available at Barneys, the Valhalla of upscale boutique brands.
Amazon Sent 1,700 Alexa Recordings to the Wrong Person (Carolina Haskins for Motherboard)
Many people are getting smart devices for the holidays. They may want to think long and hard about whether activating them is a good idea.
This isn’t the first time that voice data gathered by Alexa has accidentally been shuffled off to the wrong place. Earlier this year, conversations between a couple in Oregon was accidentally sent to a random contact. This mistake was reportedly caused by Echo (incorrectly) hearing the activation word “Alexa,” followed by “voice message” and a person’s contact name. As Wired described it, the incident was “the Echo equivalent of a butt-dial.”
Tech Is Killing Street Food (Christine Ro for The Atlantic)
Street food is as old as cities. The tech industry’s passion for ‘disruption’ could be what kills it.
In both places, many street vendors are migrants—Bangalore’s come from other parts of India, while in the Bay Area many hail from Latin America. They and their livelihoods offer a warning about the fate of immigrant service labor in the tech economy: When space is at a premium, the high-profile, high-margin industries tend to take it up, while the low-paid, already precarious jobs that keep them humming are threatened.
“Now, I’m free to do whatever”: Michelle Obama explains her $3,900 Balenciaga boots (Nadra Nittle for The Goods)
Michelle Obama spent her time in the White House under a microscope, constantly criticised for every choice, sometimes in very racialised ways. Now that she’s out, she’s refusing to go quietly.
Now that she’s no longer first lady, the boots are far more than a sign of excess. Her memoir, which chronicles her rise from Chicago’s South Side to the White House, is about how she arrived, and the Balenciagas symbolize how far she’s come. Women over 40 are told to play it safe with fashion and African Americans who flaunt their wealth, including Obama herself, tend to be criticized for not showing humility. But the former first lady has thrown to caution to the wind.
Susan Potter knew in exquisite and grisly detail what was going to happen to her body after death. (Cathy Newman for National Geographic)
This is a lovely profile of a woman who donated her body to science, and the scientist who helped make it happen.
“This story is about death,” Vic Spitzer told me in March 2004, when I first met him to discuss his collaboration with Potter. “But in this case we’re talking about the future dead.” In fact, it’s really a story about a relationship between two living people: a scientist with a vision to create a boundary-stretching, 21st-century version of Gray’s Anatomy and a woman who volunteered for a project that would be realized only when she died. You could say that for the last 15 years of her life, Susan Potter lived for Vic Spitzer.
Photo: Chris Fithall
