Tag: email_newsletter

“The BMI is controversial. In the 1830s, Belgian scientist and sociologist Adolphe Quetelet created what would eventually become known as the BMI to determine what body the socially ideal man would have. He based it on the measurements of white European men of his time, and didn’t intend for it to be applied to the bodies of women or people of colour. He also developed his system long before the contemporary stigma around obesity began to take root. Some doctors now apply additional measurements, like waist circumference, to determine whether a patient’s size is considered healthy. But size alone is not an effective measure of a person’s health”

https://thewalrus.ca/ozempic/

“How to have faith in the shadow of such uncertainty, where one afternoon, after you’ve had a bit of difficulty swallowing, the specialist speaks the words “stage four,” and life is a loan called back? Laurene told me that during Jim’s sixteen months of chemo, they never discussed his novel. But there must have been moments of quiet, of waiting for the doctor, of the hypnotic beeps of medical machines. And in those moments, did Jim wish that he had worked on the novel more or not at all?”

https://thewalrus.ca/i-tried-to-finish-a-dead-mans-novel/

“In retrospect, the Nintendo DS prepared the world for the iPhone, and for the explosion in touchscreen smartphone gaming that would eventually kill off the whole idea of a handheld games console. We don’t need them any more, now that we have one device that fits in our pockets and can do everything from giving us directions and taking photos to playing games. The DS was a half step between the Game Boy and the smartphone – a device that played games but could also do other things”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/nov/12/pushing-buttons-nintendo-ds-at-20-smartphone-gaming

“Anger and frustration in town have been boiling ever since: one person threatened to burn the school down with everyone inside it. A kind of madness has washed over the town, with people who otherwise led quiet lives being brought to the edge. One person told me they’d endure physical violence, even take a bullet if necessary, in order for the RCMP to lay charges against Didulo or her followers”

https://thewalrus.ca/queen-of-canada/

“In recent years, ideas once considered beyond the pale have made inroads into legitimate institutions and among Canadians. We’ve seen credentialled medical professionals play footsie with anti-vaccine activists wielding sciencey vocabularies, accomplished lawyers push dubious and convenient interpretations of the law, elected officials entertain baseless claims about governmental conspiracy, Convoyites swear themselves in as so-called peace officers with imagined arresting powers, and livestreamers LARP as tenacious, evidence-based journalists”

https://thewalrus.ca/conspiracy-theories-canada/

“I have a couple of books out under my name, and this was a very different experience. We got marketing support, which is an unfamiliar feeling for me. Her media team put together appearances on Good Morning America and the Today show, that kind of stuff. So that was cool in one sense and I guess dispiriting in another because it’s, like, how do beginner writers ever get that sort of coverage?”

https://www.vulture.com/article/celebrity-novels-ghostwriting.html

“Can AI be used to make cars drive themselves?” is an interesting question. But whether we should allow self-driving cars on the road, under what conditions, embedded in what systems—or indeed, whether we should deprioritize the car altogether—are the more important questions, and they are ones that an AI system cannot answer for us”

https://thewalrus.ca/ai-hype/

“If there’s one thing crypto fans won’t give up on, it’s trying to create their own countries, sovereign communities, seasteads, and other things of that nature. One such community is the rather uncreatively named libertarian paradise that will be “Liberland” — at least if they can convince the Croatian government to stop arresting its supposed “citizens” every time they try to visit the roughly 1700-acrem patch of floodlands next to the Danube that Liberlanders claim is a sovereign state. (Croatia apparently disagrees)”

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-68/

“There is in fact a lot in here that will remind you of other things. In some senses it’s a container for everything Coppola has seen and thought about his entire life”

https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/p/i-survived-megalopolis-and-all-i-got-was-this-weird-time-disease

“The past decade has ushered in cataclysmic shifts that have upended the fashion industry and changed the way we shop. E-commerce made designer fashion globally accessible, while fast fashion grew into a billion-dollar business, much of which is built on designer dupes at a fraction of the price. Social media disrupted traditional advertising’s influence and reach. Fashion influencers speak directly to consumers and suck up the robust advertising budgets that once funded the pages of Vogue or GQ. This paradigm shift leaves mass market brands like Roots in a tricky spot. If they go too fashion, they risk alienating loyal customers. If they play it too safe, they risk irrelevance”

https://thewalrus.ca/roots-sexy/