Conversation Piece, April 22, 2018
A weekly series.
Enjoy our Sunday series, Conversation Piece, a NUVO–curated digest of things on the Internet we think you’ll want to talk about.
Not just eagles. Bad animals are, on the whole, significantly less common than bald humans, but they do exist. From naked mole rates to smooth-headed vultures, many bald animals evolved away from fur and feathers for a reason. Others, like Sphynx, were bred hairless for aesthetic purposes. Rarely, animals develop pattern baldness—just like us. Read more about all types of clammy critters, here.
Follow the bees. In the summer of 2010 Brooklyn beekeepers noticed something strange—their bees, once yellow, began returning home to their hives glowing an incandescent red. Anticipating bad news, the keepers investigated—was motor fluid turning their bees red? Pollution? No—it was maraschino syrup, which the bees began drinking from puddles around the perimeter of Dell’s Maraschino Cherries factory—a historic building housing, as was subsequently discovered, more than met the eye. Learn what we mean, here.
We’d eat it. Say you’re on the California Prune Board, and you’re sitting on a surplus of dried plums—what would your marketing strategy be to offload all that fibrous fruit? In the nineties, the prune collective faced just that challenge, and tried solving it by serving fruit-filled prune burgers to middle schoolers. And it kind of worked. Read more, here.
Calling Poison Ivy. Observing that botany is enjoying a mini-revival as a plot device in films such as Annihilation and Phantom Thread, the Atlantic’s Amanda Ong wonders: why does pop culture link women with killer plants? Learn more about the historic origins of plants as a metaphor for female disobedience, here.
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