Conversation Piece VI
Enjoy our Sunday series, Conversation Piece, a NUVO-curated digest of things on the Internet we think you’ll want to talk about.
David Attenborough, I choose you. So you woke up last week and suddenly everyone from your kid niece to The Economist was talking about Pokémon Go, and there you were still taking quiet pride in your inability to describe a Pikachu. Poké-mania has descended, but rather than suffer the indignity of asking a 12-year-old to demonstrate the app for you, why not let David Attenborough break the phenomena down in his dulcet, dulcet tones? Read more.
Move over, almond milk—there’s a new dairy alternative in town. It’s plentiful, has a low environmental impact, and is a fantastic protein source. It’s also secreted by cockroaches. Don’t gag—a more calorie- and nutrient-dense alternative to milk could majorly improve global undernourishment. Hey, if cockroaches are going to outlive us all, they must be doing something right. Read more.
Hot enough for ya? In this 1998 New Yorker personal essay, the late Arthur Miller recalls the particular swelter of New York circa the twenties—those pre-AC summers when the windows of long-gone elevated, wooden train cars provided a rare chance to catch a laundry-hot gust of moving air, and families unable to bear their stifling apartments slept in the park with their alarm clocks beside them. Read more.
Soldiering forth without coffee. If you think a Monday without coffee is impossible, try making it through a war. This piece catalogs the importance coffee has played in the lives of soldiers since the Civil War—whether it was used to help vitalize before battle or as a comforting, nostalgic means to connect with other combatants in the trenches. Read more.
Stacks on stacks. Our pet geological formations of the moment are “stacks”—those stately, water-carved towers that seem so mystical and unlikely, emerging from the shoreline with their decorative caps of greenery. Vancouver’s Siwash Rock is an example, or those of Ontario’s Flowerpot Island; this article does a lovely job of unraveling their mysteries. Read more.
