Building Digital Libraries in Ghana →

Craig Mod:

Worldreader, headquartered in San Francisco but with offices in Barcelona, Accra, and Nairobi, was co-founded in 2009 by former Amazon.com executive David Risher and Colin McElwee. The genesis of the non-profit was predicated on two simple notions:

1. Everyone should have access to books.

2. Technological advances are quickly making digital books cheaper and easier to distribute in more scalable ways than physical books.

David and Colin spent a year or so preparing, gathered some Kindles, and in March 2010 went to Ghana to test the idea with twenty students. In his report, David writes:

We came away more convinced than ever that e-readers will change the face of reading in the developing world.

Their most recent annual report, released in June 2014, outlines their 2013 accomplishments, showing just how far they’ve come in three years:

2013 was a monumental year in our growth. Each month, Worldreader provided over 200,000 children, families, and adults in 27 countries in Asia and Africa with hundreds of digital books on e-readers and thousands of digital books on inexpensive phones. As a result, the children, families, and adults whom we serve have read 990,034 digital books in 2013.

In total, Worldreader’s catalog of books offered to the developing world now tops out at 6,699, with an average of 184,000 people reading per month (on ereaders and mobile phones), and a total of 1,784,419 completed books.

I wanted to see some of their accomplishments first hand.

It’s initiatives like these that cause me to swallow back bile every time I hear some well-off Westerner, usually on Facebook, pounding the table about the romanticism of physical books.

Things Organized Neatly—An Entire Box of Lucky Charms →

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I object to the single rainbow marshmallow mixed in with the blue moons.

/via Things Organized Neatly

Keith Olbermann Tearfully Remembers Tony Gwynn

Because you were already tearing up.

/via Deadspin

‘Well hell, that’s all wrong.’ →

David Johnson:

You know where this story ends for most kids. They idolize a figure they know from afar, they get an improbable chance to meet the guy, and he turns out to be a bum. He cheats on his wife. He kicks over trashcans. He shouts at clubhouse attendants. My first day at the stadium, I stood getting dressed in my sparkling new uniform in the bat-boy locker area, which was tucked around a corner from the main locker room, and located about 10 feet from the bathroom. Players filed by, most of them ignoring us. Suddenly, he appeared.

"Hey," he said to me, holding out his hand. "I'm Tony. How are you?" Flustered, I stammered, "Uh, nothing much." He laughed.

This piece is going to sucker-punch you in the heart about three-quarters of the way through. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Soccer, or Football, or Both? →

Uri Friedman:

The story begins, like many good stories do, in a pub. As early as the Middle Ages, Szymanski explains, the rough outlines of soccer—a game, a ball, feet—appear to have been present in England. But it wasn't until the sport became popular among aristocratic boys at schools like Eton and Rugby in the nineteenth century that these young men tried to standardize play. On a Monday evening in October 1863, the leaders of a dozen clubs met at the Freemasons' Tavern in London to establish "a definite code of rules for the regulation of the game.” They did just that, forming the Football Association. The most divisive issue was whether to permit "hacking," or kicking an opponent in the leg (the answer, ultimately, was 'no').

And the argument that (American) football hardly ever involves play with the foot doesn’t fly either—the forward pass and everything since is relatively new to the sport.

L.A. Kings Darryl Sutter Opens Up About His Son Christopher →

Bruce Arthur:

When Christopher was born, the doctors told Darryl and his wife Wanda that he would be deaf and blind. He had heart surgery at 14 days old. Sutter, one of the seven Sutter brothers, was the coach in Chicago; he would eventually step down to take better care of his infant son. When he coached in Calgary and San Jose, it was partly because there was either family or specialized care in place. And he made connections with other kids.

“I think it’s just important,” says Sutter quietly, no fuss. “I was raised in a big family, you know, we didn’t have much growing up. So we’ve always been really respectful of people — actually, it’s probably more family-related — that are in need of some help in some way.

I was looking for something to take away the sting of last night’s defeat. This helped.

/via Lee Jenkins

Dave Chappelle on ‘Letterman’ →

Marc Hogan:

Dave Chappelle is back, and he's cagily — almost mystically — beginning to open up about why he was ever gone in the first place. On June 18, the former star of Comedy Central's Chappelle's Show kicks off a series of performances at New York's Radio City Music Hall, where he'll be joined from June 24 to 26 by the Roots, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, and more. Last night on Late Night With David Letterman, the actor and comedian brilliantly deflected the host's questions about why he suddenly left Chappelle's Show in 2005. And when Chappelle did answer, it was in the form of a quasi-parable about money.

It never hit me until this interview how similar Chappelle and Letterman are. Am I like, late for school on this one?

30 for 30 Shorts: ‘Mecca: The Floor That Made Milwaukee Famous’ →

Grantland:

When the people of Milwaukee had the chance to renovate the Bucks’ basketball court, they chose to do something very avant-garde for a Midwestern city in the 1970s. They decided to use their public funds to commission Robert Indiana, an openly gay artist from Manhattan, to paint the floor of the Mecca. When the Bucks moved to the Bradley Center in 1988, they decided not to take their famous floor with them. So what happened to it? This is the story of how a Bucks fan discovered the floor being sold for scrap and worked with his friends and the artist — and took on serious credit card debt — to bring the iconic work back to life.

Can you imagine something like this happening in 2014?

Baby No. 2 Is Harder on Mom Than Dad →

Heather Krause:

I almost never give advice on whether people should have children, but when it comes to saying having which was more difficult for me, I don’t hesitate. Having my second child was a lot more overwhelming, because suddenly I had no downtime and not enough hands. When my second child napped, my first was awake. When my older son who was learning to ride a tricycle took off toward the street, I had to decide whether to chase after him with a baby in my arms or leave my baby alone in the yard. And so I wondered, which kid is harder on parents’ immediate happiness? Is there data that could help answer the question?

It goes without saying, and the author makes it clear too, that this isn’t hard data. And she also points out that this only refers to the first couple of years of the child’s life. But still—something to think about, especially if you’re a proactive kind of couple.

Papers for Characters →

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Kristin Hohenadel:

The minimalist movie poster has become a popular subgenre in and of itself. It’s a familiar design exercise in which graphic design and movie aficionados create their own pared-down movie poster concepts with varying degrees of artistic merit or success. These sometimes come off as self-conscious attempts to be cute or clever, providing blatant clues to make sure the viewer gets the reference.

But the other day Designboom featured a series of miniature movie posters from Spanish design firm Atipo that use abstraction to communicate the essence of a series of classic films. You have to have seen the film—or at least know the essence of the plot—to get them. And even then you might have to think before it hits you.

Fucking brilliant. The Designboom link and the actual Atipo page has the rest.

/via Meaghan O’Rourke