In Focus: The Voyage of New Horizons: Jupiter, Pluto, and Beyond →

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Alan Taylor, writing for In Focus:

A white arrow marks Pluto in this New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) picture taken on September 21, 2006. Seen at a distance of about 4.2 billion kilometers (2.6 billion miles) from the spacecraft, Pluto is little more than a faint point of light among a dense field of stars. Mission scientists knew they had Pluto in their sights when LORRI detected an unresolved “point” in Pluto's predicted position, moving at the planet's expected motion across the constellation of Sagittarius near the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.

As usual, In Focus is the place to go for anything picture-centric. And New Horizons—incredible. Think of what was accomplished here. Quite a day for the human race.

Republican Party Frets Over What to Do With Trump →

Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Martin, writing for The New York Times:

Since the start of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, a vexing question has hovered over his candidacy: Why have so many party leaders — privately appalled by Mr. Trump’s remarks about immigrants from Mexico — not renounced him?

There’s rarely been a political moment more satisfying than watching this debacle play out. The GOP, with their play towards personalities like Trump and the ideas that he represents, and their reliance on brand media sensationalism, created a golem. And now? Well, let’s just say that I don’t see it getting any less interesting. If only it was as simple as wiping a letter off of The Donald’s head.

Scanner Pro 6 by Readdle →

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One of my most-used apps is on sale today, in celebration of the app’s redesign. As The New York Times said:

Scanner Pro is perhaps the best app for quickly scanning and saving a digital version of a paper document.

Trust me, you need this app. If you’re a productivity nerd, you already own it, and if you don’t, you’re not a productivity nerd. Normally, it costs $6. At that price, I’d still be giving you the exact advice. But for $3? Stop reading this and just go buy it. You feel like you’re truly living in the future every time you use it.

‘A relay swimmer in a river full of rapids, and that river is history.’ →

David Remnick, writing in The New Yorker:

What a series of days in American life, full of savage mayhem, uncommon forgiveness, resistance to forgiveness, furious debate, mourning, and, finally, justice and grace.

God, it felt so good to read this.

Oh, Now You Want to Trample My Religious Rights

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Talk about a straw man. I can’t wait to read the reports of priests having a gay put to their head and being forced to marry people. And there’s nothing better than reading these sour grapes retorts about the activists on the Supreme Court. I bet the same accusation was being leveled after Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and McCullen v. Coakley, right?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

Your conscience doesn’t have rights and nobody is looking to coerce you into doing anything against your beliefs. We cross over to the other side of the street when we see you and your hate coming in our direction.

‘It is so ordered.’ →

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*drops the mic.*

In other news, somebody needs to grab Bobby Jindal a dictionary and explain the definition of “assault” to him.

I Better Start Writing This Down: Season 1 →

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I woke up this morning and looked at my phone. I saw that a friend from my past had sent me a DM on Twitter, just wanting to give me some positive feedback for one of the episodes of my podcast. It made me think for a second about how happy I am with how Season 1 came out, how much I enjoy the show’s page, and how thoughtful people can be sometimes.

I Made a Linguistics Professor Listen to a Blink-182 Song and Analyze the Accent →

Dan Nosowitz, writing for Atlas Obscura:

DeLonge is an extreme example but far from the only singer in the genre to adopt a very particular accent, usually described as sneering, whining, bratty, or snotty. By the early-2000s, with pop-punk nearing the apex of its popularity, singers from all over California had influenced singers from as far afield as Minnesota, Ontario, Maryland, and South Florida, all of whom sung pretty much just like DeLonge, who grew up just outside San Diego.

What is going on? How did that linguistic pattern take hold? From its start, punk has played with accents, with Americans sounding like Brits and vice versa but this voice is different. It turns out that when you make a linguist listen to a Blink-182 song, you can learn alot about how regional dialects spread globally, particularly the influential cadences coming out of California. The three-minute pop punk song is not so dumb, after all. 

My co-favorite “American guy[s] faking an English accent faking an American accent” of the time were Ari Katz from Lifetime:

and Chris Conley from Saves The Day:

The Rabbit Died: The History of the Home Pregnancy Test →

Cari Romm, writing for The Atlantic:

A long, long time before women peed on sticks, they peed on plenty of other things.

One of the oldest descriptions of a pregnancy test comes from ancient Egypt, where women who suspected they were pregnant would urinate on wheat and barley seeds: If the wheat grew, they believed, it meant the woman was having a girl; the barley, a boy; if neither plant sprouted, she wasn’t pregnant at all. Avicenna, a 10th-century Persian philosopher, would pour sulfur over women’s urine, believing that the telltale sign was worms springing from the resulting mixture. In 16th-century Europe, specialists known as “piss prophets” would read urine like tea leaves, claiming to know by its appearance alone whether the woman who supplied it was pregnant.

Piss Prophets—that was the name of my band in high school.

Joshua Cohen’s ‘Book of Numbers’ →

Alexandra Alter, writing for The New York Times:

“The world made this book true while I was writing it, which of course is the paranoid’s greatest fantasy,” he said, smoking a cigarette and sipping a glass of grapefruit juice in his small basement apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn, one morning. “The question now is not, ‘Is this true,’ but, ‘How can we live with it?’ ”

The lede of the NYT’s review of ‘Book of Numbers’ is what initially hooked me:

Alive with talk and dense with data, Joshua Cohen’s novel “Book of Numbers” reads as if Philip Roth’s work were fired into David Foster Wallace’s inside the Hadron particle collider.

But reading the first couple of chapters yesterday is what bumped it to the front of my to-read list.