Subsistence farmers generally do not do this. Remember, the goal is not to maximize profit, but to avoid family destruction through starvation. If you only farm one crop (the best’ one) and you get too little rain or too much, or the temperature is wrong that crop fails and the family starves. But if you farm several different crops, that mitigates the risk of any particular crop failing due to climate conditions, or blight (for the Romans, the standard combination seems to have been a mix of wheat, barley and beans, often with grapes or olives besides; there might also be a small garden space. Orchards might double as grazing-space for a small herd of animals, like pigs). By switching up crops like this and farming a bit of everything, the family is less profitable (and less engaged with markets, more on that in a bit), but much safer because the climate conditions that cause one crop to fail may not impact the others. A good example is actually wheat and barley wheat is more nutritious and more valuable, but barley is more resistant to bad weather and dry-spells; if the rains don’t come, the wheat might be devastated, but the barley should make it and the family survives. On the flip side, if it rains too much, well the barley is likely to be on high-ground (because it likes the drier ground up there anyway) and so survives; that’d make for a hard year for the family, but a survivable one.

— Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!, Bret Devereaux

Let’s instead encourage companies to invest in the cities in which they are based. That means paying taxes, investing in local education, and generating wealth that can be used by workers to create more companies or fund more amenities where they live.

— Our remote work future is going to suck, Sean Blanda

Let us imagine just how much time would be saved in this informational utopia. Do I want minute 15 of the 1962 Czechoslovak film Man In Outer Space? Four seconds from my thought until it begins. Do I want page 17 of the Daily Mirror from 1985? Even less time. Every public Defense Department document concerning Vietnam from the Eisenhower administration? Page 150 of Frank Capra’s autobiography? Page 400 of an economics textbook from 1995? All in front of me, in full, in less than the length of time it takes to type this sentence. How much faster would research be in such a situation? How much more could be accomplished if knowledge were not fragmented and in the possession of a thousand private gatekeepers?

— The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free, Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs

A number of former slave states also have among the lowest investments in public health, the lowest quality of medical care, the highest proportions of Black citizens, and the greatest racial divides in health outcomes. As the COVID19 pandemic wore on, they were among the quickest to lift social-distancing restrictions and reexpose their citizens to the coronavirus. The harms of these moves were unduly foisted upon the poor and the Black.

— Why the Pandemic Is So Bad in America, Ed Yong in The Atlantic

The Black book club has, over time, served as a space of critical study, leisure and fellowship. In the 19th century, free Black Americans in the North saw literary societies and the organized literary activities that they sponsored as one way to arrest the attention of the public, assert their racial and American identities, and give voice to their belief in the promises of democracy, Elizabeth McHenry wrote in Forgotten Readers Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies.

— Black Book Clubs From Oprah to Noname, Iman Stevenson in The New York Times

I genuinely didn’t know how I functioned before this system. Because I was someone who had notes everywhere. […] It always felt like there was information coming at me from every direction, but at the same time I couldn’t really find anything when I was looking for it. But now, with this system, I feel like I’ve got a little built-in secretary always reminding me of what I need to do.

— Notebooks, Yooshua Wuyts

Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century.

And 23 nations - including Spain and Japan - are expected to see their populations halve by 2100.

Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born.

— Fertility rate: ‘Jaw-dropping’ global crash in children being born, James Gallagher for BBC News

During the first month after the lockdown began in late March, sixteen women and girls were killed in suspected domestic homicides — more than triple the number from the same period in 2019. At least 10 more have died in the two months since then. The oldest of them was 82 years old. The youngest, killed alongside her mother and 4-year-old sister, was 2.

— As Domestic Abuse Rises, U.K. Failings Leave Victims in Peril, Amanda Taub and Jane Bradley in The New York Times

What I was seeking by writing first in English and then “translating” into Japanese was no less than the creation of an unadorned “neutral” style that would allow me freer movement. My interest was not in creating a watered-down form of Japanese. I wanted to deploy a type of Japanese as far removed as possible from so-called literary language in order to write in my own natural voice.

— On Translationese, Masatsugu Ono in The Paris Review

For a city that’s long been the repository of vast commercial, imperial, and industrial wealth, this might seem a very modest template. However, it is one that can be easily scaled up, points out Edward Denison, associate professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture and author of The Life of the British Home: An Architectural History.

“What’s extraordinary, in London in particular, is that you can find very grand houses in places such as Carlton House Terrace, with vast rooms and very high ceilings, that are still essentially two-up, two-downs with extra floors added,” says Denison. “Then you go to working-class terraced housing in places like Greenwich, and find a very different scale and quality of fittings, but essentially the same configuration.”

— What’s Behind the Iconic Floor Plan of London, Fergus O’Sullivan in CityLab