🍔 pandemic patties.
on the agenda this week: lost airplane luggage, an ethopian mega-dam and the supply chain journey of a burger during a pandemic.
📖 reading time: 3m 02s.
👋 hi - happy monday.
😷 i hope you’re all well & wearing masks as much as possible.
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as always, feel free to skip any section that doesn’t interest you or reply directly to this email. & a special thank you to my paid subscribers — i really appreciate the support.
👂 earworm: listen to dominic fike’s new single on spotify or apple music.
🧠 brain candy:
🧳 meet the company that sells your lost airplane luggage. if you’ve ever permanently lost a checked bag in the u.s., it probably ended up for sale at a shop in alabama.
🗽these images show new york city’s new design genre of outdoor dining.
🇦🇲 this series of armenian caves held the oldest brain, shoe, and winery in the world. the shoe looks surprisingly modern with sewn leather lacing.
⏰ this pandemic has heightened our awareness that time is subjective. for some, the days have flown by. for others, time has slowed to a crawl.
💻 amazon briefly banned tiktok on friday before quickly backtracking. this follows the indian national ban of the app that has brought unfounded privacy concerns back into the spotlight.
🕹 a sealed copy of super mario brothers has broken the record for the most expensive game ever sold. the mint copy of the 1985 classic sold for $114,000.
🤪 mildly humorous:
💡 longer reads:
🇪🇹
showdown on the nile
.
half a century in the making, the hydro-electric dam is africa’s largest, with a reservoir able to hold 74bn cubic metres of water, more than the volume of the entire blue nile. once filled it should produce 6,000 megawatts of electricity, double ethiopia’s current power supply. millions of people could be connected to the grid for the first time. more than an engineering project, it is a source of national pride.
for egypt, however, it seems a source of national danger. over 90% of the country’s 100m people live along the nile or in its vast delta. the river, long seen as an egyptian birthright, supplies most of their water. they fear the dam will choke it off. pro-regime pundits, not known for their subtlety, have urged the army to blow it up.
👉 read more via the economist.
🍔
pandemic patties
.
solano pressed the patty with the back of his spatula and watched it ooze. this particular burger was on its way to an engineer who’d just finished another day of working from home — an option solano and his nearly 200 laid-off co-workers never had. instead, the 26-year-old took a pay cut and a demotion from sous chef to line cook just to be one of the few dozen employees able to return to le diplomate’s kitchen.
on the burger’s journey from a kansas farm to the engineer’s dinner plate, every person had a story like solano’s. a rancher with five children who lost thousands every week. a factory worker who brought the virus home to her son. a courier who calculated the true cost of every delivery not in profit, but in the risk it required her to take.
to follow the burger is to glimpse the lasting toll of this pandemic: on the beef supply chain, on the restaurant industry, on the people who were struggling before this catastrophe began, kept going to work throughout it and are still waiting to see what their lives will become when it ends.
solano tucked the spatula under the patty. it spiraled into the air, one moment closer to a destiny that was set in motion two years ago.
👉 read more via the washington post.
📚 word of the week:
“ductile”.
capable of being moulded or shaped.
ductile and sensuous, paint hugs the flat photographic forms of leiter’s nudes in a tailor-made mantle.
- the new yorker, 2015
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