PicoBlog

Welcome to the latest edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation! The 2024 election is upon us, and we will be putting a lot of thought into our coverage and analysis.

Feet dangle off a girder on top of one of the world’s tallest buildings. A5 Wagyu beef makes sizzling contact with cast iron, inches from the lens. Hundreds of M&Ms fill a toilet bowl, waiting for the flush. A giant rainbow lobster is cracked open in an Okinawa market, revealing translucent flesh. An industrial shredder, befitted with googly eyes, consumes a folding chair. YouTube’s recommendation system has, in collaboration with billions of viewers and millions of creators & publishers, through by far the largest experiment on mass attention ever conducted, uncovered a staggering array of fascinating things about the human psyche.

Visceroptosis refers to the prolapse of one (or more) of the abdominal organs below their natural position. Individuals with visceroptosis experience this “dropping” of their organs when upright but not when lying flat. Symptoms are highly variable depending on the person and which organs are involved. However, some common ones include abdominal pain, severe lower abdominal bloating, pain that worsens with eating, flank pain, constipation/diarrhea, nausea/vomiting, and symptoms that improve when lying down or when the GI tract is empty.

On Sunday, January 10, 1999, “The Sopranos” debuted on HBO, and the landmarks of New Jersey it featured quickly became stars in their own right. As has become an annual tradition, I’m sharing some of my favorite pictures I’ve taken of places connected to the show. 1.) Pizza Land, North Arlington, New Jersey I’ll begin with Pizza Land, which really resonates with people whenever I post it. We catch a glimpse of this store in the opening credits.

In one of the most beautiful parts of the country, thick with redwoods, fresh air, and ocean, the state of California built its only “supermax” prison in 1989. Just north of Crescent City, about 15 minutes from the Oregon border, Pelican Bay is a 7-12 hour drive for families of people imprisoned there. They don’t get many visitors.    There are two parts of the prison. In the photo above, the top building is the “special housing unit”, which is prison-jargon for solitary confinement.

Hey! It’s Sheril Mathews from Leading Sapiens. Welcome to my newsletter, where I share strategies for getting savvier at the game of work. Want to get better at something? Pay attention to your repertoire of language in that domain. I examine this fundamental idea through the lens of neuroscience, philosophy, & peak performance. ICYMI: As I rode up on the ski lift for my first lesson, feeling somewhat apprehensive, the instructor turned to me and said “My job is to teach people to love gravity.

Penne alla vodka is, I’ve heard, America’s fourth most-loved pasta dish, hot on the heels of spaghetti and meatballs, baked ziti, and mac and cheese. Although a modern phenomenon, the dish’s origins are somewhat mysterious: It was, perhaps, invented in New York by Orsini Restaurant’s chef Luigi Franzese in the ‘70s, or maybe by James Doty, a graduate of Columbia University, in the ‘80s. Or, despite its status as Italian-American royalty, it might actually have been created in the motherland, either in Bologna at a restaurant called Dante or in Rome by a chef working to popularize vodka in a country far more interested in wine.

Welcome to Issue 47 of the Johto Times! We hope that everyone who celebrated had a wonderful Christmas with their loved ones. In our penultimate issue of the year, we are delighted to be sharing an interview with Dragonfree from The Cave of Dragonflies. I am proud to say that I have a close connection with the website as an affiliate in the mid 2000s when I ran my own Pokémon fan website, and she has kindly been involved with editing Johto Times.

Here is a button where you can subscribe to this newsletter now, if you have not previously done so. I do hope that you enjoy it. I was driving the boys out to my newly vaccinated parents’ house the other day when my younger son Wynn began to howl in pain. “Ow, brother, ouch!” I turned around and did the if I have to turn this car around thing—a gloriously Dad maneuver that delights me in its timelessness—and saw William, the older son, throw his hands up in the air.