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Early access to the March 25, 2024, edition. Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Sherman Alexie. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. If you were in middle school or high school in the last couple of decades, there’s a good chance you were assigned Sherman’s classic young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, an epistolary novel with cartoon illustrations about a native teenage boy growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation who decides to attend a nearly all-white high school.

Hey everyone, The story behind this bonus episode is the wildest ride because it all started with one of my History in the News round-ups. On the 20th I wrote something about the mystery of how the Sphinx’s nose disappeared, which I then talked about on Instagram, which then went viral, garnering me 4,000 new followers in 48 hours (and also about that many hateful comments in my DMs). So Niko and I did a slightly deeper dive into what happened to the Sphinx’s nose, and here we are: A bonus episode dedicated to the myths surrounding the destruction of the Sphinx’s nose (it wasn’t Napoleon’s army!

When people ask me what I did with my quarantine break, sure I tell them about the movies I watched and the bread I didn’t bake, but what actually took up a lot of my time was my obsession with what happened to vocational schools. A concept that used to be very favorable in America all but vanished from popular opinion in the 1980s, and I’ve spent many nights down the internet rabbit hole trying to figure out why.

Black lives matter. This document has an exhaustive list of places you can donate. It’s also got an incredible library of black literature and anti-racist texts. Donate, read, call, and email your representatives. We’re all in this together. Another donation request today, and this one is a combo. Alex asked for a piece about Raheem Sterling, while Josh asked me to write about what would’ve happened if Raheem Sterling never left Liverpool. Alex and Josh, consider your assignments fulfilled.

Earlier this month, viewers of William Friedkin’s 1971 classic The French Connection who’d seen the film before noticed something missing from the version streaming on The Criterion Channel and available to rent and purchase digitally. Within those six seconds, an exchange between the narcotics cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and his partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), Doyle uses the n-word. In the new cut, he does not. It’s a few lines of dialogue that, when removed, fundamentally change the film.

In a previous post, we learnt that hummingbird hearts beat incredibly fast while they’re awake, but slow down by 95% - 99.96% while they rest in a state of torpor. The hearts of most animal are wired in to put in about the same amount of effort - no matter how fast or slow they beat. Most creatures on earth have about about 1-1.5 billion heartbeats to their names. Here’s some examples:

I’m heading to Paris.  I’ve been asked to cook for the inaugural Matter & Shape Design Salon with We Are Ona, a creative culinary studio creating unique dining experiences all over the world. I have been a fan of their work from afar for about a year now and it’s truly a dream to be working with them. Matter and Shape is a project of Journalist Dan Thawley, former editor in chief of A Magazine Curated By.

I admire you, Corey! I am too much of a control freak to ever live ife with such uncertainty! When I was a kid, I wanted to be a singer, a stand-up comic, or an actor but I was convinced (and so was my horrible mother) that I was not pretty enough, thin enough, nor were my tits big enough to do anything in the entertainment industry, so I went the "

You’re reading The New Urban Order — where urbanists explore the future of cities. Thank you to everyone who upgraded last week to a paying subscription! I’ve almost reached my goal of 30 new paid subscribers for January. If you enjoy this newsletter, find it useful, and want to support this work, please consider upgrading. Thank you! Amidst the thousands of articles, videos, podcasts and other media about Taylor Swift this past year –  her boyfriend, her best friends, or whether she tips when she dines out – the nugget I’ve been thinking about most is her decision to move to Nashville when she was just 13.