“In a single round, the gesture had gone from being tangibly linked to the concept of ‘nothing’ to being completely divorced from it.”

“[T]here was sulfur on the surface of the white dwarf as well. Sulfur is generally a very rare element on stars, which suggested that the material did not have a stellar origin.”

“[W]hoever’s running these art theft bots found a much more profitable way of generating leads: by scanning Twitter for people specifically telling artists they’d buy a shirt with an illustration on it.”

“There are now nine women in the preppers’ group chat, soliciting advice and swapping tips on how to best package goods for Amazon. … [E]very day Roundup [Montana] receives 3,000 to 4,000 Amazon-bound packages — about double the number of people who actually live there.”

“It seemed as if one person or group might have created numerous phony accounts to run a much larger Airbnb operation. If that proved true, it meant whoever ran the five accounts I’d located was controlling at least 94 properties in eight different cities.”

“Dunne and her colleagues found traces of 3,000-year-old fatty acids from ancient milk still clinging to the insides of the vessels. … The amount of material the archaeologists found suggested that the vessels had seen a lot of use—or had been filled with milk before being placed in the children’s graves.”

“In 2001, a senior Boeing engineer named L. Hart Smith published a paper criticizing the business strategy behind offshoring production, noting that vital engineering tasks were being done in ways that seemed less costly but would end up destroying the company.”

“[O]ne slab sinking below the Mantle Transition Zone can create a mantle undertow that squeezes up mountains on an entirely different plate, 660 kilometers above it. This new level of tectonics now makes sense of other geological puzzles.”

“Endless money-losing is a variant of counterfeiting, and counterfeiting has dangerous economic consequences. … Competitors have to copy their fraudulent competitors. It’s a variant of Gresham’s Law, which says that ‘bad money drives out good’.”

“A lawful evil character ‘plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion.’ The New Yorker uses jarring diereses to prevent misreading of words that no one has trouble reading, and it doubles consonants in words like focussed because it said so, that’s why.”

“[T]he standards-and-accountability movement … is an elaborate sorting device, intended to separate wheat from chaff. The fact that students of color, students from low-income families, and students whose first language isn’t English are disproportionately defined as chaff makes the whole enterprise even more insidious.”

“The sharp turns and the difference in floor levels at the junction prove conclusively that the tunnel was excavated from both ends. At the junction itself, the floor level drops 60 centimeters from north to south, a discrepancy of less than one-eighth of a percent of the distance excavated.”

“Journalists routinely cover inequity as an abstract phenomenon that can be observed and remarked upon from afar, but it’s a rare media organization that would produce a guide for navigating rural poverty, or managing an opioid addiction, or handling your lease when you’re getting gentrified out of your neighborhood.”

“Copying and pasting made people look at what they shared, and think about it, at least for a moment. When the retweet button debuted, that friction diminished. Impulse superseded the at-least-minimal degree of thoughtfulness once baked into sharing.”

“The control panel he monitored was connected to an elaborate system consisting of tubes with tiny holes that ran throughout the [Notre-Dame] cathedral complex. At one end of each tube was what is called an ‘aspirating’ detector, a highly sensitive device that draws in air to detect any smoke.”