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Rooftops: Occupied! Communities Turn Out for Solar Power

In Australia, Germany, Romania, Georgia, Finland, Peru, and all across the United States, small and large groups met to work toward solar power.

Sarah Laskow
By Sarah LaskowNov 27, 2011
Sarah Laskow
See Full Bio

Photos courtesy of Solar Mosaic

innovationgrassrootsadvocacyenergy

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john lennon, paul mccartney, the beatles, john lennon and paul mccartney, jam session
Culture

Four years after The Beatles' breakup, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had a chaotic final studio jam

harrison ford, shrinking, apple tv, actor, television
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Why Harrison Ford immediately agreed to work with Jason Segel after seeing him naked

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What residents most love about New York City, tourists actually hate

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buying furniture, college, cheap furniture, budget tips, university

The least expensive furniture might not come from a store at all.

Photo credit: Canva

Want new furniture for less money? The best spot is not a store or an online shop.

If you’re looking to spice up a room with some newer furniture or find replacements for old, broken down couches or chairs, there are many options available to you. Obviously, you could go to a store or find some furniture online at a shop, but it can get pretty expensive if you’re on a budget. You could go to used furniture stores or thrift shops, but many of the offerings might be as old as the furniture you’re trying to replace. If this sounds like you, the best place to get gently used furniture or some kitchen appliances might not be a store at all, but actually your local college or university during graduation season.

This might seem odd, but more and more people are heading to colleges and universities to find replacement furniture, appliances, and other goods. Every year, students are moving out of their dorms or apartments after graduation and many of them are discarding old-to-them-but-new-to-you furniture, much of which is less than four years old. Beds, dressers, tables, sofas, easy chairs, and many other household items are left on the street for trash pick-up or for anyone that wants to pluck them, including fellow students. However, this type of scavenging isn’t what’s being recommended (even though that is an option). You could show up just before graduation and move-out day to offer to take it off their hands and into your truck for cash or Venmo instead of dumpster diving.

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Remembering when Paul McCartney visited Brian Wilson and played him a new Beatles song.

Photo credit: Takahiro Kyono via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 (left) Raph_PH via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 (right)

Brian Wilson was profoundly moved when Paul McCartney visited him and played a new Beatles song

Brian Wilson always had a special connection with Paul McCartney—particularly during the mid-1960s, when both The Beach Boys and The Beatles were at their most experimental, soaking in pivotal new influences. The two songwriters shared a lot of musical hallmarks: unusual chord structures, ornamental melodies, a knack for orchestrations and studio trickery. And their albums of this era engaged in a sort of cultural dialogue, each one inching popular music forward.

In his 2016 memoir,I Am Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys mastermind wrote about first meeting McCartney in the '60s. During that in-studio encounter, Wilson learned that the band’s 1966 classic "God Only Knows" was one of the Beatle’s favorite songs. "It’s the kind of thing people write in liner notes and say on talk shows," he reflected. "When people read it, they kind of look at that sentence and keep going. But think about how much it mattered to me when I first heard it there on Sunset Boulevard. I was the person who wrote 'God Only Knows,' and here was another person—the person who wrote 'Yesterday' and 'And I Love Her' and so many other songs—saying it was his favorite. It really blew my mind."

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dna test surprise, switched at birth, claire tony jessica, nhs baby swap, uk hospital mixup, ancestry dna, bbc dna report, family reunion, mistaken identity, genetic testing

Newborn in the maternity ward

Canva

She took a DNA test for fun. Then learned she had the wrong family.

What started as a casual curiosity about family history quickly turned into one of the most shocking revelations of Claire’s life.

The 74-year-old woman, whose story was reported by the BBC, had been gifted a home DNA kit by her son. She expected to learn more about her heritage. Instead, she discovered that she had been switched at birth in a U.K. hospital back in 1967—and had grown up with an entirely different family than the one she was biologically related to.

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frozen vegetables, frozen vs fresh, produce, healthy living, bobby flay

Frozen vegetables and fruits are vastly underrated.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons/Canva

Dietitians and chefs like Bobby Flay agree: You’re thinking about frozen produce all wrong

Whether it’s on a TV commercial or on display at a grocery store, we’re bombarded time and again with the idea that “fresh is better.” While it’s a manner of taste, there has to be some truth to it, right? After all, fresh vegetables and fruits are usually pricier at the supermarket compared to frozen bags of them. There is very little processing done to them, so they just look healthier, too, right? But what if it was all hype?

Several dietitians and even well-known chefs are fighting back against that stigma to argue that frozen produce is just as good as fresh produce. In some cases, both in terms of taste and in terms of health, frozen produce can even be better than buying fresh.

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Staying in bed longer only makes you want to...stay in bed longer.

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

Staying in bed longer is actually bad for you, but here’s how to get out of bed comfortably

We all know that moment when the alarm goes off in the morning and you start thinking about who you wouldn’t murder for another five minutes, (another 10 minutes?!) of sleep. You hit the snooze button, and your eyes drift closed again, only to be thrown open as the alarm sounds one more time. While those extra few moments of sleep might feel wonderful at the time, they’re never as good as simply waking up and staying up and can even cause more harm than good.

“The name for the uncomfortable feeling on awakening is ‘sleep inertia,’” writes Dr. Keith Roach in The Detroit News. Sleep inertia is that feeling of zombie-like grogginess you get when you wake up again shortly after being up once before, like when you hit the snooze button or take a nap. As the Sleep Foundation writes on their site, it can also include “disorientation, drowsiness, and cognitive impairment that immediately follows waking.” Though going back to sleep might feel nice for a short time, you’d actually be better off for the rest of the day by just getting out of bed, especially if you wake up naturally feeling well-rested, Roach continues.

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Rutgers, tomato, tomatoes, Rutgers tomato, science, agriculture, food

Students and professors at Rutgers surround a tomato plant

Rutgers University

How a small 1934 college experiment completely changed our relationship with tomatoes

Long before they appeared on hamburgers across the country, the tomato actually had quite a naughty history—or one that was perceived as naughty, anyway. The tomato was initially shown to European colonists in the 1500s by the long-established Aztec civilization in Mexico–it was originally called “Xitomatl” in the native Aztec language of Nahuatl–but because the color red was associated with hedonism and sexuality in Europe at the time, people were hesitant to get too close. They were also concerned it was an aphrodisiac whose purposes would have been strictly condemned by the Catholic Church unless used explicitly for conception.

The tomato’s bad reputation continued this way for centuries, until it then extended into murder. Because tomatoes are acidic, and many plates of royalty were made from lead-heavy pewter, the combination created lead poisoning for many who ate tomatoes off of these plates, National Geographicshared. The tomato had been framed as a “poison apple,” but this reputation changed in part because, as Italian immigrants moved westward in the 19th century, they were among those who brought tomatoes with them as a beloved ingredient. This love later extended across ethnicities and across the U.S., and in particular to a college in New Jersey.

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David Foster Wallace was asked to define "Lynchian." His answer involved peanut butter.

Photo credit (David Lynch): Aaron from Seattle, WA, USA (via Wikimedia Commons), Creative Commons Attribution 2.0; modified with peanut butter graphic (Photo credit: Canva)

Asked about David Lynch's surrealism, David Foster Wallace's perfect response involved peanut butter

Few artists create sounds or images so unique, their very names become adjectives. "Hitchcockian" conjures a highly stylized and unsettling flavor of suspense. "Beatles-esque" can point to dozens of different vibes, from psychedelic marching bands to sweetly sung pop-rock vocal harmonies. But the best example of this phenomenon might be "Lynchian": a somewhat abstruse term used to describe the surreal, largely disturbing, and often darkly hilarious films and TV shows—from Eraserhead to Blue Velvet to Twin Peaks to Mulholland Dr.—made by the late, great David Lynch.

It’s a difficult word to define, but the most profound attempt came from acclaimed author David Foster Wallace, a massive Lynch fan who wrote a famous essay about the director for Premiere ahead of the 1997 movie Lost Highway. "An academic definition of 'Lynchian' might be that the term 'refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter,'" he wrote. "But like 'postmodern' or 'pornographic,' 'Lynchian' is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately definable only ostensively—i.e., we know it when we see it."

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A job applicant got the last word in after being CC'd on the wrong email.

Photo credit: Canva

Job applicant accidentally CC'd on email before canceled interview. He responded perfectly.

A couple of viral threads on Reddit are getting people talking about the slogging process of getting a job in the current age and the importance of email etiquette during the search. The original Reddit poster, known as Bart, had applied for an IT position and had an initial interview with three out of the four people he was supposed to meet. The fourth person who couldn’t make it sent Bart a follow-up email to schedule a one-on-one Zoom just to get acquainted. Then Bart saw an email he wasn’t supposed to see.

Without knowing that Bart was CC’d in the email, one of the initial panelists emailed a reply that read, “Bart is out,” chastised his fellow coworkers, and ordered the Zoom interview be canceled and an apology be sent to Bart for good measure. After seeing “the live show of their messy internal drama,” Bart considered himself lucky. “If your team can’t even handle email coordination or basic professionalism in a hiring process—why would I want to work there?” he said on Reddit. But Bart’s question to the Internet was simple: How should he respond to the email he was mistakenly included in?

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