Stallman said the “most plausible scenario” is that one of Epstein’s underage victims was “entirely willing.”

“All Hong Kongers are afraid, but what more do we have to lose?”

The group behind the wildly successful Women’s March on Washington in 2017 is cutting ties with some of its bold-faced names and recommitting to its agenda ahead of 2020.

This is what being famous in 2019 looks like.

The Drug Enforcement Agency’s role in the opioid crisis makes clear that law enforcement shouldn’t be regulating medicine.

Victims had hoped to win compensation from the government arguing their rights were violated by Epstein’s 2007 plea deal.

Before all the brands started dumping food in books for #content, a public librarian said that someone actually did this in real life.

It remains unclear why the Manhattan DA wants to see Trump’s tax returns.

The FDA regulates the chemical, called pulegone, in food, but not in e-cigs—so it’s unclear which brands contain it.

Some local Hurricane Dorian relief efforts in the Bahamas are hoping to address the PTSD that results from our increasingly frequent weather disasters.

Read time: 7 mins

Photo: Adobe Stock

The environmental dangers of microplastics are becoming well known. These tiny particles — most all but invisible at less than half a millimetre across — form when larger pieces of plastic break down or are shed from water bottles, plastic packaging, or synthetic clothes, and have been found throughout the oceans, and even in Arctic ice.

Words matter, and your weight cannot determine whether you’re “healthy“, or “normal“.

Honestly.

Firstly, scales don’t measure the presence or absence of health, and so the term “healthy weight“, means literally nothing.

Secondly, the CDC defines a “normal weight” as one giving a person a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 yet if we were using the word normal correctly, it would differ by country and would reflect its population’s mean BMI. So in Nauru for instance normal weight would be a person whose BMI was 32.5, whereas in Eritrea it would be someone whose BMI was 20.5. Given mean BMIs in the US and Canada are 28.8 and 27.2 respectively, in North America, it should be considered abnormal to have a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9.

So what could we use instead?

Risk based terms.

Weight, though not a guarantee for any medical problem, does increase the risk of many, and so I’m proposing that rather than terms which confer judgment, we categorize weight as low-risk, medium-risk, and high-risk, and by doing so we’ll stop the erroneous use of healthy and normal terminology that constantly and insidiously promotes weight bias, shame, and stereotype.

       

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• Bullying Or Teasing Kids With Obesity Doesn’t Lead Them To Lose Weight But It May Lead Them To Gain
• President Trump May Be A Racist, Antisemitic, Xenophobic, Man-Child, But Despite What You May Have Heard Yesterday, He’s Not Obese

 

I blew it last week. A friend came over after work for that homemade meal I’d been promising her. Since my standard dinner lately has been a plate of nachos and a couple spoons of Nutella I figured it was high time to cook a proper meal. It started well: I snagged a fancy pasta […]

The post #416 When you try cooking something new and somehow everyone likes it appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 4 mins

Read time: 6 mins

CJ Hauser, in The Paris Review, with the crane wife.

Kyle Hopkins, in Propublica, on the village where every cop has been convicted of domestic violence.

Kaitlyn Tiffany, in Vox, on brain boosting.

       

Related Stories

• Saturday Stories: Running While Fat, Running While Female, And Frustrating, Confusing, Israel
• Saturday Stories: Suicide, Goop, Vaccines, And Kurbo
• Saturday Stories: Fitness Evolution, Soda Taxes, and Tick Saliva

 

Read time: 12 mins

Please note: We are discontinuing our segmented podcast feed. Please subscribe to the whole show feed.

Rocks recovered from ground zero reveal how the dinosaurs died; Archaeology from space – discovering history from a few hundred kilometres up; A jumbo jet lost an engine over Greenland — these researchers found it; The toes of foot painters are mapped in the brain as if they were fingers; Why are right whales roaming into danger off the East coast?; Why are the Tablelands of Gros Morne National Park barren?

The main building of the Canadian High Arctic Research Station in Iqaluktuttiaq. (Photo: Neha Acharya-Patel)

I am in the Arctic!

(From left) Chris Giard, Alex Traynor, Noah Booth and David Greene pose with the RCGS expedition flag in front of Mistastin Falls, Labrador. (Photo: Boreal to Barrenlands Expedition)

If the first day of our 840-kilometre expedition through the wil…

It sounds like the warm and windy start of summer. It sounds like the cool and quiet finish to fall. AWESOME! Photo from: here — Follow me on Facebook —

The post #417 The sound of water lapping against a dock on a summer night appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 8 mins

Read time: 4 mins

Say goodbye kitchen puddles, wet socks, and half-filled cubes. Say hello to AWESOME! Photo from: here — Pre-order my new book You Are Awesome —

The post #418 Carrying the ice cube tray you just filled up all the way back to the freezer without spilling anything appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 6 mins

By Eric Cline
Former Saskatchewan New Democrat Minister of Justice

Erin Weir is not well-known outside of Canada. Even many Canadian readers won’t recognize the politician’s name. But the story of how he was smeared and excommunicated by his own political party presents a stunning indictment of political cowardice in the age of #MeToo. And what happened to him could happen to virtually anyone who runs for office.
Weir is a federal Member of Parliament (MP), having been elected in 2015 to represent the Saskatchewan riding of Regina-Lewvan. He ran in that election as a candidate for the New Democratic Party (NDP), which sits to the political left of Justin Trudeau’s governing Liberals, and constitutes the third-largest party in the Canadian parliament. His downfall began on January 30, 2018, the day he announced his candidacy for NDP caucus chair by sending an email to other NDP MPs, and to the leader of the federal NDP, Jagmeet Singh (who, at the time, had not yet become a Member of Parliament). The email set off a chain of events that eventually led to his expulsion from the NDP caucus, and stripped him of the opportunity to stand as a candidate for the party in the upcoming Fall, 2019, federal election. Under the Canadian political system, party leaders are free to unilaterally block candidates, no matter the views of voters or the rank-and-file. Without party affiliation, Weir’s political career is effectively over.
Weir’s undoing was the work of Christine Moore, an NDP MP for the Quebec riding of Abitibi-Temiscamingue. In a reply-all email responding to Weir’s expressed interest in becoming caucus chair, she wrote that she could never support him because “there are too many women (mostly employee[s]) who complained to me that you were harassing to them.” She then added: “As a woman, I would not feel comfortable to meet with you alone.”
Like Weir, Moore was not well-known—except insofar as she already had helped ruin the career of two MPs in Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party after advancing claims that they, too, were sexual harassers (a subject discussed in more detail below). And her new accusation would have come as a surprise (and still does) to anyone who knows Weir, a 37-year-old economist who once worked for the Canadian section of the United Steelworkers union.
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quillette.com

Doors can be trouble. Strutting to the mall, strolling to the store, you spy those glassy doubles in the distance just waiting for you to size them up and give them a big push or pull. Sure, it looks easy, but we all know it’s nothing but. Nope, thanks to years of tense negotiations, backroom […]

The post #419 Correctly guessing if that terribly designed door is push or pull appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 5 mins

A cave selfie in the Devil’s Eye Spring in Florida. Cave diver Jill Heinerth has made a career of exploring inside the earth, a vocation that requires her to balance confidence and fear. (Photo: Jill Heinerth)

If I die, it will be in the most glorious place that nobody has ever seen.

I can no longer feel the fingers in my left hand. The glacial Antarctic water has seeped through a tiny puncture in my formerly waterproof glove. If this water were one-tenth of a degree colder, the ocean would become solid. Fighting the knife-edged freeze is depleting my strength, my blood vessels throbbing in a futile attempt to deliver warmth to my extremities.

A screenshot from a video by Dakota Smith showing lightning activity in the outer bands of Hurricane Dorian. Smith used images from the GOES-16 geostationary satellite to create a video of Dorian’s life cycle.

A new video of Hurricane Dorian from space offers a remarkable perspective on the life cycle of a destructive storm — and highlights how far satellite imaging has come in recent years. 

The middle of your back is no hands land. Those itchy islands off the coast of Spine Beach see a lot of shade and a lot of showers but not much scratchy, scratchy fingernail loving. When you’re itching hard you might try the ol’ Reverse Angle Elbow Bender a couple times before giving up and […]

The post #420 Using some random thing as some random back scratcher appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 4 mins

The saying is that long journeys begin with first steps, not flying leaps, and if there were flying leaps that routinely led to lasting change, you’d have already taken them.

It’s a straightforward message, but when applied to weight management, diet culture regularly asks us to ignore it.

The inconvenient truth of healthy living is that it will certainly require effort.

Yes, there are likely those who will succeed by changing everything all at once, but for most, slowly building and layering change, and respecting the fact that their roads will absolutely also see their share of disappointments and setbacks, is the way to finally get somewhere.

Your first step might be as small as losing one restaurant meal a week in place of cooking, or trying to reduce your sugar sweetened beverages by 50%, or actually scheduling a day to buy, or a service to deliver, weekly groceries, but if you choose steps you can actually accomplish without suffering, you’re more likely not to fall, which in turn, will help keep you moving forward.

        

Never stop wailing. When you’re singing along with the lyrics of a song and a guitar solo starts up make sure you keep onnnnnn going. We can’t have dead air in your steamy morning shower or all the fans will just hear the sound of you soaping up your armpits and blowing your nose. And […]

The post #421 Singing the guitar solo (or drum solo) (or piano solo) appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Kate Brown, in Runners World, on running while fat.

Cara Harbstreet, in Human Parts, on running while female.

David Horowitz, in The Times of Israel, with an incredibly insightful interview with Matt Friedman with some background on how and why for many, Israel may baffle or infuriate.

       

Related Stories

• Saturday Stories: Suicide, Goop, Vaccines, And Kurbo
• Saturday Stories: Fitness Evolution, Soda Taxes, and Tick Saliva
• Saturday Stories: Morning People, In Sickness, And Mom Bods

 

Read time: 5 mins

Please note: We are discontinuing our segmented feed. Please subscribe to the whole show feed.

Dodging venomous vipers and plant poachers to study how climate change impacts insects; Searching for dinosaurs in BC’s rockies — and finding grizzly bears instead; When the desert doesn’t bloom fake flowers are a scientist’s solution; A moment of distraction leads to near disaster while studying insects in a tropical paradise; Projectile vomiting birds are among the challenges in studying arctic lakes.

Mark Napier (left) and Lanny McDonald play hockey on the Arctic Ocean with youth from Arctic Bay. (Photo: Michelle Valberg)

Michelle Valberg has been to the Arctic 56 times. The celebrated adventurer, nature photographer and Canadian Geographic Photographer-In-Residence first visited the North in 2009, and was captivated by the region’s beauty and cultures. She has since focused her photography on revealing Northern wildlife, landscapes and peoples to audiences in southern Canada and around the world.