‘The Justice Department’s decision to appoint former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel charged with investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia is a win for Democrats, a new blow to a reeling White House, and a clear sign that the scandal that has engulfed the administration will only accelerate in the weeks and months ahead…’

Source: Vox

‘In this video, you’ll learn why you shouldn’t rub chopsticks together to remove splinters, stick your chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice, pass morsels from one set of chopsticks to another, and two other dining taboos.’

Source: Boing Boing

‘[A] data-driven look at prose… plumbs the new, massive corpuses of digitized books to make quantitative — rather than the traditional qualitative — statements about our literary habits…’

Source: Boing Boing

`The necessity of [the] pointless; the richness in the poverty of existence—stripped of its pretense and grand, self-important narratives…. These ideas arise from “the themes of failure that so dominate his work,” says de Botton. Though Beckett resisted interpretation in his own writing, he wrote an early study of Marcel Proust that interpreted the French author’s work as a philosophy of life which rests “on the making and appreciation of art.” Given that this is a School of Life video, this interpretation becomes the favored way to read Beckett. There are many others. But as the title of a 1994 Samuel Beckett reader—I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On—suggests, every approach to Beckett must somehow try to account for the stubborn intensity of his contradictions…’

Source: Open Culture

Source: Boing Boing

‘In a strange commencement speech given to the graduating Coast Guard Acadamy class, President Trump complained that no politician in history…has been treated more unfairly” than him, but that “everything will be just fine.” Trump seemed to be clearly referencing the scandal that has surrounded him after he fired FBI Director James Comey…’

Source: Digg

‘Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates was fired by Donald Trump after she declined to enforce his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban. But before she got the boot, Yates warned Trump that his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, might be compromised by the Russians. And in a new interview with the New Yorker, she discovered a problem that we didn’t even know we had: There’s no emoji for treason.’

Source: Gizmodo

Why so many languages invented words for colors in the same order.

Source: Vox

‘Congressional Republicans have followed a nearly identical script whenever President Donald Trump enmeshes himself in a national security scandal.  First, they make overtures toward being disgruntled and troubled by the revelation, leading to news reports about a fissure in the Republican Party. Step two is for them to rejectDemocratic calls for more congressional oversight of the president. The final act is to point out Democratic hypocrisy, while moving on to something else altogether…’

Source: Vox