Blogaround

1. The shredder of history and the oldest song in the world (May 2) "To reach the present day, it must be the case that no person or thing destroyed the document—not just in its own time, but also in every year, every decade, every century that followed."

2. This post is about the pruning process I associate with trying to manage the risk of escalation in a conflict. (May 8) "If I'm concerned about escalation in a tense conversation online, sometimes I'll go back over my message draft and try to prune down the number of provocations."

3. Daddy’s Little Interpreter (May 10) Video about a girl in China who helps her deaf father by acting as a sign language interpreter at his nail salon.

And this article, also from Sixth Tone: A Tale of Two Giants: How India’s and China’s Demographics Differ (May 9) "Additionally, India has a much younger population than China. While the median age in China in 2023 is around 39, India’s is just above 28."

Also from Sixth Tone: US Returns Two Stolen Relics Worth $3.5 Million to China (May 11) "According to the district attorney’s office, thieves used saws to cut the antiquities from a tomb in China in the 1990s then smuggled them out of the country. They were then loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than two decades by private collector Shelby White, with one of the two never exhibited, 'never cleaned and … caked with dirt.'"

4. LinkedIn to cut 716 jobs and shut its China app amid ‘challenging’ economic climate (May 9) 

5. Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows (January 18, via) "The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be 'phantom credits' and do not represent genuine carbon reductions."

6. The Meltdown of a Gay Bank (March 31, via) "Curtis said there was a big new funding round to toast — but first there were team-building exercises, and they quickly got uncomfortable. For a 'speed-dating' session, managers handed out white labels and instructed employees to fill in their identity, which led to workers wearing stickers that read 'formerly homeless' and 'sexual assault survivor.'"

7. Brief interludes with hideous men (part 1) (May 11) [content note: John Piper] "A man like that is not going to see her as a stranger in need of simple assistance but as a bit player in his own personal dirty joke, or porno, or horror movie, or treatise on divinely ordained gender roles — or even some combination of all of those."

8. Deliver Us (Opening Song) | The Prince of Egypt | TUNE. I've been listening to the soundtrack from "The Prince of Egypt", as one does.

And here's the same song in Mandarin Chinese.

9. Girlhood, Purity and Religious Trauma: A Taylor Swift Study (May 2) 42-minute video which analyzes Taylor's Swift's song "Would've, Could've, Should've", which is (apparently) about her relationship with John Mayer when she was 19 and he was 32.