The Crockpot: A Weekly Digest 02.21.12

By Staff
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Romance novels are the least stuck-up books in the world, almost never reviewed or discussed at a dinner party. One is supposed to be embarrassed to have a taste for them. And yet, The Awl reminds us, so many of us do….

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Don’t be scared of Picasso and Pollock. New research shows that fear heightens your appreciation of abstract art.

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Would food taste better if you kept it on the kitchen counter? The project Save Food from the Refrigerator finds alternative ways to keep food fresh.  

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Experimental chefs in India have captured the taste of smog.

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Artists can–and should–be ordinary, too.

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It’s time, argues Strong Towns Blog, to start getting used to a world with no new streets.

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A dispatch from an über-clandestine, global gathering of casino sharks and card counters.

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“[T]he most recent Gallup surveys” writes Joel Kotkin, “[. . . show] a remarkable correlation between the states and regions with the highest proportion of childless women under 45-the best indicator of offspring-free households–and the propensity to vote Democratic.”

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Like Sherlock Holmes, with booze: The mystery of the Canadian whiskey fungus.

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Are there too many think tanks with too few original thoughts? Tevi Troy thinks so.

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Transcending partisan rancor, lefty Ralph Nader and rightwing Bruce Fein provide a blueprint for a new kind of politics.

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Big Think exposes the myth of the tortured writer and “the kind of single-minded devotion (to anything) that seems so at odds with our disposable culture.”

Image by jjpuzzles, licensed under Creative Commons.

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