The Crockpot: A Weekly Digest 11.15.11

By Staff
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The ocean’s power is so big,” writes The Smart Set’s Stefany Anne Goldberg, “that it not only generates our worst disasters, it recycles our tragedies for later consideration, just when the whole fuss finally starts to die down.

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What is more expensive: to send a criminal to prison or to send a student to Princeton?

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When Pleasanton mom Siah Fried and her co-author wrote Tales from Swankville, a book about hyper-competitive parenting in suburbia, they didn’t expect their neighbors to take it so personally.

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See the 30-year history of the AIDS epidemic as portrayed through public health campaign posters.

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Funny Honey: “More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn’t exactly what the bees produce,” according to Food Safety News. Pollen is frequently filtered out, which would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world’s food safety agencies.

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Here’s a helpful guide for what to say when people ask why you’re still single. One solution: “Tell them how terrible your personality is, you even use the word ‘irregardless’ and have no idea the difference between ‘then’ and ‘than.'”

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What states let you take a gun to happy hour? What about Saturday evening mass? A map from Mother Jones lays it out.

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As belts get tighter, philanthropy gets tougher. Now you can donate to charity without even trying.

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For the love of Suess, what have they done to the Lorax?

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Learn why old books smell so good.

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A spectacular sight in the sky over the River Shannon: a murmuration of starlings.

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If you care about the environment, writes federal prisoner and Utne Reader visionary Tim DeChristopher, it’s time to play dirty.

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Donating a lifetime of comic books.

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A blog about bystander intervention in cases of sexual assault, all the more relevant given the Penn State Sandusky scandal.

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Smuggling pecans and canned pumpkin into Italy for an expat Thanksgiving.

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Americans are packing more heat than ever thanks to a nationwide parade of looser gun laws.

Image by Yashna M, licensed under Creative Commons.

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