Welcome to this week's [evening] edition of our Friday Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting and entertaining links. Brew a fresh cup of coffee, find a comfortable place, and relax.
[Video contains NSFW language]
"Save the Day" »
Film director Joss Whedon recently launched a site called SaveTheDay.vote to encourage people to get out and vote this November. To spread the message, he got a bunch of his celebrity friends together to make the hilarious video above.
How to Make a McDonald's McRib Sandwich at Home »
If you're a fan of the McRib, you'll love this. J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats shows you how to make one of your own from scratch, using high-quality ingredients and far better cooking technique than anything you'll find at McDonald's:
We all know that fast food is junky, but sometimes junky food just hits the spot. The McRib, with its cheap thrills of liquid smoke, sugar, and salt, might not be the junkiness we need, but it's the junkiness we want.
The problem is that, while the McRib might be inspired by real barbecue, it's ultimately a lie. Despite its corrugated appearance, it has little to do with actual ribs. (McDonald's doesn't even indicate that the product contains actual rib meat.) It's not smoked, as one would expect of barbecue ribs. Indeed, it's not even grilled—it's cooked on a griddle. We can do better.
I love the way the recipe video keeps backing up to show how yet another ingredient in the process can be homemade.
- For best results, pair this homemade McRib with a side of McDonald's-style fries that you also make yourself.
$100 Two-Weekend Kitchen Makeover »
I don't normally care to read about other people's home improvement projects, but this one by Reddit user /u/NotElizaHenry is pretty entertaining if you click through to the Imgur album and read the captions (FYI, they have lots of NSFW language):
I decided to do a herringbone [flooring] pattern because I hate myself.
I found almost zero information on the internet about how to fill in gaps in vinyl peel & stick floors, I guess because nobody is dumb enough to do what I did.
Photo: Daniel Eden
Golden Hour »
Designer Daniel Eden offers this nice collection of "golden hour" photography, which he offers for download in full and mobile sizes.
My Co-Founder, the Skittle »
Earlier this week (on my birthday, unfortunately), Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a repugnant, nonsensical analogy comparing refugees to...potentially fatal Skittles? I don't even have the words.
Thankfully, I don't have to. Postlight co-founder Paul Ford — who you may remember as the author of that crazy "What Is Code?" story from last summer, which I quoted several parts of here — wrote this beautiful post about his friend and fellow co-founder Rich Ziade, who began his life in America as a young Lebanese refugee:
When you let people in, yes, you increase the likelihood that something bad will happen. You also increase the potential that something good could happen. If you want to make America greater, if you are at all hopeful about this country, you need to increase that potential.
[...]
We have a simple no-politics rule at our company — say what you want on social media, or at home, but leave it there — and in general we stick to it. In this case, there is a direct line between a relatively liberal immigration policy in the 1970s and the salaries of everyone at the company. Without that immigration policy there would be no Postlight, no offices on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, no paychecks and health insurance, and no huge tax bills to pay (grudgingly, but with respect) into the federal, state, and city governments. We just…wouldn’t exist. I could not have built this on my own.
I couldn't agree more about that first quoted paragraph. The very foundation of this country was built on the idea that anyone should be able to come here and make a life for themselves. We all benefit from this, bad seeds or no.
- Let's not forget this fact:
Pause to reflect on the fact that this was sent from an iPhone, which was created by the son of a Syrian immigrant.
Neil Gaiman on Why We Read and What Books Do for the Human Experience »
Maria Popova of Brain Pickings quotes several passages from Neil Gaiman's book, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, on the importance of literacy. I liked this one most:
I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was R. L. Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.
It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness.
There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to someone encountering it for the first time. You don’t discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer them to read. And not everyone has the same taste as you.
Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the twenty- first-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant.
Got any suggestions for articles, videos, stories, photographs, and any other links you think we should be posting in our weekly Quality Linkage? Please do let us know on Twitter.