Welcome to this week's 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.
Photo: Josh Haner, The New York Times
Greenland is Melting Away »
Coral Davenport, Josh Haner, Larry Buchanan, and Derek Watkins of The New York Times put together this incredible and alarming interactive story about the (climate change-induced) melting ice sheets of Greenland:
The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m. across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept toward the edge of a river that rushed downstream toward an enormous sinkhole.
If he fell in, “the death rate is 100 percent,” said Mr. Overstreet’s friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.
But Mr. Overstreet’s task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.
While the prospect of a 20-foot increase in sea levels worldwide is terrifying, I must take a step back and recognize everyone behind this story for those awesome scrolling-map graphics and that drone flyover footage.
Photo: Daniel Krieger, The New York Times
Is That Cappuccino You're Drinking Really a Cappuccino? »
Turns out, there's an ongoing controversy in the coffee world about what constitutes a proper cappuccino. I like this guy's take on the whole thing:
Kenneth Nye, who founded the East Village cafe Ninth Street Espresso in 2001, grew so sick of customers’ insistence on what they believed to be a “real” cappuccino that he removed all the drink names from his menus. “All it says is ‘espresso with milk,’ ” Mr. Nye said. “We stopped with the names because it’s all silly.”
The new enthusiasm for the flat white, a drink made of espresso and milk that seems to have originated in Australia or New Zealand, is particularly nettlesome to Mr. Nye. “You put 10 people in a room who claim to be an authority on the flat white, you’re going to get at least five different opinions on what it should be,” he said. “People are trying to make the whole process intimidating to the consumer.”
Even as an avid coffee drinker, I myself have walked into a few shops and been confused by their menus. "Espresso with milk" is an awesome way to simplify all that cruft.
Photo: Curtis Mac Newton
It's Harder for Millenials to Stay Thin Than it Was for Boomers »
Olga Khazan, The Atlantic:
A study published recently in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice found that it’s harder for adults today to maintain the same weight as those 20 to 30 years ago did, even at the same levels of food intake and exercise. [...]
They found a very surprising correlation: A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans.
As if I needed another aspect of my health to worry about :\
Photo: Ubisoft/REX
An Eagle-Eye View of London »
James Dunn of Daily Mail writes about a recent project wherein game studio Ubisoft mounted a (sigh) "bespoke" 4k camera to a bald eagle named Sidney and let her fly around London for a few days to capture footage to be used in an Assassin's Creed game. Terrible word-usage aside, the eagle did capture some cool/funny views:
The incredible three-day flight captured some incredible photos and footage of the city, taking in The Gherkin, The Shard, Nelson's Column and Tower Bridge.
There were a few unexpected amusing moments too, as a seagull spotted the predator flying towards it and fled in panic.
Photo: Josh Ginter
Photo: Josh Ginter
24 Hours in Kansas City »
Our own reviews editor (and resident Canadian) Josh Ginter spent a day in Kansas City with our editor-in-chief Shawn Blanc. This may be the most meta thing I've ever linked to in Quality Linkage history, but I enjoyed the photos too much not to share.
I also like that 2.5 hours of the 24 total was spent waiting in line for legit Kansas City barbeque.
Photo: Peter Bischoff/Getty
Dole Whip, Space Mountain’s Hair-Metal Halloween Makeover, and the Terrifying Octopus Parade; or, My First Trip to Disneyland »
Long title, great story. Brian Phillips of Grantland went to Disneyland for the first time, and wrote about it in a more hilarious way than you'd expect. Here he is on the classic Enchanted Tiki Room:
Strictly speaking, and also unstrictly speaking, and also speaking in every other way, the Enchanted Tiki Room should not exist. Let’s not kid ourselves about what’s going on here. “Brought to you by our friends at Dole Pineapple,” the Tiki Room is a tropical-fruit-whip delivery device wearing a talking-bird-cabaret-show beard. You buy your $11 pineapple-soft-serve float, you kill 20 minutes in an outdoor waiting area where animatronic Polynesian-god statues recite uncomfortably pidgin-ish me-bring-the-lightning speeches about the culture they “represent,” you watch a brief propaganda video about the pineapple industry that was definitely filmed in 1962 and definitely includes classified secrets about the RAND Corporation, and in return, you are shuffled into a small theater where talking birds croon midcentury lounge music. One of the birds is joke-Irish. Another is joke-Mexican. Another is joke-French. America has the largest nuclear arsenal of any country on earth.
If you're like me and love the Disney parks despite the obvious corporation-ism behind everything, you'll get a kick out of this article.
Photo: Unknown, possibly Marcela Picanço
Screw Finding Your Passion »
Mark Manson gets real (and profane) for a minute:
Today I received approximately the 11,504th email this year from a person telling me that they don’t know what to do with their life. And like all of the others, this person asked me if I had any ideas of what they could do, where they could start, where to “find their passion.”
And of course, I didn’t respond. Why? Because I have no f** clue. If you don’t have any idea what to do with yourself, what makes you think some jack*** with a website would? I’m a writer, not a fortune teller.
But more importantly, what I want to say to these people is this: that’s the whole point — “not knowing” is the whole f** point. Life is all about not knowing, and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. All of it. And it’s not going to get any easier just because you found out you love your job cleaning septic tanks or you scored a dream gig writing indie movies.
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