"Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate who transfigured American literature, dies at 88."

“The Bluest Eye” (1970), Ms. Morrison’s debut novel, was published as she approached her 40th birthday, and it became an enduring classic. It centered on Pecola Breedlove, a poor black girl of 11 who is disconsolate at what she perceives as her ugliness. Ms. Morrison said that she wrote the book because she had encountered no other one like it — a story that delved into the life of a child so infected by racism that she had come to loathe herself.

“She had seen this little girl all of her life,” reads a description of Pecola. “Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with dirt. They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between.”

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"The theory that we are living in a computer simulation may sound bizarre, but it has found adherents."

"The technology entrepreneur Elon Musk has said that the odds that we are not simulated are 'one in billions.' Professor Smoot estimates that the ratio of simulated to real people might be as high as 10¹² to 1.... [I]f our universe has been created by an advanced civilization for research purposes, then it is reasonable to assume that it is crucial to the researchers that we don’t find out that we’re in a simulation. If we were to prove that we live inside a simulation, this could cause our creators to terminate the simulation — to destroy our world. Of course, the proposed experiments may not detect anything that suggests we live in a computer simulation. In that case, the results will prove nothing. This is my point: The results of the proposed experiments will be interesting only when they are dangerous." From "Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out/Experimental findings will be either boring or extremely dangerous" by philosophy pro...

"It's just a type of berry from Japan, unfortunately. Very cool though!"

Went to a small fruit farm were they grew strawberries crossed with raspberries. from r/pics Rubus illecebrosus — "a red-fruited species of Rubus that originally came from Japan (where is it called バライチゴ, roseberry), but is also very popular in some European countries like Lithuania. Common names include balloon berry and strawberry raspberry."

"Are You Rich? This Income- Rank Quiz Might Change How You See Yourself."

This is a little 5-question quiz in the NYT. One of the questions is "In your view, being 'rich' means having an income in the ..." — with various choices: "top 25%, top 20%, top 15%, top 10%, top 5%, top 1%." So the answer you get to "Are you rich?" is based on your own definition of who is rich. I only need to make $153,000 to be in the top 5% where I live and only $175,000 to be in the top 5% in the NYC metropolitan area. Who thinks they're rich if they make $175,000 in NYC? Can you even afford a 1-bedroom apartment?! From the article accompanying the quiz: The researchers found that a “vast majority” of their respondents believed they were poorer, relative to others, than they actually were. The people who thought they were right in the middle of the income distribution – perfectly middle class, you might say — were, on average, closer to the 75th percentile. And as a group, respondents whose incomes actually resembled the true median thou...

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