Wednesday morning news drop
Norm Macdonald’s 8 Funniest Bits, From Turd Ferguson to the Moth Joke (Videos) Comedian died on Tuesday at age 61 after a private bout with cancer (Wrap)
Norm Macdonald, Still in Search of the Perfect Joke He has won a cult following by playing the wise fool, but his comedic ambitions are much greater than that. If he could only hold down a job. (New York Times)
Inflation Is Popping From Sydney to San Francisco. It May Be a Good Sign. Inflation has surged across advanced economies. The shared experience underlines that price gains come from temporary drivers — for now. (New York Times)
We’ve been radically underestimating the true cost of our carbon footprint The Biden administration needs to factor in climate change’s cost in human lives — and what we owe to future generations. (Vox)
How the Pandemic Helped Us Recover From the Great Recession For certain industries, 2021 will be their biggest revenue numbers ever, whether it’s in motorcycles or boats or certain other industries. They never recovered from 2006, their prior peak revenue. And in 2021, some of these companies think they’re going to have even higher revenue than that. And so in some weird way, the pandemic has actually led to the recovery from the last recession. (Slate)
Lessons From the Rise and Fall of the Pedestrian Mall Car-free shopping streets swept many U.S. cities in the 1960s and ’70s, but few examples survived. Those that did could be models for today’s “open streets.” (CityLab)
Why most gas stations don’t make money from selling gas With gas prices climbing up, you may think station owners are getting greedy. But the economics behind the pump tell a different story. (The Hustle)
Ebooks Are an Abomination If you hate them, it’s not your fault. If you hate ebooks like I do, that loathing might attach to their dim screens, their wonky typography, their weird pagination, their unnerving ephemerality, or the prison house of a proprietary ecosystem. If you love ebooks, it might be because they are portable, and legible enough, and capable of delivering streams of words, fiction and nonfiction, into your eyes and brain with relative ease. (The Atlantic)
A Brief History of BC’s Housing Dumpster Fire The federal government got us into this mess. Here’s how it can get us out. (Tyee)
