Friday morning articles
Trying to Live a Day Without Plastic: It’s all around us, despite its adverse effects on the planet. In a 24-hour experiment, one journalist tried to go plastic free. (New York Times)
How microplastics are infiltrating the food you eat: Plastic pollution is one of the defining legacies of our modern way of life, but it is now so widespread it is even finding its way into fruit and vegetables as they grow. (BBC)
UPS and the Package Wars: The company offers old-fashioned middle-class jobs and is enjoying record profits. So why is a strike looming? (New Yorker)
Concrete Built The Modern World. Now It’s Destroying It. A growing chorus of architects argue we have to build differently with concrete — which contributes to global warming and environmental destruction on a scale that’s hard to fathom — or perhaps abandon it altogether. (Noema)
Inside The Secretive World Of Shark Tank Deals: Who The Real Winners Are. An analysis of 112 businesses offered deals on seasons 8 through 13 of the show reveals that roughly half those deals never close and another 15% end up with different terms once the cameras are turned off. (Forbes reached out to roughly 300 or so companies that got deals but only 112 responded). A similar 2016 survey that Forbes conducted found that about 73% of the deals in the first seven seasons either changed or fell through. (Forbes)
Not so faux: How the ‘fake’ fur industry is secretly selling you real fur: Faux fur is a staple of the fashion industry. But what’s marketed as fake might actually be all too real. (Grid)
Facebook’s Bridge to Nowhere: The tech giant had already remade the virtual world. For a brief period, it also tried to make it easier for people in the Bay Area to get to work. Then it gave up. (New York Times)
Slide in measles vaccination rate among kindergartners raises alarm: New data underscores concern that parental resistance to childhood immunizations may fuel a resurgence of the disease in the U.S. (Washington Post)
The Four Horsemen of the TV Apocalypse: What Happens When Barriers to Entry Fall in Content Creation Too? (Medium)
Robert Plant on the Finest and Most Questionable Music of His Career: He was, of course, the platonic ideal of a rock front man with Led Zeppelin until their disbandment in 1980 — his voice a golden hammer, and his lyrics an oft-inscrutable scripture of raw power, for his soul partners Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham. In the ensuing decades, Plant’s momentum was infinite, even when his music digressed and changed with purpose when he embarked on his journey as a solo artist in 1982. As he likes to put it, “I’ve sort of woven my way through it all.” (Vulture)