Monday Cup Of Links #73 - Bling Ring, Drought Millets, Gold Beads
Freshly baked Subway bread is still full of random chemicals.
Happy Monday!
How are you all doing? I’ve had a busy couple of weeks barely able to write because half my house was getting torn up and fixed. I managed to read Dr. Gabor Mate’s Myth Of Normal though. The whole thing is about how western society inflicts all these little traumas on us which leads to all kinds of physical and mental health issues in us as we try to cope. The first few chapters are riveting, but then he just keeps going on and on, and I didn’t find the chapters about how to heal particularly instructive.
And I’ve also been reading Pandora’s Lunchbox which is a book about how processed food is bad for you, which we all know anyway. But this book goes into more detail on how food is processed. Apparently the freshly baked bread at Subway is bad for you. And artificially made vitamins don’t get absorbed well by the body. It seems like processed food just goes through you, staying only as long as it takes to absorb carbs and little else.
It’s made me wonder if all the diseases that are caused by processed food are just the lack of nutrients in it, and your body doesn’t get all it needs to repair all the trauma inflicted on it.
Onto our links!
“The Suspect Wore Louboutins!” Netflix has a documentary out on the Bling Ring, a series of crimes in the late 2000s, where a group of teenagers would walk into homes of celebrities when they were out, and steal clothes, jewelry and money. It was also a movie made by Sofia Coppola, starring Emma Watson.
Predictably, everyone in the doc is a terrible person. No one has any remorse for their crimes or their fuck ups. One of the suspects had a reality TV crew following her around during the trial. They have the producers of the reality show on the doc, and they are such terrible people too.
But the funniest thing was, the cops had no clue and no inclination to crack this case initially. But Alexis Neiers (played by Emma Watson in the movie) just called the cops several times and ratted out her friend Nick Prugo. Then they got interested in him, but didn’t have anything on him. His parents understandably lawyered him up. But this aspiring celebrity decided he’s not going to have a lame pot-bellied lawyer and instead wanted a celeb-looking one. He found one. Then that lawyer told him he had a deal with the cops and Nick just needs to tell them everything and will have full immunity.
Which he did, and it turns out the cops didn’t even have a clue about the extent of their crimes. But now that they did, they threw the book at them. Nick panicked and asked his lawyer for a copy of the immunity deal. The lawyer said “we shook hands on it”.
Moral: Don’t talk to the cops. If your lawyer tells you to, get a new lawyer.
The piece linked is a good read on the whole affair, and was written as they were going to trial. All the characters understandably come off as airheaded and unaware of how serious the hole they are in was. If you watch the subsequent documentary, it seems like nothing has changed in a decade. Wow.Cities in the Indus Valley switched from wheat to millets under drought. This paper goes into archaeological digs in Kutch to identify signs of abandonment of Indus Valley sites, circa 2200 BC and later. Initially, these areas had their staples be wheat and barley. But as persistent drought came into the picture, they switched to millets, which don’t need as much water to grow. While this slowed down the decline of these great cities, their population and prosperity levels went down. As drought persisted in the area (and still does), the area de-urbanized and capital and talent fled elsewhere.
My own understanding here is you need crops like wheat and rice to sustain large cities. They can be grown easily by a small number of people to feed a large population, freeing people up for trade, commerce, politics, arts, and sciences. When these crops collapse, so do big cities.In a big win for authors, Amazon changed its policy on returning ebooks. Apparently there were videos on Tiktok about a “lifehack” where you could just return ebooks you bought on Amazon after reading them fully. This led to negative revenue for authors! Amazon has thankfully changed it so that you can only return ebooks if you have read less than 10% of them.
Artifact of the week: Gold beads from Khirsara. Khirsara was a city in Kutch that seemed to be a trading hub (the archaeological dig mentioned earlier). It flourished from 2600 to 2200 BC. These are flattened beads strung together. It’s apparently not very common to find gold beads in Indus Valley sites, so it’s quite unique.