When Done Cheaply, The Paint Comes Off On Your Hands

The most popular link last time was the body that is done keeping score, with nolearnings.com second.

1. A collection of Bulgarian proverbs. I especially liked "forests have eyes, meadows ears".
2. For anyone currently in the business of publishing books or just curious about how that all works, I recommend Phoebe Morgan's newsletter the Honest Editor. She's a commercial fiction editor at Hodder in the UK and her posts aim to demystify a process that has always seemed to me to be very keen on making itself as mysterious as possible. This piece on how pricing, discounting and retailer promotions work is a good sample of what she does. I wish this had existed when I got into book writing in 2018!
3. For the Beth from Little Women fans: why we don't fear scarlet fever anymore. (Because of antibiotics, essentially.)

4. The Cholitas Escaladoras are a collective of Aymara indigenous women in Bolivia who like to climb mountains — a pastime customarily enjoyed only by their fathers, brothers and sons. They also like to do it wearing their pollera skirts and using their homemade shawls to carry their equipment. More about then from UNESCO.
5. A This American Life episode from 2003 in which they told 20 stories in 60 minutes. I really liked Act XIV: "Call in Colonel Mustard For Questioning". It's about hot dogs.
6. A polemic about the "plague" of sprayed edges on books. This technique of painting the side of a text block to match the cover is one of a handful that publishers use to flog readers "special" editions of really popular titles (read: whatever BookTok is currently obsessed with and/or books by Rebecca Yarros). It used to be just select fantasy titles, but now it's spreading everywhere. And when done cheaply, the paint comes off on your hands. Other visual markers of enormous success like this include foiled covers, shiny covers, French flaps, deckled edges and custom endpapers. If you don't know what any of these things are, I suggest that you keep it that way.

7. A cheering success story from an artist who got really invested in making sure the US government put its "Pomological Watercolor Collection" — an archive of over 7,000 pictures of fruits and other biological specimens created between the 1880s and 1940s — in the public domain.
8. Play Timdle, a daily timeline-based history quiz.
9. This visual history of the Latin alphabet is fun to click around in. I really can't think why we didn't stick with Gothic cursive.
10. A very confusing but potentially useful archive of thousands of live, free-to-air TV channels from around the world. Do you want to watch a feed of just "Classic Mr Bean" or a news show from Nicaragua or just roll the dice and see literally anything? This is how you do that.
11. Extract from a book titled Potter Stinks: Gender and Species in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series about the way the books blend ideas of magic, technology, consumerism and automation.
12. The Missing 11th of the Month.
13. A seasonally appropriate story from 1929: "The Heat Wave: A Strange Story of Ancient Rome and Modern New York".