Quote of the day
Three coffee experiences can be lived throughout the day:
- Coffee for waking up is still preferred as a hot, dilute beverage;
- Espresso takes the lion’s share of coffees at breaks, especially in Latin countries and above all in Italy;
- In Anglo-saxon or northen European countries, espresso is considered a specialty suitable for relaxing, where feeling and care are involved in its preparation.
~ANDREA ILLY, author of Espresso Coffee.
MOTIVATION
Failure imagined (24 variations) [Tales of the Revolution
], Seth’s Blog | Tweet
Cancelled, Fired, Called out, Humiliated, Embarrassed, Crashed, Unfunded, Indicted though innocent, Typos found, Unappreciated, Late…
HEALTH
The benefit of recess before lunch, The Atlantic | Tweet
A new study found that kids ate more fruits and vegetables when playtime came first.
Evolution: Why do we have lips, BBC | Tweet
Human beings are unusual in that our mouths are surrounded by hypersensitive, easily-hurt pink tissue – why? Jason G Goldman investigates.
TECHNOLOGY
Google Translate will not help you have stoner sex in Paris, The Verge | Tweet
But it’ll help read menus. Google this week released an updated version of its Google Translate app, with two major new features. The first lets you point your phone camera at a sign or piece of text and see a translation of it in real-time. The second instantly translates speech into different languages.
AMAZON
How Amazon tricks you into thinking it always has the lowest price, Recode 
| Tweet
Amazon is known for having low prices. But a study conducted by a startup called Boomerang Commerce reveals that Amazon’s pricing strategy is much more nuanced than simply undercutting the competition.
FOOD
Inside the world’s most advanced coffee laboratory [The Art and Craft of Coffee
], Motherboard | Tweet
I’m standing in a room filled with chemistry sets, infrared sensors, lab notebooks, and hundreds upon hundreds of zip locked bags of coffee beans, each looking exactly the same but each tasting ever so slightly different.
BUSINESS
Book sales rise as readers remain true to type, FT | Tweet
That has long been the narrative of the publishing industry, with thousands of once-loved shops disappearing from high streets on both sides of the Atlantic. Waterstones, the UK’s biggest remaining book chain, seemed to endorse the shift to digital two years ago, when it started selling Amazon’s Kindle
ereaders in an attempt to break even. At the time, PwC, the professional services firm, ordained 2015 as the year that ebooks would overtake physical books by numbers sold in the UK. But the plot has now twisted sharply, with publishers and book chains in the US, UK and Australia celebrating sales figures showing the resilience of physical editions and of bricks-and-mortar stores.
Chinese restaurant promises free food to the beautiful, The Telegraph | Tweet
Beautiful people eat for free: restaurant in Zhengzhou determines customers’ bill according to how attractive they are.
WRITING
The agony of early drafts–should you keep writing [Writer’s Doubt
], Positive Writer | Tweet
The question every writer with an early draft wants to ask editors and literary agents is, “Should I keep writing?” They want to know if it’s any good, otherwise they’ll quit wasting their time. It sounds like a reasonable inquiry…
What makes a successful YA novel? My bookish life | Tweet
It might sound strange, coming from a fiction writer, but I love looking at numbers. The world seems so much neater when numbers are involved…! Take this colourful chart put together by the New York Magazine.