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Worldwide music dashboard
If you like music and dashboards, charts, and numbers, here is a very detailed dashboard of the music throughout the world.
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Teens develop affordable housing portal
Two teens created an affordable housing portal for New York City.
First, he taught himself to code. “I basically spent the first two months of summer in my room, learning from YouTube and A.I.,” said Beckett, 17. “Those are my teachers.”
In July, after countless bleary-eyed hours on bedroom computers, he and Derrick Webster Jr., his classmate, launched Realer Estate, a website that combines public data with real estate listings, allowing users to search for below-market and rent-stabilized apartments — something the grown-ups who run New York City have never managed to do.
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Amazing color picker
If you have ever programmed anything for the web, you’ll know that trying to find the right color and then coding it can be one of those annoying, trivial tasks. Different prefer have different trade-offs. The Internet offers plenty of different color pickers, however, here’s a very cool all in one with different approaches for the different methods.
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Sarah Jessica Parker shares her experience as a Booker Prize judge
Sarah Jessica Parker shares her experience as a Booker Prize judge. As someone who reads a lot, this part is validating.
For me as a reader, the idea of not finishing a book, I just really, really struggle with. But with the Booker, you sort of have to adopt a brutality, because if you’re on Page 110 and you’re waiting for the book to rise ….
Occasionally when I would be reading something, I would reach out to Roddy [Doyle, the judging panel chairman] and say, “Have you touched on this book yet? Here are my feelings about it, but it’s possible I’m spot-on wrong.” And he would write back on WhatsApp and say, “You’re not, I just put that book down, too.”
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100 years ago, an all-Black team beat the KKK on a baseball diamond
100 years ago, an all-Black team beat the KKK on a baseball diamond.
The Monrovians’ game against the KKK might have been set in motion by an open invitation that the Black team had announced in the Wichita Eagle three weeks earlier, saying they were “open for games with any team in Kansas,” according to a 2008 story by the Society of American Baseball Research.
The game, which took place 11 years before Jesse Owens would shatter the myth of white supremacy by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Nazi Olympics, provided a less-noticed dent, with the Monrovians winning, 10-8.
There was little coverage of it in the press. “Monrovians Beat K.K.K.,” ran the headline in the Wichita Eagle, in a story that was just two sentences long: “The Wichita Monrovians won from the K.K.K. team in a close and interesting baseball battle at Island Park, Sunday 10 to 8. A good sized crowd watched the colored team win the contest.”
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Smoking on screen with Cigfluencers
While, it never went away completely, smoking in movies and television shows is making a comeback. Combined with social media “Cigfluencers”, GenZ appears to be romanticizing cigarette smoking.
Dua’s photos became the first post on “Cigfluencers,” which is dedicated to showcasing stars — in archival photos and current snapshots — with cigarettes in hand. Not every celeb who smokes makes the cut, though. Oviatt, who is 26, carefully curates the vibe of the Instagram grid to his taste. He says the account feels like an extension of a blog post he wrote, in which he asked: “Is smoking only cool if you’re hot?” just a few days before “Cigfluencers” launched.
Both that question and the account’s growth — it now has more than 450 posts and 82,000 followers — illustrate how smoking has quietly slipped back into Western pop culture in recent years and is gaining traction with Gen Z.
