Новости за 23.08.2016

A daily pill called Basis made with extracts of blueberries and milk is either “the most sophisticated fountain-of-youth scam ever to come to market or the first fountain-of-youth pill ever to work”. How it supposedly works: Very-low-calorie diets are known to encourage long life in mammals. Basis tricks your body cells into thinking that they are starving, without your actually feeling hungry. Against: It sounds ridiculous. For: The inventor runs the Ageing Center at MIT

One writer’s guidelines for other writers. Represent the individuality and the agency of a disabled person just as you would any other person. Do not define a disabled person by their disability, and do not assume that you know how they feel about it, or about the world in general. “Don’t use an impairment as a signifier of or metaphor for anything — especially evil, degeneracy, or corruption. Do not magically eliminate or fix the disabled person for narrative convenience”

“The world is divided into people who sit on the floor and those who sit on chairs. Deep squatting is favoured by people in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but sitting cross-legged on the floor is almost as common. Certain Native American tribes in the Southwest, as well as Melanesians, customarily sit on the floor with legs stretched straight out or crossed at the ankles. Sitting with the legs folded to one side is a predominantly female posture in many tribal societies”

The second edition of the Australian National Dictionary adds 6000 words and phrases which have passed into the language since the first edition was published almost thirty years ago. New entries include dagwood dog; goon of fortune; rurosexual; dry as a dead dingo’s donger; and doing a Bradbury – “a reference to when Australian short track speed skater Steven Bradbury won an unlikely gold medal at the 2002 Winter Olympics after all the other competitors fell over”

Biographies of “two notorious recent English killers” reviewed: You Are Raoul Moat by Andrew Hankinson, and Jihadi John by Robert Verkaik. “Moat was working as a bouncer when he first met Stobbart. He decided that Stobbart was the love of his life, which is no doubt why he went one day to her grandmother’s home, where she was staying to escape his violence, and threatened her with a gun. He said that if she called the police, he would kill them when they arrived”