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Milk

Pumped for an infant, spilled at the dinner table, used as a tear gas antidote

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Persons of Interest

Sean Vanatta on the Unchecked Rise of the Credit Industry

The idea that a certain kind of people are worthy of credit is entirely a social construct based around an idealized vision of society. Those same people who got credit also got all the other benefits of living in postwar America.

Eating Free

Perhaps this isn’t the case at all Embassy Suites, but in Flagstaff, Arizona, between 5 and 7 pm, the hotel provides unlimited snacks and beer, gratis. I’ll repeat that: unlimited. Granted, I never imbibed more than three Michelobs and a cubic yard of Chex mix, but still. The possibility of unlimited is delectable.

Sunbeams

Slight was the thing I bought, / Small was the debt I thought, / Poor was the loan at best— / God! but the interest!

Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Debt”

Crop to Cup

Phyllis Johnson on Coffee's Colonial Roots

Many of the coffee-producing countries still operate as if they are under the rule of a colonizer. You’ve got this country that was ruled from the outside as a production mechanism for the good of other countries, right? And once they gain their freedom, things aren’t going to immediately start working out well, because now they’ve got to develop their own political systems.

Love in All Directions

Sometimes you had to conjure your own joy. Scratch that. Most of the time you had to conjure your own joy. So you had better suck it up and start chopping onions.

Sunbeams

I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

The Body Eats

I want to keep eating. I want life. More life. I want to turn from the simple facts of my existence to consider bigger mysteries, to fret about what might be, to remember what is no more. I want to imagine something other than this food in front of me, already a commodity on some assembly line, moving away from me.

Glass Overfull

William Rees on Humanity’s Ecological Overshoot

There has been a boom, and soon there will be a bust, in global human population. And no advanced civilization will be able to reemerge because we will have used everything up. There will be no oil and gas and other supplies of that nature to maintain any civilization that might emerge from the ashes of this one.