FiveThirtyEight: The Weird Economics Of Ikea

Marston echoed this empirical finding. “On average, the prices would go down, from year to year, 1 percent overall,” she said. “Some prices could go down with a huge jump. Other prices may increase slightly. But overall, year on year on year on year, we’re trying to reduce prices.”

Some mysteries persist. One is the company’s international pricing discrepancies. “They’ll sometimes reduce prices in the United States and make them go up in Canada, which makes even Canadians mad,” Baxter said. (The horror.) Marston said each country has “its own unique competition profile” that influences how the company prices its goods.

Some of these oddities may be explained by one principle: Ikea is sui generis — in a class by itself. The company navigates largely uncharted waters for traditional economic strictures. “Ikea continues to be nearly unique,” Baxter said. “I would’ve told you that they would have competitors all over the place by now, 15 years ago. I would’ve been horribly wrong. There’s only them.”

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The Guardian: Bike lock developed that makes thieves immediately vomit

He eventually landed on a less violent and more legal innovation. “I realized there really is no solution to this problem,” he said. “The biggest problem in this industry is that people don’t know that the lock that they bought for $20 is absolutely worthless. It costs at least $100 to have at least somewhere close to where you can at least curb the chances of a thief wanting to steal your bike.”

With the right tools, Idzkowski said, a thief could cut through most locks in less than a minute. Thieves, he said, “talk in seconds: a 15-second bike, a 20-second bike, and it goes up to 30-60-second bikes, with Kryptonite locks that require two cuts, each about 25 seconds”.

With his co-inventor, Yves Perrenoud, Idzkowski created a U-shaped lock of carbon and steel with a hollow chamber to hold one of three pressurized gases of their own concoction, including one called “formula D_1”. When someone cuts about 30% of the way into the lock, Idzkowski said, the gas erupts in the direction of the gash.

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CityLab: The Art of Urban Loneliness

The Lonely City is an investigation of the sites and sensations that attend the isolated person. In it, Laing interweaves the events of her own life with meditations on the lives and works of artists, among them Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz, and David Hopper. The character of loneliness itself emerges as a strikingly visual entity, but one that takes on many forms. [...]

Loneliness is a hunger for more intimacy than you have. For me—for most people, I think—it was an acutely painful state that felt very embarrassing and uncomfortable to inhabit. You can be lonely anywhere, but there's a particular flavor to living in a city: one becomes so intensely aware of how richly populated other people's lives are. The sense of being exposed or hyper-visible is intensified. [...]

One of the reasons I came to New York is that I felt the city has a kind of generosity to the solo inhabitant. All those innovations really help remove stigma, and make spaces easier to navigate. That said, there's a big difference between solitude and loneliness. Solitude is the fact of being alone; loneliness is the longing for more closeness, intimacy, and contact. So you can feel lonely in a relationship or around other people. What I think is important is finding ways to dismantle the pervasive shame around it.

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Atlas Obscura: How a Fake Typhus Epidemic Saved a Polish City From the Nazis

The doctors did not actually make their patient sick, of course. That would be unthinkable to them, even in the most dire circumstances. The typhus epidemic that they brought to Rozwadów was instead their own unique spin on “faking sick,” a concocted outbreak meant to shield their patients and neighbors from persecution. The doctors had saved the man's life by giving him a simulacrum of the disease, and by giving the same shot to many others in the area, they would save thousands more.  [...]

The doctors worked in secret and didn’t even tell their patients what they were doing, and only revealed their scheme to the world in 1977 in an article for the American Society for Microbiology’s newsletter. They were also careful to mimic the ebb and flow of real epidemics, giving more injections and creating more “typhus” cases in the winter and fall. To throw the authorities off, they referred some of their injected patients to other doctors, who would diagnose and report the typhus infections on their own. [...]

The doctors’ lies were almost revealed by the lack of deaths. With a typhus epidemic supposedly raging in the Rozwadów area, the Nazis began to wonder why more people weren’t dying there, and an informant suggested that the outbreak was not what it appeared to be. A team of German doctors was sent to the town to investigate.

Lazowski greeted the visitors with a spread of Polish foods and vodkas. While the senior German doctors sat down to the feast, their underlings toured the town with the doctor. Before their visit, Lazowski had gathered his most unhealthy-looking patients, all of whom had been injected with Proteus bacteria, together in a dirty room. Scared of infection, the young doctors gave the building and patients that Lazowski showed them only a cursory glance. After doing a few blood tests to confirm the epidemic, they quickly left. Their supervisors presumably enjoyed the vodka enough not to double-check. 

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Al Jazeera: South Africa to quit International Criminal Court

South Africa is pulling out of the International Criminal Court (ICC) because its obligations are inconsistent with laws giving sitting leaders diplomatic immunity, according to government officials.

Justice Minister Michael Masutha said on Friday that the government will soon submit a bill in parliament to withdraw from the court in The Hague, a move that comes as several African countries express concerns over what they call the ICC's disproportionate targeting of the continent. [...]

Last year, South Africa said it planned to leave the ICC after it faced criticism for not arresting Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, who is accused of genocides and war crimes, when he visited the country. Bashir has denied the accusations. [...]

Another African country, Burundi, appeared set to become the first county to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty establishing the global court, after its parliament voted last week to leave.

Burundi's President Pierre Nkurunziza signed a decree on Tuesday, but the United Nations has not yet been officially notified.Other African countries have also threatened withdrawal, accusing the court of disproportionately bringing charges against suspected human rights abusers from the continent. 

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The Guardian: Racial identity is a biological nonsense, says Reith lecturer

Two weeks ago Theresa May made a statement that, for many, trampled on 200 years of enlightenment and cosmopolitan thinking: “If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”.

It was a proclamation blasted by figures from all sides, but for Kwame Anthony Appiah, the philosopher who on Tuesday gave the first of this year’s prestigious BBC Reith lectures, the sentiment stung. His life – he is the son of a British aristocratic mother and Ghanian anti-colonial activist father, raised as a strict Christian in Kumasi, then sent to British boarding school, followed by a move to the US in the 1970s; he is gay, married to a Jewish man and explores identity for a living – meant May’s comments were both “insulting and nonsense in every conceivable way”. [...]

“How race works is actually pretty local and specific; what it means to be black in New York is completely different from what it means to be black in Accra, or even in London,” he explains. “And yet people believe it means roughly the same thing everywhere. Race does nothing for us.

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