🌅 Birch Bark Issue 51

Hello and welcome to the end of the first normal week of 2021! Well…maybe not. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Links

The best headline of the year has already happened, everyone else can go home. Target joins Costco in dropping coconut milk brand over forced monkey labor allegations.

This guy tracked every single piece of clothing he wore for 3 years straight and then analyzed the data.

I liked this piece about how “influencers” can like to eschew any responsibility for what behavior they actually influence.

“The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class”

I love this look at what portion of the U.S. Senate is controlled by different generations.

In more “fun data,” Donald Trump is the first US President to never hit 50% approval.

And finally, if you have any affinity for retro Mac wallpapers, then Aqueux is an awesome collection of dynamic wallpapers for desktop, iPad, and iPhone.

Videos

Tony Hawk is 52 years old and just landed a 720, which is nuts. Even more nuts: at 48 he was still able to do a 900, the trick he was the first to pull off in competition in 1999.

Tony Hawk @tonyhawk

I recently made a 720 and it was a battle. The last one I made before this was over three years ago, and it’s much harder now all things considered: recently dislocated fingers hinder my grab, my spin is slower so I need to go higher for full rotation and... I’m really old.

I don’t want to always link to my own videos, but I was so amped up for Carrot Weather 5 this week that I had to talk about this super cool feature that basically lets you build your own weather app in Carrot. Amazing!

I have seen The O.C. from start to finish, and while I’m not a huge fan, Patrick Willems makes a good case for it being better than most people remember.

And finally, today in gross, Hank Green didn’t clean his glasses for a week and threw them under a microscope to see what he could find.

Art

Bernie the Jewels, by Donfatty

Winter Sun, by Mandy Jurgens

Alone, by Zaldor Nariash

Music

New Fragility, by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (2021, indie rock)

This is the latest record from one of my all-time favorite bands, and although I’ve only heard 4 songs from it before this email goes out, those songs give me enough confidence on their own to recommend checking out this new album.