Here’s some of our top picks for stories in culture:
Fast Company: Grilled Cheese War: The Melt To Roll Out 100 School Buses, Invade Food Truck Industry – Last June, Flip founder Jonathan Kaplan surprised the tech world by announcing he was launching a grilled cheese company. But Kaplan’s venture, called The Melt, wouldn’t be an amateur, hotdog-stand operation. No, he’d do it with Silicon Valley flair: by hiring Michelin Star-quality chefs, James Beard award-winning designers, and workflow engineers; building a board of directors that includes former Apple retail head Ron Johnson; and raising millions of dollars in funding from Sequoia Capital”…Continue Reading
ALJAZEERA: Egypt state TV lifts ban on veiled presenters – Egyptian state television has lifted a decades-long ban on veiled female news presenters, whom successive secular-leaning regimes had barred from going on air. In a cream-coloured headscarf and a dark suit, Fatma Nabil appeared on Sunday to read the 1200pm news bulletin. State TV said this was the first such appearance by a woman with her hair covered since the channel was established a half century ago”…Continue Reading
BBC News: Venezuela bids to beat bad image to win over tourists – It has the longest Caribbean coastline of any country and the world’s tallest waterfall, not to mention snow-capped Andean mountains and Amazon rainforest. Tourist paradise? Not Venezuela. Considering the country’s size and natural attractions, tourist numbers are low. In 2009, Venezuela received just over 600,000 international visitors, according to World Bank figures, compared to more than two million in neighbouring Colombia”…Continue Reading
The Atlantic: What Is It About an Elephant’s Tusks That Make Them So Valuable? – In Garamba National Park in the northeastern corner of Congo, thousands of elephants are being killed each year for their tusks, their carcasses discarded like hair clippings on a barbershop’s floor. In a beautiful and brutal report, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman describes the carnage, both animal and human, in harrowing detail. Last year, he writes, “broke the record for the amount of illegal ivory seized worldwide, at 38.8 tons (equaling the tusks from more than 4,000 dead elephants)”…Continue Reading