Elephant Names (CBC)
by Sheena Goodyear
To us, they may be Flopsy or Dumbo, but it turns out elephants have their own names for each other. And a computer can recognize them even though people can’t.

How to Be Decadent (Aeon)
by Kate Hext
The Decadent movement looked at the problem of a troubled world shorn of traditional religious and cultural meanings and concluded that the solution lay in seeking vivid sensation. The results included ruinous misbehavior, new views of gender, and marketable home furnishings.

Meet Your Emotions (Vox)
by Allie Volpe
Almost every movie has emotion at its heart, but that looks different in Inside Out and its new sequel, where emotions are the characters. Two psychologists who consulted on Inside Out 2 discuss how the movie translated the abstract concepts of teenage feelings into cartoon characters.

LGBTQ in the US Census (Literary Hub)
by Michael Waters
Over the years, the US Census has recorded hundreds of thousands of “partners”—people in a shared household who didn’t fit the typical familial descriptors. Not all were gay couples, but some certainly were. Like trans men and women, and other LGBTQ people, they left traces in the records of bureaucracies that didn’t have a category for them.

Made—Sustainably—in China (Sapiens)
by Christina Kefala
China is among the global centers of fast fashion manufacturing. But some designers and customers in the country are using ancient dye ingredients and new ethical attitudes to try to build a different kind of apparel industry.

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