read | Chris Aldrich

🎧 Literal Farm To Table: Here’s The Dirt On Chefs Cooking With Dirt | The Salt (NPR)

Listened to Literal Farm To Table: Here's The Dirt On Chefs Cooking With Dirt from The Salt (NPR)

What's the next big foodie enthusiasm? Robust flavors, earthy scents and lusty textures from the very soil that nourishes life. It's called Veritable Cuisine du Terroir — literally, Food from the Earth Really — and in their copper-clad kitchen in the Marais district of Paris, chefs Solange and Gael Gregoire run one of the hottest bistros in a city long celebrated for its culinary prowess. Their restaurant, Le Plat Sal — which translates to The Dirty Plate — prepares four-star signature dishes, like Roche Dans la Croute, a rock from Mont Lachat folded into a pastry crust, and Boue Ragout, a stew simmered from the mud of the Seine River, washed down with a surprisingly delicate vintage of Du Vin d'Egout, a smoky gray wine distilled from Paris sewer water.

Coprophagia is so yesterday already.

🎧 Police Videos: Cincinnati, March 23, 2017 | Embedded (NPR)

Listened to Police Videos: Cincinnati, March 23, 2017 by Kelly McEvers and producer Tom Dreisbach from Embedded | NPR

On April 16, 2015, police officer Jesse Kidder encountered a murder suspect named Michael Wilcox in a suburb outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. What happened next was caught on video and surprised a lot of people, including police. And the incident tells us a lot about how these videos have changed us.

Follow us on Twitter @nprembedded, follow Kelly McEvers @kellymcevers, and producer Tom Dreisbach @TomDreisbach. Email us at embedded@npr.org

An interesting piece with some pressing questions. Though they set the race issue aside (and cleverly try to hide it at the beginning), I wonder what drastically different training might produce in these situations?

🎧 Frame of Reference | Invisibilia (NPR)

Listened to Frame of Reference from Invisibilia (NPR)

What shapes the way we perceive the world around us? A lot of it has to do with invisible frames of reference that filter our experiences and determine how we feel. Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin interview a woman who gets a glimpse of what she's been missing all her life – and then loses it. And they talk to Daily Show correspondent Hasan Minhaj about which frame of reference is better – his or his dad's.

I often think about frames of reference having grown up in poor, rural Appalachia and then living in affluent areas of Connecticut and later Los Angeles. I’m sure it’s had more of an effect on me than I could verbalize.

The closest I’ve come to having as significant a frame of reference change as the physician who realized she had Asperger syndrome (and how she came to know), was when I worked my way through David Christian’s Big History concept. In some sense I had some background in both science and history which helped, but I cannot possibly go back to seeing the world (and the Universe we live in) the same way again.

Incidentally, the fact that this treatment seemed so effective for this woman hopefully means that some really heavy and interesting research is continuing in these areas.

The final segment was interesting from the perspective of gradations in change of reference. I was blown down by the idea of the “skin lamp.” Just the phrase and it’s horrific meaning is enough to drastically change anyone’s frame of reference.

🎧 Outside In | Invisibilia (NPR)

Listened to Outside In from Invisibilia (NPR)

There's a popular idea out there that you can change from the outside in. Power posing. Fake it 'til you make it. If you just assume the pose, inner transformation will follow. We examine to what extent this is true, by following the first all-female debate team in Rwanda, a country that has legislated gender equality. We also see how an app reshaped the relationship of twin sisters. And we end our season at the beach, with a man whose life was transformed by a seagull named Mac Daddy.

The last episode of season 2. Somehow the first long segment of this episode doesn’t quite fit into the broader theme of the rest of the episodes. It felt like the producers needed to fill in the space or took a pitch from outside. The story of the twin sisters, one with diabetes, was interesting, but not exceptional.

The final piece about animals brings it all back home though.

This may be my least favorite of all of the episodes thus far, but I’m excited to hear what comes in season 3.

A Long-Sought Proof, Found and Almost Lost | Quanta Magazine

Read A Long-Sought Proof, Found and Almost Lost by Natalie Wolchover (Quanta Magazine)

When a German retiree proved a famous long-standing mathematical conjecture, the response was underwhelming.