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But with aggressive expansion plans, 7-Elevens across the U.S. might soon look a little more like those here. --- Everyone has their favorite 7-Eleven food: For one friend, whose first job out of college was stocking cigars at 7-Eleven, it’s the shrimp pork hash that reminds her of her childhood manapua truck. For another, it’s the fried chicken musubi, his energy bar for a paddle run. A farmer’s guilty pleasure is the ingeniously cellophane-sheathed tuna sushi that you roll in the still-crisp nori. And of course, there’s the ever popular Spam musubi—7-Eleven Hawai‘i sells 14,000 every day, requiring a pallet’s worth (2,000 cans) of Spam. For me, it’s the lup cheong manapua, warm from the steam case, the Chinese salami wrapped up in the dough equivalent of a puffer jacket. 7-Eleven Hawai‘i feels like one of those brands in Hawai‘i, like McDonald’s and Longs Drugs, that gets us. You won’t find our level of affection for 7-Eleven on the Mainland, just as you won’t find lau lau and kālua pig, recently spotted at the Second Avenue location in Kaimukī (the first 7-Eleven in Hawai‘i when it opened in 1978) and others. […] Franchisees manage the majority of Mainland 7-Eleven stores. In Hawai‘i, all are owned by 7-Eleven Hawai‘i, which reports directly to Japan. But that doesn’t mean every store stocks the same items: Each outpost is responsible for its own daily ordering, to better adapt to its customers. Roadwork outside the Waipahu location meant the store manager there had to order larger bentos and more drinks to keep up with construction workers’ appetites. And when schools closed last March, 7-Elevens saw a drop in musubi sales as students stopped coming into the stores every morning.

I'm having a hard time coping with this. A mass shooting in downtown Portland, shortly before last call on Saturday morning, killed an 18-year-old woman and injured six others near a line of food carts in what police described as “an extremely chaotic scene.” Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell said the killing, along with another fatal shooting four hours later in the Parkrose neighborhood, in deep Northeast Portland, marked the city’s 50th and 51st homicides of the year. Portland saw 55 homicides in 2020, a 26-year record but one on pace to be broken by the end of July. […] As of July 6, the city had seen 579 shooting incidents in 2021—more than double the number at that time in 2020. For months, city leaders have bitterly debated whether to increase staffing for a police force that saw its budget trimmed amid racial justice protests last year and is dogged by repeated allegations of excessive force. […] It occurred three blocks south of Ankeny Alley, the center of an Old Town nightlife district where dance clubs are once again packed to capacity after pandemic shutdowns. That “entertainment district,” which was once fenced off and surrounded by police squad cars on weekend nights, now sees a sparse police presence, despite what club security services describe as a gang war occurring near the queues for their venues. […] Asked by WW why police presence in the Old Town entertainment district was scant, Lovell said those officers were reassigned after COVID shutdowns reduced nightlife, and implied that the bureau was still learning that the clubs were again drawing crowds.

A peek into a hot boy summer filled with new highs, disappointment and growth.

Do not mourn the defense secretary. Mourn his victims. There were nearly too many to tally, but his Pentagon refused to count anyway.

A dispatch from under the heat dome that shattered temperature records in the Pacific Northwest --- In a city deadened by heat, the only hive of activity I spotted was at the public park that was the epicenter of Portland’s street protests and federal occupation last year. A half-dozen activists sat in folding chairs, camped under a canopy tent that read “Community Jail Support.” They were set up, as usual, to provide what leftists call “mutual aid,” to people exiting jail at the county Justice Center, as well as to a homeless encampment lining the nearby sidewalk. Tables and a shopping cart were stacked with water and Gatorade bottles dropped off by volunteers dedicated to serving these communities. Portland is not built for this heat. About a third of Portlanders have no air conditioning. That rises to well over half of residents in nearby Seattle. But I’m not sure any place is built for this heat. And that’s the problem. The emerging extremes of climate change are survivable with the right infrastructure. But our legacy infrastructure literally buckles and melts under this new reality.

Could we have been more ambitious with temporary, pop-up road diets and bike lane networks? Did we miss a perfect political moment to fundamentally alter peoples’ perceptions of street potential? Did we fight off one virus, only to allow another — the congestion and catastrophic climate and community-destroying consequences of car abuse — to re-infect us?

In this regard the answer to the question of “is this copaganda?” is yes, because an idealized symbiosis of white femininity and carceral power is basically the happy ending that American mass culture wants all of us to hope for. (That the chief of police is one of several framing Black characters only adds to the white carceral feminist fantasy, in that the show aggressively separates the police from white masculinity’s dangers.) But that “yes” comes with ambivalence, because this show is inside of white femininity deep enough to recognize white femininity, much like a police station, as a grim and dangerous place. But in a world where whiteness and carcerality have a lock on power — which, just saying, is not the only world we could imagine — that grim danger might feel, to the lucky some, the safest place available. […] What all this has to do with copaganda is that, by casting Kate, Mare of Easttown is making a particular offer to viewers like me: white women who have matured (Kate Winslet is exactly my age) watching Kate Winslet navigate the disciplining power of the American beauty economy. It is a particular offer about our abilities, ourselves, to seize police power to do our bidding. Kate Winslet is not Cameron Diaz, just like I am not. So maybe I could be her, no matter the status of my disciplinary body shit. Maybe I could be beautiful, maybe I could be worth saving. Maybe I could be the special version of copaganda this show offers, which is where the gap in power between police and white women collapses, and one woman, Mare, or me, holds the weapons of both. Maybe, just as Kate is, I could be the one who could keep the other white women safe. […] Mare of Easttown seems, at its end, to be heading into its own attic. Its ambivalent relationship to the story of police and white femininity it tells manifests in how it offers up the future — as a choice between two kinds of storytelling. There’s the male one Ryan will produce, one connected to Richard’s novel, apparently called May’s Landing, which looks to me a lot like the kind of prestige women-suffering fiction that Mare of Easttown also is. Against that, it offers the one Siobhan will produce, somewhere off-stage. When Siobhan drives away, this is one white woman, the show wants us to believe, who has truly been protected by her mother, the police. She’s been guided into a different story, to learn how to tell a different story.

"Climate change isn't your grandchildren's problem, it’s yours.” --- “There are wide disparities in who is being exposed to the heat,” she said. “For the privileged, it’s an inconvenience. Other individuals don’t have a choice.” Among those most affected are those who have no readily available shelter, people experiencing homelessness and people who work in agriculture or construction. […] Researchers at Portland State University found that areas historically subject to racist housing discrimination policies such as red-lining are home to “urban heat islands” where temperatures can sometimes be as much as 13 degrees hotter than other parts of the city. These areas have historically been denied investments in greenspace and tree cover that act as cooling mechanisms in more affluent parts of Portland.

So, I’ve got a great idea: What might be a better, more accurate, advertisement would be to run a photograph of my favorite public toilet in The New York Times, and alongside it, there can be a commitment by Portland leaders to ensure this is a place where we will not retch at the sight of poverty, where we hold police accountable, where we will not sweep away our most vulnerable people until everyone here has a place to live. What would actually be creative — groundbreaking, even — would be for Portland to see poor people as neighbors, not adversaries. Actual living, breathing humans just like themselves, whose circumstances — not moral failures — led to their situation. Portland needs to make sure everyone has a seat at our table first before we invite the world over to eat.

My friend Ryan's portfolio. Good stuff. Graphic Designer from Portland, OR

Get the moving dot into the black end dot using dots you make with your fingers! Dot Dot Dot - it's fun, addicting! How far will you get?

The reason for this is that the familiar Mercator map projection tends to distort our geographical view of the world in a crucial way — one that often leads to misconceptions about the relative sizes of both countries and continents. […] The African continent has a land area of 30.37 million sq km (11.7 million sq mi) — enough to fit in the U.S., China, India, Japan, Mexico, and many European nations, combined.

Web developer Matthew McVickar has quite amusingly remixed the classic Steve Miller Band song “The Joker” so that the iconic “wolf whistle” that takes place after the line “Some people call me Maurice” occurs after every line in the song itself. This little edit appears to make the song a bit more provocative than it already is.

Philip Sherburne asked for my opinion on earbuds for this article, and here it is! The Jabra Elite 65t is the current entry-level model, offering 5 hours of battery life (or up to 15 with the charging case), Bluetooth 5.0, wind noise reduction on calls, and three sizes of molded tips; it’s also rated IP55 waterproof. “I’ve used the Jabra Elite 65t daily for a few years,” says Portland, Oregon, web developer Matthew McVickar. “They’re considerably cheaper than AirPods and sound great, but the essential difference for me is that you can control volume, track skipping, and the hear-through—which amplifies the outside sound for better environmental awareness—with the on-earbud buttons.”

A way of seeing wealth, with context. One pixel = $1,000. By Matt Korostoff.

Philip Sherburne asked for my opinion on headphones for this article, and here it is! Portland, Oregon, web developer Matthew McVickar says, “I have yet to find a pair of over-ear headphones that don't feel uncomfortable with glasses after more than half an hour or so, but I love the Sony MDR 7506.”

Borders, dingbats, ornaments, diagrams, patterns, words, letters, numbers. To thank all of our loyal customers for decades of support in helping us create the CSA Images collection, we've decided to give away Free CSA Design Elements (with a daily download limit). Our hope is that this free collection will become a useful and constantly expanding design resource for many years to come. -Charles S. Anderson

Built by Nicole He and Eran Hilleli. Invisible Roommates is an augmented reality (AR) application that would make visible how the devices in your home interact with one another. The application would make use of existing technology to portray the different devices connected to your network as little living characters, playfully illustrating how these pieces of technology communicate while making it easier for you to understand what is happening in your home.

Four unhoused Portlanders have filed a class action lawsuit against the City of Portland for discarding private property confiscated during city-sanctioned sweeps of homeless campsites. The lawsuit, filed Monday by local civil rights attorneys Michael Fuller and Juan Chavez, states it "does not seek to change Oregon’s laws on camping site sweeps – only to enforce them." […] The lawsuit accuses the city of violating plaintiffs' constitutional rights to property and against unlawful seizure and, by doing so, violating the city's Anderson Agreement. "The City has engaged in a pattern, practice, and custom of depriving individuals subject to their sweeps of houseless encampments of their property and liberty," the lawsuit claims. The suit also accuses the city of "vagueness" in regards to the way it enforces its camping laws, since the city offers unhoused Portlanders "no alternative solution for how to avoid having their property lost or destroyed." Plaintiffs are not requesting anything from the city, aside from requiring city employees and its contractors adhere to its own policies regarding campsite sweeps. That is, all but one policy: The lawsuit asks the city to not enforce the city's latest protocol for increased sweeps announced last week "until it is no longer ambiguous, arbitrary, and unlawful."

Over the past decade, MDFT use has quickly proliferated across the country. Records obtained by OPB show the Portland Police Bureau adopted the technology as early as October 2014 and has invested at least $270,629.96, outspending significantly larger departments. By contrast, since 2015, the similarly-sized Seattle police department has spent at least $240,837 on MDFTs. The Houston police department, with five times more officers than PPB, has spent at least $210,255, and the Los Angeles police department spent around $358,426 despite being almost 10 times the size of the Portland police. Warrants reviewed by OPB going back to 2018 show PPB searching phones to investigate a wide array of crimes ranging from attempted murder, bank fraud and robbery to lower level crimes like bike theft. And for years, the bureau was conducting digital searches with no policies in place regulating the practice. […] “People, when faced with authority figures in particular, are very likely to agree to whatever they’re asked to do,” he said. “I don’t think people understand how extracting works ... but on the other hand, I’m not entirely convinced that they wouldn’t consent even if they did just because people consent to all sorts of police invasions of their privacy without a second thought in order to acquiesce to their authority.”

Here’s the thing: we need politics in the workplace. Politics—that is, the act of negotiating our relationships and obligations to each other—is critical to the work of building and sustaining democracy. And the workplace isn’t separate from democracy—it is democracy. It is as much a part of the democratic system as a neighborhood association or a town council, as a library or youth center or food bank. By the very nature of the outsized role that work plays in our lives, it’s where most of us have the potential to make the biggest impact on how we—and our families and communities—live. Workers across industries have organized to secure a legal minimum wage, won laws against unpaid overtime, established workplace safety guidelines, improved patient care standards at hospitals, kept school classrooms to a manageable size, ended private collaboration with the military and border control, worked to pass laws condemning gender and racial discrimination, and the list goes on. They’ve done this not only within their own workplaces, but for all of us.

A map of the world's lighthouses. Where the data is available (and you can see it’s quite sparse for some areas of the world), the map shows the location, color, range, and flashing frequency/pattern of each lighthouse. The color and flashing pattern of a lighthouse is called the characteristic. Each lighthouse has a different characteristic so that mariners can tell them apart and to indicate different water areas.

Pretor-Pinney described the formations as “localized waves in the cloud base, either smooth or dappled with smaller features, sometimes descending into sharp points, as if viewing a roughened sea surface from below. Varying levels of illumination and thickness of cloud can lead to dramatic visual effects.” Asperitas clouds tend to be low-lying, and are caused by weather fronts that create undulating waves in the atmosphere.

What kind of clouds are these? Although their cause is presently unknown, such unusual atmospheric structures, as menacing as they might seem, do not appear to be harbingers of meteorological doom. Formally recognized as a distinct cloud type only last year, Asperitas clouds can be stunning in appearance, unusual in occurrence, and are relatively unstudied. Whereas most low cloud decks are flat bottomed, asperitas clouds appear to have significant vertical structure underneath. Speculation therefore holds that asperitas clouds might be related to lenticular clouds that form near mountains, or mammatus clouds associated with thunderstorms, or perhaps a foehn wind -- a type of dry downward wind that flows off mountains. Such a wind called the Canterbury arch streams toward the east coast of New Zealand's South Island. The featured image, taken above Hanmer Springs in Canterbury, New Zealand, in 2005, shows great detail partly because sunlight illuminates the undulating clouds from the side.

Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.

PHP: php -S localhost:2222 npm: npm i -g serve serve

Five strategies to help you stop overloading your workday. --- Francesca’s patterns of overcommitment revealed five elements of magical thinking about her time — traps that many of my clients fall into. We devised antidotes for each. 1. My heavy workload is just temporary. 2. The next time will be easier. 3. I will collect immediate rewards. 4. Others will follow my instructions. 5. Without me, this work will be poor quality.

MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Álvarez Acevedo (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031.

Because if remote work gives us anything at all, it gives us the chance to root ourselves in a place that isn’t the workplace. It gives us the chance to really live in whatever place we have chosen to live—to live as neighbors and caretakers and organizers, to stop hoarding all of our creative and intellectual capacity for our employers and instead turn some of it towards building real political power in our communities.

An article about art and power focused on a piece from the Mughal empire, with an intriguing layout that scrolls sentences by on the left while zooming in on different parts of the art on the right. Crosscurrents of religion and culture shaped this stunningly detailed portrait of the 17th-century Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal. --- Power, for the Mughals, also came from absorbing the cultural forms under their authority, then reconstituting them in their own image.