Dutch Teenager Designs Device to Clean 7 Million Kg of Plastic From the OceanFrom Good.is: "Plastic in the world's oceans is a huge, messy problem: on average, a square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of plastic. Bigger pieces can wash ashore and kill seals, and smaller pieces are often mistaken for food by fish and birds. Because the debris eventually degrades into tiny pieces and sinks toward the ocean floor, it's an incredible challenge to clean up.
When Dutch teenager Boyan Slat was just 17, he devised a potential solution to cleaning up a large portion of the plastic in ocean waters." Will it work? Listen to his inspiring TEDx talk. Alternatively, you may want to read this rebuttal piece from Stiv Wilson, a policy director of an ocean conservation nonprofit - who disputes the viability of Slat's proposal. Either way - these proposals are intriguing for a critically important problem that desperately needs a solution. |
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The Outsider: Meet Sayed Kashua, Israel's most popular writer, comedian, critic -- and Arab.
From Foreign Policy: "Journalist, novelist and comedian Sayed Kashua has made a career skewering every element of Israeli society, from the secular to the Orthodox Jews to his fellow Arab Israeli brethren.
He's also the visionary behind one of the five most successful comedies in Israeli television history, iand the only show on Israeli TV featuring Arab characters." What's behind his success? |
"It's the first time that you see an Arab as a vulnerable human on Israeli television. Not as a terrorist and not as a victim." |
Beate Sirota Gordon: The American Woman Who Wrote Equal Rights Into Japan's ConstitutionFrom The Atlantic: "American efforts to pass an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution have failed since the early 1920s. But, in 1946, a 22-year-old naturalized American citizen participating in a secret crash project in occupied postwar Japan succeeded in writing two strikingly simple but powerful clauses into the modern Japanese constitution that stipulate equality among the sexes as well as civil rights for women involving marriage, money, and family."
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"At the beginning I thought of this lifestyle as temporary, yet now I can not imagine how I can come back to money. My life is much more colorful than it was before." |
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Russian Artist Sergey Balovin Barters PortraitsVia Visual News: For the past few years, Sergey Balovin has lived in Shanghai- quite well - without money. Instead, he created "In-Kind Exchange" - a system where he paints portraits to barter for all living needs and expenses.
Find out how it's changed his life - and what his most unusual barter gift was. |