npr:
Drink Coffee? Off With Your Head!
Most folks who resolved to cut down on coffee this year are driven by the simple desire for self-improvement.
But for coffee drinkers in 17th-century Turkey, there was a much more concrete motivating force: a big guy with a sword.
Sultan Murad IV, a ruler of the Ottoman Empire, would not have been a fan of Starbucks. Under his rule, the consumption of coffee was a capital offense.
The sultan was so intent on eradicating coffee that he would disguise himself as a commoner and stalk the streets of Istanbul with a hundred-pound broadsword. Unfortunate coffee drinkers were decapitated as they sipped.
Murad IV’s successor was more lenient. The punishment for a first offense was a light cudgeling. Caught with coffee a second time, the perpetrator was sewn into a leather bag and tossed in the river.
But people still drank coffee. Even with the sultan at the front door with a sword and the executioner at the back door with a sewing kit, they still wanted their daily cup of joe. And that’s the history of coffee in a bean skin: Old habits die hard. —Adam Cole
npr my love for you is boundless
npr:
This week we’re celebrating the 40th anniversary of NPR’s All Things Considered. This week we’re going to go retro with some pics over those 40 years. Here’s our very first logo. (Taken with instagram)
i get chills when i read this
npr:
Daily chart: Africa’s impressive growth. Over the ten years to 2010, six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa. Much has been written about the impressive performance of Asian countries: now African nations look set to outpace them.
Africa’s turn at taking the growth lead is just around the corner?
npr:
It’s rare in the “modern” world that we can feel forces greater than ourselves. When we think of grand powers unbound, we call to mind images of nuclear weapons — mushroom clouds rising high on nuclear energies released at our bidding. In this age of petroleum-fueled miracles we seem, most of the time, to have vaulted past natural limitations. Most of the time, our airplanes can lift off even as thunderheads fill the skies. Most of the time, our ships can punch through waves even when they form canyons of storm-driven ocean. Most of the time, the intricate systems we depend upon for commerce, for travel, for food and for energy manage to function. And they do so in spite of churnings of the planet’s own internal systems of atmosphere, hydrosphere and exosphere.
And then, out of the blue, the planet’s hidden powers are revealed. We see the scale of its forces and its energies. There is a particular lesson in that vision for our particular moment in history.
-Posted by wrightbryan3, from Adam Frank’s “A Metropolis Stilled: Lessons From A Storm.”
did not know that npr had a tumblr until you reblogged them
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