Linkage

• Venus Flytraps Have Magnetic Fields Like the Human Brain (Vice) I have to listen to the Little Shop of Horrors original cast album again.
  
• Amazon, the Crappy Monopolist. (Medium) Notwithstanding their assertion of being laser focused on the customer, they deliver a crappy product.
  
• Teenage Mistake (Elizabeth Spiers)  The defenestration of, "27 year old political reporter Alexi McCammond," as Editor-in-Chief of Teen Vogue was not about some anti-Asian tweets she made as a teen, it was about Anna Wintour taking someone who had no background in fashion, management, or editing, and wanting to put her in charge of an increasingly relevant magazine.
  
• The bank effect and the big boat blocking the Suez (Financial Times) An intesresting discussion of the hydrodynamics of big ships in small channels, and how it might have caused the incident.  (There is now a Wikipedia entry for the "bank effect")
  
• Connecticut Legislature Offers Up Bill That Would Make Prison Phone Calls Free (Techdirt) About bloody time.
  
• I Have Come to Bury Ayn Rand (Nautilus) An evolutionary biologist explains how natural selection actually favors groups that support each other.
  
• GOP representative Pat Fallon cites Duffel Blog, satire site, as fact while questioning SPLC head (Washington Post) The stoopid, it burns.  
• Maryland police video shows officers threatening, screaming at crying child (The Guardian) A 5-year-old eloped from school, and police officers threatened to beat him.  Support your local police.
  
• The Rebecca Riots: When Welsh Farmers Dressed In Drag To Protest (Cracked) Cross dressing tax protesters dismantling toll booths.  I love history.
  
• More than $1 billion for 56 Black charter graduates!? (Cloaking Inequity) It's Texas (where else?) and more evidence that much of the support of the charter school movement comes from people wanting to re-segregate education.
  

A specific example of how Amazon uses its monopoly position as a marketplace to crush competitors: