Curiosity Pill Awards Season Part 3
The best articles, videos and poetry for the year of 2020
After the well deserved holiday break, what better to think about than what were the highlights of sending the Curiosity Pill newsletter in the last half of year.
I want to send a personal thank you to each subscriber, without you this newsletter would not be possible and I hope you will have a wonderful 2021 and keep on reading!
The inaugural edition of the Curiosity Pill Awards Season will be split in 4 parts:
1st Part: Best Article Section #10-8; Best Video Pills #10-9; Best Podcast Pills
2nd Part: Best Article Section #7-6; Best Video Pills #8-6; Best Design Pills; released on 7th January
3rd Part: Best Article Section #5-3; Best Video Pills #5-4; Best Poetic Pills; released on 10th January
4th Part: Best Article Section #2-1; Best Video Pills #3-1; Best Underground Pills, released on 14th January
Best Articles of 2020
#5 Why we swim
A researched view on the broader history of swimming. As summer is in full swing here in the Northern hemisphere, I can not invite you kindly enough to dive into this week’s edition. "The ancient Greeks often triumphed in battle due to their swimming prowess. After the fall of the Roman Empire, swimming all but vanished from Europe for over a thousand years – it was thought unhealthy and even a sign of witchcraft. Benjamin Franklin and Lord Byron helped repopularise swimming, and as it became popular over the 19th century, when the first public pools were built in Britain (in 1828) and the USA (in 1868), swimmers in those countries stubbornly stuck to breaststroke, snubbing the front crawl of indigenous peoples in the Americas and the South Pacific as uncivilised."
https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes
#4 A Reader’s Guide to Planes, Trains, & Automobiles
Did trains, buses, ships and planes increase the amount of writing that gets done? A beautifully written thought piece on the fact that the emergence of long distance public transport ,from the early days of the railway to the plane travel we can enjoy today, increased not only the amount of book sales but also the amount of book writing. “ I want to go further and suggest that there is actually a deep affinity between a book and a means of transport, just as there is an evident analogy between a story and a journey. Both go somewhere. Both offer us a way out of our routine and a chance to make unexpected encounters, see new places, experience new states of mind. But without too much risk. You fly over the desert, or race across it, but you don’t actually have to experience it. It’s a circumscribed adventure. So it is with a book. A novel may well be shocking or enigmatic or dull or compulsive, but it is unlikely to do you too much damage.”
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/04/10/a-readers-guide-to-planes-trains-automobiles/
#3 How Nespresso's coffee revolution got ground down
A great story about the controversial founding fathers of Nespresso(Eric Favre and Jean-Paul Gaillard), this concept had to wait around 6 years of trial and error to see the light of profit. Also a great insight in the evolution of the brand. Hope you could come with an idea so grand next time you savour your favorite esspresso, so take your notebook always with you."For the people who sell it, the way coffee looks has long been as important as how it tastes. Until the late 19th century, beans were prized for their size, colour and symmetry. Nespresso applied a similar approach to its capsules: they started rather plain, in greys and golds, but evolved into a full spectrum. Red means decaffeinated, with darker purples and greys for the stronger, more intense flavours. “You are trying to give people visual clues about the origins of the product,” said Spence. “People prefer the taste of things when they think they have made a choice about it.” The Nespresso system made every customer feel like a connoisseur: you had to make a choice every time you put a capsule in the machine, even if it was just between black or purple."
Best Video Pills of 2020
#5 It's Time You Knew About Kabaddi: The Ancient Game That's Gone Pro
#4 Mister Miracle, Equations, and Anxiety Learning From Comics
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Best Poetry Pills of 2020
#3 Advice from Rock Creek Park By Stephanie Burt
“What will survive us
has already begun
Oak galls
Two termites’ curious
self-perpetuating bodies
Letting the light through the gaps
They lay out their allegiances
under the roots
of an overturned tree
Almost always better
to build than to wreck
You can build in a wreck
Under the roots
of an overturned tree
Consider the martin that hefts
herself over traffic cones
Consider her shadow
misaligned
over parking-lot cement
Saran Wrap scrap in her beak
Nothing lasts
forever not even
the future we want
The President has never
owned the rain“
#2 What is Water by Danielle Legros Georges
“What is water but rain but cloud but river but ocean
but ice but tear.
What is tear but torn what is worn as skin as in as out
as out.
Exodus. I am trying to tell a tale that shifts like a gale
that hurricanes and casts a line
that buckles in wind that is reborn a kite a wing.
I am far
from the passage far from the plane of descending
them,
suitcases passports degrees of mobility like heat
like heat on their backs.
This cluster of fine grapes Haitian purple beige
black brown.”
#1 Already I, by Choi Seungja
“Already I was nothing:
mold formed on stale bread,
trail of piss stains on the wall,
a maggot-covered corpse
a thousand years old.
Nobody raised me.
I was nothing from the beginning,
sleeping in a rat’s hole,
nibbling on the flea’s liver,
dying absentmindedly. in any old place.
So don’t say you know me
when we cross paths
like falling stars.
Idon’tknowyou, Idon’tknowyou,
You, thou, there, Happiness,
You, thou, there, Love.
That I am alive
is no more than an endless
rumor.“
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/20/deaths-traffic-light-blinks-red/
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