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It Doesn't Look So Bad In The First Image, But By The End I'm Sure This Is A Really Bad Idea

It's like watching some kind of bizarre growth.

What you're seeing: The Athabasca tar sands are a humungous (almost 55,000 square miles) deposit of oil-coated sand lying just under the boreal forests and peat bogs of Alberta, Canada. Mining companies extract the oil by digging up the sand in open-pit mines, and then rinsing it with hot water to separate the oil. The sand and wastewater are stored in ponds(smooth tan or green surfaces in satellite images). As of September 2011, roughly 256square miles of land had been dug up.


Companies arerequired to restore the land after they have finished mining. But although themining companies have planted grasses on the site (see "reclaimed pond," 2011), the imagesdon't show much greening up, do they?

Zoom 1: Pit mines can grow to more than 260 feet deep as massive trucks remove up to 720,000 tons of sand every day. It takes two tons of sand (and a heckof a lot of hot water) to produce one barrel of crude oil. The first minesopened in 1967, but growth was slow until 2000 because the global cost of a oilwas too low to make oil sands profitable. With higher oil prices, the mines areexpanding and are likely to continue to do so for decades.

Zoom 2: The mines pull water from the Athabasca River. In 1997, Suncor mining company admitted that their tailing ponds had been leaking 1,600 cubic meters of toxic water into the Athabasca a day. River water tested downstream of the mine contains naphthenic acid, metals such as mercury, and other nastiness.

Zoom 3: The oil sands lie under traditional territories of First Nations people including the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Mikisew Cree First Nation. While some First Nations people have jobs in the mining industry, many members protest the environmental devastation caused by tar sands oil extraction, especially the contamination of wildlife that traditional communities rely on for food.


Time travel back to 1905.

Back in 1905, a book called "The Apples of New York" was published by the New York State Department of Agriculture. It featured hundreds of apple varieties of all shapes, colors, and sizes, including Thomas Jefferson's personal favorite, the Esopus Spitzenburg.






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Family

Exhausted mom posted a letter begging her husband for help. And then it went viral.

An open letter by Celeste Yvonne shows overwhelmed mothers how to ask for support.

Photo via Celeste Yvonne, used with permission.

Celeste Yvonne wrote a letter to her husband asking for help.

Taking care of a newborn baby is mentally, physically, and spiritually exhausting. For the first four months (at least!), new parents have to dedicate every part of themselves to caring for this young life.

There's little time for self-care during this chaotic period, let alone a moment to be fully present with a partner.

A blogger who goes by the name Celeste Yvonne is the mother of a toddler and a newborn and wrote a revealing open letter to her husband asking for more help with their children. It's going viral because it paints a very real picture of what it feels like to be a mother who feels stuck doing everything.

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Pop Culture

Here’s a paycheck for a McDonald’s worker. And here's my jaw dropping to the floor.

So we've all heard the numbers, but what does that mean in reality? Here's one year's wages — yes, *full-time* wages. Woo.

Making a little over 10,000 for a yearly salary.


I've written tons of things about minimum wage, backed up by fact-checkers and economists and scholarly studies. All of them point to raising the minimum wage as a solution to lifting people out of poverty and getting folks off of public assistance. It's slowly happening, and there's much more to be done.

But when it comes right down to it, where the rubber meets the road is what it means for everyday workers who have to live with those wages. I honestly don't know how they do it.

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Democracy

These before-and-afters will make you question everything about how our economy works

You'd think it was some sort of natural disaster. Nope. Totally man-made.




Images via GooBingDetroit.

Yup. These images were taken only two years apart. And what you're seeing was not an accident.

When the economy crashed in 2008, it was because of shady financial practices like predatory lending and speculative investing, which is basically gambling, only the entire economy was at stake.

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Joy

Instacart delivery person followed her instincts and ended up saving the life of a customer

"You're supposed to take a picture and leave, and I could not just leave."

Jessica Higgs had a sense that something wasn't right at a customer's house and her action saved his life.

One the more mysterious aspects of being human is our sense of intuition. This "sixth sense" isn't something we can see or measure, but many people have experienced it in some form or fashion. Maybe it comes as a strong feeling that something isn't right, or that we or someone else should or shouldn't do something. It can be hard to read—not every feeling we get is truly our intuition—but there are plenty of examples of people trusting their instincts and being glad they did.

One such story has gone viral on TikTok. Jessica Higgs, a mom who works as an Instacart grocery delivery person, shared a story in an emotional video that illustrates the importance of listening to that inner voice when it prompts you to make sure someone is OK.

"I just want to start this off by saying if you see something, say something," Higgs said.

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Some friends enjoying a polite conversation at a party.



Many people don’t like small talk because it forces them to have conversations about trivial topics such as the weather, what they saw on TV the night before, or their weekend plans. Other people don’t like it because it causes them anxiety to talk with someone they may not know well.

Either way, research shows that small talk actually is a big deal. Julia Korn at Forbes says that small talk enables us to find common ground and shared interests, build muscles to overcome social discomfort, and lays the groundwork for transitioning into more serious, deeper topics.

It also makes us feel good. Studies show that a quick exchange with a barista while getting coffee can result in feelings of belonging and increased happiness.

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