Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
It’s widely known that Americans spend a lot of money on Halloween. But did you know they spend $350 million on their pets’ costumes?
U.S. retail sales were disappointing in September, worrying analysts that consumers may be feeling stretched or cautious as the biggest shopping season of the year rolls around. Some retailers make up as much as 30 percent of their yearly sales numbers from October to December.
A beer pipeline in Bruges. Yes, a beer pipeline!
Bruges-based De Halve Maan brewery is building an underground pipeline to move beer from its brewery in the city center to its bottling facility a few miles away. It makes a lot of sense practically speaking, but let’s be honest: Most people are probably concerned with how they can sneakily drill into the ground and siphon off some brew for themselves. But before their plans can go horribly awry, De Halve Maan has to build the thing. And it’s going to be a lot harder than digging a trench, laying some pipe, and turning on the spigot. That’s because this is no ordinary construction area: Bruges’ entire city center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it’s covered in medieval architecture.
That time President Woodrow Wilson raised sheep on the White House grounds:
President Woodrow Wilson wanted sheep. It was 1918, and “while riding in one of the White House automobiles through the country with Dr. Grayson [a personal friend] the president remarked that he would like to see some sheep at the White House, and that Mrs. Wilson would like to see them, too,” according to a Washington Post report from April of that year.
Ever think baseball statistics are a bit over the top? This article has fun with that:
KH (Kissed Helmets): The number of times a player has kissed a batting helmet this year. The most talented players can generally manage to keep this number under 150.
Rowan Williams on Marilynne Robinson’s work:
One of the most important marks of a serious novelist is the capacity to create a diversity of consistent voices, voices we can hear as having an integrity of their own. Bad novelists ventriloquise, good novelists allow the speakers they create to be other than their creator. Marilynne Robinson’s three interrelated novels (Gilead, Home and Lila) about a small Iowa town in the 1940s and 1950s all exhibit in exemplary ways this quality of allowing voices to be themselves. The first of the books is a first-person narration and reflection by the ageing pastor John Ames, writing down the thoughts he wants to leave for his seven-year-old son. The second is a third-person story told from the perspective of Glory, daughter of Ames’s clerical colleague Robert Boughton.
Frank Rich on why 1964 got the future all wrong:
ISIS, Khorasan, Ferguson, Gaza, Putin: The summer of 2014 had been deemed America’s “worst ever” well before Ebola, the Ray Rice video, and the Secret Service debacle kicked in. One sees the point even if it requires historical amnesia about other bad summers (like, say, that one with the Battle of Gettysburg). But you also have to ask: What was a great American summer, exactly? Lazy, hazy 2001, when a peaceful country and its new president nodded off through Labor Day, worrying about little more than an alleged uptick in shark attacks?
A very, very interesting way to fight hunger:
Up to 40 percent of the food grown, produced and sold in America never makes it onto a plate. Rob Greenfield, an American adventurer, environmental activist, and entrepreneur, wanted to know where it was going instead. So, he set off on a cross-country bike trip to find out. The answer is both shocking and beautiful.
How to get kids to sit still in class:
A post I published in July titled “Why so many kids can’t sit still in school today” seems to have struck a nerve with readers, who continue to read it in big numbers. The piece was by Angela Hanscom, a pediatric occupational therapist, who said that kids are being forced to sit for too long while they are in school and are being deprived of enough time for real physical activity. This, she said, is affecting their ability to learn and in some cases leading to improper ADHD diagnoses.
How the Colbert Report is made:
For the first episode of podcast called Working, David Plotz talks to Stephen Colbert about how he and his staff construct The Colbert Report. This is fascinating.
Sometimes last wills and testaments can be a little weird:
Via Mental Floss.