Sydney's Sunday Reads: #8
Happy Sunday, friends!!
Sydney's Sunday Reads is a weekly blog series that highlights some of my favorite stories, articles, think-pieces, and more from around the Internet.
Book it! - Here’s one bright spot of 2020: Hollywood production studios are buying up book rights, left and right! The reason? We’ve all been staying at home! This extra time has led to executive producers reading more, authors writing more, and consumers demanding more quality entertainment. With book-to-screen adaptations like Little Fires Everywhere and The Handmaid’s Tale garnering massive success on streaming sites and racking up tons of award nominations, the literary works of bestselling authors are more sought after now than ever before. And this uptick in demand has given many authors a pretty powerful bargaining chip at the negotiation table: more of a say in how their book will appear onscreen. Those of you out there who are always quick to say, “The book was better,” might soon be singing a different tune. (LA Times)
Down, kitty! - This week, while exploring Utah’s Slate Canyon, hiker Kyle Burgess stumbled upon a pack of baby mountain lions, and soon after, their mother! For six terrifying minutes, Burgess filmed Mama Mountain Lion hissing and lunging at him, while he did everything he could to make himself look and sound bigger, eventually scaring her off. He lived to tell and the tale, and his video went viral almost immediately, being shared on dozens of sites and even getting featured on NBC’s Nightly News with Lester Holt. Rangers and animal experts have since weighed in to clarify that the mountain lion was more than likely trying to scare Burgess away from her cubs rather than serve him for breakfast, but that doesn’t make the video any less panic-inducing! (HuffPost)
It’s a mystery.- What’s the flavor of the Laffy Taffy White Mystery Airhead? Cherry? Blue raspberry? A combination of the two?? Countless theories are submitted to the candymaker every day, but since 1993, no one has gotten it right. So with no definitive answer, why do people continue to eat them? The folks over at Popular Science think it has something to do with our brains. We eat both with our eyes and our taste buds. It’s easy to identify the taste of the White Mystery Airhead as both tangy (from the citric acid) and sweet (from the heaps of corn syrup and sugar), but without any visual cues (red = strawberry or cherry, green = lime or sour apple), the brain is not able to easily come up with an answer, yet still searches for one. And that’s why people are still buying them 27 years later. My two cents? There is no true flavor, and Laffy Taffy’s been trolling us since the 90s! (Popular Science)
So dreamy. -And now, for a moment of pure zen, here’s three minutes of the Internet’s boyfriend, Timothée Chalamet, walking around Woodstock, NY (GQ):