Very Fine News and Expensive Coffee

Harper’s Magazine’s Weekly Review compiles the best, notable bits of news and world happenings and presents them in a calm, reasoned way without explicit commentary. It’s pretty perfect, and the juxtaposition of stories offer perspective and chance to step back and think, oh we are part of a moment, nothing actually matters especially not the fact that I just spent $12 on a sandwich and some coffee (or at least … that’s how it works for me).

ANYWAY my favorite line from this week’s edition is the last, as it often is: “Google gave the World Wildlife Fund $5 million to expand a ‘drone conservation’ program aimed at tracking elephant, rhinoceros, and tiger poachers, and the wives of Thai mahouts were picking coffee cherries from the dung of their husbands’ elephants, to be processed into beans and sold for $500 a pound. ‘There’s definitely something wild about it,’ said one man after trying a cup, ‘that I can’t put a name on.’” (That coffee is available at luxury hotels in Abu Dhabi and the Maldives for $50 a cup.)

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