You Might Like … to Go for a Spin With Cars, Watches, News, Plants, Crime, Fruit and More

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

Toronto Life – BMW Canada launches the coolest car commercial we’ve ever seen – Kevin Naulls – Slo-mo drive-thru of a plastic apple, giant water balloons, and other pseudo obstacles. At high speed.

The Moscow Times – Putin’s Watch Collection Dwarfs His Declared Income – staff – From cars I can’t afford to watches I can’t either: Patek Philippe, Blancpain, A. Lange & Söhne… the man of the people has them all. And gives them away or drops them in wet concrete.

Donald Simanek’s Pages – Cargo Cult Science – Richard Feynman – But wishful thinking won’t make stuff drop from the sky for me (unless I’m in the concrete below Putin, perhaps). The noted physicist looks at wishful thinking here in this commencement address delivered at Caltech back in 1974.

YouTube – The Newsroom Season 1: Episode 1 : Full Episode – HBO – Not a great leap from wishful thinking to news. Sorkin, the mind behind this summer TV hit, is unhappy, one gathers, about the way things are going. In case you haven’t caught the first episode, here it is in miniature, online. And legal.

The Wall Street Journal – Why We Lie – Dan Ariely – And an equally short leap between news and lying, alas. “We like to believe that a few bad apples spoil the virtuous bunch. But research shows that everyone cheats a little—right up to the point where they lose their sense of integrity.”

OUPblog – How New York Beat Crime – Franklin E. Zimring – There’s good news and bad news about how NY did it, and what it might mean for other cities. This is a report of an inquiry originally published in Scientific American.

Scientific American – Do Plants Think? – Gareth Cook – Now to the journal itself for some thinking, though whether wishful or not, I doubt the flora can say. This is the review of the book “What a Plant Knows,” by Daniel Chamovitz.

Poetry Foundation – Paths – John Montague – Whether they can think or not, plants can inspire poets. Montague writes about his two gardens.

Chasing Delicious – Seasonal-Fruit – staff – Plants fruit. But when? Was a time it mattered; but now our fruit arrives from everywhere always. Still, some fruits have their seasons in the lands where they’re grown. This chart gives you those. (Charts for other produce are available here, all in poster form.)

The Wilson Quarterly – Man as Machine – Max Byrd – “A peculiar experiment inspired by the Enlightenment sheds light on the age-old question of what makes us human.” Automatons through the ages form the subject of this reflection.