"X is very useful if your name is Nixie Knox. It also comes in handy spelling ax and extra fox."
The 'give up altogether' approach is also used in The Sound of Music - 'la, a note to follow so.'

So, don't visit the most populated countries because so many people die there, and don't use the biggest airlines because they have the most accidents? And don't use your time machine to fly on Pan Am, which went out of business 18 years ago.
That is, these all need to be scaled by population, or "passenger-miles" or something else to make them reasonably interpretable.

Sweden too. Sweden used the "matbok" system in the first half of the 1900s. Alcohol purchases were rationed. A male passbook holder could only get up to 3 liters of hard liquor per month and an unmarried woman one liter. No wine. No beer. "In restaurants a customer was allowed one glass of schnapps - but only in combination with food. As the water brought in the dish, the guest would smile slyly and ask: 'Do I have to eat it?' More jokes have been told about the 'rubber sandwich' that was carried in and then back to the kitchen, awaiting the next customer's glassy stare." (Quoting Lorénzen's book 'Of Swedish Ways', 1964.)

"Reacher Appreciation Week" - for those teachers who helped us reach forward. ;)

I remember reading James Michener's "Space" as a teen. One of the characters was from the state of .. Jefferson, I think. It threw me for a loop, as I had never heard of it. Neither did our encyclopedia. (This was the 1980s, so that was the best I could easily do.)

"What happened" is automation. It's far cheaper (in money and human lives) to send space probes and robots to Mars and beyond, in terms of science learned. That wasn't mentioned, except hidden in the point about institutional priorities. As a similar example, look how it took decades after the Trieste until James Cameron, as a personal hobby, visited the Challenger Deep. While there were several non-crewed visits during that time, and with a longer ability to stay on the bottom.

That's an excellent Sweding job!

The Faroe Islands are in my "someday" category of places to visit. A bit of a nitpick though. The text says Lítla Dímun sheep "were the descendants of the animals brought to the area during the Neolithic era." The phrase 'the area' refers to Europe. The earliest humans on the island were around 400 AD, which is well after the neolithic. I was confused for a moment trying to figure out how neolithic peoples brought sheep to Lítla Dímun.

Surprisingly enjoyable.

As a Miami boy I expected Cuban-style black beans something like the image from chrsimona flamigni/Getty that Mother Jones uses, and was thrown for a loop by the Mexican style one from Badagnani that Neatorama uses. Comparing recipes, I think the Badagnani image here is a closer fit to the MoJo recipe than the flamigni image MoJo themselves use!

Did the people on Easter Island have variable density concrete? More to the point, I thought there were many possible explanations of how those statues could be moved - the problem is finding the archeological evidence to support a specific approach, or indicate some other alternative.

Is it for sale again, or did no one buy it back in 2013, which is when I saw it mentioned on BoingBoing - https://boingboing.net/2013/11/13/massive-1978-las-vegas-fallout.html .

A Solomonic judgement!