Welcome to Reading List, Gizmodo’s Sunday afternoon collection of the best articles from around the web this week. What have we got today? Good stuff from Slate, The New Yorker, Outside Magazine, and National Geographic.
- Autocorrect: it’s great for putting apostrophes in the right place, but it’s a ducking pain when it garbles your texts and emails. Matthew J.X. Malady lured his friends into a week-long experiment to see whether it was easier to just turn off the error-fixing robot — with some conflicting results. [Slate]
- Anyone who’s been to New York City is familiar with the standard forms of transportation: taxis, subways, commuter trains, maybe even a Citibike if you’re feeling adventurous. But venture out into the boroughs that surround Manhattan, into the ethnic neighbourhoods where service industry employees live, and you might walk by a shadowy transit method you probably haven’t heard of: Dollar vans. They’re both an anachronism of transit strikes from years ago, and a crucial option for under-served neighbourhoods, as Aaron Reiss explains. [The New Yorker]
- It’s been 50 years since the Colorado River flowed down its natural course to reach the sea — for all that time, it’s been plugged up by Glen Canyon dam. But for an eight-week period this year, 128,704 megalitres of water got sent down the long-dry riverbed. It’s all part of an unprecedented environmental experiment and Rowan Jacobsen was there to witness the strange transformation it made. [Outdoor Magazine]
- And this week’s eye candy: National Geographic‘s jaw-dropping photos and 3D video tour of some of the world’s largest caves, deep beneath southern China.
Image: Shutterstock / PathDoc