Feargus O’Sullivan wrote about the rise of the Night Mayor:

• Cities usually view the night with suspicion – a time when well-meaning citizens are asleep and more illicit characters take to the streets.
• In 2014 Amsterdam decided to instead see the night as an opportunity and appointed a night mayor.
• One action taken by the night mayor was to modify the rule requiring nightclubs to close at 5am on weekends. By letting night clubs pick their own hours there wasn’t a one time rush of sound and interference when all night clubs simultaneously closed.
• Another initiative was to have night walkers on patrol. They inform night birds in a friendly way if they’re being too loud, and could be more considerate.
• The idea has been so successful that Paris, Toulouse, and Zurich have adopted their own night mayors. London and Berlin aren’t far behind.

Read more here.

Source: City Lab

Justin Bachman wrote about a service that aims to be the Netflix for air travel:

• For $2,950 a month OneGo will let you take an unlimited number of flights anywhere in the United States.
• Travelers are required to  make bookings seven daysin advance – though for an additional $1,950 a month that requirement is dropped.
• The company markets itself to business fliers who don’t want to have to worry about the hassle of making a last minute booking if a client asks for a meeting in Chicago the next day.
• The startup’s fate rests on it getting enough customers for airlines to start offering it volume discounts.
• Airlines have tried selling ‘all you can fly’ tickets before but this is the first year round offering not limited to a specific carrier.

According to Charles Pulliam-Moore gyms are hotbeds for all kinds of workouts:

• According to a survey 25% of people have considered having sex at their gym.
• 70% of women have thought about having sex with their personal trainers.
• 66% of people say that part of the reason they go to the gym is in the hopes of having sex there.
• 10% of the gym bags you see have condoms in them…just in case.
• This might be because workouts cause your serotonin and dopamine to spike, putting you in the mood.

Read more over here.

Source: Fusion

Ellen Barry wrote about a shadowy city with ethereal sleep merchants:

• New Delhi’s shelters can accommodate 18,000 people. Yet the homeless likely number more than 100,000.
• Enter sleep merchants. These people chalk out parts of the sidewalks and offer safe spaces for people to bunk.
• They pay off the police and street sweepers so that the sleepers aren’t disturbed. Pick pockets are also paid so that the only robberies abound are dreamt.
• Some are compassionate, offer blankets, and play a Bollywood movie so that clients can slowly drift into slumber.
• Others are more calculating and will more than quadruple nightly prices – to 50 Rupees ($0.73) – when a chill begins to settle in the dark.

Source: The New York Times

According to Noah Rothbaum the best cocktail cherry garnish comes from a company called Luxardo. He looked into the company’s history:

• Luxardo’s cherries actually date back to a farm in Croatia in the 1880s.
• They were used in cocktails then too, but in the 1900s olives replaced cherries as the cocktail garnish of choice.
• But Luxardo continued to churn out its cherries until World War II. Allied forces bombed the farm in 1943 and legend has it that the family scion escaped with nothing but a cook book and a cherry sapling.
• He went to a part of Italy with acidic volcanic soil and planted the sapling there.
• Not only was it good soil for cherries but it was far from cities ensuring that in any future wars the farm wouldn’t be bombed.
• Fast forward to 2004 when Luxardo sent four jars of its candied cherries to a master New York bar tender.
• The rest is history. Luxardo cherries became the iconic cocktail garnish, inspiring bars across New York to adopt them.

Read more over here.

Source: The Daily Beast

Turns out its possible to get your own personal Alfred. Pádraig Belton wrote:

• Super-elite butlers can earn $157,000 a year, and if they go to the Middle East the salaries are tax-free – and often include an additional bonus.
• Many of them are English and either have military experience, due to cut backs in the armed forces, or have acted in the past.
• Such butlers will often oversee multiple properties, and will do things like ensuring that family visas are up to date.
• In order to become an elite butler, you need pristine references – preferably at least one from the Royal Family.
• You’ll also benefit from going through a diploma course that offers training in fire control, first aid, wine tasting, and social etiquette.
• It’s not just for men. According to one academy 40% of elite butlers are female – they’ll often wait on wealthy females in the Middle East where gender segregation is common.

Read more about the world of elite butlers here.

Source: BBC

Via: Marginal Revolution

The Parting looked at cremations:

• Cremations in the United States are on the rise. They are expected to make up half of all funerals in 2018. They were just a quarter 20 years before.
• This seems to be because those unaffiliated with a religion prefer cremations – and the number of those people are on the rise.
• Cremations allow grieving families to have more control over how their loved ones are mourned. The end product is ashes that can be placed next to a tree, hill, or waterfall without purchasing a plot.
• They can also be cheaper than burials which can require expensive coffins.
• Crematoriums are thus a thriving business. One publicly traded company has thousands of locations across the US and is worth over $5 billion.
• It costs about $1,000 for a facility to cremate a body.
• Sometimes customers will be charged less because the real margins are in add-on products/services such as caskets, flowers, and embalming.
• Others can cost a lot more. The FTC allows funeral parlours to keep their pricing secret in most cases, making it difficult for grieving family members to find the most affordable option.

Read more about the business, and find a deeper analysis of industry pricing over here.

Source: The Parting

What3words is a fascinating idea:

• Reliable building addresses, while taken for granted in the west, are a luxury in many countries around the world.
• What3words is a service that has broken up the planet into 57 trillion squares measuring 3 meters (10 feet) by 3 meters.
• It then uses an algorithm to generate three words that can serve as that square’s address.
• As the words are simple and memorable they are easier to use than formal strings of latitude and longitude numbers.
• Offensive words have been removed, and the algorithm assigns longer words to places that few people are likely to inhabit like the middle of the ocean.
• The algorithm also makes sure that similar words are on different continents. “Table.Chair.Lamps” is in the United States while “Table.Chair.Lamp.” is in Australia.
• The system is available in 9 languages and will soon spread to more.

Read about it here.

Source: What3words

Via: Marginal Revolution

It’s been about 16 years since the Spice Girls rocked the world. But their legacy lives on writes Nazanin Shahnavaz:

• Spice Girl tribute groups have popped up where women use wigs and make up to dress up as the Spice Girls.
• They do live performances where fans get really into it and sing along as if it were a performance by the real group.
• Some requests are unconventional. A group once performed at the funeral of a super-fan.
• One company that puts them together – Pink Productions – has an ensemble of characters ready to play any of the Spice Girls in case one should become sick or find another career.
• The company also has Taylor Swift and One Direction tribute performers.

Read interviews with the tribute performers in the full article here.

Source: Broadly