Tim Walker looked at some of the more interesting ways that countries welcomed the New Year:

• Russians write their New Year’s wish on a piece of paper, burn it, mix the ashes with their drink, and then drink up.
• Danes take their chipped crockery and smash it on the front porches of their closest friends.
• Brazilians spend it at the beach where thousands of tiny boats bearing flowers and other gifts are released into the ocean.

Read more here.

Source: The Independent

The Economist took a look at the state of America’s hunting industry:

• The hunting industry has rapidly grown to be worth $33.7 billion.
• Yet the number of hunts has drastically decreased.
• This paradox is explained by baby boomers who are getting older and richer. This allows them to purchase more expensive hunting equipment.
• The modern hunter has access to laser sights, 1,000 meter range finders, and night-vision scopes covered by federal arms export restrictions.
• While the hunters might be richer fewer of them are hunting. They are getting older and it’s difficult now for them to do things like climb trees.
• (Male) hunters also point to the empowerment of women. Men can no longer just disappear for a week to go hunting without informing their wives.
• The mania for giant antlers has meant that landowners close down their grounds when game with big antlers are spotted, making hunting less appealing.

The full article is actually about the rise of bow-hunting in the United States, what it’s like, why it’s threatened by cross-bow hunting, and more. You should read it here.

Source: The Economist

Maggie Lange took a look at the history of the humble shopping bag:

• Up until the 1800s shoppers used to bring their own bags to stores.
• Then the mass production of paper allowed stores to provide their own packaging – although they would charge for the bags.
• A shopping bag with handles wasn’t invented until 1912 when a grocer realized that his customers were limited in how much they could buy by how much they could carry.
• The grocer patented the invention, sold them for an inflation adjusted $1.12 per bag, and sold millions.
• Around the late 1940s stores realized that their bags were also a branding opportunity and started printing their logos on them.
• In 2002 a Museum of Bags was launched.
• Today it seems like the era of the shopping bag might be coming to an end. The trend these days is for customers to, once again, bring their own bags. That is when they’re not shopping online.

Read more about the person who first created a machine that could easily produce shopping bags, how Bloomingdale’s led the way in bag branding, and more over here.

Source: New York Magazine

As it turns out that not even reindeer magic can defy the laws of supply and demand, at least according to Vickie Elmer:

• The supply of reindeer is falling due to habitat loss.
• Regulations and disease management rules have also restricted supply.
• This has caused prices to surge – with hourly rates reaching up to $300 an hour and minimums as high as $1,700.
• Even then owners of reindeer say they are double and triple booked.

Read more about the steps that have to be taken to ensure that the reindeer don’t hurt people with their sharp antlers and more over here.

Source: Quartz

Michael Peck wrote about some of the touchier geopolitics of naming warships:

• Canada recently revealed the HMCS Queenston and HMCS Chateauguay. The battles of Queenston Heights and Chateauguay were cases of humiliating defeats of American troops by Canadian forces.
• America, too, has a rich tradition of naming ships after battles in which they defeated contemporary allies.
• British soldiers, for example, have to conduct joint exercises alongside the USS Bunker Hill, USS Cowpens, and the USS Lake Champlain.
• The Japanese must tolerate the American USS Iwo Jima and USS Leyte Gulf.
• Even America’s domestic enemies have to deal with the USS Gettysburg and USS Vicksburg.
• But it’s not just North America. Britain gleefully launched the submarine HMS Trafalgar not too far from French shores.
• The only nations that can’t seem to engage in the practice are defeated Axis Powers. There are, for example, no Japanese warships named after Pearl Harbor.

Read more examples of sensitive warship names over here.

Source: Foreign Policy

Germans don’t tweet. The Economist looked at why:

• Germany’s 82 million people have 4 million Twitter accounts. That puts it 22^nd in the world, behind countries such as Turkey and the Philippines
• This is in part because in the German language speakers like to make their points clear and have sentences with multiple subordinate clauses. These are hard to fit in 140 characters.
• Germans are also preoccupied with privacy. There are bitter memories of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, which would recruit informants to gather information on the public’s life.
• The concern about privacy is also why the windows on German houses aren’t as big as those in other places.
• Facebook remains successful in Germany because it’s easier to prevent your status updates from being broadcast to the entire world.

Read more about the few German political leaders that do have Twitter accounts, the small role that social media played during Germany’s recent election, and more over here.

Source: The Economist

Via: Marginal Revolution, Amni Rusli

Scott Kirsner wrote about the struggles of a company that wanted to be the Uber for private jets:

• The service, BlackJet, would sell individual seats on popular routes for a fraction of what it normally cost to charter a private plane. The hope was that with enough passengers the service would break a profit.
• A trip from Boston to San Francisco, for example, would cost a user of the service $3,500. Such a trip on a private jet normally costs $20,000.
• Users of the service had to pay an annual $2,500 membership fee and give two days’ notice before they flew.
• However the service is running into problems. Most planes are flying empty – and when there are actually enough passengers for the company to break even, the passengers themselves feel crowded and unhappy.

Read more about the layoffs, what the future of the company may hold, and its celebrity backers such as Ashton Kutcher and Jay-Z over here.

Source: Boston