Best Of MetaFilter

Les blés by _.Yann Cœuru ._ (cc by)

There's something called "the resource curse," or resource trap ... Eyebrows McGee with a fascinating bit of musing on Russia and Ukraine and the hinterlands and yeoman farmers, and resource extraction, wealth concentration, state benefits, education, and how they are bound together ... and why all this might be more important than usual right now. Confused? You won't be!

Krocketbällen hintereinander aufgestellt by marcoverch (cc by)

Carillon posted the excellent article "How Two Kentucky Farmers Became Kings Of Croquet, The Sport That Never Wanted Them," which — bonus stroke! — turns out to have been written by Mefi's own gottabefunky! It's a good read.

Chocolat de Bonnat. Côte d'Ivoire by EverJean (cc by)

I work in southwestern Cote d'Ivoire, just on the border of Cote d'Ivoire and Liberia. The men I employ are largely cocoa farmers, when they're not in the forest taking complex observational data on primate behavior and ecology.

ChuraChura responds to, and takes some issue with, a video of Ivorian cacao farmers tasting chocolate for the first time, plus gives a larger picture of the day-to-day reality of the tough economics of farming in the region.