Best Coffee in the World Comes From Civet Poop

Kopi Luwak, coffee made from beans critters have digested and defecated, can cost up to $227 a pound; Germany will recognize an intersex gender for newborns without clearly defined genitalia; meanwhile, maybe the intended message behind the detainment of Glenn Greenwald’s partner at Heathrow Airport is “Don’t mess with the NSA.” These discoveries and more below.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that have found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

At $227 a Pound, That Civet-Poop Coffee Better Be Authentic Apparently, the best coffee in the world comes out of the backend of an Asian palm civet.

Can Architecture Help Solve the Israeli-Palestinian Dispute? It’s 2015, and peace has finally come to the Middle East. Tourists stream to the Old City of Jerusalem from Israel and the new state of Palestine, passing through modern border crossings before entering the walls of the ancient site.

The Real, Terrifying Reason Why British Authorities Detained David Miranda The scariest explanation of all? That the NSA and GCHQ are just showing they don’t want to be messed with.

Why Don’t People Want to Read E-books on Tablets? We’ve been living through an e-book boomtime.

ESPN Quit Its Concussions Investigation With ‘Frontline’ Under Curious Circumstances “Frontline,” the prestigious, multiple-Emmy-winning investigative news show produced by Boston’s PBS member station, announced late Thursday afternoon that a 15-month-old partnership with ESPN in which they published a series of pieces exploring how the National Football League has (and has not) accounted for the relationship between playing football, head trauma, and brain damage, had come to an end.

Is Baby Male or Female? Germans Offer Third Gender Germany is soon to be the first European nation to legally recognize a third gender in cases of babies born with ambiguous genitalia.

The Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis Blowing the lid off of the conspiracy to impoverish the world.

Stanley Fish Turned Careerism Into a Philosophy He advanced fragmentation of intellectual life in America means that personalities and issues that loom large in one field are often invisible in another.

What Internet.org’s Promo Video Cut From the Kennedy Speech It Quotes Extending affordable Internet access to everyone in the world who wants it is probably a worthwhile endeavor. Information has economic value, after all.

United States of Paranoia: How the FBI Spied and Lied So Conspiracy Theorists Would Sound Crazy The special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Diego office had a plan.

NSA Fallout: A CNN Pundit’s War on Glenn Greenwald CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin is a former prosecutor and very smart guy whose judgment is really clouded when it comes to Glenn Greenwald.

Wisconsin Wants a Piece of the Fracking Boom, No Matter Who Gets Hurt In the night that he was elected governor of Wisconsin in 2010, a beaming Scott Walker told the hundreds of supporters sandwiched into Waukesha’s little Country Springs Hotel ballroom that his state was “open for business.”