Did you hear the one where the Portland cops confront a crowd salvaging groceries dumped during a power outage? That happened this month outside a Fred Meyer and I don’t know what’s more Portland at this point: the dumpster diving* or the needless police activity.

*not just in the Portlandia way— Portland has been rocking some mutual aid.

Yeah so anyway, remember when Sweetgreen boarded up its windows in case it got looted in the fall? There’s a total of one upside to this story, which is that a nonprofit in Minnesota has been salvaging all the plywood from the racist stores (not just Sweetgreen) and donating it to artists and other orgs for reuse. So far it’s become poll booths, homeless housing, furniture for outdoor dining, and canvas for public art. Some of it was of course art already, and those pieces have been donated to a project called Save the Boards to Memorialize the Movement. But not all boards are moving on to a better life: Several businesses are hanging onto theirs in case of future protests. Has anyone considered donating to the capitol?

If you google the Marshmallow Test, you’ll find a bunch of photos of white kids staring longingly at the marshmallows they’ve been instructed to leave alone until an adult gives them the go-ahead. If they can wait, they’ll get another marshmallow, and supposedly a much better life outcome thanks to all that willpower. As it turns out, those photos are historically accurate: the study was conducted on kids enrolled in preschool at Stanford (that is, children of faculty) in the ’90s, which means its results only hold for rich kids, who as we know are disproportionately white. A more inclusive follow-up makes it clear that the marshmallow test is only about willpower if the subjects have plenty of resources at their disposal. For kids who don’t always know where their next food will come from, it’s probably smarter to take whatever marshmallow comes their way.