July 28, 2014
A metaphor for the tensions and hopes of the entire city
Mr. Phelan's Building. Medium's Sarah Agudo and Marcin Wichary investigate the building they work in: "Ancient and modern at the same time; multiple slices of time meeting under one penthouse-sporting roof." [more inside]
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Build your own Universal Multi Dial Solar Time Device.
"They weren't human. They were monsters." "All monsters are human."
Jane Marie and The Secret Life of Marrieds
Jane Feltes was a producer for This American Life. She changed her name, left TAL, and became a coeditor at The Hairpin, where she created the How to Be a Girl series that included Beauty Q&A; the Friday Bargain Bin, in which Jane told us how to spend our weekly allowance; and a collection of beauty tutorial videos, the highlight of which might possibly be The Cat Eye Tutorial for its use of office supplies and magic. Office supplies as magic?
Jane also came up with Women Struggling to Drink Water (previously).
Jane left The Hairpin in 2013 and currently writes a beauty column for Rookie as a well as the occasional longer piece, such as the inspirational and practical (for teens and adults) A Guide to Finding Yourself.
She also has a weekly column with Cosmopolitan in which she talks to married couples and gets them to share insight into their lives together: The Secret Life of Marrieds. [more inside]
How Gary Gygax Lost Control of Dungeons & Dragons
The Ambush at Sheridan Springs. How Gary Gygax Lost Control of Dungeons & Dragons.
see if you can guess this month’s fossil from the underside of the box
"It’s underwhelming fossil fish of the month again. That wonderful time of the month where we take a look at one of the underwhelming fossil fish specimens in the Grant Museum collection. By staring at and reading about unloved, unspectacular fossil fish specimens I hope to increase global fishteracy as well as explore the question, why do we have material like this in museums? What is the point? What is the value? Maybe we also learn something important about ourselves. Something like, ‘I don’t find bad fish fossils particularly fascinating’. Which isn’t a bad thing at all. It’s the journey not the destination that matters right?" [more inside]
On balancing career and family as a woman of color
Michel Martin, in her last week as host of NPR's "Tell Me More," responds to conversations about work/life balance such as Anne-Marie Slaughter's much-commented 2012 "Why Women Still Can't Have It All", (previously) where "the discussion too often ends where it began: with privileged, mostly white women at the forefront." [more inside]
Carla Bozulich
"So, my life was not too bad. It was during the period where I was still panhandling daily and doin' good at that due to looking much younger than my eighteen years. It was weeks before I went to jail again and became straight up regular homeless and got all the way sunk into street prostitution and then severe mental illness. It was before the years when I was utterly severed from even one note of music I liked. So, in other words, at that moment, I was somewhat holding it together." (link goes to a magazine article scan). Carla Bozulich (of Evangelista, The Geraldine Fibbers and others) has a heart-rending epiphany in the wire magazine.
(via | previously)
Piety and Perversity: The Palms of Los Angeles
Parisians claim that in Paris, one is never more than 400 yards away from a Metro station. In Los Angeles, I am equally certain that one is always within 400 yards of a palm tree. Scores of streets are lined with them; they are ubiquitous in domestic and public gardens; they rise from hilltops; they tower above cemeteries; they front museums, movie studios, hotels, hospitals, municipal buildings, modest apartments, and lavish villas; they are clustered around swimming pools; they dominate the skyline — they are everywhere, and have never been more popular. The city’s 200-year love affair with palms has never ceased, and rather than waning, the affair is waxing. From the first palms planted by Spanish padres to the city of Beverly Hills, which recently, in an act of cosmetic alteration, created a palm-lined, palm-bisected thoroughfare on upscale Rodeo Drive, the palm has been the tree of choice for Angelenos. [more inside]
Shouldn't that second one be "xyr", not "xyrs"?
Practice with Pronouns is a site that lets you practise subject, object, possessive, and reflexive forms of English third person pronouns. It comes with a few of the most common options, but you can also fill in whatever pronouns you like. Useful for both English learners and people wanting to practise using nonbinary pronouns.[more inside]
(OH MY GOSH)
If only the real thing had only taken 5m55s.
How To make a shoe, kill a bear, and mix a Widow's Tears
To burn, to burst, to blaze
"He alone was real."
Philby's boss was Sir Stewart Menzies, who, we are told, "rode to hounds, mixed with royalty, never missed a day at Ascot, drank a great deal, and kept his secrets buttoned up behind a small, fierce mustache. He preferred women to men and horses to both." Menzies was an amateur at a time when his adversaries were professionals. Philby's fellow Soviet spy Donald Maclean was a mess. But since he was a mess with the right accent and background he easily found a home in the British spy service. At one point, Macintyre says, Maclean "got drunk, smashed up the Cairo flat of two secretaries at the U.S. embassy, ripped up their underwear, and hurled a large mirror off the wall, breaking a large bath in two. He was sent home, placed under the care of a Harley Street psychiatrist, and then, amazingly, after a short period of treatment, promoted to head the American desk at the Foreign Office."Kim Philby, the Soviet spy who infiltrated MI6, is the subject of a Malcolm Gladwell article in The New Yorker. Gladwell argues that Philby's story is not about spying but "the hazards of mistrust." He is interviewed on a New Yorker podcast about his article. Gladwell's article is also a review of Ben Macintyre's book on Philby, A Spy Among Friends. Gladwell reviewed Macintyre's previous book, Operation Mincemeat and argued that spy agencies might be more trouble than they're worth.
N O N C H A L A N C E
In 2008, strange flyers started showing up in the streets of San Francisco. If you followed up on them, they led you to a discreet office in the financial district. Inside was the Induction Center for the Jejune Institute. Sit in the lounge chair provided, watch the induction video (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), and then…. Well…. And then things really got weird... [more inside]
Datagenetics
DataGenetics is "a technology consultancy specializing in unlocking the value stored in large databases" and which runs an interesting blog. [more inside]
Star Wars Elevator Prank
The New Face of Richard Norris
"Since the first face transplant, in 2005, only three American hospitals have performed the procedure. Many of the twenty-eight transplants were partial, sections of the face transplanted from deceased donors. Richard's transplant was a full face and is said to be the most ambitious ever. Rodriguez likens the medically complex procedure to the Apollo moon landing." (previously, previously) [note: contains before and after photos]
Definitely an E Ticket
This 3 minute video of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner rehearsing for the 2014 Farnborough airshow is notable for the performance takeoff, sure, but hey check out those slipping turns, and the forward slip to a landing, in a jetliner. Remember the Gimli Glider? [upbeat pseudo-techno music warning]
Pierdom, Simon Roberts' photographic survey of England's pleasure piers
The first British pier opened 200 years ago this month in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight. Photographer Simon Roberts spent three years documenting the country's remaining piers. (The Guardian) Roberts describes his collection of photographs, Pierdom, as "a comprehensive survey of Britain’s Pleasure Piers," and he captures the current state of powerful reminder of the achievements of Victorian engineers and entrepreneurs. The Telegraph has a bit more on how he set up his process. The Photographers' Gallery has a slideshow of some of Simon's photos, and Lens Scratch has a still series of his photos.
Cages, craniums, and giant scary eyes
Hail the Traveler
Margot Adler, most widely known as a journalist and New York correspondent for NPR, passed away this morning at 10:30 am at the age of 68 from complications related to endometrial cancer, according to a Facebook post from her son Alex. In addition to being a successful journalist and correspondent, Adler was a Wiccan priestess and a member of the board of advisers of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. Adler is well known in the pagan community in America for her seminal 1979 book Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America. [more inside]
Shocking news: personality doesn't matter when dating online
OkCupid: we experiment on human beings! But by comparing Love Is Blind Day to a normal Tuesday, we learned some very interesting things. In those 7 hours without photos...people responded to first messages 44% more often, conversations went deeper...in short, OkCupid worked better. When the photos were restored at 4PM, 2,200 people were in the middle of conversations that had started “blind”. Those conversations melted away. The goodness was gone, in fact worse than gone. It was like we’d turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight.
Distillers vs. Bottlers
Your ‘Craft’ Rye Whiskey Is Probably From a Factory Distillery in Indiana. The Daily Beast covers the phenomenon of a large list of whiskey brands serving only as bottlers, purchasing their spirits from a "hulking factory in Indiana". Thirdhand hattip to blogger SKU for leading the charge on this. [more inside]
Indians are God's rotis, cooked "just right"
A right-wing Indian politician's racist, xenophobic, and anti-Muslim books are making their way to schools in Gujarat. [more inside]
DIIV’s Zachary Cole Smith Rolls On
Smith doesn’t really have an hour to spare tonight. He and his bandmates are scrambling through what might be their only rehearsal for their first US headlining tour, which launches later this week. The goal is to road-test new material for the follow-up to DIIV’s 2012 debut album, Oshin, an underground breakout hit that marked them as one of indie rock’s most promising bands on the rise. Tomorrow he has to take care of countless logistical matters for the tour such as picking up borrowed gear and buying a van, which would be stressful enough for a random Tuesday. But tomorrow is also the 22nd birthday of Smith’s girlfriend, the model and acclaimed pop singer Sky Ferreira, and he needs to make it special after spending much of her 21st birthday stressing out about an impending European tour. “Last year I blew it,” Smith says. “She was so upset.” On top of all that, he’s also supposed to meet with his probation officer upstate, one of many unpleasant consequences of being arrested for heroin possession and other crimes last September in upstate Saugerties, New York.
"I like sardines so this was a good dinner."
Former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, Rep. Tim Ryan (OH), Rep. Jan Schakowsky (IL), and Rep. Barbara Lee (CA) are among those have been participating in the Live the Wage Challenge, posting on social media about their experiences. The Challenge (pdf) "asks elected officials, community leaders, advocates and anyone concerned about the growing inequality in this country to walk in the shoes of a minimum wage worker by living on a minimum wage budget for one week. That’s just $77."
"Shiny Happy Voters"
The thin end of the whip.
Toni Bentley on the most famous dominatrix in France, and her companion.
Pennsylvania Six Five Oh Oh OH!
The oldest still-working telephone number in New York City is at least 80 years old. And you've probably heard of it: Pennsylvania 6-5000. It's the number of the Pennsylvania Hotel. Built in 1919 as a grand luxury destination, it has inspired a movie and a Bugs Bunny cartoon, Dada artwork, and of course became immortalized in song. [more inside]
The genius of Michael Bay
This summer's Transformers 4 have seen its fair share of negativity, considering it's a master class in economics and its predecessor is Michael Bay's first art movie (last linked discussed previously.)
It's like a ritualised dance - or the surprised kitty.
Every month or so there is a new scandal - mass snooping by the NSA, allegations of price-fixing by giant energy companies, major banks corruptly rigging interest rates, giant modern bureaucracies like Serco and G4S ripping off the taxpayer, children's entertainers from the past charged with sexual abuse.Adam Curtis may be the only person who is able to use the ousting of Tamara Mellon from Jimmy Choo, the age of the American muckracking journalist and the light entertainment career of Diana Dors -- amongst other diversions -- to explain the need for a new journalism to investigate the new structural powers ruling us.
But these stories never seem to add up to a bigger picture. They are isolated events . And our reaction is always the same - shock and horror, and then it all subsides and we are ready to be shocked and horrified when the next scandal comes along.
How to Invent a Person Online (Is online anonymity even possible today?)
On April 8, 2013, I received an envelope in the mail from a nonexistent return address in Toledo, Ohio. Inside was a blank thank-you note and an Ohio state driver’s license. The ID belonged to a 28-year-old man called Aaron Brown—6 feet tall and 160 pounds with a round face, scruffy brown hair, a thin beard, and green eyes. His most defining feature, however, was that he didn’t exist.
I know that because I created him.
Bollywood Hamlet
Welcome to Haider, a Bollywood version of Hamlet set for a controversial, much anticipated release this autumn. Vishal Bhardwaj's latest Shakespearian adaptation turns the Prince of Denmark into a philosophy student from Kashmir, the former Himalayan princedom, who returns home from university after hearing that his doctor father has disappeared and his mother is in a new relationship. View the trailer here - captions available. [more inside]
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