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"This is what it’s like to spend a fifth of your waking life in transit."
comment posted at 3:01 AM on Feb-8-16

Lisa Bedford's "Survival Mom" blog, which aims to help women, and especially mothers, be ready for a myriad of possible disasters, is "part of the new accessible, female-oriented, and, crucially, logical face of prepping. Even that word — prepping — makes it sound like an extension of performing responsible motherhood: like scheduling your kid’s dentist appointments ahead of time or making sure to take get your Christmas card ready in October. ... [and] Bedford’s advice feels more and more common sense." Anne Helen Petersen, "What to Expect When You're Expecting the Collapse of Society" (SLBuzzfeed).
comment posted at 1:21 PM on Feb-6-16
comment posted at 4:07 PM on Feb-6-16

John Green discusses the gender pay gap (SLYT)
comment posted at 6:44 PM on Feb-2-16

An Oral History Of The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster
comment posted at 3:23 PM on Jan-28-16

When Australian blues singer and composer CW Stoneking left his vintage New Windsor banjo in a Yellow Cab near 3rd St in New York in 2008, he was bereft. He searched and called and searched some more but it was never to be seen again until a day ago when a listing on ebay caught Stoneking's eye.
comment posted at 7:13 PM on Jan-21-16

When you’ve been in a cult and you meet new people at a dinner party, you’re never quite sure when to bring it up. But I know one thing: If I do bring it up, nobody ever finds my story boring.
comment posted at 6:02 PM on Jan-13-16

Farewell to all-around legend David Bowie.
comment posted at 1:15 AM on Jan-11-16

Games to Play With Your Child in Which You Barely Have to Move or Talk.
comment posted at 2:16 AM on Jan-9-16

"All these thoughts steamroll through my mind in the span of a few seconds, calculations firing while my cheeks burn and I stare at my plate. For the last time, I consider defending myself. Just giving voice to the confusion and anger and mortification I feel boiling in the pit of my stomach. But I know, in an instant that reminds me of countless others like it, that I’m not that person. The truth sinks in: I am the only one who can make sure that everybody keeps having a good time." Nicole Chung on what it's like when your holiday dinner is ruined by racism.
comment posted at 3:12 PM on Jan-5-16
comment posted at 10:41 PM on Jan-5-16
comment posted at 10:58 PM on Jan-5-16

One year into his newly found freedom after 6 years incarceration in Tehran´s Evin prison; Mefi´s own Hossein Derakhshan gives his views on the internet and social media.
comment posted at 5:57 AM on Dec-30-15

On the night of September 10, 1987, my father vanished from this place. He called my mother to say he was on his way home; he never showed up. From the start, our family was sure that his business partner, Augie, had him murdered after my father accused him of embezzlement — all vehemently denied by Augie. Detectives at Baltimore City Homicide have said they had similar suspicions, but no charges were ever brought. Over the years the case first grew cold and then became the stuff of cop campfire lore. David Simon based an episode of Homicide on it in 1997 and later mentioned my father by name in The Wire. In 2008, Sergeant Roger Nolan, then head of the cold case unit, told me, “We sit around this office sometimes and wonder, Whatever happened to Eddy Crane?”
comment posted at 6:45 PM on Dec-28-15
comment posted at 7:39 PM on Dec-28-15

What happens when you put all the people you have a crush on in the same secret Facebook group? Nobody gets mad, only one person leaves, you get a glimpse of what it's like to live Tina Belcher's best life, and you wind up owing them all Taco Bell.
comment posted at 1:33 PM on Dec-11-15

Once again, NPR has organized their list of the year's best books into the Book Concierge, a recommendation engine with 29 categories - everything from It's All Geek to Me to The Dark Side to Eye-Opening Reads - available to mix, match, and sort.
comment posted at 5:00 PM on Dec-8-15

The Last Message Received. This is a Tumblr chronicling people's final communications with one another, for reasons mundane, mysterious, dramatic or tragic. It may make you a bit misty.
comment posted at 2:02 AM on Dec-7-15

The Beggar CEO and Sucker Culture castigates employers who think their employees should do extra work for free.
comment posted at 2:58 PM on Nov-30-15

"Most stores in South Korea are "one size fits all," and that one size is small, as in designer sample size small. Finding clothes larger than a U.S. women’s size 6 is challenging, especially since the starting point for "plus-size," or extra-large, is a Korean size 66, the rough equivalent of a U.S. women’s 8."
comment posted at 2:30 PM on Nov-10-15

Life in a Studio Apartment with my Wife and Two Sons - Between July 2011 and August 2015 I lived in a ~400sqft studio apartment in San Francisco. I moved in a bachelor but by the time I moved out, I was one member of a four person family. Here are some things I learned along the way. (via)
comment posted at 8:09 AM on Nov-8-15

On Sunday, Jenny Lawson (AKA The Bloggess) shared this embarrassing exchange on Twitter: Airport cashier: "Have a safe flight." Me: "You too!" I CAN NEVER COME HERE AGAIN. Very quickly, Lawson’s followers were tweeting their own embarrassing exchanges at her, and she began to retweet them en masse. The result was a stream of cringingly awkward hilarity.
comment posted at 3:04 AM on Nov-5-15
comment posted at 12:02 AM on Nov-11-15

On 3 November 2015 Michelle Payne became the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup, riding Prince of Penzance to victory on 100-1 odds.
comment posted at 7:52 PM on Nov-3-15

Everyone knows that “Wuthering Heights”, Kate Bush’s debut single of 1978, was inspired by Emily Brontë’s gothic tale of unfulfilled passion and madness on the moors. But how many people know how one boy’s relationship with his father, a disciple of Freud who fled Nazi-occupied Austria to pursue his studies on the orgasm in America, came to inspire another, similarly cherished piece of pop-culture history? The story behind Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting video from Dazed [Article is SFW, Dazed website is NSFW]
comment posted at 4:20 AM on Nov-2-15

Despite the press conference, the case was fairly low profile. It received more attention back in Canada than it did in Los Angeles, where the suspicious disappearance of a young woman — though not exactly common — wasn’t a rarity either. And with no news to report as the days went on, coverage of her disappearance basically ceased. That was, until February 13, when the LAPD summoned the public’s help again. This time, the department released a video. They wouldn’t confirm it at the time, but the video was taken by the Cecil Hotel’s elevator security camera in the early hours of February 1. It was, it turns out, the last known footage of Lam. And it was so strange, so creepy, so inexplicable that the release turned the case inside out.
comment posted at 4:48 PM on Oct-31-15

At McKamey Manor, people pay to be kidnapped, bound, masked, slapped, stomped on and held under water over an eight-hour ‘tour’. But unlike other ‘extreme haunts’ of the same variety, here there’s no safe word to make it stop
comment posted at 4:06 PM on Oct-30-15

As Heroin Use by Whites Soars, Parents Urge Gentler Drug War Noting that “junkies” is a word he would never use now, he said that these days, “they’re working right next to you and you don’t even know it. They’re in my daughter’s bedroom — they are my daughter.”
comment posted at 5:12 PM on Oct-30-15
comment posted at 6:33 PM on Oct-30-15
comment posted at 6:50 PM on Oct-30-15

On September 20th, Ann Arbor-based freelance writer Emily Bingham, 33, wrote a post on Facebook that went on to be shared more than 40,000 times. Why? Because it touched on something that many, many women related to - namely, how often they're asked about their personal reproductive plans.
comment posted at 12:24 AM on Sep-29-15

For the second time, Memorial University professor Ranee Panjabi refuses to wear an FM transmitter that will allow a hearing-impaired student to hear her lectures. The student, history major William Sears, is forced to drop out of her History of Espionage course. Now Memorial University has discovered an agreement that it signed with Panjabi nearly 20 years ago that allows her to refuse to wear the transmitter on religious grounds.
comment posted at 6:01 AM on Sep-18-15

Sam and Nia, are the YouTube "stars" whose pregnancy announcement reached the national news in the US. But they are just the tip of the "family vlogging" iceberg.
comment posted at 3:05 AM on Aug-17-15

Angry eagle attacks UAV: How do drones affect wildlife? "This is the last thing a small bird sees when a Wedge-Tailed Eagle decides that you are dinner"
comment posted at 4:29 AM on Aug-16-15

When you’re facing the world’s biggest refugee crisis since the second world war, it helps to have a sober debate about how to respond.
comment posted at 6:15 PM on Aug-11-15

Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts.
comment posted at 2:24 AM on Jul-29-15

Academy Award-winning composer James Horner died in a plane crash Monday. He was known for the scores to Titanic (the soundtrack for which sold 27 million copies), Braveheart, Apollo 13, and A Beautiful Mind among many others.
comment posted at 12:42 AM on Jun-23-15

David Lebovitz visits the Le Creuset factory in Fresnoy-le-Grand, France.
comment posted at 12:23 AM on Jun-23-15

Scan of mummified body of Swedish bishop reveals baby hidden in coffin. [The Guardian]

For almost 350 years Bishop Peder Winstrup lay quietly in his coffin in the crypt of the magnificent cathedral at Lund in Sweden, concealing a secret: the body of a tiny baby, tucked in under his feet. The little corpse, believed to be of a baby born several months prematurely, was revealed for the first time when scientists scanned the coffin and the mummified body of Peder Winstrup, believed to be one of the best preserved 17th-century bodies in Europe.

comment posted at 10:38 PM on Jun-21-15

On Amy Winehouse, Four Years After Her Death
comment posted at 9:07 PM on Jun-18-15

The superpower police now use to tackle crime
Police officers with the rare ability to recognise faces they’ve barely glimpsed are helping identify criminals: take a test to find out if you share their talent.

Could you be a super-recogniser?
comment posted at 3:07 AM on Jun-15-15

The Lesson of the Saggy Burrito in my Pants
comment posted at 3:56 PM on Jun-6-15

When a celebrity resemblance is an affliction, not an attribute. A woman writes about being frequently told that she looks like Sandra Bernhard.
comment posted at 10:18 PM on May-23-15

I hadn’t thought direct action would be so much fun. Habits of a lifetime peeled away. The world bristled with opportunities for a woman in her 70s to take a stand. I shouted on planes. I fought for my place in queues. I talked to myself out loud in public. I walked along the street singing a little song under my breath: “Back off. How dare you? Make my day.” I wouldn’t say I was on a hair-trigger. I was just primed for action. Helen Garner's assault on condescension in The Monthly.
comment posted at 8:22 PM on May-14-15

Don’t Call it a Tramp Stamp: How the Patriarchy Ruined My Tattoo
comment posted at 4:30 AM on May-14-15

"It's completely alone," I said. That baby, that poor baby. What had it done? "Nobody is coming for it."

Softly she asked, "Would it be OK if we called it 'her'?"

It was then as though my therapist's finger grew very long. It arced through the air, crossing the space between us, and touched my chest, the tip of it pressing into my heart, and my body collapsed around it, folded in on itself from pain, the worst pain I had ever felt because it had no source. I was the pain. I saw that baby on her back, alone, and I understood that she was me. In that moment I was flooded—intellectually, emotionally, physically—by the very knowledge I had so long barricaded myself against: that someone had given birth to me. And worse: that I had not been fit to keep.

A meditation on adoption, heartbreak, and healing, by Sarah Church Baldwin for The Rumpus: Build-A-Bear.
comment posted at 11:14 PM on Apr-20-15

"I am in the depths of despair." Jonathan Crombie, the raven-haired actor best known to a generation of literature lovers as Gilbert Blythe in the classic Anne of Green Gables miniseries(es), has died at age 48 of an apparent brain hemorrhage.

Bridge scene (ending) in Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel
comment posted at 4:06 AM on Apr-20-15

Typographica reviews its favorite typefaces of 2014.
comment posted at 5:39 PM on Mar-22-15

Terry Pratchett, best known for the Discworld series consisting of about 40 books, died today after a long, well publicized battle with Alzheimer's in which he's also been outspoken on right to die issues.
comment posted at 5:39 PM on Mar-12-15

"Each year around Mother’s Day I go to the historic cemetery where Phoenix is buried to wash and weed his grave. Then I go to an older part of the cemetery where children were buried so long ago that their families are no longer alive to tend their graves. I hope that someday, years from now, when I am gone, maybe another mom will do that for Phoenix."
comment posted at 7:55 PM on Feb-13-15