January 2012
4 posts
“I can only speak for myself here; I don’t know the reasons for other people’s searches, just as I don’t know why User #2446971 spent, according to her search timestamps, a sizeable portion of her Mother’s Day asking a data-mining algorithm why her son has abandoned her. Perhaps this is simply another iteration of calling out into the dark, whispering prayers on bended...
Jan 2nd
Jan 2nd
515 notes
“There are innumerable examples of this, but my favorite is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Before this novel’s rise to prominence, any discussion of intrusive surveillance was singularly bloodless. ‘‘I don’t like how it would feel,’’ you could say, or, ‘‘It would change my behavior, make me self-conscious.’’ These are highly abstract, rather unconvincing arguments, especially when...
Jan 2nd
“… taken to its logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end...”
– Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (via hateshiploveship)
Jan 1st
6 notes
December 2011
12 posts
Dec 29th
9,932 notes
“…But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be...
Dec 26th
When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself—for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test...
Dec 19th
1 note
Dec 13th
20,049 notes
“We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine....”
– Leo Tolstoy, from a letter to a friend on the advent of cinema (via confusionis)
Dec 13th
205 notes
Dec 13th
122 notes
Dec 13th
18,178 notes
Dec 13th
178 notes
Dec 8th
43 notes
“She reads books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live; she read books as...”
– Annie Dillard, The Living (via thebronzemedal)
Dec 1st
129 notes
Dec 1st
37 notes
“Given the uncanny power of gum, it seems a little silly that we don’t allow it...”
– Wired’s Jonah Lehrer on the cognitive benefits of chewing gum (via curiositycounts)
Dec 1st
279 notes
November 2011
4 posts
Nov 13th
99 notes
“Do you never pick up the world as a child picks up a crystal globe – a thing of...”
– Mervyn Peake, Titus Alone (via gawdblimey)
Nov 13th
128 notes
Nov 10th
317 notes
October 2011
3 posts
Oct 31st
25 notes
Oct 27th
889 notes
Oct 6th
Call the girl asleep on the bench an avalanche: swiftness is not her calling, but she will forgo stillness to become the eel in his big glass world, otherwise known as a jar. Call the boy on the terrace an insect. His thoughts, minuteness. Call him Yashpal, Surinder, Joseph, Millipede. Don’t call it to his face, or his million legs will crumble. Call that love Call this century a fortress. The...
Oct 6th
September 2011
21 posts
1 tag
Sep 27th
13 notes
3 tags
National Geographic Magazine: Beautiful Brains |... →
nationalgeographicmagazine: By David Dobbs Photograph by Kitra Cahana Although you know your teenager takes some chances, it can be a shock to hear about them. Through the ages, most answers have cited dark forces that uniquely affect the teen. Aristotle concluded more than 2,300 years ago that “the young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine.” A shepherd in William...
Sep 27th
357 notes
5 tags
Sep 21st
6,228 notes
3 tags
Sep 21st
108 notes
1 tag
Sep 21st
3,740 notes
1 tag
Sep 21st
3,290 notes
Woods +
“…For example, I don’t know if you saw this but according to the New York Times Mark Zuckerberg is taking walks in the woods with people he’d like to hire. If he really wants you to work for him he takes you for a walk in the woods. It’s gotten that serious. And this is a responsibility of a well-educated American, to think about Mark Zuckerberg taking walks in the...
Sep 20th
Letting go of Star Wars
 Futurama executive producer (and formerOnion writer) Dan Vebber writes about watching a bootleg DVD of the old cut and offered another take on why the tinkering made so many angry:  IMHO, all this fan frustration comes from people who recognize that they will never in their lives produce anything as perfect as the original cut of Star Wars. So we’re pissed at Lucas because he was lucky enough...
Sep 20th
Sep 18th
Impossible to understand the way a teenager hears questions, like a whine disturbing their inner hum you have forgotten it, that itching ache. And the teenager thinks everyone is looking. It makes them feel as if their limbs are swaddled and so they hunch their shoulders, lower eyes, leave the tap running, the top off, slam the door. They cry, then laugh. They eat without looking and don’t...
Sep 18th
Seuss, Sendak and Silverstein ignored these rules. They brought a shock of subversion to the genre — defying the notion that children’s books shouldn’t be scary, silly or sophisticated. Rather than reprimand the wayward listener, their books encouraged bad (or perhaps just human) behavior. Not surprisingly, Silverstein and Sendak shared the same longtime editor, Ursula Nordstrom of Harper &...
Sep 18th
Sep 15th
22 notes
Sep 15th
“The smallest, stealthiest words in our vocabulary often reveal the most about us”
–  The Secret Life of Pronouns
Sep 15th
2 tags
Sep 13th
3,912 notes
Listen To the Dogs or Whoever - Josh Ritter
Sep 13th
5 tags
“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification...”
–  “A Room of One’s Own” (Virginia Woolf)
Sep 13th
15 notes
Sep 1st
Sep 1st
Sep 1st
4,611 notes
5 tags
Sep 1st
254 notes
August 2011
17 posts
Why Handwriting Must Die
  Associate professor Anne Trubek argues that handwriting will soon be history, because writing words by hand is a technology that’s just too slow for our times, and our minds. A copy-paste summary from her essay: “Handwriting has been around for just 6,000 of humanity’s some 200,000 years. Its effects have been enormous, of course: It alters the brain, changes with civilizations, cultures and...
Aug 26th
Stanley Kubrick, not Apple, designed the iPad, Samsung says in a bizarre patent defence that cites 2001: A Space Odyssey as an argument for why its copycat tablet shouldn’t be pulled from sale in the US. Read more 
Aug 25th
Aug 25th
The Devil's Double
Playboy, murderer and sadist, Saddam’s elder son left no shortage of people with horror stories to tell. Yet the trauma of Latif’s encounter with him was personal. In 1987, after noticing his striking likeness to Uday, Iraq’s secret service picked Latif to be his ”fiday”, or body double. Being the stand-in man when Uday feared assassination was an occupational...
Aug 25th
Love is the opposite of underwear
“Grit is not just about stubborn persistence. It’ no use persisting, after all, if a goal is truly impossible. While you’ve no doubt been bombarded with successful people telling you that dreams always come true, that we just need to believe, that if you can imagine it then it can happen, the dismal reality is that not every goal is worth pursuing. I might want to play in the NBA, but I’m...
Aug 25th
Aug 20th
2,910 notes