Thoughtbrain Brainfood

1) NFL Suspends Ray Rice Indefinitely After Video Surfaces Of Him Knocking Out Then-Fiancée BuzzFeed has all the details in one post ranging from the associated tweets to the horrid TMZ video. It's nice to see TMZ's story digging ability used for good.

  2) Brain-to-brain communication is finally possible. It's just very clunky.

To do this, the researchers basically used existing technology in novel ways. On the message-sending side, they took a mind-reading electroencephalograph, or EEG (which has previously been used to harness a person's thoughts to make a living mouse's tail move). On the message-receiving side, the scientists used transcranial magnetic stimulation (which has been used to, among other things, make people's memories stronger). ---  The total speed of communication using this process was 2 bits per minute. That's roughly one millionth the average internet speed in the US. And that meant it took roughly 70 minutes just for one person to say "hola" or "ciao" to another. Also, not surprisingly, the experiment wasn't perfect. The error rate ranged from 1 to 15 percent, depending on the exact trial. So yes, telepathic communication already contains typos. Then again, they weren't using any autocorrect feature. At least not yet.

  3) The Dark, Ironic Branding Drug Dealers Use to Sell Heroin I'm reading Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx right now, which tells the story of a big time heroin drug dealer and his girl. One point in the book it describes how the branding made his product more memorable. The business side of the drug dealing business really fascinates me (don't worry mom, I'm not switching careers). Anyways, here's some examples of that branding.

Many dealers would offer free samples to build brand awareness. “Inevitably, it would be really good and would knock the pants off the regular stuff,” MacIndoe says. “Being an addict you’d move over to it, but sooner or later, though not always, you’d find it was not as strong, and wouldn’t hold you as long.” In time, the dealers would begin cutting the product to increase their margins. Addicts would need ever more to maintain the same high, further boosting dealers’ revenues. “But when people drifted off to another brand the dealer would stop cutting and put something better out on the street to bring their clients back.” And so the cycle continued.

  4) Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder We have this rosy image of Little House on the Prairie, where life was good and bad things happened sometimes, but nothing too terrible. When Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her autobiography, Pioneer Girl, it wasn't published as it was thought to be too unsuitable, especially for children. That's when it was reworked to create as Little House on the Prairie as you know it.  South Dakota Historical Society is now republishing an annotated version of Pioneer Girl.

It contains stories omitted from her novels, tales that Wilder herself felt "would not be appropriate" for children, such as her family's sojourn in the town of Burr Oak, where she once saw a man became so drunk that, when he lit a cigar, the whisky fumes on his breath ignited and killed him instantly. In another recollection, a shopkeeper drags his wife around by her hair, pours kerosene on the floor of his house, and sets their bedroom on fire. Wilder's memoir also paints a different picture of her father, Charles Ingalls, known in the novels as Pa. Although the real man's character is essentially the same as the version in the novels - affectionate, musical and restless to move on through America's frontier - he is, said the book's publisher, the South Dakota Historical Society Press, clearly "romanticised and idealised". In Wilder's autobiography, he is described sneaking his family out of town in the middle of the night after failing to negotiate the rent with the landlord, justifying the flit by calling the man a "rich old skinflint".

  5) Reddit user made famous off celeb nude photos wants his privacy back. "Johnsmcjohn" feels undue media attention has been turned on him heh.

And as part of an "Ask Me Anything" Q&A on Reddit, he complained that a Washington Post story profiling (but not directly naming) him contained unnecessary personal information. "Why is my being on an asexuality website or an Aspergers board relevant to my work on /r/TheFappening?" he wrote. "I decided Thursday that I wouldn't delete my account and if the press wants to send me thru the ringer, so be it. I won't be bullied into silence."

1) Starting the week back with something fun: How Things Work is my new favorite twitter account. It shows animated gifs of how things are made. It reminds me of the Sesame Street movie that showed how crayons were made. I can't show you them here because of the way twitter embeds the gifs into videos, but here's some of my favorites: How a toothbrush is made How chains are made​ How popcorn pops How wire fencing is made​

  2) Why Aren't Women Advancing At Work? Ask a Transgender Person. Having experienced the workplace from both perspectives, they hold the key to its biases.

I found this very interesting. One person describing how differently they were treated as a woman after being a man and vice versa. They had the same exact set of skills as being the same person, but as a man they were treated better and respected more than a woman. (The people they interacted with didn't know they were transgender)

Ben Barres is a biologist at Stanford who lived and worked as Barbara Barres until he was in his forties. For most of his career, he experienced bias, but didn’t give much weight to it—seeing incidents as discrete events. (When he solved a tough math problem, for example, a professor said, “You must have had your boyfriend solve it.”) When he became Ben, however, he immediately noticed a difference in his everyday experience: “People who don't know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect,” he says. He was more carefully listened to and his authority less frequently questioned. He stopped being interrupted in meetings. At one conference, another scientist said, "Ben gave a great seminar today—but then his work is so much better than his sister's." (The scientist didn't know Ben and Barbara were the same person.) “This is why women are not breaking into academic jobs at any appreciable rate,” he wrote in response to Larry Summers’s famous gaffe implying women were less innately capable at the hard sciences. “Not childcare. Not family responsibilities,” he says. “I have had the thought a million times: I am taken more seriously.” --- Joan Roughgarden is a biologist at Stanford who lived and worked as Jonathan Roughgarden until her early fifties, and her experience was almost the mirror image of Barres’s. In her words, “men are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise, whereas a woman is assumed to be incompetent until she proves otherwise.” In an interview, Roughgarden also noted that if she questioned a mathematical idea, people assumed it was because she didn’t understand it. Other transwomen have found changes not only in perceptions of their ability, but also their personality. In Schilt’s work with transwomen for a forthcoming book, she found that behaviors transwomen had as men were now seen as off-putting. What was once “take-charge” was now “aggressive.” And they had to adapt; the transwomen quickly learned that “being the same way in the world would be detrimental to your career.”

  3) Seven Days And Nights In The World's Largest, Rowdiest Retirement Community

Boasting 100,000 residents over the age of 55, The Villages may be the fastest growing city in America. It’s a notorious boomtown for boomers who want to spend their golden years with access to 11 a.m. happy hours, thousands of activities, and no-strings-attached sex, all lorded over by one elusive billionaire.

Georgann says what you did on the outside doesn’t matter — everybody here is equal. People with a $77,000 house have access to the same stuff as people who own $2 million houses. Their friends come from Cincinnati and Westchester and Minneapolis. They were university professors and physicians and bankers and interior designers and collision technicians.  ​Patty is a former school administrator; her ex-husband wanted her to move back north after he left her for another woman, but she has her own villa now on the other side of Route 466 from him. Paula and Jim were friends of the Ozbolts from the same townhouse community in Minneapolis. Paula worked in a veterinary clinic. Jim was in the Navy for three years and three months. He has faded tattoos on his forearms and wears fancy glasses that make him look like a German sports car salesman. They first retired to Arlington, Texas, but fled because Jim was worried about Mexican drug cartel violence spilling over the border. Alan and Iris fell in love with Africa when he worked as a courier for the foreign service and Iris was a secretary. They have spent their lives hungry for adventure; now they’re Villagers.

  4) The Unauthorized Saved By The Bell Story: You Can’t Sit With Us, Dustin Diamond!​ So there was a bad Lifetime movie narrated by Dustin Diamond that was loosely based off of Diamond’s 2009 tell-all "Behind the Bell — Unauthorized" that aired last night. I was kinda curious about it but I'm sure it's terrible. If you want to get the gist without wasting hours of your life, this article has spoilers and sums up the depressing movie in 10 points. It's already on Amazon if you want to watching it for your streaming pleasure: The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story

1) This is Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft. I guess this is cheaper than buying them?

Uber said it was creating a "street team" charged with gathering intelligence about Lyft’s launch plans and recruiting their drivers to Uber. Contractors were then handed two Uber-branded iPhones and a series of valid credit card numbers to be used for creating dummy Lyft accounts. Uber assumed every contractor would be caught by Lyft eventually; the second phone, according to a contractor interviewed by The Verge, was issued so "you would have a backup phone if and when that happened so you wouldn’t have to go back."

  2) From the director of Juno and Up In The Air, Jason Reitman, the new trailer for Men, Women & Children. This looks sad but really really good. It's one of those Right Now movies. The movie site itself looks like an anonymous social network like Secret or PostSecret.

  3) I'm Ira Glass, Host of This American Life, and This Is How I Work. My favorite answer was to the question "What everyday thing are you better at than everyone else? What's your secret?" It's too long to put here, but Ira explains how he organizes a big mass of interview tape into a structure. Below Ira explains some of the tools they use when working on This American Life.

Editing a radio story goes like this: The reporter reads the script out loud and when it's time for the quotes, we play those from the computer. Someone times how long the story is. We all take notes. If you'd stuck your head into the office, you'd see four of five of us scribbling away furiously and noting what we'd change. Lately we've been buying Muji notebooks and .38 Muji gel ink pens at the office for this purpose. They're pleasant to touch and make the world seem like an orderly place. I number and date my notebooks in case I need to go back to them later. Then we all rewrite the script together on Google Docs, on MacBook Airs purchased for this purpose. We're also big users of Google Calendar at the radio show. The desktop interface for that is good but the Google Calendar iPhone app is just fucking annoying and really should go to hell. Here are two annoying things it does: 1) Every day (and after every time you close the app) it asks you to log in again with your name and password, which is a pain in the ass. 2) After you log in, a little blue box appears saying "Install this web app on your Phone: tap on the arrow and then 'Add to Home Screen'" which irritates me because the app should know that it already IS on my home screen. It already is on my iPhone. Where does it think it's living?

  4) Difficult Girl Growing up, with help. By Lena Dunham I believe this is an exerpt from Lena's new book: Not That Kind of Girl

I am eight, and I am afraid of everything. The list of things that keep me up at night includes but is not limited to: appendicitis, typhoid, leprosy, unclean meat, foods I haven’t seen emerge from their packaging, foods my mother hasn’t tasted first so that if we die we die together, homeless people, headaches, rape, kidnapping, milk, the subway, sleep.

  5) It's A Godlis World: Early Photos Of Punk Rock After Dark. Totally supported this rad photo book about the late 70's punk era, taken by Godlis.  Talking Heads, CBGB, 1977 Blondie, CBGB, 1977

1) VICE News reported on ISIS (which now just goes by the Islamic State) and I'm told the documentary is superb. I've also heard it's quite shocking/graphic. So keep that in mind. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

The Islamic State, a hardline Sunni jihadist group that formerly had ties to al Qaeda, has conquered large swathes of Iraq and Syria. Previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the group has announced its intention to reestablish the caliphate and has declared its leader, the shadowy Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as the caliph. The lightning advances the Islamic State made across Syria and Iraq in June shocked the world. But it's not just the group's military victories that have garnered attention — it's also the pace with which its members have begun to carve out a viable state. Flush with cash and US weapons seized during its advances in Iraq, the Islamic State's expansion shows no sign of slowing down. In the first week of August alone, Islamic State fighters have taken over new areas in northern Iraq, encroaching on Kurdish territory and sending Christians and other minorities fleeing as reports of massacres emerged. VICE News reporter Medyan Dairieh spent three weeks embedded with the Islamic State, gaining unprecedented access to the group in Iraq and Syria as the first and only journalist to document its inner workings.

  2) The Spy Who Loved Me. An undercover surveillance operation that went too far. What if you found out the father of your child was a spy, and had another family?

She opened the paper: the Queen in Nottingham for her Golden Jubilee; bankers under scrutiny; wives and girlfriends of the England football team. Absent-mindedly, she continued to read. She barely glanced at an article titled “How Absence of a Loving Father Can Wreck a Child’s Life.” A few pages later, she came to a photograph of a smiling young man with bouffy brown curls that parted like curtains around his eyes. Even after twenty-five years, she knew the face’s every freckle and line. She subsequently told a parliamentary committee: I went into shock. I felt like I couldn’t breathe and I started shaking. I did not even read the story which appeared with the picture. I went inside and phoned my parents. My dad got the paper from their nearest shop and my mum got out the photos of Bob and our son, at the birth and when he was a toddler. They confirmed to me, by comparing photos, it was definitely Bob.

  3) 5 Reasons Why Kate McKinnon Will Be Comedy’s Next Superstar

In addition to a nomination for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series (“I’m beyond shocked … I still think it might be a joke”), McKinnon was also nominated for an Emmy as one of the writers of the SNL music-video short “(Do It On My) Twin Bed,” which is about exactly what you think it’s about: trying to find a way to bone while staying with family over the holidays. “Aidy [Bryant] and I wanted to do an all-girl music video and dress up like sex kittens because we wanted to be badasses,” she says. “We knew it was the only time we would get to do that in our lives.” She wrote the sketch with Bryant and SNL writers Chris Kelly, Sarah Schneider, and Eli Brueggemann (music), and says the idea literally just came from someone pitching the idea What about when you go home and you have to have sex in your twin bed? “It just started flowing from there,” she says. “Aidy and Chris and Sarah are just so smart and amazing and we just, you know, pooped it out!”

  4) Slot-machine science. How casinos get you to spend more money.

Casinos put an enormous amount of thought into their designs. The layout of the tables, the patterns on the carpet, the lighting — they're all explicitly engineered to make gambling more seductive and get you to spend more money. One surprising example are the curving hallways around the property. Many casinos try to avoid making you ever have to turn at a 90° angle. --- But it's not just the machine algorithms themselves. Casinos have a vast array of strategies to keep people gambling. Modern machines now have ergonomic seats that don't cut off circulation and allow you sit for hours. Buttons and bill acceptors are placed so that they can be reached with minimal arm movement (and minimal disruption to play). Casinos have discovered that the most devoted players prefer machines to be sheltered in alcoves or crannies. "The entire architecture," Schüll says, is about ensconcing you in this comfy nook that allows you to have your own private escape." --- The stereotypical gambler in Las Vegas is no longer an older man playing cards — but a 35-year-old mother hooked on slots

  5) The Prospectives  A Brooklyn-based serial. Weekly episodes told in daily doses. Written by @adamhurly. Illustrations by @sam_kalda. Also available on instagram if you're bad about checking sites. I think it's updated more frequently there too.

New Yorkers have a way of pitying those people who choose to move away. “Can’t hack it in the big city, eh?” As if the person is giving up, too defeated to live and die for the hustle. I didn’t feel this pity toward Talia when she announced she was quitting her successful casting career and moving home to Kansas City. “I’ve got so much potential I can’t use here,” she said. “I’m over being stifled by the cost, by the rat race. I want a house, and a family, and quiet.” I felt disillusioned. She was once indefatigable. And now, quite logically, Kansas made more sense.

  Bonus: Munich's Underground Subway Stations

1) The Front Lines of Ferguson. This guy was there right in it. This is a very powerful telling of what happened during the police riots. 

“We further ask all those wishing to demonstrate or assemble to disperse well before the evening hours.” Disperse well before the evening hours. This felt like an invitation — a dare, even — for the citizens of Ferguson to disobey this thinly veiled curfew masked as a suggestion. From the moment I read it, I knew something bad would happen. --- As I considered my next move, I looked down at myself: scuffed-up Jordans, black socks, shorts, tank top, oversize denim button-down, a hat atop my head. And brown skin. I looked like I was from Ferguson. --- The police had blocked car traffic, giving pedestrians an “enter at your own risk” look as they moved forward. I expected to walk in and see protesters and police officers inches away from each other’s faces, screaming. Instead I heard gospel music blaring from a flatbed truck. This wasn’t war. This was a post-funeral barbecue … that just happened to have tanks and a small army standing before it. --- And then there was the first request, which felt more like a demand. “PLEASE STEP AWAY. TWENTY-FIVE FEET.” Begrudgingly, we moved back, but it only made us louder. And angrier. And again, as we got louder and angrier, the sky grew darker. And then, a second time: “PLEASE STEP AWAY. TWENTY-FIVE FEET.” And we got even louder. And angrier. But again, we moved back. Text after text was coming in from friends, telling me to be safe. I internalized it, without quite knowing what that meant in the moment. At this point, the only way to truly be safe was to leave Ferguson. And I couldn’t leave yet. Not when mothers had their babies out here, screaming, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” Not yet. At that moment, I gave up on trying to be safe. All I could be was smart.

  2) The Artist, the Thief, the Forger, and Her Lover. How did the “Mona Lisa” become famous? The biggest art heist of all time connects the forger and the thief.

The “Mona Lisa” — that enigmatic unfinished portrait, brushed by a renowned Italian polymath who hailed from Vinci, enveloped in cabalistic intrigue, lacquered with more commentary than any artwork, maybe any object, from scrutiny of her smile to forensics of her eyebrows, semiotics to science, the painting that pioneered new techniques, a Renaissance alchemy of enamels and varnishes, all to create that reticent smirk, those eyes gazing at you through time — You know the one. But a century ago, you probably did not know the one. She was rarely seen. --- To become the super-famous painting we know today, “Mona Lisa” needed an epic event — something momentous to transform her into one of the most iconic images in human history. She needed to disappear. That’s exactly what happened on August 22, 1911, when the painting was stolen. It is the greatest art heist story ever told, because it was absurdly simple, relatable in one sentence: "After hiding in a broom closet until the museum closed, a former Louvre employee walked out with the painting under his coat."

  3) The man who invented pop-up ads is sorry.

At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising. The model that got us acquired was analyzing users’ personal homepages so we could better target ads to them. Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad. It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content. Specifically, we came up with it when a major car company freaked out that they’d bought a banner ad on a page that celebrated anal sex. I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.

  It's a smaller story of a bigger one: The Internet's Original Sin

The fiasco I want to talk about is the World Wide Web, specifically, the advertising-supported, “free as in beer” constellation of social networks, services, and content that represents so much of the present day web industry. I’ve been thinking of this world, one I’ve worked in for over 20 years, as a fiasco since reading alecture by Maciej Cegłowski, delivered at the Beyond Tellerrand web design conference. Cegłowski is an important and influential programmer and an enviably talented writer. His talk is a patient explanation of how we’ve ended up with surveillance as the default, if not sole, internet business model. The talk is hilarious and insightful, and poignant precisely for the reasons Carlson’s story is. The internet spies at us at every twist and turn not because Zuckerberg, Brin, and Page are scheming, sinister masterminds, but due to good intentions gone awry.

  Bonus: GIFs From The Smithsonian Archives

1) Wired has a bunch of great articles about Snowden, who's on the cover for September, photographed by Platon:

“I told the government I’d volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose. I care more about the country than what happens to me. But we can’t allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. I’m not going to be part of that.”

Feature Story: The Most Wanted Man In The World (great editorial design too) Snowden: I Left the NSA Clues, But They Couldn’t Find Them Call Me Ed: A Day With Edward Snowden  

2) What’s Up With That: Your Best Thinking Seems to Happen in the Shower

Like Archimedes, when you are working on a problem your brain tends to fixate on one or a few different strategies. Kounios says these are like ruts that your mental wheels get stuck in. “If you take a break however, those thought patterns no longer dominate your thinking,” he said. The problem gets removed from the mental ruts and mingles with other ideas you’re carrying in your head. Eventually, it finds one—or several—that click together and rise up like Voltron into a solution. This is called fixation forgetting. -- It’s not clear how your brain decides which are the right connections, but it’s obvious that the farther your brain can roam, the better. Research has shown that your brain builds bigger creative webs when you’re in a positive mood. This makes sense, because when you’re anxious you’re less likely to take a chance on creativity. Even when resting or taking a break, anxious brains tend to obsess on linear solutions. This may be part of the reason that when you bring a way to record your thoughts into the equation—such as a notebook, voice recorder or word processor—the thoughts worth recording become scarce.

  3) Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

You can't kill email! It's the cockroach of the Internet, and I mean that as a compliment. This resilience is a good thing. "There isn't much to sending or receiving email and that's sort of the point," observed Aaron Straup Cope, the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum's Senior Engineer in Digital and Emerging Media. "The next time someone tells you email is 'dead,' try to imagine the cost of investing in their solution or the cost of giving up all the flexibility that email affords." Email is actually a tremendous, decentralized, open platform on which new, innovative things can and have been built. In that way, email represents a different model from the closed ecosystems we see proliferating across our computers and devices. Email is an easy-to-access refuge from the open, interoperable, less-controlled "web we lost." It's an exciting landscape of freedom amidst the walled gardens of social networking and messaging services.

    4) Seinfeld: The Elaine Story Lots of behind the scenes interviews about Julia Louis Dreyfus and her contribution as Elaine on Seinfeld.  

  5) Another awesome interview about Tavi, who's just graduated high school and is starring in her first broadway play titled "This Is Our Youth," with Michael Cera and Kieran Culkin. The Chicago Tribune has a review written up.

The year 1982 was, history now teaches us, the bad old days for Cera's Warren but the grand last stand of Culkin's player-dude. This was pretty much the last, tech-free moment when the guy with the girl, with the good hair, the connection to the dealer, the long cord on his phone and the apartment paid for by his parents could truly feel superior to the nerd-friend he keeps around mostly to feel superior. But in 1982, a straight, rich white guy with good hair, a New York apartment and a laid-back demeanor was still cock of the walk. It's a credit to Culkin, who achieves quite the recognizable 1980s persona with his Dennis, that he catches both that rich sense of privileged entitlement and just enough sense of its fragility.

  Bonus: The Salmon Cannon

1) Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn

Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. The findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune. ---

  I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

  For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.  --- And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

  2) A Man and His Cat

The cat was jealous of my attention; she liked to sit on whatever I was reading, walked back and forth and back and forth in front of my laptop’s screen while I worked, and unsubtly interpolated herself between me and any woman I may have had over. She and my ex Kati Jo, who was temperamentally not dissimilar to the cat, instantly sized each other up as enemies. When I was physically intimate with a woman, the cat did not discreetly absent herself but sat on the edge of the bed with her back to me, facing rather pointedly away from the scene of debauch, quietly exuding disapproval, like your grandmother’s ghost. I realize that people who talk at length about their pets are tedious at best, and often pitiful or repulsive. They post photos of their pets online, tell little stories about them, speak to them in disturbing falsettos, dress them in elaborate costumes and carry them around in handbags and BabyBjorns, have professional portraits taken of them and retouched to look like old master oil paintings. When people over the age of 10 invite you to a cat birthday party or a funeral for a dog, you need to execute a very deft etiquette maneuver, the equivalent of an Immelmann turn or triple axel, in order to decline without acknowledging that they are, in this area, insane.

  3) Rookie Editor’s Letter August 2014: Enchantment This more free form brainstorming/discussion but it's really great.

Summer witches and summer fairies. Cosmic vibes. The combined fairylike etherealness and witchy vindictiveness of Speak Now–era Taylor Swift and Stevie Nicks. First Aid Kit. Erykah Badu. Cat Power. But NO HIPPIES because I just listened to an interview with a Charles Manson biographer and can’t stop thinking about when he said the ’60s were really only good for like two people, for like three hours. -- One of my very favorite books of all time is Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (who is maybe my favorite nonfiction writer?). She spent 11 years practically living with one family in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, getting to know them and writing about everything they went through during those years and thinking about how each thing that happened to them affected everything and everyone else. If you have not read this book, you should do so! It is a real masterpiece. Anyway, it starts like this:

  Jessica lived on Tremont Avenue, on one of the poorer blocks in a very poor section of the Bronx. She dressed even to go to the store. Chance was opportunity in the ghetto, and you had to be prepared for anything. She didn’t have much of a wardrobe, but she was resourceful with what she had—her sister’s Lee jeans, her best friend’s earrings, her mother’s T-shirts and perfume. Her appearance on the streets in her neighborhood usually caused a stir. A 16-year-old Puerto Rican girl with bright hazel eyes, a huge, inviting smile, and a voluptuous shape, she radiated intimacy wherever she went. You could be talking to her in the middle of the bustle of Tremont and feel as if lovers’ confidences were being exchanged beneath a tent of sheets. Guys in cars offered rides. Grown men got stupid. Women pursed their lips. Boys made promises they could not keep.

  4) Do you remember when they found a bunch of old Atari stuff in the landfill a little while back? Well there's a documentary being made called Atari: Game Over: the untold story of the 80’s tech giant and its fateful launch of E.T., the video game. 5) Why Do Band Photos Look Like That, Anyway?

"The common trends I have found: Folk-rock band photos typically contain cow pastures, exposed brick and/or cobblestones and rolled-up, well-fit jeans. Just like a heavy rock band's photo commonly contains some combination of corrugated metal, sawdust, sweat and fire. Who set the trends for this in the first place?"  The first thing to keep in mind about band photos is the utilitarian purpose they serve: They're conceived and designed largely so that people like me can slap down an image around which to wrap text. In many ways, they function as the visual equivalent of the press releases they often accompany — and, like press releases, you can be artful with them. If you're too artful, though, they serve almost no purpose at all. In band photos, as in book covers, you're dealing with two powerful and often opposing forces: You want to look like no one and nothing else, while at the same time setting a tone for what people can expect from the work itself. This is an incredibly tricky assignment, which means that much of what you see focuses on the latter. A band's management may ask for "blazingly original, while also signifying that fans of Mumford and Sons would like it," and in the end, you're still likely to wind up with, well, exactly what you'd expect. After all, if your band has banjos and mustaches and whatnot, which setting will make more sense: hay bales and open skies, or an alley full of burning trash cans? For most bands, there's a time and a place to confound expectations, and press photos aren't generally the ideal opportunity to do so.

  Bonus: Beyoncify my boyfriend (via)

1) We Experiment On Human Beings! Ok Cupid has a really hilarious copywriter.

I’m the first to admit it: we might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah. But OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out. Like this young buck, trying to get a potato to cry.  We noticed recently that people didn’t like it when Facebook “experimented” with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work. Here are a few of the more interesting experiments OkCupid has run.

  2) No Time to Think

ONE of the biggest complaints in modern society is being overscheduled, overcommitted and overextended. Ask people at a social gathering how they are and the stock answer is “super busy,” “crazy busy” or “insanely busy.” Nobody is just “fine” anymore. When people aren’t super busy at work, they are crazy busy exercising, entertaining or taking their kids to Chinese lessons. Or maybe they are insanely busy playing fantasy football, tracing their genealogy or churning their own butter. And if there is ever a still moment for reflective thought — say, while waiting in line at the grocery store or sitting in traffic — out comes the mobile device. So it’s worth noting a study published last month in the journal Science, which shows how far people will go to avoid introspection. -- Moreover, in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks when left alone to think. These same people, by the way, had previously said they would pay money to avoid receiving the painful jolt. It didn’t matter if the subjects engaged in the contemplative exercise at home or in the laboratory, or if they were given suggestions of what to think about, like a coming vacation; they just didn’t like being in their own heads.

  3) The history of the high-five. 

When Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1977, the first man to greet him at home plate was his friend and teammate, rookie Glenn Burke. Overcome with happiness, Burke did the first thing that came to mind — he put his hand straight in the air and had Baker slap it. Welcome to the birth of the high five. From there, our short follows Burke’s story as he became a victim of bigotry and then a local hero for social change.

  4) When there's a 20 percent chance of rain, do you know what that really means?

"If I had an answer, I would be a famous philosopher instead of a mathematician," he says. "It's a very difficult question, and people have been arguing about it for a really long time."

  5) The Down And Dirty History Of TMZ

BuzzFeed spoke to nearly two dozen former TMZ employees, and it’s clear that Bieber’s tape was not the only near-priceless piece of dirt in the proverbial TMZ vault. (TMZ did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) According to these ex-employees, the sealed testimonies from the Michael Jackson molestation trial hide there as does footage of various celebrities — Bieber, Lohan, Travolta — behaving badly. The vault isn’t a secret at TMZ — even the lowest on the staff ladder have heard whispers of its existence. As to what goes up on the site and what stays vaulted, that’s a finer, more esoteric calculus — and one in which celebrities and their publicists have come to live in fear. As one source explained, “There’s no doubt: [Harvey] Levin absolutely changed the way celebrities function today.” -- Someone pitched the idea to use “TMZ” — Hollywood shorthand for the “Thirty Mile Zone,” or “studio zone,” which historically delineated the boundaries for union-related rates within the industry and, in branding terms, connoted a mysterious sort of insider knowledge.

1) The New Yorker has taken away their paywall until the end of Summer. Which means everything in their entire archive is available to read for free-zies. Here's some suggestions: Awl: All The New Yorker Story Roundups You Should Read While The Stories Are Still Unlocked Digg: The New Yorker Opened Its Archive — Here's Where To Start Buzzfeed: 14 Fantastic Stories From The New Yorker Archive You Should Read This Summer Longform: Our 25 Favorite Unlocked New Yorker Articles Slate: The New Yorker Stories You Should Read Before the Paywall Goes Up Gizmodo: 7 New Yorker Tech Stories That You Can Now Read For Free Pocket: Pocket Roundup: The Best of The New Yorker Entertainment Weekly: Here are the 15 best short stories you can read at the 'New Yorker' (These have gems from J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Margaret Atwood and more.)

  2) Speaking of the New Yorker, Frank Chimero posted this gem: Guy Walks Into a Bar 

And the pianist is, like, “Fuck you!” And he’s really drunk, because he’s only one foot tall and so his tolerance for alcohol is extremely low. And he’s, like, “Fuck you, asshole! Fuck you!”

  3) How to live on Mars? A crew's been simulating up on Mauna Loa for 120 days, finishing tomorrow. (via) 4) Where do restaurant reservations come from? The answer is sex in the 18th century.

Her book traces the narrative of the restaurant back to 18th-century France, and given what Carmody and Appelbaum had said, I put the question to her like this: "Does the practice trace back to the 18th-century development of the restaurant? Or is it a bolt-on of the industrial age and widespread diffusion of the telephone?" Fascinatingly, she told me that the question had never come up before. (Certainly it had never occurred to me, but once it had, it seemed like a gap in my knowledge that I had to fill.) But when she thought about it, she was able to come up with the definitive answer I'd been looking for. --  "The public restaurant or dining room is the place for a bachelor supper when ladies are guests. A private room is not proper, and your guests want to see and be seen." The same text asserts "All meals in a restaurant, unless organized on the spur of a moment, are ordered beforehand and everything, including the waiter's tip, arranged and settled for. If you have not an account at the restaurant, pay the bill at the time you arrange the menu and reserve the table."  So, what we have in the nineteenth century is restaurant reservations as a way of hiring a caterer or being able to throw a dinner party in the absence of all the necessary physical and social accoutrements (from wife and maidservants to a cook, fingerbowls and fishknives for 16, etc. etc.)

  5) Mary Poppins Quits -- Mary Poppins (Kristen Bell) is working for minimum wage, and really needs a raise.

1) My Life with Piper: From Big House to Small Screen The other true story behind ‘Orange Is the New Black’ by Larry Smith

I was 29 years old and living the dream, or at least my version of it, when everything changed. I was in love with an amazing woman and had a rent-controlled sublet in New York City’s West Village and a good job at a glossy magazine. By any estimation as I now recall my life before it was tossed upside down, my girlfriend and I had no discernible problems. -- In the spring of 2013, I am watching an advance screener of the soon-to-be-released Netflix show Orange Is the New Black, and a guy named Larry, who looks more like me than not, proposes to a blue-eyed blonde named Piper, looking like the younger cousin of my wife. They’re on a beach, as we were when I proposed, and he removes a ring from a sealed plastic bag, as I did. Larry Bloom, in one of his best lines, explains: “I gotta lock this shit down before you leave, Pipes.” I’m pretty sure it’s something I said, too, and even if I didn’t, it’s the scene at which my friends dropped their vocal opposition to Jason Biggs. For the record, though, I have never called her “Pipes.”

  2) I Don't Care If You Like It Women are tired of being judged by the Esquire metric

Instead, I’ve been thinking about an anecdote in Tina Fey’s Bossypants. Amy Poehler, then new to "Saturday Night Live," was engaging in some loud and unladylike vulgarity in the writers’ room when the show’s then-star Jimmy Fallon jokingly told her to cut it out, saying, “It’s not cute! I don’t like it!” In Fey’s retelling, Poehler “went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,” forcefully informing him: “I don’t fucking care if you like it.” I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. Just this week, the journalist Megan Carpentier wrote a piece about the evolving public appraisals of Hillary Clinton’s facial expressions that concluded with her suggestion that we get over the idea of 2014 being “the year of the strong female politician” and aim instead for “the year of the strong female politician who doesn’t give a fuck if you think she’s pretty.” -- How, in this country, every barometer by which female worth is measured—from the superficial to the life-altering, the appreciative to the punitive—has long been calibrated to “dude,” whether or not those measurements are actually being taken by dudes. Men still run, or at bare minimum have shaped and codified the attitudes of, the churches, the courts, the universities, the police departments, the corporations that so freely determine women’s worth. As Beyoncé observed last year, “Money gives men power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what’s sexy. And men define what’s feminine. It’s ridiculous.” It is ridiculous, and I wish we could all tell them how little it matters what they think. Except that of course most women, those who bear the brunt of these assessments, aren’t Beyoncé or Amy Poehler—who, not coincidentally, was on Junod’s list of newly un-tragic 42-year-olds. Instead, they are women who may not be able to pay for Pilates, let alone for day care or contraceptives, who may need but not be able to afford drug treatment, who Esquire would likely still rate as not-hot or more likely not rate at all, but whose fates nonetheless rest in the hands of empowered committees on the general value and status of womanhood in America.

  3) How Johnny Cash was nearly killed by an oshtrich in 1981.

Ostrich attacks are rare in Tennessee, it’s true, but this one really happened, on the grounds of the exotic animal park I’d established behind the House of Cash offices near my house on Old Hickory Lake. It occurred during a particularly bitter winter, when below-zero temperatures had reduced our ostrich population by half; the hen of our pair wouldn’t let herself be captured and taken inside the barn, so she froze to death. That, I guess, is what made her mate cranky. Before then he’d been perfectly pleasant with me, as had all the other birds and animals, when I walked through the compound. That day, though, he was not happy to see me. I was walking through the woods in the compound when suddenly he jumped out onto the trail in front of me and crouched there with his wings spread out, hissing nastily. Nothing came of that encounter. I just stood there until he laid his wings back, quit hissing, and moved off. Then I walked on. As I walked I plotted. He’d be waiting for me when I came back by there, ready to give me the same treatment, and I couldn’t have that. I was the boss. It was my land. The ostrich didn’t care. When I came back I was carrying a good stout six-foot stick, and I was prepared to use it. And sure enough, there he was on the trail in front of me, doing his thing. When he started moving toward me I went on the offensive, taking a good hard swipe at him.

4) The End of ‘Genius’ (H/T Design Dare)

For centuries, we’ve had a clear answer: the lone genius. The idea of the solitary creator is such a common feature of our cultural landscape (as with Newton and the falling apple) that we easily forget it’s an idea in the first place. But the lone genius is a myth that has outlived its usefulness. Fortunately, a more truthful model is emerging: the creative network, as with the crowd-sourced Wikipedia or the writer’s room at “The Daily Show” or — the real heart of creativity — the intimate exchange of the creative pair, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney and myriad other examples with which we’ve yet to fully reckon. --- The elemental collective, of course, is the pair. Two people are the root of social experience — and of creative work. When the sociologist Michael Farrell looked at movements from French Impressionism to that of the American suffragists, he found that groups created a sense of community, purpose and audience, but that the truly important work ended up happening in pairs, as with Monet and Renoir, and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In my own study of pairs, I found the same thing — most strikingly with Paul McCartney and John Lennon. --- The pair is the primary creative unit — not just because pairs produce such a staggering amount of work but also because they help us to grasp the concept of dialectical exchange. At its heart, the creative process itself is about a push and pull between two entities, two cultures or traditions, or two people, or even a single person and the voice inside her head. Indeed, thinking itself is a kind of download of dialogue between ourselves and others. And when we listen to creative people describe breakthrough moments that occur when they are alone, they often mention the sensation of having a conversation in their own minds.  

  5) To follow up on Weird Al week of videos, Robinson Meyer wrote an article about The Surprisingly Savvy Weird Al Internet Machine

No wonder, then, that this week Al has mimicked the tactics of the preeminent Knowles. From last Monday to this upcoming one, he released a new music video every day, eight videos in total. There are few songs on his new album that will lack a video, meaning that, in medium and marketing, he’s pulling a sort of time-extended Yoncé. But not all eight videos are going straight to YouTube. Weird Al is spreading that goodness around. His parody of Pharrell’s “Happy” is hosted by Nerdist, a sprawling online entertainment empire that achieved fame through its eponymous podcast but which now encompasses a news website, a network of audio and video shows, and a television program on BBC America. Al’s Lorde spoof, meanwhile, went to competing digital content factory, CollegeHumor. It did go to YouTube, but is marked “Exclusive” and a “CollegeHumor ORIGINAL.” A “Blurred Lines” send-up sits on Yancovic’s Vevo page. --- Al’s new videos aren’t being released willy-nilly: They’re going one-at-a-time to massive online video entertainment networks. CollegeHumor, FunnyOrDie, Nerdist, and Yahoo—especially Yahoo—each have their own audiences, and Al can capture the largest one possible by stringing them together. And that’s just what’s happening, in selectively activating these distro-tainment networks: Nerdist reaches an avowedly geeky if upmarket set, College Humor’s long-running fratty aesthetic captures more bros, Vevo has long-running deals with YouTube, and Yahoo is just stupid-big.  Working through networks that others have built, he can funnel content to the teenagers who help grow his audience and to the former teens who supplant it. He didn’t build these networks. One of the perks of old-media celebrity is that you just have to arrive at the party and people will fawn over you.

  Also he did a Reddit AMA. Some of my favorites:

A: Someone asked me how different my life would have been if my parents had gotten me guitar lessons instead of accordion lessons. (They just deleted their question.) Anyway... I probably wouldn't have a music career right now. The reason Dr. Demento played my material on the radio when I was a teenager wasn't because it was so GOOD, it was because it was such a novelty hearing a kid rocking the accordion. Dr. D. probably wouldn't have given my tape a second listen if I had been playing acoustic guitar. And if I hadn't gotten that early encouragement, I highly doubt that I'd be doing a Reddit AMA right now. -- Q: Was the video for Tacky really a single shot, or was there some seamless edits? A: While it looks like there MIGHT have been an edit somewhere, I absolutely guarantee you, that was all done in ONE CONTINUOUS SHOT. That was a bit of a challenge for me, because I start the video on a 5th floor fire escape, and I reappear on street level wearing completely different clothes. That means - for EVERY TAKE - as soon as the camera was off me I had to run down 5 flights of stairs WHILE CHANGING MY CLOTHES so I could be on camera again at the end. Definitely got my workout THAT day!  

1) For the next few days, Weird Al is releasing a video a day from his new album (available now). I am a HUGE Weird Al fan, I grew up with him in the 80s thanks to my older brother. We both got to see him live in Las Vegas a few years back and it was one of the most entertaining shows I've ever been to. He went all out with costumes, backup dancers and props for every song and basically sang all his greatest hits. In between songs, there was ALTV, his parody of MTV from the 80s. It consisted of Weird Al taking clips from interviews with actors, musicians and adding his own questions. It was magnificent. 

  Videos released so far: Tacky - a parody of Happy, with appearances by Margret Cho, Kristen Schaal, Jack Black and others. Word Crimes - a parody of Blurred Lines.

  2) The Sad, Strange, True Story Of Sandy Allen, The Tallest Woman In The World

Sandy was asked up to Minneapolis to do a Marriott opening and flew on an airplane for the first time out to Los Angeles, to be interviewed on The David Frost Show. Soon after an agent contacted her about the Fellini film. She’d never heard of the director before, but Sutherland she had. The state veterinary office wasn’t about to let her leave for the several weeks of shooting until the governor intervened and off Sandy went to Italy. 

  Imagine her: a 19-year-old Christian girl of little means in home-sewn enormous clothes, who’d barely left Indiana, let alone America, as she stepped off that plane in Rome. Heads swiveled; bulbs flashed. Sandy, who’d been told by her boss that Italian men liked to pinch “rear ends,” walked through the terminal with her purse behind her. Filming took time; Fellini asked Sandy to stay six weeks rather than the original three. She toured the countryside with the director and his wife, had her first glass of wine, saw Bianca Jagger on set, stayed in Roman Polanski’s mansion, which Sutherland had rented. Fellini and his wife were kind enough to get a limousine for her so she could tour the Vatican, and there, on the cobblestones, soldiers and tourists swarmed her. She was, in some sense, more holy a sight.

  3) @congressedits is a bot that tweets anonymous Wikipedia edits that are made from IP addresses in the US Congress. My favorite one.

  4)This guy has modified a wooden pallet to ride on tram tracks like a skateboard.

  5) Do We Choose Our Friends Because They Share Our Genes?

Some of the genes that friends were most likely to have in common involve smell. "We tend to smell things the same way that our friends do," Fowler says. The study involved nearly 2,000 adults. 

--

  They also found some interesting differences among friends: They tend to have very different genes for their immune systems. Other researchers have reported similar findings among spouses. "One of the reasons why we think this is true is because it gives us extra protection. If our spouses have an immune system that fights off a disease that we're susceptible to, they'll never get it, and then we'll never get it," Fowler says. "And so it gives us an extra layer of protection."

  Bonus: Illustration by Christoph Niemann (via)

1) J.K. Rowling has a new Harry Potter short story that takes place when Harry is 34. It's up on Pottermore.com (free login), but someone posted the whole thing on reddit to read. (via @kottke). Also Vox has a quick synopsis if you don't want to read the whole thing. It's written in the annoying words of Rita Skeeter and takes place during the Quidditch World Cup Final (how fitting).

Hermione Granger, of course, was always the femme fatale of the group. Press reports of the time revealed that as a teenager she toyed with the young Potter's affections before being seduced away by the muscular Viktor Krum, finally settling for Potter's faithful sidekick. After a meteoric rise to Deputy Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, she is now tipped to go even higher within the Ministry, and is also mother to son, Hugo, and daughter, Rose. Does Hermione Granger prove that a witch really can have it all? (No – look at her hair.) 

  Then there are those members of Dumbledore's Army who receive slightly less publicity than Potter, Weasley and Granger (are they resentful? Almost certainly). Neville Longbottom, now a popular Herbology teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is here in Patagonia with his wife Hannah. Until recently the pair lived above the Leaky Cauldron in London, but rumour has it that Hannah has not only retrained as a Healer, but is applying for the job of Matron at Hogwarts. Idle gossip suggests that she and her husband both enjoy a little more Ogden's Old Firewhisky than most of us would expect from custodians of our children, but no doubt we all wish her the best of luck with her application.

  --- I wonder if this is eluding that there will be more stories at the end of the month??---

But let us not be severe. Harry Potter and his cohorts never claimed to be perfect! And for those who want to know exactly how imperfect they are, my new biography: Dumbledore's Army: The Dark Side of the Demob will be available from Flourish and Blotts on July 31st.

     2) Buzz Aldrin did an AMA on reddit. Here's some of my favorites.

  Q: Is there any experience on Earth that even compares slightly to having been on the Moon?

  A: My first words of my impression of being on the surface of the Moon that just came to my mind was "Magnificent desolation." The magnificence of human beings, humanity, Planet Earth, maturing the technologies, imagination and courage to expand our capabilities beyond the next ocean, to dream about being on the Moon, and then taking advantage of increases in technology and carrying out that dream - achieving that is magnificent testimony to humanity. But it is also desolate - there is no place on earth as desolate as what I was viewing in those first moments on the Lunar Surface. Because I realized what I was looking at, towards the horizon and in every direction, had not changed in hundreds, thousands of years. Beyond me I could see the moon curving away - no atmosphere, black sky. Cold. Colder than anyone could experience on Earth when the sun is up- but when the sun is up for 14 days, it gets very, very hot. No sign of life whatsoever. That is desolate. More desolate than any place on Earth.

---

  Q: Hello Mr. Aldrin! Our nation and our world have been waiting for another monumental achievement by humanity ever since you were a pioneer in the space race and set foot on the Moon. For lack of any serious government effort, I’m rooting for Elon Musk to accomplish this by sending man to Mars. What advice would you give Elon to achieve the ultimate objective of permanence on Mars?

    A: There is very little doubt, in my mind, that what the next monumental achievement of humanity will be the first landing by an Earthling, a human being, on the planet Mars. And I expect that within 2 decades of the 5th anniversary of the first landing on the moon, that within 2 decades America will lead an international presence on Planet Mars. Some people may be rooting for Elon - I think he could, with his SpaceX, contribute considerably, enormously, to an international activity not only at the moon but also on Mars. I have considered whether a landing on Mars could be done by the private sector. It conflicts with my very strong idea, concept, conviction, that the first human beings to land on Mars should not come back to Earth. They should be the beginning of a build-up of a colony / settlement, I call it a "permanence." A settlement you can visit once or twice, come back, and then decide you want to settle. Same with a colony. But you want it to be permanent from the get-go, from the very first. I know that many people don't feel that that should be done. Some people even consider it distinctly a suicide mission. Not me! Not at all. Because we will plan, we will construct from the moon of Mars, over a period of 6-7 years, the landing of different objects at the landing site that will be brought together to form a complete Mars habitat and laboratory, similar to what has been done at the Moon. Tourism trips to Mars and back are just not the appropriate way for human beings from Earth - to have an individual company, no matter how smart, send people to mars and bring them back, it is VERY very expensive. It delays the obtaining of permanence, internationally. Your question referred to a monumental achievement by humanity - that should not be one private company at all, it should be a collection of the best from all the countries on Earth, and the leader of the nation or the groups who makes a commitment to do that in 2 decades will be remembered throughout history, hundreds and thousands of years in the future of the history of humanity, beginning, commencing, a human occupation of the solar system.

  3) This Land, JibJab's Seminal Parody Flash Video, Turns 10

Ten years ago today, a small Flash animation firm based in Los Angeles uploaded a video to its website. The three-minute cartoon parodied the year’s presidential election and borrowed the tune of an American folk song.

--

  The video was This Land, the primary digital spoof of the Kerry-Bush election. After their server crashed, the two brothers behind the video—Evan and Greg Spiridellis—moved it to a web video distributor, AtomFilms. According to a USA Today report, the video got more than 1 million “hits” in 24 hours. The brothers received all the trappings of mainstream American microfame: They were on the morning shows and named people of the year. A national newspaper compared them to Jesus. They boasted that their video was seen on every continent and on the ISS. Before Twitter existed, before Facebook allowed more than college students to join its network, the brothers made new media that went viral.

  4) How did the people of Pompeii become frozen? By what process did the victims of the volcanic eruption become frozen? Did it occur instantly upon contact with the pyroclastic flows, or did it happen over a period of hours or days?

  When archaeologists began to uncover Pompeii, they realized that they were finding bones inside air pockets within the layers of pumice and ash and debris. Fortunately they got the bright idea to start filling these air pockets, whenever they broke into them, with plaster that would solidify in 48 hours. They then chipped the pumice and ash and debris away from the plaster. This revealed the plaster in the shape of a body. 

Some of these plaster casts can be startling to look at. They aren't all neatly laid out like the human remains we usually find in graves. They are in various poses. Some lie crawling across the ground. Some sit against walls, their knees up. Some hold each other.

1) Can we just talk about the potato salad in the room? It's raised over $40k now. Some people are seeing it as a hilarious internet phenomenon. Others are outraged that more important fundraisers that are actually trying help people are struggling, while this one has gone overboard. There's tons of comments on the Kickstarter page of people desperately trying to get a piece of the ... salad... shilling for their own projects.

  There's even a bunch of knockoffs: Cheese on Toast, Coleslaw,  two different egg salads, and I'm sure a bunch more.

  You may have wondered how it's been so successful. Other think The Potato Salad Kickstarter is the Science Fiction Villain We Deserve. 

It's an investment compulsion, and the investment is a scam. (It's fun to imagine all business opportunities as jokes: They are temporary and dependent entirely on context; they are taken advantage of at the expense of someone or something that is often neither aware nor present; they are—necessarily?—cruel; they inspire the same embarrassing urge for inclusion, and the same shameful regret upon misapprehension or exclusion. Jokes! Look around you: Isn't it nice, that it's all just jokes?). If the campaign keeps going, some people may start to claim that, at some specific level of investment, the joke is no longer funny. It will be too much—the money could be better used on another campaign, or in another context entirely. This will be true but it will have always been true. None of these people will be able to explain to you what exactly changed.

  2) Why Teenagers Today May Grow Up Conservative

There was a time not so long ago when the young seemed destined to be liberal forever. Americans in their teens and 20s were to the left of their elders on social issues. They worried more about poverty. They voted strongly Democratic. 

  In retrospect, we refer to this period as the 1960s, and it didn’t last long, let alone forever. Less than a generation after young people were marching for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, they voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan. 

  Today, of course, the young are liberal again, and it seems as if they will be forever. They favor same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization, stricter gun laws, citizenship for illegal immigrants and an activist government that fights climate change and inequality. The Republican Party, as you have probably noticed, does not. 

  But the temporary nature of the 1960s should serve as a reminder that politics change. What seems permanent can become fleeting. And the Democratic Party, for all its strengths among Americans under 40, has some serious vulnerabilities, too.

  Related: An interactive NYT graphic: How Birth Year Influences Political Views

“It is important not to think about a single election or of a single defining political event,” Mr. Ghitza and Mr. Gelman write. “Rather, generations appear to be formed through a prolonged period of presidential excellence.”

  3) A NASA probe traveled unused through space for 28 years. Then, last week, @ISEE3Reboot fired its engines.

The achievement is important for many reasons. While the amateur team trying to reboot the ISEE-3 has been in radio contact with the probe for more than a month, this is the first time it has successfully commanded moving parts onboard. It’s important for technical reasons. The ISEE-3 is “spin-stabilized,” meaning it only functions properly when it’s tumbling over itself. The team can now adjust that spin. And, finally, it’s important for planning reasons. Now, the team can begin to fire the ISEE-3’s thrusters and change the ship’s trajectory—hopefully, keeping it from crashing into the moon.

--

  “You just have to push through it and the data you get back isn’t exactly what you want. As soon as it would take another command, you just rush through the next one and the next one,” he said. “It’s like telling an old dot-matrix printer from back in the day to do something.”

  4) A Different Path to Fighting Addiction

And unlike programs like Al-Anon, A.A.’s offshoot for family members, the C.M.C.’s approach does not advocate interventions or disengaging from someone who is drinking or using drugs. “The traditional language often sets parents up to feel they have to make extreme choices: Either force them into rehab or detach until they hit rock bottom,” said Carrie Wilkens, a psychologist who helped found the C.M.C. 10 years ago. “Science tells us those formulas don’t work very well.” 

  When parents issue edicts, demanding an immediate end to all substance use, it often lodges the family in a harmful cycle, said Nicole Kosanke, a psychologist at the C.M.C. Tough love might look like an appropriate response, she said, but it often backfires by further damaging the frayed connections to the people to whom the child is closest. 

  The center’s approach includes motivational interviewing, a goal-oriented form of counseling; cognitive behavioral therapy, a short-term form of psychotherapy; and harm reduction, which seeks to limit the negative consequences of substance abuse. The psychologists also support the use of anti-craving medications like naltrexone, which block the brain’s ability to release endorphins and the high of using the substance.

  5) Trailer for Terry Gilliam's 'The Zero Theorem' : I'm not a super Sci-Fi fan, but this looks really good. And hell, it even has Tilda Swinton.

An eccentric and reclusive computer genius plagued with existential angst works on a mysterious project aimed at discovering the purpose of existence - or the lack thereof -once and for all. However, it is only once he experiences the power of love and desire that he is able to understand his very reason for being. Director: Terry Gilliam Starring: Christoph Waltz, David Thewlis, Melanie thierry, Lucas Hedges, Ben Whishaw, Peter Stormare, and Tilda Swinton.

  Bonus: Zoo Jeans: Animals create distressed denim to help raise money for their zoo (via @tealtan) 

This is not a joke. At least all the profits go to the zoo?

Happy Monday!

I had a short break due to a few vacation-y things.

Let's get back to business, people!

  1) Breaking Down the Multi-Billion-Dollar Seinfeld Economy

I was just discussing this with my husband after watching some late night back to back episodes.

$400 million: What Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld can each make just from the most recent syndication cycle.

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  Snapple: It was a regional brand, recalls Patti Ganguzza, who placed it on the show. By 1994, Quaker Oats would overpay $1.7 billion for the company—then resell it in 1997 for just $300 million.

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  Megan Mullally: In 1988, she got all of $5,000 for a Murder, She Wrote gig. Her Seinfeld role, in 1993, raised her visibility; five years later, she started at $80,000 per episode on Will & Grace.

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  2) Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead?

Bambi’s mother, shot. Nemo’s mother, eaten by a barracuda. Lilo’s mother, killed in a car crash. Koda’s mother in Brother Bear, speared. Po’s mother in Kung Fu Panda 2, done in by a power-crazed peacock. Ariel’s mother in the third Little Mermaid, crushed by a pirate ship. Human baby’s mother in Ice Age, chased by a saber-toothed tiger over a waterfall.

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  The typical fairy-tale splitting of the mother into a good (usually dead) mother and an evil stepmother … is not only a means of preserving an internal all-good mother when the real mother is not all-good, but it also permits anger at this bad “stepmother” without endangering the goodwill of the true mother.

  3) Burt's Buzz : A doc about the Burt behind Burt's Bees. It's available to download digitally right now.

Humourous, authentic and compelling, BURT’S BUZZ is a journey into the remarkable double life of Burt Shavitz— a reclusive beekeeper who reluctantly became one of the world’s most recognizable brand identities. Filmmaker Jody Shapiro (How To Start Your Own Country) follows Burt from the pot-bellied stove of his rustic rural lifestyle to another world on the other side of the world, in Taiwan where the septuagenarian is greeted by hoards of his adoring fans. Moving from his privileged childhood on Long Island to his early career as a photo-journalist in counter-culture Greenwich Village, Burt left his past behind to pursue an almost monastic existence as a beekeeper in upstate Maine. Between these extremes is the story of a man who chose his own path and accidentally spawned a billion dollar natural product line. Guided by those who know -- or at least think they know -- Burt best, Burt's Buzz is a fascinating portrait of a singular personality who refuses to conform.

  Also, the documentary about Roger Ebert, Life Itself, is now out in theaters. But you can also watch it via iTunes & Amazon.

Based on his bestselling memoir of the same name, Life Itself, explores the impact and legacy of Roger Ebert’s life, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning film criticism at the Chicago Sun-Times to becoming one of the most influential cultural voices in America. The filmmakers were granted unprecedented access to Roger and Chaz during the final four months of his life. In that time, they captured Roger’s fighting spirit, his sharp sense of humor, and the ways he directly inspired filmmakers, family and fans.

  4) Pablo Escobar’s hippos: A growing problem

A herd of hippopotamuses once owned by the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar has been taking over the countryside near his former ranch - and no-one quite knows what to do with them. 

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  How much the hippos like Colombia can be judged from how much sex they are having. In Africa they usually become sexually active between the ages of seven and nine for males, and nine and 11 for females, but Pablo Escobar's hippos are becoming sexually active as young as three. All the fertile females are reported to be giving birth to a calf every year.  "It's just like this crazy wildlife experiment that we're left with," says San Diego University ecologist Rebecca Lewison. "Gosh! I hope this goes well."

  5) Without You I'm Nothing: Real and metaphorical wounds from the wrong side of idolatry. Rock Stars' ex-lovers move beyond their historical footnotes.

Getting in close proximity to a rock star, then—for a night, or a string of tour dates, or the time it would take them to compose an album especially for you—would seem a service to a higher power. “Perhaps by embracing their cherished rock gods, groupies tap into their own divinity. 

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  On the one hand you are elevated to the enviable role of Idol’s Consort. On the other hand your life becomes fair game for the press, the public and the star himself to do with what he wishes… When your personal pain becomes material for songs and the songs become hit singles, the process is strangely unnerving, however flattering it may at first seem. But then again, what else could the poor bastard have done?

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  But when she returned to New York, she realized that her life had already become material, and that the locals were not sympathetic to Bob’s abstraction of her: “Some deliberately sang songs he had written about his heartache as well as any ballad that pointed a finger at a cruel lover… It was as if every letter Bob had written to me and every phone call he had made had been performed in a theater in front of an audience.

  Bonus: The Emojis We Really Need

Last month, some 250 new emojis were rolled out by the Unicode Consortium, which develops software standards. Here are several that they might consider adding to that list to make Twitter more useful.

I’m favoriting your tweet only because you’re in a position to help me professionally.

  I loved your tweet, but I’m not retweeting it because it refers to farting and I don’t want my followers to think that’s something I do.

1) All those quizzes you take on BuzzFeed and helping them build a data profile on you. whoa. (via @tealtan)

  In other words, if I had access to the BuzzFeed Google Analytics data, I could query data for people who got to the end of the quiz & indicated – by not checking that particular answer – that they have had an eating disorder. Or that they have tried to change their gender. Or I could run a query along the following lines if I wished: 

• Show me all the data for anyone who answered the “Check Your Privilege” quiz but did not check “I have never taken medication for my mental health”. 

  In BuzzFeed’s defense, I’m sure when they set up the tracking in the first place they didn’t foresee that they’d be recording data from quizzes of this personal depth. This is just a single example, but I suspect this particular quiz would have had less than 2 million views if everyone completing it realised every click was being recorded & could potentially be reported on later – whether that data is fully identifiable back to individual users, or pseudonymous, or even totally anonymous. 

What do you think?

  2) The Eyes Have It. The actress sounds off on comedy, her convict character and why she’d never change her name.

I love this quote:

DID YOU EVER CONSIDER CHANGING YOUR NAME?

When I started as an actor? No, and I’ll tell you why. I had already gone through that. My family is from Nigeria, and my full name is Uzoamaka, which means “The road is good.” Quick lesson: My tribe is Igbo, and you name your kid something that tells your history and hopefully predicts your future. So anyway, in grade school, because my last name started with an A, I was the first in roll call, and nobody ever knew how to pronounce it. So I went home and asked my mother if I could be called Zoe. I remember she was cooking, and in her Nigerian accent she said, “Why?” I said, “Nobody can pronounce it.” Without missing a beat, she said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.

  3) I previously linked OK Go's new video using many optical illusions - now see how they did it.

...it was frantically precise. Sure, there was plenty of running around going on in front of the camera, but it was dwarfed by the number of people scrambling around behind the hand-held camera's view. But what looks like hurried chaos in this making-of video was really a super-precise collection of perfectly timed moves, as the finished product shows.

1) Tiny Letters to the Web We Miss - thought this was relevant

I knew what a blog was in 2002, I knew what it was in 2008, which was slightly different but still definitely a “blog.” Now, I have no idea what the word means any more. It isn’t something that runs on Wordpress, because that is nowthe CMS for almost 20% of the web. It isn’t a place for short links, because that is Twitter. Tumblr and Instagram took over for photoblogs. And those long personal essay/personal rant posts that people would write every once in a while — those are happening here on Medium instead of our own websites. Specific products are driving the content. 

  TinyLetter isn’t driving the content as much as it is driving the newsletter trend. The format can be used for multiple purposes just like blogs used to be. Two recent experiments with newsletters include the art projects What Price Loveby Melissa Gira Grant and We Think Alone by Miranda July.

  2) Tim Cook, Making Apple His Own

If Mr. Jobs was the heart and soul of the company, Mr. Cook seems to be trying to cast himself as a different sort of leader. His Twitter feed is a mash-up of Apple hoopla and cheerful promotion of human rights and environmentalism. He wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal in support of proposed federal legislation protecting gay, lesbian and transgender workers. 

  He often quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy but doesn’t much talk about the origin of his political views. The speech he gave last December, in which Mr. Cook mentioned the cross-burning, started to give some hints. “Since these early days,” he said, “I have seen, and I have experienced, many other types of discrimination.” All of those, he continued, “were rooted in a fear of people that were different than the majority.”

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“We do things because they’re just and right,” he said. He has a slight Alabama drawl and a cool delivery, but there was underlying pique in his voice when he rejected the idea that everything must be measured by return on investment. He concluded by telling shareholders, “If you want me to make decisions that have a clear R.O.I., then you should get out of the stock, just to be plain and simple.”

  3) The Story Behind This Incredible Photo Of A Monkey Using An iPhone

“The minutes that followed were downright hilarious. Monkeys already resemble humans in so many ways, but when they’re holding an iPhone, the similarities are almost scary. At some point, it even managed to let the built-in flash of the iPhone go off. When the macaque decided to do some serious underwater testing, the owner of the phone almost fainted. Meanwhile, I was fully aware that this would result in some of the most original snow monkey shots ever.”

  4) David Sedaris has a little short about his fitbit obsession and picking up trash.

I was travelling myself when I got my Fitbit, and because the tingle feels so good, not just as a sensation but also as a mark of accomplishment, I began pacing the airport rather than doing what I normally do, which is sit in the waiting area, wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what. I also started taking the stairs instead of the escalator, and avoiding the moving sidewalk.

  “Every little bit helps,” my old friend Dawn, who frequently eats lunch while hula-hooping and has been known to visit her local Y three times a day, said. She had a Fitbit as well, and swore by it. Others I met weren’t quite so taken. These were people who had worn one until the battery died. Then, rather than recharging it, which couldn’t be simpler, they’d stuck it in a drawer, most likely with all the other devices they’d lost interest in over the years. To people like Dawn and me, people who are obsessive to begin with, the Fitbit is a digital trainer, perpetually egging us on. During the first few weeks that I had it, I’d return to my hotel at the end of the day, and when I discovered that I’d taken a total of, say, twelve thousand steps, I’d go out for another three thousand.

  5) Pixar's new movie, "Inside Out" sounds really awesome. 

The film’s real protagonist is Joy (voiced by an effervescent Amy Poehler), one of five emotions who steer Riley through life via a control center in her mind that’s akin to the bridge from the Starship Enterprise. Joy and her cohorts — including Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Anger (Lewis Black), and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) — all work together to keep Riley emotionally balanced, and for the first 11 years of her life, the primary influencer is Joy, as evidenced by Riley’s sunny demeanor. 

  But as adolescence sets in, Joy finds her lead role usurped. Suddenly, Sadness wants to pipe in at inappropriate times — coaxing Riley to cry during her first day at a new school, for instance — and as the two emotions jostle for control, both of them fall into the deepest reaches of Riley’s mind and have to work their way back. Meanwhile, left to their own devices, Fear, Disgust, and Anger collude to transform Riley into a moody preteen.

1) SPOT THE BALL - A cool inforgraphic where you try to guess where the soccer ball is in the photo

In case you hadn't noticed, the World Cup has started in earnest. We've gathered some highlights from the games and made one important change — we removed the ball. Relive the highlights and see if you can guess where the ball is.

  2) BATTLE CRIES - Another really cool infographic!

The world’s best soccer players bring their own unique style to the game. So it is only fitting that the commentators react in kind — calling a goal with passion and personality. The jubilance that expands a commentator’s call of “goal” to fill five, six, even 10 seconds of time seems universal, but there is regional variation. Different languages play a part, but so do regional sensibilities and the spirit of individual announcers.

  3) The Weird Lure of the Internet Self-Loathing Spiral

Every time Vulture posts about celebrities reading mean tweets about themselves on Jimmy Kimmel Live, readers go bananas. And it’s true that for the celebrities on Kimmel’s show, this is essentially all a big publicity stunt. It’s famous-person code for, “Look at how down-to-earth I am!” and so on. But it made me think of how easy the internet has made it for almost any of us, famous or not, to get sucked down a spiral of self-loathing, masochistically seeking out the negative things other people have said about us online.

  I do this in my own life every time I break the No. 1 rule of internet journalism, which is to never read the comments. And just this week, my boyfriend got a brief boost into a minor kind of fame, when he appeared as a Jeopardy! contestant. After his episode aired, he told me that he went online to read things strangers had tweeted about him, and that it was mostly the negative stuff that kept him up well into the wee hours.

  4) I can't think of anything more perfect than a Lifetime TV movie version of “The Unauthorized Saved By The Bell Story”

Check the link for the full cast.

Now, thanks to hours of brand-new interviews conducted for this film (obtained independently of Diamond and his book), the real story will be brought to life in The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story, a new Lifetime television movie that promises to change the way that fans look at the classic kids’ comedy.

  5) TIGER PATROL! This is a cute comic by Lindsey Lea

  Bonus: Cool Beard, Bro. (via DesignYouTrust)