September 2010
66 posts
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The Anthropology of Hackers →
We have a lot of ideas about who hackers are, but very few people have actually tried to seriously investigate the anthropology of one of the more fascinating social groups to emerge at the end of the 20th century.
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In Your Dreams →
Rather than meaningless nocturnal frolics, dreams may be key to emotional well-being and memory function. And what you dream may be just as significant.
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Condos of the Living Dead →
An explosion of high-priced glass-and-steel condos is being marketed to New York’s new rich. Inspecting multi-million-dollar marvels of sterility, the author wonders how any real living could possibly take place inside any of them.
(via Longform.org)
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Theoretical Egalitarians →
Why income distribution can’t be crowd-sourced.
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Small Change →
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
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When Baghdad Was Centre of the Scientific World →
Islamic science had its heyday in the ninth century, thanks to Abū Ja’far al-Ma’mūn’s House of Wisdom, says Jim al-Khalili
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What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For? →
Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved — in fact, invented — by the Catholic Church. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?
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The Legacy of John Lennon →
Next month, the ex-Beatle would have been 70. Here, one of his confidantes reflects on his enduring importance and how he might have reacted to events since his death – from 9/11 to punk and the advent of Twitter
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The Origins of Good Ideas →
The secret to innovation is combining odds and ends
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Wildlife Filmmaker Chris Palmer Shows that Animals... →
“Shooting in the Wild,” published this year by Sierra Club Books, exposes the unpleasant secrets of environmental filmmaking: manufactured sounds, staged fights, wild animals that aren’t quite wild filmed in nature that isn’t entirely natural.
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Legend of Lewis Carroll has Dark Side →
Stressed-out rabbits and disappearing cats aren’t the only strange things swirling around in Wonderland. Dark rumors about the author of “Alice in Wonderland” have been dancing alongside his fanciful creations for more than half a century.
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George Lucas Stole Chewbacca, But It’s Okay →
[T]here are still plenty of dim, and in some cases even seemingly purposefully blacked out areas in the development of Star Wars. The story of how Chewbacca came to be is one of those.
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The Death Penalty: An Eye for an Eye →
Death Row (pop. 1,137) may soon lose a lot more residents to the executioner
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Kafka's Last Trial →
A tale of eccentric heirs, Zionist claims, a cat-infested apartment and a court fight the author would have understood all too well.
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The Beatles In Hamburg →
Fifty years ago last month The Beatles first arrived in Hamburg, hungry, sleepless and unprepared (for what they found there, and what it led to).
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Sex! Hackers! Embellishment! The Inside Story of... →
When the movie based on his college exploits and Silicon Valley conquests hits screens this fall, he’ll become the first tech nerd to be granted Hollywood celebrity. But then, that’s what happens when Tinseltown turns your life into film, your callow college years into fable, and your billion-dollar company into a metaphor for American ambition and the inherent loneliness that lurks just...
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America's True History of Religious Tolerance →
The idea that the United States has always been a bastion of religious freedom is reassuring—and utterly at odds with the historical record
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Mexico's Drugs War: In the City of Death →
It was just another massacre in a country plagued by violence. But this time it was carried out by prison inmates – who’d been let out specially
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Eileen Nearne, Wartime Spy, Dies at 89 →
Known to her neighbors as an insistently private woman who loved cats and revealed almost nothing about her past, she has emerged as a heroine in the tortured story of Nazi-occupied France, one of the secret agents who helped prepare the French resistance for the D-Day landings in June 1944.
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So You Wanna Be a Chef →
I am frequently asked by aspiring chefs, dreamers young and old, attracted by the lure of slowly melting shallots and caramelizing pork belly, or delusions of Food Network stardom, if they should go to culinary school. I usually give a long, thoughtful, and qualified answer. But the short answer is “no.”
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Getting Made The Scorsese Way →
Twenty years after the release of GoodFellas, the good people behind it—Scorsese, Liotta, De Niro!—re-create the making of the truest, bloodiest, greatest gangster film of all time
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Everything Alright? →
Improv as a way of life.
(via Longform.org)
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This is Your Brain on Food →
The foods you eat often affect how your neurons behave and, subsequently, how you think and feel. From your brain’s perspective, food is a drug.
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The Meat Eaters →
The continuous, incalculable suffering of animals is also an important though largely neglected element in the traditional theological “problem of evil” ─ the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent god.
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To an Aesthete Dying Young →
A National Book Award–winning writer pays tribute to a Yale roommate who killed himself last year.
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The Chessboard Killer →
Russia had never seen anything quite like the prolific serial killer Alexander Pichushkin, for whom “life without killing is like life without food.” How many lives did he take? More than Jeffrey Dahmer, Jack the Ripper, and the Son of Sam combined. The terrifying thing is, no one—not even Pichushkin himself—really knows for sure.
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The CIA and the Media →
How America’s most powerful news media worked hand in glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and why the Church Committee covered it up.
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How We Finally Got to the Truth About Joaquin... →
Rumours of Phoenix ‘laughing his ass off’ in Venice aroused our suspicions, while director Casey Affleck batted back the Guardian’s questions to keep their movie scam secret for all of a week.
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Morals & the Servile Mind →
On the diminishing moral life of our democratic age.
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Kill Whitey. It’s the Right Thing to Do →
A couple years ago, David Pizarro, a young research psychologist at Cornell, brewed up a devious variation on the classic trolley problem. The trolley problem is that staple of moral psychology studies at dinner parties in which you ask someone to decide under what conditions it’s morally permissible to kill one person to save others.
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Plagiarism and Essay Mills →
We ordered a typical college term paper from four different essay mills, and as the topic of the paper we chose… (surprise!) Cheating.
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The Deadly Corruption of Clinical Trials →
When you risk life and limb to help test a drug, are you helping science—or Big Pharma? One patient’s tragic, and telling, story.
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Why We're Teaching 'The Wire' at Harvard →
In our course on urban inequality at Harvard this semester, we want our students to understand the roots of the social conditions in America’s inner cities. To that end, we get some help from Bodie, Stringer Bell, Bubbles and others from HBO’s “The Wire.”
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Autism’s First Child →
Meet Donald Gray Triplett, 77, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever diagnosed with Autism.
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The Great Pakistani Deluge Never Happened →
The Great Deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States despite President Obama’s repeated assertions that the country is central to American security. Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting Sindh Province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has washed almost completely off American television and out of popular consciousness.
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How French Laundry's Chefs Reach for the Stars →
Thomas Keller, executive chef and owner of the French Laundry, twice named “the best restaurant in the world,” walked into the restaurant’s waiting room, shook my hand, introduced himself, then looked me up and down and cleared his throat. “You’re wearing jeans.”
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The Bomb Chroniclers →
While many of the scientists who made atom bombs during the cold war became famous, the men who filmed what happened when those bombs were detonated made up a secret corps. Their existence and the nature of their work has emerged from the shadows only since the federal government began a concerted effort to declassify their films about a dozen years ago. In all, the atomic moviemakers fashioned...
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The Secret Lives of Big Pharma's 'Thought Leaders' →
The [thought leader] is a combination of celebrity spokesperson, neighborhood gossip, and the popular kid in high school.
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America Is a Joke →
The worst of times for politics and media has been the best of times for The Daily Show’s host—and unfortunately things are getting even funnier.
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Frat House for Jesus →
The entity behind C Street.
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The Myers-Briggs Personality Test →
A critical look at the world’s most popular psychological metric, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
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The Face of Facebook →
Mark Zuckerberg opens up.
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Dirty Medicine →
How medical supply behemoths stick it to the little guy, making America’s health care system more dangerous and expensive.
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With a Little Help From His Friends →
At 19, Sean Parker helped create Napster. At 24, he was founding president of Facebook. At 30, he’s the hard-partying, press-shy genius of social networking, a budding billionaire, and about to be famous—played by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network.
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Inside the Interrogation of Detainee 063 →
The prisoner known around the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo Bay as Detainee 063 was a hard man to break. Defiant from the start, he told his captors that he had been in Afghanistan to pursue his love of falconry. But the young Saudi prisoner who wouldn’t talk was not just any detainee. He was Mohammed al-Qahtani, a follower of Osama bin Laden’s and the man believed by many to be...
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Sweatpants In Paradise →
The exciting world of immersive retail.
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How I Saved A 747 From Crashing →
Former Northwest Airlines Capt. John Hansen flew the airline’s Boeing 747 route from Detroit to Toyko for years. In 2002, the plane tried to kill him and 400 passengers. This is the never-before published story of how he saved them.
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The Crimewave that Shames the World →
It’s one of the last great taboos: the murder of at least 20,000 women a year in the name of ‘honour’. Nor is the problem confined to the Middle East: the contagion is spreading rapidly.
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Skin →
The lampshade emerged from the wreckage of Katrina. But was it really what it appeared to be—a Buchenwald artifact made of human remains? A Holocaust detective story.
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The Family Prostitute →
As the recession continues, more and more women are turning to the world’s oldest profession to support their loved ones.