Night clubs in Southeast Asia are mostly focussed on high-end clubbing, big-room EDM, bottle service and so on. For those people who seek this kind of experience, they could have their best night out, since this industry is booming. But there’s always one our two outsiders that are hungry for new music that they’ve never heard before. Looking for new places, where it doesn’t matter what you are wearing, where you’re from or how much money you have - places where the only thing that matters is the music! Those kind of clubs are hard to find in Asia, but if you’re looking deep enough into the scene you might be lucky enough to stumble upon one. As a matter of fact, underground clubs should’nt be listed in a top list, so you could find out for yousrelf, but in case you need a little help, we’ve enlisted a few that you might wanna check out during your Asia trip. 

Hossein Derakhshan:

Seven months ago, I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building in a vibrant central neighbourhood of Tehran, and I did something I had done thousands of times previously. I opened my laptop and posted to my new blog. This, though, was the first time in six years. And it nearly broke my heart.

You should really read that, powerful stuff.

For me, I feel like the solution is a re-emergence of the cultural elite on the web, as it was to a large degree in the late 90’s early 00’s. Then it was the whole web that was the elite, by definition. Now it will be self selected group(s), rejecting the draw of commercialism, and mass appeal, and returning to a smaller community of people who care about discourse. The good news is that this community will no longer be elite by virtue of privilege, but by choice and self selection. Bloggers who whine that only 800 people read their blog on the web, but get 40k impressions on FB? Ok, you are making a choice. People who chose to write to the 800 readers are joining a different community.

Kendra Pierre-Louis in The Washington Post:

Fountains were once a revered feature of urban life, a celebration of the tremendous technological and political capital it takes to provide clean drinking water to a community. Today, they’re in crisis. Though no one tracks the number of public fountains nationally, researchers say they’re fading from America’s parks, schools and stadiums. “Water fountains have been disappearing from public spaces throughout the country over the last few decades,” lamented Nancy Stoner, an administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency’s water office. Water scholar Peter Gleick writes that they’ve become “an anachronism, or even a liability.” Jim Salzman, author of “Drinking Water: A History,” says they’re “going the way of pay phones.”

Fantastic science writing, don’t miss this.

Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker:

In the end, the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed more than eighteen thousand people, devastated northeast Japan, triggered the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, and cost an estimated two hundred and twenty billion dollars. The shaking earlier in the week turned out to be the foreshocks of the largest earthquake in the nation’s recorded history. But for Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist at Oregon State University and one of the world’s leading experts on a little-known fault line, the main quake was itself a kind of foreshock: a preview of another earthquake still to come.

A new game based on Steve Reich’s iconic Clapping Music lets anyone improve their rhythm.

The app on iTunes.

A good interview:

It’s Gonna Rain part II:

And this is just wonderful:

Curbed NY:

Photographer Max Touhey was granted access [to Eero Saarinen’s 1962 terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport]. That much free time inside the historic, beloved landmark is hard to come by—especially with a camera in hand—given that it has been off limits to the public since 2001.

Eric Grundhauser at Atlas Obscura:

Blue Man Group is a theatrical performance that defies easy categorization—part drumming, part acting, part Tobias Fünke—known for an audition process that competes with Manhattan preschools for difficulty of acceptance. But what’s it like to be behind all that blue paint? We spoke to a recently-retired Blue Man named Isaac Eddy. For over 12 years, Eddy lived and performed behind the thick blue veneer and anonymous black garb of the Blue Men. From Las Vegas to New York to London, Eddy portrayed one of the wordless azure elementals first developed by performance artists Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton in 1991.

In our conversation with Eddy, we found that he was far from silent about his experience as a Blue Man. From the struggles of learning drumming for the audition, to how the behavior of dogs informed his performance, to his portentous final show, Eddy let us in on just about every aspect of his time under the Blue, and why he decided to be a human again.

Eduardo Porter in The New York Times:

As negotiations between Greece and its creditors stumbled toward breakdown, culminating in a sound rejection on Sunday by Greek voters of the conditions demanded in exchange for a financial lifeline, a vintage photo resurfaced on the Internet.

It shows Hermann Josef Abs, head of the Federal Republic of Germany’s delegation in London on Feb. 27, 1953, signing the agreement that effectively cut the country’s debts to its foreign creditors in half.

CityLab:

The map works as follows. Dark blue patches show an average annual population fall of 2 percent or more, the medium blue patches a fall of between 1 and 2 percent, and the lightest blue patches a fall of up to 1 percent. Areas in beige have experienced no statistically significant change, while the red areas show population growth. Municipalities in deep red have experienced an average annual population rise of 2 percent or more, the medium red of between 1 and 2 percent, and the pale pink areas of up to 1 percent.

Does a massive quantum particle – such as an atom – in a double-slit experiment behave differently depending on when it is observed? John Wheeler’s famous “delayed choice” Gedankenexperiment asked this question in 1978, and the answer has now been experimentally realized with massive particles for the first time.

Eric Jaffe at CityLab:

Mass transit agencies around the world face the same conundrum: How to make what amounts to four straight lines distinctive.

Margalit Fox at The New York Times:

Vincent Musetto, a retired editor at The New York Post who wrote the most anatomically evocative headline in the history of American journalism — HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR — died on Tuesday in the Bronx. He was 74.

An animated data-driven documentary about war and peace, The Fallen of World War II looks at the human cost of the second World War and sizes up the numbers to other wars in history, including trends in recent conflicts.

just edges out sneezing panda for favorite video from youtube

Open course by Robert Shiller. Link is to the fourth lecture which impressed me by explaining Efficient Portfolio Frontier in a way I actually grokked.

In this lecture, Professor Shiller introduces mean-variance portfolio analysis, as originally outlined by Harry Markowitz, and the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) that has been the cornerstone of modern financial theory. Professor Shiller commences with the history of the first publicly traded company, the United East India Company, founded in 1602. Incorporating also the more recent history of stock markets all over the world, he elaborates on the puzzling size of the equity premium and the very high historical return of stock market investments. After introducing the notion of an Efficient Portfolio Frontier, he covers the concept of the Tangency Portfolio, which leads him to the Mutual Fund Theorem. Finally, the consideration of equilibrium in the stock market leads him to the Capital Asset Pricing Model, which emphasizes market risk as the determinant of a stock’s return.

I don’t really know what to say about this link, other than heads up, this is not your average think piece. This is some intense powerful writing, about some deep and dark shit. Trigger warnings and such, don’t click unless you are ready for it.

Karl Ove Knausgaard in The New Yorker:

Inside the mind of a mass killer.