John Williams in the NYT:

ARCHER CITY, Tex. — Larry McMurtry, the famed author of “Lonesome Dove” and dozens of other books, was walking slowly along State Highway 79 on Friday morning toward this town’s only major intersection. Down the block, more than 150 collectors and dealers were queuing up to bid on 300,000 used books — about two-thirds of the stock of Booked Up, the four-building literary mecca that Mr. McMurtry started here in 1988.

Roberta Smith in the NYT:

Not all filmmakers create complete and resonant fantasy worlds, rife with strange, sometimes frightening beings as well as mysterious movement, emotional suspense and uncanny detail. Fewer still are honored with extensive museum retrospectives that do these worlds full immersive justice, allowing devotees and neophytes alike to grasp the essence of their achievement and its evolution, strengths and weaknesses all.

But this is what the Museum of Modern Art has accomplished for the elaborate puppet-centered parallel universe brought forth by the experimental animators known as the Quay Brothers.

Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:

Restaurant chains have managed to combine quality control, cost control, and innovation. Can health care?

Ben Schott in the NYT:

In the first of a new series on private languages, we offer a selection of secret codes used in the dining rooms and in the kitchens of some of New York’s finest establishments.

Steven Kurutz in the NYT:

Visitors to the High Line often marvel at the panorama the elevated park affords: open-sky views across the Hudson River, an unbroken sightline up 10th Avenue to Midtown and beyond. But in recent months, in a section of the High Line around 23rd Street, a more intimate, domestic cityscape has emerged.

Where the park widens to form a seating area with bleachers and a lush lawn, several apartment buildings rise up and enclose the space on either side. Three are newly constructed glass and steel towers that just began filling with residents, and the most prominent of them, the architect Neil M. Denari’s sleek HL23, is so close it’s as if parkgoers could walk right into one of the multimillion-dollar apartments.

Tim Doody in The Morning News:

For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime, elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting.

Great video.

Some snippets from our Liveset at Fusion Festival 2012 on Turmbühne featuring Benni the dancing polarbear playing the omnichord. Thanks to everybody, who joined it.

Carl Zimmer in the NYT:

For a century, doctors have waged war against bacteria, using antibiotics as their weapons. But that relationship is changing as scientists become more familiar with the 100 trillion microbes that call us home — collectively known as the microbiome.

“I would like to lose the language of warfare,” said Julie Segre, a senior investigator at the National Human Genome Research Institute. “It does a disservice to all the bacteria that have co-evolved with us and are maintaining the health of our bodies.”

This new approach to health is known as medical ecology. Rather than conducting indiscriminate slaughter, Dr. Segre and like-minded scientists want to be microbial wildlife managers.

By someone at http://kasparallenbach.ch, original link was http://kasparallenbach.ch/blog/weiterlesen/costa-concordia, but that is now dead.

Havatec BV, Dutch machine for processing mushrooms on an industrial scale.

Tim Jackson in the NYT:

Productivity — the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy — is often viewed as the engine of progress in modern capitalist economies. Output is everything. Time is money. The quest for increased productivity occupies reams of academic literature and haunts the waking hours of C.E.O.’s and finance ministers. Perhaps forgivably so: our ability to generate more output with fewer people has lifted our lives out of drudgery and delivered us a cornucopia of material wealth.

But the relentless drive for productivity may also have some natural limits. Ever-increasing productivity means that if our economies don’t continue to expand, we risk putting people out of work. If more is possible each passing year with each working hour, then either output has to increase or else there is less work to go around. Like it or not, we find ourselves hooked on growth.

Leon Neyfakh in The Boston Globe:

On a recent Friday morning, a classroom of teenagers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School broke up into small groups and spent an hour not answering questions about Albert Camus’s “The Plague.” It wasn’t that the students were shy, or bored, or that they hadn’t done the reading. They were following instructions: Ask as many questions as they could, and answer none of them.

The Onion:

47 U. MAJORIS STAR SYSTEM—Roughly 18 months after discovering the collection of common Earth sounds contained on the golden record placed aboard the Voyager probe NASA launched in 1977, extraterrestrial Richard Ellinger, 237, admitted Friday he still hasn’t gotten around to listening to the whole thing. ”The wind, rain, and surf sounds are pretty cool, but I usually sort of zone out when it gets to the crickets chirping, and then I just end up turning it off,“ said Ellinger, adding that he will sometimes put the record on as background noise when he’s cleaning his electro-biological habitat. ”And to be totally honest, I almost always skip that track with the mother kissing her baby. It’s like, ’Who cares?‘ you know?” Ellinger said he plans on taking a few things he likes off the record—such as the traditional Peruvian wedding song, the humpback whale calls, and the tractor noises—and throwing them on a mix with some Elvis Costello classics.

Each quote below is either from Al Gore’s Book Earth in the Balance or from the Unabomber’s Manifesto.

This is nearly imposable! I got a 50%, or equal to random.