Adam Mansbach in The New Yorker:

Dear Novelist,

So you’d be honored if I blurbed your book? Me too! I can hardly wait to dive right in. However, due to the overwhelming number of requests I receive, I have instituted a new, comprehensive pricing system. Before proceeding, please consult this chart for reference.

I went to buy a door handle for my car, and met this 9 year old boy, who had spent his summer building this elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad’s used auto part store. Caine invited me to play, and I couldn’t pass up his FunPass deal.

Almost as good as Alice

Oakland is dangerous, just got hit in an airsoft drive by.

I first heard about the Buzludzha monument (pronounced Buz’ol’ja) last summer when I was attending a photo festival in Bulgaria.  Alongside me judging a photography competition was Alexander Ivanov, a Bulgarian photographer who had gained national notoriety after spending the last 10 years shooting ‘Bulgaria from the Air’.  Back then he showed me some pictures of what looked to me like a cross between a flying saucer and Doctor Evil’s hideout perched atop a glorious mountain range.

I knew instantly that I had to go there and see it for myself.

Imagine an America in which all-female families survived the Great Depression raising children and farming homesteads in the absence of men (and in the absence of today’s detractors to gay marriage.)

Artist Debbie Grossman visualizes an alternate reality of dusty plains and simple family meals drawn from the Farm Security Administration’s archives, creating an endlessly interpretable world in which the contemporary idea of family is presented as historical.

Five years ago, I installed an ant colony inside my old scanner that allowed me to scan in high definition this ever evolving microcosm (animal, vegetable and mineral). The resulting clip is a close-up examination of how these tiny beings live in this unique ant farm. I observed how decay and corrosion slowly but surely invaded the internal organs of the scanner. Nature gradually takes hold of this completely synthetic environment.

The ants are still alive : the process will continue…

Bagehot in The Economist:

David Cameron and the coalition talk about how much Sweden and other countries have to teach us about family-friendly policies, increasing the number of women in the workforce and rising up the global rankings when it comes to well-being and childhood development.

I have no doubt that Mr Cameron is a sincere admirer of the Swedish centre-right, led by his friend Fredrik Reinfeldt. After all, Mr Reinfeldt has twice won election in a country with a strong social democratic tradition by dragging his party to the centre-ground, vowing to overhaul the state rather than dismantle it, and convincing voters that his party is best-placed to preserve all those gleaming public services with a mix of fiscal discipline and market-based competition. That must fascinate a man like Mr Cameron, leading a party like the Conservatives in a Britain emerging from a decade-long boom in public spending.

But do the British really want to compete with the Swedes?

Perri Klass, M.D. in the NYT:

In adult surgery, it is not routine to promise that someone can be with you in the operating room till you go to sleep, or to have family members a standard part of recovery room care. Many hospitals will let a family member stay overnight with an adult patient, but policies vary hospital by hospital, ward by ward.

“We accommodate family members much more in pediatrics,” Dr. Monash said. “We don’t have visiting hours where everyone has to leave.” [ … ] It seems to me we should be able to promise any hospital patient that a relative, a friend, can stay close at hand. We should be able to promise anyone going in for surgery that when she wakes up, someone familiar will be there.

Mr. Gilliam, you’ve been given the nickname “Captain Chaos” because of all the things that have gone wrong on your film sets. Do you need chaos on set to be creative?

(Laughs) It isn’t really that. I don’t want chaos, I actually want order. I really want it ordered very well and I want to surround myself with really well organized people so that when we’re on the set and an idea comes in we can play with it because we’ve got a really good structure. So it’s not chaos. Between me and the actors, or between me and the director of photography, it’s more like, “Oh, what if we did that? Okay, we can do that.” So the organized people think it’s chaos, but it’s not. I just build a structure that’s really solid so even if the lead actor dies, we can finish the film. (Laughs)

Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.

Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. User names, hostnames, IP addresses, unencrypted email fragments, web pages, images and voice extracted from this data and then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.

Sunglasses are earplugs for your eyes.

A nomad of modern times, who has travelled the continents with his music, Nu is as diverse in his musical styles as he is welltravelled. Taking influences from his various homes, such as Switzerland, Germany or Peru, the producer and trained sound engineer branched out into various genres (deep house, hip hop, trip hop, ambient, experimental, dance and even film and dance theatre music composition).

Ken Murray:

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds–from 5 percent to 15 percent–albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home.

Alina Simone in the NYT:

Then I changed my name and it changed me. In my new incarnation as Alina Simone, I had no reputation, no history of unmet expectations, nothing to lose. I started singing; I formed a band. I poured my best self into my new name.

via Jezebel