may
08
2012
Not Just a Jump, but Levitation | Lens | NYTimes.com
Kerri MacDonald writes, “Natsumi Hayashi does not call the photos she posts on Yowayowa Camera Woman Diary “jump shots.” A jump, she says, is composed of many movements. And those who go up must come down. No, Yowayowa Camera Woman is not jumping. She’s levitating.”
The frequent fliers who flew too much | Los Angeles Times
Ken Bensinger writes, “Many years after selling lifetime passes for unlimited first-class travel, American Airlines began scrutinizing the costs — and the customers.”
Waves of Grain | Slate
Nadia Arumugam writes, “How did Japan come to be a wheat-obsessed nation that needs gimmicks like the Gopan to eat rice disguised as wheat flour? The story of Japan’s conversion from rice to wheat involves a long, relentless campaign by the best propagandists in the business—the U.S. government, of course.”
The California Taco Trail: 'How Mexican Food Conquered America' | The Salt | NPR
“Once upon a time, tacos were a Mexican snack. Now they’re an all-American institution. Gustavo Arellano leads us across Southern California in search of the roots of the American taco.”
apr
22
2012
Who Made That Pie Chart? | NYTimes.com
Hilary Greenbaum and Dana Rubinstein write, “William Playfair — a businessman, engineer and economics writer from Scotland — created the first known pie chart in 1801.”
apr
19
2012
Penguins Rocket Away from Danger Aboard Supercavitating Bubble Jets | Gizmodo
Andrew Tarantola writes, “Turns out, not being eaten by a leopard seal is excellent motivation. It’s what spurred penguins to develop an ingenious method of cutting down their drag—by wrapping themselves in a shawl of bubbles.”
apr
10
2012
Why Are Chocolate Easter Bunnies Hollow? | Food & Think | Smithsonian
Amanda Bensen tracks down the history of the hollow chocolate Easter bunny, while musing, “Isn’t it cruel to disappoint kids, who bite into what looks like solid chocolate and are confronted with emptiness?”
apr
02
2012
You’re Listening To A Music Instrument Made Of Jell-O | Co.Design
Mark Wilson writes, “Noisy Jelly is a project by Raphaël Pluvinage and Marianne Cauvard, two students at L’Ensci Les Ateliers. They experiment with agar agar jellies, placed upon sensors that convert their vibrations into music with the help of arduino processing.” I love this, and I want my own kit.
mar
28
2012
In Japan, 'Sliced-Up Actors' Are A Dying Breed | NPR
Anthony Kuhn reports, “[Seizo Fukumoto] has been killed on screen more than 50,000 times — more than once in some films.”
mar
27
2012
Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz | New Scientist
Paul Marks writes, “A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi’s wireless telegraph.”
mar
23
2012
The First Google Maps War | Opinionator | NYTimes.com
Frank Jacobs on “how a simple online map almost caused a violent conflict in Central America.” (Via Alberto Cairo)
mar
19
2012
I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter | NYTimes.com
By Julia Moskin. “Tales from the ink-stained (and grease-covered) wretches who actually produce most of the words attributed to chefs in cookbooks.”
MREs get a new kick with caffeinated jerky and Zapplesauce | The Washington Post
Christian Davenport writes, “After a decade of war, military food scientists have been hard at work at a little-known research facility outside Boston transforming the field ration — known as the Meal, Ready to Eat, and perhaps the most complained about food in the world — into something not just good-tasting but full of energy-enhancing ingredients.”
mar
13
2012
Twitter analysis gets elections half right | USA Today
Scott Martin quotes Rebecca MacDonald of search analytics firm Attensity: “The fact that people are talking about candidates on Twitter doesn’t necessarily correlate to those people going out and voting.” (Via Derek Willis)
'West Wing' Babies | Vanity Fair
Juli Weiner writes, “Just as ‘All the President’s Men’ made newspapers seem cool—imagine!—and propelled legions of baby-boomers into journalism, so Aaron Sorkin’s ‘The West Wing’ has inspired a new generation with its vision of a Washington brimming with lofty ideals. Six years after the series finale, the Sorkinization of politics is still under way.”
mar
02
2012
Japan Earthquake: Before and After | In Focus | The Atlantic
Alan Taylor writes, “In just over two weeks, Japan will be observing the one-year anniversary of the disastrous magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that struck its east coast in March of 2011. The destruction was unprecedented and the loss of life and property were staggering — more than 15,800 are confirmed dead, with another 3,300 still listed as missing nearly a year later. Photographers documented the many faces of this tragedy and have now returned to give us a look at the difference a year can make, re-shooting places that were photographed during and immediately after the quake. Collected here are 20 of these pairings. They are interactive: Starting with number 2, click the images to view a fading before/after comparison.”
feb
28
2012
Back from Yet Another Globetrotting Adventure, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers That His Bid for Tenure Has Been Denied | McSweeney's Internet Tendency
Andy Bryan writes, “Moreover, no one on the committee can identify who or what instilled Dr. Jones with the belief that an archaeologist’s tool kit should consist solely of a bullwhip and a revolver.”
feb
23
2012
How Waiters Read Your Table | WSJ.com
Sarah Nassauer writes, “Called ‘having eyes’ for a table, or ‘feeling’ or ‘reading’ the table by restaurant workers, it’s how the best waiters know what type of service you prefer before you tell them. From fine dining to inexpensive chains, restaurants are working to make service more individualized as the standard script (‘I’m so-and-so and I will be your server tonight’) is sounding dated.”
feb
16
2012
At Work in Syria, Times Correspondent Dies | NYTimes.com
Rick Gladstone writes, “Anthony Shadid, a gifted foreign correspondent whose graceful dispatches for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Associated Press covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in Syria.” What a tremendous loss. The Post has a collection of some of his Pulitzer-winning work.
feb
08
2012
Who Pinched My Ride? | OutsideOnline.com
“When thieves stole his beloved commuter bike on a busy street in broad daylight, Patrick Symmes snapped — and set out on a cross-country plunge into the heart of America’s bike-crime underbelly.”
My Dinner With Clay Shirky, and What I Learned About Friendship | Media Decoder | NYTimes.com
David Carr on online / offline interactions and relationships. “As it turns out, Mr. Shirky became very good at bread eating at a young age, so his mother decided that he should also be good at bread making. We all chewed on the bread as Mr. Shirky told the story of learning how to make bread as a 10-year-old. Now, he could have told that story in a blog post or in an e-mail chain, but it became a very different story because we were tasting what he talked about. The connection in an online conversation may seem real and intimate, but you never get to taste the bread. To people who lead a less-than-wired existence, that may seem like a bit of a ‘duh,’ but I spend so much interacting with people on the Web that I have become a little socially deficient.”
jan
27
2012
Farewell To An Unlikely Hero: Why 'Chuck' Packed Such A Potent Punch | Monkey See | NPR
Linda Holmes writes, “Against overwhelming odds and in spite of eternally low ratings, Chuck’s life and death speaks in surprisingly potent ways to how television is changing. More than anything, Chuck is a story about the rise of the fan … And Chuck fans, in their businesslike enthusiasm, sold themselves as a product.”
jan
20
2012
Watching Them Watching Me | Modern Love | NYTimes.com
Dean E. Murphy writes, “The death of a spouse rewrites the rules of a family in ways I never could have imagined.” Warning: Have Kleenex at the ready.
jan
07
2012
What Does Unesco Recognition Mean, Exactly? | NYTimes.com
Steven Erlanger writes, “Independence Hall is a Unesco site, but not the White House. The Grand Canyon, yes. Niagara Falls, no. Inside the odd politics and big business of World Heritage sites.”
jan
04
2012
Washington’s 40 most essential eats | Going Out Gurus | The Washington Post
“In this week’s Weekend section, we fully devoted ourselves to the one resolution we want to stick to: to eat every last glorious thing this city has to offer. To that end, we spent months eliciting reader help in pointing us to Washington’s most necessary eats, the dishes no local should go without consuming at least once (and sometimes, at least once a week).”
jan
03
2012
StreetView Stereographic
Explore Google StreetView via stereographic images. Both awesome and mildly nauseating. Click the “+” sign in the upper left to manipulate the code that produces the images.
