October 2010
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Are you an electric-bike nerd? This magazine's for...
Open publication - Free publishing - More pedelec
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Supedipt, Founds Totato, and Preesses--new poetic... →
Fans of Urban Dictionary rejoice; bloggers Karin Zuppiger and Elisabeth Belliveau have graced the Internet with more random, amusing pseudo-definitions. The source of their inspiration? CAPTCHAs, those irritating boxes of swirling, muddled, often non-words that you’re required to decipher and replicate in order to acquire passage to certain places on the Internet.
Christened...
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“Authors are getting paid more, consumers are paying less, and as long as the...”
– EcoGeek, on the ethical perks of transitioning to e-readers and digital books.
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Politically Potent: Posters as a Protest Medium →
Patrick Maun’s most recent poster, Can You Hear Me Now?, for the latest Poster Offensive—a project started in response to the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004—takes on the issue of “conflict minerals in Africa and our dependence on them for high-tech gadgets, computers and other detritus of daily life.”
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“The court’s opinion, he wrote in his dissent, ‘is a rejection of the...”
– Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissenting opinion on the outcome of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
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We dont' shape language, language shapes us →
Boroditsky’s research suggests, for example, that the mechanics of using a language such as English, which tends to assign an agent to an action regardless of the agent’s intent, also tends to more vividly imprint that agent in the speaker’s memory. She is amassing a body of intriguing and creative evidence that language influences how its speakers focus their attention, remember events and...
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Watchpoptech:
“What we know is so vastly outstripped by what we don’t know.”- David Eagleman, PopTech 2010
Neuroscientist and best-selling author David Eagleman introduces the concept of Possibilianism, a new philosophy that simultaneously embraces a scientific toolbox while exploring new, unconsidered uncertainties about the world around us.
We’re always looking for emerging ideas, and...
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Leaky Pipes at Aging Nuclear Power Plants →
Nuclear power plants have a life expectancy of about 40 years. Many U.S. plants are near the end of that span—and like many humans at a similar stage, their plumbing is going to hell, writes Terry J. Allen in In These Times. “America’s nuclear power plants are more incontinent than a nonagenarian with an enlarged prostate,” she warns, noting that pipes at 27 of America’s 65 nuclear power sites...
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Kill ’Em All: How Loggers Use Herbicides →
Roundup is one of the best-known herbicides, but it’s not just for farmers and groundskeepers—the logging industry also pours tons of the stuff on forests. It may be killing more than you think.
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Beyond the Bump and Grind: review of "Favela on... →
You may have heard about the edgy techno dance music of Brazil’s slums, often known as baile funk or funk carioca—but short of going to Rio, seeing Favela on Blast is as close as you’ll get to a full immersion in this down-and-dirty music.
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“If you don’t like an invasive species, then use it out of existence instead of...”
– Nova Kim, a Vermont-based wild-foods expert who has made an ethos of eating invasive species, on ethical foraging.
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How Much Water Does Your iPhone Drink? →
“Plug your iPhone into the wall,” the IEEE Spectrum reports, “and about half a liter of water must flow through kilometers of pipes, pumps, and the heat exchangers of a power plant… . Now, add up all the half liters of water used to generate the roughly 17 billion megawatt-hours that the world will burn through this year. Trust us, it’s a lot of water. In the United States alone, on...
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Food Fight: Michael Pollan on the fractured "food... →
One of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the past few years is the “food movement,” or perhaps I should say “movements,” … It’s a big, lumpy tent, and sometimes the various factions beneath it work at cross-purposes.
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Whether you like it or not, technology is a boy’s... →
But … “A handful of DIY designers, craft-enthusiasts and fashionistas are trying to literally makeover the appearance of girls in the landscape of technology—by outfitting them with chic, wired clothing and accessories,” Bitch’s Tammy Oler writes, “‘tech crafting’ may just be the key to getting more women and girls involved in technology.”
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Religion is Far Game for Criticism →
Should nonbelievers shy away from examining or criticizing the religious beliefs of the devout because it might offend them? Certainly not, writes Free Inquiry’s Ronald A. Lindsey.
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A Peruvian aristocrat defends his country's... →
“The fossils make the region one of the most important paleontological areas in the world. Yet the Peruvian government offers the desert no legal protection. Fossils—taken by unscrupulous scientists and local scavengers and sold to collectors and museums—have become lucrative exports.
Our guide, Roberto, sees himself as the desert’s only protector, and for the most part he’s right....
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Film review: Erasing the terrorist/human divide in... →
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“In one fluid movement, Delmar yanked the squid out of the water, slapped it...”
– The abhorrent working conditions of Mexico’s processed seafood industry, as described by Virginia Sole-Smith in The Progressive.
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In Praise of Fast Food: Why we need a culinary... →
Culinary Luddism has come to involve more than just taste; it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade—and it is here that I begin to back off. The reason is not far to seek: because I am a historian.
As a historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by this movement: the sunny, rural days of yore contrasted with the gray industrial present. It gains credence...
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“Utne subscribers are the vanguard of this new humanity. They are some of the...”
– From “Gathering a New Tribe,” a note from Utne Reader-founder Eric Utne.
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The Eco-Myth of Trader Joe’s →
Trader Joe’s is widely viewed as a “green” company, attracting droves of eco-minded consumers who view its cozy, Hawaiian-themed stores as a cheaper alternative to Whole Foods or the neighborhood co-op. But as Sustainable Industries points out, it’s difficult to know how sustainable its operations really are—the company is “notoriously tight-lipped” about where its store-brand products come...
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On Being Fat and Running →
“But I haven’t lost weight, at least not enough to give back the kilt I borrowed or book another discount flight.
“The problem, I decided, was the kind of activity I did at the gym. Smooth resistance cardio and a few weight routines might make me a little healthier, loosen up my back, and keep me at the same weight, but they don’t get my heart pumping. I need that gasping, flushed,...
Hilarious Confessions of an Angry Monk →
“A lot of pissed-off people wind up at our monastery. This place has a tractor beam like the Death Star in Star Wars that pulls in everyone within a thousand-mile radius with four-letter words on the tips of their tongues. Her marriage tanked, he’s got an itch in his brain he just can’t scratch, she’s 45 and smells of cabbage and lives in a small studio apartment and nobody ever calls her...
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Wealth Gaps Yawn—and So Do the Media →
Last March, the Insight Center for Community Economic Development released the revelatory report “Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America’s Future,” which measures wealth gaps according to gender and race. The results are a national embarrassment, but it’s a good guess that you missed the story—because almost no one deemed the data newsworthy.
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“Could there be a more pressing book topic than the present fate of humanity,...”
– Read a review of the book Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril.
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Prisoners piece together their lives one square at... →
“As you come over the hill, a sprawling mass of structures beckons. The roofs are a bright sky blue, the walls the drab hue of concrete, and yards of razor wire glisten in the sun like a mangled crown. Here, amid fences and steel doors, a group of male inmates quilt for charity, attempting to repair a fraction of the damage they caused.”
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Pounding Out the Pain →
In Rwanda, women have started drum groups to help cope with the trauma of genocide. One of the drummers is Jacqueline Umubyeyi, who, like many Rwandans, was traumatized by the genocide. Her parents and older sister were killed, and her younger sister was captured by the paramilitary and turned into a sex slave (though she later returned). Still reeling from these tragedies, Umubyeyi was taking...
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Criticism in 300 Words or Less →
300 Reviews is a curious, trenchant, and charming criticism website that publishes 300-word reviews of everything from the gender binary to cats.
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The Science of Cooperation: Nobel Laureate Elinor... →
Elinor Ostrom was an unusual choice for the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. She is the first woman to receive the prize, and her doctorate is in political science, not economics (though she considers herself a political economist). And while standard economics focuses on competition, her work is about cooperation.
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Learning the Midnight Oil: Community Colleges... →
It’s 11 o’clock: Do you know where your students are? If they attend Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, they could be hightailing it to a lecture hall. Last fall the school became the first in the nation to offer midnight classes.
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“The rich vocal and string textures develop the music beyond mere outré...”
– Jake Mohan reviews The Books’ album The Way Out.
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The Sweet Smell of Sales →
Having mastered sight and sound, marketers are now manipulating our least-understood sense—smell. A form of sensory branding called “ambient scenting” is popping up in every corner of industry, reports BusinessWeek (June 21, 2010). The idea is to elicit an unconscious behavior or emotion, like splurging on lingerie at Victoria’s Secret or feeling extra cozy at a Marriott Hotel, by pumping a...
“Time and time again history has shown us that our most valuable experiences are...”
– Brilliant Fails in M4D | FAILFaire
Ruminating on the mission of the Dutch Institute for Brilliant Failures, an organization that celebrates the role of failures in innovation and progress. But it’s also good advice for the rest of life, too.
(via publicradiointernational)
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Can We Beat a Food Shortage With Invasive Species? →
For a few years now, the idea of eating Asian carp to slow its predicted incursion into the Great Lakes has been bandied about with varying degrees of seriousness. The carp are a hard sell: They’re unappetizingly ugly, and the peculiarities of their anatomy make it hard to harvest the meat.
