Utne Reader

The Crockpot: A Weekly Link-Digest

• These magical long-exposure pictures of fireflies are like constellations descended into a forest thicket.
• Who’s in the market for a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon? WIKISPEED sold their first one last month.
• Meet an albino hummingbird.
• “Never open a book with the weather” and other writing advice from Henry Miller, Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, Neil Gaiman, William Safire, and Elmore Leonard.
• What? The grandsons of John Tyler, our tenth president, are still alive?
• Marine archaeologists have found a sunken whaling ship captained by George Pollard Jr., the sea captain whose first ship—rammed and sunk by a sperm whale—provided inspiration for Moby-Dick.
• From a long and fascinating book review of Our Fathers, Ourselves: “The bar on committed or ‘good-enough’ fatherhood has risen radically in recent years, and especially so with respect to girls.” 
• “The bottom line is that to be on Facebook in any active, participatory sense is to risk annoying people and being annoyed,” writes Mo Perry in Metro. “Much like being alive.”
• Check out this photo dispatch from the Tough Guy competition, a race in England self-described as “eight country miles filled with freezing mud and ‘barbed wire, cuts, scrapes, burns, dehydration, hypothermia, acrophobia, claustrophobia, electric shocks, sprains, twists, joint dislocation and broken bones.’”
• Charles Bukowski’s poem “Bluebird” set to stunning video footage of California and its people.