Post-Olympic Blues: Utne Crockpot 08.17.12

“A science fiction fantasy from the sixties with a view to the sea.” We tend to forget about the Olympics once they’re over, but the games often leave behind quite a lot. In a series of vignettes in Granta, writers living in Beijing, Athens, and elsewhere recall the changes the Olympics brought to their communities, and what remains of the spectacle. “I happen to live in the Olympic neighborhood, built twenty years ago for the games,” says Santiago Roncagliolo, from Barcelona. “This is the point where past meets present, and you wonder which is the real one. I still have no answer.”

And check out this Sociological Images post on “the life of Olympic infrastructure once all the spectators pack up and go home,” from John Pack and Gary Hustwit’s Olympic City Project. 

One thing that’s clear about post-Olympic London, however: “the gloves come off,” says Dave Zirin in Edge of Sports (thanks, ZNet). International spectacle could hardly distract many Londoners from a crumbling economy, harsh austerity, and a blossoming national security state, and London politics are about to get messy. What will the city remember 20 years from now?

Want more? Food, art, and climate change in this week’s Crockpot.

Image by Kiko Alario Salom, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Biking Route 66 and other recent points of interest from the interweb of knowledge.

Biofuel madness, orchestral flash mobs, and other things you might have missed last week: the Crockpot.

Crockpot: Mark Twain, Exploding Cows, and the Unabomber -

And don’t miss:

An argument for a community-based approach to mental illness.
 

Some not-so-pretty pictures of tar-sand mining in Alberta.
 

The latest breakthrough in invisibility-cloak technology. 
 

Why Warren Buffett is buying up every last local newspaper he can find.
 

Colorado’s amazing, frozen, (and almost) exploding cows.

Why Elvis refused to dance at his senior prom in 1953.

Tokyo’s gorgeous, haunting LED-illuminated river.

It turns out that college students’ internal gaydar is surprisingly accurate.

Why LSD is more likely to block brain activity than expand it.

Solitary confinement is more and more common in American prisons, even though it defies common sense.

Why we should really be taking the Unabomber more seriously. Ted Kaczynski, the math-genius-turned-domestic-terrorist probably has every reason to stay in prison. But his manifesto on the dangers of technology dependence is gaining more ground among academics and philosophers.

Crockpot: who won the climate change debate and other things you might have missed this week.

The Crockpot: A Weekly Link-Digest

• Was Frankenstein actually about childbirth?
• Buying this thing will make you happy.
• Grope and Pillage: The woeful budget track record of the TSA.
• Every year in Colombia there are hundreds of reported cases of the criminal use of burundanga, a mysterious drug that allegedly robs victims of their free will.
• The Great New-York-to-Paris Automobile Race of 1908.
• Life lessons learned in a French cemetery.
• A historical manuscripts cataloger spends her days archiving old letters, novel drafts, diaries, and odds and ends like Dickens’ cigar case and a lottery ticket signed by George Washington.
• Glorious day—new literary prizes for fiction and nonfiction writers!
• Why most people get divorced in March.
• Bored at work? Get started on one of these: A mural made from 450,000 staples.
• Forget your thinking cap. Slip on a white lab coat to focus your brain on a tricky task.
• The next time you cut your finger, you could save a life. A new project aims to include a bone-marrow donor sign-up kit in Band-Aid boxes. Dab some blood on the included card, put it in the provided envelope and mail it to a lab, and join the ranks of donors. “I wanted to make it as fucking simple as possible to do something good,” says Graham Douglas, the man behind the idea.

The Crockpot: A Weekly Link-Digest

• Don’t pity the renters.
• Gingers unite! Celebrity redheads speak up for endangered orangutans.
• A new theory asks: Did an optical illusion sink the Titanic?
• This is what your brain sounds like: experimental musician Masaki Batoh turns brainwaves into spooky music.
• Six things rich people need to stop saying, courtesy of Cracked.com.
• Comics get an official endorsement.
• Hurrah for hacktivists! Operation Darknet forces more than 40 child pornography sites offline.
• “Public service and the public imagination,” opines The Nation, “have been weaponized.”
• Watch a 40-year time lapse of Las Vegas sprawling into the surrounding desert.
• Find out how many companies are tracking your every online move with just a click.
• Radioactive chandeliers (actually made from uranium) commemorate the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster after last year’s Japan-bound tsunami.

The Crockpot: A Weekly Link-Digest

• Romance novels are the least stuck-up books in the world, almost never reviewed or discussed at a dinner party. One is supposed to be embarrassed to have a taste for them. And yet, The Awl reminds us, so many of us do….
• Don’t be scared of Picasso and Pollock. New research shows that fear heightens your appreciation of abstract art.
• Would food taste better if you kept it on the kitchen counter? The project Save Food from the Refrigerator finds alternative ways to keep food fresh.  
• Experimental chefs in India have captured the taste of smog.
• Artists can—and should—be ordinary, too.
• It’s time, argues Strong Towns Blog, to start getting used to a world with no new streets.
• A dispatch from an über-clandestine, global gathering of casino sharks and card counters.
• “[T]he most recent Gallup surveys” writes Joel Kotkin, “[… show] a remarkable correlation between the states and regions with the highest proportion of childless women under 45–the best indicator of offspring-free households—and the propensity to vote Democratic.”
• Like Sherlock Holmes, with booze: The mystery of the Canadian whiskey fungus. 
• Are there too many think tanks with too few original thoughts? Tevi Troy thinks so.
• Transcending partisan rancor, lefty Ralph Nader and rightwing Bruce Fein provide a blueprint for a new kind of politics.
• Big Think exposes the myth of the tortured writer and “the kind of single-minded devotion (to anything) that seems so at odds with our disposable culture.”