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.”

The Crockpot: A Weekly Link-Digest

• According to a new poll, parents claim that traditional fairytales are too scary for modern children.
• The importance of roughhousing with your kids, as explained by The Art of Manliness.
• The Invasivore Movement: Four invasive species make their way to the dinner table.
• How to fix a broken border—specifically, that really long one along the southern edge of United States.
• Indoor, urban composting using the Parasite Farm.
• Have a very literary Valentine’s Day!
• Why are organic food prices so high? Glad you asked. A farmer fires back.
• Should a woman feel sad about her abortion? Revolution takes a no apologies approach.
• Tucson, Arizona, schools have banned books by Native American and Chicano authors and told teachers to stay away from discussions where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes.”
• A TED Talk on the social history of nightclubs, why girls want to sleep with the lead singer in a band, and how the stock market can influence what is hot in popular music.
• A brief history of the pawn shop.
• As more people work where they live and live where they work, it’s time to rethink home design.
• If you combine a controversial street artist with an Academy Award-winning actor, what do you get? Hanksy.
• Salon’s re-emphasis on original journalism over aggregation pays off.

The Crockpot: A Weekly Link-Digest

• A diamond is a girls’ best friend—because that’s what the diamond industry has decided.
• Ten ironic ways to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Example A: “Wait in the park, and when couples pass by in horse-drawn carriages, spatter them with glue, yelling, ‘No one cares where last year’s horse went, do they?!’”
• Illegal baby names from around the world.
• “You are an idiot and a disgrace.” The Believer writes about the flood of outrage that is the result of saying absolutely anything on the internet.
• Be inspired by this story of an actress who was propositioned by a famous casting director. When she refused to sleep with him, he told her “You’re never going to get anywhere in this business. You should go home and marry a Jewish dentist.” (Hint: She got somewhere.)
• Is godlessness is the last big taboo in the US?
• French parenting is like French cooking: It comes in smaller portions.
• Could cyber-gardening be the new urban-gardening?
• Factory farming is creating a new breed of hellacious superbugs.
• On the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, Slackbridge, Gradgrind, and Jarndyce still have something to say about contemporary society and politics.
• Manufacturers have found a new way to appeal to eco-friendly consumers: Brown it.

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.