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mefi
Points for creativity?
"In a bizarre case involving threats of kidnapping, beatings and physical torture — including the use of an electric cattle prod— two rabbis were charged in New Jersey on Wednesday in a scheme to force men to grant their wives religious divorces."
Truvada protects users from HIV with a 99% success rate
My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
Karl Taro Greenfeld wondered if his daughter had too much homework to do... so, for a week, he did all of it with her, for hours each night. "The school year hasn't been extended. Student-teacher ratios don’t seem to have changed much. No, our children are going to catch up with those East Asian kids on their own damn time."
PPP vs 538
Internet darlings Nate Silver and Public Policy Polling are feuding publicly this week, over PPP's decision not to release a polling result that they felt was probably inaccurate. Nate Silver tweeted "VERY bad and unscientific practice for @ppppolls to suppress a polling result they didn't believe/didn't like." And then the Twitter-based snipefest began, with PPP calling Silver's allegations 'absurd' and accusing him of 'jealosy,' while Silver called PPP's actions 'totally indefensible' and accused them of having their 'finger on the scale.'
This is called pointing. There's also click.
It's not tough to use a computer! Especially if you've got... Komputer Kindergarten!
The Poorest Rich Kids in the World
Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell. And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation. While their father spent millions on drug binges and extravagances, the children lived like terrified prisoners, kept at bay by a revolving door of some four dozen nannies and caregivers, underfed, undereducated, scarcely noticed except as objects of wrath.
Viking Bowling Chess
Kubb is a lawn game that was (maybe) invented by Vikings, and is often described as a combination of bowling, horseshoes, and chess. This adorably-accented video explains the rules, as does the helpful infographic here. It's easy to make your own kubb set- and once you have, you can ask all about the finer points at Planet Kubb, read Kubbnation Magazine, and sign up for the National Kubb Championship.
Orange is the New Black
New Netflix original series "Orange is the New Black", based on a memoir by Piper Kerman about her year in a women's prison, and created by Jenji Kohan of Weeds, has been garnering heaps of critical praise.
Plus, it's super gay.
Of the show's "naïve yuppie" lead character, Jenji Kohan says "I don't think I could have sold a show about black and Latina and old women in prison, you know? But if I had the girl-next-door coming in as my fish out of water, I can draw a certain audience in through her that can identify with her, and then I can tell all of these stories once she's in, once we've signed onto this journey. She's just a great entry point for a lot of people."
An Enormous Waste of Time
Clocks By Time: for when you absolutely, positively need to find multiple photos of clocks from around the world displaying every conceivable time.
The Other Person is You
There is a lot about Kundalini Yoga and White Tantric and Solstice that is very unbelievable. Does a turban really hold your brain together? Does one day of White Tantric Yoga really equal years worth of meditation? If you revolve your life around Solstice, as Yogi Bhajan says, will everything really be taken care of? I laugh at all of it, but I keep coming back, so I either believe it, or I want to...
new to New York City and friendless
Until this point, your friendships happened through a vague combination of forced institutional socializing, classes, sports and booze. None of your friends can remember exactly how they became friends with each other. But now you are an adult, and now that friend-making is a conscious act, you realize you don’t know how to do it.
A Little Chemical Education
An article entitled '8 Foods We Eat In The U.S. That Are Banned In Other Countries,' purporting to expose the rampant toxicity of American processed foods, was posted on Buzzfeed. Here's a response from research chemist Derek Lowe (of Things I Won't Work With fame, previously).
Anecdotally... yup
Six foot eight inches of badassery
Before Jason Collins, there was her. "Owning The Middle: Brittney Griner wears bow ties, dates women and dunks with abandon. Call her names if you like -- she is done hiding from haters."
Eighty-eight below
"This is video of an aurora australis taken at the geographic south pole! I'm not absolutely sure, but it might actually be the first true video of an aurora australis here, as opposed to a timelapse of longer exposures. Sorry about the swearing - if you were there seeing it you'd probably swear too."
We Found Hope in a Mega Millions Ticket
“This restaurant lifestyle is killing us,” Mandy said one night as we took a break from our creative endeavors to eat Walgreen’s off-brand ice cream sandwiches on our front stoop in the cool, salty night air. “Look at us. It’s two o’clock in the morning and we’re still awake. Working. Eating. Drinking shitty wine. Every night. It’s unhealthy! How can I work well if I don’t live well?”
“Yeah, it’s the pits. But what can we do?” I ate my ice cream sandwich slowly, nibbling around the edges.
Mandy finished her sandwich in two bites and crumpled the paper wrapper into a ball. “I’ll figure out something...”
On Romance and Psychosomatic Sneezing
Democrats and Republicans can't even agree about food
Public Policy Polling (previously) dares to address the issues tearing this country apart- such as whether Olive Garden constitutes 'a quality source of authentic ethnic food'. What are the food issues polarizing America?
Butch Heroes
"In this series of portraits I am using the format of traditional Catholic holy cards to represent butch, queer women and queer female-to-male transgendered individuals from history." Via Autostraddle.
I wanted to be a real person to my parents again
Influential- though vile and ponderous
Happy Valentine's Schadenfreude
Delicatessen with Love
Teachers boycott standardized testing
The Sessions
The Sessions, which opens nationally on October 26th, is a film depicting the true story of the therapeutic relationship between the disabled poet Mark O'Brien and the professional sexual surrogate Cheryl Cohen Greene, to whom O'Brien lost his virginity at the age of 36. The film, adapted from O'Brien's moving essay "On Seeing a Sex Surrogate," was written and directed by Ben Lewin, who, like O'Brien, contracted polio at the age of six.
Pure black and white sex
Scandals of Classic Hollywood* is a fantastic series of articles exploring the careers and private lives of old Hollywood's most legendary performers, written by self-styled "doctor of celebrity gossip" Anne Helen Petersen.
THE resource on the net for the history of GLBT music
Queer Music Heritage is a sprawling website about the history of queer music. You can listen to twelve years' worth of monthly radio shows (link goes to the first year, 2000); take a look at the Queer Music History 101 overview; check out the extensive photo galleries in the female impersonators section; or read through the blog, which features interesting tidbits from gay musical history, like this overview of the Sissy Man Blues.
Thoughts about women and homemaking in the 21st century
"This blog is a look at the social movement I call ‘New Domesticity’ – the fascination with reviving “lost” domestic arts like canning, bread-baking, knitting, chicken-raising, etc. Why are women of my generation, the daughters of post-Betty Friedan feminists, embracing the domestic tasks that our mothers and grandmothers so eagerly shrugged off? Why has the image of the blissfully domestic supermom overtaken the Sex and the City-style single urban careerist as the media’s feminine ideal? Where does this movement come from? What does it mean for women? For families? For society?"
Virtual Travel
Nice work, if you can get it
Want to be a New York City tour guide? You can't just jump right in and start doing it. First, you'll need to pass the Sightseeing Guide license test, a surprisingly difficult exam meant to ensure that only the best and brightest NYC history nerds can conduct tours.
Razzle Dazzle Berry Pie
There's only 3 types of people in the world. There's Gumbel, there's friends of Gumbel, and there's Tight Dave.
56 and counting
The Up Series [previously] continues. This documentary series, begun in 1964, has revisited the lives of a select group of British citizens once every seven years of their life. 56 Up, which shows the group at age 56, will air sometime in mid-May on the BBC, but until then, have this great Guardian article about the impact of the films on the lives of the people featured in them.
Hey, what are all these kids doing in here?
"The only answer I received from Paypal was silence."
Paypal is coming down hard on online erotica retailers. The service has sent demands to such ebook self-publishing sites as Smashwords, AllRomanceEbooks and Bookstrand, demanding that they remove all titles containing bestiality, rape-for-titillation, and incest- including the popular 'pseudo-incest' category of stepparent or stepsibling sex.
"If I had died, there would have been an investigation."
Like postsecret, but more unsettling!
"I have started an archive of photographs deemed "too hard to keep." The reason you can't live with the photo or photo album I do not need to know..."
...But I can't see the stove
Spanning centuries
Daughter of a slave casts vote for Obama. As the centenarian looks forward to turning 110 later this year, let's all take a moment to celebrate centenarians... and, of course, try to work out just how on earth they made it this far. High levels of vitamins A and E seem to play a role, or of course you could just be lucky enough to be from Okinawa or Sardinia. Whatever the reason, they sure know how to live. And as we've seen previously, they're fascinating people.
Aw, and I'm turning 21 in three months!
A group of 100 college presidents has come together to state that the 21 year-old drinking age is not working, and, specifically, that it has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking on their campuses. They want to encourage a dialogue about lowering the drinking age. They face opposition from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and from other college presidents, who accuse them of 'not wanting to deal with the problem'.
Can iDrag be far behind?
It looks like a cigarette. It smokes like a cigarette. But it's actually the e-cigarette, and it might be the future of smoking.
If it looks too good to be true...
After just eleven months of operation, Skybus has ceased operations and declared bankruptcy. It's the third American airline to do so in the past week. That, plus the fact that the FAA is coming under fire for its failure to spot missed inspections, makes this a pretty ugly week in American aviation.
How's it hangi- oh screw it
Suspension is the act of hanging one’s body from hooks inserted into the flesh. It has its origins in Hindu and Native American rituals, but it’s more recently been adopted by the body modification community, in part thanks to Fakir Mustafar, a leading figure in the movement. Motivations for suspending range from thrill-seeking to spiritual enlightenment, and the possible suspension positions are similarly varied. People have suspended their bodies from electrical towers, luggage carts, and from other people; over waterfalls in the nude (nsfw); even while getting married. Read about how it’s done, or go learn for yourself.