“The problem with hipsters seems to me the way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how “cool” it is perceived to be. Everything becomes just another signifier of personal identity. Thus hipsterism forces on us a sense of the burden of identity, of constantly having to curate it if only to avoid seeming like a hipster. But are there hipsters, actual hipsters, or just a pervasive fear of hipsters? Hipster hatred may actually precede hipsters themselves. Maybe that collective fear and contempt conjures them into being, just as the Red Scare saw communists everywhere, or how the Stasi made spies of everyone. Late capitalism makes us all fear being hipsters and thus makes us all into one, to some degree.”
“‘You are lucky,’ you are told. But with this luck comes a responsibility: that you promise to do something good with it. An anonymous millionaire is currently putting people to the test by handing out £1000 to those he randomly encounters. The Sunday Telegraph spent the day with him whilst he paced the streets of London hunting for 10 lucky recipients.”
“While consumerism relies upon our being just as fickle as the sartorial seasons, the history of fashion suggests at least one consistency: that a garment once considered “casual” will eventually be thought of as “smart-casual”, then as “businessware”, and finally as something in which one could reasonably expect to be sued or buried.”
“Diseases caused by contact with fecal matter are the largest killer of children in the world. The problem: Not enough toilets. The solutions, as you can see in this infographic, are not so simple.”
“One year ago up-and-coming reporter Jose Antonio Vargas revealed to the country he is here illegally… he speaks for the first time about the price he paid, the controversy he caused, and why figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Aaron Sorkin rallied to his aid.”
“Accurately identifying the various causes behind the criminalization of the mentally ill can only be accomplished by an impartial examination of our society’s preconceived notions of the mentally ill. This can be done by examining society’s treatment of the mentally ill throughout the course of history. Stigma clearly plays a major role in the criminalization of the mentally ill because of society’s inability to accept the dualistic and sometimes vile impulses of human nature inherent in all human beings. Therefore, society seeks to explain away unjustified acts of violence and aggression as symptoms of a mental illness, in effect scapegoating the mentally ill.”
“It is about being horrified about my own silliness,” Murphy once said about the song’s origin. While it’s a story that has likely been told a thousand times over, it’s also one that’s more relevant than ever to the current progression of mainstream dance culture. (More on that later.) As a rock DJ in the late-’90s in New York, Murphy was known for throwing experimental dance records like Liquid Liquid, ESG and, yes, Daft Punk, into his mixes. When he realized that other DJs were starting to use some of the same records, he panicked, afraid that he’d lost the crate-digging that set him apart from his rock-club DJing peers.”
“Now, however, the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.”
“Google’s Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe outlined the initiative at a Global LGBT Workplace Summit in London earlier today. “We want our employees who are gay or lesbian or transgender to have the same experience outside the office as they do in the office. It is obviously a very ambitious piece of work.” Their strategy involves developing partnerships between companies and organizations to support grass-roots campaigns. On the decision to launch the initial phase in a country like Singapore, Palmer-Edgecumbe says, “Singapore wants to be a global financial center and world leader and we can push them on the fact that being a global center and a world leader means you have to treat all people the same, irrespective of their sexual orientation.”
“The gap between the richest and the poorest among us is now wider than it has been since we all nose-dived into the Great Depression. So GQ sent Jon Ronson on a journey into the secret financial lives of six different people on the ladder, from a guy washing dishes for 200 bucks a week in Miami to a self-storage gazillionaire. What he found are some surprising truths about class, money, and making it in America.”
“On April 16, 2012, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced that it would award no Pulitzer for fiction in 2012. This was, to say the least, surprising and upsetting to any number of people, prominent among them the three fiction jurors, who’d read over three hundred novels and short-story collections, and finally submitted three finalists, each remarkable (or so we believed) in its own way.”
“Sure, we as a nation have always killed people. A lot of people. But no president has ever waged war by killing enemies one by one, targeting them individually for execution, wherever they are. The Obama administration has taken pains to tell us, over and over again, that they are careful, scrupulous of our laws, and determined to avoid the loss of collateral, innocent lives. They’re careful because when it comes to waging war on individuals, the distinction between war and murder becomes a fine one. Especially when, on occasion, the individuals we target are Americans and when, in one instance, the collateral damage was an American boy.”
“It’s all very wonderful bearing a child, I’m sure, and life-affirming; but on the other hand, one of the worst parts of being pregnant—and I was informed concretely of this very fact by some vomitus landing on my sandaled foot—is what is commonly referred to as morning sickness.”
“But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. Why, then, do they occupy the collective unconscious of nearly all seafaring peoples? That’s a question best left to historians, philosophers, and anthropologists.”
Newcastle City Gaol and House of Correction Collection 1742 – 1878. Particulars of criminals convicted of a crime specified in section 20 of the Prevention of Crimes Act, 1871 and reported to the Secretary of State as being imprisoned in Newcastle Gaol, numbers 1079-1303. All the prisoners photographed here spent time in Newcastle Gaol between December 1871 – December 1873.
‘Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.’
‘The 10-megapixel device features a built-in zink ’zero ink’ printer, producing full-colour 2×3-inch prints in under a minute, either in full bleed, with a classic polaroid border, or on a sticker-backed page. A camera setting controls whether every shot is automatically printed, or only images selected after capture by the user.’
‘Does government surveillance matter if you’re not doing anything illegal? It’s a tricky question that privacy advocate Jay Stanley has studied for years. He breaks down why privacy matters, even if you have ‘nothing to hide’.’
‘Internet and phone firms are preparing to install “black boxes” to monitor UK internet and phone traffic, and decode encrypted messages – including Facebook and GMail messages.’
If you have time to kill and a high speed internet connection to boot, spend some time pouring over the winners of this year’s Vimeo Awards with categories including Animation, Documentary,Advertising, Remix, Music Video, Fashion, Action Sports and many more.
‘I want to talk to you about a national crisis. A global crisis. A crisis of such tremendous proportions that you may not even be aware that it is engulfing you and your loved ones and your neighbors in flames. What is this crisis? It is a crisis of our brains. The brains of our fellow citizens are being digitally rewired. How? Here is how. Hundreds of millions of people are gazing at online videos, spending billions of aggregate hours slack-jawed in front of their monitors. These videos are sucking up all the time that these people would otherwise spend reading reat books.’
‘This is the unyielding view of sources within the ruling party, who told the Mail & Guardian they will “suppress” any attempts to discuss succession within the ruling party.” So much for the state of internal debate, yet clearly Zuma knows he’s a facing a serious internal fight. Even as the politicians scramble for positions, criticism mounts of how South Africa is being governed. Law Professor Koos Malan, challenges the way public office here is misused, writing, “public office somehow entitles public office-bearers to exploit the power and authority of public office to achieve maximum private gain…and to receive public accolades for these successes.” As the country prepares to mark Nelson Mandela’s 94th birthday in July, South Africa is also facing a dangerous downtown in its economy thanks to the world financial crisis, and soaring crime and unemployment. The spirit of many here remains infectious but there’s trouble on the horizon.’
Federal highway BR-222, June 9, 2012 in Para state, Brazil. Highway construction through Amazonian rainforest has led to accelerated rates of deforestation. Although deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is down 80 percent since 2004, environmentalists fear recent changes to the Forest Code will lead to further destruction. Around 20 percent of the rainforest has already been destroyed. By Mario Tama
“Wesley Warren Jr has a giant ball-sack. That is not a euphemism or misprint: Wesley Warren Jr has a scrotum about the size and weight of a medium-sized child… it is so big that Wesley must wear a hooded sweatshirt over his massive deformed genitalia when he goes out in public.”
“Last February at the Academy Awards, Adam Sandler said something funny. This is not a common occurrence — not because Sandler has devolved into our laziest movie star, but because he’s never been known for one-liners. Even people who love Adam Sandler movies don’t so much quote the dialogue as imitate how Sandler says the dialogue: The way he flutters between that high-pitched, somewhat effeminate, sweetly annoying little-boy voice of his, and the deeper, Eddie-Vedder-at-the-end-of-”Jeremy” bark that’s phase one of his signature temper tantrum, the all-fists-on-nut-sacks eruption that is typically, though not always lately, comedic in nature. Sandler has been doing this since Saturday Night Live. Back then, he worked relatively cheap. These days, he doesn’t get out of bed for less than $20 million. His range is limited, his rewards not so much.”
“No, said airline security, you can’t take this bottle onboard. It exceeds the 100 milliliter limit; it’s forbidden. But wait, said professor Martin Birchall of Bristol University. This is a medical container. Inside is a trachea, a carefully constructed human windpipe, seeded with 60 million stem cells from a very sick woman in Barcelona. We have just 16 hours to get it into her body. We pre-arranged this.”
“Turtles killed as they were having sex and then fossilised in position have been described by scientists. The remains of the 47-million-year old animals were unearthed in the famous Messel Pit near Darmstadt, Germany. They were found as male-female pairs. In two cases, the males even had their tails tucked under their partners’ as would be expected from the coital position.”
“On the evening of May 13, Mother’s Day, a Canadian woman named Dana Dirr was hit head-on while driving to the Saskatchewan hospital where she worked as a trauma surgeon. She was 35 weeks pregnant, but determined to work until the moment she gave birth. The morning after the crash, her husband John (“J.S.”) Dirr posted a note on Warrior Eli, a Facebook page the Dirrs had created to document their 5-year-old son Eli’s battle with cancer: “Last night at 12:02am I lost the love of my life,” J.S. wrote. “I lost my wife, the mother of my children, and my best friend.” Miraculously, Dana had held on in the hospital just long enough to have her baby—a daughter, and the Dirr’s eleventh child.”
“Dr. Perry Kendall stands behind his controversial comments that taking pure ecstasy can be safe. But B.C.’s chief provincial health officer says he is not advocating for the drug to be legalized and sold in stores, as stated in a previous story… Kendall says Canada should instead look at an “evidence-based way” of regulating and controlling psychoactive substances. “Let’s look at what works and what doesn’t work. Let’s look at what harms of various drugs are and compare them. And let’s look at the impacts of the policies on a drug use,” he said.”
“Police say a man upset over his daughter’s lifestyle chopped her head off with a sword and then paraded it through his village before surrendering to authorities in western India. Marble miner Ogad Singh’s 20-year-old daughter had been living with her parents in the Rajasthani village of Dungarji after leaving her husband two years ago.”
“A team of Canadian researchers has developed one of the most effective cures yet for the Ebola virus. That’s big news both for treating the deadliest virus on Earth and tackling myriad other similarly aggressive diseases. The treatment, in which injections of protein-grabbing antibodies stop a virus from replicating, has the longest treatment window so far resulting in full recovery – a full day. There’s just one catch: It can take up to two weeks for symptoms of the disease to appear.”
“A Taliban commander in northwest Pakistan has announced a ban on polio vaccines for children as long as the United States continues its campaign of drone strikes in the region, according to a statement by the Taliban. ”Polio drops will be banned in North Waziristan until the drones strikes are stopped,” said the statement, released Saturday.”
“An Indonesian man was jailed for 30 months after writing “God doesn’t exist” on his Facebook page. Alexander Aan, 30, was imprisoned on Thursday for sharing explicit material about the Prophet Mohammed online. He started an atheist group on Facebook on which he shared comic strips of the prophet having sex with his servant, a court in western Sumatra heard today.”
Twenty-three years on June 4th, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) violently cleared Beijing’s Tiananmen Square of protesters, ending a six-week demonstration that had called for democracy and widespread political reform. The protests began in April of 1989, gaining support as initial government reactions included concessions. Martial law was declared on May 20, troops were mobilized, and from the night of June 3 through the early morning of June 4, the PLA pushed into Tiananmen Square, crushing some protesters and firing on many others. The exact number killed may never be known, but estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. Today, China’s censors are blocking Internet access to the terms “six four,” “23,” “candle,” and “never forget,” broadening extensive efforts to silence talk about the 23rd anniversary of China’s bloody June 4 crackdown. Here is that story, in images and words.
‘To my mind, the thing that’s exploding into relevance in our era is not mass culture but the critique of mass culture — the Barthesian dissection of everything, no matter how trivial. This happens everywhere now, often in real time. And this critical analysis is often as vital and interesting and consumable as the culture it discusses. Consider, for instance, the way the TV recap has evolved into a nearly independent creative form. So the critical analysis of pop culture has itself become a kind of pop culture. We seem to be approaching some kind of singularity — a collapse of creativity and criticism into one.’
‘Today, all our wives and husbands have Blackberries or iPhones or Android devices or whatever–the progeny of those original 950 and 957 models that put data in our pockets. Now we all check their email (or Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or…) compulsively at the dinner table, or the traffic light. Now we all stow our devices on the nightstand before bed, and check them first thing in the morning. We all do. It’s not abnormal, and it’s not just for business. It’s just what people do. Like smoking in 1965, it’s just life.’
‘In 1956 William Whyte argued in his bestseller, “The Organisation Man”, that companies were so in love with “well-rounded” executives that they fought a “fight against genius”. Today many suffer from the opposite prejudice. Software firms gobble up anti-social geeks. Hedge funds hoover up equally oddball quants. Hollywood bends over backwards to accommodate the whims of creatives. And policymakers look to rule-breaking entrepreneurs to create jobs. Unlike the school playground, the marketplace is kind to misfits.’
‘The social network is taking something much more important than money from its nearly one billion members. By sabotaging what it really means to be human, Facebook is stealing the innocence of our inner lives.
Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells us there’s a “shift” from an analog world in which our identities are generated from within, to a digital world in which our sense of self is intimately tied to our social media presence.
But this shift to a Facebook world of incessant “friending,” Professor Turkle correctly warns us, is a “seductive fantasy” which is weakening us both as individuals and as a society. The problem, she explains, is that a “capacity for solitude is what nurtures great relationships.” But in today’s always-on social media world, our solitude has been replaced by incessant online updates, which both weaken our sense of self and our ability to create genuine friendships.’
‘The Internet has already changed the television industry significantly, and will continue to do so. But the idea that the web will cause the TV business to “collapse” is fantasy. The reality is that, yes, the TV industry will change over time. Some of today’s winners will become tomorrow’s losers, and new entrants may grow to dominate. But barring some unforeseen technical or creative revolution, it’s going to happen a lot slower than you think.’
‘A food-testing lab in Zurich, Switzerland is sounding the alarm after discovering that a batch of mushrooms shipped from Ukraine contained too much radioactive cesium-137. Ukraine had cleared the mushrooms for export.’
‘My top highlight was the last night (after 6 nights of raging, mind you). Wavves were taking the stage and I turned to my friend Dave and said, “Dave, do you have enough in you for one more?” He smiled back, and said, “No.” Which definitely meant yes. We began pushing our way to the front and every time someone tried to stop us I would tell him, “I’m going to rage. Do you want to rage with me?” They would say no and let me pass. Finally, one guy had the balls to say “Fuck yeah.” And we all pushed as close to the front as we could.’
‘The Youtube video of 12 year old Victoria Grant speaking at the Public Banking in America conference last month has gone viral, topping a million views on various websites. Monetary reform—the contention that governments, not banks, should create and lend a nation’s money—has rarely even made the news, so this is a first. Either the times they are a-changin’, or Victoria managed to frame the message in a way that was so simple and clear that even a child could understand it.’
it may be a bit far away to fit into even your long term plans at this point, but a passionate team of modern-day explorers have a mission - Mars One will establish the first human settlement on Mars in 2023. A habitable settlement will be waiting for the settlers when they land. The settlement will support them while they live and work on Mars the rest of their lives. Every two years after 2023 an additional crew will arrive, such that there is a real living, growing community on Mars.
Downward Dog Hits The Dancefloor [nytimes]
“Unlike the usual club party, this yoga rave started at 7 p.m. When I arrived at 8:30, a group called Bhakti Band was onstage, singing yoga chants over a deafening rock beat. Some people were dancing; others stood around eating Indian food or drinking nonalcoholic cocktails. The crowd seemed to be people mostly in their 20s and 30s, with many casually dressed, but a few others in business clothes.”
“Clear cutting forests, burning fossil fuels, spraying large amounts of pesticides; all these things and more can be avoided from the production and usage of hemp plants. To clarify, I am talking about Hemp, not Marijuana. Hemp will not get you high, Hemp does not contain enough THC to get you high, if you were to smoke it; you would probably just end up with a headache. Hemp is illegal in the United States because it looks too much like its sister Mary Jane. While it is legal almost everywhere else in the world, hemp is still not being used to its full potential.”
“I could go on. But to keep this short, the reason Ayanda Mabulu’s artwork didn’t cause ripples is because as far as art is concerned a black artist is intellectually incapable of producing a complex work – blacks are incapable of satire – until they are verified by their white counterparts. No conceptualism, surrealism, avant-gardism, post-modernism or post-postmodernism in black art. Keep it simple. Black stories must always be kept straightforward so as to not confuse the white reader.”
“On December 13th of 1963, at a dinner event in New York, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee awarded its annual Tom Paine Award to Bob Dylan, for his contribution to the fight for civil liberties. Despite not having prepared one, a nervous and slightly drunk Dylan gave a speech that evening — a controversial speech in which he expressed sympathy for Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who, just three weeks previous, had killed John F. Kennedy. The backlash was immediate, and prompted a fascinating explanatory letter from Dylan to the committee in the days that followed. Transcripts of both the speech and letter can be found in the link above.”
“A German 16-year-old has solved a maths problem posed by Sir Isaac Newton more than 300 years ago. Shouryya Ray is the first person to work out how to calculate exactly the path of a projectile under gravity and subject to air resistance, The (London) Sunday Times reported. The Indian-born teen said he solved the problem that had stumped mathematicians for centuries while working on a school project.”
“Gary Connery, 42, leapt 2,400ft from a helicopter while wearing a specially made “wing suit” and swooped towards a ‘runway’ of 18,600 cardboard boxes in an Oxfordshire field. Five seconds before he hit the target he flared his suit to decrease his descent and glide angle before plunging into the boxes to break his fall.”
“a team led by materials scientist Yi Cui of Stanford and SLAC has found a solution: a cleverly designed double-walled nanostructure that lasts more than 6,000 cycles, far more than needed by electric vehicles or mobile electronics.”
“It will cost us a little bit. Not much, but a little bit. We will have to forego and make a few sacrifices in our lives to enforce ethics on media, but that’s our role. Along with making free technology, that’s our role. We are the last generation capable of understanding directly what the changes are because we have lived on both sides. We have a responsibility. You understand that?”
“Zanele Muholi, described by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa as “one of the country’s foremost artists”, had more than 20 external hard drives stolen from her flat in Vredehoek, Cape Town on April 20. The hard drives contain stills and video footage, including photos from the funerals of victims of homophobic hate crimes. It is thought that the burglars were targeting Muholi’s work, as little else was taken from her flat, and back up hard drives were also taken.”
“It was bad South African TV that gave Elon Musk part of his mysterious edge. As a 10-year-old he read whole volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica after emptying the family bookshelves—anything to avoid another episode of ChiPs or Die Man van Intersek. Now, 29 years later, Musk is still playing video games alone into the late hours of the night. These days it is in a basement man cave in a leased mansion in Bel Air, California, where Musk, who sold his online payment system PayPal for R11-billion in 2002, is plotting the future of the human race. Sixteen months ago, the South African expat accomplished something only ever achieved by the governments of the United States, Russia and China. He sent a spacecraft into orbit and then recovered it.”
“Under all those long lopsided fringes, a hidden danger is lurking… A leading optometrist has warned children and teenagers are risking their eyesight for the sake of fashion.”
“George Lucas‘ rich neighbors don’t want him building a movie studio in their backyard. His response is the best thing he’s done in years… He wants to transform the property into low-income housing, naturally, ending their official statement with this zinger, “If everyone feels that housing is less impactful on the land, then we are hoping that people who need it the most will benefit.”
“A new study consisting of inducing cells to express telomerase, the enzyme which – metaphorically – slows down the biological clock – was successful. The research provides a ‘proof-of-principle’ that this ‘feasible and safe’ approach can effectively ‘improve health span.’”
“After 15 hours of fist pumping, James Peterson felt the super glue holding his right hand closed begin to loosen. That did not stop him from reaching his goal: 16 continuous hours in an effort to place his name in the Guinness World Records.”
“One Friday afternoon recently, about 50 fans and friends of the band String Cheese Incident took $20 000 in cash to the Greek Theater in Los Angeles… With money advanced by the band, each person had enough to buy eight tickets at $49.95 apiece for the group’s show in July. Once all tickets were in hand, almost 400 of them, they were carried back to String Cheese headquarters in Colorado and put on sale again through the group’s Web site — for $49.95.”
“An innocuous-seeming US Air Force press release. A serendipitous satellite image in Google Earth. Snapshots from a photographer on assignment at a Spanish air base. The crash of an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bomber in the United Arab Emirates. These are some of the fragments of information that Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti has assembled to reveal the best picture yet of the Pentagon’s secretive war in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.”
“You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it… If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.”
“It’s been 12 years and four months since the last time the pitch drop experiment at the University of Queensland saw any action – exactly the same amount of time it took something to happen before that.”
“Indian drugs giant Cipla said Friday it has slashed by up to 76 percent prices of generic medicines used to treat brain, lung and kidney cancer in what the company called a ‘humanitarian move’.”
“Two young frustrated neighbors in Australia decided to fight each other with a chainsaw and samurai sword, with both likely to lose a body part, after a brawl between the two homes involving several people.”
“When he was 12 years old, the boy did something he only later realized probably hurt his seventh-grade teacher. It was minor — he was, after all, a kid — but in time, when he was older and wiser, he wanted to find this teacher and apologize.”
“A new internet service provider, offers a ‘Global Mode’ that ‘offers greater access to the internet by circumventing geographical restrictions placed on the certain internet services.’”
“The CIA director revealed only a few details about the 21-year-old woman, a secretary among spies… Robbins was the first woman at the male-dominated CIA killed in the line of duty. She is the youngest CIA employee ever killed. And, according to Panetta, she was also the first American woman to die in the Vietnam War.”
on 5 and 6 of June millions around the world will have the opportunity to view Venus pass across the face of the sun for the second time in the past eight years, and the last time for the next 105 years.
the transit will take approximately six hours to complete, and will be visible for all to see, provided you use the right eye protection. see here for various viewing techniques.
Hippo by Mikel Arrizabalaga
