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On Breaking One's Neck. Dr. Arnold Relman, former Editor in Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, gives a first-hand account of a catastrophic accident, intensive care, and rehabilitation--as a patient. I am a senior physician with over six decades of experience who has observed his share of critical illness--but only from the doctor's perspective. That changed suddenly and disastrously on the morning of June 27, 2013, ten days after my ninetieth birthday, when I fell down the stairs in my home, broke my neck, and very nearly died. Since then, I have made an astonishing recovery, in the course of which I learned how it feels to be a helpless patient close to death. I also learned some things about the US medical care system that I had never fully appreciated, even though this is a subject that I have studied and written about for many years.
posted by russilwvong at 11:29 PM PST - 22 comments

Paramount has ceased releasing films on 35mm film and will go forward distributing movies exclusively in digital formats. The LA Times' sources said that Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues was the last Paramount movie with a celluloid release, and Wolf of Wall Street was the first major motion picture to be distributed entirely digitally.
posted by Omon Ra at 10:45 PM PST - 95 comments

Rodrigo Davis of the MIT Center for Civic Media is currently researching crowdfunding for civic and community purposes. Some of the issues he covers includes the ethics of crowdfunding (including Kickstarter's seduction guide debacle and Gawker's attempt to crowdfund a video showing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack), a case study of Kansas City's crowdfunding campaign for their bikeshare program, a timeline of online crowdfunding since 2000, and how the Statue of Liberty was made possible via crowdfunding.
posted by divabat at 10:25 PM PST - 8 comments

"The world is made of people: I get this. Our republic only works if we know our leaders are fallible humans. I disagree with the U.S. government about plenty. None of this kept me from experiencing immediate, full-on, feverish anxiety."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 10:04 PM PST - 24 comments

Hart Crane was a poet, one who was known by and friends with other notable poets. The poet e. e. cummings claimed that "Crane’s mind was no bigger than a pin, but it didn’t matter; he was a born poet" (Google books preview). Tennessee Williams said he could "hardly understand a single line" but insisted he wanted to be buried at sea at the "point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself back." Crane had his critics — Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound come to mind, and William Carlos Williams wrote "There is good there but it’s not for me" — but Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg used to read "The Bridge" together, John Berryman wrote one of his famous elegies on Crane and heavyweight Robert Lowell included his “Words for Hart Crane” in "Life Studies." Science/Fiction author, James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) also wrote that "nobody seems to have noticed that Hart Crane really was the first space poet," quoting lines from his epic The Bridge in the story Mother in the Sky with Diamonds. Those are all words by other people, why not read a few from Crane? [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 4:57 PM PST - 22 comments

French photographer Rémi Noël travelled through Texas with only his son's Batman figurine for company and took some amazing photographs. The photos are part of the This Is Not A Map series, with Noël's work representing "the least precise map of Texas in the history of Texas".
posted by Athanassiel at 4:43 PM PST - 28 comments

In this short documentary, filmmaker Darrin Johnson explores the status of atheism within African-American families and communities, and meets some non-believers from California about their experiences with breaking from religion.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:13 PM PST - 28 comments

Warning: Graphic footage. Little is known about the origins of the Abkhazian Network News Agency, ANNA. What we do know is that the agency, nominally from the breakaway Georgian republic Abkhazia, has been covering the brutal Syrian Civil War while embedded with the SAA on its Youtube channel (be sure to enable English captions). Defiant and unapologetic about its pro-government position, the videos nevertheless provide a unique perspective on what is perhaps the most well-documented war in history. Brief sample: GoPros mounted on tanks, civilian traffic driving by tanks, near misses, and close quarters combat. Sometimes the other side is taking a video too. [via /r/CombatFootage and /r/syriancivilwar] [more inside]
posted by mikepaco at 3:10 PM PST - 19 comments

Weird Al Yankovic's ridiculous 11-minute epic musical saga ALBUQUERQUE:
Animated in Flash
Mashed up with scenes from Breaking Bad
With lyrics
Bonus: Everything You Know Is Wrong [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 2:58 PM PST - 39 comments

Wrecking Ball... interpreted by Ron Jeremy. SFW, I think.
posted by five fresh fish at 2:30 PM PST - 51 comments

There is a land grab going on in Soho under the banner of morality. That night, while Stephen Ward [in Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical of that name] was bowing to an entranced audience, 200 of our boys in blue raided more than 20 models' flats, arresting 30 girls and confiscating their earnings. ... They broke down doors, intimidated girls into accepting cautions (ie criminal records) and served civil-eviction papers that, unless you were a lawyer, you would not know had hidden in their depths (20-odd pages) the time and date you were to appear in court if you wanted to appeal. Rupert Everett in defence of Soho's working girls.
posted by Grangousier at 1:15 PM PST - 16 comments

5TFU is a simple web radio station. Its content is completely anonymous; upload a track, and it's on the radio, identified only by a numeric string. Don't like what you hear? Click 5TFU! and it's gone.
posted by mkb at 12:57 PM PST - 46 comments

In the wake of recent debates about the responsibility of journalists to their subjects, this essay from TampaBay.com, about a woman suffering from a rare disorder, and the writer's relationship with her before and after the story is being written, has been hearalded as a good counterexample of "a journalist analyzing her actions ferociously," and doing a more ethical job of dealing with "suffering, suicide and a journalist's responsibility".
posted by Potomac Avenue at 12:54 PM PST - 6 comments

70s Sci-Fi Art A single-subject Tumblr that does what it says on the tin, a dozen times a day.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:31 PM PST - 18 comments

NBC's critically lauded thriller Hannibal released a season two trailer today. Author and fandom superstar Cleolinda Jones livetweeted the entire TCA preview event. (Spoilers for Season One, general screaming and rending of garments)
posted by The Whelk at 11:50 AM PST - 350 comments

(whispers) "I play jazz on the bagpipes" [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 11:40 AM PST - 33 comments

In 1994, Douglas Davis [personal blog] created The World's First Collaborative Sentence. Last summer, The Whitney Museum faced a new challenge: what happens to digital art when the technology becomes obsolete? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:03 AM PST - 31 comments

The Freudian notion that “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious” is clinically useful, after all. Thanks adamvasco!
posted by Tom-B at 9:14 AM PST - 6 comments

"I was going through boxes of my grandparents old photographs and found some incredible pictures of a tragic shuttle launch from 1986. I scanned them and made an album. My grandmother actually passed peacefully last week, and was because of her passing that I found these. We were all going through boxes and boxes of photos to find pictures to display at her memorial. I just happened to get the box with the Challenger pictures at the bottom, which was kind of special for me because I am the biggest NASA fan in the family," said Mike Hindes. [more inside]
posted by Mike Mongo at 8:56 AM PST - 50 comments

Where the road ends Recently at The Atlantic offices, we decided to take a simulated road trip using Google Street View, stopping only where we could go no further. Our virtual travels took us from the fields of Italy to the fjords of Norway and the tip of South Africa. We had such a great time at the edges of the world, we made a video out of it. (From the folks at the Atlantic news site)
posted by JujuB at 8:41 AM PST - 10 comments

The Simon Fraser University Choir performs "Every Major's Terrible" by Randall Munroe (xkcd.com)
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 7:45 AM PST - 29 comments

If the funnies in your local paper have gotten you down, with their limited space and xeroxed gags, why not take the wayback machine to the Golden Age of newspaper strips, courtesy of Gocomics' Origins of the Sunday comics? Started July last year and curated by Peter Maresca, it shows off how sophisticated and beautiful the American comic strip was almost from its birth in the 1890ties .
posted by MartinWisse at 4:57 AM PST - 15 comments

As part of a Globe and Mail series on the North exploring Canada's last frontier, writer Ian Brown and photojournalist Peter Power learn that the High Arctic, touted as Canada’s future, is like nothing any southerner expects. [more inside]
posted by jamincan at 4:54 AM PST - 21 comments

In An Autumn Garden "I always want to write erotic music... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe... about life." Toru Takemitsu Part 1 Part 2> I close my eyes for this (you don't have to).
posted by lucerita at 12:32 AM PST - 3 comments