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Graph TV uses IMDb data to visualize jumping the shark, among other things. Arrested Development. Breaking Bad. 30 Rock. Gilmore Girls. The Shield. [Via.] [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 9:38 PM PST - 101 comments

Trading business cards at GDC is a social ritual. Tarot is a social ritual. Games are social rituals. I expect that, if I combine all three, I’ll achieve a moment of perfect clarity about human social rituals. [more inside]
posted by hellojed at 8:44 PM PST - 7 comments

Inside the Kafkaesque World of the US’s "Little Guantánamos" We sat together on her couch, her small, eight-year-old hands clutching a photo of her father, Yassin Aref. “My daddy only held me twice before I was five,” Dilnia told me. For the first five years of her life, she only knew him as the man on the other side of a plexiglass window in a communication management unit in an Indiana federal penitentiary. Prisoners describe the communication management units, or CMUs, as “Little Guantánamos.” In 2006, the Bureau of Prisons created two of these units to isolate and segregate specific prisoners, the majority of them convicted of crimes related to terrorism. The bureau secretly opened these units without informing the public and without allowing anyone an opportunity to comment on their creation, as required by law.
posted by jaduncan at 7:04 PM PST - 16 comments

Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.” And that’s just what gets said in public. An engineer in his forties recently told me about meeting a tech CEO who was trying to acquire his company. “You must be the token graybeard,” said the CEO, who was in his late twenties or early thirties. “I looked at him and said, ‘No, I’m the token grown-up.’ ”
posted by sf2147 at 4:35 PM PST - 215 comments

"As fate would have it, my first week on the call-center floor fell on a weekend, which is a casual dress period. I made friends as soon as I hit the floor because c’mon, who doesn’t love me?! The very next day I came in and did all the dapper bois proud. Black slacks, white dress shirt with a pink/black/white silk tie. Hair freshly twisted up with my shades on. And yes I turned many heads. I walked in and saw all the women in the office look over to watch me walk down the aisle. I got to my group and nobody said a word. And then finally one of the women supervisors said “Ooh I like your tie.” And so my journey as the first boi in began."
posted by MartinWisse at 1:34 PM PST - 103 comments

Why is Kim Kardashian on the cover of April Vogue? In an uncharacteristically verbose and thoughtful entry, Go Fug Yourself considers the motivations of Anna Wintour, Kris Jenner, Kanye West, and the audience they're all aiming for.
posted by psoas at 1:03 PM PST - 160 comments

In the first two parts of a five-part series, The Atlantic looks at US cities with the highest levels of income segregation and US cities where the poor are segregated from everyone else. (dlTheAtlantic)
posted by Kitteh at 12:19 PM PST - 44 comments

Photographer Elke Vogelsang's thirty, joy-filled, dog portraits that will bring a smile to your face.
posted by quin at 11:38 AM PST - 18 comments

Facebook Fatigue [SLYT] [via: comediva]
posted by Fizz at 11:22 AM PST - 61 comments

Time travel, Dunder Mifflin-style. Over the last 18 months, filmmaker and digital artist Joe Sabia indexed every cultural reference from The Office, over 1,300 mentions across all 190 episodes, and used Wikipedia to find their year of origin. With the help of programmer Aaron Rasmussen, he built the The Office Time Machine to navigate it all, year-by-year, in historical order. [more inside]
posted by waxpancake at 11:19 AM PST - 17 comments

May Berenbaum, head of the University of Illinois' entomology department: "There are about 500 species of gerrids in the world and, as far as I know, not a single one of those 500 species is eusocial (i.e., has a complex social structure with reproductive division of labor and cooperative brood care)," she said. "I don't even know of an example of maternal care in the whole group."
posted by helpthebear at 10:55 AM PST - 35 comments

The Vikings invented soap operas and pioneered globalisation - so why do we depict them as brutes?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:50 AM PST - 53 comments

Malcolm Gladwell writes a compelling take on the history of the Branch Davidians and how their millennial Christian beliefs led to their ultimate confrontation with the FBI. "I came out the little driveway on the side of the building and got onto the main driveway that ran along the front of the building. As I turned the corner . . . one of the agents outside a tank started screaming at me to come over to him. My left ankle was all blistered, the skin was rolling off my hands, and my face was burned down the right side of my neck where the mask had been. I guess I took the mask off after I got out. It was kind of melting onto my face. . . . He was cussing me out, telling me if I made a false move he was going to blow my so-and-so head off. But he said: you’re gonna remember this day for the rest of your life. I thought: at least that is a true statement." [more inside]
posted by artof.mulata at 10:22 AM PST - 112 comments

"s/s/s started to sound like the Nazi Schutzstaffel with a lisp so we had to change it. We wanted a word with three S’s and Sisyphus felt like a capable anti-hero—endless struggle, the human plague, the existential condition. We are all working towards nothing. Also, the apparent futility of this collaboration—a black rapper from Chicago, a white singer-songwriter from Detroit, and an arty producer with cool glasses, though I dunno where Ryan’s from, Cleveland? We have so little in common but we have deep love for each other and we are pushing that stone together." That's Sufjan Stevens, talking about his collaboration with the rapper Serengeti (David Cohn), and singer/producer Son Lux (Ryan Lott), who released their Beak & Claw EP last year as s/s/s (Bandcamp), and have recently released their debut album as Sisyphus (Bandcamp). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:51 AM PST - 30 comments

A detailed, completely mental, somewhat plausible scheme for how a Guaranteed Minimum Income would work.
posted by Diablevert at 9:21 AM PST - 142 comments

What 11-Year-Old Kareem Granton Saw During 5 Days Roaming New York City (Warning: Slideshow format, but with original artwork.) [more inside]
posted by Pfardentrott at 9:17 AM PST - 32 comments

Sir Ian McKellen walks the Royal Shakespeare Company through MacBeth's famous soliloquy, in 1979.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:08 AM PST - 30 comments

The Uncomfortable. A treasury of poorly designed things.
posted by phunniemee at 9:02 AM PST - 39 comments

23. On screen, your hero can blow away 500 bad guys, but if he smokes one fucking cigarette, you’re in deep shit. Sam Mendes’s 25 Rules for Directors
posted by timshel at 8:50 AM PST - 16 comments

Oderus Urungus, the founder and lead singer of Gwar, has died.
posted by skycrashesdown at 8:31 AM PST - 85 comments

I Sold My Undergraduate Thesis to a Print Content Farm: A trip through the shadowy, surreal world of an academic book mill.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:21 AM PST - 47 comments

The future of sex? Once derided as being like a plastic bag with the erotic appeal of a jellyfish, the female condom is being reinvented as the next big thing in safe sex. (via).
posted by adamvasco at 5:35 AM PST - 53 comments

There's a new trend in Bangkok where males have embraced what they believe to be Mexican gangster culture, by emulating what they see on television and YouTube.
posted by gman at 5:18 AM PST - 39 comments