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So in the spirit of this New Yorker Talk of the Town piece on different city's choosing books for everyone to read, what book would you like to make everyone in YOUR city read? And, what city would that be?
posted by adrober at 11:09 PM PST - 32 comments

Pinocchio Fetish? Ok, now what's the attraction with women who look like they've told too many fibs? Well… that's hard to say. It's just sexy...
posted by milnak at 10:57 PM PST - 14 comments

Gambia for the People Two guys I know, using affordable (and easily transported) technology, have gone from our island in Maine to Gambia, West Africa the last two winters to play, promote, and help preserve traditional music. Rock stars have sold out, local radio is a joke, and big-label/commercial music is doomed, but these two are doing good things. Any inspiring independent music projects in your part of the globe?
posted by LeLiLo at 9:54 PM PST - 4 comments

"If every girl who had a Barbie doll had a vulva puppet she'd have a very different view of her body," says Dorrie Lane, the Oakland artist and sex educator who made the 300-pound vulva.

Indeed.
posted by adampsyche at 6:39 PM PST - 38 comments

China hopes to make a great leap forward in Stem Cell Research Does anyone else find this a little troubling? Are all the clones going to look like Jiang Zemin?
posted by AsiaInsider at 5:35 PM PST - 18 comments

Terrorist News, helpfully split into 2 sections: "The Good News" and "The Bad News."
posted by RobertLoch at 5:34 PM PST - 11 comments

THE SIRIUS PAPERS — "The first of a series of books the contents of which, over 450 items, were dictated directly to a group of mediums in answer to questions highly important to humanity, by what are termed 'Aliens', ...in fact, THEY are NOT 'Aliens' - THEY were HERE before WE were..!"
posted by sylloge at 5:27 PM PST - 6 comments

Welcome to the New Builder.com. Now more useless than ever. (The original web development stuff is here.)
posted by kirkaracha at 3:31 PM PST - 21 comments

"Terror Widows'' An editorial cartoon that ridicules widows of World Trade Center victims as greedy and shallow publicity hounds drew instant outrage last night from the grieving survivors. One widow was shown with a pile of cash in her lap and telling a reporter, 'I keep waiting for Kevin to come home, but I know he never will. Fortunately, the $3.2 million I collected from the Red Cross keeps me warm at night.' The NYTimes pulled the strip from its Website.
posted by matteo at 2:10 PM PST - 52 comments

The emotion Buddhists call samvega is hard to translate because it covers three clusters of feelings at once: "the oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it's normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle." Not being a Buddhist, I can't say I have any more faith in pasada than in prozac. But I and many people I've known have experienced a complex emotion like this one, so it's interesting to know that this concept has been around for so long.
posted by homunculus at 1:14 PM PST - 66 comments

"Netochka threatens lawsuits, she revokes software licenses, she cries Nazi! So much as criticize her software publicly, and she might announce that you have been banned from using it. It doesn't necessarily sound like the most prudent business strategy. But Netochka's defenders see her whole online persona as her genius. The irritation and hand-wringing -- that's all part of the point. She speaks in her own cryptic lexicon and syntax and then stands back to see just how disruptive this can be to an online community."
posted by Dean King at 12:34 PM PST - 10 comments

Frozen Dead Guy Days is this weekend in Nederland, Colorado. Events will include coffin races and a screening of the documentary Grandpa's in the Tuff shed.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 11:44 AM PST - 2 comments

Bush wanted to be the Education President, not the Terrorism President. An older piece from The Nation on Bush's high stakes standardized testing from No Child Left Behind. It's not just oil companies that have the ear of the Chief, but the textbook industry, too.
posted by ahughey at 11:28 AM PST - 14 comments

Fifteen tons of popcorn is not a murder weapon. It's just evidence in a completely seperate crime. But, one has to wonder.... did he need fibre in his diet that badly?
posted by dwivian at 11:25 AM PST - 12 comments

"Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor ... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here ... nothing valued is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill." How do we mark our radioactive waste so the warning will be clearly understood for 10,000 years?
posted by webmutant at 10:55 AM PST - 25 comments

Collapse: Here's an amusing little time-waster from Shockwave.com.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 9:14 AM PST - 29 comments

We Knew? Apparently, the US government was informed in 1995 by Filipino authorities that there were terrorist agents in the US training to crash planes into buildings. I head a blurb about this on the radio and had to dig to find the article... is this something else that is just going to be swept under the rug?
posted by darian at 9:08 AM PST - 15 comments

John Darnielle has written a song by song defense of Radiohead's amnesiac (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8/9,10,11), among other overly wordy and passionate music reviews, including many pleas for us all to learn to love doom/death metal. John is a prolific songwriter himself, under the name The Mountain Goats. All the TMG's music, including their newest, is recorded on the Panasonic RX-FT500, a cheap boom box with the gears audibly churning in the background as extra musician.
posted by malphigian at 8:00 AM PST - 25 comments

I am married to the Berlin Wall (and have been since 1979).
posted by Pinwheel at 7:36 AM PST - 20 comments

darwin's famous apostle an interesting interview with richard dawkins pondering darwinism as it is perceived today. Life the universe and everything.
posted by johnnyboy at 7:08 AM PST - 8 comments

This puts Guantanamo in perspective. I'm waiting to hear the outcry from Europe and the human rights organizations. Somehow, I doubt I'll hear much.
posted by CRS at 6:57 AM PST - 114 comments

Arundhati Roy Fined, Sent to Jail for a Day. The Supreme Court of India on Wednesday sentenced Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy to a day's imprisonment and slapped a fine of Rs 2,000 for contempt of court. If she doesn't pay the fine, she will be jailed for three months.
posted by Ty Webb at 6:45 AM PST - 19 comments

God's gonna outlaw abortion whether you legislators walk out or not.
posted by crasspastor at 3:46 AM PST - 47 comments

Step aside, Crusher! Shatner's posting his personal thoughts in "Bill's Space", he's even got a discussion section where he asks fans to "continue this dialogue further". (via some guy named matt)
posted by owillis at 2:38 AM PST - 16 comments