Quand la culture web s'empare d'Occupy Wall Street

Le mouvement social le plus médiatisé du moment, Occupy Wall Street, commence à déborder dans la sphère culturelle, ce genre de dynamique étant évidemment inspirante pour beaucoup de créatifs, et donc naturellement génératrice d'idées. Si l'art s'est plongé à bras le corps dans ce passionnant vortex, #OWS squatte également Twitter et Facebook, la technologie est utilisée à plein potentiel pour optimiser le déroulement des actions à travers les États-Unis, et ceux qui n'y sont pas se chargent de relayer le mouvement à leur façon, souris à la main. Inutile de tenter de brosser un portait global des initiatives en la matière ou de répertorier la masse hallucinante d'informations qui transite par les réseaux sociaux. La force d'Occupy Wall Street se repère par d'autres détails.

-Fluctuat

COOL KIDS CAN'T DIE

Les « Chroniques » de Guy Delisle : Jérusalem, ligne claire

Comment transformer un conflit complexe en un récit BD fluide et (presque) simple, basé sur une année de vie quotidienne en Israël  ? Visite dans l'atelier d'un magicien.


-Rue89

XTC

Les belles pochettes de disques de Robert Crumb

Crumb est un grand mélomane, féru de jazz et de blues du Delta. Il collectionne les 78 et 33 tours et a lui-même dessiné plus de 450 pochettes de disques : albums de grands standards du blues, du jazz et de son propre groupe The Cheap Suit Serenaders, mais pas seulement. Dans « Record Cover Collection », on trouve, au hasard des pages et des dessins, une compilation de musique traditionnelle irlandaise, « Cheap Thrills » de Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Deep Purple, Neil Young, The Who ou Bob Dylan.

-Rue89

Reefer Blues in MP3

US army tests hypersonic weapon over the Pacific

HONOLULU: The Army on Thursday conducted its first flight test of a new weapon capable of traveling five times the speed of sound.

The Army launched the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon from the military’s Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai at about 1:30 a.m. The weapon’s ”glide vehicle” reached Kwajalein Atoll – some 2,300 miles away – in less than half an hour, said Lt. Col. Melinda Morgan, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

-Dawn

Congress Fears Chinese Telecom Gear May Phone Home

Are telecommuniations deals with China good business — or a trojan horse for espionage? Some of Congress’ top intelligence officials are worried it’s the latter. And they’re launching an investigation to find out.

-Wired

Palantir, the War on Terror's Secret Weapon

A Silicon Valley startup that collates threats has quietly become indispensable to the U.S. intelligence community

In October, a foreign national named Mike Fikri purchased a one-way plane ticket from Cairo to Miami, where he rented a condo. Over the previous few weeks, he’d made a number of large withdrawals from a Russian bank account and placed repeated calls to a few people in Syria. More recently, he rented a truck, drove to Orlando, and visited Walt Disney World by himself. As numerous security videos indicate, he did not frolic at the happiest place on earth. He spent his day taking pictures of crowded plazas and gate areas.

-Bloomberg Businessweek

MLS Cup Preview: Galaxy favored but Dynamo eye upset

MLS Cup 2011 will match two of the most successful clubs in Major League Soccer history when the LA Galaxy take on the Houston Dynamo. The Galaxy are competing in the MLS Cup Final for a record seventh time, their last appearance in 2009. The Dynamo are playing in MLS Cup for the third time in their six-year history, becoming just the second club to win back-to-back titles in 2006 and ’07.

-MLS Soccer

Tribal Wives

Six British women swap their everyday lives for life as tribal wives in some of the most remote communities on earth. Like many women today juggling career, home and family, they feel that something is missing. By spending time in societies where female roles are very different, they hope to find answers that could change their lives.

-Top Documentary Films

South African doctor invents female condoms with 'teeth' to fight rape

South African Dr. Sonnet Ehlers was on call one night four decades ago when a devastated rape victim walked in. Her eyes were lifeless; she was like a breathing corpse.

"She looked at me and said, 'If only I had teeth down there,'" recalled Ehlers, who was a 20-year-old medical researcher at the time. "I promised her I'd do something to help people like her one day."

-CNN

In the New Gangland of Montreal in El Salvador

I’m back in El Salvador for the first time in thirty years, and I don’t recognize a thing. There are smooth highways from the airport up to San Salvador, the capital, and even at this late hour, along the stretch of dunes dividing the road from the Pacific Ocean, there are cheerful stands at which customers have parked to buy coconuts and típico foods. But I remember a pitted two-lane road, a merciless sun that picked out every detail on the taut skin of corpses, a hole in the sandy ground, the glaring news that four women from the United States, three of them nuns, had just been unearthed from that shallow pit.

The neighborhood and the road are both called Montreal, and they are notorious. Last year a Montreal public transport bus making the trip to the center of Mejicanos was set on fire as it reached the Mejicanos market. Seventeen people burned to death.

-NYbooks

Femmes avides de porno

Non, la dépendance au porno n'est pas qu'une affaire d'hommes. Les femmes aussi, parfois même toutes jeunes, avouent aimer, consommer, au point de ne plus pouvoir s'en passer, cette sexualité virtuelle, intense, compulsive, mais surtout solitaire, au pays du XXX sur le web. Suis-je normale, docteur? Très peu osent en parler. Culpabilité? Tabou? Nouveauté? Portrait.

«Moi, les sites pornos me procurent un high. Comme une drogue. Mon corps au complet réagit à cette adrénaline. Je ne me suis jamais sentie aussi bien comme ça ailleurs. C'est comme être saoule. Non. C'est mieux qu'être saoule.»

-La Presse

The American Package Museum

Whats the language of the future?

No language has spread as widely as English, and it continues to spread. Internationally the desire to learn it is insatiable. In the twenty-first century the world is becoming more urban and more middle class, and the adoption of English is a symptom of this, for increasingly English serves as the lingua franca of business and popular culture. It is dominant or at least very prominent in other areas such as shipping, diplomacy, computing, medicine and education. A recent study has suggested that among students in the United Arab Emirates “Arabic is associated with tradition, home, religion, culture, school, arts and social sciences,” whereas English “is symbolic of modernity, work, higher education, commerce, economics and science and technology.”

-Salon

What Do a Bunch of Old Jews Know About Living Forever?

Irving Kahn is about to celebrate his 106th birthday. He still goes to work every day. Scientists are studying him and several hundred other Ashkenazim to find out what keeps them going. And going. And going. The secrets of the alter kockers.

-NYmag

World Population: Where it’s thick and where it’s thin – The Big Picture

The growing population of the world, now estimated to be over 7 billion, marks a global milestone and presents obvious challenges for the planet. There are extremely densely populated cities and sparsely populated countries. China is the most populous country with India following closely behind. This post brings together some disparate illustrations of our world as it grows, including scenes from Mong Kok district in Hong Kong, which has the highest population density in the world, with 130,000 per one square kilometer. In Mongolia, the world's least densely populated country, 2.7 million people are spread across an area three times the size of France. Then there's Out Skerries, a tiny outcropping of rocks off the east coast of Scotland where the population is just 65. And doing what he can to contribute to that 7 billion global milestone is Ziona, the head of a religious sect called "Chana." He has 39 wives, 94 children, and 33 grandchildren. The world is an interesting place. -- Paula Nelson (41 photos total)

-boston.com

La grève du sexe a payé !

Le petit village Santa María del Puerto de Toledo de las Barbacoas, sur la côte pacifique colombienne, est presque inaccessible. Face à la passivité des hommes, les femmes ont décidé de faire la grève du sexe jusqu'à ce que les autorités s'engagent à construire une route. Le 16 octobre, après trois mois de "jambes croisées", les pelleteuses sont arrivées.

-Courrier international

L'Impact dans la ligue des Beckham et Henry

Au moment où les séries éliminatoires de la Major League Soccer (MLS) battent leur plein, l'Impact prépare son entrée dans cette ligue d'élite.

Dès mars prochain, l'équipe montréalaise se joindra aux 18 formations établies dans des villes comme New York, Los Angeles et Toronto, et alignant des joueurs aussi connus que Thierry Henry et David Beckham. Même si l'enthousiasme est élevé dans les bureaux du stade Saputo, ce passage au sommet du soccer nord-américain semble toujours un secret bien gardé.

-En attendant le stade Saputo

-La MLS pour les nuls

-La Presse

Leave it to the french

Tree Takeovers

- U. S. Yahoo! on Flickr

The Seductive Villains of Early STD-Prevention Posters

The U.S. military has long used posters to warn men about the threats of gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases. In some of these posters, women are portrayed as innocent flowers that must be protected from their dirty men. More often, however, they are the seductive villains, threatening to destroy the nation with their toxic filth. Take a look back through these early public health warnings, loaded with messages about male and female sexuality in the first half of the 20th century.

-Slate

William Faulkner Needed Money

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy. - William Faulkner


-This recording

My Lush Sobriety

Before I quit drinking, I liked to think of myself as Dorothy Parker or Hunter S. Thompson. I romanticized myself as a hard-drinking, savvy writer. And, for a while, that seemed to work. Drinking, after all, gave me an alter ego par excellence. I was the rock star at every party, nightclub, and living room I wafted into, happily singing or dancing like life was meant only for such pursuits. I was ready to see any evening through until dawn, to wear sequins and glitter if necessary, and to laugh until black eyeliner ran down my face. My favorite word was “subversive,” and my favorite humor was cruel. Every day was rough, but every night was Saturday.

-The Faster Times