VW Hovercraft Bring Us One Step Closer to the Jetsons

Zhang Yuan, a 21-year-old Chinese designer, has plans for a vehicle called the Volkswagen Aqua that can hover and thereby negotiate all kinds of terrain, including road, sand, ice, snow and water! The design for the invention has been shortlisted in the annual Car Design Awards competition, sponsored in part by Volkswagen.

-Discovery

The Cab Ride I’ll Never Forget

There was a time in my life twenty years ago when I was driving a cab for a living.

It was a cowboy’s life, a gambler’s life, a life for someone who wanted no boss, constant movement and the thrill of a dice roll every time a new passenger got into the cab.

What I didn’t count on when I took the job was that it was also a ministry.

Because I drove the night shift, my cab became a rolling confessional. Passengers would climb in, sit behind me in total anonymity and tell me of their lives.

-Zen Moments

Top 10 Spy Tactics

-Discovery News

5 Facts You Probably Didn’t Know about Dreams

If I could pick one thing I love doing above just about anything, it’s sleeping. If only death were permanent sleep as in you were permanently dreaming. Personally I think death is just a shut down and you don’t know anything that’s going on. But how awesome would it be if death were actually a perpetual sleep?


-Uncoached

A rare insight into Kowloon walled city

Once thought to be the most densely populated place on Earth, with 50,000 people crammed into only a few blocks, these fascinating pictures give a rare insight into the lives of those who lived Kowloon Walled City.

Taken by Canadian photographer Greg Girard in collaboration with Ian Lamboth the pair spent five years familiarising Lienthemselves with the notorious Chinese city before it was demolished in 1992.

The city was a phenomenon with 33,000 families and businesses living in more than 300 interconnected high-rise buildings, all constructed without contributions from a single architect.

-Mail Online

In pictures: The bewildering face of China

-The Independent

Drive-By Truckers

Sometime on June 25, 2007, 25-year-old Sara Hulbert went to Nashville’s seedy Cowan Street with a pair of guys named Lee and Hollywood. The three scored some crack and smoked it. Then an argument broke out about divvying up what was left. Sara got annoyed and left. Lee figured she was headed for the nearby T.A.—a truck stop with a lively prostitution trade—to make some cash. He watched her disappear between a pair of empty truck trailers. He never saw her again. Somewhere in that row of warehouses, truck washes, and va- cant lots, as I-24 roared by overhead, Sara Hulbert climbed into the wrong truck. Around 12:50 in the morning, the T.A. security guard found Sara Hulbert face-up in the back lot, near the sagging fence hookers used for access, a half-inch hole in her head.

-Readability

Why fiction is good for you

Is fiction good for us? We spend huge chunks of our lives immersed in novels, films, TV shows, and other forms of fiction. Some see this as a positive thing, arguing that made-up stories cultivate our mental and moral development. But others have argued that fiction is mentally and ethically corrosive. It’s an ancient question: Does fiction build the morality of individuals and societies, or does it break it down?

This controversy has been flaring up — sometimes literally, in the form of book burnings — ever since Plato tried to ban fiction from his ideal republic. In 1961, FCC chairman Newton Minow famously said that television was not working in “the public interest” because its “formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons” amounted to a “vast wasteland.” And what he said of TV programming has also been said, over the centuries, of novels, theater, comic books, and films: They are not in the public interest.

-Boston.com

Two Years of Longform: Editor Gretchen Gavett’s All-Time Top 5

Gretchen, who does digital things for the PBS series FRONTLINE, started contributing to Longform in April 2011. She enjoys crime reporting, gigantic Red Bulls and her handsome fiancé.

#1 : Fatal Distraction, Gene Weingarten, The Washington Post, Mar 2009. I prefer everything to be morally ambiguous. Because everything is. This is about accidentally leaving your child strapped in a hot car. It is my favorite thing on Longform.

-Longform Blog

Joey, chauffeur de limousine

Des étudiantes en chaleur qui perdent leur virginité. Des hommes mariés qui veulent impressionner leur maîtresse. De la poudre, du champagne, du vomi. Sur les banquettes de la limousine de Joey, tout est permis. Mais ce qui se passe derrière les vitres teintées doit rester derrière les vitres teintées. Omertà ou la loi du silence.


-La Presse/Urbania