A Whole New U

I decided to go back to school because I was underemployed and mind-achingly bored. I decided to study computer science because I was tired of not knowing how the Internet worked. And I decided to go to Udacity because I was broke.

-Readability

This house is located on an island called Elliðaey near Vestmannaeyjar, a small archipelago off the south coast of Iceland. The house was given to singer, Bjork from her motherland as a “Thank You” for putting Iceland on the international map.

The Russian Dash-cam Supercut

Dash-cams: Russia's Last Hope For Civility And Survival On The Road

In Russia, everyone should have a camera on their dashboard. It's better than keeping a lead pipe under your seat for protection.

15 Picturesque Shipwrecks Worldwide

The United Nations estimates that there are more than 3 million shipwrecks on the ocean floor. But, also, shipwrecks can be found on deserted beaches, on coral reefs in the middle of the ocean, at restricted diamond areas, uninhabited islands or other remote & uncivilized places. Therefore, this is a list dedicated to picturesque shipwrecks which are still visible on beaches around the world.

-The World Geography

Giant murderous half-ton car-part junkbot will hold 32 bottles of wine for you

A welder in Phoenix assembled a robot out of car and motorcycle parts that serves as a wine-rack. It weighs "Approx 1,000lbs," stands six feet high, holds 32 bottles of wine (or other beverage of choice) and is liberally wired up with glowing LEDs. Yours for a mere $7,000.00.

-boing boing

The Bathroom Muse

If you are like me, you must always have something to read in the bathroom. Anything will do. A reporter once told me about spending the night in the home of an ex-president. Being in desperate need to read something, he set out to find a book or a magazine and to his astonishment, wherever he went in that huge seaside mansion, he could not find a single thing to read, not even a Chinese takeout menu or a flyer for a bake sale at the local church. Lately, as I’ve discovered, there has been an attempt to remedy this. An anthology called Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader is widely available and describes itself on the Amazon website in these words:

At last…Here it is…The book you’ve been waiting for! No more frantic searches at the last minute for that perfect magazine article. No agonizing choices between light reading and the serious stuff. This little volume has it all: entertainment, humor, education, trivia, science, history, pop culture…and more! And it’s even divided by length—you can spend a minute with the Quickies, relax with Normal-Length articles, or really get comfortable with Long Items.

-Readability/NY Books

Cobrasnake: Girls of Summer

The only thing hotter than this current heat wave are the beautiful California girls that Mark "The Cobrasnake" Hunter photographs. Summer fun in the sun, indeed.

-LA Weekly

Why We Lie

We like to believe that a few bad apples spoil the virtuous bunch. But research shows that everyone cheats a little—right up to the point where they lose their sense of integrity.

Not too long ago, one of my students, named Peter, told me a story that captures rather nicely our society's misguided efforts to deal with dishonesty. One day, Peter locked himself out of his house. After a spell, the locksmith pulled up in his truck and picked the lock in about a minute.

"I was amazed at how quickly and easily this guy was able to open the door," Peter said. The locksmith told him that locks are on doors only to keep honest people honest. One percent of people will always be honest and never steal. Another 1% will always be dishonest and always try to pick your lock and steal your television; locks won't do much to protect you from the hardened thieves, who can get into your house if they really want to. The purpose of locks, the locksmith said, is to protect you from the 98% of mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock.

-Wall Street Journal

THE ECONOMICS OF HIGH-END PROSTITUTES

What skills can earn a woman $5,500 an hour? Still reeling from Eliot Spitzer's surprise bouts of discretionary spending, Allison Schrager examines the supply and demand of high-end call girls ...

-The Economist

The VICE Guide to Karachi

Karachi is the biggest and fastest growing city in Pakistan. In a country riddled with violence related to the never-ending war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Karachi still manages to stick out.

In the West, it’s probably best known as the place where the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl had his head chopped off. We wanted to see the seedy underbelly of this ultra-violent metropolis of more than 18 million people, so VICE’s co-founder Suroosh Alvi went to meet the key players who make Karachi one of the craziest cities on Earth.

While there, Suroosh visited the largest garbage dump in the world (and alleged home to many kidnap victims), tagged along on a police sweep for suspected Taliban members, spent some time with a hit-man who claims to have murdered 35 people, and paid a visit to the “don” of Lyari, one of the most violent slums in one of the most violent cities in Pakistan.

He did other stuff too, all of which will drop your jaws in this five-part series, The VICE Guide to Karachi.

-Top Documentery Films

Does Facebook Turn People Into Narcissists?

Recently I tried to persuade a friend, a professional woman in her 40s, to create a Facebook account. Like many people, I’m a regular user, usually to post photos and updates of my daughter’s sports and academic accomplishments — and to keep track of friends and family. But my friend believed Facebook would drain her time. She said that if she couldn’t maintain friendships in the real world, she wasn’t interested in keeping up with the small details of people’s lives.

-NY Times

Lucid dreaming: Rise of a nocturnal hobby

A slew of apps promise to encourage "lucid dreaming". So why is there such enthusiasm around the idea of controlling dreams, asks Sam Judah.

"You're only bound by gravity if you believe in it," says Rory Mac Sweeney, impatiently.

He is explaining the logic of a dream world which he not only visits each night, but apparently has active control over, flying at will through lush forests or launching himself upward into the night sky.

It sounds implausible, but the phenomenon is known as lucid dreaming.

-Readability/BBC

Back to the Future

I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… Two years ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future...

-Irina Werning

Incredible Steampunk apartement in NYC

Located at 120 West 29th Street in the Chelsea neighbourhood of New York City, this 1,800-square foot steampunk themed apartment is the type of place you definitely check out if they have an open house. For those not in NYC we can only ogle at the gallery below.

-e.magazine

Scenes From Brazil

Brazil, a growing, multicultural nation of nearly 200 million people, is preparing to host two huge international events: the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. Brazilians face numerous challenges, building many new structures and the infrastructure to support them, while attending to existing challenges and "cleaning up" before the world comes to visit. Brazil is also huge (the largest country in the southern hemisphere), and its ecological diversity ranges from dense urban spaces to forested mountains, vast plains to sparkling beaches. It's impossible to sum up a country in a single photo essay, so take this as just a sample of recent scenes from around Brazil. [45 photos]

-The Atlantic

The Yankee Comandante, A story of love, revolution, and betrayal.

For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a burst of floodlights illuminated him: William Alexander Morgan, the great Yankee comandante. He was standing, with his back against a bullet-pocked wall, in an empty moat surrounding La Cabaña—an eighteenth-century stone fortress, on a cliff overlooking Havana Harbor, that had been converted into a prison. Flecks of blood were drying on the patch of ground where Morgan’s friend had been shot, moments earlier. Morgan, who was thirty-two, blinked into the lights. He faced a firing squad.


-Readability/The New Yorker

Former CIA operative's loney truth

In a darkened room sits a man whom the American government says is a senior al Qaeda official. His interrogator, a long-serving CIA agent named Glenn Carle, thinks the man is far from a terrorist mastermind, but a bewildered halfwit. Carle's handlers tell him the man's silence proves he knows something, and insist "enhanced interrogation techniques" – many would say torture – will produce answers. Carle demurs, but is ignored, and his prisoner, while never entering a courtroom, will spend the next seven years in a secret jail far from American shores before his quiet release.

These are the bare facts of Carle's book, The Interrogator, which in the year since its publication has destroyed his life. It has caused outrage everywhere except America, where it has been smothered by what he claims is an insidious whispering campaign by friends of former American vice-president Dick Cheney. "Every word," he says, intensely. "Every f-----g word is true

-Stuff

Surviving 72 brutal days after their plane crashed in the snow covered Andes, the Uruguayan National rugby team survived by eating the flesh of their dead friends. Notice the spinal column to right of photo. 1972

Cannibals Seeking Same: A Visit To The Online World Of Flesh-Eaters

While it was shut down with a Denial of Service attack by the German authorities in late 2002, the website for the Cannibal Café can still be viewed online thanks to the Wayback Machine. Nine years is an eternity when it comes to the Internet and, suspended there in history, the website is a time capsule of early website-design features and flourishes, down to a .gif of dripping blood and the flashing "WARNING" sign. Its forum messages also carry the whiff of a different era; written at a time when people, unaware and unafraid of consequences, were more open with their identities online.

-Readability/The AWL

Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia's Founder Is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru

For years, Yvon Chouinard kept his eco-conscious, employee-friendly practices largely to himself. Now megacorporations like Walmart, Levi Straus and Nike are following his lead.

A couple of years ago, Yvon Chouinard—founder of the outdoor-clothing brand Patagonia—gave a talk at a sustainable-fisheries conference in Vancouver. He'd been invited to speak in recognition of Patagonia's longtime commitment to environmental issues and its reputation as a company that manages to churn out profit while minimizing ecological impact. Chouinard delivered his spiel, but he came away frustrated by the surprising ignorance of his audience. "They didn't know what they were doing," he says of the seafood merchants. "They had no idea about toxins, about incidental catch. Their customers are all going to want to know this stuff soon. Restaurants will want to know."

-Readability/WSJ Magazine

We The Tiny House People

This is journey into the tiny homes of people searching for simplicity, self-sufficiency, minimalism and happiness by creating shelter in caves, converted garages, trailers, tool sheds, river boats and former pigeon coops.

Basically, Dirksen made a documentary on people living in tiny houses. For around five years she was traveling the world and filming these segments.

-Top Documentery Films

Has the alphabet murderer finally been caught?

Officer Wesley Jackson's last stop for the day was a modest white bungalow on a dead-end street cracked dry by the Nevada desert sun. At the front door the policeman confronted a metal security gate and a black and red sign: Keep Out. But even without a warrant, Jackson was free to rifle through the house on the outer reaches of Reno at any time he chose. An elderly man, Joseph Naso – Joe to everyone but the justice system – knew as much as he unlocked the gate and let the officer in.

Jackson clocked the turmoil and filth. Dirty dishes piled high in the kitchen. Rotting meat lying among other food scattered across the counters. Papers everywhere. The policeman began with the bedrooms. He searched through dresser drawers packed with women's clothing, which seemed odd as there were no signs of anyone else living in the house.


-Readability/The Guardian

15 of the Most Memorable Final Lines in Film

Sometimes they refer to the punch line in a joke, a character’s dying words, or poetic thoughts about the future. It’s the filmmaker’s final chance to make a lasting impression that will get people talking. With that, here are some of cinema’s most memorable parting words. Leave us something to remember you and your favorite lines by in the comments section. Beware of a few spoilers ahead.


-Flavorwire

Château Sucker

Rare-wine collectors are savvy, competitive guys with a taste for impossible finds. The biggest hoax in history took place right under their noses.

-NYMAG

This Is Not A Beach…

It's a swimming pool! San Alfonso del Mar resort in Algarrobo, Chile, is home to the world's largest swimming pool. The 3,324 feet long pool that is set on 19.8 acres can fit up to 6,000 normal sized pools within it.

-BuzzFeed