Boy Next Door Growing up in the shadow of Paul Bernardo

It’s a may evening in 1990, and I am eleven years old, heading to gymnastics class at the high school across the street from my home in Scarborough, a suburb east of Toronto. I’m tall for my age but a slight thing, in a tie-dyed T-shirt and jean cut-offs, white-blond hair clipped back in pink barrettes. I’m a late bloomer, eagerly waiting for my body to develop into something else. Something wanted.

- The Walrus

Heal Thyself With Monkey Heads at Akodessewa Fetish Market

When troubled by illness, relationship problems, or financial woes, voodoo practitioners in the West African nation of Togo go to the fetish market of Akodessewa. Located in the capital city of Lomé, the market has a row of tables piled high with dog heads, elephant feet, chimpanzee paws, desiccated cobras, and gorilla skulls. These are all fetishes, or talismans: objects infused with the power of the divine that are used to heal and protect.

- Slate

Splitscreen : A Love Story

 
Shot entirely on the Nokia N8 mobile phone. Winner of the Nokia Shorts competition 2011.

-Vimeo

1960s -1980s Polish film posters

1960s - 1980s Polish film posters.

- Retronaut

Serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin prepares to die

Franklin hoped one of his biggest trophy killings would be Larry Flynt, publisher and founder of Hustler magazine. Flynt's crime according to Franklin? "I saw that interracial couple he had, photographed there, having sex," he says. Franklin is referring to the December 1975 issue of Hustler that featured several photos of a black man with a white woman. "It just made me sick. I think whites marry with whites, blacks with blacks, Indians with Indians. Orientals with orientals. I threw the magazine down and thought, I'm gonna kill that guy."

- CNN

Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi

North Korea is a mythically strange land, an Absurdistan, where almost nothing is known about the people or, more important, their missile-launching leaders. There is, however, one man—a humble sushi chef from Japan—who infiltrated the inner sanctum, becoming the Dear Leader's cook, confidant, and court jester. What is life like serving Kim Jong-il and his heir? A strange and dangerous gig where the food and drink never stop, the girls are all virgins, and you're never really safe. We sent Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson to meet the man who survived all the craziness.


- GQ

The Rat Hunters of New York

The city that never sleeps is home to untold millions of four-legged vermin. Richard Reynolds and his band of bloodthirsty terriers are determined to sniff them out one-by-one.

- Narratively

We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction

Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.

- The Atlantic

Creepy Clown With Voice of a GD Angel Sings Lorde's Royals

At first I was terrified — and then I was capterrified. (Which is a mix of terrified and captivated; like when you watch your Fourth Meal Taco Bell burrito get made.)

Actually, I don't think clowns are that scary, in general, but there's something about Puddles that freaks me out a little — maybe it's that he sings so beautifully. What type of deal with the Devil was made that allows a man to sing like a baby angel god. He has no right. He has no right, I tell you!

-Jezebel

What Do Women Want?

Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.


-Sensualism

Why We Cheat

Lorax's husband told her to get dressed up and pick out the place she wanted to go to, when he had not done so in months, and she spent her fifty-six-year-old day preparing her face, creaming her body, hooking a bra, and doing that thing that women do, touching a part of ourselves we imagine being touched later by a man. In the car on the way to the favorite restaurant, the Tom Waits song "Shiver Me Timbers" came on.
"I'm leavin' my family / I'm leavin' all my friends / My body's at home / But my heart's in the wind."

-Esquire

Scotch Tape Portraits by Wes Naman

We loved Wes Naman’s Rubber Band Portraits so much that we decided to also showcase his Scotch Tape Portraits that we found hilarious. As the name states and for this particular project, the creative medium that was used by Wes was scotch tape. Inspired by the time he had to place tape on his face for a particular lighting rig set-up he called upon a bunch of friends to do this same, but all in good fun.

-Indulgd

5 Creepiest Haunted House Claims by Real Witnesses

Ghosts are one of the world’s biggest mysteries. The idea of ghosts as being proof of life after death dates back to ancient Egypt. During this time it was widely believed that death was a mere transition to another world or a different existence.

-Top Secret Writers

Drugged with beer and cocaine and left to freeze to death, 500-year-old mummies of sacrificed Inca children reveal their secrets

Her body is so perfectly  preserved that it is hard to believe this girl died more than 500 years ago. But what is even more remarkable is that scientists today have been able to learn the secrets of her death – by analysing her hair. The 13-year-old Incan girl was heavily dosed with alcohol and  coca leaves, which form the basis of cocaine, before being left to die of exposure high in the Andes as a sacrifice.


-Daily Mail

Fap for Freedom

For a usually private act, masturbation has been receiving a lot of public attention lately. First there was that thing in Sweden where public masturbation was sort of legalized. Shortly after, a Cosmo writer secretly masturbated on a New York subway, which was, of course, followed up by the requisite mediocre backlash. Channel 4 released yet another flimsy “neuroscience” rehash of how jerking off to porn somehow hurts your brain, and a California punk band filmed one of their members masturbating on the lawn of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. Governments, media, feminists, scientists, musicians. Why is fucking ourselves showing up in public conversation now?

-Vice

The Style Guy's Guide to Friendship, Schmoozing, and Social Advancement

Life is a euphemism for social climbing. There's no shame in deliberately scaling the social ladder. That's evolution. We are social animals, and we thrive in the company of others. Finding the best others we can is part of the natural-selection mechanism, and it's far safer than rock climbing. And getting to the top of society is like getting to the top of Mount Everest, except you can stay there, usually in comfort. It's an adventure. It's exciting, like sport. If you fail, you don't die; you simply relocate and start over.

-GQ

Why Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel Loves Selling Drugs in Chicago

On the night that Jesús Vicente Zambada Niebla strode into the lobby of the Sheraton Maria Isabel Hotel in Mexico City, the price on his head was $5 million. The handsome 33-year-old, nicknamed El Vicentillo (Pretty Boy Vicente), was a notorious drug capo. He was also the only son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, the No. 2 boss of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel, the biggest supplier of illegal narcotics to the United States. For years, the younger Zambada had been on the run from the federales as well as from U.S. authorities. But that night in March 2009, he strolled into the hotel for an unlikely midnight tryst with—of all people—two agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

-Chicago Mag

The Prison Guard With a Gift for Cracking Gang Codes

As a corrections officer at a Westchester County, N.Y., prison in the 1990s, Gary Klivans was a one-man gang unit. Members of The Latin Kings and the Bloods made up a sizable part of the prison population. Klivans learned quickly that to handle them, he needed to understand them, and that meant understanding the code they used to communicate. Klivans taught himself to decipher their messages. He became one of the most sought-after code-breakers in the country.

-Nautilus

Kept women

Mistresses are big business in China, where no official is a real man without his own ernai. What’s in it for the girls?

-aeon

Extraordinary Photos Of Drag Queens In Half Drag

New York-based photographer Leland Bobbé has captured portraits of drag queens in half drag for his ongoing project 'Half-Drag . . . A Different Kind of Beauty.' "With this series my intention is to capture both the male and the alter ego female side of these subjects in one image in order to explore the cross over between males and females and to break down the physical barriers that separate them," Bobbé says. 

-imgur

Juan Gatti’s “Ciencias Naturales” Collage Series

A collaborator of Pedro Almodovar’s, Argentine-born artist Juan Gatti has credits that include graphic designer for films such as Volver, The Skin I Live In and The Flower of My Secret. Based in Madrid, the artist creates brightly-colored collages that complement the Spanish director’s color-saturated cinematography and penchant for visual flourishes. Gatti’s collages in the series “Ciencias Naturales” (“Natural Sciences” in English) turn the human anatomy into a canvas for his baroque, tropical arrangements that lie somewhere on the spectrum between still life and portrait. Take a look at some of Juan Gatti’s collages below. 

-Hi Fructose