Life More: Features China Hong Kong Photo Here's The Hong Kong That Westerners Never See

Investment advisor and photographer Jonathan van Smit is one of the few foreigners who ever sees the dark side of Hong Kong. The New Zealander tells us by email: "I know some Western expats who never eat Chinese food, and who rarely venture outside their expat communities. They're here to make money not to experience a different culture. They live in a largely expat world, their kids go to international schools, their maids do the housework, cooking and shopping. I imagine that the more local parts of Hong Kong are completely alien to many of them."

-Business Insider

The rise of the military’s secret military

“Dude, I don’t need to play these stupid games. I know what you’re trying to do.”  With that, Major Matthew Robert Bockholt hung up on me. More than a month before, I had called U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) with a series of basic questions: In how many countries were U.S. Special Operations Forces deployed in 2013? Are manpower levels set to expand to 72,000 in 2014?  Is SOCOM still aiming for growth rates of 3%-5% per year?  How many training exercises did the command carry out in 2013?  Basic stuff.

-Salon

The Story of the John Lennon Statue in Havana, Cuba

February marks 50 years since The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, igniting a global phenomenon. But when Beatlemania swept the world, communist Cuba resisted. Believing the Fab Four were the epitome of mindless, vulgar consumerism, Fidel Castro declared a nationwide ban of Beatles music in 1964. Cubans eager to experience the rock-and-roll revolution resorted to trading smuggled tapes of "I Want To Hold Your Hand."


-Slate

6 bonnes raisons de ne jamais se marier

Tout le monde n'a pas besoin - ou la volonté - de se faire passer la bague au doigt. L'auteur de I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance (Je ne sais pas: pourquoi admettre qu'on ne sait pas - à part quand on ne devrait pas) explique pourquoi.

-Huffington Post

Secret State of North Korea

Using undercover footage, FRONTLINE explores life under Kim Jung-un.

-PBS

This Famous Google Exec Quit His Job To Work In China — And He's Been Totally Blown Away By What He Found

For years, Hugo Barra was one of the most visible executives at Google. He was a product manager for its Android team. Every year at Google's biggest conference, Google I/O, Barra would show off Android's latest new features for the whole world. Then, in August of this year, Barra quit Google to work for a Chinese company. In December, he gave a talk in Paris about how utterly blown away he's been by that place.

-Business Insider

Your Distracted Driving Killed Me

Today you killed me. I was on my way to work when I noticed your SUV slide into my lane in a three second blur before everything turned to black. One second I was listening to U2, the next I noticed you looking down. Were you texting. Changing your radio. Getting your coffee mug. Grabbing a beer? I’ll never know.

-M

North Sentinel Island – The World’s Hardest Place to Visit

It’s hard to believe that there are people in this world who have no idea about the internet or cell phones. These are tribes that are completely cut-off from global civilization and do not welcome any kind of contact from the outside world.

-Oddity Central

Les drones deviennent des jouets

Ce n'est pas un oiseau, ni un avion, mais peut-être bien le drone personnel de quelqu'un qui vole dans le ciel au-dessus de votre tête.

-La Presse

The Most Violent Sport On Earth

A mix, of rugby, soccer, american football, boxing, MMA and Greco Roman wrestling, Calcio Storico happens once a year in Florence, Italy. The 600-year-old sport is probably the most violent game you'll ever see.

-Digg

Sex and advertising, Retail therapy

THESE are thrilling days for behavioural research. Every week seems to yield a new discovery about how bad people are at making decisions. Humans, it turns out, are impressionable, emotional and irrational. We buy things we don't need, often at arbitrary prices and for silly reasons. Studies show that when a store plays soothing music, shoppers will linger for longer and often spend more. If customers are in a good mood, they are more susceptible to persuasion. We believe price tends to indicate the value of things, not the other way around. And many people will squander valuable time to get something free.

-The Economist

The Pimps and Prostitutes of 1970s Times Square

From 1972 to 1982, Sheldon Nadelman worked as a bartender at the “roughest bar in town”—Terminal Bar, directly across from the Port Authority. When he wasn’t pouring drinks, Nadelman was taking photographs of his patrons. He had good material: as one regular put it, “through these doors pass some of the most miserable people on Earth.” Over 10 years, Nadelman made more than 1,500 black and white portraits of bouncers and boxers, actors and cooks, businesspeople and hustlers.

-The Atlantic

The World’s Best Bounty Hunter Is 4-Foot-11. Here’s How She Hunts

At 4'11" and just over 100 pounds, Michelle Gomez doesn’t look like the sort of person you’d hire to retrieve earthmoving equipment stolen by a Peruvian crime family. But in the summer of 2013, that’s exactly what she was doing.

-Wired

There's an Anti-Tipping Revolution Brewing in Restaurants

What the hell is tipping, anyway? As immortalized in the opening to Reservoir Dogs, tips aren’t really required by law but neither are they truly optional. If tipping was ever actually some sort of additional bonus to reward exceptional service, that era ended long ago—now tipping usually is that waiter’s wage, as tips allow many employers to pay their tipped employees less than minimum wage, as low as $2.13 an hour.

-Vice

I was a semi-literate truant who read Harold Robbins and the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley. Only my 'wicked' stepmother made me who I am today, writes MARTIN AMIS

Amis never forgave Jane – as she was known to family and friends – for leaving him, refusing to speak to her and turning down her request to see him on his deathbed in 1995. Here, Martin Amis pays his first tribute to his stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard, and reveals the profound influence she had upon him as a young man.

-Daily Mail

Joshua Kotin on The Letters of Ernest Hemingway

ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S LETTERS from the summer and fall of 1925 are especially thrilling. “I’ve written six chapters on a novel and am going great about 15,000 words already,” he tells Sylvia Beach in August. Two weeks later, in a letter to Ezra Pound, he declares, “48,000 words writ. […] If novel not suppressed sh’d sell 8 million copies.” “It is a hell of a fine novel,” he tells Jane Heap a few days later; “Written very simply and full of things happening and people and places and exciting as hell and no autobiographical 1st novel stuff.” Then in a letter to his father in September, he triumphantly announces, “I have finished my novel — 85,000 words — and am very tired inside and out.”

-LA Review of Books

30 trucs fascinants que j’ai appris en glandant sur le Net

Saviez-vous que Voltaire doit sa fortune à une loterie qu’il a réussi à truquer ? Qu’il y a du caca sur la lune ? Jouez avec cette appli dédiée à la connaissance inutile mais passionnante.

-Rue89

The Homes of Hoarders

When photographer Paula Salischiker saw an American TV series about extreme hoarders, she felt instinctively that the way they were being portrayed wasn’t fair. “They are usually shown under a very obscure light, like objects themselves,” Salischiker said via email. “I somehow felt there was something else beyond these stories of horror portrayed with the question of, ‘How can anyone live like that?’ in mind.”

-Slate

What Makes Us Happy?

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.


-The Atlantic

Life after death, The idea of life after death lives on in near-death experiences and messages from beyond the grave. What’s the evidence?

She was nothing like the sweet old lady in Poltergeist, a film that gave me, an overly imaginative child growing up in the 1980s, my most memorable brush with the spirit world. In fact, Caroline seemed so down-to-earth that I wondered if she truly believed this stuff. Maybe she just enjoyed pulling people’s legs and catching the money falling out of their pockets.

-Aeon

This Is As Close To Heaven As You Can Get Without Leaving Earth

There are so many places in the world that will blow your mind, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Canyons, waterfalls, cities and forests all have the power to reduce your legs to jelly and make you start writing romantic novels. No matter just how many there are in existence, we did our best to find some of the ones you should really consider putting on your bucket list, because, wow.

-Viralnova

Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century

There are now over one billion cars traveling roads around the world directly and indirectly costing trillions of dollars in material resources, time and noxious emissions. Imagine all these cars running cleanly for 100 years on just 8 grams of fuel each.

-Industry Tap