18 avr. 2014
Sex, Snow, and Cocaine: My Life As a Ski Resort 'Chalet Bitch'
Belle de Neige (“Beautiful Snow”, if you didn’t take French) is a blog about what people who work at ski resorts get up to when they’re not fixing snow blades, or delivering après-ski drinks to Jemima Khan and whoever else goes on ski holidays. The writer just condensed a bunch of her blog posts into a book, so we asked her to condense her book back into a blog post. This is that.
-Vice
This Is What Finding Love Online Looks Like
It wasn’t long ago that online dating—and admitting you were dating someone you met online—was a taboo subject. Couples who met online would defer questions about how they met or even make up a story far less scandalous than meeting “anonymously” over the Internet. Clearly that isn’t the case anymore.
-Slate
Bagong Silang, a short film about a community that lives in a cemetery
In death ther is life : the unique community that lives in a cemetery by Manila Bay in the Philippines.
-Aeon Film
China’s Concubine Culture Lives On in Mistress Villages
A friend attended a work-related banquet in China recently. Seated at the same table were several men who were executives of Chinese state-owned enterprises. As bottles of Hennessy Cognac and jet-fuel-like baijiu were opened and quickly consumed, the topic of conversation awkwardly jostled from work to geopolitics to the price of Apple’s latest iPhone. One executive, his face glowing red from the night’s imbibitions, said he needed to buy one because his mistress demanded it. In fact, she was texting him about it as he spoke. He held out his phone’s lit screen as proof, new messages still incoming on his WeChat account.
-The Daily Beast
The Paramedic Murderer of Narrowsburg, N.Y.
In the hills around Narrowsburg, N.Y., where second-home owners tend gardens and the Lenape once roamed, people don’t forget a mysterious death. They still talk about the bar owner who shot his waitress in the chest late one night and served just six months in jail after saying it was an accident. Then there was the story about the man who arrived home one night only to notice that his wife, who had been in the back seat, was no longer in the car. Her body was found on the side of a road along the route he’d taken. Charges were never filed.
-NY Times
12 avr. 2014
The Man Behind the World's Most Famous Fake Vagina
Steve Shubin wants us to talk more about touching ourselves. The inventor of the world’s most successful sex toy, the Fleshlight, a polymer vagina housed inside something that looks a bit like a fat torch, said that it's a man's duty to masturbate frequently. As such, he's baffled as to why dildos have become an acceptable brunch conversation topic while male sex toys remain taboo.
-Vice
What People Eat Around the World
Photojournalist Peter Menzel and his wife and writer Faith D'Aluisio, from California, spent three years travelling to 30 countries visiting countless people to document what they eat over the course of a single day. The result is a fascinating study of people and their diets.
-Amusing Planet
Life and death at his fingertips: watching a brain surgeon at work
It is just after lunchtime on a wet Monday in February when Henry Marsh is finally able to return to the operating theatre in the Atkinson Morley Wing of St George’s Hospital in Tooting, south London, and begin the work that will save a young woman’s life.
Jenny is not long out of her teens; the previous week, she had collapsed – from a haemorrhage, the result of an abnormality in the veins and arteries of her brain. She had been close to death: late at night, Henry had operated to remove a blood clot and save her life. But a later scan showed that the abnormality remained. If the problem was not corrected, she could suffer another bleed at any time. So this will be the second time he has been inside her skull.
-New Statesman
6 avr. 2014
This Is What Gun Ownership Looks Like in America
In early 2013, on a five-day assignment for the German magazine Stern, photographer Charles Ommanney traveled around the United States photographing Americans with their guns. Ommanney has built a career working as a political and documentary photographer and felt a responsibility to make a story that wasn’t just another “predictable NRA-bashing” type of series. He wanted to see “real” people to find out why they wanted to have guns in their homes. He also decided to shoot the project in a more engaged manner with his subjects instead of simply being a fly on the wall.
-Slate
How will life extension transform punishment
What happens to life sentences if our lifespan is radically extended? A philosopher talks about future punishment.
-Aeon
Man hangs himself and 4-year-old son over malware message
Senseless tragedy struck in the Romanian commune of Movila Miresii when Marcel Datcu took a distressing but wholly impersonal malware threat at face value, killing himself and his four-year-old son, Nicusor, in a misguided attempt to avoid prison and spare his boy shame.
Datcu had apparently visited a number of adult websites and thereby exposed his computer to infection by ransomware, a set of tools used by cybercriminals to lock down a device and extort the user for a cash payout, often while posing as law enforcement. Such insidious tactics have been popular of late, and are nowhere more prevalent than in Eastern Europe and Russia.
-Daily Dot
The U.S. Air Force’s Most Secretive Squadron
Never mind stealth bomber outfits and units remotely operating multi-million-dollar spy drones from secure desert outposts. Arguably the most secretive flying squadron in the whole U.S. Air Force owns a bunch of small Cessnas and medium-size transports that look pretty much exactly like civilian aircraft.
-Medium
