Dreaming of a City for Manila’s Little People

In Manila, the bustling, crowded capital of the Philippines, one marginalized group dreams of a place to call its own. They call themselves the Little People Association of the Philippines, and for years they’ve been working to form their own community, a place made to their size where they can live and work independently, free of the discrimination that makes everyday life difficult. In 2012, photographer Biel Calderon and journalist Eric San Juan spent several months with members of LPAP for their e-book, The Little Big Project.

-Slate

The 10 weirdest artworks ever

From sexy heels trussed and presented on a silver platter to Damien Hirst's formaldehyde shark, a tour through some of the strangest, most shocking surrealist art around.

-The Guardian

Les « hikikomori » : « Je ne suis pas anormal, je ne sors juste plus »

Lucas (le prénom a été modifié) serait allé assez loin dans la vie s’il ne l’avait pas abandonnée. Maigre, malingre même, le visage mangé par de grosses lunettes sur sa photo de profil Facebook, il n’est pas repoussant. Il avait commencé une khâgne, puis des études de lettres avant de tout laisser tomber. A 24 ans, cela fait deux ans qu’il ne quitte plus sa chambre. La seule personne qu’il voit, c’est son père, chez qui il habite en banlieue parisienne et qui le blanchit, le nourrit. En T-shirt et en caleçon, il reste devant son ordinateur, à se gaver de jeux vidéo, de surf sur Internet et surtout de haine de soi.

-Rue89

Bill Murray, Internet Jester

Bill Murray is your Facebook friend—or else, a friend of a friend, showing up with regularity in your feed. You know what he’s up to. This week, he was the guy joining a couple in Charleston, South Carolina, during their engagement photo shoot. Last month, he was giving an impromptu speech about finding sturdy, true love to a group of cheering bros during a bachelor party. Then he lifted the soon-to-be groom onto his shoulders. Murray, the man in public, is a promise of Internet virality, a gift to Web editors sweating clicks or visitors or impressions. In the world, he is mysterious, unexpectedly appearing among strangers. You have to call a special 800 number to get a hold of him. Online, he is ubiquitous, just one search away. He doesn’t have a Twitter account (just a fake one, of course), and why should he, since someone else will fill us all in on what he’s been doing.

-The New Yorker

Vietnamese Motorbikes and the Amazing Things They Carry

In Vietnamese cities, high population densities, narrow streets, and a tradition of shopping locally have made motorbikes the preferred way to transport just about anything. Photographer Hans Kemp arrived in the country in 1991 just before Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, and was immediately overwhelmed by the rushing crowds preparing for the holiday. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was an incessant stream of motorbikes on the road in front of me. There were entire families on a bike, guys in suits, girls dolled up. I stood there mesmerized, intoxicated by this all-permeating scent of petrol mixed with perfume, sound, color, and motion.

-Slate

Center of the Universe

I was a young Marine scout sniper, definitely his type. And for a single, unforgettable afternoon, Orange County’s most notorious serial killer coaxed me into a place from which many didn’t escape.I read something on the Internet one recent evening that made a brief and tangential reference to a serial killer preying on Marines in Southern California in the 1970s and early ’80s. Having been stationed at Camp Pendleton, I thought, “How come I never heard about this?” I had returned to the East Coast upon my discharge in September 1980, but still. So I searched “serial killer California Marines 80s” and came up with the name Randy Kraft.

-Orange Coast

Chinese Men Searching For Wives Abroad Have Started A Disturbing Trend

KANDAL PROVINCE, Cambodia — Petite, soft-spoken and innocent Kai Sochoeun dreamed of a better life, away from the poverty she was born into in rural Cambodia.
She passed her days fetching water from a pond and tending to chickens that roamed near her wooden stilt home. She watched the men in her village skeptically. If they only cared about card games and alcohol, how could marriage improve her life? “I wasn't interested in a husband,” she said. That changed when an acquaintance of her uncle approached her with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

-Business Insider

Abandoned Hotels Around The World

From the Cayman Islands, Bali and Germany, to Alabama, New Jersey and Detroit, these abandoned hotels are creepy beautiful.


-5 Things I Learned Today

41 Eerie Photos of Abandoned Soviet Buildings

Rebecca Litchfield stepped into her first abandoned building, a Victorian asylum, in 2005. Today she travels the world, taking pictures of broken and forgotten places. For her latest project, she explored the remains of the crumbled Soviet Union and satellite states. The result was the breathtaking collection found in her new book, Soviet Ghosts.

-Mental Floss

The Reykjavik Confessions

Over decades and decades in Iceland people have gone missing without anyone finding anything out. They just sort of disappear.

-BBC

An Anatomy of Iceland's Penis Museum

  A collection that started as a joke now has a higher purpose.

-The Atlantic

The Strange Swiss Custom of Dressing Up as a Bush and Throwing Women in Wells

 

However you spent your weekend, it’s probably safe to say that it didn’t include disguising youself as a bush, sneaking up on unsuspecting women, and dunking them in a nearby well.
Unless you happen to live in the Swiss village of Ettingen, where people did exactly that. It’s all part of a fertility custom so quirky that even most Swiss people haven’t heard of it: Men cover their bodies in beech brushwood, simulating fauns and forest spirits, before chasing random women on the street, picking them up, and subsequently dipping them into fountain wells.

-Vice

Slavery, Sex and the Roots of Brazil's Transcendent Style of Soccer

 

When I was ten, just old enough for familial truths, my mother began telling me about the time she spent in displaced-persons camps across Germany. The horrors of the previous few years were so immense that her mother would fall asleep imagining a transplanted life in Brazil, where the bulk of her surviving relatives had wisely fled before the war. But all her pleasing fantasies about starting over in the tropics were ruined by a xenophobic reality. My grandparents had picked one of the worst moments in Brazilian history to file an immigration application. Quotas shut them out. They settled on a more plausible destination: Washington, D.C.

-New Republic

Cancer Treatment as Comic Book

I once advised my old friend, comics artist Art Spiegelman, against using the holocaust as a subject for a comic book. We all know how well that advice turned out. Since then, I’ve read dozens of graphic novels dealing weighty personal themes of war, persecution, and health, and have come to understand that addressing life-and-death horrors through wit and humor can be quite liberating for the artist/author—and inspiring for the reader as well.


Still, I felt the dread of oncoming stress as I opened Matt Freedman’s new graphic novel Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal. But I’m glad I did open this moving, sometimes hilarious, and, yes, emotionally draining account of an all-too-common ordeal.

-The Atlantic

Climate Change Will Force Us to Abandon Coastal Cities

 
On Monday, the New York Times reported on two new climate change studies that came to the same, terrifying conclusion: “The heat-trapping gases could destabilize other parts of Antarctica as well as the Greenland ice sheet, potentially causing enough sea-level rise that many of the world’s coastal cities would eventually have to be abandoned. ”Abandoned.

-New Republic