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

Delia Derbyshire - Sculptress of Sound documentary

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

“We are ignorant of the beyond, because this ignorance is the condition of our own life. Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting and vanishing.”
—Jules Renard