You Really Don’t Need To Work So Much

Experts once predicted that Americans would face an excess of leisure time. Recently, the New York Times ran a front-page story about the conditions for white-collar workers at Amazon. It revealed a workplace where abrupt firings are common, grown men and women cry at their desks, and people are scolded for not responding to e-mails after midnight. The story made clear how much things have changed in the American workforce. Once upon a time, it was taken for granted that the wealthier classes enjoyed a life of leisure on the backs of the proletariat. Today it is people in skilled trades who can most find reasonable hours coupled with good pay; the American professional is among those subject to humiliation and driven like a beast of burden.


-The New Yorker

The Cursed Paradise of Palmyra Atoll

There are many places in this world that are pervaded by paranormal phenomena, curses, and strange goings on. Houses, buildings, even roads and bridges are all said to become haunted, cursed, or exhibit a certain infusion of the supernatural, but what of an entire island? Can a whole island be cursed? One seemingly idyllic island paradise in the North Pacific is known for its quaint beauty, but perhaps even more well-known as being a cursed place imbued with evil.

-Mysterious Universe

Cooling off

It’s summertime, and people and animals everywhere are looking for ways to escape the heat. From backyard fun to huge theme parks, photographers around the world captured this seasonal pastime.

-The Boston Globe

What really happens at a high-class Sydney sex party

I am making idle chit chat with the taxi driver while my heart beats loudly inside my chest. It is close to 10pm and I am on route to an exclusive Killing Kittens party for Sydney’s ‘sexual elite’. About this time on your average Saturday night, I am in my pjs watching Netflix with my husband of 12 years, whilst having a cup of tea, child in bed. Not tonight.

-Mamamia

25 Queer Women Remember The First Time They Kissed A Girl

''Some of these women have paid a high price for kissing a girl, acknowledging they are gay, and being out. Some have been ostracized from their families, their churches, their friends. What was clear to us as we were filming is that for every woman in our series, whatever the cost for kissing a girl — it was worth it.”

-BuzzFeed

An Identity Thief Explains the Art of Emptying Your Bank Account

Nightfall in Minsk means Dmitry Naskovets begins working the phone. At 24, Naskovets is tall and skinny, and still looks like the college kid he recently was. He’s in his apartment’s kitchen, in a respectable neighborhood off the second ring road in the capital of Belarus. He starts around 6 p.m. and usually doesn’t quit until three the next morning.

-Bloomberg

No One Asks To Be Buried with His iPad

Do you ever wonder what it means to really live? Matthew Crawford, this generation’s leading philosopher-cum-motorcycle-repairman, has a pretty definite answer. For him, it is to be entangled with the physical challenges presented by the world as it is. To be living and to be free, as Crawford sees it, consists of “skillfully engaging” with the obstacles and frustrations of reality, as when playing musical instruments, repairing engines, raising children, or sailing boats. In his first book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” Crawford detailed his own migration from a life of think-tank paper-shuffling to motorcycle repair. He prizes entanglement with the real, because that, he says, is how we really experience magnificence. “To encounter things in this way is basically erotic,” he writes in his new book, “The World Beyond Your Head,” for “we are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty.”

-The New Yorker

How leisure helps us reclaim our human dignity in a workaholic culture

Today, in our culture of productivity-fetishism, we have succumbed to the tyrannical notion of "work/life balance" and have come to see the very notion of "leisure" not as essential to the human spirit but as self-indulgent luxury reserved for the privileged or deplorable idleness reserved for the lazy.

-Brain Pickings

Art Made Flesh: 35 Sculptures Rendered in Human Skin & Hair

Do these fleshy works of art manipulating human body parts into unnatural shapes make you uncomfortable? That’s probably just what the artist was going for.

-Web Urbanist

Voyeuristic photo series lets you peer into the lives — and windows — of New Yorkers

Many a city dweller is familiar with the habit of stealing a peek (or full-on stare) across the street into your neighbor’s window. Living in densely populated cities where apartments are stacked in front of one another like dominoes makes it an especially easy hobby. Several years ago, photographer Gail Albert Halaban also found herself staring out at the people milling about in the apartment and storefront windows in her New York neighborhood and soon had the idea to explore this fascination with watching other people’s lives, turning it into an opportunity to confront the feeling of isolation in a large city in her ongoing series “Out My Window.”

-Washington Post

Cult Movies - Explore

Though many drive-ins have been shut down, and the practice of screening midnight movies in theaters has waned considerably from its heyday in the early 1970s, the thrill of sharing boundary-testing films in the dark can now be enjoyed just as well while curled up on the couch—no accompanying cult required. From the whiff of exploitation emanating from Roger Vadim’s sensational And God Created Woman to the touch of snuff in Michael Powell’s voyeuristic Peeping Tom, these films delicately ride the line between pulp and art, always landing firmly in the latter camp.

-Criterion

30 Stunning pictures worth more than 1000 words

 
Five year old boy smoking at a party in the gypsy community of St. Jacques, Perpignan, southern France. It is quite common for kids to smoke in St. Jacques.

-Leenks

Photographs that take a different look at cultural clichés

It all started when Muir Vidler was in college and photographing the club scene for a gay magazine in London. He noticed an older man—at least by nightclub standards—named Adrian Delgoffe who was dressed in a leather harness. “I thought, that guy is the same age as my dad, and my dad is at home sleeping on the couch in front of the television,” Vidler said. Delgoffe agreed to have his portrait taken and inspired Vidler to find more people who weren’t “acting their age.” 

-Slate