Headlines from May 25, 2012
- New research shows Mars “has life’s building blocks,” though there’s still no sign of fossilized SUVs.
- When you in factor in inflation, they’ve taken a 25 percent pay cut in the last six years. The hidden costs of being a New York City cabbie.
- After inadvertently transporting shellfish across the ocean, deep-sea scientists warn against removing organisms from their habitats.
- Unlike private firms, the USDA doesn’t need permission from a court to start collecting on unpaid debts.
- Today’s bulging backpack is a far cry from the bag’s minimalist, adventurous roots.
- Book jackets aren’t dead in the Kindle age, we just need to refocus on function. #longreads
- Marie Curie, Segway founder James Heselden, and other inventors killed by their own inventions.
- I have pretended to be over fifty different Pokémon characters. The cooler me: A dad finds his doppelgänger.
- RVs have long been bound up in the American myth of freedom and mobility and independence, with allusions to the covered wagon, that symbol of the Western frontier.
- The British Film Institute’s painstaking effort to restore nine of Hitchcock’s silent films.
- Do you hate Dickens’s stuff? I can’t read it. Wodehouse’s comic gift: repressing unpleasantness.
- Coach Taylor makes a guest appearance at Buzz Bissinger’s book reading in Austin.
- Trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. #video
- State Dept. human rights report turns the spotlight on China for deteriorating conditions.
- Do you know how many people in Qingdao can’t afford medical cost? Chinese citizens revolt over a $630 million plan to plant trees.
- People who do not know the Bible well have been gulled into thinking it is a good guide to morality.
- Solar plane takes off from Switzerland, heads for Morocco on trial flight for round-the-world trip.
- A weightlifting machine for weightless astronauts. #video
- First installment of Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box,” as serialized on Twitter.
- Tattoos and their origin stories.
- You can make fun of only things that only you can make fun of. Inside the Qatari comedy scene.
- Old but gold: Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner’s series on Jai al-Leno, Afghanistan’s late-night comic.
- Scientists analyze German idea of fun, conclude that Germans just can’t enjoy themselves.
- What your favorite Wes Anderson film says about you.
- The grannies wrote the song themselves in their native tongue, Udmurt. The worst songs of Eurovision 2012.