Headlines from May 8, 2012
- America is “obscenely comfortable in conflating black with crime.”
- Losing weight does not always equal looking good—but sometimes it does and it’s okay to say so. Responding to “Why Black Women Are Fat.”
- France’s center-right party stares glumly at new paths in a post-Sarkozy future.
- Part one of “Our French Connection”—figuring out what Americans think of the French right now. #tmn #longreads
- Related: The whole story currently available as an e-pub for $3.
- Carnegie Mellon computer scientists use Foursquare to map “livehoods” rather than neighborhoods.
- YouTube isn’t just the immediate past, it’s the pre-internet past.
- Young writers today avoid writing what they know because they only know SUVs in the suburbs.
- Erin Geyer investigates myths about serial killers, concludes that they could be basically anyone.
- Story of one man’s man-boobs, and how he came to embrace the name Tits.
- Krulwich: Ike’s highway system killed the popularity of hats.
- Comparison: Downton Abbey is essentially Battlestar Galactica with corsets.
- The biblioracle needs your last 5 books in order to immortalize a recommendation for your next read.
- Large-scale relief prints made from trees’ cross-sections. #tmn
- Poll says North Carolina very likely to amend its constitution today to ban same-sex marriage.
- Upgraded “underwear bomb” plot foiled before an AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) bomber could reach an airport.
- Ethiopia cracks down on international adoptions as reports of fraud surface.
- Nuclear-free Japan looks to thermal springs for energy alternative.
- State of the Free Tibet campaign now that MCA is dead.
- Long profile of Facebook’s boy genius Zuckerberg discovers his hidden talent: firing people.
- Porn company sues Tumblr for copyright infringements.
- Meta column about how “meta” went from fashionable to ubiquitous in pop culture.
- Angry Birds Land opens inside a Finnish theme park.
- Exhorting obese people to eat less and exercise more doesn’t work; blame the value of the advice. #opinions
- Airplane seats designed for 170-pound dummies may not protect today’s larger passengers.
- South Korea confiscates “human flesh” capsules believed to fight disease.
- “The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’” The history of human remains used in medicine.
- Biologists think to look for shy animals’ DNA inside leeches’ last meals.
- Tragic story of wife caring for husband with frontotemporal dementia. #longreads
- Trailer for a documentary about the voice-over side of Hollywood. via #video