Headlines from November 19, 2012
- It was like someone had written a Murphy’s Law algorithm and deployed it at scale. The data crunchers who won the 2012 election.
- If you’re so determined, how to hide email communication from prying eyes.
- Related: Privacy Settings for Bigamists. #tmn
- The famous Champs-Elysées…are now a by-word for scruffy cafés and souvenir shops. A challenge to Paris: Reclaim your sparkle.
- Raymond Carver’s OkCupid profile, edited by Gordon Lish.
- Electronic tattoos, water purified with oil, and other world-changing ideas.
- It was not intended to drive people crazy. From 1913, Charlotte Perkins Gilman explains why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
- In a new set of illustrations, Carson Ellis channels medieval Norwegian mothers. #tmn
- A comic-book version of what happens at R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet wrap parties.
- Work from Dr. Seuss’s day job: advertising illustrator. #art
- Ikea apologizes to East German political prisoners for forcing them to make furniture in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
- Debunking “neuromyths”: We use 100% of our brains, and environmental stimulus aids lab rats, not humans.
- Watch the trailer for PROSPECT, “a coming of age story about a teen girl who is with her father on a toxic foreign planet.” #video
- Archaeologists unearth 10,000-year-old home in Scotland.
- Researchers discover Tycho Brahe did not die of mercury poisoning, as previously believed. #history
- Civil War surgeons almost always had chloroform to anesthetize patients before an amputation.
- Charts presented on the U.S. Congress floor. #photos
- Death toll climbs in Israel-Hamas fight, with 91 Palestinians killed.
- Conservatives in Wyoming—America’s least populous state, 86% white—stunned by Romney’s loss.
- In Germany, Putin defends jailing Pussy Riot with baseless charges of anti-Semitism.
- Customers hard to find for BBC sex-criminal star’s old Range Rover that includes a bed in the back.
- Long accounting for the Grateful Dead’s afterlife tended by fans and archivists. #longreads
- Increase in emails from the Taliban “coincides with the end of the annual Taliban fighting season.”
- Elderly criminals in Japan commit 50 times more assaults in 2012 than in 1992.
- Photos of compression and discomfort in Tokyo’s packed subways. #photography
- Infamy, job loss, and criminal trials after an Alabama fan tea-bags a fan from LSU.
- Our biggest mistake may have been relying on previous experiences. Expert skier tells the story of surviving a deadly avalanche.
- Studies find people can read and do math unconsciously.
- London counts 11 Abbey Roads; Beatles-loving visitors constantly visit the wrong ones.
- Poem for your Monday break: Rita Dove’s “November for Beginners.”
- See also: Miles Davis improvises over LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down.” #video
- Adam Curtis shows how, despite the music playing, we are all together when we dance. #video