Good Reads

But before the night of August 14, 1944, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg ’48CC, and William S. Burroughs weren’t the three principals of a literary movement — at least, not one that existed outside their own heads. They were simply roommates, friends, and confidants, who shared books and booze and sometimes beds. And, as history would largely soon forget, there was a fourth.

A murder in Riverside Park changed the lives of a group of Columbia undergrads. Did it change literature as well?​

- read the full article The Last Beat (from Columbia Magazine)​

The giant squid has consumed the imaginations of many oceanographers. How could something so big and powerful remain unseen for so long—or be less understood than dinosaurs, which died out millions of years ago? The search for a living specimen has inspired a fevered competition. For decades, teams of scientists have prowled the high seas in the hope of glimpsing one. These “squid squads” have in recent years invested millions of dollars and deployed scores of submarines and underwater cameras, in a struggle to be first.

Can Steve O’Shea capture the sea’s most elusive creature?​

- read the full article The Squid Hunter (from The New Yorker)​

A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.

“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”

Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.

“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.
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The spectacular thefts of Apollo Robbins. In magic circles, Robbins is regarded as a kind of legend. Psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and the military study his methods for what they reveal about the nature of human attention.​

- read the full article A Pickpocket’s Tale (from The New Yorker)​

West, however, wasn’t ready to retire, and so he began searching for subjects that needed his skill set.

Eventually he settled on cities: the urban jungle looked chaotic — all those taxi horns and traffic jams — but perhaps it might be found to obey a short list of universal rules. “We spend all this time thinking about cities in terms of their local details, their restaurants and museums and weather,” West says. “I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.”

- read the full article A Physicist Solves the City (from NYT)​

Tide detergent: Works on tough stains. Can now also be traded for crack. A case study in American ingenuity, legal and otherwise.​

- read the full article Suds for Drugs (from New York Magazine)​

Black and Latina women in porn are very often given names of food, cars, inanimate objects, countries, and spices. No one ever told me, or many women of my generation, how important it was to have a name that was a real woman’s name.​

- read the full article Transforming Pornography: Black Porn for Black Women (from Guernica Magazine)​

Tonight I’m on a hike with three members of the Southeastern Ohio Bigfoot Investigation Society (that’s SOSBI for short). With a whopping 228 sightings listed on an Internet database, Ohio has the third most Bigfoot sightings in the nation. According to some, the Ohio Bigfoot has been living in the area for centuries. He just doesn’t want to be found.​

- read the full article Waiting for Bigfoot (from Outside Magazine)​

On Feb. 15 2010, Thomas Bruso's already unpredictable life took an abrupt detour. It was the day he ceased being Thomas Bruso and became Epic Beard Man, Internet sensation.​

- read the full article The rise and fall of an Internet sensation (from SF Weekly)​

On Nov. 29, 1972, a crude table-tennis arcade game in a garish orange cabinet was delivered to bars and pizza parlors around California, and a multi-billion-dollar industry was born. Here’s how that happened, direct from the freaks and geeks who invented a culture and paved the way for today’s tech moguls.​

- read the full article Atari Teenage Riot: The Inside Story Of Pong And The Video Game Industry’s Big Bang (from Buzzfeed)​

Although rare diseases are still among the worst diagnoses to receive, it would not be a stretch to say there’s never been a better time to have one.

When Peeper’s parents received their daughter’s diagnosis, they didn’t tell her. She enjoyed a kickball-and-bicycles childhood in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and only became aware of her disorder when she was 8.

“I remember vividly, because I was getting dressed for Sunday school,” she told me. She realized that she could no longer fit her left hand through her sleeve. “My left wrist had locked in a backwards position”—the result of a new bone that had grown in her arm.​

- read the full article The Girl Who Turned to Bone (from The Atlantic)​

The pitch was simple: “John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Blues Brothers, how about it?” But the film The Blues Brothers became a nightmare for Universal Pictures, wildly off schedule and over budget, its fate hanging on the amount of cocaine Belushi consumed. From the 1973 meeting of two young comic geniuses in a Toronto bar through the careening, madcap production of John Landis’s 1980 movie, Ned Zeman chronicles the triumph of an obsession.​

- read the full article Soul Men: The Making of The Blues Brothers (from Vanity Fair)​

When thieves stole his beloved commuter bike on a busy street in broad daylight, Patrick Symmes snapped—and set out on a cross-country plunge into the heart of America’s bike-crime underbelly. What he saw will rattle your frame.​

- read the full article Who Pinched My Ride? (from Outside Magazine)​

Though there’s an industry built on telling you otherwise, there are few real joys to middle age. The only perk I can see is that, with luck, you’ll acquire a guest room. Some people get one by default when their kids leave home, and others, like me, eventually trade up, and land a bigger house.
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“If you prefer a shower to a tub, I can put you upstairs in the second guest room,” I say. “There’s a luggage rack up there as well.” I hear these words coming from my puppet-lined mouth and shiver with middle-aged satisfaction. Yes, my hair is gray and thinning. Yes, the washer on my penis has worn out, leaving me to dribble urine long after I’ve zipped my trousers back up. But I have two guest rooms.​

- read the full article Company Man by David Sedaris (from The New Yorker)​

Things Adam Bulger hates about David Cross: Smugness, Hostility, An inability to write "jokes"

Things to love about David Cross: Smugness, Hostility, Satiric bile​

- read the full article David Cross talks with Someone Who Hates Him [Adam Bulger] and Someone Who Loves Him [Eric Spitznagel] (from Believer Magazine​

Tim Masters, who seems closer to 30 years old than his chronological age of 40, is wearing faded jeans, a blue T-shirt, and well-worn, white running shoes. He has a reddish-brown mustache and a carefully groomed beard. His blue eyes convey an intense attention to detail as he talks about the treachery and turning points that have shaped his life since that morning nearly 25 years ago when he stumbled upon a corpse and became a suspect. The stigma hovered over him during high school and through an eight-year stint in the Navy. It peaked with his arrest in 1998 and his conviction for first-degree murder.

It took everything he had to keep his spirit from folding into itself during the decade-long legal battle that ultimately won his release from prison. The events surrounding the case tore apart a town and challenged people’s perceptions of right and wrong, truth and justice, and who, really, were the good guys and the bad guys.​

- read the full article Presumed Guilty: The wrongful conviction of Tim Masters is one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in Colorado history. (from 5280 Magazine)​

“If you are not making mistakes, you’re not taking enough risks,” a Debbie Millman counseled. “Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before,” Neil Gailman advised young creators.​

- read the full article Intuition Pumps: Daniel Dennett on the Dignity and Art-Science of Making Mistakes (from Brain Pickings)​

B. F. Skinner’s notorious theory of behavior modification was denounced by critics 50 years ago as a fascist, manipulative vehicle for government control. But Skinner’s ideas are making an unlikely comeback today, powered by smartphone apps that are transforming us into thinner, richer, all-around-better versions of ourselves. The only thing we have to give up? Free will.​

- read the full article The Perfected Self (from The Atlantic)​

Chris Kyle, a decorated sniper, tried to help a troubled veteran. The result was tragic.​

- read the full article In the Crosshairs (from The New Yorker)​

“Love LEGO but hate plastic?” asked Apartment Therapy in March, just one of more than a dozen design blogs to feature wooden Lego blocks, made by Mokulock, this spring. Described as “handmade” and “all-natural,” the eight-stud-size blocks have clear visual appeal, in the minimalist Muji way, and come packaged in a brown cardboard box, with an unbleached cotton sack for storage.
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Are Legos even Legos without the universal snap-together property? Do toys need to be as artisanal as our food? I understand why my child would want to make his own toy, but does someone else need to do it for him? And why wood?​

- read the full article Why Wooden Toys? (from the New Yorker)​

Now, bumper to bumper at 27,000 feet, we were forced to move at exactly the same speed as everyone else, regardless of strength or ability. In the swirling darkness before midnight, I gazed up at the string of lights, climbers’ headlamps, rising into the black sky. Above me were more than a hundred slow-moving climbers. In one rocky section at least 20 people were attached to a single ratty rope anchored by a single badly bent picket pounded into the ice. If the picket popped, the rope or carabiner would instantly snap from the weight of two dozen falling climbers, and they would all cartwheel down the face to their death.​

- read the full article Maxed Out on Everest: How to fix the mess at the top of the world (from National Geographic)​

[Ancient Gay History] is really just yesterday. My surrogate parent Clayton Coots was one of countless closeted men who didn’t live long enough to see this moment.



In a new century dominated by terrorism and recession, few would deny two big bright spots: the election of an African-American president and the expansion of gay civil rights. The first arrived nearly 150 years after the Civil War. The second happened with the speed of a fever dream. The modern gay-rights movement only got going in 1969, after the Stonewall riots. Now a dozen states have legalized same-sex marriage, a concept unknown in political discourse a mere quarter-century ago. More astounding is the likelihood that a conservative-leaning Supreme Court will expand those marital rights, however incompletely, next month—it took more than a century after the Emancipation Proclamation to end all bans on interracial marriage.

As we just learned, a man can still be murdered for being gay a few blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. But the rapidity of change has been stunning. The world only spins forward, as Tony Kushner wrote. And yet as we celebrate the forward velocity of gay rights, I think we must glance backward as well. History is being lost in this shuffle—that of those gay men and women who experienced little or none of today’s freedoms. Whatever the other distinctions between the struggles of black Americans and gay Americans for equality under the law—starting with the overarching horror of slavery—one difference is intrinsic. Black people couldn’t (for the most part) hide their identity in an America that treated them cruelly. Gay people could hide and, out of self-protection, often did. That’s why their stories were cloaked in silence and are at risk of being forgotten.​

- read the full article Ancient Gay History (from New York Magazine)​

Throughout time, humans have been purposefully mislabeling, marketing and adulterating food. But thanks to a global economy, one food fake can reach millions of people; are we doing enough to stop it?​

- read the full article Farm Fakes: A History of Fraudulent Food (from Modern Farmer)​

The search for life on Mars is now in its sixth decade. Forty spacecraft have been sent there, and not one has found a single fossil or living thing. The closer we look, the more hostile the planet seems: parched and frozen in every season, its atmosphere inert and murderously thin, its surface scoured by solar winds. By the time Earth took its first breath three billion years ago, geologists now believe, Mars had been suffocating for a billion years. The air had thinned and rivers evaporated; dust storms swept up and ice caps seized what was left of the water. The Great Desiccation Event, as it’s sometimes called, is even more of a mystery than the Great Oxygenation on Earth. We know only this: one planet lived and the other died. One turned green, the other red.​

- read the full article The Martian Chroniclers: A new era in planetary exploration. (from The New Yorker)​

Sometimes you want to make love. And sometimes, you just want to destroy your man’s penis. Check out the eight sex positions below that’ll be sure to rock his cock off.
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2. The One-Two Punch

This one’s not so much a sex position as it is an intimate way to relieve stress. After a long day of work, come home, light some candles, put on your favorite tunes, then punch your man in the dick. This will definitely take him by surprise, and you will most certainly destroy his penis.​

- read the full article 8 Sex Positions That Will Blow His Mind And Destroy His Penis (from The Reductress)​