Good Reads

[Laurel]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/Cullum-JFK.jpg

“You’re using this conspiracy theory as an excuse to avoid sex with me.” There’s plenty to choose from, but this is one of the better lines from “Annie Hall,” delivered to Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer character at the breaking point of a failed relationship.

The scene is a flashback to a time when many Americans were obsessed with the official explanation of the Kennedy assassination, as delivered by the Warren Commission, which published its report in book form in September, 1964, much the way that, decades later, the Starr Report was bound and delivered to bookstores. Television news programs were dedicated to parsing its findings, namely that Oswald had acted alone. But, of course, not everyone was convinced. By 1977, when “Annie Hall” was released, the suspicions mentioned in this scene had been fully absorbed into the culture—concerns about bullet trajectory and exit wounds and second shooters and Cubans and Johnson and the mob. It is a perfect kernel of character development: of course the anxious Alvy Singer was a conspiracy kook. His fear of moths helped ruined one relationship, why shouldn’t worries about a Kennedy coverup have ruined another?

If the official version of Kennedy’s assassination is true, there’s nothing funny about it. But a conspiracy might be. In 1991, the Oliver Stone movie “JFK” helped renew the spring of fascination about the murder and the lingering questions that have trailed it. A year later, an episode of “Seinfeld” transformed Stone’s so-called magic bullet into a “magic loogie,” one that had supposedly been spit at Kramer and Newman by the Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez.
[...]
There is something darkly comedic, and readily mockable, about the conspiracy theorist considered as a type: the lonerism, eager dot-connecting, and thinly-veiled death curiosity masked by a supposed quest for the truth. (Mark Lane, the author of “Rush to Judgment,” who toured talk shows in the sixties wearing bulky black glasses, may be the ur-Conspiracy Man of the Kennedy case.) Richard Linklater’s movie “Slacker,” from 1991, gives us another hero of the genre, the Austin, Texas, resident John Slate, author of the not-likely forthcoming book about the assassination, “Conspiracy-A-Go-Go” (or “Profiles in Cowardice”):​

- read the full article The Humor in the J.F.K. Conspiracy (from The New Yorker)​

 

[Laurel]

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3343/3269859182_ce38a3f4f6_z.jpg

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/195n4vlwf73c4jpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

It’s a place where few living New Yorkers have ever set foot, but nearly a million dead ones reside: Hart Island, the United States’ largest mass grave, which has been closed to the public for 35 years. It is difficult to visit and off-limits to photographers. But that may be about to change, as a debate roils over the city’s treatment of the unclaimed dead. Never heard of Hart? You’re not alone—and that’s part of the problem.

Hart Island is a thin, half-mile long blip of land at the yawning mouth of Long Island Sound, just across the water from City Island in the Bronx. Depending on who you ask, it was named either for its organ-like shape or for the deer (or hart) that thrived here after trekking across the frozen sound in the 18th century. Hart is dense with history; it’s been used as a prison for Confederate soldiers, a workhouse for the poor, a women's asylum, and a Nike missile base during the Cold War.

Its most important role has been to serve as what’s known as a potter’s field, a common gravesite for the city’s unknown dead. Some 900,000 New Yorkers (or adopted New Yorkers) are buried here; hauntingly, the majority are interred by prisoners from Riker’s Island who earn 50 cents an hour digging gravesites and stacking simple wooden boxes in groups of 150 adults and 1,000 infants. These inmates—most of them very young, serving out short sentences—are responsible for building the only memorials on Hart Island: Handmade crosses made of twigs and small offerings of fruit and candy left behind when a grave is finished.​

- read the full article What We Found at Hart Island, The Largest Mass Grave Site In the U.S. (from Gizmodo)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.trbimg.com/img-528eae4e/turbine/la-pj-scottsboro-jpg-20131121/600

FAIRHOPE, Ala. — The state of Alabama can't rewrite a history shot through with hate and violence, but with the help of one determined woman it has added a postscript.

On Thursday, Alabama's parole board pardoned the last of the long-dead Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers falsely accused of rape in 1931. Their case was monumental. It divided some residents here and united others, led to two landmark Supreme Court decisions, and precipitated the civil rights movement in the decades that followed.

All the while, though, justice remained undone for some of the boys as they became men, went into hiding, and eventually died with the stigma of rape on their reputations. That changed only after a long campaign by a Scottsboro woman.

In the mid-1970s, when Sheila Washington was 17, she found a package under her parents' bed. She retrieved it: a pillowcase, which held something rolled in layers of plastic. She unwrapped it, and a book tumbled out.

"An old, thin paperback," she said Thursday. A book about nine boys who were black, like her. What she read changed her life.​

- read the full article In Alabama, a measure of justice for the Scottsboro Boys (from The L.A. Times)​

 

[Laurel]

Bumping fists has a negative bro-stigma, but it's better than shaking hands—in that it transmits significantly fewer bacteria. At a time of global concern that our antibiotics are becoming obsolete, new research shows how fist bumping could save lives.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/2013/11/Screen_Shot_2013_11_19_at_5.10.16_PM/83df000f5.png

"Closed-fist high-fives." In 2008, that's how a wide-eyed New York Times article described the confounding gesture Barack Obama was sharing with members of the media on the campaign trail, and later, famously, his wife.

The world, though, had for years been calling this a fist bump. (Or, Wikipedia offers: "dap, pound, fist pound, bro fist, spudding, fo' knucks, box, bust, pound dogg, props, bones, or respect knuckles.")

The origin of the fist bump is a subject of concentrated but heated disagreement. Many narratives center on athletics, with historians of various sports claiming the fist bump as their creation. Athletes wanted to minimize the risk of dislocating a finger in a passing or celebratory handshake. The more aggressive, less formal fist bump was better suited to the cause, and it continues to evoke machismo and bro-ness.
[...]
So McClellan's team had a small group of clean-handed research subjects shake and fist bump at various intervals. They then cultured the bacteria grown on their hands. The handshake exposed more than three times as much skin surface area as the fist bump, and the contact averaged 2.7 times longer. More bacteria were transmitted, as expected, with the handshake.​

- read the full article The Fist Bump Manifesto (from The Atlantic)​

 

[JohnnySavage]

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3343/3269859182_ce38a3f4f6_z.jpg

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/195n4vlwf73c4jpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

It’s a place where few living New Yorkers have ever set foot, but nearly a million dead ones reside: Hart Island, the United States’ largest mass grave, which has been closed to the public for 35 years. It is difficult to visit and off-limits to photographers. But that may be about to change, as a debate roils over the city’s treatment of the unclaimed dead. Never heard of Hart? You’re not alone—and that’s part of the problem.

Hart Island is a thin, half-mile long blip of land at the yawning mouth of Long Island Sound, just across the water from City Island in the Bronx. Depending on who you ask, it was named either for its organ-like shape or for the deer (or hart) that thrived here after trekking across the frozen sound in the 18th century. Hart is dense with history; it’s been used as a prison for Confederate soldiers, a workhouse for the poor, a women's asylum, and a Nike missile base during the Cold War.

Its most important role has been to serve as what’s known as a potter’s field, a common gravesite for the city’s unknown dead. Some 900,000 New Yorkers (or adopted New Yorkers) are buried here; hauntingly, the majority are interred by prisoners from Riker’s Island who earn 50 cents an hour digging gravesites and stacking simple wooden boxes in groups of 150 adults and 1,000 infants. These inmates—most of them very young, serving out short sentences—are responsible for building the only memorials on Hart Island: Handmade crosses made of twigs and small offerings of fruit and candy left behind when a grave is finished.​

- read the full article What We Found at Hart Island, The Largest Mass Grave Site In the U.S. (from Gizmodo)​

That was interesting. I've spent the last hour googling and mapping.

video

 

[Eternal_88]

Hey Laurel?

 

[Phelia]

I love this thread

*fistbump*

 

[MisterChillax]

What It's Like to Fail

Editor's note: The following is the personal story of David Raether, a former comedy writer for the sitcom Roseanne who later became homeless. It is adapted from his memoir, "Tell Me Something, She Said."

On Christmas Day, 2001, I sat down at my Yamaha G2 grand piano, set up my metronome, and opened up a book of Shostakovich’s “Preludes.” It was late afternoon, and the warm, orange light of the fading day poured into my five-bedroom house — paid for by my $300,000 a year income as a Hollywood comedy writer — in San Marino, California, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. My wife, Marina, was cooking dinner for me and our eight children, and it was as happy a Christmas afternoon as I would ever have.

****

On Christmas morning, 2008, I woke up on the floor of the 1997 Chrysler minivan I lived in, parked behind the Kinko’s just two miles from my old house in San Marino. It was raining, and I was cold, even though I had slept in three layers of clothes. It was one of those blustery storms that regularly whoosh down from the Gulf of Alaska and pummel Los Angeles during the winter. I climbed out of the van and walked to a Starbucks five blocks away. Although I didn’t have any money, I had scavenged the Sunday Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle from another coffeehouse a couple days before. The baristas didn’t mind me sitting quietly for several hours every day to warm up and kill time.

I was neither a drug addict nor an alcoholic, nor was I a criminal. But I had committed one of the more basic of American sins: I had failed. In eight years, my career had vanished, then my savings, and then our home. My family broke apart. I was alone, hungry, and defeated.

Between 2007 and 2011, some five million American families lost their homes to foreclosure. Some of them found alternative housing by renting an apartment or moving in with family members. But not all of them. Many American families broke apart during this time. Mine was one of them. And I was one of the people who ended up homeless. This, however, is not the story of five million American families. This is just my story.

http://priceonomics.com/what-its-like-to-fail/

 

[Laurel]

Editor's note: The following is the personal story of David Raether, a former comedy writer for the sitcom Roseanne who later became homeless. It is adapted from his memoir, "Tell Me Something, She Said."

On Christmas Day, 2001, I sat down at my Yamaha G2 grand piano, set up my metronome, and opened up a book of Shostakovich’s “Preludes.” It was late afternoon, and the warm, orange light of the fading day poured into my five-bedroom house — paid for by my $300,000 a year income as a Hollywood comedy writer — in San Marino, California, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. My wife, Marina, was cooking dinner for me and our eight children, and it was as happy a Christmas afternoon as I would ever have.

****

On Christmas morning, 2008, I woke up on the floor of the 1997 Chrysler minivan I lived in, parked behind the Kinko’s just two miles from my old house in San Marino. It was raining, and I was cold, even though I had slept in three layers of clothes. It was one of those blustery storms that regularly whoosh down from the Gulf of Alaska and pummel Los Angeles during the winter. I climbed out of the van and walked to a Starbucks five blocks away. Although I didn’t have any money, I had scavenged the Sunday Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle from another coffeehouse a couple days before. The baristas didn’t mind me sitting quietly for several hours every day to warm up and kill time.

I was neither a drug addict nor an alcoholic, nor was I a criminal. But I had committed one of the more basic of American sins: I had failed. In eight years, my career had vanished, then my savings, and then our home. My family broke apart. I was alone, hungry, and defeated.

Between 2007 and 2011, some five million American families lost their homes to foreclosure. Some of them found alternative housing by renting an apartment or moving in with family members. But not all of them. Many American families broke apart during this time. Mine was one of them. And I was one of the people who ended up homeless. This, however, is not the story of five million American families. This is just my story.

http://priceonomics.com/what-its-like-to-fail/

Wow. Good read indeed.

 

[Laurel]

Hey Laurel?

Yes, dear?

I love this thread

*fistbump*

http://img.pandawhale.com/39552-Maurice-moss-it-crowd-fist-bum-FUQY.gif

 

[Leeloo777]

This book is wonderful.

http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347459025l/5203.jpg

 

[Eternal_88]

Wow. Good read indeed.

Could you check your personal messages please? There's a message in there from me to you...there's a cat AND a manic banana, so it's totally not a waste of precious lit time!
(Apologies for contacting you this way, but I'm kinda in need of assistance...I'm super. cereal)

Thanks for replying!

-Me

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750
by Lester K. Little

In this volume, the first on the subject, twelve scholars from a variety of disciplines history, archaeology, epidemiology, and molecular biology
have produced a comprehensive account of the pandemic's origins, spread, and mortality, as well as its economic, social, political, and religious
effects. The historians examine written sources in a range of languages, including Arabic, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Old Irish.

Archaeologists analyze burial pits, abandoned villages, and aborted building projects. The epidemiologists use the written sources to track the
diseases means and speed of transmission, the mix of vulnerability and resistance it encountered, and the patterns of reappearence over time.
Finally, molecular biologists, newcomers to this kind of investigation, have become pioneers of paleopathology, seeking ways to identity pathogens
in human remains from the remote past.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1189270.Plague_and_the_End_of_Antiquity

Modern science tracks the path-

Yersinia pestis: New Evidence for an Old Infection

Nov 28, 2012

It is not currently known if these sequences represent strains that are pathogenic to humans, though the placement of their divergence provisionally
suggests a radiation event possibly resulting from a distinct epidemic occurring significantly in advance of the Black Death.

Based on similarity in mortality levels, geographic distribution, and recorded symptoms, historians have long suspected that the Plague of Justinian
(542–740 AD) might have been caused by the same infectious agent as that responsible for the 14th-century Black Death [5].
*5. Sherman IW (2006) The Power of Plagues. Washington, D.C: ASM Press. 431p.

Since several publications have implicated Y. pestis as the principal cause of the Black Death by phylogenetic assignment and evaluation of DNA quality [1]
[6], [7], the possibility that the Plague of Justinian may have been responsible for the deep cluster we observe here carries some legitimacy.

This is further supported by the placement of the cluster approximately half the distance between the Black Death (1283–1342 AD) and the ancestral
rodent strain Y. pestis microtus, which is suspected to have diverged from the soil-dwelling Y. pseudotuberculosis root approximately 2000 years ago
(41–480 AD). Our cursory dating analysis based on relative branch lengths reveals a divergence time of 733–960 AD for this cluster, thus placing it in
a phylogenetic position expected for a Y. pestis radiation event roughly coincident with the Plague of Justinian.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0049803

 

[JohnnySavage]

http://galleries.gothamistllc.com/asset/5292b00607fa4e35e4272997/mobile/rennfair-27.jpg

Yes, a mere 60 miles outside of D.C. sits a particularly unusual piece of abandoned history. Just off of U.S. Route 3 in Fredricksburg, in the middle of what locals like to call "Sherwood Forest," the Virginia Renaissance Faire is slowly returning to the earth, its plywood facades and half-eaten turkey legs feeding the forest that's reclaiming it.

Situated on land once owned by George Washington's mother, the f air opened for business in the summer of 1996. The site cost upwards of $5 million to purchase and renovate. It was an investment - made by then owner and operator Renaissance Entertainment Corporation - that would prove foolhardy. Done in by awful weather (exacerbated by its swampy location), poor ticket sales and technical issues, the park closed for good in 1999.

Many of the ren faire's dressings and accoutrements were moved to REC's other parks - they own renaissance fairs in various locations around the U.S. - but the structures remained, left to fade ingloriously back into the Earth. It's most recent owner purchased the land for $1.3 million some years ago and filed for bankruptcy in 2013. It is presently for sale. Yes, if you'd like your very own abandoned Renaissance festival, you can have it for six or seven million dollars.


--- read more Abandoned Faire

 

[Laurel]

Could you check your personal messages please? There's a message in there from me to you...there's a cat AND a manic banana, so it's totally not a waste of precious lit time!
(Apologies for contacting you this way, but I'm kinda in need of assistance...I'm super. cereal)

Thanks for replying!

-Me

I checked and I don't see a PM from you. Could you send it to me here:
http://forum.literotica.com/private.php?do=newpm&u=7

 

[Laurel]

Get your new hands, shipped straight from the uncanny valley!

https://www.sciencenews.org/sites/default/files/main/blogposts/gt_Rubber%20hand_free.jpg

If you had to have a prosthetic hand, would you want it to look like a real hand? Or would you prefer a gleaming metallic number, something that doesn’t even try to look human?

A new study looks at one of the issues that prosthetic designers and wearers face in making this decision: the creepy factor. People tend to get creeped out by robots or prosthetic devicesthat look almost, but not quite, human. So Ellen Poliakoff and colleagues at the University of Manchester in England had people rate the eeriness of various prosthetic hands.

Forty-three volunteers looked at photographs of prosthetic and real hands. They rated both how humanlike (realistic) the hands were and how eerie they were, defined as “mysterious, strange, or unexpected as to send a chill up the spine.” Real human hands were rated both the most humanlike and the least eerie (a good thing for humans). Metal hands that were clearly mechanical were rated the least humanlike, but less eerie overall than prosthetic hands made to look like real hands, the team reports in the latest issue of Perception.​

- read the full article Almost-lifelike hands perceived as creepy (from Science News)​

 

[Laurel]

I thought about something my dad told me awhile ago: “When someone violates your boundaries, they forfeit their right to politeness. You get to set the tone.”

http://www.xojane.com/files/Construction-worker-catcaller-600x450.jpg

Yesterday I was taking an early morning walk around my neighborhood before work. It was still pretty dark out, and as I shuffled groggily past a gas station a guy got out of his car and whistled at me. “Hey sweetie! Where you going?” he said. I kept my head down and kept walking. “Where you going?!” he asked again, getting noticeably irritated at my unresponsiveness. I picked up my pace a bit, trying to appear aloof and very sure of myself, but inside I felt anything but. Maybe I should have been more assertive, I thought as I turned the corner. And then I started questioning my own instincts: Maybe I was too rude. Maybe I should have at least smiled or waved or something. It’s embarrassing to admit that I was worried about not being polite enough to a strange man who demanded to know where I was going, but it’s true. Getting catcalled or harassed on the street always makes me feel this way: insecure, nervous, unsure of myself and my reactions.

I thought about something my dad told me awhile ago: “When someone violates your boundaries, they forfeit their right to politeness. You get to set the tone.” So as a reminder to myself and every other woman who isn’t sure how to deal with street harassment, here is a list of totally acceptable ways to respond to catcallers. Take your pick:

1. Keep your head down and keep walking.

2. Hold your head higher and keep walking.

3. Flip him off.

4. Be like, “Wow, yeah, let’s get married.”

5. Stop and glare at him intensely until he looks away.

6. Take a voodoo doll out of your pocket. Stick a pin through its heart.​

- read the full article 25 Totally Acceptable Ways To Respond To Catcallers (from XO Jane)​

 

[Laurel]

Lucid dreams are now being taken seriously by scientists. So why is the researcher who pioneered the field in academic exile?

http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4096/4778530417_70bd66c9e4_o.jpg
image courtesy Robert Bruce Murray III (Flickr)

STEPHEN LABERGE APPEARS SUDDENLY, slipping out from behind a partition at the back of the room, like the Wizard of Oz emerging from behind the curtain. “So the first big question we face,” he announces without preamble, “is what is this reality?”

It’s opening night of a workshop called Dreaming and Awakening, which LaBerge leads at the Kalani Oceanside Retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii. LaBerge, who is 66 years old, is the main attraction—the reason we’re all here. He’s the founding father of the science of lucid dreaming.

If you’ve ever been aware that you are dreaming, but remained asleep, you’ve experienced a lucid dream. Some people claim to have had one at least once, if only briefly—usually just before waking up. With enough practice, say proponents like LaBerge, lucid dreamers can rescript their nightly narratives as they please. According to one recent study, the newly initiated most often use lucid dreams to satisfy sexual appetite or aeronautic fancy. The more experienced, though, claim to be able to create art or acquire skills in their dreams. It is not uncommon to hear testimonials stating that lucid dreaming “changed my life.”

LaBerge says one can choose to become lucid within a dream. Indeed, LaBerge claims to be an uncommonly prodigious lucid dreamer himself, having catalogued thousands of his own lucid dreams. He says it’s a skill that can be cultivated. That’s what two dozen or so paying customers, myself included, have come to Hawaii to learn.​

- read the full article Why the world’s most talented dreamers may hold the secret to a new state of consciousness (from Medium)​

 

[Fata Morgana]

This book is wonderful.

http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347459025l/5203.jpg

That's one of my all time favourite books. I love Dolores.

 

[Laurel]

Fata!

I made you a thread!

http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=959322

 

[Sinny]

Holy crap, this needs to be read by everyone. Linking via evesdreaming: http://jezebel.com/one-womans-dangerous-war-against-the-most-hated-man-on-1469240835

 

[Laurel]

Holy crap, this needs to be read by everyone. Linking via evesdreaming: http://jezebel.com/one-womans-dangerous-war-against-the-most-hated-man-on-1469240835

Wow. Fucked up.

 

[Sinny]

Wow. Fucked up.

I want to cock punt that dude. I actually wanted to say cunt punt, but since he is a dick and has a dick, guess I have to nut punt him. But he really is a cunt. And not a fun cunt like the kind Fata likes. Like a bad, smelly, evil, sociopathic cunt.

 

[Laurel]

I think "cunt punt" is the most accurate.

 

[Laurel]

http://timelifeblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/01_268693.jpg?w=383

Guadalcanal. Iwo Jima. Saipan. These names, and others from the Pacific Theater during World War II, serve as a kind of brutal shorthand for scenes of unspeakable carnage and, at times, unfathomable courage.

But for reasons lost to the decades, countless other pivotal battles in the Pacific have been largely forgotten by most of the world — even as they’re remembered and commemorated by the dwindling number of those still alive who fought in them, and by those who lost husbands, brothers, fathers and friends to the war. The long, long, three-and-half-year New Guinea Campaign, for example, saw scores of battles as bloody and as strategically vital as any others fought during WWII, but the names and places of many of those battles and the places strike no chord with the general public.
[...]
What is ultimately so notable about Strock’s picture, however — beyond its sheer technical excellence, and its quiet power — is that when it was published in LIFE magazine in September 1943, it was the first time that any photograph depicting dead American troops had appeared in any American publication during World War II. The story behind how the photograph came to be published, meanwhile, speaks volumes about LIFE magazine’s national stature during the war, and the strained relationship that always exists (and, in an elemental way, should always exist) between journalists and government officials.

The short version of the story goes like this:

For months after Strock made his now-iconic picture, LIFE’s editors pushed the American government’s military censors to allow the magazine to publish that one photograph. The concern, among some at LIFE and certainly many in the government, was that Americans were growing complacent about a war that was far from over and in which an Allied victory was far from certain. A 25-year-old LIFE correspondent in Washington named Cal Whipple refused to take no for an answer from the censors and — as he put it in a memoir written for his family years later — he “went from Army captain to major to colonel to general, until I wound up in the office of an assistant secretary of the Air Corps, who decided, ‘This has to go to the White House.’”​

- read the full article Behind the Picture: ‘Three Dead Americans,’ Buna Beach, 1943 (from Time)​