Good Reads

[Laurel]

Of the 17,808 players (and counting) who’ve run up the dugout steps and onto a Major League field, only 974 have had one-game careers. In baseball parlance, these single-gamers are known as "Cup of Coffee" players. The number fluctuates slightly throughout each season as new prospects get called up to fill in for injured veterans, or when roster size expands in September. (Last year, for example, Braves rookie Julio Teheran was a Cup of Coffee player for the eleven days between his MLB debut and a spot start.) But staying on the list for an extended period of time is generally not a good sign. It's an ominous one, an indication that something's gone horribly wrong, that however long a person has worked to attain his dreams, all he was allowed was a brief glimpse before the curtain was yanked shut in front of him. The Cup of Coffee club is filled exclusively with people who do not want to be members.​

- read the full article The Cup Of Coffee Club: The Ballplayers Who Got Only One Game (from The Awl)​

 

[Laurel]

Growing up on the Upper East Side in the nineteen-seventies, I was a bit of a shut-in. I would prefer to have been a sickly child. I always love it when I read a biography of some key Modernist or neurasthenic Victorian and it says, “So-and-so was a sickly child, forced to retreat into a world of his imagination.” But the truth is that I just didn’t like leaving the house. Other kids played in Central Park, participated in athletics, basked and what have you in the great outdoors. I preferred to lie on the living-room carpet, watching horror movies.

I dwelled in a backward age, full of darkness, before the VCR boom, before streaming and on-demand, before DVRs roamed the cable channels at night, scavenging content. Either a movie was on or it wasn’t. If I was lucky, I’d come home from elementary school to find WABC’s “The 4:30 Movie” in the middle of Monster Week, wherein vengeful amphibians chased Ray Milland like death-come-a-hopping (“Frogs”), or George Hamilton emoted fiercely in what one assumes was the world’s first telekinesis whodunnit (“The Power”). Weekends, “Chiller Theatre,” on WPIX, played horror classics that provided an education on the subjects of sapphic vampires and ill-considered head transplants. I snacked on Oscar Mayer baloney, which I rolled into cigarette-size payloads of processed meat, and although I didn’t know it at the time, started taking notes about artists and monsters.​

- read the full article A Psychotronic Childhood: Learning from B-movies. (from The New Yorker)​

 

[Laurel]

For 12 days she was tortured and raped by a former neighbor, who strung her up on a deer-skinning device. On the fourth day, she forgave him.

Jeffrey Maxwell told the police officers that his house was a mess. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him. He was a big man, 6-foot-5 with nearly 300 pounds poured over a broad frame. He had thick, gray sideburns and greasy, disheveled hair. He smiled at the investigators waiting for him on the small front porch.
...
“When’s the last time you had any contact with Miss Pearson?”

Maxwell thought about it for a moment. “Well,” he said, “she sent me a check here—” He stopped to clear his throat. “She owes me some money.”

Montgomery didn’t miss a beat with his follow-up. “What does she owe you money for?”

Maxwell said he’d loaned her money a couple of years earlier, but he couldn’t remember the exact amount. “A couple thousand dollars,” he told the officers. “I guess I felt sorry for her.”

Montgomery started to ask Maxwell if he would be willing to come down to the sheriff’s office when the front door swung open. They heard the high-pitched voice of an older woman.

“I’m here!” she said. The woman was frail, hunched over, her unwashed hair in knots, her face covered with bruises. She limped quickly past Maxwell, toward the officers. Though Montgomery was carrying a picture of the missing woman, he didn’t recognize her.

“Who are you?” he said.

Before she could answer, one of the men behind Montgomery called out in shock: “That’s her!”

“Lois Pearson,” she said, her sweet Texas twang lingering in the air.

There was a second of stunned silence. Texas Ranger Anthony Bradford, who was standing next to Montgomery at the time, would later explain, “We all needed to pick our jaws up off the ground.”​

- read the full article When Lois Pearson Started Fighting BackTLExxx (from D Magazine)​

 

[Laurel]

On a bright May afternoon in 2007, a German artist and printmaker named Hans-Jürgen Kuhl took a seat at an outdoor café directly opposite the colossal facade of the Cologne Cathedral. He ordered an espresso and a slice of plum cake, lit a Lucky Strike, and watched for the buyer. She was due any minute. Kuhl, a lanky 65-year-old, had to remind himself that he was in no rush. He’d sold plenty of artwork over the years, but this batch was altogether different. He needed to be patient.​

- read the full article The Ultimate Counterfeiter Isn’t a Crook—He’s an Artist (from Wired)​

 

[Laurel]

Another interesting genius-going-missing story

Margie Profet generated solutions to seemingly intractable puzzles of biology. Then she disappeared.

Margie Profet was always a study in sharp contradictions. A maverick thinker remembered for her innocent demeanor, she was a woman who paired running shorts with heavy sweaters year-round, and had a professional pedigree as eccentric as her clothing choices: Profet had multiple academic degrees but no true perch in academe. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Profet published original theories about female reproduction that pushed the boundaries of evolutionary biology, forcing an entire field to take note. Indeed, back then it was hard not to notice Margie Profet, a vibrant young woman who made a “forever impression” on grade school chums and Harvard Ph.D.s alike. Today, the most salient fact about Profet is her absence. Neither friends, former advisers, publishers, nor ex-lovers has any idea what happened to her or where she is today. Sometime between 2002 and 2005, Profet, who was then in her mid-40s, vanished without a trace.​

- read the full article The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Genius (from Psychology Today)​

 

[Laurel]

Postscript to article above: Margaret Profet Found!

Margaret “Margie” Profet has returned. In Psychology Today this month, journalist Mike Martin tells the haunting tale of a promising young evolutionary biologist who vanished without a trace.
...
From her e-mail, which she gave Martin permission to share (emphasis from the original):

“Margie had called us on Monday, after someone who knew her Googled her name and found from your article that she was being sought by family and former colleagues. She had not known that people were looking for her and deeply regrets giving anyone cause for concern on her account.

At the time we lost track of her, Margie was in severe physical pain. Not wanting to trouble anyone else, she did not disclose the fact to us or to her friends, but moved to a new location in which she thought the pain would soon diminish. Instead, it persisted for many years.

Unable to work because of it and subsequent injuries, she had long lived in poverty, sustained largely by the religion she had come to early in the decade.

Margie is finally home now, recovering from her long ordeal and hoping to find work in the near future. She is very happy to be reunited with her family, and we are overjoyed to have her back.”​

- read the full article Missing biologist surfaces, reunites with family (from Nature)​

 

[Laurel]

It was Friday night, May 22, 2009, and one of New York City’s most storied music venues, the Fillmore at Irving Plaza, was sold out. The line stretched all the way down Irving Place, turned the corner onto East 16th, and kept going. People had come from as far away as Michigan, Toronto, and Ohio, but they weren’t lined up for the latest indie darlings or house music sensation. They’d come to see an improbably successful Korean trio named Epik High, which as far as anyone could tell was the first Korean hip hop act to attract a mainstream American audience.
...
But then, at the height of the group’s fame, the comments sections of articles about Epik High started filling up with anonymous messages accusing Lee of lying about his Stanford diploma. In May 2010 an antifan club formed and quickly attracted tens of thousands of members who accused him of stealing someone’s identity, dodging the draft, and faking passports, diplomas, and transcripts. The accusations were accompanied by supposed evidence supplied by the online masses, who also produced slick YouTube attack videos. It was a full-fledged backlash.
...
But in fact Lee had not lied about his academic record. He actually did graduate from Stanford in three and a half years with two degrees. His GPA had been in the top 15 percent of his undergraduate class. The evidence marshaled against him was false. It was an online witch hunt, and last spring I set out to discover why it happened.​

- read the full article The Stalking of Korean Hip Hop Superstar Daniel Lee (from Wired)​

 

[Laurel]

For Terri White, editing lads' mags, with their topless pictures of "real women", was a fast track to success. After years defending her career, she confronts the "monster" she helped create – and returns to face the women who bared all for her.​

- read the full article The woman who edited Nuts magazine (from The Guardian)​

 

[Laurel]

For walking is the ultimate “mobile app.” Here are just some of the benefits, physical, cognitive and otherwise, that it bestows: Walking six miles a week was associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s (and I’m not just talking about walking in the “Walk to End Alzheimers”); walking can help improve your child’s academic performance; make you smarter; reduce depression; lower blood pressure; even raise one’s self-esteem.” And, most important, though perhaps least appreciated in the modern age, walking is the only travel mode that gets you from Point A to Point B on your own steam, with no additional equipment or fuel required, from the wobbly threshold of toddlerhood to the wobbly cusp of senility.

Despite these upsides, in an America enraptured by the cultural prosthesis that is the automobile, walking has become a lost mode, perceived as not a legitimate way to travel but a necessary adjunct to one’s car journey, a hobby, or something that people without cars—those pitiable “vulnerable road users,” as they are called with charitable condescension—do. To decry these facts—to examine, as I will in this series, how Americans might start walking more again— may seem like a hopelessly retrograde, romantic exercise: nostalgia for Thoreau’s woodland ambles. But the need is urgent. The decline of walking has become a full-blown public health nightmare.​

- read the full article The Crisis in American Walking (from Slate)​

 

[Laurel]

Update (6/27/2013): This morning, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that, according to Joel Burns, who holds Sen. Davis' former Fort Worth City Council seat, Davis was equipped with a catheter during her filibuster. When contacted to confirm, Davis' office responded that the senator "made all necessary preparations."

While obsessively watching state Sen. Wendy Davis' heroic filibuster in the Texas Legislature yesterday, I couldn't help thinking the obvious: 13 hours without peeing is a long time. Was she just holding it? Or wearing some sort of, er, contraption? (The options on such things, by the way, are many.)

For the most part, the logistics on this tend to be something politicians keep mum about. "It's a kind of urological mystery," Joseph Crespino, biographer of legendary filibusterer Strom Thurmond, told the BBC last year.

But over time, filibustering heavyweights have tried some pretty incredible tactics to avoid defeat by bathroom—and have gone on to share their tales. A few of them below:​

- read the full article Peeing During Filibusters, Explained (from Mother Jones)​

 

[Laurel]

I first heard about nuclear diving while I was getting my hair cut in downtown Manhattan. My stylist seemed out of place in an East Village salon, so I asked her where she lived. Brooklyn? Queens? Uptown?

“Upstate,” she answered. “I commute two hours each way a few times a week.”

I asked her why, and she stopped cutting.

“Well, my husband has kind of a weird job,” she said. “He’d rather not live around other people.”

I sat up in the chair. “What does he do?”

“He’s a nuclear diver.”

“A what?”

“A diver who works in radiated water at nuclear power plants.”​

- read the full article Swimming On The Hot Side (from PopSci)​

 

[Laurel]

The designer of Passage, The Castle Doctrine and Diamond Trust of London, Jason Rohrer, has developed a game designed to be played by people he'll never know. Rohrer hasn't played it himself, he says, and has buried the game — designed to survive thousands of years — in the Nevada desert, making it likely that no one will ever play it.

It's called A Game for Someone. The game was inspired by ancient board games like Mancala, as well as the architects and builders who, over hundreds of years, constructed religious cathedrals that they themselves would never set foot in, never see completed in their lifetimes.

"I wanted to make a game that is not for right now, that I will never play," Rohrer said, "and nobody now living would ever play."​

- read the full article Game designer Jason Rohrer designs a game meant to be played 2,000 years from now, hides it in desert (from Polygon)​

 

[Laurel]

Erwin, who studied history at the University of Iowa, had been posting on Reddit for about five months. He used the alias Prufrock451, a dual reference to the schlubby protagonist of a T. S. Eliot poem and the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451. Prufrock451's contributions were all over the map. One day he wrote about the historical roots of the civil war in Liberia; another day he told a funny story about a shooting range in Iowa. He also uploaded a few pictures of European forts that he thought looked cool and a quote by Voltaire.

In his atypicalness—Prufrock451 was pretty clearly a quirky character—he was entirely typical of a habitual Reddit user, and like many other redditors, as they are called, he found the site addictive. More than just a creative outlet or time-killer, Reddit was a game. The object was to amass points—”Reddit karma.” Every time Erwin saw his karma level increase, he felt a little squirt of adrenaline. “People are sweating to make you laugh or make you think or make you hate them,” Erwin says. “It’s the human condition, plus points.”

Now, in response to The_Quiet_Earth’s question about time-traveling marines, Erwin started typing. He posted his answer in a series of comments in the thread. Within an hour, he was an online celebrity. Within three hours, a film producer had reached out to him. Within two weeks, he was offered a deal to write a movie based on his Reddit comments. Within two months, he had taken a leave from his job to become a full-time Hollywood screenwriter.​

- read the full article How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big-Budget Flick (from Wired)​

 

[Laurel]

Worries about post-traumatic stress have become a stock part of the media narrative surrounding tragedies like Boston and Newtown. And resilience is supposedly the best we can hope for in the face of adversity. But what if there’s a third option? The story of one mass shooting, and the surprising tug of post-traumatic growth.​

- read the full article The Upside of Trauma (from Pacific Standard Magazine)​

 

[Laurel]

Scientists remain surprisingly conflicted about what it means to die -- and it has big implications for us all

Michael DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh recalls making the rounds at a student teaching hospital with his interns in tow when he remembered that he had a patient upstairs who was near death. He sent a few of the young doctors “to check on Mr. Smith” in Room 301 and to report back on whether he was dead yet. DeVita continued rounds with the remainder of the interns, but after some time had passed he wondered what happened to his emissaries of death. Trotting up to Mr. Smith’s room, he found them all paging through “The Washington Manual,” the traditional handbook given to interns. But there is nothing in the manual that tells new doctors how to determine which patients are alive and which are dead.

Most of us would agree that King Tut and the other mummified ancient Egyptians are dead, and that you and I are alive. Somewhere in between these two states lies the moment of death. But where is that? The old standby — and not such a bad standard — is the stopping of the heart. But the stopping of a heart is anything but irreversible. We’ve seen hearts start up again on their own inside the body, outside the body, even in someone else’s body. Christian Barnard was the first to show us that a heart could stop in one body and be fired up in another. Due to the mountain of evidence to the contrary, it is comical to consider that “brain death” marks the moment of legal death in all fifty states.​

- read the full article The evolution of death (from Salon)​

 

[Laurel]

Incredible as it may seem, and there may be no greater anachronism on earth, there are still “wild” human beings living in some of the remotest corners of the tropics. Known or suspected locations of “uncontacted” groups are mapped and identified at www.uncontactedtribes.org (click on “Where are they?”). Most are around the fringes of the Amazon in the border regions of Brazil, especially in neighboring Perú where there are suspected of being at least fifteen uncontacted groups. Outside of South America, the only remaining uncontacted humans are in the Andaman Islands and Indonesia’s West Papua province (the western half of the island of New Guinea).​

- read the full article The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes (from The New York Review of Books)​

 

[Laurel]

Virginia knows it has DNA evidence that may prove the innocence of dozens of men convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Men just like Barbour. So why won’t the state say who they are?

Bennett Barbour was convicted in 1978 of a rape he didn’t commit. At trial, he had an alibi supported by several witnesses. He didn’t match the victim’s description of her attacker. Barbour suffers from a severe bone disease that would have made it nearly impossible for him to be the assailant. Police found no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, beyond the eyewitness identification by his alleged victim. Barbour was handed an 18-year sentence and paroled after nearly five years.

He tells me his time in prison was “a nightmare.” He has cancer now, “all over my body,” and travels regularly to Richmond for treatment. In prison, he says, “everything is taken away. Your pride ...” as his voice trails off. Jonathan Sheldon, a lawyer familiar with his case says, “People think, ‘Oh, he only got five years.’ But in that five years he lost his six-month-old marriage, and scarred his relationship with his daughter. That five years broke him.”

The Commonwealth of Virginia learned that Bennett Barbour was innocent nearly two years ago, when DNA testing cleared him of the crime. Virginia authorities, however, never informed Barbour of his innocence. (State officials claim to have mailed a letter with the test results to Barbour’s last four known addresses, but none of those letters ever reached him.) Barbour learned of the DNA tests that proved his innocence only last month, on Feb. 5, when he received a phone call from Sheldon. “I was with my nephew playing cards, and Mr. Sheldon called my mother’s house looking for me,” says Barbour. “He said the authorities stopped looking for me because they couldn’t find me. But Sheldon found me in two days using the Internet.”​

- read the full article The Exoneration of Bennett Barbour (from Slate)​

 

[Laurel]

This 10,000-rpm, no-pulse artificial heart doesn't resemble an organic heart--and might be all the better for it

Meeko the calf stood nuzzling a pile of hay. He didn’t seem to have much appetite, and he looked a little bored. Every now and then, he glanced up, as though wondering why so many people with clipboards were standing around watching him.

Fourteen hours earlier, I’d watched doctors lift Meeko’s heart from his body and place it, still beating, in a plastic dish. He looked no worse for the experience, whisking away a fly with his tail as he nibbled, demonstrably alive—though above his head, a monitor showed a flatlined pulse. I held a stethoscope to his warm, fragrant flank and heard, instead of the deep lub-dub of a heartbeat, what sounded like a dentist’s drill or the underwater whine of an outboard motor. Something was keeping Meeko alive, but it was nothing like a heart.​

- read the full article No Pulse: How Doctors Reinvented The Human Heart (from PopSci)​

 

[Laurel]

Have you ever wondered about the secret life of your trash after you toss it into the dumpster, or after it has disappeared from your curb? How about the lives of the people who pick it up? How about what would happen if suddenly all trash collection stopped?

The idea of a semi-invisible world undergirding the modern city has long captured the human imagination. Look to the many books, TV shows, and movies about street urchins, sewer-dwellers, and the criminal underground, or the many plot devices centering on the hidden wealth of information in the homeless community.
...
Sanitation workers, it turns out, have twice the fatality rates of police officers, and nearly seven times the fatality rates of firefighters.​

- read the full article The Secret World of 'Garbagemen' (from The Atlantic)​

 

[oggbashan]

Importing the UK's Garbage.

http://www.cbc.ca/strombo/technology-1/this-city-is-so-clean-its-importing-garbage.html

Oslo, Norway has an interesting habit: the city burns garbage to create heat and electricity.

In fact, about half of Oslo's buildings (and most of its schools) are heated with electricity generated by facilities that burn garbage, according to the New York Times.

But the city also has a problem: it's become so efficient at turning trash into energy that it's run out of garbage. So, it's actually started importing some from other places, including the UK.

Not just any garbage will do, though. Naples, in southern Italy, has been paying other countries to take its trash, but authorities in Oslo decided that the garbage from Naples wasn't as "clean and safe" as the UK stuff, and refused to import it.

As for the habit of burning trash to create energy, Oslo's not alone. A lot of other Northern European countries are burning garbage, including household, industrial, and even toxic waste from hospitals and drug busts, to produce electricity.

And in many places, the trash is running out.

At this point, incinerating plants in Northern Europe can handle about 700 million tonnes of waste a year, but the population only produces a total of about 150 million tonnes.

 

[Laurel]

Does the seemingly perpetual decline in consumption of France's national drink symbolise a corresponding decline in French civilisation?

The question worries a lot of people - oenophiles, cultural commentators, flag-wavers for French exceptionalism - all of whom have watched with consternation the gradual disappearance of wine from the national dinner table.

Recent figures merely confirm what has been observed for years, that the number of regular drinkers of wine in France is in freefall.

In 1980 more than half of adults were consuming wine on a near-daily basis. Today that figure has fallen to 17%.

Meanwhile, the proportion of French people who never drink wine at all has doubled to 38%.​

- read the full article Why are the French drinking less wine? (from the BBC)​

 

[oggbashan]

Does the seemingly perpetual decline in consumption of France's national drink symbolise a corresponding decline in French civilisation?

​

No. It shows a massive increase in the number of traffic police imposing on the spot fines, and a public distaste for drunk drivers.

If I drive in France I have to carry at least TWO alcohol testing kits. The traffic police may require me to demonstrate with one of the kits that I am sober, but I must have another one in case I am stopped.​

 

[Laurel]

No. It shows a massive increase in the number of traffic police imposing on the spot fines, and a public distaste for drunk drivers.

If I drive in France I have to carry at least TWO alcohol testing kits. The traffic police may require me to demonstrate with one of the kits that I am sober, but I must have another one in case I am stopped.

I didn't know that! Wow.

 

[Laurel]

For £45 an hour, the fake mourners can be rented to cry for the duration of a funeral service in order to swell the numbers at funerals.

Ian Robertson, the founder of Rent-a-Mourner, in Braintree, Essex, admits the idea may be unfamiliar to the British, although the phenomenon is popular in places such as Asia.

The mourners-for-hire are briefed on the life of the deceased and would be able to talk to friends and relatives as if they really had known their loved one.

Rent-a-Mourner has 20 staff on its books to hire out for funerals, which Mr Robertson said were friends of his rather than professional actors.

He added that they are not required to well up, but are mainly there just to make up the numbers.​

- read the full article Mourners-for-rent hired to blub at funerals (from The Telegraph)​

 

[Laurel]

Internationally lauded “explosives artist” Cai Guo-Qiang has already amassed some stunning stats: He may be the only artist in human history who has had some one billion people gaze simultaneously at one of his artworks. You read that right, one billion. I’m talking about the worldwide televised “fireworks sculpture” that Cai Guo-Qiang—China-born, living in America now—created for the opening of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. If you’re one of the few earthlings who hasn’t seen it, either live or online, here’s Cai’s description: “The explosion event consisted of a series of 29 giant footprint fireworks, one for each Olympiad, over the Beijing skyline, leading to the National Olympic Stadium. The 29 footprints were fired in succession, traveling a total distance of 15 kilometers, or 9.3 miles, within a period of 63 seconds.”​

- read the full article Meet the Artist Who Blows Things Up for a Living (from Smithsonian Magazine)​