Take some time this weekend to delve a bit deeper and enjoy these long reads.
When greens eat themselves – Mike Steketee (Global Mail)
Take the case of the coalition of nine organisations — including the Australian Conservation Foundation, Greenpeace, the ACTU, the Climate Institute, GetUp! and the World Wildlife Fund — which last year funded the Saying Yes to a Price on Pollution campaign. If you remember it at all, it may be for Cate Blanchett’s involvement (more of which later). According to a “strictly private and confidential” review and evaluation study commissioned by the Say Yes coalition, the campaign was a raging success. “Now is the time to declare victory,” the leaked report says of the campaign. On what grounds? Australia put a price on carbon pollution.
Google throws open doors to its top-secret data center – Steven Levy (Wired)
If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest—you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it’s the home of a Google data center.
Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, the biggest troll on the web – Adrian Chen (Gawker)
But Michael Brutsch is more than a monster. Online, Violentacrez has been one of Reddit’s most reviled characters but also one of its most beloved users. The self-described “creepy uncle of Reddit” has played a little-known but crucial role in Reddit’s development into the online juggernaut it is today.
No evidence of disease – Maciej Cegłowski (Idle Words)
Once you’ve had cancer, no one will ever tell you you’re healthy. The best you can hope for (and it’s wonderful) is the little phrase ‘no evidence of disease’, often shortened to NED. This is less comforting than what you really want: a 100% guarantee that your body is cancer-free. But for many types of cancer the detection methods remain primitive. Absence of evidence is the best you can get.
The man who would fall to earth – Luke Dittrich (Esquire)
From 120,000 feet, Felix Baumgartner will step from a sealed capsule and drop 23 miles. In 35 seconds, he will become the first human to free-fall through the sound barrier. What happens after that, nobody knows…
Dark social: we have the whole history of the web wrong – Alexis C. Madrigal (The Atlantic)
… the vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. It shows up variously in programs as “direct” or “typed/bookmarked” traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that’s not actually what’s happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you.
Project Runway; finale, part I – John Teti (AV Club)
The veteran viewers among you surely smelled trouble here. Heidi loves designer anguish. She pores over it, cocks her head in fascination at it, as if she were a little girl hovering over a wounded butterfly. If she has an opportunity to fill designers with terror—if she really means it—she lets loose. She doesn’t couch her statements in careful legalese like, “You are not guaranteed a spot in the final three.” When the vampire loses her taste for blood, you’re about to watch a boring vampire movie.
Ghost dances on the great plains – Josh Garrett-Davis (Guernica)
Ghost dance devotees generally sought peace with whites while they waited the anticipated two or so years until the apocalypse, which would come in one of a number of forms. The Indians would ascend high mountains before a great flood washed whites from the land. Indians would fall into a deep sleep before a typhoon, and their dance feathers would loft them, still unconscious, to the new world. A new earth would slide from the west over the old one as the right hand slides over the left.
Anal sex: science’s last taboo – Debby Herbenick (AlterNet)
In an incredibly short period of time, anal sex has become a common part of Americans’ sex lives. As of the 1990s, only about one-quarter to one-third of young women and men in the U.S. had tried anal sex at least once. Less than 20 years later, my research team’s 2009 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior found that as many as 40-45 percent of women and men in some age groups had tried anal sex.
Is this shopped? Truth, lies, and art before and after Photoshop – Joshua Kopstein (The Verge)
Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, reminds us that yes, we have seen quite a few ‘shops in our time. Tracing the practice through the centuries, the unprecedented collection shows that not only has manipulation been around since the beginning of the recorded image, but many of its methods and motives have remained more or less the same.
Why do so many pretty female comedians pretend they’re ugly? – Ashley Fetters (The Atlantic)
Diller was one of the first to disguise her sex appeal for the sake of her comedy, but she wasn’t by any means one of the last. Many beloved female humorists, both now and in the past, have made the deliberate choice to highlight their un-sexiness in the interest of being funny.
You’ll never be Chinese – Mark Kitto (Prospect)
Don’t you think, with all the growth and infrastructure, the material wealth, let alone saving the world like some kind of financial whizz James Bond, that China would be a happier and healthier country? At least better than the country emerging from decades of stultifying state control that I met and fell in love with in 1986 when I first came here as a student? I don’t think it is.
