As a quick Twitter search of “al gore” “global warming” will demonstrate, an upsettingly large portion of the population remains confused about just what the latter is—confusion only exacerbated by a particularly wintry winter such as the one we’re having now. At the New Yorker’s Elements blog, Maria Konnikova writes about how cold weather makes us forget about climate change.
Chinese search-engine censorship is apparently not limited to China itself: “Microsoft’s Bing appears to be censoring information for Chinese language users in the US in the same way it filters results in mainland China.”
Of everything published in the United States every year, only three percent is translated from another language.
A Carleton University student and his electrical engineer father have created a power management system that dramatically increases the life of the lithium-ion batteries in laptops and mobile devices. You might think the big tech companies would be all over this. But you’d be wrong.
“Remember that the weather is always against Boris. It singles him out for particular persecution and no one else can possibly understand how bad it can be.” How to tweet like Boris from Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch.
Is Rob Ford really seeking the anti-gay vote? Toronto Star reporter and Crazy Town author Robyn Doolittle on the politics of homophobic rhetoric.
There are times when you need a pithy sentence to make research accessible. This isn’t one of them: Resource Security Impacts Men’s Female Breast Size Preferences.
Two friends noticed musical notation in an unusual part of Heironymous Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Enter, “a 600 year old butt song from Hell.”
And Turkish artist Murat Palta reimagines modern films as Ottoman-era paintings.
Here’s Hazlitt contributor Michelle Dean (and soon-to-be Gawker senior writer!) on why she hopes binge-reading isn’t the new binge-watching. “The kind of trance that reading induces is qualitatively different from the experience of sitting down and watching 12 hours of television. This is true even if the television is really good, I think. It just uses a different part of your brain. “
Just in time for the RoboCop remake coming out this week comes this oral history of the first RoboCop movie, which, by the way, is an absolute masterpiece.
Oh boy, did Vulture ever get this list of the 25 best rom-coms wrong. First of all, The Proposal is a terrible movie. But more importantly, it’s impossible to trust any list that considers Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a “romantic comedy.” You know what’s a better romantic comedy than that waking nightmare? Robocop.
