From ProPublica: "Jill Dopf Viles — self-taught genetic detective — passed away recently at the age of 50. She became convinced she had a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Emery-Dreifuss, which causes muscle wasting, and an even rarer form of partial lipodystrophy, which causes fat to vanish from certain parts
From New York: "Woeltz and Duplessie transformed the five-story townhouse they were staying in on Prince Street into an after-hours nightclub, filling it with young employees from Brandy Melville around the corner. The parties were wild and sometimes unnerving; the hosts bragged about ties to intelligence agencies and showed
From Wired: "Tuvalu is preparing to carry out the first planned migration of an entire country in response to the effects of climate change. Recent studies project that much of its territory could be submerged in the next 25 years due to rising sea levels, forcing its inhabitants to
From the New Yorker: "Around sunset on a rainy Saturday in November, 1906, a woman walked the streets of Rochester, in western New York State, trying to off-load a stack of counterfeit two-dollar bills. She looked about forty, tall, broad in the beam, with dark eyes and dark hair;
From Nautilus: "On a brisk January evening this year, I was speeding down I–295 in northeast Florida, under a full moon, to visit my dad’s brain. As I drove past shadowy cypress swamps, sinewy river estuaries, and gaudy-hued billboards of condominiums with waterslides and red umbrellas boasting,
From Toronto Life: "From the moment he was born, Ryan Wedding was the family darling. He belonged to a sporty, tightly knit clan with a shared love of the outdoors. In the 1960s, his grandparents, Laurence and Marlyn Spiess, had purchased the Mount Baldy Ski Area, a ski club
From The Atavist: "The weeks leading up to the city’s election had been marked by a frenzy of political violence. Chicago’s flamboyantly amoral mayor, William “Big Bill” Thompson, who had recently won office on the populist slogan “America First,” enjoyed the backing of local gangsters, including the
From Scientific American: "If you haven’t accomplished as much this summer as you had hoped to, you can blame forces far beyond your control: a few of these dog days, by one measure, are among the shortest you’ve ever lived through. For most of humanity’s history,
From SF Weekly: "A rumor had circulated for years that in the 1950s, Lehrer invented the Jell-O shot, a cup of flavored gelatin infused with booze, which has now become a frat-house favorite. He throws his head back and laughs. "What happened was, I was in the Army
From Boing Boing: "Autotune gets a bad rep. Sure, it's been abused by plenty of artists, notably T-Pain and Cher's "Believe" single. But used as a mild assistive, it can be a great way to punch up a piece of music. Dr. Andy
From New York magazine: "Andrew first met Matthew Christopher Pietras in September 2019 at the opening-night gala for the Metropolitan Opera. At 34, he was considerably younger than the other wealthy donors, not to mention handsome — tall, slim, and stylish. Pietras was vague about how he had made his
From Futurism: "An art installation project in Australia, titled "Revivification," has performed a quasi-resurrection of the late experimental American composer Alvin Lucier, creating a sort of brain that continuously composes music on the fly with its errant electrical signals. At the center of the piece is an