Top Reads
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Revenge, ego, and the corruption of Wikipedia
In the wee hours of the morning of January 27, 2013, a Wikipedia editor named “Qworty” made a series of 14 separate edits to the Wikipedia page for the late writer Barry Hannah, a well-regarded Southern novelist with a taste for the Gothic and absurd.Qworty cut paragraphs that included quotes from Hannah’s work. He removed 20 links to interviews, obituaries and reminiscences concerning Hannah. He cut out a list of literary prizes Hannah had won.Two edits stand out. Qworty excised the…
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Daft Punk: the midas touch
Masked men: Daft Punk at Electric (an alternative music and culture venue) in Paris, France. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Observer It is a peculiar experience meeting the most famous faceless…
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Dirty Medicine - Fortune Features
By Katherine Eban 1. The Assignment FORTUNE -- On the morning of Aug. 18, 2004, Dinesh Thakur hurried to a hastily arranged meeting with his boss at the gleaming offices of Ranbaxy Laboratories in…
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The Lethality of Loneliness
Sometime in the late ’50s, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann sat down to write an essay about a subject that had been mostly overlooked by other psychoanalysts up to that point. Even Freud had only…
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The Ethics of Extreme Porn: Is Some Sex Wrong…
Flickr/Captain Orange In "What Do You Desire?" Emily Witt travels to San Francisco, attends a shoot for a pornographic video about "women bound, stripped, and punished in public," reflects on her own…
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Caterpillar's Doug Oberhelman: Manufacturing's…
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-16/caterpillars-doug-oberhelman-manufacturings-mouthpiece Caterpillar’s (CAT) D 11 bulldozer, which costs about $2 million, is the size of a small studio…
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How Exercise Affects Your Body (and How to Pick…
We all know that exercise is good for you, but when you understand why, it makes getting off the couch and into the gym a lot easier. Here’s an explanation of what happens when you work out,…
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Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman
William Seward Burroughs is not a talkative man. Once at a dinner he gazed down into a pair of stereo microphones trained to pick up his every munch and said, "I don't like talk and I don't like talkers. Like Ma Barker. …
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The Evolution Of Hacker News
The idea of a VC having its own news aggregator was a bit outlandish in 2007. But Y Combinator was in an unusual position in those days anyway. Startup accelerators had been a highly visible part of…
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Out in the Great Alone
I landed in Anchorage in the middle of the night. The next morning, I drove an hour north to Wolf Lake Airport, a private airfield near Wasilla. You know those old photo-backdrop screens that little kids in department stores used to have their…