Every week we share links to stories, articles, and other interesting things we’ve come across online for you to enjoy over the weekend. It’s the utne.com crockpot; we add the ingredients for a great online meal. Enjoy!  

Fun! Get your own miniature copy of Patrick Somerville’s “The Universe in Miniature in Miniature” from featherproof books.

Do you know what a mosquito heart looks like? How about a rat’s retina? There are some truly amazing photos from the winner’s of this year’s Nikon Small World Competition that will blow your mind.

Conservationists have found a new species of monkey that sneezes when it rains, due to its upturned nostrils. These monkeys apparently sit with their heads between their knees when it rains. Awwwwwww.

Check out The Free Verse Project: Picture a Poem.

Conservatives for public transit? We know it sounds as dissonant as liberals for Sarah Palin, but Grist has a provocative interview with the head of a conservative pro-transit group who says better mass transportation—especially rail—is a matter of national security, wise government spending, and racial norms. (Yes, he touches that third rail.)

The New York Observer educated us about Longreads, an aggregator that brings long-form journalism back to into the lives of commuters who read on mobile devices and use applications like Instapaper. Nate Freeman explains: “Each piece on the Longreads site indicates the number of words and, using the average reading speed, the approximate amount of time it will take to read. For instance, the Vanity Fair piece that went up today about House Republican leader John Boehner contains 4220 words, and will take 17 minutes to read. Sounds like our daily commute on the F train! Perfect!”

Cover Spy secretly tracks down what people are reading in public.

What if they held a meeting to discuss the extinction of many animal species, and no one paid much attention? That unfortunately is what’s happening at the current Convention on Biological Diversity in Japan, which is not registering high on the U.S. mass media radar but whose agenda ought to matter to anyone concerned with the fate of species—our own included. Mongabay has a nice rundown of a massive new study being released at the conference, while E publishes a pithy commentary on what’s at stake, and Boing Boingexplains the meeting using Star Wars references for the sci-geek crowd.

Bill Nye (you know, the science guy) is the recipient of the 2010 Humanist of the Year Award, and The Humanist has adapted parts of his awesome acceptance speech.

This Magazine explores the consequences of Canada slamming the door on Mexico’s drug-war refugees.

Every week we share links to stories, articles, and other interesting things we’ve come across online for you to enjoy over the weekend. It’s the utne.com crockpot; we add the ingredients for a great online meal. Enjoy!  

The Walrus has composed a photo essay documenting the lives of a small community of Mennonites residing in Manitoba, Bolivia. The colony of 2,000 recently suffered a shattering scandal when it was discovered that a gang of men had drugged and raped between 60 and 140 women in the community.

We’ve been enjoying Peter Terzian’s crisp, personal, decidedly nontrendy writing at the music blog Earworms, where he posts YouTube clips of favorite musicians from the ’70s through today along with engaging mini-essays. Terzian’s tastes run toward pop, folk, and rock but still range pretty widely, from Joni Mitchell to Led Zeppelin to Belle & Sebastian.

A new army of female rockers is showing the guys how to wield an ax.

Newsweek has a fun roundup of clips of embarrassing voicemails left by public figures (think Brett Favre, Alec Baldwin, etc.) have left on answering machines.

Read about the Frozen Zoo, a project that collects and preserves the genetic material of rare and endangered animals.  

Novelist and short story writer Lorrie Moore rhapsodizes about The Wire in The New York Review of Books.

Two from Fast Company: As the influence of Lance Armstrong’s Livestong organization continues to grow and the allegations continue to swirl around the man, one writer asks, “Is Livestrong's greatest asset also its greatest risk?”  And, a profile of the rapper and—thanks to Coca-Cola—pop star K’naan, exploring his journey from playing with grenades as a child to writing the song at the center of Coke’s World Cup campaign.

On the sixth-month anniversary of the Gulf oil spill, environmentalist and essayist Terry Tempest Williams offers a very different portrait of the region and its people than you might hear on your nightly news (if you hear anything anymore) in her comprehensive essay, “The Gulf Between Us,” for Orion.

Conan O'Brien has more than 1.7 million followers on Twitter. Jay Leno has fewer than 100,000. To say that Conan has a younger audience—and therefore an audience more likely to use Twitter—would be an understatement, as well as a path well-beaten. Nonetheless, Conan's use of social media to rev up the hype around his new show on TBS has been impressive. Using the name Team Coco, O’Brien has dived head first, reports Fast Company, and “dominated…the digital age.”

Starting with the website TeamCoco.com—“[t]he source of all things Conan”—O’Brien has used all the tools at his disposal for promotion: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Google Maps (to track his large blimp around the country), and YouTube to promote his new show. By creating web videos for announcements—which are then promoted via Twitter, et al.—like the name of his new show (“Conan” or “Conaw”?) and whether or not Andy Richter would be joining him on TBS, O’Brien has created a place for viewers to get all the information they needed while he was away from their TV screens.

Never mind the self-promotion and all that, though. What makes Conan O’Brien popular in these new venues is what has always made him popular: He’s hilarious. Just read some of these Tweets:

After 9 hours driving from drug store to drug store, it hit me: no one sells Columbus Day decorations.

The Nobel Prize in Science has gone to scientists who created an ultra-thin carbon. Actually it's normal thickness, but wearing stripes.

David Hasselhoff was kicked off of “Dancing With the Stars.” He should stick to singing. I mean acting. I mean…

Of course, those could have been posted by writers or assistants. But there’s no substitute for O’Brien’s delivery, which is on full display in his YouTube videos.

Right now Utne is just shy of 12,000 followers on Twitter. At 1.7 million, Coco’s got us beat…for now.

Source: Fast Company 

Every week we share links to stories, articles, and other interesting things we’ve come across online for you to enjoy over the weekend. It’s the utne.com crockpot; we add the ingredients for a great online meal. Enjoy!  

We’re voracious readers, but when we tire of words we soothe our eyeballs by scrolling through the latest entries at the amazing visual blog This Isn’t Happiness.

Good discusses designing buildings that promote activity and combat obesity.

It’s harvest time, and we love to read about the bounteous scene at small farms across the country at The Blog Barn run by Local Harvest. Writing about subjects from pecans to pumpkins, alpaca babies to bunny wool, small producers across the country share vivid vignettes from the barn and the field.

Indie group Belle & Sebastian wants to write a song about you.

Jason Fried on why you can’t work at work. If you haven’t seen this already, it’s a must-view for anyone who works in an office.

Every week we share links to stories, articles, and other interesting things we’ve come across online for you to enjoy over the weekend. It’s the utne.com crockpot; we add the ingredients for a great online meal. Enjoy!  

Finally, a beer bottle designed to promote your musical tendencies.

A Last.fm internvisually depicts how music taste differs between genders.

Check out the 10 most expensive books in the world.

Look! You can buy uranium online! Who knew?

Grain Edit is a beautiful website that highlights work from contemporary designers and illustrators whose styles are influenced by the aesthetic of the 1950s-70s.

A man philosophizes on the various aspects of his neighborhood White Castle.

A Virus Comix illustration depicts the different paths of Gertraud Junge and Sophie Scholl, two young women of similar age, during the Holocaust.

Fans of contemporary fine-art photography will enjoy Conscientious, a website featuring interviews with photographers and links to interesting photo projects from around the world.

Despite the availability of cheap labor in China, Sabiq Rahim of ClimateWire says that manufacturing jobs in the electric car industry have nowhere to go but America.

Slate chronicles the tragedy at the Virginia Quarterly Review that ended in its managing editor's suicide.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of life at the Utne Reader is the daily access to hundreds of publications from all over the world. On any given afternoon, the mail bin might bring the latest issue of anything from Tin Houseto Waxpoeticsto The American Window Cleaner. This onslaught can be overwhelming, as you might imagine, and it’s surprisingly easy to lose half a day wading through a case study of mid-life crisis in Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention.  

Fascinating as that might be, however, I recognize that it might be rough sledding—or even just plain too creepy—for the general reader. And even I sometimes feel like I need a little palate cleanser, some entertaining trifle to stoke my day dreams. 

Forbes Billionaires feature was just what the doctor ordered today, and of particular interest was the magazine’s list of the world’s billionaire bachelors and bachelorettes. It’s irresistible, really, and full of lots of people I’d never heard of.  

Oprah kicks the thing off, but from there it was all fresh faces to me (and if you think it’s nothing but snoozy white geezers, think again). Hong Kong’s Richard Li (net worth: $1.1 billion), for instance, is only 37 years old and is “a licensed jet plane pilot and avid scuba diver.” Twenty-year-old Albert von Thurn und Taxis (there’s a name fit for a billionaire, and the lad is worth $2.1 billion) is a 6’ 4” German who “enjoys riding his Harley-Davidson and playing the drums.” Guy Laliberte ($1.1 billion) is the 44-year-old founder of Cirque du Soleil, and is described as a “fire-breathing billionaire” as well as a “consummate dreamer” who loves kids. 

And then there’s Adrei Melnichenko, a 33-year-old Muscovite also worth $1.1 billion. But he seems like a bit of a snooze, frankly. 

Also, Ria Novosti has a gallery of Russia’s other wealthiest celebrities, but there’s no indication of eligibility status (or even proper identification—a number of them appear to be hockey players), so if you’re really serious about snagging a billionaire you’re probably just wasting your time. 

Source: Forbes 

Image by mahalie, licensed under Creative Commons.