Ever wondered what would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennet, Nancy Drew or Harry Potter, Jay Gatsby or Humbert Humbert? Flavorwire presents its literary mixtape series.

Alexander Tsiaras visualizes conception to birth in the span of a few minutes. Truly stunning.

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Monsanto’s patented pest-resistant corn may be losing its magic.

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Don’t forget to make a digital New Year’s resolution. Here’s why you should switch your web-hosting service.

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The 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, in pictures.

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If you’re too afraid to crawl through a dark, cramped cave (hey, we don’t blame you), you can get spelunking experience from the comfort of a pre-fabricated tube.

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Why one historian decided to stop lecturing on the Holocaust.

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Abdelrahman Al Ahmar, on how he became a so-called terrorist: “Our homes were raided nightly, and we saw our friends, mothers, sisters being attacked. . . . We saw no end in sight, just more Israelis about to move into our neighborhood and make our lives hell.”

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Making bike lanes out of litter to prove there is room to share the road.

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In case you haven’t seen it yet, Mother Jones is serving up what they’re calling “Your Daily Newt,” delivering a moment from Newt Gingrich’s political career each day.

Image by kate*, licensed under Creative Commons.

A woman in the bike lane is the cycling equivalent of the canary in the coal mine. If your city maintains healthy, safe cycling habitat, female riders will come out in full force.

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That date who announced himself as polyamorous may have seemed full of it, but bigger love is legit.

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As if you didn’t envy expats enough, Scotland plans to build a “city of literature” hub to house the Edinburgh International Book Festival and to stage world-class literary events.

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The Atlantic comments on the never ending campaign to ban Slaughterhouse Five. “It’s as if the novel’s theme of history repeating itself manifests in the controversies the Kurt Vonnegut book has caused over the years,” writes the magazine’s Betsy Morais.

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Do you remember the guy who threw a pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face? Well, he went to prison . . . and now he’s blogging from there.

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Touche! Earth Island Journal’s Jason Mark picks up his pitchfork to valiantly defend organic farming after its recent takedown by Scientific American.  

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Welcome to a modern palace of poetry.  

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A generous invitation from Bill McKibben: Come to Washington to get arrested and help stop climate change.  

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Why does the Leaning Tower of Pisa lean?  

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Frenchman Karl Marc has inked the world’s first augmented reality tattoo.

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If you haven’t seen this slow-motion video of an owl, than you’ve never seen beauty.

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“Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?” asks Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. “A whistleblower claims that over the past two decades, the agency has destroyed records of thousands of investigations, whitewashing the files of some of the nation’s worst financial criminals.”

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“In coordinated raids Monday at locations in Delaware, South Dakota, and California,” begins one of The Onion’smost prescient pieces of satire, “federal agents apprehended dozens of executives at Visa Inc., a sham corporation accused of perpetrating the largest credit card scam in U.S. history.”

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Across the world, slums are home to a billion people. The rich elite want the shanty towns cleared, but residents are surprisingly determined not to leave, reports New Statesman.

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What books influenced your favorite author? The Strand bookstore in New York presents curated lists of the most beloved books of authors and artists like Gary Shteyngart, John Waters, Jennifer Egan, and more.

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Feel safer at the club: Scientists have developed a sensor that can be dipped into your cocktail to detect the presence of date rape drugs.

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There is no such thing as vegan. Unless you stop using sugar, shampoo, crayons, antifreeze, and fireworks.

What’s the best evidence that America is run by a gaggle of spineless, paternalistic, hypocritical, chowder-headed liberals? Bike lanes, obviously. 

Or, at least, that’s thrust of a recent screed by Wall Street Journal columnist P.J. O’Rourke. O’Rourke presents every conceivable non-argument against government-financed bike lanes, nearly all of them colossally out of touch with urban reality. If you didn’t know O’Rourke was a satirist, you’d assume from his tone that his mother never let him ride a bike and all the neighborhood kids teased him for it. Here’s a taste:

The bicycle is a parody of a wheeled vehicle—a donkey cart without the cart, where you do the work of the donkey. Although the technology necessary to build a bicycle has been around since ancient Egypt, bikes didn’t appear until the 19th century. The reason it took mankind 5,000 years to get the idea for the bicycle is that it was a bad idea. The bicycle is the only method of conveyance worse than feet. You can walk up three flights of stairs carrying one end of a sofa. Try that on a bicycle.

Ugh. Really, P.J.? Despite being loaded with 90 percent obtuse (and admittedly pretty humorous) hyperbole, O’Rourke concludes with a seemingly reasonable argument. “Bike lanes can become an acceptable part of the urban landscape,” writes O’Rourke, “if bicycle riders are willing to pay their way.” From one angle, this would make sense. In most cases, a fuel tax pays for road construction, shifting the tax burden to those who use transportation infrastructure. A bicycle sales tax could be similar source of funding for bike lanes.

But might the whole argument be just a reflection of the bigger budget crisis faced across the country? There’s massive pressure to cut services and non-essential projects—and what’s a bike lane worth if HIV/AIDS patients and victims of domestic violence are losing services. (And when the budget becomes unsteady again, how long do you think those programs will last?) If anything, O’Rourke’s too-commonsensical argument works to give back planning power and tax-muscle to the status quo—the affluent suburbanite content in their SUV and insurance plan—when those who live a life less ordinary need support more than ever.

Who could put that better than O’Rourke himself: “And if [bicyclists] pay enough, maybe we’ll even give them a lift during the next snow storm.”

Yeah, maybe.

(Thanks, The Avenue.)

Source: Wall Street Journal 

Image by Jason Anfinsen, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Earlier this month, I blogged about bike lanes in the sky. That’s exactly what it would take to get me biking in Delhi, India where 130,000 people—mostly pedestrians and cyclists—were killed in crashes in 2007. All the same, they’re giving bike lanes a try, reports Streetsblog:

One month after a local bicycle advocacy group, the Delhi Cycling Club, sent a list of demands to the Delhi government, Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit announced that all major streets will be retrofitted with bike lanes. "In a city like Delhi, cycling would be the most effective mode of transport to combat pollution and congestion on the roads," wrote Dikshit.

From press accounts, it's not exactly clear whether the new network would consist entirely of physically separated lanes, which currently exist along the city's bus rapid transit corridors.

A network of physically separated lanes would be especially useful in a city where traffic laws go largely unenforced. There are 110 million traffic violations in Delhi every day, according to the Guardian.

Delhi 's investment in a cycling future comes not a moment too soon. Last year's introduction of the Tata Nano, a car priced at $2,000, has threatened to flood the city's already full streets with even more automobiles and even worse gridlock.

Source: Streetsblog

The large Hasidic Jewish population of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has been clashing with hipsters since an onslaught of 20-somethings began invading their neighborhood in the ’90s. Today the two groups are fighting it out over bike lanes. At a community board meeting on September 8, the New York Post reports that Hasidic representatives proposed the elimination of bike lanes on the grounds that the lanes cause traffic problems and congestion. One Hasidic representative, Simon Weisser, admitted to the Post that the hipsters’ scantily clad attire was also a major problem. “It bothers me,” said Weisser, “and it bothers a lot of people.”

The bike lanes are the latest front in the hipster vs. Hasidic cultural clash over fashion, modesty, and neighborhood identity. New York Magazine points to an article from the Brooklyn Paper about a fight over a billboard for the remade TV show 90210 that was deemed distasteful because it featured people in swimsuits. Back in 2004, Harper’s magazine printed a more spiritual salvo in the fight against the hipsters, when Hasidic Jews distributed a prayer called, “For the Protection of Our City Williamsburg From the Plague of Artists.” The prayer read in part:

Please, our Father God of Mercy, have mercy upon our generation that is weak, and remove this difficult test from these people, these immoral antagonists that by their doing will multiply, God forbid, the excruciating tests and the sight of the impurity and immorality that is growing in the world.

(Thanks, Jewlicious.)

Image by Sookie, licensened under Creative Commons.