These magical long-exposure pictures of fireflies are like constellations descended into a forest thicket.

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Who’s in the market for a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon? WIKISPEED sold their first one last month.

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Meet an albino hummingbird.

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“Never open a book with the weather” and other writing advice from Henry Miller, Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, Neil Gaiman, William Safire, and Elmore Leonard.

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What? The grandsons of John Tyler, our tenth president, are still alive?

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Marine archaeologists have found a sunken whaling ship captained by George Pollard Jr., the sea captain whose first ship—rammed and sunk by a sperm whale—provided inspiration for Moby-Dick.

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From a long and fascinating book review of Our Fathers, Ourselves: “The bar on committed or ‘good-enough’ fatherhood has risen radically in recent years, and especially so with respect to girls.” 

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“The bottom line is that to be on Facebook in any active, participatory sense is to risk annoying people and being annoyed,” writes Mo Perry in Metro. “Much like being alive.”

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Check out this photo dispatch from the Tough Guy competition, a race in England self-described as “eight country miles filled with freezing mud and ‘barbed wire, cuts, scrapes, burns, dehydration, hypothermia, acrophobia, claustrophobia, electric shocks, sprains, twists, joint dislocation and broken bones.’”

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Charles Bukowski’s poem “Bluebird” set to stunning video footage of California and its people.

Images courtesy of Cocolog. 

The three deadliest words in the world: “It’s a girl.”

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Wolves and lynx and moose, palīgā! As Latvia’s forests fall, the country’s underappreciated wilderness and wildlife are threatened.

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Use dancers instead of Powerpoint to augment presentations? We’re all for it.

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Coronal mass ejection, the movie: Watch NOAA’s video of this week’s incredible solar flare.

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At long last, the New Yorker weighs in on America’s prisoner epidemic.

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When being a vegetarian gets in the way of family.

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Does black history need more than a month?

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In which an intrepid young man fixes his girlfriend’s grandparents’ Wi-Fi and is hailed as a conquering hero.

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On the merits of eating penguins, when in the Antarctic. Apparently, you lure them by blowing a trumpet.

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Should unengaged, everyday citizens be allowed to sell their votes?

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The other black market: International adoptions can be ugly affairs, but some parents to be will stop at nothing for their would-be children.

Image by Sue Rostvold, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Why we love to watch people (or robots) doing the robot.

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If you believe in kindness, you’ll be free. That’s the attitude blogger Dig This Chick had to take after a domain squatter bought up her blog domain and tried to sell it back to her.

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Playboy has 383,049 followers on Twitter. Ms.needs your help to catch up. Follow @msmagazine and tell your friends to do the same!

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What are the consequences, if any, of stopping reading?

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Advice for indie bookstores: Amazon isn’t really your enemy, and poetry readers may be your best friends.

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Why do some neighborhoods get overrun with chain stores, while others don’t?

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“Sea Trees would be big, lush, tiered towers that rise up offshore, whether in a lake, a river, or the sea, and create floating preserves for plants and animals,” reports Fast Company. “Think of them as elaborate city parks (except humans aren’t allowed).”

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When the First Lady comes to your restaurant, what’s a young cook to do?

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The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight.

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The best pen pal ever: Sign up for Letters in the Mail and get letters, in the mail, from your favorite author.

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Infographic: Get enough sleep or else you’ll be dumber, get fatter, die sooner, be meaner, and get lucky less often.

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Fatherly advice from John Steinbeck to his son, on the beautiful complexities of love.

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“Madame Tussauds is like a safari, only it’s celebrity you’re stalking, and about halfway through you begin to feel more hunted than hunter.” Prospect magazine uncovers the secret behind the success of wax museums.

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How many of us have threatened to give up the rat race and live simply in a cabin in the woods? This guy actually did it.

Image by Victoria, licensed under Creative Commons. 

During a late-night college powwow session many years ago, a guy asked me, for some reason, how much I weighed. I was 5 feet, 8 inches tall and pretty scrawny at the time from biking and walking across campus every day. I told him: 120 pounds.

“What!” he said. “Don’t worry, you don’t look that heavy.”

He was just a clueless college boy, but this bizarre line of thinking—that 120 pounds could possibly be construed as overweight for a 5'8" woman—isn’t limited to frat boys. It exists all over our advertising and our media. Every model in every commercial and every catalogue has stick-thin arms and legs, often made even more emaciated by Photoshop. Watch an episode of Project Runway and you’ll see the contestants picking apart the so-called flaws of a model who looks like she hasn’t eaten in a month—pointing out her “pouchy stomach” or her “big booty.”

PLUS Model Magazine, a publication celebrating the plus-size fashion industry, recently printed some revealing statistics about the models that exhibit our clothes, sell our products, and generally define female beauty. The highlights:

• Twenty years ago, the average model weighed 8% less than the average woman; today, she weighs 23% less.
• Most models meet the Body Mass Index physical criteria for anorexia.
• When the plus-size modeling industry began, the models ranged in size from 14 to 20; today, they average between a size 6 and 14.
• Half of American women wear a size 14 or larger, but most standard clothing outlets cater to sizes 14 or smaller.

As Madeline Figueroa-Jones points out, “we are not talking about health here because not every skinny person is healthy.” We’re talking about an abnormal body image that promotes anorexia-thin women as the standard. What’s almost as fascinating (and dispiriting) as PLUS Model Magazine’s revelations are the reader comments that follow the online article, largely focused on whether or not the (gorgeous) plus-size model featured in the accompanying photographs is “fat.” Which tells you that we’ve still got a long ways to go before that college boy mindset is in the minority.

Source: PLUS Model Magazine 

Image by PLUS Model Magazine, courtesy of PLUS Model Magazine. 

Ever wonder what the heck primary elections actually are and how they work. Truth is, it’s really complicated. Here’s a crash course. Careful, it gets wild after about 50 seconds. 

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Question: What’s more beautiful than a Christmas tree full of sparkly ornaments? Answer: Christmas ornaments full of sparkly glitter—exploding.

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Trash talk at the dinner table: Salt needs a new companion; pepper is lame. 

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A mother writes about how she went into breastfeeding all wrong.

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Recession inspiration story: A 40-year-old, out-of-work architect who moved back with his parents has now built a career as the creative force behind the Lego architecture kits you see everywhere, making $10,000 per commission. 

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Skyhorse Publishing has announced an unusual program: It will pay cash to struggling book publishers for their backlist titles.

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The best American Sign Language music videos, including White Stripes, “We’re Going to Be Friends”; Kanye West, “Good Morning”; and Paula Abdul, “Opposites Attract.”  

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It’s a frog-eat-bat world. Cool footage from Smithsonian scientists studying fringe-lipped bats in Panama.

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BrethalEyes, a new iPhone app, tells you if you’re sober enough to drive. By scanning your eye movement, it claims it can estimate your blood alcohol content. 

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A musical airport floor, played by your and your suitcase 

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Once you pop you just can’t stop: A look inside the big business of communion wafers.

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Of all the thousands of novels written, can you guess the number of unique plots contained therein? If you guessed 1,462, you’d be right. 

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Is your relationship with your drinking buddies platonic or Platonic?

Here’s a pretty distraction: a time-lapse video of Comet Lovejoy taken over South America’s Andes Mountains. As Kottke points out, it’s definitely worth watching through the last sequence.

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“When the rallies happened in Tahrir Square,” wrote an Egyptian army officer in his personal journal, recently written about by The Guardian, “we would all receive a large bonus.”

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Forget the Laundromat: these clothes need only sunshine to get clean.

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Mario Kart can save your life.

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We’ve been hearing a lot about the pointlessness of the Iowa caucus and its unsophisticated voters. One Iowa native blasts back. (Available in clean or saucy versions.)

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Why are movie theaters losing their charm? Roger Ebert posits a few of their problems. Price is one issue, of which he says: “No matter what your opinion is about 3D, the charm of paying a hefty surcharge has worn off for the hypothetical family of four.”

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A brief consideration of the meteoric rise of queer studies.

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“When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago,” writes Nicholas Carr, “he also gave us immovable text.” According to him, e-books make literature both editable and collaborative—what amounts to the most drastic change to the book in centuries—for better or worse.

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There is something intrinsically different between people who know one or a handful of languages and those that know eleven. Have you ever met a hyperpolyglot?

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How a 1930s photographer turned writers into literary celebrities.

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More red tape: As of the first of the year, New Hampshire girls under age 18 have to notify a parent or guardian at least 48 hours before they have an abortion.

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Bellingham Review’s first online issue is now available.

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Newt Gingrich’s mission is no longer seeking the Republican presidential nomination; it’s destroying Mitt Romney.