Talk about a traffic jam: Globally, there are now 1 billion cars on the road.

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Lori Adorable offers women 8 ethical tips in her guide to feminist erotic modeling.

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A travel guidebook writer achieves transcendence on a 30-hour van ride across Mongolia.

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French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s indictment may have been dismissed, but the case still shed light on the sexual assaults suffered by hotel housekeepers.

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Advice from the world’s oldest investment banker, the 105-year-old Irving Kahn: “There are a lot of opportunities out there, and one shouldn’t complain, unless you don’t have good health.”

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Get ready for “The Missing Piece,” a forthcoming documentary which chronicles the 1911 theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre.

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Eight movie clichés illustrated.

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“It’s all too easy to divide the world into people like us and outsiders,” writes Tom Jacobs at Miller-McCune. “Newly published research points to a surprising factor that exacerbates this unfortunate tendency: Boredom.”

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Apparently John Huntsman thinks the GOP presidential candidate should try to appeal to more than just 10 percent of the population. Interesting strategy, sir.

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If Frida Kahlo’s most memorable physical features were her eyebrows, then her most forgotten was her weak spine, a condition which required her to wear plaster corsets for most of her life. They were, unsurprisingly, another sort of canvas for the idiosyncratic artist. Paris Review’s Leslie Jamison writes that Kahlo decorated her corsets “with pasted scraps of fabric and drawings of tigers, monkeys, plumed birds, a blood-red hammer and sickle, and streetcars like the one whose handrail rammed through her body when she was eighteen years old.”

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Every year Beloit College releases a “Mindset List” that gives a snapshot of the “cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college” on a given year. The list for the class of 2015 includes factoids like “Ferris Bueller and Sloane Peterson could be their parents,” “Life has always been like a box of chocolates,” and “Women have always been kissing women on television.”

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Even after decades of study, neuroscientists find the brain a mysterious thing. The posterior cingulate cortex—sometimes called “the dark energy of the brain”—uses more calories than any other part of the brain (which burns 20% of the calories you eat), but scientists have no idea what it does.

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Popular Science explains how to make crop circles and offers up a gallery of the phenomenon.

In an article about “9/11 fiction” in Prospect, Adam Kirsch points out one difficulty in writing about that day: It was a television event, and that is the medium through which the vast majority of us learned about it. Of one writer’s experience escaping one of the towers, Kirsch writes, “Like everyone else, he had to watch TV afterwards to piece together what had happened.” (I previously wrote about Kirsch’s article here.)

I hadn’t realized just how true this was—just how attached the attacks were to television—until I heard Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger on Democracy Now!this morning. Kahle, a 2009 Utne Reader Visionary, and Prelinger are Internet archivists who have put together a project called “Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive.” “[9/11] was a major event, that was really a television event,” says Kahle. “People understood this through television.”

The archive is a collection of 3,000 hours of television news from around the world from September 11 to September 17. The project is exhaustive and impressive, at times even overwhelming—seeing all the news organizations’ coverage in one spot. Watching Charles Gibson reference New York fashion week going into a break, on the other side of which would be footage of one burning tower, has an effect like nothing I’ve felt on the page. It brings you back to that exact moment.

Kahle and Prelinger are looking to television as “a medium of record,” which is somewhat antithetical to the way it is usually used. News on television is here and then it is gone, never to be referenced again, at least not with any depth and analysis. “When we can watch the real-time coverage [of 9/11],” says Prelinger,

not just the famous images that get broken out and repeated all over again, but capture the full stream of that day and see how consciousness developed and how events were covered, it gives us a lot of grounding and enables us to begin to really think kind of analytically, critically about these events and about the way that television works.

Source: Democracy Now!, Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive 

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.

For those who strive for inner peace but don’t take themselves too seriously: A list of 20 thoughts to think while pretending to meditate.

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What does a real life superhero look like? Photographer Peter Tangen will show you.

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Is the story of finding Osama bin Laden a cover for the real story?

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Before the EPA was a “Job-Killer,” Michele Bachmann thought it could bring “long-term benefits to…the economy.”

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A smart young woman launches an activist website to help her parents’ native country, Yemen, in its grassroots battle to oust 33-year-dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh.

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A 417 million-year-old oil deposit is drawing the oil industry to North Dakota, “the only state in the country that had more residents in 1930 than it does today,” Governing reports.

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How fast fashion takes a toll on the earth.

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High school girls earn ‘A’s for asexuality.

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It’s no surprise that Kanye West and Jay-Z would make a collaborative album about how awesome they are. But, Grantland asks, is it any good?

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Not to harsh your buzz, but Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is no longer the authoritative work of art on Ken Kesey’s psychedelic school bus ride.

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From banjo to violin to blues guitar, street performers offer a primer on the art of busking.

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Forget the book of love. Meet the kindly author who wrote the Book of Raunch.

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With lots of enticing buttons, flashy animations, pop-ups, and hyperlinks, the Internet can be a pretty distracting place. How is anyone supposed to get any writing done? Answer: Head to QuietWrite, the web’s private writer’s nook.

Image by Drab Makyo, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Like us, you’re probably no Einstein. The question is, “Why Aren’t We Smarter?”   

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Religious, Republican—and in support of Planned Parenthood and abortion insurance. 

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The art world has a history of dismissing the role of gay culture. It’s time to make reparations. 

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Focusing on The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire,and Breaking Bad, Chuck Klosterman argues in Grantland that the rise in morality-based programming has birthed the “four best television shows of the past 10 years.”

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The War on Terror will never end: Now, the haboobs are invading Arizona.

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How ugly do we look after exercising? Photographer Sascha Goldberger got to work and found the answer. As it turns out, the answer is “reaaaaaaaaal ugly.”

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Because you were dying to know, American Scientist published an article about how putting a circular pizza in a square pizza box works. Trust us, it’s more complicated that it sounds.

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Rural America now accounts for just 16 percent of the nation’s population, the lowest ever.

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Taking a cue from Meg Wolitzer’s latest novel, The Uncoupling, women from the small Colombian port village of Barbacoas are withholding sex from the menfolk until the government repairs some crucial roads in and out of the town.

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Something new on the green fashion front: A German designer makes clothing from sour milk.

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Do you have a stack of books waiting to be read? Be like Bill Gates and plan a reading retreat.

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The Onion renders the marriage debate hilarious in a parody starring Pope Benedict XVI and his new gay friends Tony and Craig.

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The ambiguously gay SpongeBob riles FOX once again--this time for spreading global warming propaganda.

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Go to hell, you say? Well, here’s the top 10 weirdest ways a person might burn.

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If your aunt was Virginia Woolf, this might be what she would say about your poetry. Take a look at an original note from Aunt Virginia to her nephew, Thoby.

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Three-minute showers will green your morning routine. Are you up to the challenge?

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Working just enough to get by while enjoying the good things in life: Welcome to the medium chill.

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Did you hear about the married lesbian couple who saved 40 teens in the Norway massacre? Not in the mainstream media, you didn’t.

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Rebecca Solnit writes about “the care and feeding of hope.”

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A fascinating story about a disastrous hydrogen balloon mission to the North Pole in 1897 (with photos).

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Welcome to the Sex Plex.

Image by maisonwb, licensed under Creative Commons.