The Crockpot: A Weekly Digest 10.11.11

By Staff
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“The Swiss have mountains, so they climb. Canadians have lakes, so they canoe. The Australians have canyons, so they go canyoneering, a hybrid form of madness halfway between mountaineering and caving in which you go down instead of up, often through wet tunnels and narrow passageways.”

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A rival to the Booker Prize has been announced, sending the literary world into an uproar.

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A black male feminist speaks out.

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Finally, you can carry David Bowie in your wallet.

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Afghanistan, Iraq, Ecuador, Antarctica, and more are the latest citizens of Google Maps‘ growing empire of crowdsourced maps.

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For all you typography junkies (you’re out there, right?), Kerntype offers a strangely addictive kerning game, in which you move the letters in words left or right to achieve even spacing and optimal readability.

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One writer’s takeaway from South by Southwest Eco: We should care for the planet not because it makes economic sense, but because it’s the right thing to do.

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Big Agriculture mounts a PR campaign to counter the side effects of Food Inc.

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Let’s downsize Sprawlopolis by shifting property taxes to land dues.

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Gibson Guitar hits a sour note with environmentalists as it cozies up to the Tea Party.

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Murder City: The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime offers a world map detailing homicide rates around the world.

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An upstart newspaper files dispatched from the edge of capitalism. Introducing, the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

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How do you get people to attend a reading? Host a Literary Death Match.

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The big business of televised food is bigger than you think. The ice in a beverage, for example, might be made of acrylic and cost $500 a cube.

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The decline and fall of America’s decline and fall.

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Puff, puff, pour? Leave it to the gourmands to add marijuana to upscale beers and wines.

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This new medical device is like a super soaker for the burn unit: It coats a burn victim’s wound with their own skin cells, allegedly healing the injury in days instead of weeks.

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Snarky t-shirt or serious chic? A design writer for imprint teases out the difficulties of choosing what to wear to a protest.

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What if Facebook developed a web browser to challenge Google?

Image by spacecadet, licensed under Creative Commons.

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