Instapaper

What’s a drug used to deworm livestock—a drug that can obliterate your immune system—doing in your cocaine? Nobody knows.

Started as an experiment, Ticketmaster has since developed a near lock on the multibillion-dollar ticketing industry. And the company is only getting bigger. Last winter it merged with Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the country, which means that in effect Ticketmaster now also controls access to acts like U2 and Jay-Z and owns many of the amphitheaters in the US, including the Irvine Meadows/Verizon Amphitheater in California and the Nikon at Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York.

Niodior is an African village that exists in two different places: in Senegal, where the families live in poverty, and in southern Spain, where their sons live together after making the perilous journey north. They work illegally and wire their earnings home, as a form of private development aid.

A week inside the future of journalism

(Thanks, Brian)

Two surprising finds help scholars understand the source of the city’s wealth

The odds of their conception were astronomical; of surviving in the womb, let alone a live birth, slim to none. The odds of living past their first day, worse than a coin toss, though not if the small army deployed by Vancouver’s Children’s Hospital had a say in it. And they did.

With unemployment still stubbornly high, the economy continuing to sputter along, and the federal government racking up $1 trillion-plus deficits, Pelosi became the personification for many of everything wrong with the Democratic Party.

Mickey Mantle made history against the Washington Senators. A local teen found the high-flying ball behind a house near the stadium. Finding that boy 50 years later wasn’t so easy.

From Tijuana east, Ed Vulliamy traces a violent drug war, spreading repression condoned by the U.S., a wall that separates family members, a water supply shut off, and the worship of Holy Death.

(via The Browser)

It’s been an era of the most amazing technical achievement, marked by an overwhelming flood of new data. It’s true that we are gaining, even if largely by trial and error, certain manipulative powers. But our understanding of the integrity and unified functioning of the living cell has, if anything, been more obscured than illumined by the torrent of code.

The musician and artist Brian Eno coined the odd but apt word “scenius” to describe the unusual pockets of group creativity and invention that emerge in certain intellectual or artistic scenes: philosophers in 18th-century Scotland; Parisian artists and intellectuals in the 1920s. In Eno’s words, scenius is “the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

For the past eight years, Salazar has been paid by Nike to lead a group of up to a dozen runners, who train together on the campus of the company, in Beaverton, Oregon—and who, Nike hopes, will win races wearing swoosh-adorned clothing. At first, Salazar had limited success. But in recent years he has acquired a certain mystique for his ability to cajole fragile runners into peak performance.

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War.

When a surgeon cut into Henry Molaison’s skull to treat him for epilepsy, he inadvertently created the most important brain-research subject of our time — a man who could no longer remember, who taught us everything we know about memory. Six decades later, another daring researcher is cutting into Henry’s brain. Another revolution in brain science is about to begin.

The story of cancer as a distinctively modern—and even specifically American—entity starts with the marriage, in 1940, of Albert Lasker, a wealthy and well-connected advertising executive whose accounts included Lucky Strike cigarettes, and Mary Woodard, a dress designer and Radcliffe graduate, who had social aspirations.

Criminal profiling made easy.

Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.

“I may be a thief and a liar,” he says in beguiling Italian-accented French. “But I am going to tell you a true story.”

As it wins the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, revisit the true story behind one soldier’s last trip home

The effeminate sheep and other problems with Darwinian sexual selection.