Inside the disgusting Los Angeles haunted house where they actually TOUCH YOU:
These rooms are very scary and I would recount them in detail but honestly, all I remember is a toenail being removed from a corpse and trying not to cry. In the fourth room, they separate you from your group and make you walk down a dark hallway alone. Although I am cautioned to walk, I run through that thing like Jackie Joyner-Kersee at the ‘88 Summer Olympics. As I book it, I’m simultaneously screaming Jonas’s name repeatedly until a man in a pig mask and bloody surgical scrubs starts mocking me. He puts his pig-face in my human-face and screams, “Jonas! Jonas! JONAS!”
In which Beyonce praised King George’s walk.
David Mitchell on Earthsea:
Four principal wizards inhabited my childhood. These were, in order of discovery, TH White’s Merlin, JRR Tolkien’s Gandalf, Susan Cooper’s Merriman Lyon and Ursula K Le Guin’s Ged, more commonly known as Sparrowhawk, true names being a serious business in Earthsea. Other magicians and witches also lived on my boyhood bookshelf, but even at 10 years old I sensed that these belonged to a lesser order. Growing up, I adored A Wizard of Earthsea, Le Guin’s slim but muscular 1968 novel, which I read and reread until my ratty old paperback copy required emergency surgery, and I still have a precious memory of getting to the last page for the umpteenth time, staring at the final line – “and Yarrow ran to meet them, crying with joy” – and realising with a giddy clarity that being a goalkeeper or inventor or forester was yesterday’s news, and that I had to be a writer and nothing else would do. I yearned to do to other people what A Wizard of Earthsea had just done to me – even if I couldn’t articulate exactly what that was. Adulthood brings more demanding critical standards and many a childhood favourite has been booted off my podium of most cherished books, but my admiration for Le Guin’s artistry has only grown with every rereading.
I can’t believe I read the entirety of this immense thing about the weird and often very bad life of Norbert Grupe, but I certainly did.
When Mallory and I were watching AHS: Coven together she found out I’d never seen Lucy Lawless playing Stevie Nicks on SNL, which we rectified (also, I LOVE Stevie Nicks.)
How a Simpsons episode is made (long and fascinating):
After receiving notes and some creative direction, an episode’s writer takes two weeks to pen a first draft. “Almost all of the writing is done here at the Fox [lot] in one of two rewrite rooms,” says Al Jean, who at the time of the interview is deep into production of the show’s upcoming 27th season. “The two rooms was a change that came about around season nine. We split because we had enough writers, and we could get more done.”
Tony Abbott is the worst and why isn’t he going away?
Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott has called on Europe to take on Australia’s border security policies or risk “catastrophic error” and urged Western nations to “stand up for ourselves”.
In his first major speech since being forced out, Abbott said Europe should close its borders to migrants.
“The Australian experience proves that the only way to dissuade people seeking to come from afar is not to let them in,” he said.
This walk through how the WDBJ newsroom handled the experience of the shooting on August 26th is really intense and moving and sad:
The video autoplayed. “It was like a magnet. It attracted everyone,” Zuber said. “I looked at it, and then I looked at the faces of the people who were looking at it. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to go well. In a moment, I was trying to say, ‘Don’t watch this.’ But it went by that quickly.”
The gunman’s video showed him firing for several seconds beyond what the live broadcast showed.
“It was like it had happened in the newsroom,” Zuber said. “People just scattered from that computer to all corners of the newsroom, trying to get away from it.”
The video reinforced the feeling that everyone at WDBJ was a victim. He had used the station’s own equipment to broadcast an execution locally and used social media to show the rest of the world.
In the newsroom there was no discussion of showing either video — because a victim of a crime wouldn’t consider doing that.
In the aftermath, Zuber said, “I think more and more about what would happen if the victims of crimes had the opportunity to write the stories.”
Pacific Standard on the history and upcoming release of (some) non-violent drug offenders:
The mass release is good news for more than just the released inmates: Research has found that overcrowded prisons create a litany of problems, from overtaxed infrastructure with projected repair costs in the millions, to psychological and physical consequences for inmates and corrections officers. Reducing the inmate population will therefore benefit not just the released, but also those inmates who will remain behind bars, as well as the corrections officers charged with guarding them.
So how did we get here in the first place?
The featured image this morning is of Anne Helen Petersen walking her puppy, Peggy Olson, in Prospect Park, because it is my personal goal for lookin’ good and having a puppy.
