RaveVlog

As he made the rounds of Jersey City’s sprawling Medical Center last week, Mayor Thomas J. Whelan cheerily shook hands with employees and urged them to give him a call “if there’s anything I can do for you.” That was a pretty tall offer, considering that 1,172 of them—two-thirds of the hospital’s entire staff—were to be fired by Mayor Whelan this week. Since economy-minded Tom Whelan, 43, took over Democratic Boss Frank Hague’s old fiefdom in 1963, he has discharged a total of 1,777 municipal employees for a saving of $10. [Read More]

November 20, 2014 7:05 AM EST I first met Glen A. Larson in 1979, when he wanted me to do a show called Magnum, P.I., which was a nice position to be in. Glen, who died on Nov. 14 at age 77, was one of those guys I knew of as a giant in our industry–he had already created Battlestar Galactica and the medical drama Quincy, M.E.–and I was really flattered. [Read More]

Studying the depths of the sea by sonar, dredging, and instruments lowered from ships, oceanologists have so far gained about as accurate an idea of what lies below as man had about the continents back in 1750. The obvious need has been for more precise exploration of the deep. And the obvious lack, until now, has been ways and means to plunge to great depths, remain there for days or weeks at a time and explore such mysteries as the exact topography and geological composition of the ocean floor. [Read More]

Noah Church is a 26-year-old part-time wildland firefighter in Portland, Ore. When he was 9, he found naked pictures on the Internet. He learned how to download explicit videos. When he was 15, streaming videos arrived, and he watched those. Often. Several times a day, doing that which people often do while watching that genre by themselves. After a while, he says, those videos did not arouse him as much, so he moved on to different configurations, sometimes involving just women, sometimes one woman and several guys, sometimes even an unwilling woman. [Read More]

Getty Images Gregory Currie, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, recently argued in the New York Times that we ought not to claim that literature improves us as people, because there is no “compelling evidence that suggests that people are morally or socially better for reading Tolstoy” or other great books. Actually, there is such evidence. Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, reported in studies published in 2006 and 2009 that individuals who often read fiction appear to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and view the world from their perspective. [Read More]

In the finale of Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar, Mallikajaan (Manisha Koirala), who reigns over the courtesans in the titular neighborhood in pre-Independence India, receives word that the British Army has arrested her daughter, Bibbojaan, for her rebellion in colluding with Indian freedom fighters. “All these years, we were just tawaifs [courtesans], but now we have become patriots of our homeland,” she says defiantly, tears welling up her eyes.  The renowned Indian director Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who created and directed the widely anticipated Hindi-language series which premiered on Netflix on May 1, says he wanted to reimagine the world of the real-life courtesans of the walled city of Lahore, now situated in modern-day Pakistan. [Read More]

Who ever heard of Florindo (“Porky”) Vieira? Not the basketball fans who only bother with big-time games and big-name colleges. But the students of Connecticut’s Quinnipiac College (enrollment 800) insist that their chunky, 5-ft-6-in. sharpshooter is one of the best roundball players in captivity. Last week Porky boasted an average of 35 points per game, a healthy five points ahead of such highly touted major-college players as Kansas’ Wilt Chamberlain and South Carolina’s Grady Wallace. [Read More]

TIME August 10, 1953 12:00 AM GMT-4 On the late Boston Transcript, a feature writer, with a fondness for using three words where one would do, once referred to bananas as “elongated yellow fruit.” This periphrasis so fascinated Charles W. Morton, now the associate editor of the Atlantic, that he began collecting examples of “Elongated Yellow Fruit” writing. Friends on newspapers and magazines have joined in the game, send him the worst examples they can find for the Atlantic Bulletin, a chatty monthly promotion letter (circ. [Read More]

About 13 years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) asked the scientific community to create a food that soldiers could take onto the battlefield. The agency, which wanted to improve troops' physical and mental performance, turning war fighters into super-soldiers. Researchers at University of Oxford and National Institutes of Health answered the call. With $10 million in funding from DARPA, a team of biochemists invented the ketone ester, a drink that generates energy from ketones — molecules formed by the breakdown of fat — rather than carbs, fat, or protein. [Read More]