A client checks his performance on the monitor installed on the ceiling of the Heaven Room. Taken by one of four web cameras installed in each corner of the room, the video went out live on the Big Sister website.
Photo: Hana Jakrlova
In her book Big Sister, photographer Hana Jakrlova explores an internet sex club in Prague where the clients get to have sex for free as long as they agree to let their exploits be filmed and broadcast live across the web.
“To me it seems like an extreme example of what is happening to all of us in this internet age,” says Jakrlova, who splits her time between Prague and New York. “There is an absurdity where some people have to have it online to have it become real or exciting.”
Beyond making her struggle with the notion of over-sharing, Jakrlova says the project also challenged her as a photographer and as a woman. While the johns always seemed to behave themselves, she says the acts that played out were hard to be around. Prostitution is legal in the Czech Republic, but that doesn’t make it any less exploitative, she says.
“I was battling certain feelings of guilt, sort of like a war photographer,” she says. “Are you a witness or are you going to be the one who throws away the camera and is going to help the person who is wounded.”
The book is titled after the name of the club, Big Sister, which closed in 2010. Most of the photos were taken between 2006 and 2007. Jakrlova says not all the interactions she witnessed at the club felt staged. There were moments of real affection between the clients and prostitutes, but the fact that those moments were broadcast online always qualified and relativized them, she says.
“There were real moments of humanity,” she says. “But overall I found it quite depressing.”
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The United States Postal Service “The United States Postal Service delivers more mail to more addresses in a larger geographical area than any other post in the world. We deliver to nearly 151 million homes, businesses and Post Office Boxes in every state, city, town and borough in this country. Everyone living in the U.S. and its territories has access to postal products and services and pays the same postage regardless of location.”
Between 30% and 60% of cocaine users combine the drug with alcohol. This concurrent use is the cause of nearly 75% of cocaine-related fatalities in the U.S., and a cocaine user is 25 times more likely to experience sudden death when combining it with alcohol. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Children and adults with herd of sheep in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, New York City, ca. 1900-1910. (Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives) #
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“Centerville, California. This youngster is awaiting evacuation bus. Evacuees of Japanese ancestry will be housed in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration.”, by Dorothea Lange, 9 May 1942
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Why Smart People Are Stupid
Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)
For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.
When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions.
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Powerful Movie Images We All Know
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Forty years ago, when U.S. cities began abandoning high-rise public housing, blasting crews would fill a tower with explosives and in a few monumental booms all would be reduced to rubble and rolling clouds of dust. It was as swift as it was symbolic. Now the demolitions are done by wrecking ball and crane, and the buildings are brought down bit by bit over months. This gradual dismantling seemed especially ill suited to the felling, in March 2011, of the last remaining tower at Cabrini-Green. Described almost unfailingly as “infamous” or “notorious,” this Chicago housing project had come to embody a nightmare vision of public housing, the ungovernable inner-city horrors that many believe arise when too many poor black folk are stacked atop one another in too little space. For the end of Cabrini-Green, I imagined something grandiose and purifying—the dropping of a bomb or, as in Candyman, the 1992 slasher film set in Cabrini’s dark wasteland, a giant exorcising bonfire. Instead, as I watched, a crane with steel teeth powered up and ripped into a fifth-floor unit, causing several feet of prefabricated façade to crumble like old chalk. Water sprayed from inside the crane’s jaws to reduce dust.
The fifteen-story high-rise was known by its address, 1230 N. Burling. Already stripped of every window, door, appliance, and cabinet, the monolith was like a giant dresser without drawers. The teeth tore off another hunk of the exterior, revealing the words I NEED MONEY painted in green and gold across an inside wall. Chicago was once home to the second-largest stock of public housing in the nation, with nearly 43,000 units and a population in the hundreds of thousands. Since the mid-1990s, though, the city has torn down eighty-two public-housing high-rises citywide, including Cabrini’s twenty-four towers.
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World-Wide Web Virtual Library: Botany / Plant Biology (Biosciences)
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When we talk about surveillance, we make a connection, almost automatically, between surveillance and crime, and another between surveillance and technology: The CCTV camera capturing the masked robber, the bank manager monitoring every inch of his vault for signs of intrusion, the giant NSA black site in Utah, designed to store indefinitely all the data that travels across American wires and through American airspace. Whether James Bond–glamorous or 1984-terrifying, surveillance is high-tech and polices the illicit.“The Secret Shopper” was originally published in The New Inquiry Magazine, No. 5: Spies. Subscribe to TNI Magazine for $2
These intuitive connections are reflected in the fact that, when someone refers to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, they are almost always talking about the prisons he designed. And while Foucault wouldn’t have us forget that Bentham also designed panoptic factories, hospitals, schools, and mental institutions, these all still follow after the form of the prison, which is where the power differential is the starkest. Wardens, however, need to watch prisoners much less closely than the capitalists looking to squeeze out every dollar need to watch those at work in their stores. As long as workers are forced to smile, politely greet customers, and point them toward a special deal, capital will need to send out mystery shoppers to keep them in line.
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Rudy Karniawan and the Largest Known Wine Fraud in History
On the evening of April 25, 2008, the wine auction house Acker Merrall & Condit held a sale at a New York restaurant called Cru. In contrast to the tedium of most wine auctions, Acker sales were bacchanals. They were normally held in restaurants, and many extravagant wines would be uncorked and consumed during the course of the auctions. Acker’s 36-year-old president, John Kapon, who was known to be the hardest-working and hardest-drinking man in the wine business, would join in the revelry while wielding the hammer. He would often have multiple glasses of wine arrayed on the lectern, and the effect as the night wore on was to simultaneously ratchet up his use of expletives and accentuate his tendency to butcher French pronunciation.
Wine helped lubricate the flow of money: early in the auction at Cru, two bottles of 1959 Dom Pérignon rosé that had once belonged to the Shah of Iran sold for $42,350 apiece, setting a new record price for champagne.
Later that night, Kapon was to sell a collection of wines consigned by a friend of his, Rudy Kurniawan, a 31-year-old Indonesian who lived in Los Angeles. Nicknamed “Dr. Conti” because of his affinity for Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Burgundy’s most famous estate, Kurniawan had started buying massive quantities of wines around 2003; at one point, he was reportedly spending $1 million a month. Kurniawan also sold lots of wine: at two Acker auctions in 2006, he had unloaded wines worth an astonishing $35 million. For the auction at Cru, which he had flown in to attend, he was putting up 268 bottles from three esteemed Burgundy producers: Domaine Armand Rousseau, Domaine Georges Roumier, and Domaine Ponsot.
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Biggest cave of the world
The world’s biggest cave ( Son Doong cave ), hiding in the jungles of Vietnam. A team of cavers with a local farmer decided to explore its depth.
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It’s the world’s tallest inverted boomerang – reaching heights of 20-stories tall, and roaring at 65 mph – leaving words like, “epic,” to be understatements, and sayings like, “must-ride,” to be truths.
Its name is GOLIATH, and with its 3 million pounds of steel, 10 million pounds of concrete, and outrageous green and blue appearance, it is, undoubtedly, this summer’s must-see, must-ride MassFinds “Find of the Month.”
That’s right, folks, GOLIATH is the latest addition to Six Flags New England, located in Agawam, standing as the Parks 11th roller coaster, and debuting as the worlds tallest boomerang-style coaster in the world.
Riders are sent racing head-over-heals on the outside of a 102 ft. vertical loop, followed by an enormous 110 ft. butterfly turn, just before rocketing up the second 20-story tower where they are then hurtled back through the coaster again – only this time, backwards.
Seemingly, though, our words don’t do the coaster its justice – so, for your viewing pleasure, Six Flags New England has provided this whopping look into what lies ahead when you board this gargantuan coaster.
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Cain Pitches Perfect Game
AN FRANCISCO—Matt Cain pitched the 22nd perfect game in major league history and first for the Giants, striking out a career-high 14 and getting help from two spectacular catches to beat the Houston Astros 10-0 on Wednesday night.
Cain’s 125-pitch masterpiece for San Francisco featured a pair of great plays by his corner outfielders, and he got pinch-hitter Jason Castro on a grounder to third for his 27th and final out with the sellout crowd of 42,298 roaring.
At a ballpark where Barry Bonds made home run history, Cain produced the signature moment for pitchers.
Left fielder Melky Cabrera chased down Chris Snyder’s one-out flyball in the sixth, scurrying back to make a leaping catch at the wall. Cain raised both arms and slapped his glove in delight when Cabrera made the play.
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WHO Says Diesel Exhaust Definitely Causes Cancer
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has concluded that exhaust from diesel engines is definitely a cause of lung cancer in humans. The IARC, which is part of the World Health Organization, had previously labeled diesel exhaust fumes as “probably carcinogenic.” The new label is based on research on workers in high-risk occupations, such as truck driving and mining. Such workers are believed to have a 40 percent higher chance of developing lung cancer. However, the expert panel recommends that everyone avoid exposure to diesel exhaust.
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Alcock and Brown Embark on First Nonstop Transatlantic Flight (This day in 1919)
In 1918, the Daily Mail newspaper renewed its £10,000 prize for the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic. The next year, British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown claimed it after completing a treacherous 16-hour flight from Newfoundland to Ireland. Along the way, Brown had to repeatedly climb onto the wings of their biplane to remove ice, and snow filled the open cockpit. Upon reaching Ireland, they attempted to land in what they thought was a field, but it turned out to be what?
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Best-selling humor author Bill Bryson famously said: “You couldn’t be here without a little incest.”
Michael Stevens of Vsauce clarifies: “Actually, quite a lot of incest.”
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Carlsbad Caverns’ new secret passages
This large, newly found room in Lechuguilla Cave is being called Munchkin Land. Note the caver standing on a rock, for scale.
Despite being explored for more than a century, Carlsbad Caverns National Park still hides more passages.
A team exploring the park’s Lechuguilla Cave, the deepest cave in the continental United States, climbed over 410 feet (125 meters) into a high dome in early May. Upon reaching the top, lead climber James Hunter discovered a maze of previously unknown passages, pits and large rooms. The team named it Oz.
One of the newly discovered pits, dubbed Kansas Twister, is 510 feet (155 m) tall, making it the largest vertical expanse yet discovered in the caverns. It’s about half as high as New York City’s Chrysler Building or Chicago’s Sears Tower. The cavers use laser distance meters to measure the height from the floor to their final rope anchor.
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