My Bodyguard, 1980, wandering the old Maxwell Street area–the first shot is 13th and Halsted. All of the buildings in these screenshots have since been demolished.
Covers are weird for many reasons. What's strange about this is that Natalie Imbruglia covered "Torn." It's originally by Ednaswap. Their version sounds more grunge-synth-y, but you never really hear about them. I get that her version is x1000 more popular, but isn't it a strange cultural thing that artists get totally eclipsed by more popular versions and then never get credit again?
Not that Directioners need any more reasons to sob happy tears with just hours left before Made in the A.M. drops, but this is it if there ever was one
One Direction stopped by BBC's Radio 1 Live Lounge to sing a few tracks from the new album and perform a couple covers, including Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn."
The song is significant because the first song the boys performed as a group when they were put together on X-Factor, and they haven't played it since their season's finale five years ago. This is also the first time they've perfomed with without Zayn, which is bittersweet for their fans Read more...
This is what we've all been missing out on while Missy Elliott's been laying low
The rapper and master of the music video medium just released "WTF (Where They From)," featuring Pharrell Williams — her first song since 2012, save for a few guest features — and the video is predictably bonkers
The subreddit r/CucumbersScaringCats is dedicated entirely to the proposition that cats are scared of cucumbers, and to providing video evidence in support of that proposition. (more…)
Almost as soon as photography was invented, police and prison authorities began photographing prisoners and suspects to aid in their identification. The pictures became known as "mugshots," after the slang word for face.
These photographs were taken in 1880 and 1890 at Wormwood Scrubs prison in West London. They are unusual in that, through the clever use of a mirror, the full face and profile views appear in the same shot. The prisoners also showed their hands, so that any distinguishing features such as missing fingers or tattoos could be recorded. Read more...
When’s the last time you paid attention to alleys?
Chances are, unless you’re taking out garbage or trying to squeeze a U-Haul back there, you rarely think about the narrow lane that can cut through a block.
Here’s at least one reason to take note: Chicago is the alley capital of the country, with more than 1,900 miles of them within its borders. (If you left Chicago by plane and flew southwest for that distance, you’d end up just shy of Mexico City.)
Chicago architect Dan Weese would never take his alley for granted. To him, the alley is a many-splendored thing. Dan grew up in Lincoln Park, a North Side neighborhood with plenty of alleys, and he spent a lot of time playing in the alley behind his family’s rowhouse. As he puts it, the alley was the “rec room of the block.”
“I remember on Saturday mornings, all the garage doors would open up, and people would be working on cars, or working on a woodworking project, or taking the garbage out, and you could have a relationship with them,” he says. “It was very different than the people you would meet on your street.”
For Dan, alleys aren’t just utilitarian service lanes. They’re an important social gathering place — an informal parallel to the street out front. He’s been thinking about them so much, that he sent us this question:
How was it decided that Chicago should have alleys?
Well, the answer to Dan’s question got us more than we bargained for. It involves a story that spans centuries, and that same story not only explains Chicago’s enormous network of alleys but also why some parts of the region are conspicuously alley-free.
Hip to be square
What gives? Why all the alleys — and why the divide between Chicago communities with and without them?
According to Michael Martin, alley expert and professor of landscape architecture at Iowa State University, the “why alleys” question is easy to answer. You just have to go back to the late 1700s, decades before Chicago was founded. America was young, and had hardly touched any of its newest territories to the west.
“There's one thing you can do without having to explore all of it,” says Martin. “Lay a grid over that giant swath of land, and divide it up in ways that you can then take that land and you can sell it, you can deed it over to people.”
The federal government’s National Land Ordinance of 1785 imposed a massive grid over everything west of the Ohio River, dividing uncharted territory into square townships, each 36 square miles in size. Those townships were then sliced into progressively smaller sections, all the way down to the city block.
“As you think about finer and finer scales of design, what's happening is those squares are being infilled and infilled,” says Martin. “The big grid was always the framework within which people developed things, and that leads to towns having square blocks, and ultimately the alley inside of that block.”
This expanding grid eventually hit the Chicago area.
According to cartographer and Chicago history buff Dennis McClendon, alleys had become so commonplace in the American West that the Illinois General Assembly “simply expected it to happen in Chicago.”
The particulars came into play with the Illinois & Michigan Canal. In the 1820s, the U.S. Congress had granted the state of Illinois enough land to dig a canal to connect Lake Michigan and the Illinois River. The state planned to finance the construction by establishing towns along the canal and selling the land to developers.
The I&M Canal Commission hired surveyor James Thompson to lay out Chicago at the eastern end of the canal in 1830. To attract prospective land buyers, the General Assembly ordered that the new town of Chicago be “subdivided into town lots, streets, and alleys, as in their best judgment will best promote the interest of the said canal fund.”
Thompson was apparently a law-abiding man: His town plan for Chicago had 58 blocks, and every single one had an alley.
The practical side
As it turns out, it’s a good thing that Thompson planned Chicago with alleys. The city was a filthy, stinky, disease-ridden place in those days. Rear service lanes were essential for collecting trash, delivering coal, and stowing human waste — basically, keeping anything unpleasant away from living quarters.
“This was one of the reason why alleys have this dark and nasty reputation,” says Martin. “They were very much the grimy service part of daily life. It wasn't expected that this would be a well-maintained landscape; it was kind of a landscape of raw utility.”
In that same vein, McClendon theorizes that widespread horse ownership in the West translated into a lot of horse dung in the city, which would’ve encouraged city planners to include alleys. “The horse has the inflow and outflow problems,” McClendon says. “You have to bring in a lot of hay, you have to muck out a lot of manure. ... That's one of the reasons that you want to have a service lane that’s segregated from where the womenfolk of the town are walking, or other places that you want to be more tidy and well-kept.”
Riverside and the beginning of the end of Chicago-area alleys
For its boom years in the 1800s, Chicago was an alley monster; it planned new blocks with alleys, annexed towns with alleys, and added territory to its alley-riddled gridiron. But all grid things must come to an end, and soon communities started popping up without alleys.
The first of those communities arrived in 1869. That year, Frederick Law Olmsted — the father of landscape architecture (and who later played a huge role in Chicago’s landscape) — planned the community of Riverside, which was situated on what was considered to be the far western outskirts of the Chicago region. It was the first planned suburb in America, and the earliest sign of divergence from Chicago’s alley trend.
Constance Guardi, from the Riverside Historical Commission, takes me on a walking tour of the town. As we stroll down winding, tree-lined streets, she points to old, beautiful houses set back behind lush, rolling lawns. Guardi explains that Olmsted wanted to create the town of the future: a community that combined the peacefulness of the country with the luxury of the city.
“The plan was so that it would meander, rather than that hustle and bustle,” she says. “This was to be relaxed. ... So that you would be able to really just have a quiet and lovely life.”
She says Olmsted’s master plan for Riverside didn’t include alleys, because they just weren’t necessary in the wide open spaces of the Illinois countryside. It so happens that Guardi is exactly the kind of person Olmsted had in mind when he planned Riverside. She grew up in a Chicago neighborhood with alleys, and she never cared for them.
“I'll tell you why I didn't like alleys,” she says. "They were dirty! ... Everybody's garbage was out there all the time.”
For years after it was established, Riverside was an outlier. Other suburbs that popped up around it in the years to come — like Berwyn and Cicero — followed Chicago’s lead with alleys and a grid. Look at a map of the area today, and Riverside is a squiggly green island in a sea of squares.
Where the alley ends
By the turn of the century, though, more city planners jumped on Olmsted’s bandwagon and began designing communities to be beautiful and clean — counterpoints to the density and industry they wanted to avoid.
“Instead of the old boring grid of the national survey and of the old town,” Martin says, “we're now going to do curving streets because they're modern and they’re different.”
As a sign of the times, a 1913 development competition in the suburbs of Chicago yielded almost no designs with alleys; instead, the proposals featured curvilinear streets, and blocks with interior courtyards. (The account is contained in a book authored by alleys scholar Grady Clay.) In one proposal for the contest, Frank Lloyd Wright advocated for the abolition of alleys.
Martin says the death of the alley came about from this shift in urban planning principles, but other factors contributed, too, including improvements in sanitation technology.
“Once you have systems like sanitary sewers or garbage collection that can be done in an efficient way, you don't really have to have an alley,” he says. “So we decided that the street was capable of handling all that stuff.”
Then, the automobile came along. In 1920 there were about 8 million car owners in the country; by the end of the decade that number jumped to 23 million. Widespread auto ownership meant there were fewer stables and less horse poop in the city. More importantly, the automobile increased the mobility of working Americans, allowing people to live way out in the sparse suburbs, where the house lots were spacious and streets didn’t have to conform to a dense city grid.
“Now it becomes possible to build cities at lower densities, [with] bigger lawns, and bigger landholdings for each house,” says McClendon. “And that allows you to have a side garage or a side driveway. You no longer have to have the vehicle access through this service lane in the rear.”
The move away from alleys in the early 20th century — combined with the end of Chicago’s growth via annexation — solidified the divide between alley places and non-alley places in the Chicago region. While new suburban towns and outlying communities forged bravely into an alley-free world, Chicago’s historic core and the older suburbs were stuck with their alleys.
You can see the effects today. Within the Chicago city limits, 90 percent of residential blocks have alleys. But as you move from the city center, alleys begin to fall away. Not immediately, mind you. Suburbs like Oak Park, Evanston, and Blue Island are chock-full of alleys, but in suburban communities like Naperville and Tinley Park, alleys are much harder to find.
Repurposing a relic
The role of Chicago’s alleys has obviously changed; even though the city doesn’t need alleys for the same reasons it did back in the 1800s, they’re still essential parts of the city environment. Today, residents put recycling back there instead of piles of horse dung. And, utilities deliver phone service and electrical power through alleys rather than coal.
Plus, after centuries of building up around them, alleys are pretty hard to get rid of. A few American cities have instituted “alley vacation” programs. They’re not so fun as they sound: The programs basically involve vacating the alley as a public service lane. For the program to work, however, every alley-abutting homeowner has to agree to extend their property line into the middle of the alley. Not many cities have followed through with the administrative nightmare.
Instead of eliminating them, Chicago is reimagining its alleys. In 2006, Chicago became one of the first cities in the country to conduct a “green alley” program, resurfacing alleys to prevent runoff and decrease solar heat absorption. In the last several years, the Chicago Loop Association has been experimenting with alleys as social spaces, using them to host pop-up art events.
Martin says Chicago’s current approach holds promise for the future, and many contemporary urban planners and architects agree. The New Urbanist school of thought considers them to be both useful infrastructure and an important part of the cultural landscape.
“Now you see people designing and building things where the alley is actually a functioning social space, a gathering space, where the neighbors can actually connect with each other in their own somewhat intimate urban narrow space instead of on the street,” says Martin. “So you have a two-sided situation in these neighborhoods, and I think that's a very positive development.”
More about our questioner
“My curiosity about the alleys came about because it's part of the landscape and it's one of these things that you don't really think about,” says Dan Weese. “It's in the background, but it actually forms a really important part [of the city]."
As for any takeaways from our reporting? He says it’s especially interesting that the alley hasn’t become entirely irrelevant.
“There was this structure that apparently came about because the folks in the canal commission thought it was a good idea to put in alleys, and then human behavior adapts to that and morphs it,” he says.
Architecture happens to run in Dan’s veins. His uncle is none other than renowned architect Harry Weese. (Curious City profiled one of Harry Weese’s buildings, the Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist.) Most of Dan’s cousins are architects or designers and his parents founded an award-winning architecture firm — a firm that he now works for.
When he was a kid, Dan played kick-the-can and raced go-carts in the alley behind his house. He also broke a lot of stuff back there.
“You could do more destructive, less socially acceptable things in the alley,” he says. “It was just a little more rough and ready, and you could kind of let your hair down a little bit.”
Now 50 years old, Dan lives with his wife and three children, just three blocks from the rowhouse he grew up in. Unfortunately the couple lives in a highrise, and the alley isn’t nearly as good for playing as the one he remembers.
That is, Dan’s all grown up, and he prefers nerding out about alleys and their history, rather than destroying things in them.
In the superb Master of None, Aziz Ansari is coming straight for your heart
The biggest theme of the show: with so many options available, be it tacos or people to fall in love with, and no impetus to decide, it’s easy to become paralyzed. While that’s perhaps more acutely obvious in a city like New York, it’s a fair observation for so many people who grew up with a smartphone in their pocket. There also happens to be a paralysis of choice for New York comedies (or Netflix original series). As it turns out, it’s fairly easy to pick Master of None.
158 years ago today, Theodore Roosevelt, the manliest U.S. president of all time, was born. Throughout his career, Roosevelt was a favorite subject of political cartoonists. His big, toothy grin, framed by his walrus-like mustache, along with his bespectacled eyes, were easy to caricature. It also helped that TR had a larger-than-life personality to match his larger-than-life features.
To celebrate the birthday of the patron saint of the Art of Manliness, we thought it would be fun to tap into this part of TR’s history by showing AoM readers how to draw Teddy Roosevelt as a cartoon. AoM illustrator extraordinaire Ted Slampyak created an old school “how to draw” feature for us that breaks down the process step-by-step.
Wish TR a bully birthday by drawing your own version of him and snapping a pic of it on Instagram. Be sure to tag it with @artofmanliness@tedslampyak #TRcartoon so we can see it.
In this beautifully shot and un-narrated half-hour video directed by Baptiste Buob, we get to watch Dominique Nicosia use hand tools to make a violin. It's interesting to see him use specialized tools, and use them with confidence. After watching this, I almost felt like I made a violin myself!
I've been following news about a company called Steorn for many years now. They claim to have developed a technology that generates more energy than it consumes. Every time they've had a public demonstration, it doesn't work. I'm not surprised.
I thought they'd given up, but they are back. And they have a new video, which appears to be a webinar for investors. Michael Ferrier, who runs a blog about Steorn, has a good recap:
Description of the Orbo PowerCube internals
[Steorn CEO Shaun McCarthy] showed the internal components of a PowerCube, described how the energy generating Orbo power pack works, and even demonstrated the process of manufacturing a simple device of this kind.
The Orbo battery (or power pack) is made up of three components: two dissimilar metals and a layer of chemical gel that sits between them. The two metals can be sheets, or "basically any physical format". Shaun compares the resulting combination of components to a galvanic cell. However, in a galvanic cell, the chemical agent would be chemically eroding the other components; but in the Orbo battery, the chemical layer is completely inert and has no chemical interactions with the magnets.
The process of producing an Orbo battery involves taking these three layers, two dissimilar metals separated by a chemical (the formula of which is "not that simple"), heating them up to just beyond the melting point of the chemical, and then very slowly cooling them, which allows the chemical gel to retain an electric field that is impressed up it. The result is that a permanent electric field is "frozen" into the gel material, with positive and negative poles. This polarized electric field then interacts with the two dissimilar metals to generate an electric current, in a way that is analogous to how the magnetic fields in the "classic" perpetual motion machine Orbo interacted with one another to generate force. The electric field frozen into the gel material works in a way that parallels the frozen magnetic fields of permanent magnets. The term for a device with this sort of permanently frozen electric field is "electret", a portmanteau of "electric" and "magnet".
Shaun states that when polarized the right way, "what you end up with is something that is positive and negative." "It doesn't matter what you do to me, I will always polarize." The Orbo battery is thus an electric field version of the original magnetic Orbo. "So it is consistent, similar, and in many ways an incredibly simple piece of technology."
According to Shaun, Steorn's first battery prototypes were built approximately 2 years ago, and are still outputting power 24/7. Shaun says, "we know theoretically these materials will hold an electric field for circa 800 years."
Presidential debates are generally a cacophony of politicians and moderators making nonsensical statements that usually have nothing with America and everything to do with Hillary Clinton's email preferences
So the folks over at Bad Lip Reading helped make sense of the latest Democratic debate by adjusting a few things Hillary, Bernie and the rest of the gang were arguing about
This is the most articulate Lincoln Chafee has ever been.
This Cassini spacecraft view of Enceladus shows the moon’s active south pole and its “tiger stripes.”
(credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)
On Wednesday, a school-bus sized spacecraft will dive out of the inky blackness of space more than one billion kilometers from Earth and zip through an icy plume that springs from the south pole of Enceladus.
Although it's just a tiny satellite of Saturn—less than one-sixth the size of Earth’s moon—Enceladus has become one of the most intriguing bodies in the Solar System. Earlier this year, NASA confirmed that in addition to the moon's geyser-like plumes, it has a global ocean beneath its icy crust. Where there is water and energy, scientists believe, there's the possibility of life.
A last flyby
At this point, the venerable Cassini spacecraft, which made these astounding discoveries during the last decade spent exploring the Saturn system, has expended most of its fuel. Before Cassini runs dry, however, NASA scientists say they will take one final, long look at Saturn’s mysterious moon. On Wednesday, the spacecraft will dip down to within 50km of Enceladus’ surface—closer than ever before—and fly through one of its plumes.
A guy who works by day as a pharmacist in Korea makes these funny video compilations of himself singing Asian pop hits. His supercut is going super viral in Korea and Japan. (more…)
Every now and again people publish these articles, but has anyone ever done a study about how happy and productive drinking makes them (maybe not *while* you drink, but having it peppered into your week along with other fun social things)? It seems like the positive impact of that would far outweigh the loss of productivity from hangovers.
That extra drink or three you had last night may cost more than just your bar tab.
Excessive drinking cost the U.S. economy $249 billion in 2010, up from the $223.5 billion it cost the country in 2006, according to a new analysis by the CDC in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. That increase, about 2.7 percent annually, “significantly outpac[ed]” the 1.9 percent annual inflation rate of the four-year period, researchers found.
The biggest cause of economic loss was lost productivity, which accounted for 71.9 percent of the total, or about $179 billion. Being hungover at work, and therefore having “impaired productivity” there, cost the economy approximately $77 billion. Health care was 11.4 percent of the cost, at about $28 billion. Almost half of these costs, 40.4 percent, were borne by the government.
Binge drinking caused more than three quarters of these costs, 76.7 percent. Researchers included several categories of “excessive drinking.” Binge drinking was defined as four or more drinks at a time for women or five or more for men; heavy drinking was more than eight drinks per week for women, or 15 for men. And any drinking by people under the age of 21 and pregnant women was also included.
All that boozing comes out to $807 per person per year, or $2.05 per drink.
While there are limitations to the study, the researchers believe they likely underestimated the toll excessive drinking takes on the economy because their estimates were based on primary causes rather than secondary, and did not include “intangible costs like pain and suffering.”
This post originally appeared on Quartz, an Atlantic partner site.
Special Agent Dale Cooper used to call Diane on his cell phone late night when he needed to confess his doughnut consumption for the day before dozing off to sleep and dreaming of Drake
This jazzy "Hotline Bling" mashup puts Drake's bizarre dance moves in possibly the only location they make sense besides an art museum: the mysterious town of Twin Peaks
I went here this weekend. It's awesome. And it's only going to get better.
Head over to Chicago’s South Side, and chances are you’ll find a vacant home, ready to be demolished. But some of these homes and buildings have the best architecture in the city, available to the public at clearance rack prices.
Theaster Gates is an installation artist who recently decided to purchase an abandoned bank for $1, and transform it into an architectural landmark and community center. According to CityLab, the artist had to raise a tidy $3.7 million to complete the restoration and turn Stony Island Art Bank into a real neighborhood venue
This baby must be from the Middle Ages, because he is way too impressed with modern conveniences, such as running water
Every time this baby dunks his head under the faucet during his bath-time, he simply CANNOT believe it: a miniature waterfall, right in the kitchen sink! The universe is full of wonders! Water is amazing!
I'm kind of surprised the gov't hasn't turned the corner on Snowden yet and turned his story into a white hat one. Public opinion seems to be going in that direction.
(credit: Joe Raedle, Getty Images)
After last night's Democratic presidential candidate debate, the first of the cycle, privacy and information security appear to be grabbing all the headlines. That's because perhaps the most controversial Democratic talking point—Hillary Clinton's use of an Exchange 2010-hosted private e-mail server while acting as Secretary of State—came and went as quickly as some of the Republican candidate campaigns (here's looking at you, Rick Perry).
After the first commercial break, moderator Anderson Cooper asked Clinton directly about the e-mail scandal for which she will be testifying in front of Congress next week. Clinton admitted her wrongdoing ("Well, I've taken responsibility for it. I did say it was a mistake," she replied. "What I did was allowed by the State Department, but it wasn't the best choice."), but she proceeded to then call the entire affair simply a talking point of the Republican National Committee.
Anderson then pointed the topic at Clinton's primary competitor, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Rather than jumping at the opportunity to attack, Sanders reinforced his campaign ethos of focusing on core issues and avoiding commonplace political machinations. "Let me say something that may not be great politics," he began. "But I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails." After a brief response from the other candidates, it was the last mention of the situation throughout the entire night.
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star's light pattern is consistent with a "swarm of megastructures," perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
"When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," Wright told me. "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build."
Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.
By 2050, the world’s population is projected to approach nine billion. With more people will come more developed land—a lot more.
Urbanization, agriculture, energy, and mining put 20 percent of the world’s remaining forests, grasslands, and other natural ecosystems at risk of conversion by 2050. With that kind of expansion, there are sure to be harms—namely clean water, clean air, and biodiversity.
To mitigate some of those risks, scientists and geographers at the Nature Conservancy have taken a crucial step by mapping the potential impact that human growth will have on natural lands. It’s the most comprehensive look to date at how major forms of development will take over fragile ecosystems, if left unchecked.
Using publicly available global datasets, the researchers projected how terrestrial ecosystems would be affected by nine sectors: urban and agricultural expansion, fossil fuels (conventional oil and gas, unconventional oil and gas, and coal), renewable energy (solar, wind, and biofuels), and mining.
They ranked the development potential for each sector on a relative scale, based on either “the amount of unexploited resources (i.e. for fossil fuels, renewables, and mining) or estimated future area expansion derived from past trends (i.e. for urban and agriculture).”
Land conversion won’t look the same from region to region, or biome to biome. Continents that are less developed than others today will look much different in 35 years: In South America, the amount of natural land put to work could double, while in Africa, it could triple. Tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas, shrublands, forests, and deserts make up 66 percent of the areas projected to convert.
Globally, only five percent of at-risk natural lands are strictly protected. That’s not enough, the authors write:
With development increasingly encroaching into more remote and previously undisturbed areas, it is critical that international corporations, governments and conservation organizations collaborate to reduce and minimize potential future impacts on remaining habitats.
The authors urge stronger regulations on development siting and land-use planning to ease the effects of growth.
Below are maps of each sector’s projected development threat, via PLoS One:
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More about our questioner 
