“Parsons’ impetus for working with Cohn was to celebrate everything he loved about both old-time singing cowboys and California culture, a look he dubbed ‘Cosmic Americana.’ Hundley calls the look ‘an embrace of classic with a psychedelic edge,’ which became part of the Gram Parsons legend. ‘Nudie,’ she said, ‘was the embodiment of that presentation.’”
 — Tablet’s Jason Diamond writes about the late Country-Western designer Nudie Cohn — who was named Nuta Kotlyarenko when he was born in 1902 in Kiev.

“In media reports on women’s issues — abortion, birth control, Planned Parenthood — men are quoted around five times more than women, a new study shows.”

“TimeScapes is the debut film from award-winning cinematographer and director Tom Lowe. The film features stunning slow-motion and timelapse cinematography of the landscapes, people, and wildlife of the American South West. Lowe spent 2 years roaming the Southwest in his Toyota pickup truck shooting the film.”
 — Ummm, it looks pretty cool. Plus there’s a bear in it! You’ll definitely want to go fullscreen on this.

“Belgian researchers watched videos of women walking, and were able to tell whether they regularly had orgasms from intercourse…. The walk of a woman who has had orgasms, but not from intercourse with a man is visibly different.”

A woman who works in finance and lives in Fort Greene recently got three chickens to keep in her backyard so that she could eat fresh eggs every morning. Yesterday, she was walking her kid to school when she heard someone shout, “Hey, how are the chickens?” She looked across the street and saw a man waving, but she didn’t recognize him. She was a little freaked out. Until another woman, ten feet ahead of her on the sidewalk, also walking a child to school, turned and waved to the man and said, “They’re doing great!” Brooklyn.

“While it did not exhaustively look into the reasons behind why people think they can urinate in a public pool, the survey suggests that it is easy and anonymous.”
 — Also, “Human Slurry” would be a good name for a band.

Do you love reading, but hate books? SUPERB NEWS.

The Citia team takes the author’s book and deconstructs it, looking for the main and subsidiary themes in the book’s narrative. This is done without regard to the book’s original organizational structure. It doesn’t follow existing chapters per se (or at all); it’s completely rethought. Then the information is further granularized into “cards”, 100–150 words (sometimes borrowing the author’s prose but often rewritten) that summarize a particular point.

You guys, stop laughing. It gets better!

This turns the original book (which Linda sometimes calls “a brick”), which can only really be satisfactorily navigated by starting at the beginning and reading (linearly), into something far more lightweight and navigable (which Linda calls “permeable”.)

DOES SHE.

Responses from agents, publishing executives, editors, and rights directors were overwhelmingly positive, but the ask for rights was very complicated. A few players were concerned that Citia apps would cannibalize more sales of the book than they would generate. Some others had the concern that authors wouldn’t want to see their work changed in this way and, indeed, author acceptance — if not enthusiasm — was quickly seen as important by Semi-Linear, even though the Citia team really does all the considerable work required to create their version.

That does sound “considerable.”

You guys? “This is an extraordinarily ambitious attempt here, literally reinventing the nonfiction book.”

Not a joke. Here is the tech blog coverage. LITERALLY REINVENTING THE NONFICTION BOOK. OR BRICK. REINVENTING THE BRICK. (via)

“There are a lot of people out there looking for any excuse not to exercise. This might be an excuse for them to say, ‘Oh, I must be one of those 10 percent.’”
 — William Haskell, emeritus professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, expresses concern about a series of studies which show that rigorous exercise actually harms the health of about 10 percent of people who attempt it. Are you part of the 10 percent? Almost certainly. So relax, it’s good for you.

Photo by Slava Gerj, via Shutterstock

“Terrifyingly, much of the public and the press does actually care more about fancy horseback riding and teen pot use than secretive protocol for unchecked killing and legal precedents that radically erode civil liberties.”

by Luke Hopping

Anyone who considers growing a beard weighs the same set of pros and cons. Assuming you’re already confident in your ability to muster respectable whiskers — and you may not be, as one sad sack relates — your immediate concern is probably skin irritation. Beards itch. They itch you, and they’ll itch anyone you’re close to. They can even irk casual observers. Try watching Giant’s relief pitcher Brian Wilson midgame. The fake beards donned by fans meant to display support for Wilson’s Black Beard Revival are an affront to his dedication. In the midst of summer, hurling 100 mph fastballs, that thing probably feels like a bird’s nest made of fiber insulation. But it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Major League baseball star or just a major fan of Sean Connery’s chin frost in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: facial hair prickles, and it ought to. Trying to minimize irritation by refusing to grow out your peach fuzz is a bit like doing a polar bear plunge in a wetsuit. It misses the point.

A full beard can be a sign of commitment. Indeed, many of history’s most memorable beards were rough, hot, and all-around inconvenient. Take Hemingway. Every July, heavyset men with salty beards descend upon Key West to participate in the annual Hemingway Day Festival’s lookalike contest. Yet Hemingway never rocked the full beard during his stay in Florida: the whitewashed mane for which he is now famous was a fixture of his time in Cuba. As if Key West weren’t muggy enough, Hemingway waited to grow the thing out until he was ninety miles closer to the equator. You better believe that thing chafed. And it was worth it, too. Why else would otherwise sane middle aged men throw on turtlenecks in July, abstain from shaving, and pack themselves into a place called Sloppy Joe’s Bar to be judged based on their resemblance to Papa? Let us take a look at some of history’s most irritating and famously full beards.

Socrates
He may not have left us any instructions in writing, but there are lessons to be learned from the way he groomed his face. At least his pupils, and their subsequent pupils, seemed to think so. Both Plato and Aristotle followed Socrates’s lead and grew billowing beards of their own. Socrates introduced the beard as an indispensible part of Western society’s conceptualization of the sagacious philosopher. Even though his successors claimed he refused to flee Athens before his execution for ethical reasons, we prefer to believe that Socrates knew a life on the lam would require shaving his most distinguishing feature, and chose death instead.

Grigori Rasputin
Those wild eyes were God-given, but pairing them with an equally untamable beard was pure genius. In doing so, Rasputin set the style for generations of heartthrob zealots to come (see Guevara, Che). And, while a thick beard is far from uncommon in frigid Russia, Rasputin still manages to make it look risky.

ZZ Top
It’s been said a million times, but these guys deserve another round of applause for all they’ve done on behalf of overkeen beards in pop culture. That is, except for drummer Frank Beard, who, despite his name and occupation, inexplicably chooses to go mustache-only.

Brigham Young
Whereas some beard wearers seek new converts, Brigham Young’s mutton-chop and goatee column combo is not to be repeated. Literally. Scruff is strictly forbidden at the university that bears his name (unless you get a special “Beard Card”) and, in modern times, it’s been something of an unspoken rule that Mormon prophets must be clean-shaven. Ensuring he would never be bested, Young birthed a religion with mixed feelings about facial hair.

General Ambrose Burnside
This guy was responsible for not one, but two, of the North’s worst defeats during the Civil War, yet he’s remembered for inventing sideburns. Now there’s a beard.

Frederick Barbarossa
In our shared, cultural consciousness, there exists a stocky guy with a bushy, strawberry-colored beard. How’d he get there? Frederick Barbarossa, the man whose last name actually means “red beard,” was the original. Indeed, from Yukon Kornelius and Action Bronson to the less portly Conan O’Brien, beards look good on redheads. Improbably, Emperor Barbarossa’s lasting crusade may not have been his invasion of the Germanic states in the late 1100s but in the world of men’s fashion.

Kimbo Slice
Most modern militaries agree that facial hair interferes with soldiers’ duties, but street fighter turned professional boxer Kimbo Slice feels differently. Almost entirely bald, Slice lets his beard speak for itself, wearing it like war paint to intimidate his enemies in the ring. Unkempt and tangled, it recalls a primordial age in which warriors were encouraged to look as fearsome as they behaved.