“Current heavy smokers are at three times greater risk for major depression compared to former heavy smokers, according to a study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. Although the link between smoking and depression is well-documented, the results support the causal hypothesis regarding smoking and depression rather than simply the ‘shared-vulnerability’ hypothesis.”

“I recently climbed to the top of the statue of Peter the Great in the center of the city one night — 100 meters (330 feet) up and onto his head. We climbed up while the guards were sleeping. A weather vane was spinning in the wind on the very top. Below, the sun was slowly rising over Moscow. The city was asleep, and it was like life was frozen. I was the happiest person on Earth. I only need to look down to forget all my problems.”
 — Yikes! Wait a minute! I thought the rule was “DON’T look down!” Der Spiegel’s as-told-to by leading Moscow “roofer” Marat Dupri

(and the accompanying slide show) is dizzying.

“In a series of papers on adolescent health published in The Lancet today, scientists describe how new research has changed our understanding of adolescence which was thought to start with the physical changes to the body around puberty and to be completed when growth stopped in the late teens. Now researchers believe the brain goes on maturing and is not fully developed until at least the age of 24.”

Two Early Poems By Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt

by Carmen Johns

I didn’t even know that Thebe Kgositsile, a.k.a. Earl Sweatshirt, went to my elementary school before I started leafing through old copies of “The Poet Tree,” the poetry collection from our alma mater, Community Magnet School in Los Angeles.

His poem “Mummies” (my favorite of the two here) needs no explanation, except to note that it’s incredible to see a five- or six-year-old with the swagger of Biggie or the like. This bigger-than-the-world-and-all-the-scary-things-in-it mentality is something that many rappers front, but what makes Earl Sweatshirt so amazing is that he’s genuinely had it since he was a tot (just compare his poem to the one below his to see the difference).

Usually the poems we wrote in elementary school were assigned to us with a specific theme in mind, like a color or animal, and we had to fill in the rest (i.e. one student’s poem “Blue,” which goes “Blue is the ocean/Blue is a cup/Blue is a marker/Blue is the sky./I like blue.”) Paging through, it’s easy to see which poems had built-in structures and themes, and perhaps Thebe was supposed to write one that told a story. But really, there is no other poem in this thing that’s anything like “Mummies.”

Carmen Johns is a student at Oberlin College.

If you thought the “Happy Birthday David” short was an ingenious bit of marketing for Ridley Scott’s upcoming Prometheus, wait til you see this.

Apparently, unbeknownst to moviegoers down here on earth, 20th Century Fox has hired one of the 62 moons orbiting Saturn to shill for their big summer release. The film company knew we’d wind up watching, through our computers and the high-powered lenses of NASA’s Cassini Probe. (One of our very favorite space probes.) As the BBC reports:

“The F-ring is the outermost of Saturn’s main rings. It is located 3,000km beyond the bright A-ring and has a circumference approaching 900,000km. The Cassini imaging team had been watching the 40km-wide Prometheus moon dance along the edge of this ring for some time.”

A little dance! Like Justin Timberlake does for Omeletteville in those “Saturday Night Live” skits. The most amazing part, though, is the small, Kilometer-wide clumps of ice that the spokesmoon’s gravitational perturbations dislodge from the F-ring. They’re like giant snowballs, and as they fly around and blast back through the ring, they produce eye-catching trails, “rogue jets” of space gas, or “advertising gold.”

How much did they have to pay for that?! I thought it was impressive when Nike shelled out for the Beatles’ “Revolution” in the ’80s, or when McDonald’s got our own moon to sing “Mac the Knife.”

Those were quaint, innocent days. Now that we know that 20th Century Fox has the budget clout to get celestial bodies 1216 billion kilometers away to sell out, it’s a whole new galaxy.

“While many Portlanders still pluck aging birds for the broiler, others seek a blissful, pastoral end for them. Because most chickens lay the majority of eggs early in life, and can live about 10 years, the quest for a place where chickens can live out their sunset years has brought a boom at least two farm animal sanctuaries.”
 — PORTLAND!

Although I’m huge on newspapers, no New York newspaper seems to fit my demographic: aging socialist who only wants to read the Sports Page and Garfield. I give up on newspapers ruthlessly and as permanently as I can. The Boston Globe and The New York Times were the first to go by the wayside. The Globe because The New York Times destroyed it, and then The Times because of their craven build-up to the Iraq War. That, and all their annoying Brooklyn trend pieces. I read the Boston Herald in Boston, minus the entire front section (except the always-enjoyable “The Inside Track,” because I want to know what Matt Damon and Donnie Wahlberg are up to). And I read The Wall Street Journal until recently, when it just got too expensive and too cumbersome to read on the subway. It was like building a tent inside a crowded submarine. I went with the New York Daily News for a while, but their sports page sucks and their politics aren’t much better. So I went back to the Post even though it represents everything I despise in a tabloid newspaper. But such a great sports section.

What’s a manchild to do? I came up with a solution to the Problem by Un-Posting the Post.

1. Here’s your New York Post. It was barely trying to do anything yesterday — Slow News Month.

2. Open it at the centerfold.

3. Cut it in half wildly with scissors.

4. Add Page Six.

5. Add Garfield.

6. Flip over.

7. Staple crazily.

7.5. Or — as I discovered after some beta testing — if you leave wider gutters, you can use clips.

8. You’re good to go.

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

“It clears my mind and gives me a blank canvas to work from. That helps me create. When it gets too hectic and overwhelming, I just turn on a tune. And I focus.”
 — It’s funny that chef Jesse Schenker listens to ’90s metal band Tool while he’s cooking food at his restaurant, Recette

, since what that music mostly conjures for me is the creepy, nauseating imagery that always accompanied it in the videos. (The other bands he likes, too — Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains. Good or bad, all sort of pukey!)

Rupert says he forgot meeting because it took place on his wife Wendi’s boat rather than his own

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) April 25, 2012

Who gamed a substantial number of professional news-gatherers into providing free content for Twitter?

Remember back when newspapers and other organizations doubled their employees’ workload? (You should, it was only like a couple years ago.) And they were all, ha ha, now you have to blog too! Or you’ll get fired like all those union guys who used to run the printing plant! So that worked out pretty well actually. Worked out real good for… some people. But everyone has taken this message way too much to heart. This morning, we saw a seemingly endless number of journalists spend the very early hours frantically live-tweeting every possibly interesting bit (and plenty not) of Rupert Murdoch’s testimony at an inquiry. It didn’t seem like note-taking; they weren’t going to get a transcription out of this for later use; there was definitely hardly any room, at 140 characters, for analysis. It certainly wasn’t helping them get their news articles published in a more timely fashion! And it not only didn’t result in any revenue for their news organization, it didn’t even result in any revenue for the writer in the course of his job duties.

Or did it? I suppose the good news is that all this furious tweeting likely increased their Klout scores, and that may result in sneaky hotel upgrades. And more!

Klout is starting to infiltrate more and more of our everyday transactions. In February, the enterprise-software giant Salesforce.com introduced a service that lets companies monitor the Klout scores of customers who tweet compliments and complaints; those with the highest scores will presumably get swifter, friendlier attention from customer service reps. In March, luxury shopping site Gilt Groupe began offering discounts proportional to a customer’s Klout score.

So they’ve tricked everyone into “building their brand.” For Gilt Groupe discounts!

Also, all this attention will then get reporters attention for their links to their actual work… allegedly. Maybe. Transient attention, at least.

People use Twitter because it’s fun, mostly. It’s a great game! Twitter is actually an earnestly, honestly fun thing to do. And if you love news, and reporting, it makes sense that you’ll probably like live-tweeting.

Until it’s 11 a.m. in New York, and you’ve been typing furiously for four hours, and then you have to, you know, do your job all day. For your paycheck. Your Twitter followers totally might help you get a promotion! But your Klout score isn’t gonna help with the IRS and the rent. (Yet.)

“It used to be young creative types started magazines that defined the culture. Think Spy in the mid-1980s or even Might in the 1990s. The digital era hasn’t quite had that. One effort underway, naturally in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, wants to change that.”
 — Guess what’s going to be Spy for millennials. Just guess! Okay, pencils down. Here’s your answer. The sad thing is, given millennials, you can sort of see the point.