Mariano Rivera's Final Appearance at Yankee Stadium

Mariano Rivera's entire career has been defined by his unflappable nature on the mound. Win or lose, ball or strike, his expression always remains the same. His ability to consistently reproduce the same delivery of the same cut fastball is what he owes his success to, but his legend was cemented by that cool, detached demeanor.

I find it fitting—and comforting—that as his final appearance at Yankee Stadium came to an end last night, he finally showed some emotion.

Thanks for the memories, Mo.

The Best Album Arcade Fire Has Ever Made

David Fricke, writing for Rolling Stone: 

Reflektor is even better, for this reason: the jarring, charging union of [LCD Soundsytem's James] Murphy's modern-dance acumen and post-punk sabotage with Arcade Fire's natural gallop and ease with Caribbean rhythm. (Chassagne is of Haitian descent; she and Butler have been active in relief efforts there.) Murphy worked on all but two songs, with most of those tracks near or over six minutes long. The result is an epic made for dancing and sequenced like whiplash.

I literally giggled after reading this review.

 /via @ArcadeFiretube

The Other F Word

The Other F Word

My wife is a midwife and she's constantly finding herself in situations (outside of work) where she winds up in contact with, or at least in the vicinity of, pregnant women—at the mall, at the supermarket, etc. And she can never decide if it's some kind of drawn-in-to-her-witchcraft-midwife-aura thing, or if she's just more aware of pregnant women, since her life kind of/sort of revolves around them. 

Since my daughter was born, I've constantly had stuff like the above trailer come my way. I probably would have found The Other F Word interesting before becoming a father, but now that I am one, it has a whole new level of meaning and purpose and depth. And, I mean, come on—Flea! Why'd you have to go there?

/via kotkke.org 

Beautiful Portrait Photography by Hannes Casper

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Philip Kennedy, writing for The Fox is Black: 

There’s an elegant intimacy in Caspar’s work. Every image seems to be bathed in a beautiful tender light, and no matter if shot in color or black-and-white, his images have gentle tones and perfect lighting.

For me, black and white, done properly, beats color every time. 

The Ground We Lived On

Via PRX Remix and Sound Portraits: 

The Ground We Lived On documents the loving relationship between journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and her father, Adrian Leon LeBlanc, in the last months of his life. Using recordings she made of her father, namesake and inspiration from his hospital bed in the family living room, The Ground We Lived On is an ode to the ordinary ways we continue loving even as we are letting go.

A powerful twelve minutes of storytelling.

Details and the iPhone 5S

Dustin Curtis: 

1. The outer part of the new home button is exactly the same size as the Phone app and passcode keypad number circles in iOS 7, which are in turn also identical in size to the holes in the back of the new iPhone 5c rubber case.

2. The inner part of the new home button is exactly the same size as the circle template for icons (e.g, the circle around the “A” in the App Store icon), minus the exact size of the button chamfer. That is, you need two widths of the chamfered border, plus the icon circle, to be precisely the same size as the outer part of the home button.

3. The microphone hole on the back of the phone is now a perfect circle instead of an oval.

Question everything.

/via Daring Fireball

The Chart Itself Was Classified

Molly Crabapple, writing for Vice: 

For all their friendliness, the JTF controls what the media is allowed to see. Photos are prohibited in most places, and whenever I sketched a scene, press officers swarmed around me. The pressroom was filled with soldiers watching our laptops, listening to us talk. US cell phones don’t get service at Gitmo. There’s a sticker on all the landline receivers inside the compound: use of this telephone constitutes consent to monitoring. Badges that read military escort at all times are required to be worn at all times. We were given them inside something called a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which is plastered with propaganda posters. One features a woman in a ski mask pointing a gun straight ahead; underneath it reads: keep talking, we’re listening. practice opsec [operations security]. I took notes on the back of a pamphlet listing banned items. The security officer inspected my notes, worried that I copied a classification chart. Like so much of Guantánamo, the chart itself was classified.

The fight over the Guantánamo Bay prison camps has been going on for more than a decade—opening them, maintaining them, closing them. At this point, I assume that everyone knows where they stand on the issue, so I won't try and change your mind. All I'll say is this—read this piece. Just to be sure.

The Serengeti Lion: Life on the Plains With the Vumbi Pride

I've been fascinated by this National Geographic project (as you will see, it's really hard to describe) since In Focus linked to it on August 8th. Stunning photography, mixed with audio and video components, all wrapped up in a package that feels like it was designed for 2013. If this is the future of New Media, count me in. 
 
At the same time, we're going to need to develop a new lingo to describe this new across-the-curriculum style of "post." People won't talk about what they cannot describe.