Brazil Prepares for the World Cup →

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I take my linking to an In Focus series quite seriously. They’re always amazing and it would be too easy (and borderline wrong) to just link to it every day. But today’s series—40 images of Brazil preparing for the World Cup—is outstanding, not just in image quality, but in the layout as well. The juxtaposition of glorious, gleaming architecture with soldiers preparing for end-of-the-world scenarios; of mega-fans with protestors; of douchebags and their homemade trophies and women and men working for a pittance has a structure and a narrative not unlike a well-written short story.

Nicolas Cage and Andrew Dice Clay, Backstage at a Guns N’ Roses Concert →

Hollywood Prospectus:

Here’s a photo of Nic Cage and Dice Clay chilling backstage at a GN’R concert at the Hard Rock in Vegas. Cage is wearing a cowboy hat. And beads. And a Nic Cage t-shirt. And many, many rings. Also, he has a cane. There’s a lot going on here. Take your time with it.

You already clicked the link, right?

Super Depressing Stats About the Most-Highlighted Kindle Passages →

Joseph Stromberg:

Of the top 25 most-highlighted passages ever, a ridiculous 19 come from one of the books in the Hunger Games trilogy, including numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Additionally, the three books rank as 3, 8, and 13 in the list of most-highlighted books of all time.

…

It might not be a huge shock that the Bible is the single most highlighted Kindle book of all time. But it may be a surprise that it's also number 4, 6, 11, 16, and 18 — because different versions of it are listed separately. In addition to the six Bible versions, there are five other Christianity-oriented books in the top 25 most-highlighted books of all time.

…

When you take away The Hunger Games, the top 50 most-highlighted books include just eight novels written since the start of the 20th century.

So basically, as a nation, we’re reading below grade level, about God, and we really, really want to just be told how to be happy and/or successful.

Bill Watterson’s Return to Comics

Stephan Pastis:

So I emailed him the strip and thanked him for all his great work and the influence he’d had on me. And never expected to get a reply.

And what do you know, he wrote back.

Let me tell you. Just getting an email from Bill Watterson is one of the most mind-blowing, surreal experiences I have ever had. Bill Watterson really exists? And he sends email? And he’s communicating with me?

But he was. And he had a great sense of humor about the strip I had done, and was very funny, and oh yeah….

…He had a comic strip idea he wanted to run by me.

Now if you had asked me the odds of Bill Watterson ever saying that line to me, I’d say it had about the same likelihood as Jimi Hendrix telling me he had a new guitar riff. And yes, I’m aware Hendrix is dead.

So I wrote back to Bill.

“Dear Bill,

I will do whatever you want, including setting my hair on fire.”

So he wrote back and explained his idea.

He said he knew that in my strip, I frequently make fun of my own art skills. And that he thought it would be funny to have me get hit on the head or something and suddenly be able to draw. Then he’d step in and draw my comic strip for a few days.

That’s right.

The cartoonist who last drew Calvin and Hobbes riding their sled into history would return to the comics page.

To draw Pearls Before Swine.

If you’re a Calvin and Hobbes fan, you must, must, must visit the link to see the three strips Watterson drew. The final panel of the second strip is CLASSIC (when do I ever use all caps?) C&H construction. My favorite comic strip after C&H was Zits (I was roughly the same age as the protagonist, Jeremy, at the time) and I used to fantasize that “Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman” was actually Bill Watterson publishing under a pseudonym (because after all, I used to exclaim, Jeremy is exactly the age Calvin would be at this point in history!) I wouldn’t be surprised to find that out that most C&H fans came up with some kind of theory along these lines—any way to keep Watterson’s work alive.

But this? This is way better.

/via John Siracusa

In Search of America’s Best Burrito

Nate Silver:

It’s a little crazy, but we think it needs to be done. And we think we’re the right people to do it. One reason is that narrowing the field to 64 contenders is a massive problem of time and scale. It perhaps couldn’t be done adequately if not for a little data mining and number crunching. In 2007, I was able to sample every burrito restaurant — in one neighborhood, in one city. But there are 67,391 restaurants in the United States that serve a burrito. (I’ll tell you how we came up with that figure in a moment.) To try each one, even if you consumed a different burrito for breakfast, lunch and dinner each day, would require more than 60 years and run you close to 50 million calories.

We need some way to narrow the list of possibilities. Fortunately, Anna and I were able to enlist some help. The past seven years have produced explosive growth for crowdsourced review sites like Yelp. Yelp provided us with statistics on every burrito-selling establishment in the United States.

The Yelp data was the starting point for FiveThirtyEight’s Burrito Bracket, which will officially launch early next week and whose solemn (but not sole) mission is to find America’s best burrito. There are three major phases in the project, each of which I’ve already hinted at:

Step 1: Data mining. Analyze the Yelp data to create an overall rating called Value Over Replacement Burrito (VORB) and provide guidance for the next stages of the project. (This step is already done, and I’ll be describing the process in some detail in this article.)

Step 2: Burrito Selection Committee. Convene a group of burrito experts from around the country, who will use the VORB scores and other resources to scout for the nation’s best burritos and vote the most promising candidates into a 64-restaurant bracket — 16 contenders in each of four regions: California, West, South and Northeast. (The committee has already met, and we’ll reveal the 64 entrants in a series of articles later this week and this weekend.)

Step 3: Taste test. Have Anna visit each of the 64 competitors, eat their burritos, rate and document her experiences, and eventually choose one winner in a multi-round tournament. (Anna will be posting her first reviews early next week. She’s worked as a documentary photographer and multimedia journalist, and as a producer at ABC News and Univision, where she’s spent years reporting on Hispanic-American culture.)

I am unable to decide if this lengthy, lengthy article (1,500 words of footnotes?!), which really only serves as an introduction to the project, represents either the apex or the nadir of American culture.

And I think that says it all, really.

The Eight Hour School Day →

Liz Riggs:

Peter Smith directs a Philadelphia high school that extends its day—but only by a half an hour for students. Hours run from 8:00 a.m. to 3:17 p.m. After school, teachers are required to stay for office hours from 3:17 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. While teachers are in school for an hour and 15 minutes longer than other teachers in the district, they actually teach less than they would in a traditional public school.

“Teachers are totally on board,” Smith says. “Teachers love having that designated time [after school] to be with students, and it does free up their time during the other parts of the school day, and parents love it—especially at the high school level.”

Extended school days can also provide structured planning time for teachers. Without this built-in time, teachers end up working additional hours after school and on the weekends, clocking in as much time as they would if the day were extended—if not more.

It’s all cyclical, baby. To quote Ecclesiastes 1:9:

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Pour Some Sugar On Me →

James Hamblin:

As Stanhope puts it, “Nature provided fructose in quite dilute packages compared to what we’ve done with our food.” Even raw sugar cane is only about ten percent sucrose. So, chomp on sugar-cane stalks all you like. “We have concentrated that fructose in ways I suspect nature never meant us to eat it.” 

That line of reasoning that merits an important distinction. Agave nectar and fruit-juice concentrate are not “natural” in the sense that whole fruit is natural, but they defend themselves the same way. The recently proposed FDA nutrition labels include the suggestion that the nutrition information panel add in a line that notes how many “added sugars” are used in a product. Many food companies, especially those that operate in the organic and “natural” space, are lobbying that fruit-juice concentrate should not be included as an added sugar on labels. Popkin says fruit juices are at least as dangerous as any other kind of sweetener. To even consider not including it as an added sugar on labels concerns Popkin deeply.

There are no shortcuts or miracle cures. Everything has a price.

Everything Wrong With ‘Gravity’

The more time I put between me and Gravity, the less I like it.

The Uniqueness of the New York Rangers’ Jersey →

Paul Lukas:

The Rangers' basic uniform look has been around so long and become so familiar that it's easy to overlook how unusual it is. While most hockey teams wear a logo or crest on their chests, the Rangers simply wear the letters that spell out their team name (or, in the case of their alternate jersey, their city name).

Let’s go, Rangers.

Naval Adm. William McRaven Explains Why Making Your Bed Matters →

Naval Adm. William McRaven:

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.

By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.

As my wife will confirm, I’ve been saying this for years. To watch the entire commencement address, hit the via link.

/via Lifehacker