How Photography Bridged the Autism Gap Between Father and Son →

View fullsize

Taylor Glascock, Vantage:

It started in 2007, when Archibald began to notice that there was something different about his son. At the time, Eli had not been diagnosed with autism. There were tantrums and odd fascinations with household objects, strange behaviors and failures to communicate. Raising a child is difficult, but this was something else. A commercial photographer, Archibald adapted by doing what he did best. He took photos.

Incredible images. And I respect/appreciate that this is a story that’s being told that doesn’t have a sweet, clean, happy ending.

Boston’s Winter From Hell →

E.J. Graff:

But for those of us living here, it’s not a pretty picture. We are being devastated by a slow-motion natural disaster of historic proportions. The disaster is eerily quiet. There are no floating bodies or vistas of destroyed homes. But there’s no denying that this is a catastrophe. 

A total reframing of this recent spate of storms. I emailed the piece to a friend who lives in Boston, just to, no pun intended, take the temperature of the situation, and see if maybe Graff had been gripped by a bit of fed-up pathos. She confirmed almost everything he said and even added that garbage pickup has started to become sporadic. I think, for some, there’s a sense that, hey, it’s the Northeast, it’s winter, this shouldn’t be surprising. But sometimes it’s the things that we’re expecting that surprise us the most.

Critics in G.O.P. Say Chris Christie Is in a ‘Bubble’ →

Maggie Haberman and Nicholas Confessore, The New York Times:

In Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Christie’s negative ratings in some opinion polls are higher than his favorable ones. He has been slower than Mr. Bush to lock down support within the Republican Party’s pool of big-name “bundlers,” and it is unclear how quickly Mr. Christie is amassing cash. A spokesman declined to say, or even provide a range for, how much money the governor’s leadership political action committee has raised.

Chris Christie’s presidential campaign is floundering because of hubris. In other news, it’s below freezing and the cup of water I left outside froze.

Jeff Dekofsky Explains ‘The Infinite Hotel Paradox’ →

Take 6 minutes out of your day and watch this. Your brain will thank you.

/via kottke.org

Chuck Klosterman Interviews Kobe Bryant for GQ →

Chuck Klosterman, GQ:

It is widely assumed Shaq and Bryant are not friends, particularly after a 2008 incident in a New York nightclub when O'Neal performed an impromptu freestyle rap requesting that Kobe describe the flavor of his anus.

That’s the most Klostermanish sentence ever written. Oh, and the interview is amazing.

The 15 Year-Old President →

Tyler Riewer, charity:water:

By the time we arrive at our first village in Mozambique, a small crowd has already gathered around the hand pump, anxious to talk about the difference that clean water has made in their community.

At the front of the pack, neatly lined up in matching blue T-shirts, are five members of the local water committee. They stand tall, three men and two women, as they introduce themselves and their responsibilities one by one.

I am Bonito; I’m the chairman.
My name is Sophia, I’m a mechanic.
Mario, tax collector.
Fraqueza, head of hygiene.

And then the final introduction — which comes from the seemingly shy 15-year-old girl on the end. “My name is Natalia,” she says. “I’m the President.”

Hold on. The President?

Just one of those pieces that you need to read to help you remember your place in the world.

Win Butler’s ‘Jesus Walks, Loser’ Mash-Up →

When word got out that Arcade Fire’s Win Butler, a.k.a, DJ Windows98, opened his DJ set on Friday night with a mash-up of Kanye’s ‘Jesus Walks’ and Beck’s ‘Loser,’ my first thought was: perfect. My second thought was: damn, I wish I could hear that.

Fast-forward to 15 minutes ago, when ‘dj-windows98’ posted the mash-up on SoundCloud. Is it actually Win Butler? No idea. The account only has one ‘sound’ and I just don’t see Butler creating a SoundCloud account just to post the track, but you know what—is the song terrific? Yup. And that’s all that matters.

/via Pitchfork

Reading David Carr →

I wasn’t going to post anything on here about David Carr’s death on Thursday, mostly because every single blog out there already did. But when the Times posted this piece on Friday, a collection of his work hand-picked by his colleagues, the most fitting eulogy I could think of for a writer like Carr, I spent the time since reading/watching all of them and I couldn’t help but share it again. It is all worth your time, I promise, but I’ll highlight just one graf, from this 2009 piece, ‘The Rise and Fall of Media’:

Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.

For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.

Rest in peace, Mr. Carr. You are already missed.

Charles D’Ambrosio’s ‘This Is Living’ →

Charles D’Ambrosio:

I was seven and had a leather purse full of silver dollars, both of which, the purse and the coins, I considered valuable. I wanted them stored in the bank. At the time, the bank had an imposing landmark status in my map of the world, in part because it shared the same red brick as the public school, the two most substantial buildings in our town. As a Catholic school kid I did a lot of fundraising in the form of selling candy bars, Christmas stamps and fruitcakes, and my favorite spot for doing business was outside the bank, on Friday afternoons, because that was payday. Working men came to deposit their checks and left the bank with a little cash for the weekend. Today, that ritual is nearly gone, its rhythms broken, except for people on welfare, who still visit banks and pack into lines, waiting for tellers, the first of every month. But back then I’d set my box of candy on the sidewalk and greet customers, holding the door for them like a bellhop. Friends of mine with an entirely different outlook on life tried to sell their candy at the grocery store, but I figured that outside the supermarket people might lie or make excuses, claiming to be broke; but not here, not at the bank, for reasons that seemed obvious to me: this was the headquarters of money. Most of the men were feeling flush and optimistic, flush because they were getting paid and would soon have money in their pockets, optimistic because the workweek was over and they could forget what they had done for the money. On their way in I’d ask if they wanted to buy a candy bar and they’d dip a nod and smile and say with a jaunty promissory confidence that I should catch them on the way out. And I did. I sold candy bars like a fiend. Year after year, I won the plastic Virgin Marys and Crucifixes and laminated holy cards that were given away as gifts to the most enterprising sales-kids at school. I liked the whole arrangement. On those Friday afternoons and early evenings, I always dressed in my salt-and-pepper corduroy pants and saddle shoes and green cardigan, a school uniform that I believed made me as recognizable to the world as a priest in his soutane, and I remember feeling righteous, an acolyte doing God’s work, or the Church’s. Money touched everyone in town, quaintly humanizing them, and I enjoyed standing outside the bank, at the center of civic life. This was my early education into the idea of money.

I was absolutely floored when I recently read this essay in D’Ambrosio’s new collection, Loitering. If you enjoy it even half as much as I did, I would recommend buying the collection immediately.

Send in The Weathermen

Tony Dokoupil, NBC News:

On a moonless night in October 2001, an American helicopter lifted off from an airbase in Uzbekistan, banking south on a covert mission into Afghanistan. Inside was one of America’s most elite and unknown special operators, hand-selected for a job so important that the wider war on terror hinged on its success.

In New York and Washington, D.C., the funerals continued. Families gave up hope of a miracle rescue in the rubble of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. But if this soldier succeeded he would never shoot his gun and no one outside the military would know his work.

He was a weatherman.

More precisely, he was a special operations weather technician, known as a SOWT (pronounced sow-tee). As the Department of Defense’s only commando forecasters, SOWTs gather mission-impossible environmental data from some of the most hostile places on Earth.

They embed with Navy SEALs, Delta Force and Army Rangers. Ahead of major operations they also head in first for a go/no-go forecast. America’s parachutes don’t pop until a SOWT gives the all-clear.

That was Brady Armistead’s job as his helicopter rumbled toward a strip of desert 80 miles south of Kandahar, the capital of the Taliban government. He had a satellite forecast calling for clear skies. But satellite forecasts depend on ground data, too, and there was nothing from Afghanistan.

Maybe you’ll want to think twice the next time you badmouth a weatherperson.

Also—this is one hell of a nicely-designed page of writing and multimedia work. All of the typography is a variant of Roboto, so you know I’m not getting paid to say that.