Electronic Security a Worry in an Age of Digital Espionage. Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia. By Maria Popova Prison storytelling, subcultural anthropology, and the allure of darkness. In the 1970′s, while American hippies were busy inking themselves with peace signs and psychedelic rainbows, Danzig Baldayev, a guard at St. Petersburg’s notorious Kresty Prison, began documenting the far less Woodstockian body art of Russia’s most infamous criminals.
For 33 years, Baldayev used his exclusive access to and rapport with the prisoners to hand-illustrate and capture in artful photographs more than 3,600 inmate tattoos — as admirable a feat artistically as it was sociologically. In 2003, when he was in his late 70′s, Baldayev began releasing his magnificent archive as a series of books revealing a rich and eerie intersection of art and violence. Thanks, Greg Each of the volumes is an absolute masterpiece and a fascinating slice of (sub)cultural anthropology. Some images by Donald Weber Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Share on Tumblr. Gordon Mathews on Chungking Mansions. Kent Wang by Gordon Mathews Chungking Mansions is a dilapidated 17-story structure full of cheap guesthouses, restaurants, and shops of all kinds located in the heart of Hong Kong’s tourist district, which encompasses some of the most expensive real estate on earth.
Chungking Mansions has been famous in recent decades as the haunt of backpackers traveling through Asia, but today it is has a different significance: It is where small entrepreneurs from South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions come to seek their fortunes; where Indian temporary workers on tourist visas struggle to survive on substandard wages; and where asylum seekers in flight from societies in Africa and South Asia come to escape political tyrannies and economic deprivations. Chungking Mansions was built in 1962, and for a few scant years was the address of Hong Kong celebrities, but it rapidly deteriorated. This, then, is Chungking Mansions.
All photographs (except first image) courtesy of the Author. Startup hopes to hack the immigration system with a floating incubator. Some of the Silicon Valley's most important companies, including Intel, Google, and Yahoo, were cofounded by immigrants. Yet America's creaky immigration system makes it difficult for talented young people born outside of the United States to come to the Bay Area. There have been various proposals to make it easier for immigrant entrepreneurs to come to the United States, but they've made no progress in Congress.
So a new company called Blueseed is seeking to bypass the political process and solve the problem directly. Blueseed plans to buy a ship and turn it into a floating incubator anchored in international waters off the coast of California. Ars talked to Blueseed founder Max Marty. He acknowledged that it would be better for America to reform immigration laws and thereby make his company unnecessary. But in the meantime, Marty and his team are hard at work tackling the practical obstacles to making their vision of a floating, year-round hack-a-thon a reality. Seasteading light. "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes" Takes on the NYPD | Past Imperfect. Mrs. Grace Humiston, a.k.a. "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes" Unlike in Mike Dash’s recent tale of a mysterious cold case, detectives knew right away the identity of a body found in Harlem on a cloudy spring day in June 1917. She was 18-year-old Ruth Cruger, who had been missing since February 13. She’d left her home on Claremont Avenue that morning wearing a blue velvet coat, a black hat adorned with a flowered ribbon, white kid gloves and her new graduation ring from Wadleigh High School.
She walked toward 127th Street with a pair of ice skates dangling from her wrist and was never seen again. The morning after Ruth disappeared, her older sister, Helen, searched for clues in their neighborhood. “Did my sister leave her skates to be sharpened yesterday?” The man replied that a young woman had left a pair of skates to be sharpened in the morning and returned for them later. “What kind of skates were they?” “They were fastened on shoes like you have on,” the man answered. “Yes.” Sources Books: Articles: Adam Curtis Blog: RUPERT MURDOCH - A PORTRAIT OF SATAN. The Future according to Josh Harris. But wait, who's Josh Harris?
This isn’t just a story about the future according to Josh Harris. This is a story about Josh Harris according to Josh Harris. When I was first introduced to the Internet entrepreneur, I scheduled our interview for 2pm on a Friday afternoon at the offices of Morris & King on 5th Avenue. After I watched We Live in Public, a documentary about his life, I emailed him and changed it to the following Tuesday at 5pm, when I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about getting back to my desk.
Everything you are about to read was told to me in 5 hours, over 2 beers and a soggy cigar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Only one alarm was set off in the process. In the late 90s, Harris was a bona fide New York City business star when his company, Jupiter Communications, went public. “He is one of the 10 most important people in the history of the Internet,” said entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, who chronicled New York’s tech scene in his publication, The Silicon Alley Reporter.
Joshua M. Gilligan’s Island Harrowing? Judy Garland speaks, you sons of bitches!