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Picture Show: Post-Katrina Graffiti on the Walls of New Orleans

Patrick James
By Patrick JamesSep 10, 2010
Patrick James
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Photographs from the new book, Destroy This Memory, by Richard Misrach.

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work from home, remote work, healthy living, work life balance, employment
Work & Money

Scientists definitively know why working from home makes us happier and healthier

Elizabeth Hurley, model, aging, supermodel, beauty
Culture

What Elizabeth Hurley's naked 60th birthday portrait can teach us about aging fearlessly

grief support, coping with loss, internet wisdom, reddit advice, GSnow comment, dealing with death, emotional healing, wave theory grief
Past Events

This response to someone grieving a friend might be the best internet comment ever

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History

In WWII, Queen Elizabeth II was called "Princess Auto Mechanic." Here's how she earned the title.

More For You

chatgpt, ai, college essays, scientific study, creative writing

College professors can detect which papers were written by robots.

Photo credit: Canva

College professors share the secret of how to detect ChatGPT in term papers

Some current college students welcome our A.I. overlords, especially when it comes to writing up term papers. ChatGPT has become a popular way for many students to cut corners when typing up essays, to the point where some barely write anything at all aside from the prompt. However, a study is showing that ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence programs aren't fooling any college professors and can expose students who are slacking off.

A published international study is showing that college professors can tell which essays are genuinely written by students versus ones that are compiled and cooked up by ChatGPT. The researchers at University of East Anglia and other universities that participated in the study analyzed 145 essays written by British university students and 145 essays written by ChatGPT with both batches writing about the same topics. What they have found is that while A.I. and large language models (L.L.M.s) wrote with proper grammar and were academically coherent, all of those essays lacked engagement techniques that are typically used by humans.

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owl, interview, wildlife, hoot, birds, wildlife expert

The Lesser Horned Owl is a lot chattier than you might expect.

Diucón, commons.wikimedia.org

Interviewing a wild owl, a man got an answer he never expected

Owls typically prefer to be left alone, so getting close enough to one to have a conversation is extremely rare. Yet this is what happened to renowned birder and wildlife expert Emin Yogurtcuoglu while traversing Argentina on a recent expedition.

As Yogurtcuoglu told The Dodo, at first he spotted an owl pair from his car. The next day, he saw the owls again, and this time got out of the car and close to the ground, to be eye-level with them. And on the final day, the female of the pair had gotten even bolder, coming up to Yogurtcuoglu upon his arrival, less than two feet away. He decided to interview her, and in the video this lovely feathered friend hoots warmly into the microphone, inching ever closer: “What do people think about our nature?” he asked. “How often do you hoot?” Eventually, Yogurtcuoglu was close enough to see himself in her own eyes, snapping a picture in the process, and the female owl stayed close. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

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bill gates, article, philanthropy, good, sharing, journalism, gates

Bill Gates discusses the work that helped him understand philanthropy.

Steve Jurvetson, Wikimedia Commons

Bill Gates reveals the 1997 article that convinced him to use his incredible wealth for good

As Bill Gates shared in his GatesNotes newsletter recently, he read a New York Times article in 1997 that changed his life. The article was “For Third World, Water Is Still a Deadly Drink” by journalist Nicholas Kristof. In the article, Gates learned of the health and sanitation issues faced by poverty-stricken countries in different parts of the world, and quickly realized he wanted to focus part of the philanthropic efforts of his Gates Foundation on helping to fix this problem.

“Nick reported that diarrhea was killing 3.1 million people every year, almost all of them children. We were shocked…How could that many children be dying from something that was, as far as we knew, little more than an uncomfortable inconvenience? We learned that the simple lifesaving treatment for diarrhea…wasn’t reaching millions of children. That seemed like a problem we could help with,” Gates wrote in his 2022 book, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, explicitly citing Kristof’s article as the catalyst for the Gates Foundation’s efforts.

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gossip, community, ego, research, narcissists, self identity, social status, personal information

Gossiping in the office

Image via Canva - Photo by Science Photo Library

Surprising study shows these types of people actually really like being gossiped about

Almost every one of us wants to be accepted socially and gain some form of group attention. Studies have consistently shown that social isolation and loneliness leads to poor physical and mental health which includes a high risk of mortality. Trying to find a sense of community and elevate one's personal status at the same time can be confusing and often emotionally challenging. The need to be accepted and seen positively by others all influence our drive to fit in socially.

Some of our favorite secrets are about our friends and colleagues, and we divulge this information through a process called gossip. One of the main determining factors in finding pleasure through gossip is being an active participating witness instead of the actual subject. However this balance isn't the truth for all of us. Some people really like being talked about.
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red hot chili peppers, led zeppelin, john frusciante, jimmy page, letter

John Frusciante once wrote a letter to Jimmy Page, with a bold musical request.

Photo credit: Avda via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (left) / Afirebenside via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (right)

Red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante once wrote Jimmy Page a letter, with a bold request

As a young guitarist, John Frusciante worshipped at the altar of rock giants like Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. But as he recalled at the 2004 Mojo Awards while handing out a prize to Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin visionary was "the first person that made [him] want to play" the instrument. "[His] playing in Led Zeppelin was the perfect rock guitar playing, and he himself was the perfect rock guitar player," he enthused. "Four years before I started, I was taught the beginning of 'Stairway to Heaven' and stopped learning because my teacher could not show me the solo. Of course, I got around to it eventually…"

So in the early 2000s, when Frusciante started collaborating with Omar Rodríguez-López, bandleader of experimental prog-rock band The Mars Volta, he saw the perfect opportunity to connect with his childhood idol. Taking a personal approach, he sent Page a charmingly eager, handwritten letter, asking him to join in a triple-guitar solo for a Mars Volta song. While that would have been an incredible mind-meld and a notable moment in rock-guitar history, there’s no evidence to suggest it happened. Nonetheless, the letter itself is a thing of beauty, highlighting Frusciante’s reverence toward Page and a wide-eyed wonder about music creation.

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drag, drag queen, drag artist, drag king, kennedy center

Trump banned drag from the Kennedy Center stage, but he said nothing about drag artists in the audience.

Photo by Rochelle Brown on Unsplash

Drag artists shared their experiences attending the Kennedy Center on a powerful night out

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump shouted from TruthSocial “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA” would be allowed on the Kennedy Center, but he said nothing about the audience. Four drag artists knew this well as they attended the Kennedy Center’s opening night of popular musical Les Misérables, itself known in part for commenting on themes of abuse of power. After the performance, all of the drag artists took to social media to recount their experiences.

They had all been given tickets to the show by The Qommittee, a D.C. based nonprofit dedicated to “bringing drag artists together to protect each other, support each other, and help each other thrive.” The tickets were donated to The Qommittee in part by “season ticket holders, in order to protest ‘Trump’s presence at the show, following his ban of drag at the center,’” The Qommittee told The Daily Beast.

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Elizabeth Dunn, psychologist, Phd, happiness, charity, depression, service, helping others

Elizabeth Dunn on her Ted Talk

Image from YouTube video.

Elizabeth Dunn shares why all giving doesn't make people happy. But one kind always works.

What's better than being depressed? How about being happy. For most of us, living is a constant mix of ups and downs. The older we get and the more experiences we have in navigating the trials of life, hopefully finding a routine of positive habits can help us manage our moods better.

One of the most productive tools for feeling good is service. Yes, having a big chunk of money or great things occurring are super positive influences for a moment. But showing up for friends, family, and strangers boosts are inner morale like no other. Surprisingly, how we do that has a dramatic affect on it working.

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tom jones, prince, david gilmour, pink floyd, cover songs

Tom Jones once recruited Pink Floyd's David Gilmour to cover Prince's "Purple Rain."

Photo credit: screenshots from Tom Jones YouTube

27 years ago Tom Jones and David Gilmour performed an astounding version of Prince's 'Purple Rain'

In theory, these three names—Prince, Tom Jones, and David Gilmour— shouldn’t even appear in the same sentence. But they just appeared in the same sentence for a weird and wonderful reason: Jones, the husky-voiced baritone pop crooner, once recruited Gilmour, the psychedelic maestro from Pink Floyd, to help reinterpret Prince’s eternal rock ballad "Purple Rain" on stage.

At first, it might be hard to compute what such a cover song might sound like. If you throw "Purple Rain" in a blender with "It’s Not Unusual" and "Comfortably Numb," would said blender just explode? Well, sort of—and that’s part of what makes their live take so fun. The performance dates back to 1992, during an episode of the limited TV series Tom Jones: The Right Time, in which the singer explored how modern popular music had been influenced by disparate genres like country and soul.

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