Tagged: profiles

Do you have ten minutes to spare? I certainly hope so, because I'm imploring you to watch this incredible piece The Wall Street Journal produced on Iraq War Veteran Ian Welch, who was diagnosed with PTSD and traumatic brain injury after his convoy was attacked. The video was filmed by Brandon Thibodeaux. It's an intimate look over a two month period of the problems Ian deals with and the effects on his relationship with his girlfriend and caretaker Katie Brickman. This is kind of the unknown told story of the Iraq [...]

Oddly, Esquire and GQ both published feature pieces on the suicide of Terry Thompson and the exotic animal zoo crisis in Zanesville, OH. This might have been one of the craziest news stories in 2011, but got overlooked because, you know, 2011 was a crazy year for news.

DJ Havana Brown can do it all. Not only is she a superstar, international DJ, she's also quickly becoming a pop phenomenon with "We Run the Night" ( iTunes ) featuring Pitbull, her debut single for Universal Republic Records. However, that was always the plan for Brown. Growing up in Melbourne, the singer discovered music by raiding her brother's collection of R&B records. Crooning along to the likes of Janet Jackson and Bobby Brown, Brown taught herself how to...

"There's a common explanation that profound sadness leads to someone's becoming a comedian, but I'm not sure that's a proven equation in my case … I'm not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so. … She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that's directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain [...]

Camper Van Beethoven are one of the weirdest bands to emerge from Southern California. During their heyday in the mid-80s they blended a kitchen sink mix of rock, ska, folk and country in a sound that foreran the alternative music explosion of the early 90s. Founding member Jonathan Segel (violin) left the band in 1988 and started a record label with fellow CvB alum Victor Krummacher. He also taught music composition at Ohlone College and worked as a listener advocate for Pandora. Segel has roots in Madison as his parents met here as grad students in the late 50s. [...]

Here's an excellent hour-long BBC documentary about Steve Jobs, featuring interviews with Woz, Stephen Fry, Tim Berners-Lee, John Sculley and many more. [via kottke ]

The NYT has published a three-part series on the life of late hockey enforcer Derek Boogaard , who died earlier this year at age 28 of a drug and alcohol overdose. Part 1: A Boy Learns to Brawl ; Part 2: Blood on the Ice ; Part 3: A Brain 'Going Bad. ' Tough read, but interesting for anyone fascinated by hockey or the downside of life as a professional athlete.

The NYT has published a three-part series on the life of late hockey enforcer Derek Boogaard , who died earlier this year at age 28 of a drug and alcohol overdose. Part 1: A Boy Learns to Brawl ; Part 2: Blood on the Ice ; Part 3: A Brain 'Going Bad. ' Tough read, but interesting for anyone fascinated by hockey or the downside of life as a professional athlete.

By Roman Gokhman Trampled By Turtles – "Wait So Long" Burrowed halfway between Minneapolis and Canada's Thunder Bay, along Minnesota's corner of Lake Superior, Duluth is a small city surrounded by forests, hills, streams and lakes. Considering the population is only 90,000, an annual weeklong music festival with 150 local bands may seem out of the ordinary. Yet the "Homegrown Festival" is symbolic of just how musically diverse the birthplace of Bob Dylan is. "Per capita, there has to be more bands there [...]

• Trampled By Turtles - Wait So Long

Lynn Zwerling is a 67-year-old retired car salesman. She also teaches knitting to prisoners . Her first thought was to bring knitting to a men's prison, but she was turned down repeatedly. Wardens assumed the men wouldn't be interested in a traditionally feminine hobby and worried about freely handing out knitting needles to prisoners who had been convicted of violent crimes. Five years passed before the Pre-Release Unit in Jessup accepted her, and Knitting Behind Bars was born. "I [wanted to teach] them something that I love that [...]

The Awl has a profile of the 25-year-old dude behind the website, Is Anyone Up? , which basically published nude photos of people occasionally without their knowledge. The site, which I've never heard of before until now, supposedly does about 30 million pageviews a month - which makes it one of the most popular websites on the Internet. Seems like that's a bot of a stretch. Still, it's very highly trafficked. Moore said he generally spends 12 hours a day, five days a week uploading posts to his site. There are different [...]

As you may know, Spotify doesn't provide any direct way to connect your Facebook Fan Page to your Spotify artist profile. Now, there is a way to link them! But you need to do a little bit of finicking to get there... like creating a Facebook dummy profile. Below are ...

Suzanna Andrews profiles Elizabeth Warren for Vanity Fair : Born and raised in Oklahoma, Elizabeth Herring spent most of her early life performing all the good-girl Stations of the Cross. She won the Betty Crocker competitions, married for the first time at 19, had two children before she was 30, and was once a registered Republican. She was the youngest of four children and the only daughter. Her father worked as a janitor, and her mother brought in extra money working in the catalogue-order department at Sears. Warren would recall her mother hesitating to take her [...]

One place was truly home to Ernest Hemingway: the Finca Vigía, his rustic estate outside Havana. It was kept by the Cuban government as a shrine in the half-century since his suicide, and its full contents remained a mystery until 2002. Now, Vanity Fair has published a slew of artifacts and memorabilia from the author's Havana estate. The accompanying story about Hemingway's time in Cuba is also a must read for any fan of the author.

From Open Culture : Set for release on October 4th, The Magic of Reality will be unlike any book written by Richard Dawkins before. It is illustrated for starters, and largely geared toward young and old readers alike. Perfect, he says, for anyone 12 and up. When it comes to the structure and gist of the book, Dawkins does a pretty good job of explaining things. So let's let the video roll… Note: If you're willing to tweet about the book, you can view the first 24 pages of The Magic of [...]

The Neighborhood: SOMA // Painted Palms from Yours Truly on Vimeo . This episode of The Neighborhood captures Painted Palms in a really positive head space, and, why shouldn't it? This is a duo clearly excited about being in SF, even if Chris Prudhomme's stay is only part of a semester-long college sabbatical. "What you put out is what you ingest" - it's an idea that didn't start with these guys, but it's encouraging to see them carry it with them. Related Posts: [...]

Fast Company has a nice piece on Adam Lisagor , better known around the Internet parts as lonelysandwich and one half of the geniuses behind Put This On . After doing a 2009 promo video for Birdhouse, a Twitter app he developed with a friend, Lisagor found himself in demand to do similar videos for who's who of start-up tech companies. And now, he's the tech world's silent ad man. But his tone is his real strength. "I try to identify that thing in a product that matters most to me," Lisagor [...]

As a rule, never take your eye off Texas. There's always something happening there and typically it's worth your attention. If I remember correctly Sundress were covered in buzz after their SXSW performance earlier this year. After listening to "Derelict," it seems the hype is well deserved. Hailing from Denton, TX, Sundress weave a '90s pop sound with the lighter side of shoegaze; there's a lot more Slowdive than My Bloody Valentine in their sound. The band's EP is due out later in the summer, but you can get a taste right now. Sundress – [...]

Photos courtesy of Conumbdrum. Push Button for Conumbdrum A conumdrum is a riddle whose answer involves a pun. A conumdrum is also an intricate or difficult problem. It stands to reason that when I interviewed Los Angeles based street artist Conumbdrum, his responses were filled with thought provoking riddles; however, he was anything but difficult when he answered the following questions. According2g : How did you get started in street art? Conumbdrum : I've [...]