Daily Briefing
Deep buzz for the content-deprived
Every weekday, while you get showered and dressed, we pluck these dewy- fresh, breaking stories from the info-clogged byways of the datasphere. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and stoke up on everything you need to know, or at least enough to fake it.
Protests are usually messy, noisy and often confused. But they have produced some of the most important changes in American history — the Sons of Liberty, the abolitionists, the populists, the labor movements, the civil rights movements, the anti-war movements and many others. All were first attacked as rabble and mob rule. But our democracy would be far more fragile without them — seldom more so than during economic crises...
After his dramatic rescue from a mine last year, Jimmy Sánchez traveled the world, cruising the Greek islands, visiting Britain, Israel, Los Angeles, Disney World — all paid for by people who were moved by the Chilean miners’ story of courage and perseverance. But today Mr. Sánchez, like many of the 33 miners who survived 69 days nearly a half-mile underground, is jobless and at wits’ end...
On Nov. 22, 1995, Toy Story—the world’s first fully computer-animated film—opened to critical acclaim and $29 million in box-office receipts. One week later, Pixar, the studio that created the movie and that many had written off just months before, went public. It was the biggest IPO of the year and meant a billion-dollar windfall for Jobs. More than that, it gave Jobs back his mojo...
In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found...
Matthew Herbert has devoted a large chunk of his life to listening. Since the '90s, the UK-based electronic musician has been collecting and recording everyday sounds and making them into music. The result is an eclectic list of albums: One is made of sounds from kitchen objects; another from the human body; yet another samples food sounds, from noises inside an industrial poultry factory to thousands of people taking a bite of an apple at the same time.
But his latest effort, One Pig, is different: Over the course of a year, Herbert recorded the life of a pig, from the time it was born till its last hours in a truck on its way to the slaughterhouse...
Photograph from Occupy Wall Street demonstrations around the country...
Under dim lights in a grand hall of the great Folger Shakespeare Library lies the “Wicked Bible,” called so because it omits one distinctly important word from the Seventh Commandment. It is a word with the power to prevent sin.
“Thou shalt commit adultery,” the Wicked Bible commands...
The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document...
Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday. He was 56...
Steve Jobs' 10 Commandments...
