Killer article about Lance Armstrong and the culture of doping in professional cycling: With few regulations in place, the obvious rise of PEDs went largely unchecked, proving that the humanity of cyclists could be sacrificed for the same reason that the truth of Armstrong's story had to be overlooked: commercial profitability.Fivethirtyeight.com ( Read more... )

Vonda McIntyre's novel The Moon and the Stars is being made into a movie starring Pierce Brosnan as the Sun King. She got invited to watch some of the filming, which took place at Versailles, and here is one of her reports. So cool ( Read more... )

... just sleeping. And running. And looking for work. And dog-sitting. And so forth.

Some of these links are a little dated, but if I don't post them now they won't get posted at all.

Connie Britton is even more awesome than you thought. She's teamed up with Planned Parenthood to offer a What Would Tami Taylor Do? t-shirt to fund PP programs ( Read more... )

Check out some awesome suffragists a century ago. I'm impressed at how fashionable so many of them look. I know those clothes were probably a bear to wear & maintain, but they look fabulous.

You find some of the best writing in sports, I really think you do. Runners World profiles Debbie Heald, who 40 years ago did something nobody had ever done ( Read more... )

Yikes, several days worth of links here.

Awww, this animated short is just ridiculously wonderful. Dogs and their people, really.

Clay Shirky on the future of publishing.

The Big Picture focuses on growing tea in England.

This website has beautifully-photographed portraits of women with gray hair. Gorgeous and inspirational ( Read more... )

John Crowley writes an appreciation of Joan Aiken's Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and the sequels involving Dido Twite. (Ignore the headline, which is blatant clickbait--Rowling is barely mentioned in the essay.) (SF Signal)

MGK has a pretty cool piece of LotR-based fanfiction here, which is not unrelated to Jim Hines' essay about the way goblins ( Read more... )

James Nicoll asks what was the best self-published book you read this year? Lots of recommendations in the comments.

Roger Ebert lists his best movies of the year.

In honor of my niece's love for Les Mis, I give you Grantland's Les Mis Geek-Out.

*

Huh: Even NASA doesn't exactly know what causes motion sickness.Outdoorsy types might want to ( Read more... )

In case you were wondering what would happen to all the rats in the NYC sewers... wonder no longer. Ew?

I defy any sports fan to read this article about a tragedy-plagued high school baseball team in western Maryland without crying. FNL fans, I think, will find it particularly compelling.

Harper's has an interesting history of the game Monopoly ( Read more... )

Yeah, yeah, US politics, already. I cannot wait for the election to be over. ::twitches::

People who can't handle the stress are invited, nay, encouraged to cheer yourselves up with a visit to
( Read more... )

I had good shopping luck tonight. In pursuit of nothing in particular, I grazed the sale racks at Banana Republic and tried on a grey sweater dress (made me look lumpy and frumpy), a black twist-neck sheath (would require Spanks), and a black cowl-neck sheath. And the cowl neck was the clear winner by a wide margin (as we age, we require linings ( Read more... )