millionsmillions:

“I felt like I had to earn the right to write this book, and the only way I could do that was by working very hard to imagine myself into the soldier’s experience, and hopefully write it correctly.”

- Ben Fountain, Everything is Political: An Interview with Ben Fountain

[Image via Brad Listi]

explore-blog:

“Your 185-millionth great-grandfather was a fish.”

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, originator of the world “meme,”explains why there was no such thing as a first human being in a short but mind-bending interview about his children’s book on evolution, The Magic of Reality.

(↬ Open Culture)

newyorker:

Radium and Lab Cats: Cancer’s History

In “The T-Cell Army,” [sub. req.] Jerome Groopman writes about new approaches to curing cancer that involve activating the body’s own immune responses to fight tumors. Recently, researchers have found that the body’s white blood cells can be stimulated to shrink tumors, leading to startling remissions in some patients. For over a hundred years, doctors have relied on chemotherapy and radiation as the only effective ways of treating the disease.

- Click through for the story behind the above images, and for more images of the methods and people from the last century of fighting cancer: http://nyr.kr/ITWoK6

slaughterhouse90210:

“It really was such a shame, the way you could be so careful, and for so long, and then go ahead and undo it all in the end, as though nothing had ever been held together by anything at all.”
—Johanna Skibsrud, This Will Be Difficult to Explain: And Other Stories

explore-blog:

The Death of Poor Joe – the earliest surviving Charles Dickens film, an adaptation of Dickens’ thermopoetic novel Bleak House created in Brighton in 1901 and only 61 seconds long, uncovered after sitting on the BFI’s shelf for more than half a century.

(ᔥ The Telegraph ↬ Metafilter)

this needs no other caption

freepressbooks:

dementir:

A candle that smells like books.