August 4, 2011: Afternoon
By The Morning News
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- Mogadishu included among three new regions added to Somalia's famine.
- Gadhafi's son forging an alliance with radical Islamists within Libya's rebels.
- Our generation's new collective goal—health—is futile considering the likelihood of, you know, death.
- Lesbian couple saved 40 kids from Anders Behring Breivik's killing spree.
- Man commissions house in Warsaw in order to live like a finch, and attract "young creators and intellectualists from all over the world."
- Cindy Sherman gets her own makeup line with MAC cosmetics.
- What to do if your parents have great taste, and other symptoms of "retromania," catalogued by Simon Reynolds.
- Sylvia Plath's young-adult novel, The Bell Jar, reaches middle age.
- Virginia Woolf critiques nephew's poem.
- Notes from a biographer: Joseph Heller was called "Angel of Death" at his gym, where he ran to avoid double chins.
- Joe Posnanski on the long jumps that mattered, and why we haven't come close since.
- Lorrie Moore pants academically for Friday Night Lights.
- Equations from traffic theory applied to basketball; study says faster-passing teams should shoot more selectively.
- Computers can beat humans at almost any game, but remain stumped by Go.
- "Expected real-life Batman generation rate" finds a Batman appears approximately every 25 million years.
- Have your day made: Mariachi band performs for a beluga whale.
