December 22, 2011: Afternoon
- Scientists develop new approach to achieving coldest temperature ever recorded: removing hottest atoms from "optical lattices."
- Mexico City to close one of the world's biggest dumps; city has halved its garbage through recycling and composting.
- Behind-the-scenes photos of police patrolling New York in the 1970s.
- Life of the Baghdad Country Club, bar founded in the middle of the war zone of 2006 Iraq.
- "Nicest place on the internet" features videos of strangers trying to hug you.
- Plans to give Thatcher a state funeral insult many honest, patriotic people.
- Brit: "In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation."
- Economics of college football's widely unpopular bowl system explained.
- Dorothy L. Sayers's The Nine Tailors is the perfect framework for a holiday discussion of bells and change-ringing.
- Christmas classic: The year Darth Vader made Matthew Baldwin cry and killed Christmas.
- From 2003, perhaps our favorite Christmas Times op-ed: Zadie Smith's "Scenes From the Smith Family Christmas."
- The internet weighs two ounces, or as little as a single grain of salt.
- Studies show: No matter how many Facebook statuses you post, you won't convince others to like your favorite band.
- Five centuries before Facebook, how Luther's “95 Theses” went viral.
- Miéville on "the hauntological"—"something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it"—and quantum vampires.
- Short film: Prison Photography on the Road.