Featuring Ed O’Neil and Kristen Bell in Sex Kitten Of The Supreme Court.

[Illustration by ALEX FINE] FRESH AIR John Waters describes himself as a “cult filmmaker whose core audience consists of minorities who can’t even fit in with their own minorities.” In a new memoir, Role Models, the director and writer of such films as Hairspray, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Cry-Baby profiles the many people — from singer Johnny Mathis to a stripper named Zorro — who have inspired him over the years, both in his personal life and in his transgressive cinematic career. Waters says he has only written about people he has looked up to — even if they’ve […]

[via ONLINE MBA]

INQUIRER: The Mariner Project, as Sunoco Logistics Partners L.P. has dubbed it, calls for construction of a refrigerated terminal to store supercooled ethane at one of Sunoco’s existing facilities. Philadelphia, Marcus Hook, and Westville, Gloucester County, are possibilities. The deal between Sunoco Logistics and MarkWest Energy Partners L.P. addresses one of the issues nagging gas operators as production in the Marcellus Shale rapidly escalates: how to transport the growing volume of natural gas and its byproducts to market. Marcellus wells in northern Pennsylvania produce “dry gas,” mostly methane, that can be sold by pipeline directly to electrical generators or homeowners, […]

[Click image to enlarge]

BY ST. JOHN BARNED SMITH The question I get asked the most by people back in the States is “So what do you do all day??” Just like everything else in Peace Corps, “it depends.” Since I finally arrived in site, I have been shuttling between families, living with each for a week or two, and then moving on. The idea is that I’ll integrate much faster into the community and meet a lot more people this way. Right now, I’m staying with the family of a man named Teofilo, who owns some cows and makes his living growing cash […]

VANITY FAIR: It was like something out of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. A gaping, perfectly circular sinkhole appeared Sunday in Guatemala City, devouring a three-story building and killing at least one man in the process. The gargantuan cavity appears to be about 60 feet wide and 30 stories deep, according to National Geographic. If it wasn’t caused by aliens, how did the sinkhole form? Where did its insides go? And why the heck is it so round? We consulted David Bercovici and Mark Brandon, both professors of geology and geophysics at Yale University, to fill in the gaps in our […]

THE ATLANTIC: Lynn Hirshberg’s cover profile of rapper M.I.A. in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine has provoked the kind of reaction normally reserved for a significant movie or album, and for good reason. The spectacular—and spectacularly nasty—takedown is full of repudiation by scorned lovers, French fries as means of character assassination, policy wonk soundbites, and first-world-third-world clash. But the piece’s reverberations really come from a question Hirschberg doesn’t pose or answer directly, but that has been a consistent animating theme in her best work. In an age of faked memoirs, staged reality programs, and self-reinvention as quasi-religion, do we […]

CBS NEWS: Russian science editor Vladimir Lagowski has written a column in which he claims that the U.S.S.R. used nuclear devices to plug underground fissures several times with success – most of the time. The author cites one failure, where a 1972 gas blowout was not extinguished by a nuke. But at least it was only 4 kilotons. This peaceful use of nuclear detonations fell under the Soviet Union’s Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy program. The Russian Analytical Center for Non-Proliferation lists 67 underground nuclear explosions conducted by the U.S.S.R. in the interests of its national economy between 1965 […]