Jill Leovy of Los Angeles Times documents homicide in L.A. through her blog. The blog started out with 17 names and reached 845 within a year.

Aliza Shvarts, a senior art major at Yale, wants to exhibit abortion as art:

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

That is some fucked up shit.

I thought this broad looks hot in ao dai, yet she looks even hotter without it. Let me hear your vote: with or without.

DesigningTheNews.com “is a series of experiments which visually explore the news in various ways to encourage new ways of seeing a predominantly text based medium.” The site looks great too.

NPR profiles Gerry Mulligan:

Arguably the most influential baritone saxophonist in jazz, Gerry Mulligan was also a commanding composer, arranger and bandleader, and played a pivotal role in developing the “cool jazz” sound and the West Coast jazz community. Mulligan extended his unwieldy instrument’s vocabulary with his soft tone, rhythmic agility and harmonic brilliance, and established the “bari” sax as a solo instrument in small group settings

Check out the program here.

Simply beautiful. The about section worth browsing as well.

An album titled Cosby Narratives Vol. 1: State of Emergency to be dropped next month. AP cites:

Cosby said the hip-hop music he hears is profane and degrading. His album is “the opposite of what I think is the profanity for no particular reason, the misogyny for no particular reason,” he said. “It really looks at the frustration and the anger that a young man may have.”

A time-lapse video shows a man was trapped in the elevator for more than 40 hours. Check out the New Yorker piece here.

Love aside I have great respect for the woman I am about to marry. Unlike me who has not been able to step out of the web-design territory, she has no fear in taking on new directions. From a chemical engineer who worked for a drug company, she steps up her game by becoming a patent examiner.

The requirements for an examiner are read, search and patience. The challenges are even more crucial for the beginners. Her day starts from six in the morning to five or six at night. At home she spends her evening prepare dinner and next-day lunch for all three of us. (Of course I try help out too by cooking the rice, cleaning the vegetables, and washing the dishes. I can’t just sit at the TV and drinking beer while she does all the work. My conscience wouldn’t allow me to do that.) After dinner she would get back to her case until midnight.

With her hard work and determination, I have no doubt that she will become better at her job. Just watching her work makes me feel like a lucky bastard. How did I court such a fantastic girl? She is strong, witty and very mindful (a character I love most about her). So I shouldn’t be asking for anything more. I’ll try. I promise I will.

20 respectable rock and rap acts that peaked with debut albums, including 50 Cent’s Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, Nas’ Illmatic, The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready To Die, Kanye West’s The College Dropout, Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter The Wu-Tang and Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle.