Here at Flavorwire, we pride ourselves on not only writing some of the best content on the internet, but keeping an eye on all of the great writing that other folks on the ‘net are doing, too. We have a story about a theater experience made specifically for babies and two weed-themed pieces for 420, of course. There’s also an excellent, far more serious piece questioning the legal and social implications for video services recently used by rapists to live-stream their crimes online.
Racked profiled 56-year-old “Sister Kate,” née Christine Meeusen, an Occupy activist who found a new purpose as a non-denominational nun evangelizing about (and selling) marijuana-based medicines, including tinctures and salves.
Sister Kate and Johnson, who goes by Sister Darcy, see themselves as spiritual figures who can heal all sorts of physical ailments with their products, which they refer to as “medicine.” They look to many religions, from Judaism to paganism, for rituals, and make their products according to the moon cycle, beginning each two-week production run with the new moon and completing it when the full moon appears. (If they are low on supply during the remaining two weeks of the month, they will produce off the moon cycle, but will label the goods accordingly and significantly mark down the prices.)
Buzzfeed reported on the upsetting case of three London men who took turns raping a woman while broadcasting live on Periscope.
But as thousands of people joined up to watch the stream, the mood in the video shifted. Viewers said that, at first, the girl shown on screen appeared to be complicit – then, when she saw that the others were filming, she asked them not to. Viewers say she then told them “no”, as well as explicitly saying that she wanted to stop, and that “she was almost passed around”. “I felt helpless,” a 19-year-old woman living in west London told BuzzFeed News. “She was going along for a bit at first, then it was clear she didn’t want to be there. All I could do was report it and wait. I sat there and watched people talk about it on Twitter, while it just carried on live.”
The Awl‘s Mary HK Choi tried many strains of weed systematically, for the sake of figuring how to find the right kind of weed for the recurring activities for which you might want to smoke, such as “brunch,” “running errands,” and “wack social engagements.”
I love that I’ve now collected three perfect highs for three very different occasions. Pineapple for high-functioning situations; J1 if I need to nimbly cross-examine anyone in a spirited argument whilst jogging; and Gorilla Glue for Netflix and chilling with a box of mini Altoids, a large Volvic, and a suitably companionable warm body.
The New Yorker wrote about Babble, an Irish show that recent came to New York that was created as an “immersive theatre experience for babies.”
There wasn’t much in the way of plot, but the show did have a protagonist: a red cartoon fish, projected onto the walls of the dome. From time to time, the singers would blow at the fish, propelling it into different video-generated environments: an ocean, a cityscape, the African plains. For the most part, the babies seemed rapt, except for the crier, who was brought outside. Occasionally, the performers would crouch down and sing to the babies one on one, as if spreading gossip. (“The performance is really nuanced by who the babies are, both as individuals and as a group,” Newell said.)