Interviewers want to know about Speech Debelle‘s past. After all, it’s not every day that a kid from London goes from scrounging food and bouncing around youth hostels to being a Mercury Award-nominated rapper. But, after listening to her debut album Speech Therapy, her rise to stardom isn’t all that surprising. Peppered with organic, jazzy beats (instead of samples) and powerfully direct lyrics (instead of this), her music is a breath of fresh air in a genre dominated by auto-tuned dudes. Recently, Flavorpill got a chance to talk with Speech Debelle about the pressures of fame, what she has in common with Tupac, and, of course, her past. Read More »

We’re looking at you, @CalexicoCart: In the sea of unsuccessful, navel-gazing uses for Twitter, a rare good one — Serious Eats compiled a national list of street food vendor Twitter feeds, allowing you to know where your favorite taco truck resides throughout the day. Now if only we could get ‘em to tweet about how long the line is… [via Serious Eats] Read More »

The money-soaked arts economy was a boon to many things — huge commissions, a glitzy gallery scene, awe-inspiring auction sales, and Jeff Koons. But, we’ve widely accepted that the party is over. With donors and collectors zipping their wallets, some grim commentators have pronounced this the end of a fertile period for the arts. But for every apocalyptic vision, there is an equally optimistic solution. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that alternative funding strategies exist — artists have been broke for as long as there have been artists at all (we’re imagining neanderthals begging for change in between cave paintings). They’ve also managed to do incredible things in the face of poverty. Read More »

We want a spot in Eric Yam’s utopian space colony. Yesterday, the seventeen year old beat out nine hundred other students from around the world in NASA sponsored competition to design a space station that will orbit the earth fifty years from now. We’re a little suspicious that NASA knows something we don’t and is using high school brain power to rescue us from the end of the world or something, but that’s a conspiracy theory for another time… Read More »

Oprah pisses off the the entire Food Movement: Earlier this week, Oprah teamed up with KFC to offer America a downloadable coupon for two free pieces of the company’s new grilled chicken product, setting off shockwaves of angry eco-bloggers. Silver lining? A possible cage fight between Oprah and Alice Waters. All she needs to do is throw down the gauntlet, baby, and it’s on. [via The Ethicurean] Read More »

This week’s Flickr Photos are the product of semantical error. We meant to enter “rear view mirror”, but instead we typed “rear view window”. This was probably the combined result of drinking too much on Thursday night and a recent Hitchcock binge. Anywho. After wondering why there were so many weird pictures of windows and questioning Flickr’s filtration system a little. We looked at the search box and realized our mistake. Apparently, though, a lot of other people confuse these two (relatively different) terms because we still found plenty of rear view mirror pics to choose from. We were lazy,  so we decided to roll with it. On a totally unrelated note — shout out to “folkyouover” for our favorite Flickr handle ever.

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This black, patent leather heart is the perfect trinket to creepily leave in the mailbox of that special someone who never called you again [via I Heart Guts]

14 items all design geeks must have OR The Design Porn Hall of Fame (Soduku toilet paper? Brilliant.) [via Eighty One Design]

At least this bizarrely morbid Spanish board is educational. [via Boing Boing]

There’s nothing to, ahem, get your motor running like a Tesla turbine powered vibrator [via io9]

Awesomely eco-friendly Parisian housing project [via Inhabitat]

This camera is a great for photographing grizzly bears in their natural habitat. But, we’d stick to a drugstore disposable for taking pictures of your sister’s graduation… [via Billionaire Boy's Club]

You know your evil empire has lost a little validity when it can be symbolized by an 150 kilogram, stainless-steel hamburger. [via Moco Loco]

Laura Keeble’s installations confirm our suspicion that the two sole survivors of the apocalypse will be cockroaches and Karl Lagerfeld. [via Design Boom]

So, the James Beard Foundation doled out its cookbook awards earlier in the week and all we can say is three outta thirty-four ain’t bad. Maybe we were a touch overly ambitious to think we could try them all in the span of three weeks. For the record, Mr. Beard, it’s been quite a ride — we just had no idea that we could only purchase Alinea’s cookbook with gold bouillon or that the source of galangal and fish mint would constantly elude us.

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MoMA’s survey of Dutch artist Aernout Mik’s moving image installations keeps you waiting. Scattered in improbable places throughout the museum, his films often grab viewers with the same immediacy as news media footage. But after ten minutes, it becomes clear that no story will develop. His installations, suspended in time by perpetual loops, construct scenes that are bizarrely unaffected by their duration. Despite the occasional promise of action, Mik’s work is entirely devoid of narrative. While many of them deal with contemporary issues, none of them contribute judgment or interpretation. On  the contrary, Mik’s work leaves its audience knowing far less than when they first encountered it. Read More »

We wonder if this elephantitis-infected lamp is contagious. [via Next Nature]
A table with lotsa legs [via Boing Boing]
We will be spearheading the movement to return monocles to the mainstream. [via Cool Hunting]
So much hipper than those lame Sars masks… [via Core 77]
Wethinks Van Gogh would approve of these bijoux [via Designspotter]
Babydolls coughed up from the mouth of hell? [via MoCo Loco]
This 45-square-foot house beats living in a double wide [via Billionaire Boy’s Club]