America’s Civil War changed the lives of not only the men on the front lines of battle but also the women they left at home. A century-and-a-half since the Civil War began, the faces of these women are preserved in photographs by the father of American photojournalism, Mathew Brady. His portraits show the many faces of Civil War-era women, from a smirking young girl to the elderly to the tender expression of a nun. Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow See more photos of the Civil War’s brutal battlefields , strangest personalities , its African-American fighters , the portraits of photographer Mathew Brady , and at LIFE.com .

The rest is here:
Women of the Civil War: LIFE Photos

“Old Bald Head”; the first defense of temporary insanity; a nervous breakdown; and even our country’s worst president—while many of these descriptions sound like they might be out of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest , they’re actually referring to some of the most bizarre individuals to come out of America’s Civil War. A century-and-a-half has passed since the conflict began, when Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861. Below is a gallery featuring some of the more unusual people involved in the war, their eccentricities at least as odd now as they were fifteen decades ago. Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow See more photos of the Civil War’s African-American fighters , the portraits of photographer Mathew Brady , and at LIFE.com .

View original post here:
The Civil War’s Strangest Personalities: LIFE Photos

Last February, a big snowstorm hit the mid-Atlantic, covering major metro-areas like DC and Philadelphia in 2-3 feet of snow. Cities unaccustomed to such massive snowfall didn’t really know how to handle it. Sans proper plowing and snow removal equipment, streets remained undrivable; sidewalks unwalkable; and most areas completely shutdown. This inability to handle the snow physically translated to an inability to handle the snow psychologically. What a place accustomed to snow — like Buffalo or Winnipeg — might refer to simply as a blizzard, suddenly became an occasion to freak out. News and weather outlets began referring to the storm in hyperbolic terms: Snowpocalypse, SnOMG, Monster Storm. Even President Obama, in a speech at the Democratic National Committee Winter Meeting, referred to the extreme weather as Snowmaggedon. Since then, as more big snowfalls have drifted through not-so-snowy parts of America, freaking out has become a normal response. As the country prepares for another big one, here’s a look at our new winter vocabulary.  Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow

Visit link:
A New American Tradition: Snowstorm Hyperbole

We all have our favorite blogs. And, if you visit them every day or with some frequency, you might find that you start to get to know the bloggers behind them – or, at least, you get to know exactly as much as they reveal to you through their words and writing style. With her new project, Bloggers , Gabriela Herman puts faces to all of those names and shows popular bloggers in the environments in which they work. More often than not, that means otherwise average people sitting in dark corners in local cafes or curled up on the couch, the glow of a laptop screen illuminating their face. A fine art, lifestyle, and portrait photographer, Herman has shown her work internationally and been featured on many websites. This project was a natural step for the Wesleyan grad; she is known for putting portrait subjects at ease, a necessary skill for getting these bloggers to open their homes to her. “I wanted to bring their intimate worlds to the outside public,” Herman told Wired ‘s Raw File , which recently featured her work. “Ultimately though, Bloggers is more about rethinking the way we experience the world, looking at how we live and spend our time.” Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow Images: Copyright Gabriela Herman. Used with permission.

Link:
Putting Faces to Names: Getting to Know Your Favorite Bloggers

Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow The John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston unveiled a massive digital archive that will preserve the legacy of one of America’s most beloved presidents. The Archive contains 200,000 scanned document, 1,245 recordings of telephone conversations and speeches, 72 reels of movies, and 1,500 photos. It’s the country’s largest digital presidential collection, and opens up the details of the life of the former President to a wider audience than could ever touch the physical collection. It’s available at http://www.jfklibrary.org . We got an early look at the library’s photographic archives and picked out some iconic pictures of the President’s life that we can all access online now.

Read the rest here:
The Digitized Life of John F. Kennedy

Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow LAS VEGAS — The more time I spent wandering the great halls of the convention center, the more I grew obsessed with how conference booths were designed. From the choice of floor covering to the arrangement of products, every company was trying to say something , even if it wasn’t always clear what. The oddest manifestation of this newfound interest is the gallery you see above. It’s a bunch of (mostly) stock photos that different companies used to illustrate their products. Stock photos like this tell you nothing about a product, obviously. They could be used to sell salad or cell phones. Stock photos are photographic emoticons. They tell you how a product will make you feel. I found all these particular specimens in South Hall, but they were scattered pretty evenly throughout the thousands of booths. I’d say one in four booths made heavy use of them, though not all stock photos are quite as ridiculous as these.

Read the original:
Photographic Emoticons

Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow LAS VEGAS — If anything is true, it is that Las Vegas has the most awesomely bad carpets in the world. The Convention Center, airports, and hotels collectively show a stupefying dedication to installing bad-trip psychedelic carpets. Perhaps they introduce massive amounts of cognitive noise, thereby distracting gamblers from their profit-losing enterprise. Maybe an evil sorcerer cursed the town long ago, following a dust-up with a conniving magician promoter. Whatever the reason, these carpets exist, and that should be enough to make you question this whole idea of Western civilization.

More:
The Carpets of CES

Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow

Continued here:
10 Big Tech Questions for 2011

Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow

See original here:
The 14 Biggest Technology Stories of 2010

This year, as ever, the villains we’ll most remember were malicious, entitled troublemakers, who one way or another made things a little—or a lot—worse for somebody. In some cases, of course, the villainy was probably more perceived than real. But in a rough year like this one, it helps to have a few scapegoats… ( Also see The 10 Biggest Heroes of 2010 ) Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow

View original post here:
The 10 Biggest Villains of 2010

With unemployment lingering, partisanship raging, and natural and man-made disasters striking all over the place, we were certainly in the market for a few heroes this year. Here’s a look at some of the men and women—and one dog—who stepped up to make things a little better… ( Also see The 10 Biggest Villains of 2010 ) Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow

View post:
The 10 Biggest Heroes of 2010

2010 through the eyes of the Atlantic.com’s cartoonist… ( For more, also see The Decade in Cartoons. ) Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow

Read more:
The Year in Cartoons