If you type your password into a Facebook comment, it converts into asterisks

Good news, bad news. Good news is this is a great interview about modern magazine design with Dick Barnett. Bad news is that he is currently designing Maxim.

Playboy (Um, NSFW)

REUBENS: In truth Pee-wee has this false sense of confidence. He acts as though he knows everything, but really it’s all fake. It’s a facade.

PLAYBOY: But wasn’t Pee-wee your own facade?

REUBENS: Boy, that was convenient, wasn’t it, to become somebody else

TIME Advanced is to be produced for readers who already know where Pakistan is

Brian Whitaker

As a rule of thumb, high taxes can act as a spur towards democracy and accountable government. Conversely, where taxes are low the pressure for democracy and accountability is usually less.

The rise and fall of Confidential magazine

Traditionalism being one of the things that makes Afghanistan so hard for Americans to understand. We Americans have so many traditions. For instance our political traditions date back to the 12th-century English Parliament if not to the Roman Senate. Afghans, on the other hand, have had the representative democracy kind of politics for only six years. Afghanistan’s political traditions are just beginning to develop. A Pashtun…

How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?

This fascinating interactive graphic that shows the low-level guerilla war that the ‘hippies’ waged against the ‘system’ between 1965 and 1970. Over 716 police stations, schools, and military installations in the US were subjected to bombs, Molotov cocktails, or general destruction. Nobody talks of this any longer.

The graphic originated from a 1971 edition of Scanlan’s Monthly, which featured writers like Hunter S Thompson and illustrators like a young Robert Crumb.

Johann Hari

Carey and the CofE demand Christians be allowed to break the law requiring them to treat gay people equally when providing a service to the general public – and that any case where a Christian feels discriminated against should be judged by a special court of “sensitive” Christians. If we started allowing religious people to break basic anti-discrimination laws, where would we stop? Until 1975, the Mormon Church said black people didn’t have souls. (They only changed their mind the day the (US) Supreme Court ruled this was illegal, and God niftily appeared to their leader that morning and announced blacks were ensouled after all.) Would we let a Mormon registrar refuse to marry black people? Would it be “Mormonophobia” to object?