Poor in cages show dark side of Hong Kong boom
“For many of the richest people in Hong Kong, one of Asia’s wealthiest cities, home is a mansion with an expansive view from the heights of Victoria Peak. For some of the poorest, like Leung Cho-yin, home is a metal cage. The 67-year-old former butcher pays 1,300 Hong Kong dollars ($167) a month for one of about a dozen wire mesh cages resembling rabbit hutches crammed into a dilapidated apartment in a gritty, working-class West Kowloon neighborhood.”

Tinkerer-in-Chief Bolts Times: Joe Sexton’s Innovative, Profane Reign
“‘If you are not asking yourself every couple of years how to once more scare yourself to death, then you are living something of the coward’s life,’ he says. ‘Ain’t no room for cowards in journalism at this moment in time.’”

Death-defying self-portraits of falling
“It’s an understatement to say photographer Kerry Skarbakka puts himself in perilous situations. He leaps from great heights–often a cliff or ledge–and then clicks the shutter. He photographs himself falling in a series titled The Struggle to Right Oneself. Using a clever combination of daredevil imagination, martial arts, and some rigging gear, Skarbakka captures that proverbial ‘point of no return,’ the space in between an action or an event, of scary mid-air suspension.”

The Lost Wolves of New England
“Beef was considered the proper staple of a modern nation, however. With the introduction of so-called “industrial farms” for breeding horses and cattle, especially in the northern island of Hokkaido, wolves were re-categorized as evil predators, and Japan created “a culture of wolf hatred.” So efficient were the Japanese, with guns and traps and strychnine, that the last Japanese wolf was killed, near the beautiful ancient capital of Nara, in 1905, the same year in which the upstart nation won the Russo-Japanese War and took its place among the beef-eating world powers.”

How to Save a Dying Language
“In a highly connected global age, languages are in die-off. Fifty to 90 percent of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today are expected to go silent by century’s end. We live under an oligarchy of English and Mandarin and Spanish, in which 94 percent of the world’s population speaks 6 percent of its languages. Yet among threatened languages, Aramaic stands out. Arguably no other still-spoken language has fallen farther.”