Katey Rich has written up a brief, loving tribute to Back to the Future:

Back to the Future is the oldest kind of movie magic, a story both wild and innately familiar that’s so confident it captivates the audience as a whole; it is that rare experience of sitting in a room full of hundreds of people, all feeling and thinking the same thing in unison. Seeing Back to the Future in a theater is proof that a great movie is both intensely personal– the way I felt so desperate to time travel as a child–but universally appealing as well. Take anyone and everyone you know to see it, like I did, and get that unique thrill of discovering something you already thought you knew perfectly.

I saw the film tonight at AMC, which only screened it twice in celebration of the film’s 25th anniversary. My favorite moment by far was towards the end of the film, when Doc flipped down those opaque sunglasses and says, “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need….roads.” The audience knew those lines by heart, recited them aloud, along with Christopher Lloyd, then spontaneously started applauding at the shared experience. What an awesome film.

[Also: Gawker has a nice list of 14 things from Back to the Future II that Actually Came True]

Over at Salon, Jennifer Joyner has written a heartbreaking account of what it’s like to be morbidly obese. It includes this tidbit on the difficulties of the physical act of love:

As if this weren’t enough, I now have to have sex with my husband. Michael is not the problem here; he loves me unconditionally and has stood by me for 16 years of marriage, even after I gained 100 pounds before our first-year anniversary. He actually, unbelievably, wants me. This I cannot possibly understand. He hugs me so fiercely, so lovingly, and I am repulsed for him. He is 5-foot-8 and 170 pounds. How can he stand to touch me? He kisses me with passion, and I try to lose myself in the moment, focusing on my love for him and the memory of our once insatiable sex life. But these days, our lovemaking is physically limited to one single position. You wouldn’t believe how we must contort our bodies to make sex work; suffice it to say the measures we take greatly interfere with achieving true intimacy. Once the act commences, there is no passionate kissing, no stroking of your lover’s face. Our being together becomes a perfunctory means to a physical end. The finale leaves me devastated.

No joke: I think that description left me devastated.

Youtube and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation have collaborated to create “the ultimate Youtube playlist,” a series of videos selected by an 11-person panel of extremely talented and respected individuals. Unifying factors of this list, in my opinion: uniqueness, technical virtuosity, and occasionally, brilliance. Here’s a sample:

Find the whole list here.

Great analysis by /Film’s Adam Quigley on the recent Inception-inspired episode of South Park:

Regardless of what your stance is on the matter, nothing changes the fact that the South Park creators watched an internet comedy sketch that already made the same joke they were planning to, had no reservations about continuing forth with the joke anyway, and then worst of all, copied lines from said video without a second thought. Simple error in judgment or not, this is clear evidence of the show’s fading creative energy and inspiration.

This article is great if for no other reason than it introduced me to this video:

Rape, threesomes, and brutal violence, children’s books in Uganda have it all and more. According to the BBC:

The book How Kwezi Got Into Trouble has a picture on the cover of a girl sobbing into a tissue at a school desk. So when I saw it, I thought Kwezi might have got into trouble for handing her homework in late, or perhaps she had been copying somebody else’s exam paper. Then I looked at the text on the back cover and got quite a shock. It read: “At her mother’s funeral, Kwezi is raped by her late father’s best friend.”Kwezi has no-one to tell but her mother lying in the grave. Though she gets Aids, Kwezi is determined to let other pupils know how dangerous Aids is.” It is a surprising storyline for a book aimed at eight-to-10-year-olds.

According to Ugandan President Museveni, “When a lion enters your village, you must raise the alarm loudly.” In the past few years, the HIV rate in Uganda has dropped from 20% to 6.7%.

At a recent event, Apple announced the Mac App store, taking their white-hot concept of “App Store” to the Personal Computer. Gizmodo penned a rather alarmist interpretation of this announcement, but Ryan Block from GDGT asks a better question: Will the Mac App Store have enough to sell?

[E]ven if the desktop software business is ripe for disruption or revival (and I’m not sure that it is), the space is nothing like mobile apps prior to 2008, where distribution was the primary problem. The real issue with the desktop software market is that (unless you’re talking about productivity software) there just isn’t all that much consumers need to buy anymore. The boxed software business didn’t die because of app stores, it died because of an overabundance of great programs that are free, open, or otherwise subsidized that are available through other web or internet services. To put it another way: lately, how often have your parents bought software for their computer (that wasn’t Microsoft Office)?

I’ve watched virtually every episode of The Daily Show for the past 7 years or so, but whenever host Jon Stewart releases a book (once every few years for the last few years), we’ve gotten the unique opportunity to see him go on press tours and talk frankly, not in character and without the faux-formality of his trademark Canali suit. Recently, he went on Larry King Live to share his thoughts on a variety of topics, including the firing of Rick Sanchez:

Should they have fired him? No. With the crap you guys have put on over the past 10 years? What, are you kidding me? Fire somebody if you don’t think they’re doing a good job as a news person. This whole idea…you know they fired a woman for tweeting something on her blog. They fired Sanchez for saying what he said. I think it’s absolute insanity.

Watch a few minutes from the interview below and read the transcript: