gunnar.se

Happy birthday, Green Machine.

Photographer Steve Roe brought his fractal lens to Japan & Korea and got some shots that look like they’re out of Blade Runner, Speed Racer, or anime.

As millions head abroad on holiday, our correspondents choose the words that for them speak volumes about the countries they love and live in by Guardian correspondents

Alia Ghanem is Osama bin Laden’s mother, and she commands the attention of everyone in the room. On chairs nearby sit two of her surviving sons, Ahmad and Hassan, and her second husband, Mohammed al-Attas, the man who raised all three brothers. Everyone in the family has their own story to tell about the man linked to the rise of global terrorism; but it is Ghanem who holds court today, describing a man who is, to her, still a beloved son who somehow lost his way. “My life was very difficult because he was so far away from me,” she says, speaking confidently. “He was a very good kid and he loved me so much.” Now in her mid-70s and in variable health, Ghanem points at al-Attas – a lean, fit man dressed, like his two sons, in an immaculately pressed white thobe, a gown worn by men across the Arabian peninsula. “He raised Osama from the age of three. He was a good man, and he was good to Osama.”

Trots sin förhållandevis lilla befolkning har Island en livaktig pop- och rockscen. Men The Sugarcubes, Björk, Sigur Rós och Of Monsters and Men uppstod inte ur ingenting. I två delar berättas historien om den isländska pop- och rockmusikens framväxt.

Steve Jobs and Chrisann Brennan were 23 when their daughter was born. Lisa Brennan-Jobs remembers the pride and pain of a childhood spent navigating the vastness between her struggling single mom and Apple’s mercurial founder.

My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten to twenty seconds for a basic news article.

Steven Galanis, a former LinkedIn account executive who is C.E.O. of Cameo, realized a couple years ago that “the celebrity selfie is the new autograph” and set out to democratize the experience with the help of co-founders Devon Townsend, a former Microsoft engineer, and Martin Blencowe, a producer and N.F.L. agent. Now, you no longer need to hope for a random celebrity run-in to secure such an image; you can pay Cameo to engineer it for you.