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The first study to actually count the number of cortical neurons in the brains of a number of carnivores, including cats and dogs, has found that dogs possess significantly more of them than cats. […] The results of the study are described in a paper titled “Dogs have the most neurons, though not the largest brain: Trade-off between body mass and number of neurons in the cerebral cortex of large carnivoran species” accepted for publication in the open access journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:57 PM PST - 84 comments

The National's music video for Dark Side of the Gym, choreographed and directed by Justin Peck, and performed by Justin Peck and Patricia Delgado (SLYT). As Marina Harss puts it in the New Yorker, "the whole video is essentially an extended pas de deux, highly technical but low-key, intimate, and a little sexy." [more inside]
posted by yasaman at 9:17 PM PST - 26 comments

Didion’s journalism from the Sixties and Seventies seems newly relevant because then (as now) American history had taken a few alarming turns, and everyone wanted to know why and what to do about it. While crossing the nation on book tour she heard the same question from every TV and radio host: “Where are we heading?” Today, the questions remain the same. Why is this happening? And: What can we do to change it? But Didion regarded answers to these questions with skepticism, bordering on contempt. At the heart of grand narratives about who we are and where we are heading she saw self-deception in the face of meaningless disorder. Instead of trying to change the world, Didion was content, as she writes in South and West, “to find out, as usual, what was making the picture in my mind.”, Paul Gleason for The Point
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:10 PM PST - 9 comments

Patterns in Flax (10’55, Black & White) (1947) This Weekly Review pays respect to the traditional Māori art of raranga (or weaving), and looks at the industrialisation of New Zealand flax (harakeke) processing. The episode features a factory in Foxton where Māori designs are incorporated into modern floor coverings. Patterns in Flax features some great footage of the harvesting and drying of flax plants, and shots of immense (now obsolete) flax farms. [more inside]
posted by Start with Dessert at 8:03 PM PST - 5 comments

A very old breed, indeed, poodles are and were everywhere and did every thing. As you can see by the links in this first section, they are not just prancing dogs in funny haircuts, they were working dogs. They were considered for use during WW II war dogs, though they turned out not to be ideal. They've raced in Alaska sled dogs and did fairly well. And they're being retrained for what their history suggests is their most suitable job water dogs
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:31 PM PST - 24 comments

Erin O. White: The gift wrappers at the Chinook were North End girls, the North End being the old downtown section of a newly sprawling western city, a downtown of treed boulevards and clapboard houses so separate from the city swelling around it that only in college did I learn that the rest of the country saw Colorado Springs as something of a joke: militarized, fundamentalist, ignorant. What I saw instead was Pikes Peak from every street corner, towering and maternal and vigilant. I saw the loud and gentle Vietnam vets who lived in the Albany Apartments and panhandled out front on Tejon Street, the stucco churches with their statues of a brown Jesus, the shallow creek near the highway where in spring we waded in water the color of rust. I saw the Chinook.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:33 PM PST - 11 comments

Rarely can a film’s video game adaptation say it improved upon the film from which it drew inspiration, but the 1989 Game Boy version of Robocop, Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-violent genre classic, has at least one thing on its source material: An unforgettable theme song. [more inside]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 4:59 PM PST - 36 comments

Veteran screen actor Rance Howard died this past Saturday at the age of 89.
The name might not ring a bell, but chances are you know his face, perhaps as That Guy in Ed Wood; or maybe as That Guy in Chinatown; or maybe That Guy in Nebraska; or That Guy in that Seinfeld episode; or That Guy in that other Seinfeld episode; or That Guy in The Burbs; or That Guy in Babylon 5; or That Guy in the Andy Griffith Show. Or any of the other 200+ character roles he performed in over 60 years of professional acting. (You might also be familiar with his sons Ron and Clint, and more recently, his granddaughter Bryce Dallas.)
posted by Atom Eyes at 4:26 PM PST - 10 comments

The LA Weekly's sale to a mysterious buyer is completed with immediate layoffs of most of the editorial staff. With the deaths of the Gothamist family of sites (previously) and the end of the print edition of the Village Voice (previously), we can now add the impending end of the venerable LA Weekly. Except, who the heck is Semanal Media? Meanwhile, in related depressing OC Weekly news...
posted by wibari at 4:18 PM PST - 26 comments

Tom and Lorenzo Present the 2017 Miss Universe Pageant Costumes: Part One: SPINAL INJURY SHOWDOWN! “Come to Belgium, where we like our showgirls darkly ominous and unhealthily obsessed with heraldry!” [more inside]
posted by Hypatia at 3:04 PM PST - 61 comments

There's a new Chart Party, and in this installment, Jon Bois uses math and statistics to explain why the argument that Colin Kaepernick isn't good enough to play in the NFL doesn't hold water. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:21 PM PST - 33 comments

Epic Games is suing more Fortnite cheaters, and at least one of them is a minor [Polygon] “In October, Polygon learned that Epic Games had filed suit against two individuals for making and using software that allows players to cheat in the game Fortnite. Since then, the publisher and developer has filed suit against at least nine more individuals, both in the United States and overseas. Unsurprisingly, at least one of them is a minor. We know this because a new and unusual document has been entered into the court record: A sternly worded, and legally savvy, note from his mom.” [Lauren Rogers to the U.S. District Court Eastern District of North Carolina by Polygondotcom on Scribd] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:15 PM PST - 120 comments

Alma Deutscher , born 2005 in England, is a composer, violinist and pianist. She began playing the piano when she was two years old and the violin when she was three. Soon afterwards she started improvising simple melodies on the piano. Her attempts at composition began at age four, when she began writing an opera about a pirate called Don Alonzo. There followed various compositions for violin, piano, viola and voice, as well as works for chamber ensembles that were commissioned by music festivals in England and Switzerland. [more inside]
posted by lungtaworld at 2:03 PM PST - 2 comments

All-girl elementary school group raps positive messages about education and Black Girl Magic. (The latter inspired by Beyonce, Serena, Michelle Obama and other prominent Black women.) The sixth graders get shout outs from none other than Michelle Obama, Jemele Hill, and Jada Pinkett Smith. Complex magazine interviewed the girls' teacher.
posted by AFABulous at 1:29 PM PST - 11 comments

New Study Finds That Most Redditors Don’t Actually Read the Articles They Vote On [more inside]
posted by tobascodagama at 12:44 PM PST - 44 comments

Three tools that help digital journalists save their work in case a site shuts down. This is also about preserving articles from writers you care about. If You See Someting You Like, Save It in the Wayback Machine.
posted by storybored at 12:10 PM PST - 6 comments

RIP Jim Nabors, 87. LA Times obit. Forever known as Gomer Pyle on the Andy Griffith show, he had an amazing singing voice, putting out several albums, including The Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. Record Album and Kiss Me Goodbye, which yours truly remembers being advertised extensively on afternoon television. He also sang Back Home Again in Indiana at the start of the Indianapolis 500 almost every year from 1972 to 2014. Oh, and he also appears on the first (broadcast) episode of the Muppet Show. In 2013, at age 82 he married his partner of 38 years, Stan Cadwallader.
posted by Melismata at 11:54 AM PST - 64 comments

His name is Max. Max is Nice.

His owner does not want Max in the Library.
We do not want Max in the Library.

Max wants to be in the Library.

Please do not let Max in the Library.

[via]
posted by not_on_display at 11:48 AM PST - 67 comments

"It feels a little weird to put 100 hours into something that won't be noticed by its absence." Lukas Pope (developer of Papers, Please [previously]) had a problem with his upcoming game Return of the Obra Dinn. The dithering used in the game's stylised 1-bit graphics caused uncomfortable flickering when the camera moved. So he fixed it.
posted by figurant at 11:27 AM PST - 17 comments

Talking Simpsons, the in-depth Episode-by-episode Simpson’s podcast, takes a break to explore the history and backstory of the USA Network’s attempt to create a raunchy and extremely 90s competitor to The Simpsons, Duckman (92 min). They discuss the episode ‘About Face’, available online here.
posted by The Whelk at 10:35 AM PST - 11 comments

How intentional communities try to combat loneliness, a detrimental condition experienced by 40% of Americans. "Intentional communities[...] are intimate: a couple dozen apartments or single-family homes, built around central squares or common spaces. And they’re operated in ways intended to keep the community connected — with weekly dinners at a community center or other common area, shared babysitting services, shared gardens or games or even vacations. If you don’t want to participate, fine; no one will come pester you to play a pick-up game you don’t want to play or join a committee you don’t want to join. But when you need the community — because a spouse is away or a baby is sick or you’re just plain lonely and would like some companionship — it’s there for you."
posted by cocoaviolet at 10:16 AM PST - 27 comments

How to Make Biscornu Make a complicated looking octagonal pincushion out of two simple squares. They can be made with embroidered or plain fabric and you can add a button in the middle to make it look more like a doughnut biscuit spaceship. Biscornu is a French term that means 'bizarre' or crooked.
posted by soelo at 9:36 AM PST - 16 comments

"In 2007, a feral child was found starving, covered in her own filth, unable to walk or talk. A new family took in the girl, called her Dani, and tried to make up for years of neglect." Ten years later, an update from the Tampa Bay Times. [more inside]
posted by mosessis at 8:51 AM PST - 48 comments

Why You Left Social Media: A Guesswork. An essay by Sofia Samatar on Kate Zambreno and quitting social media

At first I thought you were simply taking a break, as writers sometimes do, to meet a deadline or clear your head. That was before the election. Later, during the election and its aftermath, I thought maybe you left because you couldn’t stand the climate. [...] Perhaps you were suffering a kind of political depression.

posted by ocular shenanigans at 7:14 AM PST - 99 comments

So, You’d Like to Buy Your Loved One a Book? A flowchart from the New York Times Book Review
posted by not_the_water at 6:41 AM PST - 28 comments

A camera left behind on a beach in Yorkshire filmed itself being swept up by the tide and recorded the beginning of a 500-mile odyssey across the North Sea. It was found on Süderoog, a tiny German island in the Wadden Sea. The owner is now being sought. (From The Guardian)
posted by carter at 6:40 AM PST - 10 comments

Geese dgaf
posted by uncleozzy at 6:39 AM PST - 15 comments

Did you know baby tigers can need help pooping? Mika is a new baby tiger at C.A.R.E. and without a mom-tiger to help her poop. She already prefers chicken to her bottle, and she's diligently working on her sneak attacks.
posted by gladly at 6:24 AM PST - 21 comments

Equal Justice [content warning: rape] - "More than a decade before Parks became a civil rights hero for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, Parks led a national campaign against sexual assaults on black women." (previously)
posted by kliuless at 5:38 AM PST - 6 comments

Vexillology is the study of flags. There are five simple rules. There is also an incredibly entertaining TED Talk which highlights some egregious rule-breakers.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:35 AM PST - 66 comments

Harley Windsor is an accidental ice skater (a wrong turn made when he was a child), who became a pairs skater after growing too tall, from Sydney's Rooty Hill. “Anything’s possible,” he says. “Nina Mozer, the head coach, told me that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from, if you train professionally, you’re going to show results." [more inside]
posted by freethefeet at 3:01 AM PST - 7 comments

Well they do all 16 dances - So you're stumped on your next song. Here's a tried and true method to overcome that writers block! [more inside]
posted by ctmf at 11:06 PM PST - 35 comments

These are not your friendly neighborhood spiders: scientists have mixed a graphene solution that when fed to spiders allows them to spin super-strong webbing. How strong? Strong enough to carry the weight of a person. And these spiders might soon be enlisted to help manufacture enhanced ropes and cables, possibly even parachutes for skydivers, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

[more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:37 PM PST - 33 comments

A stamp, or philatelic, cover is the term of art for the outside of a package or envelope. A "mail cover" is a surveillance technique where law enforcement or intellignce agencies record all the information on the outside of an envelope or package. And now the USPS lets you mail cover yourself, using a frighteningly insecure protocol - knowledge-based authentication.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:59 PM PST - 10 comments

When Ursula Vernon’s The Tomato Thief won the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, she gave an acceptance speech the likes of which you’ve never heard.

Well. This is an unexpected honor. My fellow winners have said some very meaningful things up here on the stage tonight. I want to talk to you about dead whales.

posted by Lexica at 6:18 PM PST - 29 comments

A long-held belief about how hummingbirds drink is wrong—and the truth is really weird. The hummingbird tongue is a "fluid trap, not a capillary tube." HTML and PDF of the PNAS journal article. Video.
posted by zarq at 6:06 PM PST - 27 comments

Captive breeding programs rescue animals from extinction at the potential cost of creating a semi-domesticated species. Maggie Koerth-Baker ponders the consequences in The Complicated Legacy Of A Panda Who Was Really Good At Sex.
Also, a photo essay in The Atlantic showing costumed researchers in Sichuan pandering to their charges.
[via Boing Boing]
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:42 PM PST - 19 comments

CyberCity is a 1:87 (HO) scale "miniaturized physical city" designed to simulate "the best efforts of a well-funded terrorist organization or other cyber attacker trying to control city assets".
posted by OverlappingElvis at 4:37 PM PST - 10 comments

In British Baby Names, Eleanor Nickerson posts about name history and contemporary naming: Tudor names, Victorian Gothic names, excellent names from 1876, Victorian Romany names, alliterative Edwardian siblings. There are rare names, phrase names and families with interesting name choices: the Farmans, the Stuarts and the Stockers. Name poems show that interest in names is not new. In more recent data, Nickerson looks at regional names (girls, boys), names by letter (girls, boys) and fast-rising names. She gives name help and links to other name blogs.
posted by paduasoy at 3:42 PM PST - 18 comments

What’s the deal with the magazine where Amber works?
First of all, Amber is an editor. We know this because she confronts a very rude writer who turned in 650 words instead of 300. “Just clean it up,” the writer sniffs at her. Amber mopes back to her friends. She wants to be the one writing the stories, not just fixing them. “Amber, we’re junior editors, not writers,” her friend who never gets a name says, giving us helpful exposition. But see — at most (all?) publications, editors are a more senior position than writers. Why do they treat it at Now/Beat/Now like it’s the world’s worst internship?

Why would they serve such a disgusting appetizer at a palace?
Another bit of “comedy”: The food they serve in foreign countries is gross sometimes! But this is a cocktail party at the royal palace of a country, with only the nobility invited. Even if the dish was “jellied meat,” why would it be served on cheap, stale-looking baguette slices with a sliced black olive and a neon toothpick? Everything else in this movie indicates that the royal family is classy and has impeccable taste. Why would anyone serve anything that looks like this at a party?

Dana Schwartz reviews the Netflix original film A Christmas Prince, "the only Christmas movie that matters now"
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:25 PM PST - 51 comments

There is a major security issue with macOS High Sierra. "We always see malware trying to escalate privileges and get root access," says Patrick Wardle, a security researcher with Synack. "This is best, easiest way ever to get root, and Apple has handed it to them on a silver platter."
posted by capnsue at 2:58 PM PST - 63 comments

War criminal dies after apparently drinking poison in court (Warning, the link contains autoplay video of the act.) [more inside]
posted by Aubergine at 1:05 PM PST - 71 comments

The unlikely life of Norris McWhirter, kids' TV star and the original Brexiter He was beloved by British kids in the 70s thanks to his Guinness Book of Records and role on TV’s Record Breakers – but Norris McWhirter was also a rightwing libertarian who inspired Thatcher and laid the foundations for Brexit.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:58 PM PST - 12 comments

New York City Has Genetically Distinct ‘Uptown’ and ‘Downtown’ Rats. A graduate student sequenced rats all over Manhattan, and discovered how the city affects their genetic diversity. [The Atlantic]
posted by moonmilk at 12:26 PM PST - 25 comments

Civilization VI: Rise and Fall Expansion Announcement Trailer [YouTube] “The expansion looks to majorly shake up the flow of the game with era-long modifiers that will force you to shift your strategy for fear of losing your cities or ambition to seize others'. Its centerpiece feature is the addition of "Golden Ages," "Dark Ages," and "Heroic Ages"—macro events that apply each civilization's ever-shifting fortunes, achievements, and momentum to a struggle for territory and cultural influence, whether military force is involved or not. The expansion will also add governors, a greatly expanded alliances system, cities that peacefully flip between civilizations, and an "Historic Moments" system that gives players special milestones that impact outcomes. Players can look forward to "emergency situations," which allow the civilizations at the bottom to pool their resources in order to gain benefits that help elevate them all closer to the top players. And, of course, expect new civilizations and leaders.” [via: Ars Technica] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:10 PM PST - 63 comments

While most of the commentators on the Ramadan Affair have been—as tends to be the case with conversations about Islam, laïcité, and terrorism in France—white and male, some of the most important insights on the scandal have come from those Muslim feminists who are dismayed both by the prejudice of Valls and Charlie, and disappointed with Bouteldja’s seeming indifference to victims of abuse. A debate about the Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan and his treatment of women has been eclipsed by a discussion about how France’s intellectuals view Islam in French life. (SLNewYorker)
posted by beisny at 11:46 AM PST - 3 comments

DMX drops remix of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. DMX has previously demonstrated an affinity for Rudolph.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:23 AM PST - 20 comments

Developers share their most memorable dirty coding tricks Developers behind video games such as Super Time Force, Mega Man Legacy Collection, Titan Quest, and others solved pesky problems with dirty coding tricks. Here's how they did it. (Warning: features ambient squirrels)
posted by Servo5678 at 10:46 AM PST - 35 comments

“Ultimately, though, the most frustrating thing about Kids These Days is how Harris keeps coming back to that broken promise framing, encapsulated in those blunt rhetorical questions quoted above: “[T]he market hasn’t held up its side of the bargain. What gives? And why did we make this bargain in the first place?” As a millennial might say, great questions.” -Won’t Get Fooled Again: Malcolm Harris’s “Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials” Jacqui Shine, LA Review Of Books

“The disdain that so many people feel for Harris’s and my generation reflects an unease about the forces of deregulation, globalization, and technological acceleration that are transforming everyone’s lives.” - Where Millennials Come From On “Kids These Days” Jia Tolentino, New Yorker
posted by The Whelk at 10:08 AM PST - 30 comments

Single link YouTube with valuable information on how to deal with a territorial Sea Lion.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 9:02 AM PST - 20 comments

"Now, with Call of Duty: WW2, even the humanity and the hope are draining out of the story. It is World War 2 as viewed from an era of endless war, compounding geopolitical crises, and a political system that cannot even articulate objections to much less act against fascism and racial supremacy. It’s only fitting that the all-American platoon of Call of Duty: World War II seems almost to be fighting a forever war, acting more like members of the modern professionalized military that replaced the citizen-soldier ideal with a warrior ethos. Waypoint's Rob Zacny argues that the latest game in the long-running 'Call of Duty' videogame series" isn't just a hackneyed war story, it's the endpoint of a 70 year process of stripping the Second World War of meaning and context.
posted by firechicago at 9:02 AM PST - 35 comments

But it just was one of three ideas to combat sexism in the beer industry. Jaega Wise is the head brewer at Wild Card Brewery based in London; she was speaking at the first Brewers Congress on Monday, November 27th. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:49 AM PST - 26 comments

"I’m the person that looked at the Mona Lisa and be like, Man, that’s gonna be cool in 40 years. I play forever.": The New York Times' Dean Baquet talks therapy, family, music, politics and more with Jay-Z, with annotations by Wesley Morris and Reggie Ugwu.
posted by palindromic at 7:56 AM PST - 2 comments

Charlie and Daddy Show #1: The Ceiling (SLYT): Charlie looks at the ceiling, identifies a television and plays guitar. Charlie is roughly 2 and 1/3 years old. Daddy is 36. [more inside]
posted by minsies at 7:32 AM PST - 15 comments

Marvel’s New Editor-in-Chief Admits Writing Under Japanese Pseudonym ‘Akira Yoshida’ [Vulture] [more inside]
posted by runt at 7:16 AM PST - 52 comments

The world’s slowest, most boring bus simulator finally has a VR version [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 6:46 AM PST - 12 comments

Amazing and beautiful portraits of African-American kids and young adults (via Kottke)
posted by Stark at 6:26 AM PST - 8 comments

The official first trailer for Avengers: Infinity War Part I has landed. [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:11 AM PST - 188 comments

Giving someone a big name game console this christmas? Apply software updates beforehand! Modern ".. game consoles require a lengthy series of updates, downloads, adjustments and vaguely arcane incantations before they work properly." You do NOT want to be attending to this Christmas day. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 3:44 AM PST - 44 comments

ADHD - Benjamin Fro (SLYT)
posted by ouke at 3:25 AM PST - 10 comments

... through My Mom's Crocheting. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 9:57 PM PST - 30 comments

Even Hey Arnold!'s city is gentrifying now After more than a decade off the air, Arnold is coming back to TV this week for Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie. In the show’s timeline, just one year has passed. But Hillwood, their fictional city, has clearly changed. Just like the the real-life places it’s based on, Arnold’s historic neighborhood has been discovered by hipsters. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:11 PM PST - 9 comments

...who were surveilled, interrogated, and abused; who were forced to turn on their friends and colleagues; who lost wages and lost health and lost loved ones - we betrayed you. And we are so sorry." Today, Canada's prime minister delivered an apology to LGBTQ2 members of the Canadian civil service and military whom the government attempted to purge between the 1950s and 1990s and to people who were criminally convicted for same-sex acts in the years when they were illegal. This included introducing legislation to expunge their criminal records. In addition to the apology, a settlement with the victims of the purge was also announced today. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:54 PM PST - 20 comments

'Much Too Good For Children': The Cast Of 'Matilda' Reflect On The Film On Its 20th Anniversary
posted by J.K. Seazer at 7:12 PM PST - 12 comments

Of course we have all learned by this time,” Barnum told his retinue, “that there is no such thing as a really pure white elephant. This is a sacred animal, a technical white elephant, and as white as God makes ’em. A man can paint them white, but this is not one of that kind.” Although readers who had followed the coverage of Toung Taloung’s reception in London would indeed have learned that white elephants are not literally white, Barnum’s matter-of-fact statement belied the controversy that the color of white elephants had already engendered in the popular imagination. In 1884, Toung Taloung was the catalyst for a broader public debate about race and authenticity.

Ross Bullen on how a bizarre episode in circus history became an unlikely forum for discussing 19th-century theories of race.
posted by Rumple at 5:06 PM PST - 2 comments

“I was struck by an emotion so powerful and raw that I had a hard time identifying it at first: grief. I sood there in that ecstatic crowd and mourned. I mourned all of us dumb kids. I mourned our graying hair and slackening bodies. I mourned some unnameable forgotten truth I used to know. I mourned Harold. I'd thought I was there for nostalgia; turns out I was there for an opportunity to grieve that I didn't know I'd needed”

Young and Dumb Inside (SLNewYorker), a comic by Emily Flake about an adolescence spent in an underground music scene, and the mid-life nostalgia of the former kids to whom music meant everything.
posted by acb at 4:59 PM PST - 41 comments

Betty Corwin , 97, the woman responsible for NYPL’s Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, explains how she founded the comprehensive database to create live theatre’s legacy.
posted by colorblock sock at 3:35 PM PST - 8 comments

Joyner Lucas - I'm Not Racist
posted by cashman at 2:44 PM PST - 22 comments

Aisha Sabatini Sloan wonders about the work she might have done...
posted by bq at 1:53 PM PST - 12 comments

Game dev Evan Todd tells the tale of developing his game's camera.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:50 PM PST - 10 comments

Why do bad readers matter? It is because they lead us to the kinds of citizens—the internationalized subjects—that practices of bad reading aspired to produce; and show how these literate subjects used reading to navigate a political climate that championed liberal individualism, on the one hand, while establishing unprecedented forms of institutional oversight, on the other. These subjects’ diverse and often overlapping genres of reading— properly “literary” novels but also “how to” manuals, advertisements, magazines, newspapers, simple novels, and bureaucratic documents—formed a rich textual ecology whose national and geographic limits literary scholars and cultural historians are only just beginning to map. Good Reader, Bad Reader, an essay by Merve Emre in Boston Review [Via Literary Hub]
posted by chavenet at 12:35 PM PST - 20 comments

Back in 1973 a certain Ridley Scott directed a famous advert for Hovis... the star of that ad returned to the original location - Gold Hill in Dorset - for another advert this year, this time for a different product.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:09 PM PST - 17 comments

Daisy Ridley Builds A Millennium Falcon (While Answering Our Questions) [YouTube] [Elle Magazine]
posted by Fizz at 11:04 AM PST - 47 comments

Last year, the US state department said it had uncovered a fake embassy in Accra that had been issuing a stream of forged visas (Previously). The fake embassy became a sensation largely because the story was so predictably familiar. The Africans were scammers. The victims were desperate and credulous. The local police officers were bumbling idiots. Countless officials were paid off. And at the end, the Americans swooped in and saved the day. There was only one problem with the story: it wasn’t true.
posted by Blasdelb at 10:52 AM PST - 12 comments

The modern Doctor Who Episodes that never got made, joining a long list of meanwhiles and neverweres.
posted by Artw at 10:39 AM PST - 29 comments

Judith Kerr, now 94, escaped Nazi Germany with her family on the eve of Hitler's rise to power. Writer of 33 books (so far!) she is the creator of the much loved Tiger who came to tea, as well as the lovable, recently deceased Mog. [more inside]
posted by threetwentytwo at 10:31 AM PST - 16 comments

Laptops are great. But not during a lecture or meeting. In a series of experiments at Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles, students were randomly assigned either laptops or pen and paper for note-taking at a lecture. Those who had used laptops had substantially worse understanding of the lecture, as measured by a standardized test, than those who did not. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 10:18 AM PST - 123 comments

AT THE MUSEUM is a short webseries produced by the [New York] Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) that shows off some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into running an art museum. The videos primarily consist of ambient recordings of museum employees at work, feature little narration, and are incredibly satisfying/relaxing to watch. Episode 1. (via kottke.org)
posted by schmod at 9:09 AM PST - 8 comments

The Royal Botanical Gardens, Burlington, Ontario, has a collection of 30,000 historical seed catalogs. Once produced as ephemera, they are now of interest to historians, biologists, and others. [more inside]
posted by carter at 8:49 AM PST - 6 comments

On Nov. 25th the NYT published ‘A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland’, a profile of white nationalist Tony Hovater that, in the Times own words, ‘has drawn significant feedback, most of it sharply critical.‘ Criticism included failure to fact check or confront Hovater’s claims (‘Here Are Some Facts And Questions About That Nazi The New York Times Failed To Note’- Splinter News), briefly linking to a Nazi merchandise store, normalizing white nationalism ( ‘New York Times Faces Back Lash Over Half-Basked Profile’ - Washington Post), and a failure to understand where these young men are being radicalized into far-right groups ( ‘The online ecosystem that supports and nurtures white nationalists..’ - Buzzfeed cw: Nazi imagery, hate speech.)
posted by The Whelk at 7:49 AM PST - 98 comments

Finishing Dot Com is the Home Page of the Finishing Industry. It is a website for Serious Education, promoting Aloha, & the most FUN you can have in metal finishing! [more inside]
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:54 PM PST - 13 comments

This Cat And Dog Love Travelling Together, And Their Pictures Are Absolutely Epic (Bored Panda). Also on The Dodo. Also on Instagram.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:47 PM PST - 35 comments

Every Parent Wants to Protect Their Child. I Never Got the Chance. To fight for my son, I have to argue that he should never have been born. - Jen Gann "But if you had known, what then? a woman asked me earlier this year, shaking her head, her smile soft with pity. If I responded at all, and I’m not sure I did, I can’t remember what I said. But I know I did not use the word abortion, or bring up our legal situation, or explain the concept of “wrongful birth.” In a roomful of people I barely knew, with Dudley pushing a plastic car back and forth over the carpet nearby, I did not tell her that I do know exactly what it is I would have done."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:46 PM PST - 43 comments

Demon's Souls Servers Are Shutting Down, Removing Part Of What Made The Game Great [more inside]
posted by mysticreferee at 3:22 PM PST - 6 comments

"Our music should contain multitudes as well," writes Leesa Cross Smith in an essay about Sturgill Simpson in the Oxford American's 2017 music issue. The annual issue returns to its state-by-state look at some notable music (last year's focus was a departure from that usual format with Visions of the Blues). For 2017, here are the notes on the songs from the 19th Southern Music Issue CD featuring Kentucky. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:29 PM PST - 15 comments

The Martians Claim Canada - a short satire of settler-colonialism written and illustrated by Margaret Atwood.
posted by Rumple at 1:23 PM PST - 10 comments

"Outside of her day job, Markle is involved in a number of humanitarian projects. She has worked as a United Nations ambassador, visiting Rwanda and India, and written a powerful essay on combating the stigma surrounding menstruation. Windsor is a 33-year-old former soldier, having served in Helmand, Afghanistan with the Army Air Corps. He is currently unemployed but does charity work."
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:17 PM PST - 97 comments

Billy Strings was practically born into bluegrass: his mother’s water broke while she was attending a birthday party packed with musicians and baby Billy was born with the echo of guitars and banjos in his ears. Short set with Don Julin for KEXP at Pickathon 2015. Full set at Colectivo in Milwaukee last month.
posted by stinkfoot at 1:11 PM PST - 8 comments

You might have heard of Ozark Mountain Daredevils. You might have heard their mid-70s hit Jackie Blue. But that's not who they were. Here's the full album Jackie Blue came from, their sophomore album, It'll Shine When It Shines. Surprising with every new turn, starting with track one, You Made It Right. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 12:38 PM PST - 21 comments

“The rest of the country sees queer life in the Deep South as being really tragic and utterly challenging and ultimately ending in suicide, so, what I wanted was to sort of elevate these stories and sort of celebrate them in the way that I saw them flourishing.”
'New Deep South' Series Explores LGBTQ Life in Mississippi. [more inside]
posted by Grandysaur at 12:16 PM PST - 6 comments

Tiffany Quon, a third-year engineering student at the University of British Columbia, has used a hydrophobic spray to create a public art installation on the UBC campus that only appears when it rains. (UBC is in Vancouver, one of the rainiest cities in Canada.) Quon also designed the images and hand-lettering in the piece, which was part of Thrive Week, promoting mental health for the UBC community. [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 7:47 AM PST - 38 comments

Steve Cutts (previously) brings us a tale of finding Happiness in the rat race.
posted by Catblack at 6:09 AM PST - 18 comments

Fifty years ago, Sister Marie Augusta Neal, SND conducted The Sister Survey, a 649-question survey of nearly 140,000 American women in Catholic ministry. It gathered data on sisters' theological beliefs and readiness for social change (and for Vatican II reforms). The dataset's newly available online, and Nicole (@leffel on GitLab) analyzes it to find which question led the most respondents to choose "The statement is so annoying to me that I cannot answer." (The answer: 3702 sisters (3%) chose that response when asked to agree or disagree with: “Christian virginity goes all the way along a road on which marriage stops half way.”)
posted by brainwane at 5:57 AM PST - 42 comments

Inside the Revolution at Etsy Etsy’s founders believed its business model — helping mostly female entrepreneurs make a living online — was inherently just. Employees shared their emotions freely, often crying at the office. Perks included generous paid parental leave, free organic food and a pet-friendly workplace. Etsy was certified as a B Corp by a nonprofit called B Lab, denoting its particularly high social and environmental standards. But once Etsy went public in 2015, it was evaluated just like any other company traded on the stock market. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 8:56 PM PST - 123 comments

"The time capsule was buried in a secluded square in Murmansk in 1967 on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Inside was a message dedicated to the citizens of the Communist future." Vadim Nikitin, financial crime journalist, writes the LRB diary.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:55 PM PST - 11 comments

When you don't speak the language, just point. First link is about a Japanese maker of food replicas who's been at it for 60 years. The second link is a woman with allergies who was inspired by the Great British Baking Show to satisfy her longings. French desserts
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:22 PM PST - 10 comments

One hundred years ago today, the National Hockey League was formed. With 5 of 6 owners of the National Hockey Association forming the new league, it was obvious what its purpose was: "It's like our old league except that we haven't invited Eddie Livingstone to be part of it." Meanwhile, right now in Ottawa, the 105th Grey Cup, the Canadian Football League championship, is turning into a bit of a snow bowl. Watch it if you can.
posted by clawsoon at 4:23 PM PST - 28 comments

All I Possess

all i possess is an online installation by conceptual artist Simon Freund. A register of each and every object that the artist owns at this specific time. This installation is updated as soon as an object has drastically changed (ie is broken, was stolen, got lost) or when an object is added.

[more inside]
posted by device55 at 4:17 PM PST - 35 comments

Hard Times At Plimouth Plantation, Michael Hare [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:37 PM PST - 13 comments

By popular demand, here is the second in a series about disheveled animals. Emee Emu was hatched, as birds are wont to do. She was soon running about and playing with other young animals. She especially enjoys fetch. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:12 PM PST - 9 comments

Between 1996 and 2015, the number of working-age adults receiving federal disability payments increased significantly across the country, but nowhere more so than in rural America. Multi-part series from the Washington Post on disability payments and how they are shaping rural communities. [more inside]
posted by stillmoving at 9:22 AM PST - 104 comments

How AMC designed and brought the Javelin to market (and racing) with the help of Mary Wells just before the peak of the pony car market in 1967.
posted by jessamyn at 8:00 AM PST - 33 comments

A dev named Nothke talks about implementing a simple navigable infinitely large library, inspired in part by Borges, Castel del Monte and Jonathan Bosile's earlier Borges project, libraryofbabel.info (of which previously).
posted by cortex at 7:35 AM PST - 18 comments

"After the meeting, I found myself wondering why otherwise smart people so easily slipped into this kind of business bullshit. How had this obfuscatory way of speaking become so successful?" A brief history of management speak, from a book by Andre Spicer. [more inside]
posted by carter at 7:24 AM PST - 251 comments

Jackson Hole, Wyoming has a live stream of its town square. Join hundreds or even thousands of others in watching traffic drive by, and keep an eye out for red trucks. Follow the live chat as people describe everything that happens on the feed in real time.
posted by Literaryhero at 2:05 AM PST - 99 comments

The History of the Sims [YouTube] [33:12] “Very few games can say they presented something truly original to medium like The Sims did, and even fewer can boast the kind of cultural significance it has. Released in 2000, The Sims allowed players to puppeteer the lives of virtual people, micromanaging every aspect of their existence with no real goal other than whatever they set for themselves. For some, The Sims provided unparalleled escapism, letting them live out a fantasy life through in-game characters. For others it was an invitation to indulge their creative whims by crafting ideal homes and, of course, there's also those that indulged their sadistic side by toying with the lives of Sims in cruel but often amusing ways.” [via: Gamespot] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:14 PM PST - 31 comments

The Most Entertaining Police Recruitment Video
posted by Sebmojo at 8:26 PM PST - 22 comments

"People are still drawing amazing graphics on a 35 year old microcomputer, the Commodore 64. A thread, starting with this one by Duce/Extend:" [Twitter][threadreader] [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:27 PM PST - 17 comments

The articles behind the movies:
Coyote Ugly trailer
The Bling Ring trailer
Adaptation trailer
Saturday Night Fever trailer
The Fast and the Furious trailer
Blue Crush trailer
The Insider trailer
The Perfect Storm trailer
Shattered Glass trailer
Argo trailer
Fast Times at Ridgemont High trailer [more inside]
posted by Grandysaur at 3:25 PM PST - 33 comments

Sudarsan Raghavan and Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post report from Agadez, Niger on a US drone base under construction nearby, that local residents fear will become a target for Islamist extremists. [more inside]
posted by J.K. Seazer at 2:59 PM PST - 2 comments

Tucked under the east wing of the UA football stadium is the University of Arizona's Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory. Since 2005, they've been casting and polishing the giant mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile: each one's 8.4 m / 27′ in diameter. So, how do you build a mirror for one of the world's largest telescopes? Seemingly very slowly, while spinning.
posted by scruss at 2:36 PM PST - 17 comments

“Last Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission, led by deregulation zealot Ajit Pai, presented a plan to dismantle net neutrality in America. Not only must we fight to prevent that from happening, we must ensure it can never happen again.“ Nationalize The Internet - Brendan Gallagher, Daily Dot.
posted by The Whelk at 12:22 PM PST - 88 comments

A few things you might not know about the javelin.

- Discontinued Olympic javelin events include two-handed javelin and freestyle javelin.
- The "Spanish style" of free-style javelin which included a spin, was banned swiftly.
- Babe Didrikson Zaharias was the first female javelin medalist when women were allowed to participate in 1932.
- As record-setting javelin throws approach the maximum distance attainable within a stadium infield, the javelin has been redesigned to be less aerodynamic.
- Javelin accidents are rare but do happen occasionally.
- Javelinas are cute, but unrelated.
posted by jessamyn at 7:56 AM PST - 51 comments

This week in 2019, the Prado Museum in Madrid will turn 200. This VR reconstruction takes you back 140 years, to the room that still exists but is completely different. Gaming technology was used to allow anyone, anywhere to walk through a view assembled from a 19th-century glass plate negative. A different approach from the apps that other museums have been using for augmented reality.
posted by JJ86 at 7:53 AM PST - 3 comments

Reviewer #2. Reviewer #2. Reviewer #2. Reviewer #2. Reviewer #2? Reviewer #2. Reviewer #3. [more inside]
posted by metaquarry at 4:29 AM PST - 10 comments

On Saturday, a limousine driver plans to launch himself on a mile-long flight over the Mojave Desert in a rocket of his own making. His name is "Mad" Mike Hughes, his steam-powered rocket is built of salvaged metals, his launch pad is repurposed from a used mobile home — and he is confident this will mark the first step toward proving the Earth is flat, after all.

'I Don't Believe In Science,' Says Flat-Earther Set To Launch Himself In Own Rocket [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 4:13 AM PST - 127 comments

How many holes does a straw have?
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:26 AM PST - 110 comments

The democracy of sound: is Garageband good for music? Along with open-source recording software like Audacity, which was originally released in 1999, GarageBand has allowed women to freely explore audio recording without being discriminated against. "As a woman, I was used to being undermined and having my creative abilities doubted and my physical allure pitted against me," says Pringle. "I knew I could make something interesting in GarageBand, so I stuck with it and didn't let the haters get me down." [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 11:24 PM PST - 58 comments

Titus Andromedon [from Netflix series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt] feels he's being cheated on and he goes full-on Lemonade. Hold Up/Sorry/All Night [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:27 PM PST - 13 comments

"So You Just Bought a $450 Million Leonardo da Vinci Painting. Now What? From decoy trucks (yes, really) to tax wizardry, here's what happens after you win the most expensive painting in auction history." [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:39 PM PST - 15 comments

The Quirky Voyage of StarTropics [Kotaku] “StarTropics released towards the end of the life of the original Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990, it was developed by Nintendo R&D3, a team that focused on Nintendo’s hardware and peripherals, but also developed Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. You play as young ace pitcher, Mike Jones. Mike’s uncle has been abducted under mysterious circumstances so he has to search the islands to find him. He does this using a submarine controlled by the NAV-COM, a robot with an uncanny resemblance to the Nintendo peripheral, ROB. There are many visual similarities the game has to the Zelda series. Mike has heart containers representing his life bar, needs to make his way through multiple caves, and eventually has to find three mystical items (cubes instead of triangular triforces). But the grid based battle system quickly diverges from Zelda with tricky boss battles, interesting characters, and jumping puzzles that take him to the stars.” [YouTube][1991 Original NES Star Tropics Commercial] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:08 PM PST - 10 comments

Want to spend a lot of money before Christmas? No need to thank me!
posted by smoke at 5:34 PM PST - 22 comments

Genetic analysis of Big Bird - no, not that one, the one discovered by legendary researchers Peter and Rosemary Grant (previously) - has been completed by Leif Andersson at Uppsala University and published in Science. What's special about the Big Bird lineage is that it was observed developing into a new species in only three (or two, according to the press release) generations. "Charles Darwin," said Andersson, "would have been excited to read this paper."
posted by clawsoon at 11:53 AM PST - 5 comments

Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson has announced that Netflix is renewing the show for a Season 12. Stories on Satellite News, Tor, AV Club.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:27 AM PST - 64 comments

The Exciting History of Carbon Paper dates back to the beginning of the 19th century. Today, we still refer to the technology, even though we have not used it in a long time. [more inside]
posted by carter at 6:59 AM PST - 52 comments

Science Fiction Makes You Stupid Addressing the effects of genre first, in comparison to Narrative Realism readers, Science Fiction readers reported lower transportation, experience taking, and empathy. Science Fiction readers also reported exerting greater effort to understand the world of the story, but less effort to understand the minds of the characters. Science Fiction readers scored lower in comprehension, generally and in the subcategories of theory of mind, world, and plot.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:55 AM PST - 110 comments

"Almost everything that Brexiters say now, in the circumstance of having chosen to leave, makes much more sense as a response to being forced to leave. ... Instead of the generosity, confidence, patience and optimism that might be expected to accompany victory what we see amongst Brexiters is an oscillation between sour, crabby, resentful anger and bellicose, belligerent, defiant anger. That anger seems, if anything, to grow with each passing week." [more inside]
posted by rory at 3:39 AM PST - 121 comments

'Obsession' by OK Go (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:12 AM PST - 31 comments

Please show me pictures of weird stuff in your parents house. (SLTwitter)
posted by MartinWisse at 1:05 AM PST - 91 comments

The invention of the chilled packaged sandwich, an accessory of modern British life which is so influential, so multifarious and so close to hand that you are probably eating one right now, took place exactly 37 years ago. Like many things to do with the sandwich, this might seem, at first glance, to be improbable. But it is true. In the spring of 1980, Marks & Spencer, the nation’s most powerful department store, began selling packaged sandwiches out on the shop floor. Nothing terribly fancy. Salmon and cucumber. Egg and cress. Triangles of white bread in plastic cartons, in the food aisles, along with everything else. Prices started at 43p.
posted by ellieBOA at 12:31 AM PST - 76 comments

On the eve of the Civil War, a nightmare at sea turned into one of the greatest rescues in maritime history. More than a century later, a rookie treasure hunter went looking for the lost ship—and found a different kind of ruin.

The Wreck of the Connaught, by David Wolman.
posted by Rumple at 9:50 PM PST - 6 comments

David and Jonathan by Anthony Oliveira

David and Jonathan’s love is the apotheosis of this redemptive love; despite centuries of embarrassed and embarrassing exegesis, their relationship is explicitly romantic, explicitly “surpassing the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26), and its power is the means by which God (in his usual manner of favouring the outcast, the second son, the marginalised) remakes and renovates the collapsing and decadent reign of the paranoiac Saul, bringing rain to a parched landscape.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:04 PM PST - 21 comments

The Patania family of Santa Fe and Tucson are three generations of jewelers. The first two links (from 2011) provide an extensive history of the Italian immigrant Frank, a silversmith by trade, who wound up in Santa Fe, saw Native American jewelry and the gems used, and married the two. His son and grandson have carried on the business. These works are absolutely gorgeous and splendid and magnificent. I lived in Tucson for 14 years and cannot understand how I missed their shop, the Thunderbird. Ah well. Here's the link to Part Two This history also has a lot of photographs. [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:02 PM PST - 8 comments

“Six months ago, I got a phone call from someone pretending to be Apple Computers. And, just through sheer force of will, and I guess a lot of free time, me and Damiano managed to figure out a lot about these people.” A story of friendship, sleuthing, and scamming. Full transcript available at the bottom of the page.
posted by Grandysaur at 7:42 PM PST - 26 comments

Instant Monkeys Online™
posted by Fizz at 4:12 PM PST - 34 comments

"Did you spot a ragtag procession of musicians, people in costume, children and dogs marching from Aldgate through Whitechapel to Mile End Waste last Sunday? Behind this light-hearted frolic was a serious intent, for this was the Great Yiddish Parade, commemorating the procession of Jewish unemployed and garment workers which took place here in 1889." So writes the Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life in a photo-filled post about the event. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:00 PM PST - 2 comments

How tungsten carbide machine tool inserts are made. SLYT [more inside]
posted by Bee'sWing at 1:16 PM PST - 21 comments

There’s precedent for Amazon competing with so many companies. It doesn’t end well. (Michael J. Coren, Quartz)

[…] Amazon’s unprecedented logistics and delivery infrastructure, paired with access to personal data about Americans’ purchasing habits, means it is unique in the history of global commerce. No company has ever wielded this combination of consumer insight and infrastructure, say historians and legal analysts, which means the company grows stronger and less assailable with every purchase.

[more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:10 PM PST - 56 comments

R.I.P. Terry Laughlin, founder of Total Immersion Swimming, a technique emphasizing streamlining, mindfulness and working with the water which has proven incredibly effective in teaching even adult hold-outs to become not just at ease, but confident, graceful swimmers. [more inside]
posted by protorp at 12:05 PM PST - 5 comments

"It all went wrong when Sanchez turned the wrong way," Ryan says. "That was the first indication that it was going to be a bad play. But we had no idea it was going to be a disaster."

- ESPN presents an oral history on the fifth anniversary of the Butt Fumble.
posted by jenkinsEar at 11:02 AM PST - 19 comments

On Twitter, Paul the Trombonist (@jazztrombonist) tweets: "I accidentally texted my wife with voice recognition...while playing the trombone" #singlelinktwitter
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:52 AM PST - 36 comments

In a departure from tradition, a young widow’s marriage was solemnised in the presence of around 500 widows in the 400-year-old Gopinath temple of Vrindavan This simple description of a photo gallery published by The Hindustan Times last month leaves out the context and background that would convey to the foreign reader the groundbreaking nature of the entire event.
posted by infini at 6:35 AM PST - 13 comments

National radio program Native America Calling shares the indigenous American peoples' stories [59m, sadly no transcription] about how Thanksgiving originated, rose up in US culture as a holiday, and what it means to them today.
posted by hippybear at 9:30 PM PST - 6 comments

Looking for a nice little speakeasy? Next time you're in NYC, check out the fine bars listed in Zagrat. Better go fast before they get too popular--they're already getting some hip press. Hey, it beats visiting a bedbug hotel or falling into a hipster trap.
posted by ferret branca at 8:10 PM PST - 4 comments

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from. [more inside]
posted by AFABulous at 7:18 PM PST - 64 comments

An interesting mix of Aztec hieroglyphs and Spanish language. This 1593 map shows southern Puebla from the church of Todos Santos (now northeast of Mexico City) and Lake Texcoco, to the church of Santa Cruz Huitziltepec, Pue (lower right). The map also reveals the genealogy and land ownership for the Nahuatl "de Leon" family from 1480 to 1593. Just recently acquired by the U.S. Library of Congress.
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:39 PM PST - 7 comments

Meet virtual YouTuber Kizuna A.I. [more inside]
posted by lucidium at 4:01 PM PST - 13 comments

Forgotten fruit trees: What the heck is a persimmon? (Fall's best fruit!) What the heck is a medlar? What the heck is a quince? What the heck is a pawpaw? Some of these need bletting [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:07 PM PST - 115 comments

Instead of taking us out of the real world and drawing us into the artificial virtual space, [Pokémon Go] combines the two; we look at reality and interact with it through the fantasy frame of the digital screen, and this intermediary frame supplements reality with virtual elements which sustain our desire to participate in the game, push us to look for them in a reality which, without this frame, would leave us indifferent. Sound familiar? Of course it does. What the technology of Pokémon Go externalizes is simply the basic mechanism of ideology—at its most basic, ideology is the primordial version of “augmented reality.”

Slavoj Žižek unpacks Pokémon Go .
posted by Rumple at 2:08 PM PST - 53 comments

The #GoogleTranslatesMTG hashtag highlights Magic: The Gathering (previously) cards that have been run through Google Translate many times before finally arriving back in English. @RosewattaStone is working to post a new one every day. You may prefer to have Desert Bus read the cards out loud to you... well, try to read them, anyway. [more inside]
posted by one for the books at 1:49 PM PST - 8 comments

CinemaSins is a very popular youtube channel whose motto is that "no movie is without sin. We exist mostly just to remind you of that." It is also a youtube channel that is wrong about everything. And I mean it. [more inside]
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:02 PM PST - 97 comments

Die Hard is not a Christmas Movie.
posted by Artw at 12:49 PM PST - 122 comments

Dave Pell (Managing Editor, the Internet) has produced a special edition of his newsletter: the reader-supplied NextDraft Good News Only Pre-Thanksgiving Extravaganza. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:30 AM PST - 5 comments

While the show is currently halfway through, Land of the Lustrous has already announced itself as a singular vision. The only other show to surpass it this year is David Lynch’s magnum opus Twin Peaks: The Return. But where Lynch rewrites the rules of history and structure, Kyogoku redefines cinematic motion. We are lucky to witness something so bold, so utterly new this year, and nothing looks and feels more unlike anything else than Land of the Lustrous.

Carol Grant looks at the beauty and horror of Houseki no Kuni/Land of the Lustrous, a CGI anime show about sentient non-gendered jewel-people fighting off Lunerian invaders who want to harvest their bodies.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:22 AM PST - 8 comments

Adam Hillman, an artist from New Jersey, makes colorful geometric art from the arrangement of unremarkable objects.
posted by cortex at 10:44 AM PST - 14 comments

Brazil's Video Game Gray Markets [YouTube] “Brazil’s video game market is strange. A military dictatorship ruled the country from 1964 to 1985 and enforced strict protectionist economic laws. During the period, Brasília eschewed imports and attempted to manufacture everything it could within its country’s borders. That led to an odd hodgepodge of cloned systems, strange cartridges, and pirated games that are still with the country today. Drew Scanlon of Clothmap recently traveled to Brazil where he explored the strange gray markets that make up the country’s video game culture. He sees a combo Mortal Kombat/ Street Fighter II cartridge made to run on an NES, strange consoles of questionable legality, and learns what happens when the local games store learn the cops are coming to raid the place.” [via: Motherboard] [Previously.]
posted by Fizz at 10:26 AM PST - 6 comments

Slippery Stairs is a Japanese game show that delivers exactly what it promises. [SLYT]
posted by gottabefunky at 9:50 AM PST - 52 comments

What's better than some pre-Thanksgiving vintage cats?
posted by Zosia Blue at 9:30 AM PST - 23 comments

Data contradicts common talking point that high taxes cause the rich to flee.
posted by The Whelk at 9:26 AM PST - 31 comments

Stobe the Hobo, the internet’s most famous train-hopper, dead after apparent accident

James Stobie was the most famous train-hopping hobo on the internet. He rode the rails in a way that was reminiscent of a desperate man searching for work at every city he could find during the Great Depression. Except that Stobie, aka Stobe the Hobo, made YouTube videos about his experiences, hopping trains to move around the country for the pure fun of it.

[more inside]
posted by peeedro at 8:25 AM PST - 29 comments

In February, after an investigation by ProPublica, Facebook announced it would be more diligent about prohibiting housing, employment and credit discrimination in ads on its platform. (In the United States, the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) prevents discrimination based on race, skin color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.) As a follow-up, ProPublica bought dozens of rental housing ads on Facebook last week, but asked that they not be shown to certain categories of users: African Americans, Muslims, mothers of high school kids, the blind and/or people interested in wheelchair ramps, Jews, people from Puerto Rico, expats from Argentina and Spanish speakers. All are groups protected by the FHA. Every single ad was approved within minutes.
posted by zarq at 7:33 AM PST - 51 comments

As holiday festivities ramp up, you might be wondering "how should I decorate this table? Why should I decorate this table?" To answer both questions, Curbed continues its Period Dramas series with How Christmas decorations evolved through the 1800s in New England. For another look at (New England) Christmas Past, here's Christmas: Williamsburg Style. But wait, you say, let's tackle one holiday at a time. OK, here's the origin of the Thanksgiving cornucopia, and more on the cornucopia in general. If you want a more beachy theme, here's Secret Life of Antiques: Victorian Shell Work. And if you combine all that, you can get a festive garbage clam, just like Ivanka Trump. Holiday centerpiece problem solved!
posted by filthy light thief at 7:07 AM PST - 24 comments

Survivors called Mr. Mladic the Butcher of Bosnia. The deadliest year of the campaign was 1992, when 45,000 people died, often in their homes, on the streets or in a string of concentration camps. Others perished in the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, where snipers and shelling terrorized residents for more than three years, and in the mass executions of 8,000 Muslim men and boys after Mr. Mladic’s forces overran the United Nations-protected enclave of Srebrenica. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 6:06 AM PST - 16 comments

"In 1905, Charles Clayton ("Todd") Webb III was born in Detroit, Michigan. Having been a successful stockbroker in the 1920’s, he lost all of his earnings, and then some, in The Crash. During the Depression, Webb prospected for gold, worked as a forest ranger, and wrote short stories that have gone unpublished. It was during this exploratory period in the 1930s that he first picked up a camera. His interest and love for photography soon crowded out his writing ambitions, and he was able to do the two things he loved the most: travel, meet people, and photograph them."
posted by ChuraChura at 5:32 AM PST - 1 comment

A science blogger asked UK water companies if they still used the ancient 'art' of water divining / dowsing ... and the answer was yes, mostly. Since the story broke the companies have backtracked somewhat - it's not official policy but it still goes on.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:11 AM PST - 98 comments

The Icicle Atlas contains more than 230,000 images of icicles (plus 3D models, time lapse movies and time-series data) on 237 icicles made at the University of Toronto over a five year period. [Via Ottawa Citizen] The atlas is the end product of a quest to determine why icicles form ripples.
posted by Mitheral at 1:26 AM PST - 8 comments

1970s teen heartthrob David Cassidy of The Partridge Family dies from liver failure [autoplay video]. One of the Partridge Family hits was "I Think I Love You."
posted by maurreen at 9:55 PM PST - 52 comments

Here's A List of Some Videogame Youtubers Who Aren't Terrible [more inside]
posted by naju at 8:24 PM PST - 70 comments

Warning: graphic violence
After the liberation of Mosul, an orgy of killing
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:18 PM PST - 10 comments

Black Friday as a commercial concept probably shouldn't have gotten off the ground in Australia, but the rumour mill suggests a hard launch of the local site this Friday. [more inside]
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:07 PM PST - 29 comments

Last weekend, NTS and Sonos presented a full weekend of programming celebrating the David Bowie, broadcasting direct from the new Sonos London store on Seven Dials in Covent Garden. Hosts included Dev Hynes, Iggy Pop, Thurston Moore, Connan Mockasin, Neneh Cherry, and many more. The full archive is here; descriptions of individual shows (as provided by the NTS website), with links to each show, follow. [more inside]
posted by carrienation at 5:12 PM PST - 5 comments

Prehi(p)storic An early history of the ostentatious moustache, a storymap from the Early Celtic Art in Context project.
posted by Helga-woo at 3:25 PM PST - 6 comments

Christopher Herwig is back with more wild architectural wonders: When Christopher Herwig, a Canadian photographer, first embarked on his arduous long-distance cycle from London to St Petersburg back in 2002, the outlandishly designed bus stop was nothing more than a pleasing oddity. What Herwig didn’t expect was that this was only the start of his life-long obsession; there were similarly peculiar roadside shelters scattered across the post-Soviet world. His Soviet Bus Stops Volume II is a new collection of bus stop photos from remote areas of Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia. Herwig previously on Metafilter: A fascinating journey of architectural obsession (also previously and previouslier).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:30 PM PST - 5 comments

The Church of the SubGenius Finally Plays It Straight , Eddie Smith
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:21 PM PST - 67 comments

I do love the Cambrian Explosion but this is just as spectacular. I checked the link to the original publication but it only leads to an abstract so this article is better.
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:54 PM PST - 8 comments

CEO of HQ (a live trivia app) to The Daily Beast: If You Run This Profile, We’ll Fire Our Host

[CEO] Yusupov’s objections began with the line, "Scott said that despite the attention, he's still able to walk down the street and order his favorite salad from Sweetgreen without being accosted." "He cannot say that!" Yusupov shouted. "We do not have a brand deal with Sweetgreen! Under no circumstances can he say that." [...] When The Daily Beast read Yusupov a quote from Rogowski saying “I can make people happy and give them the trivia they so desperately love and want. It's been so great to build this community," Yusupov implored the reporter to “take that out.” Asked for clarification, Yusupov replied that Rogowski was absolutely not allowed to say that he "enjoys making people happy and giving them the trivia they want."

posted by Atom Eyes at 12:51 PM PST - 72 comments

But for the actual test – this is the sentence that Rorschachians always repeat – ‘what matters isn’t what you see, but how you see.’ A few ‘content’ answers would later come to be thought significant: ‘food responses’ indicate that a person is ‘unusually dependent’ in relationships; a lot of sexual responses point to schizophrenia. But of more importance is whether an answer is judged to have ‘good form’ – ‘whether it could reasonably be said to describe the actual shape of the blot’ – as determined by Rorschach’s own sense of things, and also by responses from other ‘normal subjects’; he doesn’t say how he determined that those subjects were normal.

Deborah Friedell reviews The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:41 AM PST - 14 comments

The drumbeat of devastating news can take its toll on the mental health of people who have devoted their lives to coral. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:50 AM PST - 23 comments

The climate crisis? It’s capitalism, stupid. Benjamin K. Fong ( NYT Opinion) Kim Stanley Robinson: We’ve Come To A Bad Moment And We Must Change, climate change, capitalism, and dystopia.
posted by The Whelk at 9:20 AM PST - 73 comments

Russ Slater’s vanguarda paulista playlist [After tropicalia ended, the more conservative MPB reigned,] The vanguarda paulista that emerged at the end of the 70s attempted to return to those heady days of tropicália, when it was possible for music to be popular, even as it combined advanced compositional theories with irreverent lyrical ideas and an awareness of mass culture. These same traits characterised the work of the São Paulo based group of musicians and composers who congregated around the small theatre, live venue and record label called the Lira Paulistana.
posted by OmieWise at 9:14 AM PST - 4 comments

25 years ago, Mortal Kombat redefined American video games [Polygon] “What Mortal Kombat lacked in substance, though, it made up for with style. Its characters, digitized from motion capture footage of martial arts actors, looked “realistic” by the standards of the era. Their movements had a choppy quality, and the fighters never looked like they really inhabited their photorealistic settings, but Mortal Kombat’s gory, lifelike gloom gave it a heavy metal album cover feel that set it apart from Street Fighter’s cartoonish fare. Mortal Kombat’s brawlers bled, froze and died in a number of explicit ways ranging from brutal impalement in a pit of spikes to messy dismemberment. Midway’s brawler invested its viscera with a panache that became the game’s main draw.” [YouTube][Mortal Kombat - 25 Year Anniversary Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:48 AM PST - 74 comments

"But in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history. [...] Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered. Moreover, this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators."
posted by destrius at 5:31 AM PST - 33 comments

A catchy song about dogs to brighten up your Tuesday. (A SLYT from the people who brought you Dump Truck and Cement Mixer. )
posted by mippy at 4:50 AM PST - 7 comments

Interstellar object confirmed to be from another solar system - it's dark red and has organic material - absolutely nothing to worry about [nudity].
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:28 AM PST - 106 comments

Tanja Brandt loves photographing animals. A recent project involves Ingo, a Belgian shepherd, and Poldi (Napoleon), a one-year-old owlet.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:43 PM PST - 13 comments

The Last of the Iron Lungs "In 2013, the Post-Polio Health International (PPHI) organizations estimated that there were six to eight iron lung users in the United States. Now, PPHI executive director Brian Tiburzi says he doesn’t know anyone alive still using the negative-pressure ventilators. This fall, I met three polio survivors who depend on iron lungs. They are among the last few, possibly the last three."
posted by rhizome at 11:13 PM PST - 34 comments

The end of Net Neutrality to be announced by the FCC as early as this Thanksgiving week. As early as tomorrow, Tuesday, November 21, in the year of our lord 2017, the FCC may announce their intention to dismantle the Obama-era rule that guarantees that all web traffic be created equal. Fast lanes for some websites, blocking competitors' websites for others (let's not forget that Comcast is looking to buy some of Fox while we discuss this). [more inside]
posted by General Malaise at 7:14 PM PST - 182 comments

Tommy Tucker was a male grey squirrel who toured the United States wearing women's fashions and selling war bonds to support America in WWII as well as other charitable endeavors. He died in 1949, was stuffed and was bequeathed to the Smithsonian in 2005. While the museum maintains an archive of Tommy Tucker related ephemera (and possibly dresses), the actual stuffed squirrel lives in the lawyer's office who had been handling the bequest according to this podcast. (prev, via)
posted by jessamyn at 5:43 PM PST - 18 comments

Native Americans had long tried to prevent the theft of their dead. But it was not until the 1960s, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, that activists turned collections into a question of conscience: Why were U.S. museums filled almost exclusively with the bones of Native Americans? “When a white man’s grave is dug up, it’s called grave robbing,” as the Tohono O’odham activist Robert Cruz said in 1986. “But when an Indian’s grave is dug up, it’s called archaeology.”

The long ethical arc of displaying human remains: A look at why museums exhibit Egyptian mummies, but not Native American bones, by Chip Colwell.
posted by Rumple at 5:28 PM PST - 27 comments

Your Reckoning. And Mine. As stories about abuse, assault, and complicity come flooding out, how do we think about the culprits in our lives? Including, sometimes, ourselves. [content warning: sexual assault, harassment] [more inside]
posted by triggerfinger at 5:19 PM PST - 270 comments

The Weather Channel was photobombed by a bus today. (slyt)
posted by curious nu at 4:15 PM PST - 50 comments

They were once Olympic rivals — one the captain of the U.S. women's hockey team, the other the captain of Canada's women's hockey team. But now Julie Chu and Caroline Ouellette are celebrating the birth of their daughter. [more inside]
posted by roger ackroyd at 2:24 PM PST - 33 comments

What better way to share your love of video games and your love of dance than by combining them? (SLYT)
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 2:17 PM PST - 4 comments

Amazingly intricate dollhouse of three stories by Gayle Palama. Ignore the first two photos. These are close-up photos of each floor of the dollhouse. The amount of work that went into the furniture and goods and decor of these rooms is truly astonishing. Hover on a photo and a short title will pop up. I found this blog of hers which may provide more info. Annadancie
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:48 PM PST - 18 comments

Some U.S. Hospitals Don’t Put Americans First for Liver Transplants: At a time when there aren’t enough livers for ailing Americans, wealthy foreigners fly here for transplant (SLProPublica)
posted by crazy with stars at 11:17 AM PST - 41 comments

Flemish bitterness about this lies close to the surface, as so much else does in the fields of Flanders. At the monument on an autumn morning I met a local writer, André Gysel: “There are six million Danish people; they have a country,” he told me. “We have six million but we share our country with these other people and we give them €1,000 a year from each of us. And they never say thank you.” He paused, witheringly: “Mer-ci!”
posted by Chrysostom at 10:55 AM PST - 53 comments

Two minutes and one second into its annual mega-sale, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba hit $1 billion in sales, quickly passing Amazon's 2017 Prime Day sales record. By the end of the day, the final sales tally rang in at $25,386,927,848, about 40% higher than last year's record. How do you hype a commercial holiday that dwarfs Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States? A musical number from Pharrell Williams, as part of a lavish gala in Shanghai with Nicole Kidman, Karen Mok and Maria Sharapova. And why November 11? To co-opt Singles' Day, which was created in the 1990s by a group of university students at Nanjing University, before the Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma founded Alibaba.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:06 AM PST - 29 comments

It's time. In just a few days, the first ball in The Ashes (mens) will be bowled. Beginning in 1882, the current score is Australia: 32, England: 32. A few previous players, one of whom could bowl a bit. The Ashes are part of a tour of Australia and New Zealand by England which concludes after five months. England start without their star player while Australia have undertaken some unexpected squad selections. Joe Root, the England captain previously punched by Australia's star player, may be a decisive factor; diplomatic incident and in-play violence are, unlike previously, unlikely but not impossible. There will be much verbal abuse from players and spectators, plus mental disintegration. In the Women's Ashes, currently drawing to a close, Australia have retained the urn. Previously.
posted by Wordshore at 7:46 AM PST - 26 comments

In theory, there are two parts to an immigration court case. The prosecution (ICE attorneys) has to show that an immigrant is removable — that he either has no legal status in the US or that he’s done something that allows the government to strip his legal status from him — and that he doesn’t qualify for any form of “immigration relief,” which can mean formal legal status or another form of protection from deportation. But without a lawyer, good luck figuring out what any of those forms of relief even mean — much less whether you qualify for them.

So New York City and eleven others are providing lawyers to immigrants facing deportation. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:35 AM PST - 3 comments

One hundred years ago today began the Battle of Cambrai. On November 20th, 1917, the British army launched the first massed tank attack in history. Nearly five hundred vehicles, accompanied by air power, poison gas, and swarms of infantry, slammed into German lines before the northern French city of Cambrai. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 6:07 AM PST - 9 comments

Cory Arcangel (previously) describes his artwork/Super Mario Bros ROM hack "Super Mario Clouds" as "an old Mario Brothers cartridge which I modified to erase everything but the clouds." Except, as Patrick LeMieux discovers when reverse-engineering the ROM, "Arcangel’s ROM hack does not actually contain Nintendo’s ROM". There was no erasure. This video documents Patrick's analysis of Arcangel's ROM and his own attempt to erase "everything but the clouds".
posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:42 AM PST - 44 comments

I had flown to the Balkans in late July 2017 to learn about blood feuds, or the ancient oaths of vendetta sworn between warring families and passed on from one generation to the next. The killing is concentrated in northern Albania—in the rural, often unreachable villages of the Accursed Mountains, and in the modern city of Shkodër, one of the oldest municipalities in southeastern Europe. Here, justice works like this: When a man is murdered, his family avenges his death by similarly executing either the killer himself or a male member of his clan. Sometimes, after a killing has been successfully vindicated, the feud is settled. Other times, the head of the family that initiated the feud, while admitting both sides are now ostensibly “equal,” nonetheless chooses to perpetuate the cycle by killing a second male from the avenging family.
posted by ellieBOA at 3:23 AM PST - 32 comments

During WWII, the United States and New Zealand conducted secret tests of a "tsunami bomb" designed to destroy coastal cities by using underwater blasts to trigger massive tidal waves. [more inside]
posted by Start with Dessert at 2:18 AM PST - 15 comments

This past April a massive 80-foot steel kraken was purposefully sunk into the Caribbean Sea on top of a decorated WW2 ship. The former Navy fuel barge and its monstrous passenger were placed underwater in order to jumpstart a new coral ecosystem, while also serving as a cutting-edge education center for marine researchers and local students from the surrounding British Virgin Islands. The project is titled the BVI Art Reef, and aims to use sculptures like the porous kraken as a base to grow transplanted coral.

[more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:29 PM PST - 15 comments

Charles Manson, the mass murderer and cultural icon, has died. (NYT link) He was convicted of the murders of 9 people, most famously Sharon Tate (wife of Roman Polanski, the movie director). However, Manson was not physically present for any of the killings, which were carried out by his followers, known as the "Manson family." [more inside]
posted by John Cohen at 10:30 PM PST - 180 comments

Cuphead and the Racist Spectre of Fleischer Animation [Unwinable] “When asked in a Rolling Stone interview about the unfortunate associations of Cuphead‘s 1930s aesthetic, lead inking artist for the game, Maja Moldenhauer replies: “It’s just visuals and that’s about it. Anything else happening in that era we’re not versed in it.” But these visuals are weighed down by the history that brought them into being, despite the developers best efforts at stripping them of the more overt caricatures that are rife in cartoons for most of the first half of the 20th century. By sanitizing its source material and presenting only the ostensibly inoffensive bits, Studio MDHR ignores the context and history of the aesthetic it so faithfully replicates. Playing as a black person, ever aware of the way we have historically been, and continue to be, depicted in all kinds of media, I don’t quite have that luxury. Instead, I see a game that’s haunted by ghosts; not those confined to its macabre boss fights, but the specter of black culture, appropriated first by the minstrel set then by the Fleischers, Disney and others -twisted into the caricatures that have helped define American cartoons for the better part of a century.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:21 PM PST - 76 comments

Acai, one of many Guitar Hero experts on YouTube, flawlessly plays an arrangement of “Steamed Hams”, A.K.A. the “Skinner and The Superintent” portion of “22 Short Films About Springfield”. (A piano arrangement.)
posted by Going To Maine at 4:32 PM PST - 27 comments

We utter the first syllables of a sentence while taking a leap of faith that we’ll be able to choose the right words en route and formulate phrases adequately as the words tumble out of our mouths and bring us to an intersection in our thoughts that demands our next move. This puts an upper bound on complexity. But written text, which can be more deliberately planned out and revised, is able to transcend this.

Linguist Julie Sedivy on the rise (and eventual fall?) of sentence complexity in written and oral languages.
posted by Rumple at 4:31 PM PST - 40 comments

Planet P Project is a science-fiction-inspired one-man band and an album by Tony Carey. Their debut album [46m] featured known single, Why Me. Planet P Project previously.
posted by hippybear at 2:31 PM PST - 11 comments

Around this time of the year, the New York subway system offers rides on its "Holiday Nostalgia" train, which consists of eight restored cars from the 1930s, complete with vintage subway advertising and riders who show up in appropriate costumes. Lots of pictures. Transit Museum info page. More pictures! Video! Pix and video at the late Gothamist.
posted by beagle at 2:29 PM PST - 19 comments

Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese wrter with nearly 80 different literary alter egos or "heteronyms". Each of which had a biography, psychology, politics, religion, physical description; the main characters being interconnected and with their own horoscopes
"I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays," he once wrote and “a drama divided into people instead of into acts”.
“I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” he writes in one poem. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me. . . . That’s me. Period.
His occult interests led him to a correspondence and friendship with Aleister Crowley who enlisted him in faking his suicide.
(Previously).
posted by adamvasco at 1:55 PM PST - 12 comments

UC Berkeley professor Stuart Russell and the Future of Life Institute have created an eerie viral video titled "Slaughterbots" that depicts a future in which humans develop small, hand-sized drones that are programmed to identify and eliminate designated targets. In the video above, the technology is initially developed with the intention of combating crime and terrorism, but the drones are taken over by an unknown forces who use the powerful weapons to murder a group of senators and college students. UC Berkeley professor's eerie lethal drone video goes viral [Warning: graphic violence]
posted by chavenet at 1:16 PM PST - 64 comments

UK comedian Michael Dapaah, better known under his pseudonym Big Shaq, has become an unlikely grime music icon with his simple ode to men who never take off their coats: Man's Not Hot. Recently Dappah sat down with Genius to explain the song. See also the Genius page for annotated lyrics. And here's the original viral freestyle.
posted by Frobenius Twist at 12:16 PM PST - 20 comments

This is Ruchie Freier, a 52-year-old Hasidic Jewish grandmother who has blazed a trail in her insular religious community with so much determination that the male authorities have simply had to make room. Eleven years ago, she became one of the first Hasidic female lawyers in Brooklyn,and last November, she was elected as a judge to civil court. She has done so not by breaking the strict religious rules that govern ultra-Orthodox women's lives, but by obeying them so scrupulously that there are limited grounds for objection.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:48 AM PST - 5 comments

Day 303: it's turkey time, and Republicans are putting tax and spending cuts on the table, which many are finding an unpalatable centrepiece. CBO estimates suggest that poor Americans' gooses in particular will be cooked if the bill passes, with households earning under $50,000 increasingly worse off. Republican senators have stated, on the record, that major donors will not be inviting them back for a second helping of support if the tax cut bill fails. The House bill has been served but the Senate bill is still in the oven, and preparing it will involve two opposed groups coming together with a shared purpose, and also some way of massaging the figures so they won't increase the deficit. [This is a catch-all US politics thread; Roy Moore talk goes here] [more inside]
posted by Merus at 8:35 AM PST - 2561 comments

J'Dess and Chris Rio do battle on The Voice Nigeria. [SLYT]
posted by clawsoon at 7:35 AM PST - 12 comments

Colin J. Carlson, part of the Parasite Extinction Assessment & Red List, couldn't sleep recently and decided to assign letter grades to the weird foxes (here's a threadreader compilation for the Twitter-averse, but it doesn't include the numerous entertaining replies). [h/t ChuraChura]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:36 PM PST - 48 comments

Meet Doug Jones, One Of The Biggest Movie Stars You’ve Probably Never Seen
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:06 PM PST - 26 comments

Where did the idea of boiled peanuts come from? And why? Turns out, of course, it's more complicated than you knew. And then it got even more complicated when Congress got involved. Part Two
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:52 PM PST - 52 comments

Charlotte Gainsbourg Finds Her Own Voice [The New York Times] “Ms. Gainsbourg engages with her family’s glorious, tangled history as never before. On one level, it’s an album about grief, tinted by the deep loss she felt after the 2013 death of her older half sister, the photographer Kate Barry (whose parents were Ms. Birkin and the film composer John Barry). But it’s also an album about pleasure, full of pulsating disco beats and cool pop choruses that feel like Ms. Gainsbourg’s birthright. Above all, it’s an album that comes directly from her heart.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:52 PM PST - 9 comments

@everybird: Robot posting every bird on the planet. Mostly accurate. Random bird order, last bird posted in 2019. By @nah_solo (Lucas Quinn). See below for list of birds
posted by Going To Maine at 4:04 PM PST - 11 comments

A marginal but useful definition of insanity is not knowing what genre of book you are in; depression is knowing, but being helpless to change it.

Beth Boyle Machlan on writing, memory, and helplessness.
posted by Rumple at 3:33 PM PST - 9 comments

Machine Learning Explained. In this essay Rodney Brooks, one of the founders of iRobot and emeritus professor at MIT, explains machine learning in layman's terms. He uses a real-life example of one of the first machine learning algorithms, a tic-tac-toe program implemented in the 1950s using matchboxes(!). The essay gives you an appreciation of how machine learning is different from human learning, and what its limitations are -- nice, given the hype surrounding AI today. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 12:47 PM PST - 38 comments

Tabatha Southey asks: Is Jordan Peterson the stupid man’s smart person?
posted by scruss at 11:35 AM PST - 105 comments

The Avocado, originally formed as a diaspora from the Onion AV Club comment section, has now become an excellent website in its own right. Recently they have been running retrospectives of old magazine issues and it is a fascinating and funny look into recent US history. [more inside]
posted by Frobenius Twist at 11:24 AM PST - 21 comments

RIP Malcolm Young co-founder, rhythm guitarist and songwriter for AC/DC. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:38 AM PST - 81 comments

Ten of thousands of Zimbabweans are in the streets of Harare after the Zimbabwe Defence Forces and the Zimbabwe Republic Police approved a rally led by the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association against President Mugabe’s continued stay in office. Mugabe was placed under house arrest earlier in the week in what the army insisted was not a coup. This appears to be the culmination of a power struggle between Mugabe's wife, Grace Mugabe and recently ousted vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa. Mugabe, now a billionaire in one of the world's poorest countries, was once considered a revolutionary hero after leading Zimbabwe to independence from Great Britain.
posted by clawsoon at 5:21 AM PST - 30 comments

The Smithsonian has a scrolling gallery of Norwegian "stave" churches, named after the "stavers", the load bearing pillars that keep them from collapsing. Wooden medieval architecture taken to fascinating, beautiful extremes.
posted by hippybear at 4:39 AM PST - 22 comments

Argentine submarine San Juan has been missing for more than two days. [more inside]
posted by ctmf at 9:55 PM PST - 28 comments

The 50 best Superhero Movies Of All Times - Because this debate is already well-worn territory, we at The Ringer set out to develop a ranking that goes beyond personal opinions—to try to synthesize the overall goals and spirit of these films in order to identify the ideal superhero movies. In order to do that, we took into account four factors—Critical Success, Box Office Performance, Rewatchability, and Timelessness—and ran them through a fancy formula to come up with an overall score. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:17 PM PST - 118 comments

How mid-2000s emo groomed underage girls and poisoned teen boys (TW). Emo, the alternative/punk offshoot dealing with (male, mostly negative) feelings has had a problem with misogyny for a long time, having dominated the alternative-music culture of the 00s with an exclusively male worldview whose attitude to women, ranging from objectification to contempt, permeated the formative experiences of a generation of music enthusiasts (the writer Jessica Hopper described it as the antithesis of the Riot Grrl experience). And now, it now turns out, that sexually predatory behaviour is endemic in the scene, with musicians and promoters preying on fans, many of them underage.
posted by acb at 6:12 PM PST - 63 comments

Game designer @MaxKriegerVG says "If you want a fully immersive 'postmodern design hellscape' themed dining experience I highly recommend dinner at The Cheesecake Factory—from a design perspective that place is fuckin wild and I'll talk a little bit about why (here's a threadreader compilation for the Twitter-averse). And he links to an Eater story about the designer.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:18 PM PST - 64 comments

Star Wars Battlefront 2 players took on EA, and won (for now). [Polygon] “The microtransactions are gone from Star Wars Battlefront 2, at least for the moment. The fans, with their days, if not weeks, of outrage over the paid content, have won their fight against Electronic Arts. Just like that, the day before it was set to be officially released, the for-pay currency has been removed from the game. Good.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:16 PM PST - 52 comments

He is known as the abimor and he's the most mysterious killer of all time. [more inside]
posted by juliplease at 5:13 PM PST - 14 comments

“Since then, the federal government has failed to offer any childcare programs anywhere near as generous as those created by the Lanham Act. Through the Head Start program launched in the 1960s, the federal government has tried to improve access to childcare. But with a limited number of slots available and eligibility to participate restricted by income, the program is even further removed from a universal ideal. Nor have the 50 states sought to create any better childcare options. Jurisdictions that provide universal free preschool remain the exception; meanwhile, daycare expenses continue to devour family budgets in large metropolitan areas.” Every Parent Deserves A Nanny State - Vanessa A. Bee, Current Affairs.
posted by The Whelk at 2:31 PM PST - 11 comments

Max Deutsch is an obsessive learner. Last year he embarked on a quest to master twelve incredibly difficult skills in twelve months. This is story of his final and most challenging month of the past year: Defeat world-champion Magnus Carlsen at a game of chess .
posted by noneuclidean at 12:22 PM PST - 57 comments

Kevin Makice (@kmakice) is a geek dad who tried to get his boys into Dungeons and Dragons with a 4th Edition starter kit, but they lost interest due to all the nuanced rules, but they liked their dad's painted miniatures. So he set about simplifying D&D and made a pared down version of the game he loved in a 3 page PDF: DnDish. The game worked for his 7-12 year olds, with the kids making their own campaigns. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:08 AM PST - 67 comments

Black Girl in a Big Dress is an online comedy series "about an African American Anglophile cosplayer in love with the Victorian Era who's trying to bring a fantasy courtship from her re-enactment events into the real world."
posted by jedicus at 9:52 AM PST - 38 comments

The new Transformers: Power of the Primes toys were released early! The assortment includes fan-favorite and classic G1-era character Jazz. But one eagle-eyed toy collector noticed tiny Cybertronian writing under the Autobot symbol: 4 characters that translate to MAGA. As in Make America Great Again, the campaign slogan of President Donald Trump and the battle cry of the current movement of white nationalists. Which is especially galling as Jazz was one of the few classic characters voiced by a person of color: the great Scatman Crothers of The Shining.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 8:51 AM PST - 31 comments

In which science-fiction author and sometime game writer Chuck Wendig's review of the car-chase crime movie Baby Driver goes off on an unexpected detour, thanks to fantasy author Sam Skykes: in Storify version and original flavor Twitter. (previously) [more inside]
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:37 AM PST - 40 comments

Christmas with The Killers! 2006: A Great Big Sled ft. Toni Halliday [more inside]
posted by one teak forest at 8:18 AM PST - 5 comments

"The idea, that Homer buy a massive truck and pay for it by becoming Springfield's snow removal hero, was born out of a single desire: Writer Jon Vitti wanted to meet Adam West. " Mr. Plow at 25: How 'The Simpsons' Classic Pushed New Boundaries and Helped Cement Show's Legacy
posted by bondcliff at 7:43 AM PST - 31 comments

Into the Perilous Night: An Essay by Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers: I wrote a nearly complete first draft of “What It Means” in one afternoon in my kitchen in Athens, Georgia. As a song, I didn’t know if it was worth a shit. But I had to get those feelings off my chest. The song at least felt honest and real. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:28 AM PST - 10 comments

Here is the story as given by the local news, but a TLDR version was provided by @notwokieleaks on Twitter: Detroit cops posing as drug dealers tried to arrest Detroit cops posing as drug buyers and then they all had a fistfight in the middle of the street.
posted by Ipsifendus at 4:24 AM PST - 46 comments

FR. Reginald Foster, The Vatican's Latinist [Archive.org]

The number of Foster’s students runs into the thousands, and many of them are now themselves some of the most dedicated teachers in the field. “When I was in college I asked people, ‘Hey, we all know Latin is a language. Does anybody actually speak it anymore?’ And they told me there was one guy, some guy at the Vatican, who still spoke the language, and that was Fr. Foster,” says Dr. Michael Fontaine, a professor of Classics at Cornell University. “I said to myself, ‘I have to study with this guy.’ And that changed everything for me.” Dr. Paul Gwynne, professor of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the American University of Rome, said of Foster, “He is not just the best Latin teacher I’ve ever seen, he’s simply the best teacher I’ve ever seen. Studying Latin with the Pope’s apostolic secretary, for whom the language is alive, using the city of Rome as a classroom . . . it changed my whole outlook on life, really.”

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:13 PM PST - 27 comments

…....no one remembers. The uncounted. US Military officials say that the air war against ISIS is the most precise in history. [more inside]
posted by lalochezia at 6:16 PM PST - 16 comments

Boston Dynamics has posted a new video. It's 54 seconds of a robot doing things I never thought they could do. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:05 PM PST - 99 comments

For years, this day had seemed inevitable. It was the predictable end to nearly a decade of well-documented and thoroughly-investigated psychological and physical torment: threatening phone calls, notes, strange encounters, vandalism, fires, animal killings, and a half-dozen violent physical attacks; all perpetrated by an unknown assailant. There were about a hundred documented incidents between 1982 and 1989. Someone was terrorizing her. After Cindy’s death, there was a thorough investigation. It culminated in the lengthiest and most expensive public inquest in British Columbia’s history. Cindy’s death was ruled a suicide. The Mysterious Death of Cindy James [more inside]
posted by mannequito at 4:52 PM PST - 13 comments

Each year Mallory Ortberg explores the horror of what it takes to be crowned People's Sexiest Man Alive. She began with Adam Levine. Then there was Chris Hemsworth and David Beckham. Now, Blake Shelton has been named Sexiest Man Alive. God have mercy on his soul.
posted by Emily's Fist at 4:50 PM PST - 102 comments

The Greggs £24 advent calendar has 24 tear-off doors that customers can exchange for a treat in a Greggs shop - though the choice of promotional picture has raised eyebrows. However, the UK Evangelical Alliance says it is "not too outraged" about the Greggs nativity scene (contradictory quote), while a vicar from t'north is not amused. Becky Barnicoat rounds up some tweets, while Peter Ormerod argues this is not an issue to be outraged about. (First mentioned by fearfulsymmetry)
posted by Wordshore at 4:42 PM PST - 29 comments

Teddy Girls and Drag Racers. The Teddy Girls had their own style but were often overshadowed by the Teddy Boys. This is a short photo-essay on the girls. Next, we have a photo-essay on a girls' drag-racing team, the Dragettes of the Kansas City Timing Association drag strip in the 1950s. They preferred convertibles and they worked as their own mechanics, too. The Dragettes
posted by MovableBookLady at 4:41 PM PST - 6 comments

“Alter Dark is a new project that lets you create your own screensavers out of NES ROMs. It was put together by Rachel Weil, an NES homebrew expert and glitch enthusiast, and recently shown off at NodeConf EU in Dublin. For Weil, it combines two of her favorite things: messing around with NES software and the dated aesthetics of screensavers. The name is also a play on the After Dark software package release in 1989 which consisted of, among other things, a flying toaster screensaver.” API files and code at GitHub. Rachel Weil also discusses how screensavers influenced her work, spurring a years-long obsession with putting screensavers where they don't belong. [YouTube]. [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 3:51 PM PST - 4 comments

An Interactive Map of Every Record Shop in the World. (You're welcome.)
posted by mrgrimm at 11:41 AM PST - 25 comments

The Punisher, Marvel’s avatar of gun violence and toxic masculinity, is hitting TV screens at possibly the worst ever time (just like every other time), to mixed reviews. With the shows focus on angry male white men the characters popularity with law enforcement officers and the military may be more troubling than ever.
posted by Artw at 11:25 AM PST - 94 comments

Timbuktu has long been Africa's El Dorado. Located on the southern edge of the Sahara and north of the Niger river (Google maps), what was initially a small river-side settlement bloomed as a trading hub for salt, gold, slaves, ivory and later, books. While its academic prominence has never returned to its peak of centuries past, it is still a treasure trove of ancient manuscripts from western Africa, maintained and protected through the years by families who have kept these works safe from numerous regime changes. These are the lost (and found) libraries of Timbuktu (hour long documentary on Vimeo from documentary producer; more info from BBC Four and stream if you're in the UK). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:36 AM PST - 28 comments

Jalopnik excerpts Elon Musk's Rolling Stone profile. (full profile)
posted by Literaryhero at 7:24 AM PST - 91 comments

Alex Salmond is the ex-leader of the Scottish National Party who lost his Westminster seat at the last election. He has recently launched The Alex Salmond Show on RT. This has been criticized by many other politicians and journalists (many of whom have actually appeared on the channel) but is seen by others as a voice against a pro-nationalist mainstream media. His first main guest was deposed Catalan president, Carlos Puigdemont, You can watch the episode on youtube.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:21 AM PST - 14 comments

I Pretended to Be Emily Dickinson on an Online Dating Site Would a lovelorn poet, obsessed with death and privacy, be able to woo a modern man?
posted by Miko at 7:19 AM PST - 40 comments

The squeeze on public finances since 2010 is linked to nearly 120,000 excess deaths in England, with the over 60s and care home residents bearing the brunt, reveals the first study of its kind, published in the online journal BMJ Open. The critical factor in these figures may be changes in nurse numbers, say the researchers, who warn that there could be an additional toll of up to 100 deaths every day from now on in.

The original research is published in the BMJ Open journal. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 6:24 AM PST - 16 comments

A report from Millennial 20/20, a two-day conference held in the Carriageworks “creative space” in Sydney; where hundreds of marketing executives, CEOs, startup founders, big-data analysts, “disruptive innovators”, “change makers” and “thought leaders” gathered to discuss the subject of “millennials”, and how to most effectively monetise them. The WiFi password was “SmashedAvo”, there were branded fidget spinners in the swag, and the overall attitude was one of predatory infantilisation.
posted by acb at 5:01 AM PST - 71 comments

British explorer Benedict Allen found alive in Papua New Guinea, 16 Nov, 2017

“He has been sighted alive and well near a remote airstrip in Papua New Guinea having trekked vast distances. He has requested rescue and efforts are under way to get him out. This is only a reported sighting, but it is the second sighting and it’s a tribal commission that has been looking for him and they have reported him in. So unless they have got it horribly wrong, and I’m not aware of any other lost British explorers in that part of Papua New Guinea, Benedict Allen is safe and well.”

[more inside]
posted by Thella at 2:40 AM PST - 61 comments

YouTuber Woodsie employs the Face Swap Live iPhone app to make videos of his daughters. Sometimes you get miniature food critics, sometimes you get nightmare fuel [h/t Miss Cellania].
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:38 PM PST - 11 comments

A simple list of charming terms from libraries/archives. [special appearances by MeFi's Own jessamyn]
posted by Chrysostom at 10:27 PM PST - 17 comments

Umberto Eco in 1985, and Bill Watterson in 1989, discuss the poetry and artistry of Krazy Kat and Peanuts.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 9:31 PM PST - 9 comments

On the 25th anniversary of Automatic for the People, R.E.M. has released a remastered album. Remastered in Dolby Atmos by the original producer (Scott Litt) and engineer (Clif Norrell), the reissue has been well received. [more inside]
posted by hexaflexagon at 4:40 PM PST - 85 comments

Joan Cuneo raced in the very early 1900s and once set a speed record at 111mph. Second part of this blog post Part Two
posted by MovableBookLady at 4:31 PM PST - 4 comments

Contouring 101 (SLYT)
posted by Four String Riot at 4:17 PM PST - 60 comments

Why the Movies are So Obsessed with Capes [more inside]
posted by Mchelly at 4:12 PM PST - 23 comments

How One Woman's Digital Life Was Weaponized Against Her
posted by capnsue at 2:39 PM PST - 66 comments

The Game Awards 2017 Nominee Announcement! [YouTube] “The Game Awards nominees are in for 2017, and they are a preview of just how great of a year it was for video games. Four of 2017’s biggest games — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, Destiny 2 and Super Mario Odyssey — each received six nominations. Those were followed by strong showings from Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (five nominations), Persona 5 (four nominations), Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus (four nominations), Cuphead (four nominations) and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (three nominations). Nintendo, in a hot race with itself for many of the awards, took home 23 nominations, the most for any publisher. The nominees were selected by a jury of 51 media and influencer outlets. Voting is now open to the public on most awards, and fans can vote via The Game Awards website, or on social media platforms. (Full instructions are available in this Medium post.)” [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 2:30 PM PST - 36 comments

Why Black Men Love Dragon Ball Z.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:21 PM PST - 5 comments

"Poldark is ostensibly a soap opera about eighteenth-century copper mining, but, in reality, it is a show about hot people staring at one another to a soundtrack of melancholy orchestral whining and the ceaseless crashing of waves upon the Cornish beach. Sometimes the hot people are staring at each other in anger over the glaring economic and political disparities of Georgian England, and sometimes they are staring at one another in sadness over babies dead of putrid throat or peasants crushed in mine collapses. But mostly, they are just looking at each other because they want to fuck."
posted by blithers at 12:51 PM PST - 16 comments

“Billions of dollars of this debt comes due in the next few years. “If today is considered a retail apocalypse,” Bloomberg reported, “then what’s coming next could truly be scary.” Eight million American retail workers could see their careers evaporate, not due to technological disruption but a predatory financial scheme. The masters of the universe who devised it, meanwhile, will likely walk away enriched, and policymakers must reckon with how they enabled the carnage.“ - The Cause and Consequences of the Retail Apocalypse - David Dayden for The New Republic.
posted by The Whelk at 11:32 AM PST - 75 comments

The gang at the Onion just launched The Takeout, a new food-focused spinoff site. Stories for the debut include Rick Bayless' gravy recipe, advice for restaurant-goers from a server, and a review of Trader Joe's' turkey and stuffing flavored potato chips.
posted by Clustercuss at 11:30 AM PST - 30 comments

Volunteer your computer's spare power to get people out of jail - When you download the app, a small part of your computer's unused processing power is redirected toward mining a popular cryptocurrency called Monero, which is secure, private, and untraceable. At the end of every month, we exchange the Monero for US dollars and donate the earnings to the Bronx Freedom Fund and through them, a new nation-wide initiative, The Bail Project.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 11:22 AM PST - 15 comments

Male bumblers are an epidemic. A nice explanation to provide to those who confess to be worried that they can't tell the difference between sexual assault and asking someone out on a date. [more inside]
posted by janey47 at 11:17 AM PST - 58 comments

Allan Simmons, a top-billed British Scrabble player, has been barred from tournaments for three years after an inquiry concluded he had broken the rules by putting a hand with freshly drawn letter tiles back into a bag to draw more favorable tiles. [more inside]
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 10:54 AM PST - 18 comments

The Unique Sexual Harassment Problem Female Prison Workers Face The sexual harassment began in 1994, Paula Purdy says, shortly after she started work as a corrections officer at the Denver County Jail. Colleagues made demeaning comments about her body. One male captain made her so uncomfortable she avoided him. But the worst abuse came from inmates, who would make sexual remarks and masturbate at her as she did rounds in their housing areas. Purdy says she reported the behavior to her bosses, but there were few consequences. “I would get emotional at work several times a day,” she said.
posted by strelitzia at 8:52 AM PST - 6 comments

'Hello. Hey Listen'. The Phrase that makes Zelda Fans everwhere shudder Warning: This Video Gets Exponentially loud and mind-meltingly annoying. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 7:51 AM PST - 15 comments

In December 2016,Water Safety New Zealand and ACC created The Swim Reaper as a way to use dark humor and social networking to spread awareness of swimming hazards, specifically targeting young males. You can find the Swim Reaper lurking at known high risk beaches, lakes, rivers and waterways in New Zealand, looking out for young people making bad decisions. He's been in a few YouTube videos, but the best place to see his work is on Instagram. (title source)
posted by Fig at 7:46 AM PST - 10 comments

Male Incompentence is a Subtle Form of Misogyny talks about the larger picture of many men's refusals to perform emotional labor in the frame of gender politics.
posted by bile and syntax at 7:30 AM PST - 207 comments

Nick Offerman loves woodworking. The actor, perhaps best known for his turn as Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation, adores the craft so much, he’s started Offerman Woodshop, where he makes and sells everything from meat paddles to mustache combs to custom dining tables. Nick Offerman also loves the betterment of humanity which is why when he found a project that combined his two passions, he leapt at the chance to participate. Would Works is a non-profit charity that helps Americans in need get back on their feet through the production of handmade wood goods. Proceeds from purchases help fund the woodshop and the program. Plus, Offerman will match any donations to Would Works, dollar-by-dollar, up to $20,000. [slGQ]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:49 AM PST - 22 comments

The Racked Swag Project:
We Received $95,000 Worth Of Free Stuff In Six Months
Brands Send Me More Free Stuff Than You Can Imagine
The Secret Swag Resale Economy

posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:51 PM PST - 34 comments

“At times while tracking [Anglin], I couldn’t help but feel that he was a method actor so committed and demented, on such a long and heavy trip, that he’d permanently lost himself in his role.”
Writing for The Atlantic, Luke O’Brien has assembled a detailed account of the strange history and fickle beliefs of Andrew Anglin, the man behind the almost-defunct Daily Stormer: “The Making of an American Nazi”
posted by Going To Maine at 9:50 PM PST - 40 comments

Returning stuff is an American pastime, a tradition even. The industry-wide consensus is that 8 to 10 percent of all goods bought in the U.S. will be returned. For online sales, the rate is much higher, in the range of 25 to 40 percent. So...what happens to it all?
posted by Chrysostom at 9:42 PM PST - 31 comments

Could we call it Asian-American cuisine? The term is problematic, subsuming countries across a vast region with no shared language or single unifying religion. It elides numerous divides: city and countryside, aristocrats and laborers, colonizers and colonized — “fancy Asian” and “jungle Asian,” as the comedian Ali Wong puts it. As a yoke of two origins, it can also be read as an impugning of loyalties and as a code for “less than fully American.” When I asked American chefs of Asian heritage whether their cooking could be considered Asian-American cuisine, there was always a pause, and sometimes a sigh. [SLNYT]
posted by destrius at 6:00 PM PST - 25 comments

The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students' papers tells his story. Two days had passed since I last heard from the business student. Overnight I had received 14 e-mails from her. She had additional instructions for the assignment, such as "but more again please make sure they are a good link betwee the leticture review and all the chapter and the benfet of my paper. finally do you think the level of this work? how match i can get it?" [more inside]
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:27 PM PST - 130 comments

An Important Discussion About ‘Pottersville,’ The Weirdest Christmas Movie Ever
posted by Ipsifendus at 1:12 PM PST - 58 comments

A Guide To A Bunch Of Weird Chinese Car Brands You've Never Heard Of
posted by timshel at 12:55 PM PST - 22 comments

The Last of Us 2 Trailer Controversy Explained [Game Rant] “One of the nice surprises at Sony’s Paris Games Week press conference was a new trailer for The Last of Us: Part 2. While many fans were excited to see more footage of the highly anticipated game, others were outraged at the extreme level of violence shown in the trailer. Over the past couple of weeks, numerous outlets have stepped forward decrying the trailer for its brutality, but some fans may still not quite understand why there’s so much controversy.” [YouTube][Teaser Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:49 PM PST - 44 comments

A three-metre-tall polar bear stood in the doorway. It walked up to her, put its snowshoe-sized paw on her pregnant belly, and began to speak: ‘If it’s a boy, you name it after me.’ . . . When Alice gave birth to a son two weeks later, she gave him two names. The first was Mangilaluk. The second was Bernard.

A new all-season highway opens tomorrow, which will be the first road to connect Tuktoyaktuk to Inuvik, in Canada's far North. It is already informally being called "Bernard's Highway". Nadim Roberts tells the harrowing life story of Mangilaluk / Bernard.
posted by Rumple at 11:38 AM PST - 14 comments

New Lord of the Rings series coming to Amazon.
posted by mono blanco at 10:51 AM PST - 145 comments

There are three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass-ceiling: an invisible career barrier, based on prejudiced stereotypes, that prevents women from accessing the ranks of power. Conservatives and chauvinists tend to endorse the first; liberals and feminists prefer the third; and those somewhere in the middle are usually drawn to the second. But what if they all missed the big picture? ... In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 10:22 AM PST - 49 comments

The ABS will be announcing the results of Australia's same-sex marriage plebiscite in just under eight hours. After a long fought campaign which has seen some of the worst of Australia's homophobia given license to speak up, the same-sex marriage plebiscite is coming to a head. If polling is any indication, with 89 percent turnout, the yes vote looks to be romping home with 63% polling yes.
posted by Talez at 7:23 AM PST - 146 comments

Reckoning Bill Clinton's sex crimes (not an article about Monica Lewinsky) "...Let us not forget the sex crimes of which....Bill Clinton was very credibly accused in the 1990s" -Caitlin Flanagan
posted by bearette at 7:16 AM PST - 189 comments

How is a long-running comedy distorting the perceptions of South Asians? Comic Hari Kondabolu, a long-time Simpsons fan, confronts the problematic portrayal of his ethnicity on TV, with The Simpsons as the most conspicuous and influential aspect. His new documentary, The Problem with Apu explores the mass-media depiction of Indian-Americans, with help from Aziz Ansari, Vivek Murthy, Maulik Pancholy, Sakina Jaffrey, Kal Penn, and others.
posted by jackbishop at 5:09 AM PST - 46 comments

Free Money: The Surprising Effects of a Basic Income Supplied by a Tribal Government - "Thanks to a profitable casino, an Indian tribe gives its members sizeable cash payments."
posted by kliuless at 3:33 AM PST - 30 comments

RIP Jeremy Hutchinson, AKA Baron Hutchinson of Lullington AKA Lord Hutchinson of Lullington who has recently died at the age of 102 and was one of finest criminal barristers to practice. He defended Lady Chatterley, Fanny Hill and Christine Keeler and defeated Mary Whitehouse. The Guardian has an extraordinary obituary of an extraordinary man.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:42 AM PST - 12 comments

Gamepee - connect with your audience through the interactive experience of this new technology in advergaming. (Yes, the start-up behind this is Belgian.)
posted by progosk at 1:55 AM PST - 17 comments

The Washington Post asked readers to submit stories of a time a stranger performed an act so unexpectedly kind that it stayed with them. Here are some of the most poignant ones, in honor of World Kindness Day. (yesterday at this point, but every day is immeasurably improved by kindness)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:35 PM PST - 46 comments

The incredibly detailed miniatures of Blade Runner 2049. Blade Runner 2049 concept art by George Hull. Designing the technology of ‘Blade Runner 2049’.
posted by Artw at 10:15 PM PST - 35 comments

“It’s lovely to drive by on a motor boat and it has a very nice crew and very capable, but the acoustics are hideous,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “For a catholicity of reasons, it’s not the wisest place to put on anything…with the possible exception of maybe a circus.” -- Sydney's beautiful but impossible Opera House.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:18 PM PST - 11 comments

What The Hell Explains Its Appeal? Of life’s great mysteries, surely among the most impenetrable is how Bat Out of Hell, Meat Loaf’s adolescent wet dream of an album that was released forty years ago today [October 21, 1977], came to be one of the best-selling albums in the history of the record industry, cracking the top five in some rankings, and out-selling nearly all the pillars of the rock canon. - Matt Fogelson [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:09 PM PST - 109 comments

"In a directive called “Valuing All God’s Children,” the Church [of England] said elementary school students 'should be at liberty to explore the possibilities of who they might be without judgment or derision'...'All bullying, including homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying causes profound damage, leading to higher levels of mental health disorders, self-harm, depression and suicide,' Archbishop Welby wrote, 'This guidance helps schools to offer the Christian message of love, joy and celebration of our humanity without exception or exclusion.'." SLNYT
posted by Grandysaur at 5:38 PM PST - 13 comments

Stunning photos of critters who only surface from the depths at night.
posted by MovableBookLady at 4:05 PM PST - 15 comments

Kristen Bell Will Reunite High School Musical Cast Members for New TV Series "ABC is teaming up with Frozen and The Good Place star Kristen Bell on a new TV series titled Encore, which will reunite former high school class mates to perform their high school musical one more time. Executive produced by Bell, the series is currently seeking out cast members from high school musicals in the [1990s and early 2000s]." [more inside]
posted by ZeusHumms at 3:28 PM PST - 38 comments

In July, 1990, photographer Peter Widing snapped a perfect shot of three young football (soccer) players. In 2006, his friend and colleague Christian Daun first saw and became obsessed with the photograph, half-joking with Widing about tracking the three unnamed boys down. In May, 2016, Widing took his own life, shattering Daun's understanding of things and sending him down the journey they'd never taken. By July, 2017, he'd found the boys, now grown men, and learned about where their own lives had led.
posted by Navelgazer at 1:42 PM PST - 6 comments

That time that Brian Eno was a member of the worst orchestra in the world. (You may know them from that one Youtube video).
posted by MartinWisse at 1:25 PM PST - 29 comments

In the newest installment of Chart Party, SB Nation writer and national treasure Jon Bois discusses why the kickoff sucks and should be abolished. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:50 PM PST - 40 comments

The Union of Concerned Scientists is on the phone again. You going to get it this time? In 1992 the UCS issued the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity. Now, 25 years later, many things have changed. They've gotten worse.
posted by crazylegs at 12:36 PM PST - 13 comments

When I look back on not only the wasted time in Puerto Rico, but the couple of unproductive years around it I see it differently now. When I wasn’t beating myself up for not being productive enough, I was thinking about and interacting with the world. I was laying the first stones of a new foundation, a new way of thinking about networked culture, and even about our place on this planet. Instead of getting things done I was learning, smiling at people I didn’t share a language with, and cross-connecting the notions of my brain and the experiences of my life. via
posted by roaring beast at 11:25 AM PST - 6 comments

215 gunshot victims, arriving four to a car, in one night, in one ER. A Nevada emergency doc tells how he managed the ER on the night of the worst mass shooting in US history. (Warning: contains descriptions of injured people and trauma medicine).
posted by stillmoving at 11:17 AM PST - 33 comments

"These micro quasi-brains are revolutionizing research on human brain development and diseases from Alzheimer’s to Zika, but the headlong rush to grow the most realistic, most highly developed brain organoids has thrown researchers into uncharted ethical waters....In the previously unreported experiments implanting human brain organoids into lab rodents, most of the transplants survived....More notably, the human organoids implanted into mice connected to the rodent’s circulatory system, making this the first reported vascularization. And mature neurons from the human brain organoid sent axons, the wires that carry electrical signals from one neuron to another, into “multiple regions of the host mouse brain,” according to a team led by Fred “Rusty” Gage of the Salk Institute".
posted by Diablevert at 10:45 AM PST - 37 comments

Why your favorite indie game may not get a boxed edition [Engadget] “Before September, it was possible to launch a boxed version of an existing, digital-only game without paying for an additional ESRB rating. This policy allowed Limited Run to be a lean operation, avoiding ESRB fees and still releasing physical versions of weird digital games (all of which are already rated by the ESRB). In September, the board announced a new tier for rating digital-to-physical games, allowing any title with a development budget of $1 million or less to be rated as a boxed product for $3,000, rather than the standard submission price of more than $10,000. With this change, all three console manufacturers made it a requirement for every game to pay this fee and carry an ESRB rating -- even physical launches of digital titles.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:16 AM PST - 19 comments

Bruce Yeany's Youtube channel has some great build-your-own classroom and home demos for physics, such as physics marble tracks, and sand pendulums and Lissajous patterns.
posted by carter at 10:12 AM PST - 2 comments

I’ll get straight to the point: you know what hasn’t been done before? A public vote, in the digital age, to see what is the most memorable piece of Canadian television. You know what we’re going to do? That. Right now.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:22 AM PST - 225 comments

Edward Enninful is the new Editor-in-chief of British Vogue. His first cover girl, Adwoa Aboah is also a founder of Gurls Talk. [more inside]
posted by threetwentytwo at 9:04 AM PST - 5 comments

The browser that Mozilla built jumps into a new chapter on November 14th. They're saying this is pretty big jump as they're giving Firefox release 57 the moniker "Quantum". [more inside]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 7:47 AM PST - 182 comments

How Generative Music Works: A Perspective by Tero Parviainen (Put on headphones, uses mouse/keyboard/touch)
posted by gwint at 5:38 AM PST - 17 comments

Let it be known that Ashley Volk had loved Sam Siatta since elementary school, the age of True Love Always in sidewalk chalk. She loved him before he joined the Marines and went to war, before he descended into depression and alcoholism upon his return, before he was convicted on a felony charge for a crime he did not remember through a blackout fog. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:58 PM PST - 19 comments

Could the Romans have had their own Industrial Revolution?
posted by Chrysostom at 8:46 PM PST - 33 comments

A Visual Explanation of the Relative Toxicity of Opioids. Fentanyl is so lethal, it requires new procedures for first responders. Carfentanil though is in a class by itself. There are concerns it can be used as a WMD.
posted by storybored at 7:58 PM PST - 63 comments

Awesome Twitter Thread Of “Nice Allegations” About Celebrities Gives Us Hope "It’s rough out there emotion-wise, as day after day seems to arrive with fresh allegations that expose many of our famous faves as awful abusive creeps. So this Twitter chain wherein people share happy stories of fun celebrity encounters and anecdotes feels like balm for our wounds." [more inside]
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 4:47 PM PST - 107 comments

In the 1920s and 1930s, Chaïm Soutine painted a series of portraits of service personnel at hotels and restaurants around Paris. These helped launch his career (though he's perhaps better known today for his paintings of meat and having posed for Modigliani). Now the portraits have been brought together in an exhibition at London's Courtauld Gallery. Soutine's distant cousin, Stanley Meisler, has written about his life and his tragic death under the Nazi occupation.
posted by Perodicticus potto at 3:43 PM PST - 3 comments

A Paean To SMAC
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:37 PM PST - 46 comments

The Mysterious Frontiers of Can Xue - 'The author, whom the American novelist and editor Bradford Morrow has described as one of the most “innovative and important” in contemporary world literature, revels in such mysteries and entanglements. Can Xue is the genderless pen name of Deng Xiaohua, who was born in 1953, in Changsha City, in Hunan Province. In Chinese, the name means “residual snow,” a phrase, Deng has explained, that is used to describe both “the dirty snow that refuses to melt” and “the purest snow at the top of a high mountain.” [more inside]
posted by TheGoodBlood at 1:05 PM PST - 6 comments

November 15, 1977 marks 40 years since the release of the Saturday Night Fever Original Movie Sound Track Album [YouTube full playlist]. The globally music defining album's run of hits actually started in 1975 when the Bee Gees released "comeback track" Jive Talkin' which reached the top of the charts in several countries and and was included on the album even though it was cut from the final film. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 12:28 PM PST - 77 comments

Million of Muslim soldiers came to fight in the savage trench warefare. Most people have no idea that there were any Muslims at all fighting on the western front for the allies but a new foundation has begun getting the story out and more people are going to the French national cemetery to visit the graves. The new foundation has a link in this article but most of its introduction is in the news story. It's definitely a story that should be better known.
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:07 PM PST - 11 comments

A Huthi Missile, a Saudi Purge and a Lebanese Resignation Shake the Middle East.
Volatility is rising across the Middle East as local, regional and international conflicts increasingly intertwine and amplify each other. Four Crisis Group analysts give a 360-degree view of the new risks of overlapping conflicts that involve Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Lebanon and Israel. [more inside]
posted by adamvasco at 5:13 AM PST - 36 comments

In the video, Weidner, chipper and chatty, lobs a few big spoonfuls of smooth peanut butter onto a piece of wax paper, folds it, then runs over its surface with a rolling pin to spread the peanut butter thin. She puts the whole thing in the freezer and, when it’s sufficiently chilled, cuts the hardened sheet into sandwich-size squares that she keeps in a stack, à la Kraft Singles. […] On Facebook, commenters, eighteen thousand of them, were not buying it. “Love this . . . since having kids I had to quit my job due to the amount of time I needed to spread peanut butter each day,” one woman wrote. “Maybe now I can go back to work part-time!”
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:43 PM PST - 173 comments

How Doctor Who’s New Costume Cleverly Leans on History [Vanity Fair] “Cosplayers and fan artists alike, rejoice! Doctor Who, the iconic, lead-swapping franchise, has just revealed the costume for the 13th actor taking on the moniker of “The Doctor”: Jodie Whittaker. The reveal of a new Who costume—soon to be replicated and worn by convention-goers around the world—is always a cause for celebration. But anyone following the cloud of controversy swirling around Whittaker’s casting will know that, this time, the costumers on the long-running show faced a new challenge when selecting just the right coat and trousers for the time-traveling adventurer.” [.jpg] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:06 PM PST - 71 comments

Stephen Malinowski of the Music Animation Machine creates beautiful animated visualizations of classical music, which enable viewers to see repetition, variations on a theme, structure, complexity, and other interesting properties of music. [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:05 PM PST - 5 comments

#Deep Space Nine Nine, source of the title and prompt for this FPP, is an entertainingly silly series of posts with dialogue from "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" on screencaps of "Deep Space Nine." [more inside]
posted by wintersweet at 7:51 PM PST - 29 comments

Not Your Messiah, Peter Lucier, for The Revealer

The language that Marines use about death is revealing. The radio code for a dead casualty when I was in Afghanistan was “hero.” It suggested to me something about the nature of service, and sacrifice. Growing up Catholic, the idea of a blood sacrifice, a human sacrifice that could save and redeem, was familiar to me. Above every chalkboard in my grade school was the image of our Christ, crucified. Now, my dead friend was the lamb burnt whole, the crucified bloody savior.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:30 PM PST - 26 comments

Whilst having a poo, a human could read a book, a magazine, MetaFilter, or a newspaper, for example. But why just humans? Don't cats appreciate lavatorial reading material too?
posted by Wordshore at 2:30 PM PST - 17 comments

The crimson wave of menstruation liberation (slTheGuardian)
posted by Kitteh at 12:09 PM PST - 35 comments

For Remembrance Day: Although not subject to conscription, many Aboriginal men and women signed up to fight for Canada in the World Wars. Some escaped from the horrors of residential schools to the horrors of the battlefield. Although many experienced equal treatment on the front, upon return they were denied the same benefits and recognition as their non-Aboriginal comrades. Photographer Zehra Rizvi interviews three surviving Aboriginal WWII veterans (and the late Henry Beaudry, who died last year at 95). [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:00 PM PST - 5 comments

Transcriptions of a bunch of Sonny Sharrock interviews.
posted by OmieWise at 11:42 AM PST - 8 comments

Fountain Girls by Samantha Tucker.
(cw: domestic violence, suicide)
posted by zarq at 11:26 AM PST - 5 comments

Roguelike Celebration 2017 is currently streaming on twitch and scheduled to run throughout the weekend. Last year's celebration was covered on Metafilter; the talks were consistently interesting and fun, and they're all available on Youtube and The Internet Archive. This year's talks will be archived as well. What's a roguelike?
posted by naju at 10:58 AM PST - 24 comments

Be the death of the party with this keg of ranch dressing. The five-litre mini keg is currently available for preorder. For presentation purposes, a ranch dressing fountain is also available, but sold separately.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:23 AM PST - 62 comments

Harry Leslie Smith is not afraid to school anyone on the current regression to the bad old days. At 94, he’s got every right. He’s a veteran of the British Royal Air Force during World War II, so when he compares current times with Nazi Germany he knows about it first hand. [more inside]
posted by mrcrow at 9:52 AM PST - 4 comments

Good work you probably haven't seen
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 9:13 AM PST - 6 comments

No no, you can't just listen on the surface. You have to do a critical reading of just the lyrics. I love stuff like this.
posted by MovableBookLady at 9:41 PM PST - 24 comments

CMU researchers suggest a new method of redistricting which might create voting districts which prevent gerrymandering. It's all about who cuts the cake, and who gets to choose their piece. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:31 PM PST - 57 comments

The 2017 finalists for Comedy Wildlife Photographer of the Year have been announced (previouslies: 1, 2, 3)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:43 PM PST - 32 comments

Tegan and Sara are twin sisters and a singing duo from Calgary. They are openly gay, and have been strong advocates on LGBTQ issues. They have recently spoken out on the issue of Gay Straight Alliances in Alberta’s schools, an issue that is garnering a lot of attention, with conservatives warning of sex clubs operating without any parental input. K.D. Lang, who also hails from Alberta, has also been active recently on the issue of LGBTQ rights in Alberta. The voices of gay women are now a force to be reckoned with in the land of the Rocky Mountain cowboy.
posted by No Robots at 6:51 PM PST - 29 comments

Day 295: the light at the end of the tunnel is visible, as the Democratic wave starts sweeping elections across America, including the Deep South. Attention turns to the special senate election in Alabama next month, where jerk-off Republican candidate Roy Moore is facing unexpected allegations of child predation. As of posting, Trump is currently touring Asia, representing America and definitely not getting orders from Putin in a secure, untraceable manner how could you think that there is no collusion. [This is your catch-all U.S. politics thread, for things not related to the recent elections or Roy Moore.] [more inside]
posted by Merus at 5:53 PM PST - 2473 comments

Good news for people who've had chicken pox. Shingrix, the new shingles vaccine prevents more than 90 percent of shingles cases, even at older ages. It will start shipping this month. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 5:16 PM PST - 38 comments

Pianist Nahre Sol improvises Mary Had A Little Lamb in the style of Bach, Rameau, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Debussy, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Messiaen, Schoenberg, Glass, Reich, and herself. (SLYT)
posted by theodolite at 2:23 PM PST - 27 comments

The word from the doctors came early this week: They had tried one cocktail of antibiotics after another, but Mallory Smith’s fever and chill and chest rattle were only getting worse. They were out of options. Her father, though, had an idea. He wanted to infect Mallory with a virus — one carefully selected to kill the bacteria that had colonized her lungs. It was hardly foolproof, and it would require special emergency approval from the federal government, but it might just do what the antibiotics couldn’t.
posted by Bella Donna at 2:17 PM PST - 12 comments

How Eddie Berganza rose through the ranks at DC Comics despite accusations of sexual harassment.
posted by Artw at 2:09 PM PST - 32 comments

Everyone hates e-bikes
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:01 PM PST - 74 comments

Twenty years later, Shawn Michaels reflects on the Montreal Screwjob. [ESPN] “In the midst of the most heated days of the "Monday Night Wars" between World Wrestling Entertainment (then the WWF) and World Championship Wrestling, money and contract issues led Bret Hart and Vince McMahon to an impasse. McMahon needed to get the title off of Hart before he left for WCW, and Hart refused to lose the title to Shawn Michaels, his most bitter rival, in front of a pay-per-view crowd in Montreal, feeling that a loss in such a Canadian stronghold would be devastating for his on-screen persona. In the lead-up to Survivor Series, there were several different ideas thrown around as solutions. Hart suggested he could instead lose to Steve Austin, or perhaps drop the title to Michaels at a live event in Detroit the night before. But once it became clear that they couldn't come to terms on a solution, the wheels were set in motion for a moment that would forever alter two companies, countless wrestlers' careers and, ultimately, set the WWE on a path toward becoming a multibillion-dollar brand.” [WWE][Autoplay Video] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 1:36 PM PST - 15 comments

Yes Mom, There is Something Wrong.
From Victim to Survivor.
In Medium, actor Anthony Edwards reveals that he was sexually molested and a friend of his was raped when they were children, by Broadway producer and theme park designer Gary Goddard. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:39 AM PST - 20 comments

How Corporations and the Wealthy Avoid Taxes (and How to Stop Them)
posted by crazy with stars at 10:14 AM PST - 14 comments

The Secret History of Cricket Magazine, the "New Yorker for Children," by A.J. O'Connell at Electric Literature. "In a time when children’s magazines mostly featured hidden object drawings and games, Cricket stubbornly refused to underestimate its young readers. It welcomed their correspondence, and was such a human endeavor that for many readers, finding Cricket in the mailbox every month was like a visit from a friend."
posted by goatdog at 7:57 AM PST - 79 comments

The Interactive Database of the World's River Basins is an interactive database of the world's river basins.
posted by Dim Siawns at 5:54 AM PST - 21 comments

Ever wondered why it's so cheap to ship small stuff on the slow boat from China? It's due to an international agency that "sets prices based on factors such as national income. The cost of sending mail from China to Canada was set at a low amount years ago, long before the advent of e-commerce and China's emergence as a major economic force." That will start to change in 2018.
posted by clawsoon at 5:18 AM PST - 22 comments

The Acorn Woodpecker is one of the most interesting birds in North America. A short documentary by bioGraphic describes their granaries, and the unusual family structures that may show that cooperation can be good evolutionary sense.
posted by Stark at 2:49 AM PST - 15 comments

Contemporary Christmas, here in Albion, is marked by the unveiling of ad campaigns by the chain stores, of which the big one is the the John Lewis Christmas TV advert (previously). This year, their theme is something under the bed/child insomnia, soundtracked by a cover version of Golden Slumbers by The Beatles. Some other stores and chains have released their ads, including the strange honesty of the PC World family, Asda's food factory, Aldi's sweet carrot lurve, Tesco's middle class Aga-ruined Turkey, the slightly odd gender dynamics of the Morrison family, and the tie-in between Paddington Bear and Marks and Spencer - but does he swear at the bear? Also Argos, and an obscure American online shop. Verily, Merry Christmas, MeFites!
posted by Wordshore at 12:18 AM PST - 68 comments

Hilary Clinton is the guest editor of the forthcoming issue of Teen Vogue -- before Conde Nast shuts down print production thereof, as previously. [more inside]
posted by clew at 11:49 PM PST - 17 comments

If you think about Rock and Pop songs with great strings there's a good chance you're thinking about the work of Paul Buckmaster who died Nov. 7 2017. If you don't know the name you almost certainly know his work. [more inside]
posted by bongo_x at 1:45 PM PST - 18 comments

The Web Began Dying in 2014 - André Staltz [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:44 PM PST - 82 comments

Louis C.K. Crossed a Line Into Sexual Misconduct, 5 Women Say [SLNYT]
posted by kittensofthenight at 1:38 PM PST - 644 comments

In the wilderness of Washington State’s Hoh Rain Forest, a poet searches for the rare peace that true silence can offer.
posted by bq at 12:57 PM PST - 18 comments

“Of course Mario isn’t a plumber, or at least not just a plumber. Because professionally speaking, Mario wears many hats. He’s a doctor. He’s the lead in a mariachi band. He’s a building inspector. He’s eager to fill whatever role the occasion calls for. Super Mario Odyssey expands on Mario’s chameleon-esque nature by giving him a new, all-encompassing ability: the power to take over and control other characters and enemies by tossing his hat upon their noggin. So now, with the zip of his cap, Mario is also a Goomba. Or a Bullet Bill. Or a strange woodland creature that can extend its legs to reach untold heights. Or a stylish statue with the ability to see invisible platforms.” [YouTube][Game Trailer] [via: Polygon] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:54 PM PST - 52 comments

After cathartic Democratic gains on Tuesday, 2017 awaits one last big federal contest -- Alabama's December 12th special election to fill A.G. Jeff Sessions' seat in the U.S. Senate. The normally determinative Republican primary was riven by divisions, with the controversial theocratic ex-judge Roy Moore defeating establishment-backed Luther Strange. The Democrats, meanwhile, nominated respected US attorney Doug Jones, best known for successfully prosecuting the Klansmen behind the horrific 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Still, Moore was widely seen as the narrow favorite... until today's bombshell WaPo story in which multiple conservative women independently confirmed Moore sexually harassed them in the 70s -- some as young as 14. While the Moore campaign rejects the story as "fake news", GOP senators are abandoning him in droves, with talk of mounting a write-in campaign for primary loser Luther Strange. With just a month until election day, could deep-red Alabama elect a progressive Democrat for the first time in more than twenty years? [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:37 PM PST - 1565 comments

Jeff Goldblum: The Oral History | Nick Offerman: "If Jeff says 'Thank you. Have a nice day,; there’s a natural timbre that he can’t even control that vibrates the pelvic bone of whomever he’s making eye contact with." [more inside]
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 10:18 AM PST - 64 comments

Vox teams up with 99% Invisible to help explain biomimicry.
posted by hanov3r at 10:09 AM PST - 5 comments

Author Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG shares his picks for Three Obscure Days in Los Angeles...
posted by jim in austin at 9:34 AM PST - 14 comments

“Over the past seven months, Tanisha Smythe has spent her entire life savings, and most of her son’s. She’s on the verge of losing her apartment and is relying on food banks for meals. Smythe is one of 1,800 former Time Warner Cable employees who have been on strike in New York City since 28 March, over a contract dispute with Charter Communications.” - Seven months long, 1,800 out … an epic TWC strike mirrors US unions' fight to survive (The Guardian) A Conservative Case For Unions ( New Republic) - Meet The NYC Strippers On Strike (Broadly) - What Labor Needs Now (Splinter)
posted by The Whelk at 8:54 AM PST - 27 comments

The bayan is a type of Russian chromatic button accordion with a phenomenal range and tone. The favoured tool of Eastern European and Russian accordion virtuosi in particular, you might be surprised at what it can be pressed to do in the hands of a skilled performer:
Sergei Teleshev performing Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
Alexandr Hrustevich performing Vivaldi's Summer (Four Seasons) and Alexander Borodin's Petite Suite
Alexandr Hrustevich performing Franck Angelis' Etude sur Chiquilin de Bachin, Brahms' Hungarian Dancea, Vyachesla Chernikov's Jazz Waltz, Waltz Impromptu, and The Lonely Harmonica, Vladimir Zubitsky's Omaggio ad Astor Piazzolla, and Yevgeny Derbenko's Cabman
All links to YouTube
posted by Dysk at 7:07 AM PST - 16 comments

The surviving footage of the only time Coltrane performed of A Love Supreme live. (Previously, 6 yrs ago, broken link)
posted by OmieWise at 5:54 AM PST - 14 comments

"Al Franken Just Gave the Speech Big Tech Has Been Dreading" [SL Wired] [more inside]
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 5:32 AM PST - 97 comments

Do you like string quartets? And piano music? How about combining these flavours in the form of a Piano Quintet? If you’re unsure (or haven’t much time), try dipping a small spoon into the bowl with the second movement of Antonin Dvořák’s 1881 Piano Quintet. If this kind of thing is already to your taste, or if you have all day & nothing better to do, then see within for a whole lot more... [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 2:24 AM PST - 25 comments

Morioka Seiko Instruments is located in the northern industrial city of Morioka, about three-and-a-half hours from Tokyo by high-speed train. This is where Seiko's high-end mechanical watches are born – where a single watchmaker puts together each Credor Caliber 68, where a 40-year Seiko veteran assembles high-end movements, and where the widely revered Grand Seiko takes shape — A visit to Seiko Japan
posted by timshel at 11:55 PM PST - 18 comments

Discovering theory one sound bite at a time.
posted by koavf at 9:31 PM PST - 4 comments

An animal rescue group feeding stray cats in South Korea noticed one who was a little different. She eagerly took cat food that was packaged, but tended to leave loose food alone. When presented with a choice of wrapped or unwrapped food, she selected the wrapped food and took off. [h/t Miss Cellania] [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:22 PM PST - 17 comments

"In Japan, you can pay an actor to impersonate your relative, spouse, coworker, or any kind of acquaintance."
posted by exceptinsects at 9:11 PM PST - 56 comments

What Happens If China Makes First Contact? "As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose."
posted by homunculus at 7:42 PM PST - 51 comments

Barbara Loden, director of "Wanda," has her own interesting backstory. The movie is a cult favorite for its uncompromising approach and horrific story. And it's all based on a true story: William & Alma. The first link is specifically about the film. The true crime link has a lot of info on Loden's life and some analysis of her and her film by a French writer. But then it becomes an account of the horrific crime that inspired the film and especially about the relationship between the male and female criminals.
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:36 PM PST - 4 comments

Mobile game developer Niantic has conjured up another massively popular franchise to turn into a location-aware mobile game, announcing that they are working on Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

However, both their existing games, Pokemon GO and Ingress, have been troubled by cheaters and stalkers who use sophisticated automated tools to gain advantage over legitimate players. Niantic has stated that they will take action to enforce their Terms of Service but will this be enough to mitigate the privacy risks?
posted by radwolf76 at 7:20 PM PST - 40 comments

A miniature masterpiece from the Greek tomb of the “Griffin Warrior.” From an archaeological dig in the Pylos region of Greece, a find in a Bronze Age grave : "the tomb has revealed its most valuable secret, and intricately carved sealstone that researchers are calling “one of the finest works of prehistoric Greek art ever discovered.”
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 2:38 PM PST - 50 comments

The Situationist International Online at The Collaboratory for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech. Worth it for the astonishingly packed chronology - did these people never sleep?
posted by thatwhichfalls at 1:49 PM PST - 2 comments

The Radical Vision Behind One Company’s Unstoppable Pants - "Outlier started nearly a decade ago making pants to bike to work in. Now they’re making weirder, exaggerated, occasionally dystopian gear, too. What happens when a company that makes pants for the future finds itself living in a darkest-timeline present?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:37 PM PST - 72 comments

Peggy is troubled by an ominous dream. Hank makes his dreams come true. Bobby gets ready for his baseball game. Hank meets his neighbors and chats with a machine. Hank catches Bobby smoking and reacts. Edited by Aliantos.
posted by Fizz at 11:43 AM PST - 20 comments

Thor: Ragnarok Is Quietly the Queerest Superhero Movie Yet versus Thor: Ragnarok's Valkyrie Shows How Far We've Got to Go for LGBTQ Representation on the Big Screen
posted by Artw at 11:16 AM PST - 42 comments

Gordi's cover of Linkin Park's In the End gives me the frisson.
posted by Lutoslawski at 11:08 AM PST - 4 comments

Manson Bloggers and the World of Murder Fandom (Rachel Monroe, in The Believer). Longreads: "Monroe’s piece isn’t just about the Manson Family or those who still obsess about him; it’s about whether we ever truly escape ourselves. Do we carry pieces of our younger selves with us, even as we grow and change?"
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:29 AM PST - 13 comments

We've had Robo-Rosewater. We've had Robo-Romance (of the Harlequin variety). Most recently, we've even had Robo-Slashdot. But only now have we reached the glory days of what AI can bring us, with the Recurrently Generated English Football League.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:51 AM PST - 34 comments

In the ongoing tradition of cloud required devices being killed by their creators, Logitech will be bricking the Logitech Harmony Link in March of 2018. [more inside]
posted by sotonohito at 9:22 AM PST - 56 comments

The Unforgiving Minute | We have built entire lives, families, and communities around the absence of this conversation. And yet here we are, having it anyway. So let’s deal with some common queries, the very first of which is: how do we handle what we know now about how women have been treated for so long? (Laurie Penny on Longreads)
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 9:11 AM PST - 52 comments

The World Wealth and Income Database WID.world "aims to provide open and convenient access to the most extensive available database on the historical evolution of the world distribution of income and wealth, both within countries and between countries."
posted by amitai at 8:56 AM PST - 4 comments

Frank has done it again. Check out the incredible wooden eye Frank Howarth created recently. [more inside]
posted by RhysPenbras at 7:42 AM PST - 12 comments

There was much discussion, in the wake of Donald Trump’s shock election win a year ago this week, of the risk of normalisation ... that a climate of authoritarian nationalism could gradually take hold – and that everyone would simply accept it... I’ve worried about a similar escalation here – but now I think I was worrying about the wrong thing. It’s not authoritarian nationalism that the May government has successfully normalised. It’s total fucking incompetence.

John Elledge in the New Statesman
posted by Grangousier at 6:15 AM PST - 164 comments

During World War II the FBI expanded its fingerprint records dramatically. The records were kept on cards in index cabinets in an 80,000 square foot facility in the National Guard Armory in Washington D.C. [more inside]
posted by carter at 5:32 AM PST - 19 comments

Spacing out is so important to us as a species that “it could be at the crux of what makes humans different from less complicated animals."

Manoush Zomorodi discusses boredom.
posted by Rumple at 11:25 PM PST - 15 comments

Chris de Burgh's 1986 album Into The Light [50m35s] was released at the height of the Reagan-era Cold War and is a document of its time. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:17 PM PST - 40 comments

Finance isn't just an industry. It's a system of social control - "A system for constraining the choices of other social actors." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:12 PM PST - 19 comments

Approximately US$150M of Ethereum was accidentally burned by someone mucking around with a multisig contract. [more inside]
posted by Coventry at 7:00 PM PST - 213 comments

Larry and Balki meet the Demogorgan in Perfect Stranger Things. [SLYT] [more inside]
posted by Servo5678 at 3:02 PM PST - 48 comments

Roy Halladay, former pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies, has died in a plane crash off the Gulf coast of Florida. Halladay is one six pitchers to win a Cy Young award in both the American and National Leagues, and only the second person to throw a no-hitter in the post-season. He was 40.
posted by thecjm at 2:32 PM PST - 41 comments

Threadless made millions by selling out huge runs of crowdsourced T-shirts; now they’re printing almost everything one by one.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:36 PM PST - 73 comments

Hola Papi! is an advice column by "writer, Twitterer, and prolific Grindr user John Paul Brammer", that tackles topics like cultural appropriation, internalized homophobia, and mental health concerns with empathy and humor. [more inside]
posted by ITheCosmos at 12:16 PM PST - 15 comments

What happened when my partner became prime minister? For starters, no curry
posted by Start with Dessert at 12:13 PM PST - 26 comments

Bendik Giske creates incredible solo performances with just himself and a saxophone. He states "By using a number of microphones on my instrument and body, I aim to create an augmented version of the instrument and my voice without any loopers or layers." The result is something unique, abrasive and wonderful.
posted by Field Tripper at 11:09 AM PST - 7 comments

Call of Duty: WWII – War Is Still Kind of The Same [Gaming Bolt] “Since 2003, Activision has released sixteen full-length Call of Duty games, if you count standalone spin-offs like Call of Duty: Finest Hour and Call of Duty 2: Big Red One. Games in the series have been created by original developer Infinity Ward, Treyarch (who has made the franchise’s most commercially successful games with the Black Ops sub-series), and newcomers Sledgehammer Games. The series has traveled from the beaches of Normandy to the rivers of Vietnam and even into space. [...] The goal is here is twofold: to return the series to its boots-on-the-ground roots, which were lacking in the last two titles, and to the conflict that defined the series before its excursion to a technology-focused future for a change of pace.” [YouTube][Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:35 AM PST - 41 comments

In 1990, Bill Watterson created a Calvin and Hobbes storyline in which Calvin is bullied into playing baseball during recess.
posted by rewil at 9:14 AM PST - 117 comments

Princeton University, founded as the College of New Jersey in 1746, exemplifies the central paradox of American history. From the start, liberty and slavery were intertwined. The Princeton and Slavery Project investigates the University’s involvement with the institution of slavery, through a range of primary sources and stories exploring its slaveholding presidents and professors, its African American communities on campus and in town, its first African American students, and the legacy of slavery in its archives and public memorials.
posted by verstegan at 6:14 AM PST - 4 comments

100 years ago today, the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee toppled Russia's Provisional Government, leading to the Bolsheviks' assumption of state power. [more inside]
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 5:51 AM PST - 88 comments

You know you just can't get enough of those juicy, succulent Presidential tweets, so here's the Markov chain bot the world so obviously needed.
posted by loquacious at 5:23 AM PST - 31 comments

When the drugs came, they hit all at once. It was the eighties, one in ten residents slipped into the deep of heroin addiction—bankers, university students, carpenters, socialites, miners—and Portugal fell into a panic.
posted by ellieBOA at 4:19 AM PST - 5 comments

The Guardian's Alexis Petridis anatomises the underground metal scene. This is the most enjoyable bit of music journalism I've read in some time - it has just the right tone of affectionate bemusement which this genre demands. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 2:58 AM PST - 29 comments

The Charter of the Forest gave the commons rights, and protected the common good. Facsimile and translation, rich with words. A proposed modern version. In Our Times discusses it with the Battle of Lincoln (around 35'). A glorious tree that was coppiced for centuries. Previously (Chomsky, commons), previously (secret history of Magna Carta).
posted by clew at 11:16 PM PST - 8 comments

Who can resist adorable baby cows? Not these dogs and humans. Older cows are pretty fun, too—and give excellent face baths. Aw heck, just watch this compilation of charming cows. [Most videos have cheery music]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:31 PM PST - 26 comments

In which a large corporation reacts to a major natural disaster with a bit of heart that feels completely heartwarming to me. TJX [TJ Maxx & related companies] Paying Its Employees In Puerto Rico, Even Though Its Stores Remain Closed [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:48 PM PST - 10 comments

Last week, author, UN speaker, and Chuck Tingle avatar Zoe Quinn was banned from Postmates for attempting to order a penguin from the zoo. [more inside]
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 7:34 PM PST - 35 comments

Teamwork [farther] [closer]
posted by Room 641-A at 6:44 PM PST - 15 comments

Chris Thile and his Prairie Home Companion band cover Vulfpeck's Fugue State.
posted by stinkfoot at 5:45 PM PST - 24 comments

Valérie Plante a été élue maire de Montréal. Elle est la première femme à occuper cette fonction.
Valérie Plante has been elected as mayor of Montréal. She is the first woman to hold this office. [more inside]
posted by mrjohnmuller at 5:30 PM PST - 15 comments

You have worked hard today. You deserve to sit back and enjoy the Simon's Cat animated special in color.
posted by 4ster at 5:16 PM PST - 18 comments

Travel Oregon : the game is a web-based travel adventure simulation, rendered in a style which may appear historically familiar. Choose what type of traveler you are e.g. Yoga Teacher, Winemaker or Surfer, spend your $1,000 on supplies (artisanal coffee is $5 a pot, kombucha is $3), choose your region of the Beaver State, and away you go. Part of the Travel Oregon tourism website.
posted by Wordshore at 5:11 PM PST - 28 comments

Adapted from an ongoing manga by relative newcomer studio Kinema Citrus, Made in Abyss (youtube trailer) explores the drive of curiosity, the limits of humanity, and a giant, terrifying pit. [more inside]
posted by lucidium at 4:50 PM PST - 15 comments

This site, a rabbit-hole, only got a casual mention back in 2012. Two other posts from 2011 were about specific collections, so I believe this is the first post about the full site. The lists are updated quarterly so there's a lot new (and they're marked since the last update). The sections for the main collections are The Museum Campus, The Permanent Collection, and Galleries, Exhibitions, and Shows. Then, over on Page Two / Archives (link in the upper right corner), are several other categories of lists/links for such things as posters, typography, comics, maps & travel. I dipped into Typography and quickly realized I'd be there for hours, so have put it off. Great fun.
posted by MovableBookLady at 4:02 PM PST - 5 comments

A brave journalist sees the bittersweet vision of the end of his job and his industry. Building on the many fascinating discussions [fp btw, hello to all] here on the cars that will drive themselves, Bob Lutz of Automotive News takes a guess at the near future of the automotive industry. Bring on the pods.
posted by breezytimes at 2:34 PM PST - 59 comments

On being a Frank Zappa fan.
posted by Artw at 2:28 PM PST - 46 comments

APEIOΣ ΠOTHP KAI H TOY ΦIΛOΣOΦOY ΛIΘOΣ [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:20 PM PST - 13 comments

Thirty Years After My Adoption, I Found Out I Wasn’t a US Citizen
posted by crazy with stars at 1:18 PM PST - 18 comments

What To Do When Racists Try To Hijack Your Religion White supremacists are coopting Norse heathen symbols. Should the heathens ignore them? Protest them? Create a new theology?
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:04 PM PST - 97 comments

It’s somewhat stunning just how uniform the rejection of “ornament” became. Since the eclipse of Art Deco at the end of the 1930s, the intricate designs that characterized centuries of building, across civilizations, from India to Persia to the Mayans, have vanished from architecture. . .no modern buildings include the kind of highly complex painting, woodwork, ironwork, and sculpture that characterized the most strikingly beautiful structures of prior eras. [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 11:35 AM PST - 139 comments

5 November 2017 - the ICIJ leaks a literal treasure trove of documents related to the piggy banks of the 1% Wilbur Ross, Bono, Trump, Apple, and Queen Elizabeth II are among over 120k people variously implicated in leaked documents pertaining to an estimated $10 trillion dollars in funds.

Wikipedia

Grauniad

NYT

posted by aspersioncast at 11:23 AM PST - 70 comments

Miriam Lancewood and her husband Peter live a decidedly spartan nomadic existence. (slTheGuardian) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 11:16 AM PST - 38 comments

One year after perhaps the most disastrous electoral result in the history of the United States, tomorrow America returns to the polls for Election Day.

With a mixed record this year of surprising victories in state-level legislative special elections, but several disappointments in Congressional ones, the Democratic party is hoping to turn the historic low approval ratings of the president into electoral victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere across the nation. [more inside]
posted by Chrysostom at 10:59 AM PST - 1119 comments

Who needs Hyperloop when we could have been getting around all this time in hovercraft trains? That's right: I said hovercraft trains! Get your fill of air-cushioned, levitating nerdery after the jump. [more inside]
posted by adamgreenfield at 10:47 AM PST - 3 comments

Before New Zealand director Taika Waititi (previously) hit the box office big leagues this week with Thor: Ragnarok, he helped usher in another blockbuster when he wrote the initial screenplay for the Disney hit Moana. More recently, he took time out of his busy schedule to translate the entire movie into Maori. So now you can now enjoy Jemaine Clement getting his Bowie on in this Maori translation of "Shiny".
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 10:34 AM PST - 9 comments

Remembering the Radioactive Boy Scout. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:12 AM PST - 24 comments

Our Choices to Buy Physical or Digital Games Are Controlling Our Gaming Habits [Game Revolution] “Outside of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I’ve logged the most Nintendo Switch hours playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The former I purchased on a physical cartridge, while the latter was received via digital code as a review copy. It may seem minor, but the more I think about it, the more certain I am that I wouldn’t have played either game as much had they swapped places. As digital marketplaces have become increasingly commonplace and storage becomes cheaper, most players have begun to establish a consistent preference: I prefer digital, or I prefer hard copies.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:57 AM PST - 44 comments

Sometimes the gods see a little boy with a single mother and no money and decide to sprinkle stardust on him. Friends come easy and stay true. He is given effortless grace and talent, and the respect of his peers. When the time comes to ask for the blessing of the great departed elder (previously), he glides down the face of a monstrous wave and through its roaring foam to victory. He is given normal human fears, but none of the demons that the gods use to drive and torment the great. He sails from island to island with his friends, immersed in beauty, making movies. The gods never ask him to grow up. Like everything else with John John, the tableau is weirdly innocent—Edenic, even.
posted by clawsoon at 6:31 AM PST - 10 comments

In existence since 1958, the World Constitution and Parliament Association has been taking preliminary steps to form a World Parliament, as mandated by the Constitution for the Federation of Earth, which had its first draft in 1968. This constitution, under the auspices of the so-called Earth Federation Movement, sets out in detail how a world parliament should be construed, as well as defining the steps and processes we need to take towards achieving it. Jindal Global University is hosting a conference in Delhi this week: “Building the World Parliament 2017”. [more inside]
posted by cbrody at 6:16 AM PST - 5 comments

How do we know when it starts? How to differentiate dementia from climbing the stairs to retrieve something, but being unable to remember what? Do we declare an onset of Alzheimer’s after forgetting a famous face (you know, what’s his name?). It’s a dim boundary, but at some point our neurons struggle to recalibrate. The cortex and hippocampus are irrevocably changed. In memory loss, there is already death. Cells die and each one is a divesting of some part of the past. The cortex shrinks where the cells used to be. The spaces in between expand. Islands in the sea of the mind. An archipelago of the former self.
posted by ellieBOA at 4:17 AM PST - 21 comments

Flaming good fun in Sussex. Every year at this time, the English seaside town of Lewes goes slightly insane. It hosts the biggest and best Bonfire Night celebration anywhere in the UK, a festival that's essentially a Sussex Mardi Gras with elements of The Wicker Man thrown in. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 2:02 AM PST - 17 comments

A man named Hlynur Hallgrímsson tried to throw a garbage bag down the garbage chute in his apartment building while a storm passed through Reykjavík last night.
posted by Kattullus at 1:43 AM PST - 22 comments

Various countries in East Africa are trying to curb the import of used clothing from the West not just to support their local textiles industries but also to protect "the dignity of its people". However, their efforts to do so have led to severe backlash from Western countries like the United States, who have threatened to remove these countries from trade deals geared towards building economic growth in the region.
posted by divabat at 10:00 PM PST - 48 comments

Nearly three hours of David Mitchell (previously 1, 2). being hilarious on the BBC show, Would I Lie To You: Posh and repressed?; Barbigerous Harbinger of Exuberance; Mitchellian rants and outbursts.
posted by Room 641-A at 4:52 PM PST - 83 comments

TripAdvisor removed warnings about rapes and injuries at Mexico resorts, tourists say
posted by crazy with stars at 1:07 PM PST - 54 comments

from 2013: Critical Perspectives on Waluigi
Guest Post: More Critical Perspectives on Waluigi [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:35 PM PST - 13 comments

Why Burial’s Untrue Is the Most Important Electronic Album of the Century So Far (Simon Reynolds, Pitchfork). [more inside]
posted by sapagan at 10:49 AM PST - 45 comments

4K time-lapse footage of monsoons [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 10:23 AM PST - 7 comments

George Michael once said that he wanted to be remembered as a great songwriter more than anything else. Here's Coldplay's Chris Martin performing a posthumous duet with Michael: A Different Corner.
posted by hippybear at 9:55 AM PST - 19 comments

Nintendo’s old promotional Flash games are being brought back to life. [Origami64] “A modder, programmer, and all-around Nintendo enthusiast who goes by the name Skelux has been working on restoring all of Nintendo’s old promotional Flash games. As these creations only lived online, many of them eventually disappeared without a trace. Over time, Flash became less popular and dedicated Flash-based game websites were often deleted once they had aged past the release they were designed to promote. However, Skelux has made it a mission to restore and make available all of Nintendo’s Flash games, spanning from 1999 to 2010.” [Flash Games Nintendo Made, MEGA Collection!][YouTube] [via: The Verge]
posted by Fizz at 8:39 AM PST - 2 comments

@Jack has been a busy boy recently: Twitter banned a popular account because dumb nazis fell for a prank (or pretended to). In fairness, so did fox. Twitter announced new rules to prevent abuse and harassment - the main outcome of which appears to be banning bisexuals. Nazis, an extremely favored user group on Twitters, are likely to be okay. A Twitter engineer identified Russian bots in 2015 and was told to "stay in lane". The thing Jack does want from employees, instead of raising obvious problems? Relentless optimism.
posted by Artw at 8:33 AM PST - 113 comments

A man with a steady job leaves it behind to start a restaurant. If at any point during reading this you think, "Eesh, what else could go wrong?" just wait a few paragraphs. You'll find out.
posted by veggieboy at 7:03 AM PST - 168 comments

The Observer celebrates 10 years of the Observer/Cape/Comica graphic short story prize with a Graphic Novel special [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:11 AM PST - 16 comments

The internet will inevitably steal the soul of every child at some point as he or she grows up, but some are speeding the process along by manipulating YouTube's powerful algorithm. […] Take for example the video embedded below that showed up on both YouTube and the Kids app: You press play and at first your screen fills with recognizable cartoon characters and cheesy music — but things take a drastic turn when Elsa and Spider-Man arm themselves with automatic weapons.

posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:35 PM PST - 82 comments

"You can play this game forever, with any given set of magical powers. Controlling the elements, for instance, seems considerably harder than controlling an animal (unless, perhaps, it is a cat)—but, if you are going to try to control the elements, summoning a breeze seems easier than turning night to day. If you’re going to work magic on your own body, becoming invisible seems more plausible than transmogrifying, perhaps because of the abundance of everyday ways to conceal ourselves. Yet, if transmogrification is going to occur, I’d wager that it is easier to turn oneself into a wolf than one’s enemy into a toad."
An article on the relative plausibility of impossible beings and reasoning about unreasonable things, SLNewYorker
posted by Grandysaur at 9:44 PM PST - 12 comments

Krista and Tatiana Hogan (previously) share a skull, a thalamus, a conciousness, a tiny dog, and, recently, a landmark birthday (video is canada-locked. workarounds welcome) [more inside]
posted by mrjohnmuller at 9:19 PM PST - 12 comments

The Canadian Down Syndrome Society would like to offer some suggestions on what to say when you hear that a friend's bundle of joy has Down Syndrome. And what not to say. Perhaps you'd prefer to send a card?
posted by jacquilynne at 8:08 PM PST - 23 comments

On the Face of It: Darwin and the Evolution of Expression. An experiment on his son 4-month-old Willy Darwin led Charles Darwin to a lifelong study of how we show emotion - and to breakthroughs in child psychology. The experiment turned out to be an often-overlooked landmark in the history of science.
posted by gudrun at 6:42 PM PST - 3 comments

Boston University recently hosted culinary historian Michael Twitty as part of its Pépin Lecture Series. Here's what he had to say about his memoir, The Cooking Gene, and the "search for my food roots and family routes during the first 250 odd years of American history." [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:39 PM PST - 9 comments

A child genius raised in poverty, she wanted to change the world. Then a horrific act of violence nearly destroyed her. This is a story of how family dynamics and outsider obsession can stifle and derail the most brilliant among us, and poses the question of how much can be lost and has been lost to the world. It's one of the saddest stories I've heard.
posted by MovableBookLady at 3:14 PM PST - 57 comments

Why can't you go faster than the speed of light? Here it is, explained just about as simply as possible. From Fermilab.
posted by JHarris at 2:57 PM PST - 86 comments

Yemen's Houthis fire missile at Riyadh [more inside]
posted by glonous keming at 2:06 PM PST - 71 comments

A short video clip. Dezeen: "The five-storey-high space is framed by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, which are staggered at different levels to form the shape of an eye socket, while a spherical mirrored auditorium at the centre forms the pupil." Curbed: "Measuring about 363,000 square feet, the Tianjin Binhai Library comprises what is essentially a glass box sheathed in horizontal louvers that correspond to the “continuous” floor-to-ceiling system of bookcases that appears to “cascade” down the interior walls." Inhabitat: (Winy Mass, co-founder of the designers MVRDV) "The bookshelves are great spaces to sit and at the same time allow for access to the upper floors. The angles and curves are meant to stimulate different uses of the space, such as reading, walking, meeting and discussing." [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 1:30 PM PST - 18 comments

“There’s no state too red for us to go into,” Turner said. “We’re not going to leave any state or anybody in any state behind because they’re not ‘electorally viable.’”

“From Texas to Florida, voters are supporting candidates across the broad spectrum of the left: progressive Democrats and committed socialists who want to reduce wealth inequality, return power to workers, and chip away at structures of oppression that have kept people of color, women, LGBTQ folks, and others from wielding economic and political control.” In cities across the South, Socialism is on the ballot. Casey Williams, Scalawag Magazine. [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 10:06 AM PST - 111 comments

Wayne Sorce's cityscapes captured NYC and Chicago in gorgeous color. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Sorce explored the urban landscapes of New York and Chicago with his large format camera, making precisely balanced compositions of color, geometry, and light that also recorded the era’s particular styles of signage, advertising, and automobile design.
posted by hippybear at 9:30 AM PST - 18 comments

The War Against Pope Francis.

With more than a billion followers, the Catholic church is the largest global organisation the world has ever seen, and many of its followers are divorced, or unmarried parents. To carry out its work all over the world, it depends on voluntary labour. If the ordinary worshippers stop believing in what they are doing, the whole thing collapses. Francis knows this. If he cannot reconcile theory and practice, the church might be emptied out everywhere. His opponents also believe the church faces a crisis, but their prescription is the opposite. For them, the gap between theory and practice is exactly what gives the church worth and meaning. If all the church offers people is something they can manage without, Francis’s opponents believe, then it will surely collapse.

Oh, and did you know that Steve Bannon is trying to take over the Church too? (Single link, longread Guardian.)
posted by Melismata at 6:37 AM PST - 52 comments

J. Saxena (previously) on gender in food trends and marketing: Women Aren't Ruining Food and Are Men OK? No really, are they OK?
posted by progosk at 3:33 AM PST - 119 comments

Alongside a few tubes of Mummy Brown are other pigments whose origin stories are practically legend. Tyrian purple, an ancient Phoenician dye that requires 10,000 mollusks to produce a single gram of pigment, is said to have been discovered by Hercules’s dog as he snuffled along the beach. Indian yellow, purportedly made from the urine of cows fed only on mango leaves, was banned by the British government in the early 20th century on the grounds that its production constituted animal cruelty. Ultramarine, a vivid blue made from lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan, was once more precious than gold.

[more inside]
posted by infinite intimation at 2:16 AM PST - 5 comments

Indeed, one of the most significant challenges facing anyone who wants to develop an exercise pill is that the biological processes unleashed by physical activity are still relatively mysterious. For all the known benefits of a short loop around the park, scientists are, for the most part, incapable of explaining how exercise does what it does. [slNewYorker]
posted by ellieBOA at 12:34 AM PST - 23 comments

Tell me about a complicated man. / Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost / when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, / and where he went, and who he met, the pain / he suffered in the storms at sea, and how / he worked to save his life and bring his men / back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, / they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god / kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, / tell the old story for our modern times. / Find the beginning.

Emily Wilson is the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English. via [more inside]
posted by Rumple at 11:05 PM PST - 29 comments

All the News and Trailers From Blizzcon 2017's Opening Ceremony [IGN] New characters, new expansions, and much more. Blizzcon kicked off today with an opening ceremony full of new announcements for StarCraft 2, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft. Below you'll find all the news and trailers from Blizzcon 2017's opening ceremony. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:40 PM PST - 40 comments

The rise and decline of one college's student movement. Chris Bodenner chronicles the career of Reedies Against Racism. (Reed College previously)
posted by doctornemo at 6:06 PM PST - 35 comments

4 years old. 5 years old. 6 years old. 7 years old. 8 years old.
posted by clawsoon at 4:30 PM PST - 4 comments

Reddit has banned several hate groups in the past couple of weeks, including r/Nazi, r/EuropeanNationalism, and r/pol. Also gone: r/NationalSocialism, r/whitesarecriminals, r/Far_Right, and r/DylannRoofInnocent. The new policy explanation says,

Going forward, we will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people; likewise, we will also take action against content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals. This applies to ALL content on Reddit, including memes, CSS/community styling, flair, subreddit names, and usernames.

[more inside]
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 3:36 PM PST - 100 comments

Maths crusader and football fan, Matt Parker, has started a campaign to fix the football image on street signs in the U.K. which are mathematically incorrect. He explains here.
posted by agatha_magatha at 3:21 PM PST - 29 comments

8 sci-fi writers what Star Trek show they would write if given the chance.
posted by Artw at 11:27 AM PST - 180 comments

Nick Stewart: Fountain pen inks are made up of dyes. When the inks are applied to blotting paper the dyes are released and the colours spread outwards – imagine a drop of petrol on wet tarmac. I have found a way of achieving and utilising this effect on watercolour paper. The chromatic process is very much serendipity led and the beauty of the final outcomes are invariably dictated by this. Because they are natural and non contrived, the viewer is naturally drawn to them, like watching clouds or a sunset. I’m also a firm believer in the concept of ‘less is more’ and through these processes you can get so much from so little. I also love the idea of alchemy or in this case, creating a gold effect through subjecting fountain pen inks to bleach.
posted by rewil at 10:45 AM PST - 15 comments

After the LA Times reported how Disney uses its power to dodge paying its fair share of Anaheim local government, the company banned the newspaper from its press events, in effect preventing them from reviewing and reporting on their movies before public release.
posted by grobstein at 10:03 AM PST - 24 comments

Lindsay Ellis once again gives a deep dive into movie history and film theory with Disney’s The Hunchback Of Norte Dame (38:00), touching on Victor Hugo’s original work, authorial intent, the history and problems of adaptation, visual mass media, internal Disney power struggles and ...Nazis.
posted by The Whelk at 9:48 AM PST - 15 comments

"The reason bosozuko are gone now is that Japan is a fully developed country. It won't allow any flaws in the system. Current society will not allow the average low-life to succeed at life by doing low-life things."

-Revisiting the Glory Days with One of Japan's Most Violent Biker Gangs [more inside]
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 9:16 AM PST - 18 comments

The Great Diary Project: "Diary rescuer" (and also British Museum curator) Irving Finkel, founded the Great Diary Project, a repository for any all diaries in non-digital formats by private individuals. Finkel believes that every diary is a valuable resource full of remarkable details. "All human life is there, and every entry is helpfully dated for future historians." For the sake of posterity, you can donate your own. via ALDaily.
posted by Miko at 6:19 AM PST - 34 comments

How Martin Luther Changed The World [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:15 AM PST - 19 comments

Study Explains Why We Empathize More With Dogs Than [Adult] People [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:05 PM PST - 84 comments

Canadian runner breaks beer mile world record “I guess you could say I’m living every student athletes’ dream,” he said with a laugh. Corey Bellemore breaks (his own) world record for the beer mile.
posted by kneecapped at 10:42 PM PST - 30 comments

The story behind the Chicago newspaper that bought a bar: "One of our customers who came in every day, suddenly said to no one in particular, but loudly, “I’ve figured it out, I’ve finally figured it out, this place is a front! It’s gotta be a front for something.”" Ron Howard: "It was."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:09 PM PST - 29 comments

No, this video game is not ‘eco-terrorism’ [The Verge] “...Minnesota lawmakers and oil lobbyists have slapped a terrorism label on an unexpected new target: a game about a bird. Specifically, a thunderbird. The video game Thunderbird Strike [Vimeo], created by Native designer and Michigan State University professor Elizabeth LaPensée, transforms players into a thunderbird flying across Canada and through the Great Lakes. In dozens of indigenous traditions throughout North America, thunderbirds are considered sacred beings that can bring renewal or destruction; in the game, you restore fallen caribou and buffalo to life, and strike construction and oil equipment with divine lightning. "My goal was to examine the modern through the lens of our stories," LaPensée told The Verge in an interview.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:40 PM PST - 32 comments

By reimagining the kinks and folds of origami as atoms in a lattice, researchers are uncovering strange behavior hiding in simple structures. Statistical mechanics is not my area of expertise (hahaha) but, as much as I can grasp, it's fascinating in its use of origami structures with deliberate faults. The Origami Revolution is a Nova program about all the new ways origami is being used.
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:29 PM PST - 4 comments

Politico has published an excerpt from the upcoming book by Donna Brazile, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC. "When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America. The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised." [more inside]
posted by supercrayon at 5:04 PM PST - 521 comments

As the CIA releases (link news) more of the content of the hard drives in Osama Bin Laden's compound, the Internet wades through the movies (Antz, Cars, Chicken Little, and Resident Evil), propaganda, anime, and games including not surprisingly Counter-Strike, but perhaps more surprisingly ... Animal Crossing: Wild World. We can sadly only speculate on life in his town as Mayor, and his encounters with Tom Nook. (Post title)
posted by Wordshore at 4:47 PM PST - 7 comments

"OR4’s ancestors didn’t ask to be relocated to the lower 48. And while gray wolves have arguably restored a lost component to western ecosystems, they returned to a place much changed—a place full of people, of fat hornless cattle, of snack-sized sheep, of rubber bullets and range riders and firecrackers and helicopters and tranquilizers and traps and collars and GPS signals and government regulations. OR4 never failed as a wolf. He broke human rules. And in the 21st century, being a competent wolf isn’t enough to stay alive. You must also — impossibly — know your place."
posted by zarq at 2:50 PM PST - 12 comments

Condé Nast is shutting down Teen Vogue's print version, laying off 80 people, and reducing frequency on other print publications. No explanations beyond the usual "reduce expenses; remove low performers" business babble. The Mary Sue has some things to say about the shutdown. [more inside]
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:06 PM PST - 56 comments

"When shooting began for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella in July of 1997, the closest Disney had come to showcasing a black princess were the muses from Hercules. In fact, it would be another 12 years before an (animated) black girl got the lead in The Princess and the Frog. But megastar Whitney Houston didn’t want to wait. Remaking Cinderella had been on Houston’s mind for years; long before any footage was shot, before glass slippers were fitted, before anyone thought that Cinderella could have microbraids. Houston and her co-producers knew how important it was for each modern generation to have their own Cinderella — and for many young black girls growing up in the 90s, Brandy was ours." 20 years on, a conversation with the team behind Cinderella.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:09 PM PST - 15 comments

The trouble is that masculinity tells us all – whatever our gender – that women do not know what we are talking about. We live in a world that does not want women to trust themselves. Maybe, as a man with his own abusive tendencies told me not long ago, “even good men don’t really want women to trust themselves, because that would give back some of the power and control that patriarchy gives men.” ‘Good men’ can destroy a woman’s sanity, if they have not seriously, seriously worked on this.
posted by crunchy potato at 12:01 PM PST - 32 comments

Andrei Kashcha's vector field explorer : Plentiful examples of interesting fields on reddit, compose your own with GLSL, or just click randomize.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 11:30 AM PST - 21 comments

Day 287: Cut, Cut, Cut. [this is your U.S. politics thread] [more inside]
posted by Anonymous at 11:29 AM PST - 2565 comments

Play Payba¢k [via mefi projects]
posted by ellieBOA at 10:34 AM PST - 6 comments

“Recognizing these difficulties, a growing number of activists within the industry are developing a different plan. Their insight is as compelling as it is counterintuitive: the best people to confront the power of the tech giants may be their own employees. First, they want to teach their colleagues to see that tech work is work, even though it doesn’t take place in a factory. Then, they want to organise them, so that rank-and-file workers can begin to bring political transparency and democratic accountability to the platforms they have worked to build. Call them the Tech Left.“ - For decades, tech companies promised to make the world better. As that dream falls apart, disillusioned insiders are trying to take back control. By Moira Weigel for The Guardian.
posted by The Whelk at 9:42 AM PST - 26 comments

Unicode Consortium and the Frowning Pile of Poo
posted by rewil at 9:25 AM PST - 33 comments

Google's AI thinks this turtle looks like a gun. The 3D-printed turtle is an example of what’s known as an “adversarial image.” In the AI world, these are pictures engineered to trick machine vision software, incorporating special patterns that make AI systems flip out. Think of them as optical illusions for computers. Humans won’t spot the difference, but to an AI it means that panda has suddenly turned into a pickup truck.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:18 AM PST - 66 comments

John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’: The Story of an SF Horror Game-Changer
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:44 AM PST - 65 comments

Why aren’t area codes laid out in a seemingly logical way, like ZIP Codes are? A dig into the history of the apparently random assignation of US telephone area codes.
posted by carter at 5:10 AM PST - 96 comments

Dan Erlandson (aka DanceHer) has been accused of rape and other sexual misconduct by dozens of women for many years within Seattle's ecstatic dance community. After a failed attempt by the community itself to conduct restorative justice, this week's Seattle Weekly cover story blew the story open.
posted by Revvy at 11:07 PM PST - 16 comments

A Large-Scale Analysis of Technical Support Scams. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 10:20 PM PST - 33 comments

After 12 years, The Consumerist is no more. Founded by Gawker Media (also RIP), Consumerist was sold in 2009 to nonprofit Consumer Reports and reborn as a nonprofit consumer affairs blog with a snarky, savvy tone. On October 30, Consumer Reports moved toward its long-term strategy of "transitioning Consumerist from a standalone site" by shuttering the site and firing the writing staff: Chris Morran, Mary Beth Quirk, Laura Northrup, Kate Cox, and Ashlee Kieler. [more inside]
posted by nicebookrack at 7:49 PM PST - 62 comments

The first article is about writers who've faded into obscurity and some who could repay new fans. Most of them are British, but the story of one who quit after being a best-selling author and went into an entirely new line of work—well, he was American. The second article is about horror authors who deserve movie or tv adaptations of their work. Some have had small success, some have never been on any screen. Horror writers
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:38 PM PST - 37 comments

An Ode To The Greatest Trees In Video Game History [Now Loading] “With trees being a fairly common sight in all but the harshest environments found on Earth, it's only natural that they soon made their transition into the digital world. From the blurry emerald blobs found in the top-down games of the '80s, to the fluffy 3D structures seen in Super Mario 64, trees have been with us gamers all the way. Sometimes, they have a purpose beyond aesthetics. As in Black and White where your divine avatar is able to pick them up and use them for ungodly purposes, or in today's MOBAs where the fog of war created by trees is an essential part of the mechanics. But mostly, they're just there to create a recognizable and immersive world. Let's take a closer look at some of the defining trees in the history of games” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:16 PM PST - 29 comments

Attorneys general from 46 states and the District of Columbia have filed an antitrust complaint against the $75 billion generic drug sector of the pharmaceutical industry to include 18 companies and at least 15 drugs. The 230-page consolidated brief is here for your reference in case you come across news purporting to summarize the merits or conflate them with any virtuous cause of action to "break-up" Amazon, Twitter, Google, Facebook, or other forms of "prescription benefit management" (PBM). [more inside]
posted by marycatherine at 3:16 PM PST - 17 comments

"On Saturday 2 September, a Traditional Low Mass was held at the Oxford Oratory to mark the anniversary of the death of world-renowned Catholic writer & philologist JRR Tolkien. The Mass was offered, however, not for the repose of Tolkien's soul – but rather praying for his Cause for Beatification to be opened." [more inside]
posted by Paragon at 2:49 PM PST - 42 comments

The Sticky, Untold Story of Cinnabon [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 12:05 PM PST - 114 comments

Revisiting the Greenbelt Towns, a Forgotten 1930s Attempt at American Utopia - “They didn’t want these towns built because they would be put into direct competition with the private housing market.“ (NYT blog) - StoryCorp interviews with long time Greenbelt residents
posted by The Whelk at 9:17 AM PST - 13 comments

Jonesing for just one more scary story after Halloween? Check out the short comic The Door In The Kitchen by Abby Howard.
posted by Adridne at 8:17 AM PST - 21 comments

Can you improve your school's rankings without discriminating against the poor? Probably not, as it turns out. This Vox article and browser game will simulate how selective colleges make their student acceptance and aid package decisions (in a very simplified way). Decent overview of the market failures in the system and in the way America ranks its universities, so that poor students are discriminated against while richer kids with better SAT scores get aid they probably don't really need.
posted by sharp pointy objects at 7:58 AM PST - 54 comments

Mark Hamill has always embraced his “Star Wars” legacy, but when he was invited back for “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi,” he hesitated: “I was just really scared.” from Luke Skywalker Speaks [SLNYT]
posted by chavenet at 7:43 AM PST - 22 comments

It's health insurance time again. Open enrollment season starts today in the United States for individuals. Need to sign-up? It's time to get covered on HealthCare.gov by December 15th. The marketplace offers lower costs for most Americans this year, yet "daunting obstacles" and widespread confusion persist amid sabotage attempts, causing much higher costs for some. And a grassroots group works to do what the government won't to Get America Covered. More details inside, in increasing levels of wonkery. [more inside]
posted by zachlipton at 7:36 AM PST - 43 comments

A Halloween stop motion pumpkin carving experiment [slyt] [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 7:07 AM PST - 4 comments

Haeckel's legacy as a biologist includes the phrases "ecology" and "stem cell", but he is most known for his amazing illustrations. His radiolaria images are iconic. Wait, you say, haven't we seen him on here before? You have indeed, but not since 2009, so you might not yet know that his book Kunstformen der Natur is now also available as a coloring book, or that this gallery of Haeckel images is curated by the editor of an entirely new book with 450 drawings and paintings by Haeckel. This sudden abundance of Haeckel art is possibly a build-up to the 100th anniversary of his death in 2019. Either way, after 8 years it was about time for some more Haeckel on here.
posted by easternblot at 5:00 AM PST - 6 comments

Chicken on a Raft is a sea-shanty. But what the hell is it about? [more inside]
posted by Stark at 4:56 AM PST - 10 comments

Milk Chocolate Is Better Than Dark, the End
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:26 AM PST - 114 comments