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An interview with architect-turned-filmmaker Kibwe Tavares about his new film, Jonah. "Something I noticed while I was travelling in East Africa was the segregation between tourists and local people. I felt strange. None of the locals expected me to be a tourist because I was black – but I was staying in these weird campsites which were really isolated – so I was in Africa but surrounded by white people. Somehow I was the only black guy in a very black place." (previously)
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:40 PM PST - 3 comments

Did you know the U.S. was at war in the Philippines? An excerpt from David Axe's new book. Previously.
posted by destrius at 11:01 PM PST - 19 comments

This memory was added on: May 3, 2009
gotta love him!..I found him in the attic recently and was reminded of the times my friends and I would take him out with us to concerts, culbs and parties in the late 70's early 80's...he does not have his disguises .. just his beautiful bald head and blue eyes...I was tempted to sell him..but i know he would haunt me in my dreams...he's here right next to me now giving me the unhairy eyeball just talking about it...I hear Hugo...and I obey....
posted by not_on_display at 10:53 PM PST - 7 comments

John William Keedy is a photographer who was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder 9 years ago. Since then, he's been thinking of thoughts and feelings that are considered not "normal," and he has displayed some of these thoughts in a series of photos titled It’s Hardly Noticeable. Wired's Raw File has larger images and more thoughts from Keedy.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:57 PM PST - 34 comments

Brian Christinzio, a.k.a. B.C. Camplight, is a former semi-professional boxer and an extraordinary Philly-bred piano-pop singer-songwriter who got some mainstream exposure when Blood and Peanut Butter, off his first album "Hide, Run Away," landed on an episode of Grey's Anatomy. He's also spent much of his life struggling with mental illness, and wrote his second album, "Blink of a Nihilist" -- a minor hit in the UK, but barely released stateside -- from a mental institution. (Here's Lord, I've Been on Fire, the lead single from that album.) [more inside]
posted by eugenen at 5:52 PM PST - 6 comments

[All links probably NSFW] Ingrid Berthon-Moine is a London-based photographer whose latest series Marbles focuses specifically on the testicles of Classical Greek statuary. Hyperallergic asks her why.
posted by shakespeherian at 4:01 PM PST - 95 comments

Book Titles with One Letter Missing [more inside]
posted by ActionPopulated at 2:42 PM PST - 529 comments

Lost Words in the Chamber. "This blog will post the last words of criminals executed in the United States, starting with Texas, the state with the highest annual number of executions." Via NYT.
posted by milquetoast at 2:38 PM PST - 16 comments

A sense of foreboding is rising across an increasingly troubled land.
One year after being democratically elected Egypt's President Morsi defies threat of military coup.
Some say the Egyptian Army Can’t Oust President Without ‘American Approval'
Al Jazeera - Egypt opposition to continue mass protests.
Background: Financial Times Egypt in transition.
posted by adamvasco at 2:27 PM PST - 128 comments

Kid snippets.
posted by mudpuppie at 2:00 PM PST - 23 comments

Daniel Lessner plays Liszt's piano transcription of the overture to Tannhäuser.
posted by klue at 1:31 PM PST - 6 comments

On July 1st, 1867, an act creating a federal dominion and establishing the Government of Canada came into effect. While citizens of the world's second largest nation may celebrate by reminiscing over tear-inducing beer commercials, bemoaning the craziness of its mayors, or feeling bad about the tar sands, I posit to you that there is no more Canadian thing on the internet than this video of Chris Hadfield singing a song with the Barenaked Ladies.
posted by sparklemotion at 12:11 PM PST - 41 comments

The Merry Pranksters Who Hacked the Afghan War [more inside]
posted by zarq at 12:02 PM PST - 16 comments

Canada has lost its famous politeness. With oil and gas now accounting for approximately a quarter of its export revenue, over the last decade Canada has not so quietly become an international mining center and a rogue petrostate.
posted by four panels at 11:56 AM PST - 73 comments

F**k, I Need Some New Swear Words: Too many curse words strengthen the kind of social structures that we should be dismantling. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:05 AM PST - 244 comments

Photographer Linda Kuo's work focuses on "animals and their encounters with human civilizations". Displaced shows exotic animals being cared for at the Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine in NYC, while Hit and Run shows the aftermath of wild animals' encounters with vehicles upstate. (warning: Dead Animals).
posted by theweasel at 10:28 AM PST - 8 comments

Black Soviet Icon's Lonely American Sojourn: For decades Jim Patterson was arguably the most famous black man in the Soviet Union, a debonair homegrown poet whose childhood role in an iconic film cemented his celebrity and who later roamed the vast country reading his work to adoring audiences. These days Patterson, whose African-American father emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1932, is convalescing in a threadbare subsidized apartment in downtown Washington, where he has led a reclusive life plagued by illness and depression since his Russian mother died more than a decade ago.
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:25 AM PST - 16 comments

Until this point, your friendships happened through a vague combination of forced institutional socializing, classes, sports and booze. None of your friends can remember exactly how they became friends with each other. But now you are an adult, and now that friend-making is a conscious act, you realize you don’t know how to do it.
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:41 AM PST - 317 comments

American Way of Birth, Costliest in the World (SLNYT)
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:17 AM PST - 104 comments

Measuring the fecal output of hippos. If you wanted to spend the first day of July watching a timelapse video of a Hippo enclosure being cleaned, filled & then dirtied again, you've come to the right place. Full details of the research being done are on this blog post.
posted by mostlymuppet at 8:03 AM PST - 20 comments

A growing number of American workers are confronting a frustrating predicament on payday: to get their wages, they must first pay a fee.
posted by boo_radley at 7:55 AM PST - 138 comments

I believe we must define a journalist and the constitutional and statutory protections those journalists should receive.
posted by el io at 7:52 AM PST - 20 comments

Diet Wiegman takes using light and darkness to a new level in his sculptures. What may, at first, seem like an abstract composition, often made of mundane recycled items, reveals its amazing secrets when a light is applied. [via]
posted by quin at 7:44 AM PST - 3 comments

Olek is a crochet artist that is furiously crocheting anything that enters or leaves her life. She's crocheted the Wall Street Bull, a Pedi Cab Rickshaw(piloted by an acrobat), a billboard, text messages, automobiles, bikes, shopping carts, and people. When she's not crocheting the streets she is probably weaving her next art exhibit. This woman has made crocheting her life.
posted by rageagainsttherobots at 7:32 AM PST - 8 comments

El-P (also known as El-Producto, formerly of Company Flow), founder of Definitive Jux and producer and rapper of note, and often political rapper (don't call him one), "mayor of Atlanta underground rap" Killer Mike have teamed up to release a free mixtape. It has already gotten some good reviews. (El-P Killer Mike, and R.A.P. Music previously, previouslier.)
posted by Going To Maine at 7:11 AM PST - 13 comments

Breaking a bone often means a stinky, itchy cast that hinders personal hygiene arrangements and means your friends seem to suddenly think it's ok to scrawl obscene graffiti on you (although some people find ways of making them super awesome). But what about a 3D-printed cast? [more inside]
posted by greenish at 7:01 AM PST - 41 comments

Can Silicon Valley Save the World?
posted by infini at 6:42 AM PST - 43 comments

DEC - I mean Digital - I mean Compaq - er, CMGI - no, Overture; rather - Yahoo ... will shut down AltaVista for good next week.
posted by dmd at 4:58 AM PST - 121 comments

From Australia Day 2011 to Australia Day 2012 (26 January, natch) John Thompson posted a different Australian folk song on his blog each day, starting with Mortom Bay and ending of course with Waltzing Matilda. For those who'd like the full audio visual Aussie folk experience, there's also Raymond Crooke's Youtube playlist.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:36 AM PST - 7 comments

Cats puking to techno music (SLYT). Exactly what it says on the tin.
posted by Jacqueline at 3:16 AM PST - 43 comments

Paris Je T'aime - a short 5 minutes film by the Coen Brothers.

In Tuileries, a short film by Joel and Ethan Coen from the 2006 anthology, Paris Je T’Aime, Steve Buscemi plays a mild-mannered tourist caught completely out of his element. What transpires is a rather bizarre five-minute cultural lesson they won’t teach you at Berlitz. via Open Culture

posted by lipsum at 12:52 AM PST - 24 comments

Why StarCraft crashed frequently during development, How we could have fixed the most common causes, The Starcraft Path-finding Hack The making of Warcraft - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 . Game development articles thanks to Patrick Wyatt (about) who led the development efforts on Starcraft, programmed extensively on Diablo and Diablo II and later left Blizzard to help run ArenaNet and release Guild Wars.
posted by meta87 at 12:34 AM PST - 12 comments

"This is a story, a picture story, of two very lucky people before whom was spread out the greatest of treasures, the planet Earth. We traveled aboard a magic carpet, the one with the yellow borders, National Geographic magazine. During four decades we wandered over all the continents and left wakes across the seven seas." [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong at 12:27 AM PST - 9 comments

"Inside a Startup's Plan to Turn a Swarm of DIY Satellites Into an All-Seeing Eye" - Wired on Skybox Imaging. [more inside]
posted by peacay at 12:05 AM PST - 14 comments