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Not so long ago, Western women who wore short hair, and/or garments usually tailored for men, had to be pretty badass to go so visibly outside the usual gender norms, whatever their reasons. And their reasons were many. A gallery on Flickr, with short descriptions of the women featured, from Ida Emily Leeson (1885-1964), the first woman to be named head librarian at the Mitchell Library, the state library of New South Wales, in 1932, to Dr. Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919), a Civil War surgeon who was the only woman to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor in the United States military, for her service during the Civil War.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:48 PM PST - 23 comments

Anthropologists weigh in on Jared Diamond's latest: lack of citations, ethnographic carelessness, and the smoothing of complex narratives into quotable fables. The World Until Yesterday has prompted a flurry of commentary from anthropologists unenthusiastic about the physiologist turned evolutionary biologist turned geographer. In a recent London Review of Books, leading political anthropologist James C. Scott doesn't buy Diamond's description of the modern nation-state arising to curtail primitive tribal violence "[i]n a passage that recapitulates the fable of the social contract" given how "slaving was at the very centre of state-making." Anthropologist Alex Golub, who shares Papua New Guinea as a major research site, wrote "Still, it is telling that we live in an age when a member of America’s National Academy of Sciences and one of the world’s foremost public intellectuals has less concern for citations and footnotes than do the contributors to Wikipedia." David Correia pulls no punches in his opinion piece "F*ck Jared Diamond" calling Diamond's resurrection of environmental determinism as racist apologia and his latest book as essentializing primitivism in order to define Western industrialized exceptionalism. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:03 PM PST - 269 comments

"The American homeland is the planet" Not content with a militarized southern border, the U.S. is now militarizing borders around the world (slsa)
posted by allkindsoftime at 6:49 PM PST - 7 comments

A short video clip about an artist who takes pictures of stranges acting like they're old friends or lovers or relatives. Surprisingly touching and beautiful photos ensue.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 6:21 PM PST - 14 comments

Before You Say You've Never Discriminated Against Someone, Listen To The Second Sentence From An Introverted Single Dad. You Will Punch Your Monitor When You See What A Homeless Upworthy Generator Delighted The Internet With. Starts around 1:54. Gets mindblowing around 2:15.
posted by FAMOUS MONSTER at 6:05 PM PST - 74 comments

State Rep. Uses Sledgehammer To Destroy Homeless People’s Possessions [more inside]
posted by eviemath at 5:57 PM PST - 122 comments

Ry Cooder and Corridos Famosos: Live "From this rich catalog, Cooder cherry-picked only a dozen songs to include on Live but they’re fairly representative of his eclectic oeuvre. His picks also feature plenty of his guitar playing, which will please fans who felt (as I sometimes did) that his recent albums were a bit stingy with his greatest asset. " "The shows also were a family affair. The Corridos Famosos include Ry’s son Joachim on drums, Joachim’s wife Juliet Commagere on vocals, and her brother Robert Francis on bass, as well as an old friend and collaborator, Flaco Jimenez, the Tejano accordionist who was at Cooder’s side when he played this venue 34 years earlier. Terry Evans, another veteran of the 1977 shows, handles backup vocals, along with Arnold McCuller, filling in for Cooder’s other longtime singing partner Bobby King." Don't miss the clip at the end of the review. [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive at 5:29 PM PST - 17 comments

5pointz is gone. Here's a tour of what one day in its history looked like. Here's 50 nice photos of the building and its surroundings. Bid farewell to one of the most (only?) iconic NYC subway views, as the 7 train emerges from underground. [more inside]
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 4:51 PM PST - 45 comments

That Intoxicating Pink

Rose champagne is the intoxicant of choice for courtesans and kings. Beautiful, expensive, and rare, it was beloved by the grandest of the grandes horizontales of nineteenth-century Paris—and the men who could afford to love them. In Second Empire France, the Countess Henkel von Donnersmarck—known to historians of the libido as La Païva, and earlier as Esther Lachmann, late of the Moscow ghetto—demanded magnums of it as a “gratuity” while entertaining clients in the boudoir of her ill-begotten Hotel de la Païva on the Champs-Élysées.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:40 PM PST - 18 comments

The Danish royal family has released their new portrait, which is less Hans Holbein and more "cover of a Stephen King novel." [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:17 PM PST - 178 comments

The Economist takes aim at the American criminal justice system in three articles from their latest edition: An opinion piece on mandatory life sentences without parole, a more in-depth view of some specific instances and of the data, and a look at the practice of charging fees to those convicted, or even just accused.
posted by felixc at 2:41 PM PST - 36 comments

An Atlas of Cyberspaces An archive of late 90s cybergeography research: Conceptual (Neuromancer/Snow Crash/The Matrix), Geographic, ARPANET, Usenet, submarine cable systems, early African fibre optics, Cospace screenshots and a ton of 90s web visualisations. via silentservant in /r/techonolgy (reddit).
posted by meta87 at 2:37 PM PST - 4 comments

Behind the scenes footage of the filming of the music videos for The KLF's 'Justified and Ancient' and 'What time is Love?'.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:16 PM PST - 18 comments

Kay Nielsen, a Danish illustrator who was popular in the early 20th century, the "golden age of illustration", contributed artwork for many Disney films, including concept paintings for a proposed adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid. The adaptation was to be part of a package film containing various segments based on Anderson's fairy tales. The film, however, was not made within Nielsen's lifetime and his work went unused until production started on the 1989 film. [more inside]
posted by latkes at 2:12 PM PST - 6 comments

Just like if you found out that revered Japanese/Australian chef Tetsuya secretly does the Tim Tam slam, there's a special kind of awesome when you see a collection of Martha Stewart's horrible food tweets. Maybe it's reassuring when the Queen of Lifestyle Programming makes food look so bad.
posted by Kaleidoscope at 1:59 PM PST - 120 comments

Blood Avocados: The Dark Side of Guacamole [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:21 PM PST - 25 comments

The First Gay Bachelor with Jesse Tyler Ferguson and George Takei
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:23 PM PST - 27 comments

So He Drew This Instead. (TW: child abuse)
posted by Kitteh at 12:02 PM PST - 29 comments

In a week which also marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, the Gettysburg Address was delivered by Abraham Lincoln, 16th President, 150 years ago today. Mitch Rapoport narrates an animated version. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 11:30 AM PST - 17 comments

In the summer of 2012, Jeffrey Wilson interviewed Noam Chomsky.

“When the police came into [Occupy Wall Street] under Bloomberg’s orders and smashed up Zuccotti Park one of the things that they did was destroy all the books. You have got to destroy books that are dangerous. It has a long tradition back to the middle ages. Arizona knows all about that.”

They discussed the Occupy movement (previously) and its roots in previous resistance movements, back to the Civil Right Movement Spanish Civil War. To bring the conversation to a mass audience, he's now publishing the transcript as a comic book. The artwork so far is beautiful. [more inside]
posted by mutesolo at 11:29 AM PST - 23 comments

English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet. The word "because," in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in which one (the subordinate) explains the other. In that capacity, "because" has two distinct forms. It can be followed either by a finite clause (I'm reading this because [I saw it on the web]) or by a prepositional phrase (I'm reading this because [of the web]). These two forms are, traditionally, the only ones to which "because" lends itself. I mention all that ... because language. Because evolution. Because there is another way to use "because." Linguists are calling it the "prepositional-because." Or the "because-noun."
posted by scody at 10:58 AM PST - 163 comments

A simple guide to how compound words work in German. (SLYT, rudimentary German makes it funnier but probably not essential)
posted by Artw at 10:32 AM PST - 38 comments

You might've noticed that the castles in the various Castlevania games, while different in every game, often feature similar areas and architectural ideas from game to game. You probably haven't gone to the trouble to catalogue these common components and their recurrences in the sprawling Castlevania series, but this is the internet, which means that somebody has.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:29 AM PST - 12 comments

"Martha, call the cable company--it's playing 'Like a Rolling Stone' on every channel again!"
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:11 AM PST - 45 comments

The U.S. Department of the Interior has an Instagram account, to which it posts some truly breathtaking photos.
posted by jbickers at 10:05 AM PST - 15 comments

"We are reminded that everything is flowing—going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks both in solution and in the form of mud particles, sand, pebbles, and boulders. Rocks flow from volcanoes like water from springs, and animals flock together and flow in currents modified by stepping, leaping, gliding, flying, swimming, etc. While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature's warm heart." — John Muir [more inside]
posted by theodolite at 9:58 AM PST - 2 comments

Slate's Ben Blatt "sat in a Barnes & Noble for three hours flipping through all seven Where’s Waldo books with a tape measure" and emerged with a method for finding Waldo with speed more than 50% of the time. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 9:53 AM PST - 43 comments

In this teaching video, Suzanne Stensaas, Ph.D., demonstrates the properties and anatomy of an unfixed brain, showing its squishiness and vulnerability. [WARNING: The video contains graphic images, a human brain from a recent autopsy.]
posted by Blasdelb at 8:51 AM PST - 43 comments

In the spirit of "Cog," here's Honda's "Illusions." Making of here. Via Hendrick Ball's "Grand Illusions."
posted by Marky at 8:33 AM PST - 12 comments

A Cold War Fought by Women Intrasexual competition among women (SLNYT).
posted by The Blue Olly at 7:56 AM PST - 117 comments

How does economics work in a post-scarcity society - namely the United Federation of Planets? As depicted, the canon is not entirely consistent. But there are clear consequences to meeting all one's material needs with ease. Why is there money at all, for example? Does Picard's family own vineyards just for kicks?
posted by Chrysostom at 7:12 AM PST - 232 comments

Football as soccer …or should that be American Football as football?
posted by ShawnString at 5:46 AM PST - 56 comments

What Combat Feels Like, Presented in the Style of a Graphic Novel. An animated film based on a true story by Iraq veteran Colby Buzzell (previously).
posted by cenoxo at 4:58 AM PST - 23 comments

These movies offer not just a twist, but a twist atop a twist, and a joke atop the joke: the “superjoke,” as Billy Wilder called it. Those themes repeat: the lively, often-painful love triangle, the sexual and romantic jealousy, the thrill of sex, and in this case, the carnal kicks co-mingling with the art of stealing, an act more erotic than gold-digging. (Gold-fleecing is much more penetrating.) And then—important during one of the worst economic times in America’s history—there’s Lily and Gaston’s hard, artful work, something to respect.

Ernst Lubitsch’s charming pre-Code transgressions
posted by timshel at 3:01 AM PST - 10 comments

... has no limits, and your awesomeness will not be limited by your TV. Not anymore. Not today. Not with your new 4K UHDTV (or 4k TV. Or Ultra High Def TV). Get it for your yacht. Enjoy being on top with a TV so expensive, Sears' POS system didn't have enough commas for the price. You earned it, so soak it in. Except your 4k $39999 UHDTV yacht TV, will have to come over to my house and watch my 8K Super UHDTV, which will be known as Super Hi-Vision. Super Hi-Vision. Also available in 'Full Dome' Super Hi Vision. You heard me. So f*ck your $40k 4k Ultra High Def TV, because in 2016 I'm getting the 8K Super Hi-Vision Full Dome moth3rf*cker. Things just got real.
posted by jdaura at 2:40 AM PST - 84 comments

Magpie and puppy play a game. Featuring a very unphased woman hanging out a sheet.
posted by h00py at 2:18 AM PST - 30 comments