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Straight from the I can't believe with all this internet we've got I've never seen this before, please enjoy this old commercial for the McDLT. [Technically this is a double post, I was packing to leave for college last time this hit mefi.]
posted by phunniemee at 7:35 PM PST - 94 comments

From Doug Mack's Snack Stack newsletter, Goldfish-Swallowing: A History: "a practice with a surprisingly long history as prank, hazing ritual, sport, and crowd-gathering spectacle, including a brief moment when it was front-page news despite a looming world war." (TW: animal cruelty)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 4:39 PM PST - 5 comments

At the National Forensic Academy, crime scene investigators learn to dowse for the dead, though it’s not backed by science. Experts are alarmed. (Content warning for some discussion of finding dead bodies.)
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 4:07 PM PST - 53 comments

Ken Shirriff writes about the magnetic amplifier for IEEE Spectrum's History of Technology series. [Possibly timewalled without an account.]
posted by eotvos at 2:05 PM PST - 18 comments

Idle Breakout. Break a million bricks! A weird, addictive mix of the classic game Breakout, a tower defense game, bullet hell and an idle clicker and upgrade game where certain upgrades carry over through resets. (Warning: Manic sound and graphics.)
posted by loquacious at 11:52 AM PST - 68 comments

Urban Planning graduate student Sola Olasunda unearthed and tweeted a clip of white children racially abusing Black children from a nearby neighborhood in Queens, which went viral in the summer of 2019 (WPIX doc, 24min). The segment came from a 1976 Bill Moyers documentary (Vimeo, 58min) on Rosedale, where the arrival of a few Black families to the mostly white neighborhood had spurred racist violence and protests, including the 1974 New Years Eve bombing of the home of Ormistan and Glenda Spencer. In June 2020, the New York Times published interviews with many of the (Black) children from the video clip. [more inside]
posted by pjenks at 10:44 AM PST - 8 comments

🐦 Kaitlin's Dad has an Idea: “for years my dad has argued that what the world needs is ‘the travel taco’ i.e. a taco with sealed edges to keep all the filling from falling out while you’re on the move. and for years my mom has patiently explained the concept of burritos.” [🧵 threadreader]
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:14 AM PST - 93 comments

"Americans have powerful fantasies about what work can provide: happiness, esteem, identity, community. The reality is much shoddier. Across many sectors of the economy, labor conditions have only worsened since the 1970s. As our economy grows steadily more unequal and unforgiving, many of us have doubled down on our fantasies, hoping that in ceaseless toil, we will find whatever it is we are looking for, become whoever we yearn to become." [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 5:07 AM PST - 50 comments

Lawsky Practice Problems is a website that generates multiple-choice practice problems for United States federal income tax classes and often provides useful redirections for wrong answers. "The problems are a random selection of facts, names, and randomly (but thoughtfully) generated numbers about a range of basic tax topics and partnership tax topics" such as depreciation, options as compensation, home mortgage interest deduction, capital gains, etc. Professor Sarah Lawsky also works on Catala, a "domain-specific programming language designed for deriving correct-by-construction implementations from legislative texts". [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 4:57 AM PST - 4 comments