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Friendship uniquely requires mutual self-knowledge and will. It takes two competent, willing people to be friends. You cannot impose a friendship on someone, although you can impose a crush, a lawsuit, or an obsession. If friendship is not reciprocated, it simply ceases to exist or, rather, it never existed in the first place. Andrew Sullivan's book Love Undetectable, illuminated via BrainPickings.
posted by Athanassiel at 8:39 PM PST - 30 comments

Wolfcop - The Movie. Half cop, half werewolf. He goes by the name Lou Garou. [more inside]
posted by ashbury at 8:22 PM PST - 41 comments

The entire first episode of John Oliver's new current-events comedy show on HBO, Last Week Tonight, is viewable on its official YouTube Channel. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 7:51 PM PST - 99 comments

Dogs Annoying Cats with their Friendship (SLV)
posted by bibliowench at 7:24 PM PST - 63 comments

Over a hundred years ago, a most impressive collection of early motion pictures was collected by the Swiss Jesuit abbot, Josef-Alexis Joye, who collected a trove of films as a way of educating children and adults. In total, he collected around 2,500 titles between 1902 or 1904 and 1915. The abbot's collection was not forgotten or lost after his death in 1919 -- it was stored and cataloged, though in danger of deteriorating by the 1940s. A few decades later, Italian film historian Davide Turconi, fearing that the films would be entirely through deterioration, decided to clip a few frames from each print and save something of the collection. Luckily, his fears were unfounded, and many the films were preserved in the 1970s by David Francis of the National Film and Television Archive of the British Film Institute, where approximately 1,200 of the nitrate prints still exist. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:16 PM PST - 6 comments

"Peter and Rosemary Grant are members of a very small scientific tribe: people who have seen evolution happen right before their eyes."
posted by brundlefly at 4:49 PM PST - 36 comments

James Nielsen has run the world's first verified sub-5 minute beer mile.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:35 PM PST - 50 comments

git man page generator
posted by OverlappingElvis at 3:42 PM PST - 76 comments

The 2014 Goldman Environmental Prize winners were announced today. Known as the "Green Nobel", the Goldman Prize this year highlights grassroots champions working against industrial pollution, deforestation, dam-building, and legal land use. The awards ceremony will be streamed live on YouTube at 5:30 p.m. PDT. [more inside]
posted by HE Amb. T. S. L. DuVal at 2:46 PM PST - 2 comments

Linda Gormezano, a researcher with the American Museum of Natural History, studies polar bear ecology by collecting and analyzing polar bear feces. "One thing I didn’t mention is I don’t find the scat, my dog Quinoa finds it." via.
posted by ChuraChura at 1:54 PM PST - 12 comments

Fifty years on, we're still coming to terms with Guy Debord's 1967 situationist text, The Society of the Spectacle. Debord presented an eerily-accurate portrait of our image-saturated, mediated times. You can find all kinds of insights into the spectacle of 2014, from Instagram and viral marketing to hipster culture and personal brands. Fittingly, he also did it with a series of short, aphoristic sections that could almost be described as proto-tweets. Leveraging the Tumblr aesthetic, Ryan Oakley has created an Illustrated Society of the Spectacle (start there, then click "Newer Post" to progress.) The images aim to resonate with Debord's text, rather than provide on-the-nose illustrations. NSFW. [more inside]
posted by naju at 1:20 PM PST - 15 comments

Video proof that being all alone in a subway car causes madness in passengers
posted by The Whelk at 1:09 PM PST - 54 comments

Did you know that the Mister Softee jingle has words? And sheet music?
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:13 PM PST - 30 comments

It should have been an extraordinary scene: more than 100 factory hands fainting in unison as if possessed by spirits.

But in Cambodian garment factories (pdf, graphic violence depicted), which play a major role in supplying American malls, mass fainting is no longer a freak phenomenon. It’s disturbingly common.
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 10:40 AM PST - 36 comments

Walter Kitundu is an artist and MacArthur Fellow (previously). In this video, he gives a lecture at the San Francisco Exploratorium about his bespoke instruments and lighting experiments. At around 16 minutes in, he plays his digital revision of a kora.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:22 AM PST - 1 comments

Verbatim: What is a Photocopier? (NYT SLV)
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 10:13 AM PST - 57 comments

James Minchin's backstage photos taken during the filming of Mad Men show, among other things, Ken holding a Macbook.
posted by mippy at 10:02 AM PST - 26 comments

Whether it's the constant fretting over Miley Cyrus' influence on school girls or the growing (and troubling) tradition of Purity Balls, it's clear that society has a fascination with young women's sexuality — especially when it comes to controlling it. But what are we actually teaching today's girls about sex? Fueled by outdated ideals of gender roles and the sense that female sexuality is somehow shameful, there seem to be certain pernicious myths about girls and sex that just won't die. That sex education in America has gaping holes in its curriculum hasn't helped much, either; in a recent Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report just 6 out of 10 girls said that their schools' sex ed program included information on how to say no to sex. This lack of personal agency was reflected in a forthcoming study by sociologist Heather Hlavka at Marquette University as well, which found that many young girls think of sex simply as something that is "done to them." Knowledge is power, and we can promote a healthier relationship with sex by encouraging a more open dialogue, teaching girls to feel comfortable with their sexuality and, most importantly, emphasizing that their bodies are theirs and theirs alone.

But first, we're going to need to stop perpetuating the following 17 myths about female sexuality.

[more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 9:06 AM PST - 120 comments

The impact of "unfriending" on Facebook. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:12 AM PST - 271 comments

Fred's Pencils
posted by obscurator at 8:01 AM PST - 22 comments

Why This Movie Perfectly Re-Created a Picasso, Destroyed It, and Mailed the Evidence to Picasso’s Estate.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:50 AM PST - 10 comments

How To See Without Glasses [more inside]
posted by gwint at 6:46 AM PST - 37 comments

Comedian Andy Daly is an expert at creating naive, offbeat characters with dark secrets. He has appeared in many places (and this AV Club article walks through them all in an interview with Daly), but now has his own show, Review on Comedy Central, in which his character, Forrest, reviews life experiences, from eating 30 pancakes to divorce to being Batman. All 8 of the episodes so far are now online, the funny/dark/uncomfortable parts really start with episode 3: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Andy Daly is also a comedy podcast regular, and ran a one-off series where he played a different character every week (the amazing one where he plays a German travel writer, with many other comedians as guests, is a good place to start).
posted by blahblahblah at 6:42 AM PST - 18 comments

Who is Jon Snow's mother? What's up with the crazy seasons in Westeros? Why have the White Walkers returned after all this time? These questions and more have been the subject of much speculation and debate among fans of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire / Dunk and Egg universe for more than a decade. Fans have published their theories in forums, on fansites, and even as the occasional academic journal article. (Spoiler warning: All sources -- show, books, cut scenes, DVD special features, pre-released chapters, interviews, visions you got from a tree, etc. -- are fair game in this thread!) [more inside]
posted by Jacqueline at 5:03 AM PST - 503 comments

And now for my magic marketing trick! (I mean, illusion.) By simply conflating surfactants and their main use, soap, I will now proceed to warn you that soap is in absolutely everything, and we should all freak the hell out, NOW. -- Through a handy demonstration Michelle Wong explains why the danger of chemicals is often inflated for The Toast's Gal Science column.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:33 AM PST - 90 comments

"Barcelona's Dani Alves reacted to having a banana thrown at him during Sunday's dramatic 3-2 win at Villarreal by peeling it and then taking a bite. He was about to take a corner when the banana landed on the pitch". "We have suffered this in Spain for some time," said Alves. "You have to take it with a dose of humour."
Former Barca striker Gary Lineker praised Alves. "Picked it up, peeled it, ate it and proceeded to take the corner," he tweeted. "Top response." The ex-England striker added: "Utterly brilliant reaction from Alves. Treat the racist berk with complete disdain!"
Alves has been a regular target of racist abuse during his 12 years in Spain with both Sevilla and Barcelona.
Dani Alves: “If you don't give it importance, they don't achieve their objective”
posted by marienbad at 1:10 AM PST - 59 comments

After moving two years ago to the poorer and more crime-ridden neighborhood of Belle Haven, Facebook has simply given the city $600,000 to open a police substation located one block from its headquarters.
posted by meowzilla at 12:02 AM PST - 90 comments