Displaying post 1 to 50 of 511
"The drug's effectiveness inspired an elegant theory, known as the chemical
hypothesis: Sadness is simply a lack of chemical happiness. The little blue pills cheer us
up because they give the brain what it has been missing.
There's only one problem with this theory of depression: it's almost certainly wrong, or at
the very least woefully incomplete."
How Prozac sent the science of depression in the wrong direction, from the Boston Globe.
posted to MetaFilter by zardoz
at 7:53 PM on July 6, 2008
(27 comments)
What's That?
Sadly, the education of the youth of amerika is declining in more than one way. The other day I was at the grocery store and the checker was unable to identify a portabello mushroom. And no, she wasn't new...and to make matters worse the checker next to her didn't know either. (more inside)
posted to MetaFilter by MiHail
at 9:25 AM on November 12, 2005
(1032 comments)
I Met the Walrus
In 1969, 14-year-old Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. This is the whimsically animated film that Jerry has produced about the interview.
posted to MetaFilter by milestogo
at 2:31 PM on July 6, 2008
(16 comments)
Jezebel.com editor on
why she hasn't been raped: "I think it has to do with the fact that I'm like smart. I don't hang around with frat guys" -- a quote from
Jezebelism: Lizz Winstead's interview with
Moe Tkacik and
Tracie Egan (aka
Slut Machine). Winstead's intent was "to have a conversation about Hillary and sexism, women’s magazines and if they feel any obligation to write about responsibility and safety when they write graphically about their sex lives." After the interview Winstead stated: "I don’t know if they came to the show drunk, or just ended up drunk by the time they hit the stage, but what I do know is that the discussion that ensued was deeply disturbing to me..."
posted to MetaFilter by ericb
at 1:56 PM on July 6, 2008
(139 comments)
Matmos provides a song-by-song exposition
of their synth-only* album
Supreme Balloon, including explicit pics of the gear they used. Highlights include the Electronic Valve Instrument, the Coupigny, & everything else.
*
Mostly - all sound sources were synths, some software controllers were used.
posted to MetaFilter by univac
at 10:53 AM on July 6, 2008
(10 comments)
Can anyone give me any firsthand (or reliable secondhand) impressions of US (Amtrak) rail travel these days?
posted to Ask Metafilter by flapjax at midnite
at 5:09 PM on July 5, 2008
(43 comments)
Twenty years ago this week,
the biggest escape ever over the Berlin Wall took place, but the
event went nearly unreported outside of the two Germanies. The 182 persons who jumped over the Wall in the early morning hours of 1 July 1988, instead of leaving East Germany,
fled in the opposite direction (
scroll down to "Wolfgang Ritter") to escape the West Berlin police. East German border guards waited with trucks on the other side of the Wall in the middle of the death strip to pick up the wall-hopping protesters; they were driven to another location, served breakfast, and then taken to the Friedrichsstrasse crossing to West Berlin with the admonition to "use the usual border crossing next time."
posted to MetaFilter by sister nunchaku of love and mercy
at 10:01 PM on July 3, 2008
(16 comments)
Christiane F was a 1981 German film that portrayed the life of young heroin addicts growing up in 1970's Berlin. Notable for the collaboration of David Bowie, the film became
well known for its realistic portrayal of drug use.
posted to MetaFilter by panboi
at 5:01 AM on June 29, 2008
(28 comments)
MagCloud
enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and they take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.
posted to MetaFilter by FunkyHelix
at 9:13 AM on June 23, 2008
(43 comments)
Record player + video camera =
Phonographantasmascope, animator Jim LeFevre's extension of the zoetrope. "It is all live action and works by using the shutter speed of the camera rather than the rather irritating stroboscope methods other 3D Zoetropes use."
posted to MetaFilter by nthdegx
at 12:38 AM on June 23, 2008
(15 comments)
After reading this
article on
Weegee, I started thinking about the concept of Noir and wondered about this question. "Does Noir exist as a current idiom or appear in a culture in America in 2008, and if so where might it be found?"
posted to Ask Metafilter by Xurando
at 2:58 PM on June 20, 2008
(11 comments)
Le réseau
- Starting in the late 19th century, Belgian
Paul Otlet envisioned the basics of a human powered Wikipedia and Google. He created a 12 million item database on index cards and accepted queries via mail or telegraph. The article describes his work and the Mundaneum museum in his honor. Be sure to watch the video. There is a
full documentary on Otlet as well.
posted to MetaFilter by Argyle
at 7:15 AM on June 17, 2008
(8 comments)
Death were a
proto-punk trio of black Jehovah's Witnesses based out of Detroit back in 1974. They were almost signed to Columbia, but bailed on the label when Columbia wanted them to change their name. Instead, they self-released a 7" which is now
quite a collector's item, influenced as it was by,
“Iggy and Stooges, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper and The Who”.
But the story doesn't end there. Recently, Bobby Hackney, whose father played in Death along with two of his uncles, learned of the band and, lo and behold, his dad found the master tapes for their unreleased full-length in his attic. Is a new chapter in
punk rock history about to be written?
posted to MetaFilter by stinkycheese
at 7:52 AM on June 11, 2008
(35 comments)
How can I share a single file or folder on my Mac? I am always connected to the internet, have seen what gazillions of "upload first" file sharing websites and services can do (MobileMe, Pando, YouSendIt, etc.), but it seems to me there should be a way to right click on a file, choose "share & email link," write & send that email and be *done* with it. My recipient can then download said file straight off my machine. Does anyone know of any solutions which are even close? Thanks!
posted to Ask Metafilter by spinpapi
at 11:07 AM on June 10, 2008
(10 comments)
"In the early 1970s, the artist Chris Burden pioneered a kind of sculpture that explored boundaries few people would care even to approach."
The artist has had himself (in two of many examples...) nearly electrocuted and
shot; some of his later and lighter work includes
building complex model bridges and reconstructing a "Speed of Light Machine". He created a
ghost ship, uninhabited and self navigated, and
continues to surprise with his latest work....
posted to MetaFilter by Kronos_to_Earth
at 7:45 PM on June 8, 2008
(23 comments)
The horrifying crimes of Joseph Fritzl shocked Austria and the world. Recently two essays explored Austrian literature in an attempt to understand what cultural conditions could foster such monstrosity. Nicholas Spice, in
Up from the Cellar, explores the work of Nobel Prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek and her dissection of male violence. Ritchie Robertson searches for antecedents in
Josef Fritzl's fictive forebears.
[via The New Yorker's Book Bench]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus
at 10:29 AM on June 8, 2008
(63 comments)
"
The Photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (May 15, 1925 - May 7, 1972) suffered a fate common to artists who are very much of but also very far ahead of their time. Everything about his life and his art ran counter to the usual and expected patterns. He was an optician, happily married, a father of three, president of the Parent-Teacher Association, and coach of a boy's baseball team." "His images had nothing to do with the gritty "street photography" of the east coast or the romantic view camera realism of the west coast. His best known images were populated with
dolls and
masks, with
family,
friends and
neighbors pictured in
abandoned buildings or in
ordinary suburban backyards." His most well known and last photography series "
The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater" (1972) was based on the short story by
Flannery O'Connor, "
The Life You Save May Be Your Own."
posted to MetaFilter by Del Far
at 9:26 AM on May 28, 2008
(13 comments)
RelationshipFilter, 1873. An online archive of letters from a wife to her husband, which include an intimate look at their relationship crisis.
posted to MetaFilter by amyms
at 8:01 PM on May 26, 2008
(37 comments)
"Claude Degler attended the Chicon in 1940, and at Denver in 1941 delivered a speech purporting to have been written by Martians."
So begins the Fancyclopedia I entry on Degler's Cosmic Circle.
Claude Degler believed that science fiction fans were destined to evolve into a new species superior to homo sapiens, "cosmen." In 2001 (the year) David B. Williams went
in search of Degler, who had disappeard from fandom in 1951. Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote in 1986 a story/essay about the inner Degler called
Hell, 12 Feet. He was as infamous as fans got, though some
remember him sort of fondly. Degler crops up regularly in the
"All Our Yesterdays" columns written by fandom historian, Harry Warner Jr. The ones with most information are the columns
H.C. Koenig. Claude Degler,
O Pioneers and
The Cosmic Circle. Here's a Degler quote from the last link:
We have created a fannationalism, a United World Fandom. Someday soon we will have our own apartment building, then our own land, our own city of Cosmen, schools, teachers, radio programme — later; our own laws, country perhaps! Our children shall inherit not only this earth — but this universe! Today we carry 22 states, tomorrow, nine planets!
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus
at 8:22 PM on December 8, 2006
(3 comments)
Propaganda is now officially hip.
Barack Obama's presidential campaign has
struck a
palette with those interested in good, effective design.
Shepard Fairey was recently given the opportunity to create a
screenprinted poster for Obama's campaign, which sold out quite quickly. Next, his campaign turns to artist Scott Hansen, aka
ISO50 for his visual art and
Tycho for his music. Mr. Hansen's
poster employs his idealistic and nostalgic style, yet more direct than his typical dreamy work. It's quite lovely.
posted to MetaFilter by blastrid
at 11:36 PM on May 23, 2008
(64 comments)
One fine old day in old LA, in the year of nineteen and sixty, one Frederick Usher met
Eddie "One String" Jones, heard him lay down some deep blues on his
diddley bow, and was so taken with Jones'
monochord masterpieces that he ran home, grabbed his tape recorder and recorded Jones in the alley. One other recording session ensued soon thereafter, which was
released as an LP in 1964. By that time, however, the mysterious Eddie Jones (if that was even his real name) was long gone, and was never heard from again.
[NOTE: see hoverovers for link descriptions]
posted to MetaFilter by flapjax at midnite
at 12:09 AM on May 24, 2008
(22 comments)
HistoryWorld
is a general-knowledge website, designed for anyone above the age of about twelve with an interest in history. I found the site searching for
dance history, but it includes 400 broad topics with more added all the time. It approaches history as a narrative, making full use of
chronology. This is for the student as well as the researcher.
posted to MetaFilter by netbros
at 5:36 AM on May 23, 2008
(15 comments)
...with the sun still high in the sky and his heart full of joy, Brian O’Doherty attended his own wake."
The artist's alter ego was so named as a gesture of protest over the events of Bloody Sunday. Satisfied with the prospect of peace, he laid Patrick Ireland to rest.
Slideshow of the wake.. Doctor, poet,
novelist, art critic, journalist,
film and television writer/director,
pioneer in
conceptual art, and author of the influential essays collected as '
Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space.' What will be the next chapter in Brian O’Doherty's
prolific career?
posted to MetaFilter by desuetude
at 4:38 PM on May 22, 2008
(7 comments)
Blonde Zombies
-
So NSFW, unless your work is cool with trashy Mexican comics, space vixens, pulp paperback covers, and the like.
posted to MetaFilter by jtron
at 1:48 AM on May 23, 2008
(30 comments)
In the 17th century Dutch painters began to create informal paintings that focused on the features and/or expressions of anonymous people. These were called tronies. Although a tronie showed a person’s face, it wasn’t considered a portrait. [...] In 1995 Dutch photographer Hendrik Kerstens began a series of tronies featuring his daughter Paula. some images NSFW
posted to MetaFilter by xod
at 1:24 PM on May 22, 2008
(35 comments)
