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The brazen heist, which made international headlines, occurred during a COVID-19-related lockdown in Ottawa some time between Christmas Day 2021 and Jan. 6, 2022, the hotel determined. No one was in the building during that period. The photo had been gifted to the hotel by Karsh himself and had been on public display at the Château for decades until it was removed from the wall and replaced by a fake, which then hung in its place, unnoticed, for eight months. A very over-dramatic CBC video with more information from 2 years ago called this 'The art heist of the century'. The portrait was returned last week.
posted by bq at 9:08 AM - 1 comment

A person has died for the first time in euthanasia campaigner Dr.Philip Nitschke's suicide machine, the Sarco, in Switzerland. [more inside]
posted by toycamera at 6:28 AM - 29 comments

Nari Nari Tribal Council looks to wind farm to restore culture and country in New South Wales. A traditional owners' group strikes an agreement that could see it become an equity partner in a renewable energy project proposed for their land in the state's south west. Only one per cent of renewable developments in Australia involve Indigenous ownership, compared with 20 per cent in Canada.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:01 AM - 1 comment

Highlighting all the small but powerful steps you’ve taken to conserve energy over the past few months (and how that energy has instead been used to fuel the insatiable beast that is AI).
posted by autopilot at 1:52 AM - 28 comments

Nowadays, we have a different appetite or tolerance for scientists who had mystical beliefs. We have become increasingly tolerant of his heretical views, which have seemed less problematic. Sometimes, people can still get very upset about the alchemy. But there’s actually very little that he left of his own work in alchemy. Most of it is copies of other people’s stuff that he indexed and made notes on. It’s hard to know what he thought about it, because we don’t know quite what he was doing. from The Strange, Secret History of Isaac Newton's Papers [Wired; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:48 AM - 4 comments

UFO 50 is an anthology collection of 50 games made by the fictional company UFO Soft in the 8-bit era. [more inside]
posted by Why Is The World In Love Again? at 8:36 PM - 11 comments

I'm sorry, but this fart by horse Sven is epic in a way that will delight 3-year-olds for hours. And probably a few adults too.
posted by hippybear at 8:21 PM - 33 comments

The U.S. military’s admiration of a proto-fascist city-state is based on bad history. "Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other,” a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society."
posted by AlSweigart at 7:44 PM - 21 comments

"Wendy and Lisa are veteran composers and singer-songwriters. They were integral members of Prince's Revolution ...They talk with us about their 40-plus year partnership, and their Emmy award-winning work as composers. They'll reflect on their childhood friendship and the work their fathers contributed as members of The Wrecking Crew. And of course, what it was like to collaborate with Prince, and work on some of his most iconic records." An interview with Jesse Thorn at Bullseye.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:51 PM - 9 comments

The Oldest Known Burial Site in The World Wasn't Created by Our Species
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:57 PM - 12 comments

Mirrors in Movies: How Filmmakers Make Cameras Disappear. When a camera takes a shot full-on of a character facing a mirror, you don't see the camera in the reflection. How do they do that? An entertaining look at the tricky techniques. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 1:22 PM - 24 comments

Everybody wants to waste your time [SLYT, 30m; CW: longer than it needs to be]
posted by chavenet at 11:41 AM - 29 comments

Singer Halsey, nee Ashley Frangipane, did a lengthy interview with SHE MD about her pregnancy and its complications. Halsey Part 1: Endometriosis, Lupus and The Unfiltered Truth About Living With Chronic Illness [50m] and Halsey Pt 2: Overcoming Postpartum Depression and Clinical Ketamine Therapy That Changed Everything [40m] were illuminating to me as a gay man with no experience of pregnancy at all. I feel like they might be useful or comforting to others who are having difficulty with their own situation.
posted by hippybear at 9:17 AM - 2 comments

Legalized Sports Gambling Was a Mistake (slTheAtlantic) (archive here) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:31 AM - 90 comments

over the past few weeks and months, the talk around Lichtenstein been more about his appropriation of the work from comic artists and less about his impact on the art world. Jonathan Bailey, Plagiarism Today, 2023 [more inside]
posted by bq at 7:43 AM - 86 comments

John Baez: "Once there was a thing called Twitter, where people exchanged short messages called ‘tweets’. While it had its flaws, I came to like it and eventually decided to teach a short course on entropy in the form of tweets. This little book is a slightly expanded version of that course." [PDF, 129 pages]
posted by Westringia F. at 5:52 AM - 16 comments

Intellectual giant Fredric Jameson has died. The LRB has a brief obituary, with links to his reviews. His most famous work--at least the one most frequently seen popping up in graduate English courses--is 1991's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (read a selection here, or the whole thing at the internet archive), but he was a prolific author who kept writing (and analyzing) up to the very end (in fact, in two weeks, his (much-anticipated-by-me) The Years of Theory will be out).
posted by mittens at 5:26 AM - 22 comments

The neo-modernist faith in the future assumes the potentiality of the not-yet as an ideal; it credulously takes the bait of hype, assuming that technological innovation will continue to produce new aesthetic paradigms, and ideally market value. These cycles of hype go from boom to bust with predictable regularity—see, for instance, the spectacular death of NFTs—but to the believers, individual fads matter less than the stubborn insistence on the importance of each of them, which is unsurprising when you consider that every one of the faithful might also be a profiteer. from Gimmicks of Future Past [The Baffler; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:40 AM - 12 comments

Malicious data sharing to be outlawed in Australia as part of privacy law update. The malicious release of personal data online, known as doxxing, will be outlawed and attract up to seven years in jail under new legislation being introduced to Federal parliament. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:46 PM - 14 comments

With recipes, trivia, history, cooking tips, poems and an extensive listing of festivals by US state, country and month, Chef James' 25-year-old, daily-updated foodreference.com is a comforting survival from the early web. (Previously [2002], pointed out by Brian Jeffears on Mastodon) [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 1:59 PM - 8 comments

Scientists have argued that recursion, a technique that allows chunks of language such as sentences to be embedded inside each other (with no hard limit on the number of nestings) is a universal human ability, perhaps even the one uniquely human ability that supports language. It’s what allows us to create—literally—an infinite variety of novel sentences out of a limited inventory of words. from The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence [Nautilus; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:27 PM - 12 comments

"Candy came from out on the Island / In the back room she was everybody's darling" Beautiful Darling [1h26m] is a documentary about the life of Andy Warhol Factory participant Candy Darling. You've heard the lyric, but probably don't know the story.
posted by hippybear at 12:22 PM - 6 comments

On his YouTube channel stand-up comic Josh Johnson has released nearly a full day’s worth of stand-up videos. They are generally topical routines, so it might make sense to start with the latest one, about the Harris-Trump debate. In a couple of recent interviews, with Vulture and the Los Angeles Times, Johnson explains why the Daily Show writer and correspondent decided to start releasing his material immediately.
posted by Kattullus at 9:07 AM - 30 comments

The whale disassemblers are coming. An hour long documentary on the process of moving the contents of a natural history museum that have been in place, in some cases, for almost 200 years. SLYT
posted by mygothlaundry at 8:53 AM - 9 comments

The 2024 Ringo Awards were announced last night at the Baltimore ComicCon. [more inside]
posted by CMcG at 8:13 AM - 8 comments

"It was a special thing for me to experience that outpouring of grief. It showed the true impact he had on people." With the new release of The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal documentary (directed by the late Gord Downie's brother, Mike Downie), a Toronto Life interview with the remaining members of the band on their musical legacy. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 7:16 AM - 11 comments

Humans imitating AI imitating humans. [more inside]
posted by lucidium at 7:08 AM - 4 comments

You've heard of Iron Maiden (previously). You've probably heard of singer/songwriter Mitch Benn (previously). You may have heard of cult BBC stop-motion animation The Clangers (previously). Now, thanks to Mitch Benn, we have Iron Maiden's The Clangers. [SLYT, 8m30s)
posted by Major Clanger at 3:10 AM - 10 comments

Turtle rookery's future brighter after feral deer eradicated on Great Barrier Reef island. Authorities wipe out feral deer on Wild Duck Island off the central Queensland coast in a bid to preserve one of Australia's largest flatback turtle rookeries.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:26 PM - 1 comment

Robert Schock, 39, was last seen hiking on the North Cascade's Chilliwack River Trail with his dog on July 31. On August 3, his dog was found on the trail by a forest ranger. Three searches of the 17-mile trail were conducted, but he wasn't found. (archive) One month later, a trail crew with the Pacific Northwest Trail Association was working in the field when they heard his barely discernible calls over the sound of the Chilliwack River. (archive) Jeff Kish, the PTNA director gave details on his rescue, saying, "I hope more of this story eventually gets out, but I don't think it's my story to tell." Now, Robert Schock recounts his 30-day disappearance and how he survived. (archive)
posted by ShooBoo at 9:01 PM - 36 comments

That one time when Devo played a Bat Mitzvah. Presenting: Muffy’s Bar Mitzvah.
posted by bq at 7:44 PM - 15 comments

The first crucial thing to understand is that, if you're at least on board with the basic idea that COVID denialism is a pervasive problem, COVID-19 has already disabled you. This is an analysis based on the social model of disability, a major branch of disability theory that emphasizes the way disability is created by a society's failure to provide accommodations for certain bodies and minds rather than intrinsic aspects of those bodies and minds themselves.
posted by evilmomlady at 1:37 PM - 137 comments

The Blowback podcast has released its fifth season on Cambodia, Nixon, Kissinger, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (previously). Each season features hosts Noah Kulwin and Brendan James providing historical analysis of post-WWII U.S. foreign policy, leftist perspectives on the death and destruction its caused, and dark humor for the colorful, macabre cast of characters that populate their narratives. Bonus episodes for season 5 include interviews with journalists Elizabeth Becker and Sy Hersh (previously), and historians Ben Kiernan and Vu Minh Hoang. The first of ten episodes is available here. [more inside]
posted by Hume at 1:27 PM - 11 comments

Helicopter parenting often doesn’t end when a child graduates from high school. Today’s parents have more tools than ever at their disposal to stay involved (or overinvolved) in their children’s lives and keep track of their whereabouts, habits, and activities, from tracking services like Life360 to Facebook groups specifically for parents of college students. If college is historically meant to be a time of self-exploration, complete with bad decisions and murky mistakes, an increasing number of parents seem to be attempting to curtail that growth. from Helicopter U. [Slate]
posted by chavenet at 12:05 PM - 23 comments

"I Enjoy Being A Girl" - Carol Burnett, Chita Rivera, Caterina Valente ala Morticia Addams 5m30s [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:49 AM - 7 comments

Do you remember Demi Adejuyigbe making a simple video in 2016 celebrating the date mentioned in Earth, Wind & Fire's classic "September?" He did increasingly elaborate followups in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, and previously [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 10:58 AM - 22 comments

"I want to explain exactly what it is that I think makes The Atlantic terrible and why I think we’d all be better off if it stopped publishing." Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs
posted by german_bight at 9:46 AM - 46 comments

Breathtesting cattle to battle climate change. The agriculture industry is a huge greenhouse gas emitter. This breath testing machine gives farmers a real-time record of cattle methane emissions, so they can take measures to reduce them.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:22 AM - 10 comments

As part of the events for this year's fundraising we'll have an Ask the Mods Anything Podcast. Come check out the post with the deets on how to submit your questions!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:13 AM - 5 comments

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age is an essay by author Thea Lim in the Walrus on what happens to your self worth when everything you do, from work to leisure to hobbies becomes something measured by someone, something you can, perhaps have to, monetize.
If you find yourself asking "why am I doing this?" this is worth your time to read.
posted by tommasz at 7:59 AM - 19 comments

“My priesthood, rooted in the discipline of a spiritual path, tends to be explicit in its ethical demands. But the facts of queer life also unquestionably demand a lived ethical response. What may come as a surprise—what surprises me—is that the ethical demands placed on me by my identity as a queer person & by my involvement in the LGBTQ{+} community tend to be far clearer and more rigorous than those placed on me by my ordination to holy orders.” Reverend Liz Edman’s Queer Virtue [g] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 7:37 AM - 3 comments

Excavator operators are bringing joy to the world, one two-year-old at a time.
posted by rory at 1:33 AM - 17 comments

We know that denial plays two roles in human life: the positive force that allows a person to rebound from a disabling loss, and the negative force that buries the truth in order—or so we believe—to make life livable. In addition to accommodating the family’s longstanding and hard-won reliance upon denial, the challenge for me was to finally understand my own relationship to denial. I was unable to judge others without first admitting to myself that each of my attempts to write The Child Widow as fiction had failed because I still always included the possibility that maybe the suicide wasn’t entirely deliberate. I knew better—I was right there in the next room—but I still found it possible to deflect. from Rejecting Denial and Embracing Sorrow: On Writing the Story of a Husband’s Suicide by Alexandra Marshall [LitHub] CW: suicide
posted by chavenet at 1:04 AM - 0 comments

It was a known dairy barn axiom that cows are the better temperament for the singing. Milking a female animal,... was an inherently sensual act. More pointedly with the likelihood of being a romance. There never was a right-thinking cow who would milk easily and with earnest devotion if her attendant did not sing to her as he conducted the chore. Worse yet if his hands are cold." [more inside]
posted by rubatan at 12:44 AM - 14 comments

No creator has put more LGBTQ characters on TV than Ryan Murphy. His Aaron Hernandez show raises the question of why so many are killers. [more inside]
posted by Pitachu at 10:30 PM - 9 comments

Vibrant peacock spiders likened to famous artworks delight photographers. Akin to the famous Van Gogh painting, the starry night peacock spider highlights the rare species' beauty. But some people are concerned not enough is being done to protect the arachnids.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:10 PM - 5 comments

Tamsyn Muir -- creator of a queer gothic necromantic space dystopia/paradise from which only she is personally barred -- has nonetheless invited the rest of us back to her world in a new short story. The multi-genre script that is the story occurs midway through Nona the Ninth inside a nested set of souls and also a graduate seminar and also a British country house murder mystery. (Previously and previously).
posted by SandCounty at 4:11 PM - 56 comments

Famed musical writers Howard Ashman and Alan Menken have an abandoned song that I'd never heard of before. Aria For A Cow was made into an animated short several years ago, and it's delightful. 7m
posted by hippybear at 3:34 PM - 3 comments

Ten children drew their favourite sea creatures. Then Australia’s leading artists responded. Ken Done, Jonathan Zawada, Blak Douglas and others created companion pieces to children’s works celebrating sharks and rays. They’re now on display at the Australian Museum.
posted by goo at 3:17 PM - 10 comments

Tishani Doshi (Aeon, 09/16/2024), "Tender, yet creepy": "Tom sits in his box, one blue eye blinkered shut. I reach for him, and I am a girl again, gently rattling his head so his eye can become unstuck." Topics include Freud's "The Uncanny" [PDF], Baudelaire's "The Philosophy of Toys" (a.k.a. "Morale du joujou" and its excerpt "The Plaything of the Poor"), Rilke's "The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls" (a.k.a. "Puppen" with illustrations by Lotte Pritzel related to her dolls, etc., etc.), Ibsen's A Doll's House, and Mahasweta Devi's Urvashi and Johnny. See also Tishani Doshi's entry at the Poetry Foundation.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:58 AM - 1 comment