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How to: change your car's oil, change a flat tire, flush your radiator and cooling system, jump-start a car, fix a running toilet, replace a kitchen faucet, diagnose and fix clogged drains, fix a blown fuse and reset a circuit breaker, install a light fixture, patch and repair drywall, and find wall studs
posted by Cozybee at 11:46 PM - 0 comments

New research analyzing camera footage shows the bystander effect may be largely a myth.
posted by blue shadows at 11:03 PM - 7 comments

Relive last year's brief, dizzying green screen tattoo fad with work by tat2worthy: glasses; joshhermantattoo: TV; leerowlett_tattooer: Rick and Morty (alternate animation), dragon eye, Game of Thrones; Heathur Sawyer: Betty Boop; danowartattoos666: Rick and Morty (alternate animation), TV (alternate animation); inky_blinders: Ghostbusters, TV; madame.liesl: Gameboy. (All links to artist Instagram posts. SFW.)
posted by not_the_water at 7:43 PM - 6 comments

I was PrOtOtYpE, A tranquil web residency for casual investigations into how we (from people to plants) interface with our planetary computer. [more inside]
posted by sockermom at 6:17 PM - 2 comments

"What is new is that I have decided, at the age of 60, that I am a goddamn knockout. Like Dorothy at the end of the film version of The Wizard of Oz, I had the power I sought all along. I rub my thighs together — sorry, couldn’t resist — and tell myself over and over that I am beautiful and, what do you know, suddenly I am." Crime novelist Laura Lippman reflects on aging, eating, wanting, and leaping in her Longreads essay, "Whole 60." [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:47 PM - 15 comments

At least 12 states require sex offender registration for public urination; five apply it to people charged with offenses related to sex work; 29 require it for consensual sex between teenagers. According to Human Rights Watch, people have been forced to spend decades on the registry for crimes they committed as young as 10 years old. An article by Michael Hobbes
posted by latkes at 4:15 PM - 9 comments

I almost blurt out that my daughter fills her heavy bags with books and printouts filled with bizarre words, setting off across the country like an itinerant salesman. That she's a pitiful girl who eats a meal in her tiny car after class, takes a cramped nap, and comes back home to immerse herself in books and writing again until she falls asleep. These unspoken words pound me in the chest like an assault. And now here she was, paying me a rent that was more of a bribe, having barged in with some strange girl and shaming her parents. The words are about to leak out of my mouth. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 2:15 PM - 10 comments

The Roaring Twenties in the United States was a time of numerous publicity stunts. One such example was Richard E. Byrd’s 1928-1930 Antarctica Expedition, which was sponsored by mass media (JStor Daily article) and the companies who provided typewriters to candy, paper to Byrd’s desk. His first exploration was recorded and presented in With Byrd at the South Pole and documented by Byrd in Little America : aerial exploration in the Antarctic, the flight to the South pole (documentary and book on Archive.org). But he was not the only self-promoter on that journey: meet the teen who snuck aboard a polar expedition (Nat Geo), a scrappy Polish American kid from New York’s Lower East Side named Billy Gawronski (New Yorker).
posted by filthy light thief at 1:20 PM - 3 comments

We've scoured the U.S. to find the least interesting and most skip-worthy destination in each state and Washington, D.C. We’re prepared for the fact that we’ll anger many locals, and we mean no offense with these choices. It’s likely we included many folks’ favorite detours. But just because you have a fond memory of a place doesn’t mean it’s worth anyone else’s time. And you can be sure that if it claims to be the world’s “largest” or “best” of anything, it made the list.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:58 PM - 174 comments

A look at some of the gems hidden away in the photo archive of Ebony and Jet magazines, set to be auctioned tomorrow. With more than four million prints and negatives in boxes and old file cabinets, the archive is considered the most significant collection of photographs depicting African-American life in the 20th century. Much of it has barely been seen by the public in decades, and few photos have been digitized. Now art historians fear a private collector could buy the archive and stash it away. [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 12:39 PM - 6 comments

“They fascinated the public, not because of all of the possessions they accumulated but because of all the things they seemed to shun: ostentation, flamboyance, narcissism. Even as they lived in plain sight on the streets of New York City, they were a glimmering, beguiling mystery presumably to all but their inner circle.” An appreciation of the style of JFK, Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy on the 20th anniversary of their deaths by the Washington Post‘s Pulitzer-Prize-winning fashion critic, Robin Givhan.
posted by sallybrown at 12:32 PM - 3 comments

"I made the worst ever 1-1 remake in Mario Maker 2"
posted by cortex at 12:09 PM - 36 comments

Purple fairy wrasse named Wakanda discovered on reef in twilight zone "Scuba divers have discovered a new fish – a vibrant purple fairy wrasse. They have named it Cirrhilabrus wakanda" [New Scientist] [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 11:22 AM - 9 comments

You've seen the videos. Now hear the song. [more inside]
posted by QuakerMel at 11:15 AM - 5 comments

The BBC tells the story of separating a pair of conjoined infant twins, from funding and visa issues to surgeries to aftermath.
posted by Catseye at 11:04 AM - 3 comments

Salwa Benaissa interviews translator, poet, and literary scholar, Mona Kareem.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 10:47 AM - 1 comment

A retired teacher found some seahorses off Long Beach. Then he built a secret world for them. Now he works with scientists to answer questions about mating and lifespan, among other questions. His partner Ashley Arnold 'learned to dive as part of a program the Salt Lake City Veterans Affairs hospital offered to female veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and military sexual trauma.' “All the irritation on the surface disappears when you go under the water,” she says. “It’s like, ‘What was I concerned about?’ You forget about everything else. Nothing else matters.” [more inside]
posted by stoneweaver at 9:53 AM - 2 comments

In 2007, Colombia became aware of a peculiarly destructive invasive species making its home in its rivers: the hippopotamus. Descendents of a cocaine kingpin's menagerie, the hippos had been quietly breeding unchecked for more than a decade. Now they are spreading. Colombia is unsure how to handle the situation, having attempted culling, castration, and capturing the hippos to limited success. Hippos powerfully influence the environment in their native Africa, leading ecologists to worry about the impact to Colombia's native flora and fauna. A few biologists wonder whether the hippos might provide a replacement for long-extinct megafauna. Previously, previously.
posted by sciatrix at 9:38 AM - 22 comments

In 2017, I started getting regular messages from an anonymous Twitter user telling me my religion was ‘evil’. Eventually I responded – and he agreed to meet face to face. Hussein Kesvani meets his Islamophobic troll. Kesvani discusses the article and growing up Online and Muslim in suburban U.K on ‘What A Hell Of A Way To Die.’ (59:09)
posted by The Whelk at 8:21 AM - 9 comments

Forget Synthetic Meat, Lab Grown Dairy Is Here
posted by jacquilynne at 7:16 AM - 34 comments

More than 15 years ago, a young indie folk artist set a course to traverse the United States of America through song, accruing acclaim, a fan base, and lots of anticipation along the way. Or did he?
posted by Etrigan at 6:32 AM - 29 comments

She still wonders why no one ever asked her to come on the show herself. Content from historian Sarah Milov's forthcoming book on the history of The Cigarette was used exclusively as fodder for a segment on public radio's "Here & Now." The segment, America's Complex History with Tobacco, was presented by three men: two historians and the NPR host. Milov's name, nor her book, were ever mentioned. [more inside]
posted by KleenexMakesaVeryGoodHat at 6:29 AM - 29 comments

Sweet pickin' and singin', live from the Tohoku University Bluegrass Club. (mlyt)
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:29 AM - 5 comments

Tom7 invents and tests a variety of very bad chess-playing algorithms.
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:02 AM - 12 comments

Filipino food in general is having a moment in the spotlight (see restaurants Jeepney Filipino Gastropub and Bad Saint in Washington DC. A particular purple tuber that has long been a staple of Filipino desserts is now popping up all over Instagram. [more inside]
posted by brilliantine at 5:44 AM - 18 comments

SPY INTRIGUE is one of the finest and bravest things ever produced in the [interactive fiction] medium: personal and true, technically masterful in both code and design, literary in the best sense. - Emily Short [more inside]
posted by value of information at 3:43 AM - 14 comments

About Disabilities, Accommodations, and School. "Because of her reaction, I assumed all professors might view my health condition as a nuisance. I became skilled at performing wellness, enough so that even people in graduate school made sly comments like, I’ve never seen you this way after reading my personal essays about my neurological symptoms, as if they, too, needed reassurance that what I had experienced was real."
posted by Little Dawn at 11:36 PM - 15 comments

Maybe you wanna start getting ready for nanowrimo, maybe writing is for all year round. Either way, I've got around 50 links bookmarked just for you [more inside]
posted by Cozybee at 10:50 PM - 16 comments

Best Buy tops the list of "most sustainable U.S. companies." Barron's and Calvert Research and Management teamed up to produce the list, culled from the 1,000 largest publicly held U.S. companies. The scores aren't based on only environmental sustainability. It's more about overall corporate responsibility.
posted by NotLost at 8:44 PM - 43 comments

Food scientist and YouTuber Ann Reardon (How To Cook That) decided to evaluate the claims in a scaremongering viral video about detecting "fake foods". Unsurprisingly, the video's claims were nonsense. [more inside]
posted by biogeo at 7:15 PM - 30 comments

Both the fans and the media companies want to cheat a little. The media companies want to parade their Web savvy in the marketplace and they want to funnel all the ‘Net traffic into a few commercial sites. The fans want to have freedom of speech and assembly in sites of their own choosing and to have fewer constraints on the use of copyrighted materials than in any other medium. - Keidra Chaney on What it Feels Like for a Fangirl in the Age of Late Capitalism.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:45 PM - 3 comments

I can feel the change this time
They'll never take away what's mine
I'm gonna reach even higher I know
I found the strength I'm looking for
I'll take it to Forevermore
I feel the fire that burns inside
I hear a choir sing through the night
Don't let it go
Don't ever lose hope [more inside]
posted by one teak forest at 4:52 PM - 4 comments

It's taken him three months longer than usual but the Adam Cadre's 2019 Lyttle Lytton Contest Winners are here! [more inside]
posted by Navelgazer at 4:11 PM - 20 comments

Going home with Wendell Berry The integration of the various animals and crops into a relatively small acreage becomes a formal problem that is just as interesting and just as demanding as the arrangement of the parts of a novel. You’ve got to decide what comes first, and then you work your way to the revelation of what comes last. But the parts also have to be ordered. And if they’re ordered properly on a farm, something even more miraculous than most art happens: you have sustainability. Each thing supports the whole thing. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 4:03 PM - 8 comments

Revealed: This Is Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops [Vice] Motherboard obtained a Palantir user manual through a public records request, and it gives unprecedented insight into how the company logs and tracks individuals.

“Through a public record request, Motherboard has obtained a user manual that gives unprecedented insight into Palantir Gotham (Palantir’s other services, Palantir Foundry, is an enterprise data platform), which is used by law enforcement agencies like the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. The NCRIC serves around 300 communities in northern California and is what is known as a "fusion center," a Department of Homeland Security intelligence center that aggregates and investigates information from state, local, and federal agencies, as well as some private entities, into large databases that can be searched using software like Palantir.”

[The document obtained by Motherboard for this story is public and viewable on DocumentCloud.]
posted by Fizz at 3:17 PM - 23 comments

"If you conduct a quick internet search on “history of data visualization,” you’ll nearly always see Florence Nightingale included in the annals of history. Why? It’s not like a Nightingale Rose chart is easy to read, or a cinch to make, or even all that common. One clue to the answer lies in the fact that she is most often the only woman on such lists." Beyond Nightingale: Being a Woman in Data Visualization
posted by everybody had matching towels at 1:10 PM - 6 comments

A video game streamer SmyleeKun and the group “Shitposting cause im in shambles” created an event, titled Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us, on Facebook. The event is set to take place on September 20, 2019 at 3am. Attendees will meet at the Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa Valley, Nevada before proceeding to Area 51 itself. Well, attempting to proceed, anyway. The initial plan was simple: "If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens." As the number of people who say they'll attend has grown past a million, there have been a number of proposals and expanded plans kicked around on a related Facebook group, and in r/memes, where about half of the posts are related to Area 51 now. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:06 PM - 70 comments

PMDb - The Pigeon Movie Database is exactly what it sounds like. [more inside]
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 12:38 PM - 10 comments

"Lizzo is a joyous inspiration – but body positivity has come too late for the likes of me" – Grace Dent in The Guardian: "There was no such thing when I was a teen in the 80s... As Lizzo paraded gloriously with her flute at Glastonbury last month, a paean to body positivity, a poster girl for billions of proud, perfectly-imperfect young women worldwide, I finally accepted that, when it comes to radical self-acceptance, I have missed the boat."
posted by bitteschoen at 11:58 AM - 30 comments

Internet sports statistical bard Jon Bois and partner Alex Rubenstein have showcased a number of statistical oddities on the SBNation show Dorktown. But for the tale of the 2014 Spurs-Mavericks series in the first round of the NBA finals, the two have gone to a new format - a digital comic book. (SLDorktown)
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:24 AM - 5 comments

Against the background of London's housing crisis, Joel Golby of Vice presents the Rental Opportunity of the Week. [more inside]
posted by Catseye at 10:32 AM - 26 comments

Tehching Hsieh, extreme performance artist: 'I give you clues to the crime'
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:34 AM - 8 comments

When China took action to protect its borders from foreign plastic pollution by effectively shutting its doors to plastic waste imports in the beginning of 2018, it threw the global plastic recycling industry into chaos. As waste began piling up in ASEAN nations, leaders stepped up to send containers "back where they came from" - the United States (the world's leader in plastic waste creation), Japan, the UK, and Germany, among others. As more Asian nations ban foreign plastic waste, a full fledged global crisis is ongoing for the "developed" world.
posted by Mrs Potato at 9:25 AM - 44 comments

Created by master builders in the late medieval Iranian world, the Topkapı Scroll compiles a rich repertory of geometric drawings for wall surfaces and vaults. [previously]
posted by ragtag at 8:15 AM - 9 comments

Reagan invoked the nameless woman frequently...She became known as the “welfare queen.” The term was designed to conjure racist stereotypes of a single black mother living large on the taxpayers’ largesse, collecting government checks while bedecked in diamonds and driving a Cadillac. Sometimes, journalists and political opponents challenged Reagan on his tale. In Jan. 29, 1986, The Washington Post quoted Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill telling Reagan, “I never did believe your story about the Chicago welfare queen.” [more inside]
posted by devrim at 7:29 AM - 52 comments

Vanishing Twin is a British band with members from Belgium, Japan, Italy, France and America. Their latest album, The Age of Immunology, has been garnering great reviews featuring lots of favourable comparisons to obvious touchstones Stereolab and Broadcast. Its title is the name anthropologist A. David Napier gave to the modern era viewed as the zenith of 'the central assumption of immunology—that we survive through the recognition and elimination of [the] non-self'. The band's music is an expression of its desire to push against this tenet and towards a genuinely utopian future. Check out tracks Magician's Success and Backstroke, and then hopefully listen to (or even purchase) the whole thing!
posted by Panthalassa at 7:05 AM - 4 comments

"One way to preserve that sense of home is to bring it with you, wherever you end up — a recipe, a memory, a confrontation with homophobia in search of something better." "Bread pudding was the first thing that I baked after I came out to my parents: one batch, for myself (because holy fuck), and, later, one for my mother." "As if these hours of blending, rolling, baking, stirring, spooning, freezing, spooning and freezing again were not sufficient workout for a lanky, depressive teenage girl with hormones to burn, there was still the meringue." Queer baking stories galore, and if you're hungry when you're done, maybe you'll find something appealing in this round-up of cookbooks with LGBTQIA+ authors.
posted by Stacey at 6:59 AM - 6 comments

AIDS Medication Produced and Sold for $1 Per Day “We cannot afford not to (help.)” became the driving force behind Cipla’s production of AIDS cocktail. Hamied said in response to accusation of an ulterior motive: “Of course I have an ulterior motive: before I die, I want to do some good.”
posted by Yellow at 6:34 AM - 5 comments

Is Netflix bad for the environment? How streaming video contributes to climate change - "Driving an electric car, choosing train travel or using less plastic — we know there are many things we can do to be less of a burden on the world's environment. But would you be willing to give up on streaming video?" [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 5:49 AM - 68 comments

Simeon Solomon: the rise and fall of a Victorian aesthete; Madame de Pompadour: Rococo style icon; Who were the Bluestockings?; The socialite and the introvert: the shared life and art of Ethel Sands and Anna Hope Hudson; Frank Bowling: 60 years of pioneering colourful abstraction; The cinematic and artistic genius of Ray Harryhausen; Fashion reconstructed: the dress in Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait... these are a small handful of the many articles at Art UK: "a cultural education charity [who] enable global audiences to learn about the UK’s national art collection" whose website "is the showcase for art in every UK public collection" and includes "over 220,000 artworks by over 40,000 artists." [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 5:30 AM - 4 comments