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The home stretch. It’s time to pay attention, call your members of Congress, and mobilize your networks. Crunch time: this is America's last chance at serious climate policy for a decade. It's going to be a clean energy standard & clean energy tax credits, or nothing. David Roberts explains the climate policy in the upcoming reconciliation bill, which needs all 50 Democratic votes to get past the US Senate. [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 4:53 PM - 0 comments

Image Conscious: Jasmine Sanders on the Black Romantic “My cousin worked for Artistic Impressions,” she says. “I saw a painting she had and liked it, so that’s how I got started.” The painting, titled The Lord’s Blessing, is a textured oil-on-canvas by the American artist Mobassi. A mother and infant appear in profile, both a deep, sumptuous brown, their features faintly drawn. The pair are conjoined by a crescent of glitter, gold, and cream paint, the maternal bond made tactile and flashily literal. The first piece of art my aunt ever purchased for herself, Mobassi’s canvas hangs in her living room still.
posted by klangklangston at 4:00 PM - 1 comment

What Do You Do With A Billion Grams Of Surplus Weed? Cannabis legalization was supposed to be a licence to print money. Three years on, nobody is turning a profit
posted by hoodrich at 3:41 PM - 15 comments

Stephen Sondheim had been successful (and not) on Broadway for over a decade before Company [Wikipedia]. In a lot of ways, it redefined "musical", being less about a straightforward plot and more about emotional honesty and development. One major (and majorly entertaining) performance was a 2011 New York Philharmonic concert production [2h25m], with Neal Patrick Harris, Stephen Colbert, Jon Cryer, and Patti LuPone (amongst others). But, if you like comparison/contrast studies, there are others! [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:01 PM - 10 comments

the world's largest electric vehicle, a 110-ton dump truck, to haul lime and marl off the side of a mountain to a cement factory. Perhaps best of all, it consumes no energy
posted by sammyo at 12:57 PM - 25 comments

An overview of archaeological investigation into pre-Neolithic use of grains: "Well before people domesticated crops, they were grinding grains for hearty stews and other starchy dishes." Lots of different archaeologists, many of them experimental archaeologists, and their recent insights into early diet. Links to all the scholarly articles at the bottom.
posted by clew at 12:04 PM - 4 comments

Mötorhead’s classic “Ace of Spades”, played on some really big bells. (SLYT) Lemmy would be proud, I’m sure. Also notable: look at how the carillon is pounding the keys with his fists!
posted by snortasprocket at 11:09 AM - 9 comments

To try to mitigate the widespread fears and pessimism about the future, Wired co-founder and lifelong techno-optimist Kevin Kelly (earlier) makes his Case for Optimism.

There are two important sets of reasons why you should be optimistic right now. One is the general case for optimism at any time. The second reason is a handful of forces at work in the world that make specific cases for optimism at this particular time, in 2021.

[more inside]
posted by PhineasGage at 8:42 AM - 61 comments

For nearly nine months, Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, a safe haven for trans and queer Coloradans, faced violent threats from right-wing extremists. Until, that is, they turned to their local anarchists for help. from Alt-Right Coloradans Went to War with an Alpaca Farm — And the Farm Won [from the revitalized Mel Magazine]
posted by chavenet at 7:41 AM - 9 comments

"Hello, ground. It sounds weird, but there's something to that mindset where you're just saying hello to everything." Skateboarder Andy Anderson makes friends with everyone (and everything).
posted by clawsoon at 8:35 PM - 12 comments

Bog Bog, The Electronic Ladyland Mixtape (link goes to SoundCloud; Bandcamp) is a 2016 mixtape by anonymous French music collective Arandel featuring 55 tracks by 35 women pioneers of electronic music. Track listing within: [more inside]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:30 PM - 8 comments

A programmer who goes by the alias of GuideDev has posted Hearthstone Access, a mod to allow blind people using screen readers to play some of the single-player content in the famous free-to-play card game. [more inside]
posted by Alensin at 5:11 PM - 4 comments

Pfizer and Moderna just raised prices for their COVID vaccines in the EU. And they're still not producing enough vaccines to go around. As Matt Stoller details, the Biden administration was supposed to break the vaccine monopoly in order to make it possible for factories globally to produce the vaccine and pay royalties to Pfizer and Moderna. Spoiler: they did not. Luckily for developing nations, and just like PPE and other needed items, China and Russia are stepping in with their vaccines to deliver what the West can't. [more inside]
posted by rednikki at 4:55 PM - 22 comments

Oh, you're a big fan of semantic dissociation, huh? Then name ten unrelated nouns.
posted by cortex at 4:11 PM - 167 comments

The Dogs at Daycare and their ✨Problems✨ -🐕- Part 2 -🐩- when it rains, it pours 🐶🦴 [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:06 AM - 11 comments

It's been quite the year for blaseball fans, going from a scrappy "566 votes opens the Forbidden Book" to a story finale that abolishes the concept of money. But there'll be enough of that another time. Last year Mike Townsend is a Disappointment was the hot new bop. Let's check in on where the Seattle Garages have gone since being called "the biggest punk rock opera since Zen Arcade" by Bandcamp Editorial. [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 9:23 AM - 15 comments

GamerGaters inundated her with death threats. Now some are apologizing — and she forgives them. “Over 100 Gamergaters have written me over the year asking for forgiveness, and I’ve thanked them and forgiven them every single time,” she wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “If I can understand people can grow past their worst moments, I think the rest of us can too.”
posted by panglos at 9:13 PM - 126 comments

Thousands of Patients Were Implanted With Heart Pumps That the FDA Knew Could Be Dangerous. (ProPublica, Aug. 5, 2021) As HeartWare and Medtronic [which acquired HeartWare in 2016] failed inspection after inspection and reports of device-related deaths piled up, the FDA relied on the device makers to fix the problems voluntarily rather than compelling them to do so. The HeartWare Ventricular Assist Device [HVAD] was implanted into more than 19,000 patients, the majority of whom got it after the FDA found in 2014 that the device didn’t meet federal standards. [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 5:21 PM - 20 comments

Which Singers Have the Biggest Vocabularies? [Word Tips] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:54 PM - 66 comments

PieceWork Magazine "celebrates the rich history of needlework and makers from around the globe". [more inside]
posted by paduasoy at 1:42 PM - 8 comments

Alien Dreams: An Emerging Art Scene. In recent months there has been a bit of an explosion in the AI generated art scene. Ever since OpenAI released the weights and code for their CLIP model, various hackers, artists, researchers, and deep learning enthusiasts have figured out how to utilize CLIP as a an effective “natural language steering wheel” for various generative models, allowing artists to create all sorts of interesting visual art merely by inputting some text – a caption, a poem, a lyric, a word – to one of these models.
posted by Cash4Lead at 12:54 PM - 37 comments

Surrounded by fires, parched by drought, and shut down by the pandemic – residents of California’s scenic South Lake Tahoe thought they’d endured everything. That was until this week, when the US Forest Service announced it was closing several popular sites after discovering bubonic plague in the chipmunk population. The Guardian's Erin McCormick reports on something that sounds terrible but maybe isn't a nightmare? As frightening as it sounds, plague in rodents at higher elevations is apparently not that rare, and a spokeswoman for the US Forest Service said spread to humans was easily preventable with a few precautions.
posted by Bella Donna at 7:59 AM - 55 comments

How the 33rd president finagled his way to a post–White House fortune — and created a damaging precedent. Ex-US Presidents are given pay and perks for life because poor Harry Truman left office skint - except he was lying, he was rich as hell, and he effectively stole the equivalent of half his salary from the US Gov each year in office. via
posted by mosessis at 8:15 PM - 36 comments

Becky Chambers and Martha Wells discuss A Psalm for the Wild-Built and Fugitive Telemetry (slyt)
posted by curious nu at 4:51 PM - 23 comments

Take a look at Opener's battery-powered VTOL BlackFly and its simulator. [more inside]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:40 PM - 37 comments

In-browser JS/HTML Kid Pix, sound effects and all.
Okay, I guess grownups can use it too. [more inside]
posted by subocoyne at 2:11 PM - 21 comments

In 19 seconds, GLASYS does just that in a pleasing way. [SLYT] [more inside]
posted by filtergik at 1:48 PM - 10 comments

Victor Berger IV, master video troubadour of our troubled digital age, microexpression microscoper and air horn tooter to the stars [previouslies 1234] has teamed up with VICE News to ask the pressing question: “MAGA Icons: Where Are They Now and Are They OK?” [slyt 28'41"]
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 12:21 PM - 29 comments

The very first two hours of MTV [SlYT]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 9:47 AM - 100 comments

Writing for Gawker, Brandy Jensen doles out some good (if classic?) advice on aging: “Dear Fuck-Up: I Feel Old and Washed Up”
posted by Going To Maine at 8:28 AM - 81 comments

The Guardian asks: Why does Jeff Bezos’s rocket look like that? An inquiry. Slate asks a rocket scientist the same question. Jon Stewart gives an answer in a promo sketch [NSFW] for his upcoming Apple+ show (with Jason Alexander as Jeff Bezos)
posted by ShooBoo at 7:42 AM - 48 comments

Does what it says on the tin [NSFW]
posted by Gorgik at 7:24 AM - 11 comments

All evidence that he was someone else was ignored, and his claims to not be the person the police was looking for were taken as evidence of insanity. [more inside]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:17 AM - 23 comments

The ship [...] arrived at Felixstowe - months later than expected but with its fame - or infamy - assured. As it turned the corner for the home straight, noise levels from those waiting dropped noticeably to almost a hush, only to be broken by children shouting "It's here!". [BBC]
posted by ellieBOA at 12:49 AM - 13 comments

Tiffany Ferguson (tiffanyferg) discusses [SLYT] influencer smiles, the rise of veneers, dental tourism, class implications and stigmas of our teeth, dental care as a human right, and what we can do to fix dental care in America. [more inside]
posted by AlSweigart at 7:34 PM - 38 comments

“In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog. 2017's No Time to Spare collected a selection of her posts into a book, and for a time, those posts were unavailable online. They've now been restored.” Here’s Le Guin’s introductory post. [via]
posted by Kattullus at 1:45 PM - 11 comments

Reading the criminal complaint in June 2020, the Steiners got a view for the first time of what had been going on inside eBay during their torment. “The vitriol towards us, where did it come from?” David asked. “We didn’t even know these people,” Ina added. “We were helping their customers sell more. That should be a good thing.” (CW: stalking, harassment)
posted by bondcliff at 1:44 PM - 31 comments

Pond House [YouTube] is the first music to surface from the forthcoming release I've Been Trying to Tell You by English trio Saint Etienne: an album (their tenth) "made largely from samples and sounds drawn from the years 1997-2001, a period that was topped and tailed by Labour's election victory and the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. Was the optimism of that era a lost golden age, or was it a period of naïvety, delusion and folly?" The album is accompanied by a short film [trailer @ YouTube] directed by Alasdair McLellan.
posted by misteraitch at 12:42 PM - 9 comments

When she wasn’t working to scrub away vanity likes, [Sophie Zhang] diligently combed through streams of data, searching for the use of fake pages, fake accounts, and other forms of coordinated fake activity on politicians’ pages .... Was it more important to push for a case in Bolivia, with a population of 11.6 million, or in Rajasthan, India, with a population close to 70 million?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:24 AM - 12 comments

British trancecore band Enter Shikari spent the last few days releasing a series of mini-documentaries, partially about the making of their 2020 album Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible [YouTube playlist], but more interestingly about the state of humanity's existence in the 21st century, what lies ahead, the challenges we face today, and how our systems in place now tend to bring out the worst in us.

A Film On Possibility: 1 - EXISTENTIAL RISK (20m), 2 - THE NATURAL WORLD (26m), 3 - SOCIETY (28m), 4 - STRUCTURE (28m) [more inside]
posted by glonous keming at 8:30 AM - 12 comments

Presenting the top contender for "feel-good moment" from this year's Olympics in Tokyo: in the Men's High Jump event, Qatar's Mutaz Essa Barshim and Italy's Gianmarco Tamberi tied for first and faced a tiebreaking jump-off. Instead, Barshim proposed to officials that they simply share the gold. [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:15 AM - 75 comments

Following up on their award winning documentary on the history of the Seattle Mariners, Jon Bois and his compatriots at Secret Base now turn their eyes to Atlanta to dissect the Dirty Birds themselves, the Falcons. (SLYT)
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:43 AM - 5 comments

Thomas Hegghammer on the Cheese Bell Theory of foreign fighting: "that foreign fighting provides strategic depth - and hence longevity - to movements that would otherwise crumble under domestic repression." [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 11:52 PM - 19 comments

It slipped under my radar, but last month Danny Elfman put out an album, Big Mess. [Wikipedia] It's industrial/grunge rock (includes 2/5 of NIN!) with an orchestral grounding. Hints of minimalism, triple dueling guitars, and a seething cauldron of hate and anger about Trump and 2020. Enjoy! Disk One: Sorry [video, behind the scenes], True [video], In Time, Everybody Loves You, Dance With The Lemurs, Serious Ground, Choose Your Side, We Belong [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:13 PM - 12 comments

As the new millennium dawned, a mysterious invention from a charismatic millionaire became a viral sensation—then went down in flames. Ever since, I’ve wondered: Was it all my fault? - the story of selling the story of the Segway.
posted by ShooBoo at 10:18 AM - 112 comments

How Big Beverage Poured Empty Promises Down Our Throats
posted by box at 10:15 AM - 54 comments

Craig Murray, historian, journalist, whistleblower and former diplomat, has begun an 8 Month Prison sentence over his reporting of the former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond’s Trial in 2020. Craig is the first person in the world to be jailed for supposed “jigsaw identification” of witnesses. Craig has previously reported on the Assange extradition hearing, the Israeli Elbit weapons factories in the UK and the Philip Cross Affair at Wikipedia.
posted by Lanark at 9:35 AM - 24 comments

With an instantly recognizable voice and songs that have been streamed several billion times, The Weeknd is one of the most ubiquitous pop stars in the world. But where does Abel Tesfaye end and his dark, grimy public persona begin? Mark Anthony Green finally gets the artist to explain. [GQ]
posted by ellieBOA at 9:28 AM - 24 comments

"So-called rationalists have created a disturbing secular religion that looks like it addresses humanity’s deepest problems, but actually justifies pursuing the social preferences of elites."
posted by simmering octagon at 9:06 AM - 81 comments

The TLS relaunched their podcast at the beginning of last winter, with hosts Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas. Usually the format is two interviews about an article each in each week’s issue, bracketing a couple of shorter items. Among the subjects covered are Christina de Pisan, Vivian Gornick and Dungeons & Dragons, Agatha Christie and the return of live opera and Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon’s relationship and Arsène Wenger. A word of warning, if you’re prone to buying books, every episode is like a trap set before you, just last Friday I ordered The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero which was discussed on last week’s episode, along with William Blake.
posted by Kattullus at 4:25 AM - 11 comments