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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 - 0 comments

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 - 3 comments

That one time when Devo played a Bar Mitzvah. Presenting: Muffy’s Bar Mitzvah.
posted by bq at 7:44 PM - 5 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 - 40 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 - 8 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 - 19 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 - 6 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 - 20 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 - 29 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 - 8 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 - 16 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 - 2 comments

Excavator operators are bringing joy to the world, one two-year-old at a time.
posted by rory at 1:33 AM - 16 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 - 10 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 - 7 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 - 54 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

On Thursday afternoon, (Shohei) Ohtani’s legend continued to grow as he wrote the next chapter of one of the best individual offensive seasons in Major League history with arguably the best single-game performance the sport has ever seen. In an otherworldly game in which he stole two bases and went 6-for-6 with a career-high three homers and 10 RBIs, Ohtani proved he’s in a class of his own once again, becoming the first player to hit 50 or more homers and steal 50 or more bases in a single season in Major League history. from Otherworldly Ohtani creates 50-50 club in a 6-for-6 game for the ages [MLB]
posted by chavenet at 11:46 AM - 48 comments

It’s Friday, so it’s a good time to try to Guess the (video/computer) game! Or to go back into the archives and try to guess some of the 859 previous games. (hat tip to Buried Treasure.)
posted by Going To Maine at 11:42 AM - 8 comments

Which is More Difficult - Violin or Piano? (SLYT)
posted by Gyan at 10:56 AM - 30 comments

New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi placed on leave after disclosing RFK relationship Nuzzi disclosed that she “had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign.” While the magazine did not identify the subject, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told CNN that the relationship was with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who ran for president as an independent candidate and recently endorsed Donald Trump. The person said the relationship was emotional and digital in nature, not physical. A Kennedy spokesperson told CNN, “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.” [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:25 AM - 67 comments

Cards Against Humanity is suing Elon Musk for $15 million dollars
posted by Diskeater at 10:21 AM - 27 comments

"Google has decided that Forbes is the authority in everything. Credit cards, cockroach removal, and getting too high from gummies. Forbes is now the dominant authority in damn near everything. [...] I know a lot of folks in the SEO industry. Not one person thinks this is normal or okay. I even heard from a source that I deeply trust that Google employees were complaining about Forbes internally. That was two years ago." A deep dive on the underpinnings of Forbes Marketplace, the parasite SEO operation launched in 2019 by Lars Lofgren.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:38 AM - 52 comments

Farmer invents machinery that smashes bejesus out of weed seeds. Weeds cost Australia's crop farming industry around $3.3 billion dollars [US $2.25 billion dollars] each year, but a home-grown invention that crushes herbicide-resistant weed seeds could make that a problem of the past.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:37 AM - 18 comments

In 2021, House House, the makers of Untitled Goose Game, created a proof-of-concept for an animation series involving the Goose and its hapless victims. It never made it to production, but they've released the proof-of-concept animation to Youtube. So for just four minutes of your time, please journey back to the beleaguered village, and watch the Untitled Goose Programme. (Previously and first on Untitled Goose Game)
posted by JHarris at 5:19 AM - 20 comments

"conventional wisdom has been that black hole jets can’t be larger than about a quarter the radius of a cosmic void, and none larger has ever been seen. That all changed with the discovery of Porphyrion..." [bigthink] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 2:40 AM - 14 comments

It is now difficult to imagine the mass of general readers—assuming they exist—being reached even by a historian of genius. The exigencies of modern academic publishing, declining levels of general culture among historians themselves, and, in some cases, what occasionally looks less like sloppiness or indifference and more like a positive hostility toward good writing among peer reviewers, above all the atrophying of readers’ own attention spans—for all these reasons, it seems to me unlikely that we will ever see a classic on the order of Runciman capture the public imagination. from The Rise of Post-Literate History by Matthew Walther [Compact]
posted by chavenet at 12:45 AM - 22 comments

Hopes for future hatchlings outside Perth as rare western swamp tortoise returns to southern home. An endangered tortoise that excited wildlife carers by surviving outside its only known habitats in Perth has returned home to its birthplace and site of a relocation trial in Western Australia's South West. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:54 PM - 7 comments

At least according to Carter Vail, a musician on YouTube (and probably Tik Tok, but I am old). Let him tell you about the thing all guys do, how to succeed at wizarding school, or how to appreciate marine life. Or you could listen to his really good serious music if you are into that sort of thing, I guess.
posted by pattern juggler at 4:35 PM - 9 comments

There are some interesting people moving their bodies interestingly in the music video half•alive - Sophie's House (Official Video). [5m]
posted by hippybear at 3:20 PM - 7 comments

Explore the beautiful, intricate paths of ships over a year - tracked from America's busiest ports to the open ocean via AIS marine tracking data.
posted by mhoye at 1:04 PM - 11 comments

Draw Lines ... Make Music ... Share your Instrument
posted by chavenet at 11:55 AM - 12 comments

Euripides Unbound is an account of the recent discovery by archeologist Heba Adly of a papyrus containing 97 lines from Polyidus and Ino, lost plays by Euripides, written by Robert Cioffi who participated in the dig led by Basem Gehad. The fragment was deciphered by classicists Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and John Gibert, who have been interviewed about it by Johanna Hanink on the Lesche Podcast. Bill Allan wrote a short essay about the fragment for the Times Literary Supplement, which led Mary Beard to discuss it on the TLS Podcast.
posted by Kattullus at 11:02 AM - 8 comments

"It is not often that one in the process of learning of, or reading, a book develops three different opinions about the book. I have heard of Lea Ypi’s Free after it became an international bestseller. I was even then somewhat intrigued by the topic, an autobiographical story of growing up in Albania at “the end of history”, given that Albania was somewhat of a black box (because of the isolationist policies followed by its long-time president Enver Hoxha). Yet since I had a uniform negative view about any personal reminiscences coming out of Eastern Europe, I was almost sure not to read the book? Why such mistrust?" Branko Milanovic with a thoughtful review of Lea Ypi's awardwinning Free: Coming of Age at the End of History.
posted by mittens at 10:51 AM - 3 comments

A few short, brisk fantasy stories, published this year, involving peril and rescue. "The Dragon Shepherd" by George S. Walker, in Electric Spec: a young girl challenges complacent dragonslayers. "The Doomsday Book of Labyrinths" by LM Zaerr, in Uncharted Magazine: a tax assessor (who doesn't care to look too closely at his own emotions) needs to figure out why a scared kid is running a shop. "Labyrinths for Wayward Teens", also by Zaerr (and, like "Doomsday Book", ending abruptly), in Electric Spec: an exploited hero-for-hire, paid to rescue thrillseeking customers from magical escape rooms, faces (mostly gratuitous) danger when his own daughter gets trapped.
posted by brainwane at 9:47 AM - 8 comments

How to be a butler to the super rich. (archive link here) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:52 AM - 42 comments

All large planets in our Solar System have rings, and it has been suggested that Mars may have had a ring in the past. This raises the question of whether Earth also had a ring in the past.
posted by bq at 8:14 AM - 23 comments

Ring of Gyges: A shepherd named Gyges discovers a magical ring that grants him the power of invisibility when he twists the ring on his finger. With this newfound power, Gyges seduces the queen, kills the king, and takes over the kingdom. The Ring of Gyges is a dialogue featured in The Republic by Plato. The story raises a moral question: would people still act justly if they could act unjustly without fear of being caught or punished? [more inside]
posted by rageagainsttherobots at 7:45 AM - 74 comments

For the second time ever (the first was in 2020), Scientific American endorses a presidential candidate. For the first time since 1996, the Teamsters union does not. [more inside]
posted by box at 5:56 AM - 61 comments

BatCam offers glimpse into secret life of threatened flying fox species. A live-streaming camera is offering insights into a grey-headed flying fox colony in northern New South Wales, aiming to change public perception that the animals are pests, and guide conservation work. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:56 AM - 3 comments

Everyone was bereft and unnerved at the loss of this soft-spoken person they had been tending to near constantly for months. “I couldn’t believe it,” Cheatham says. “I was so sad that he died. They were telling me that they were hoping he would get over the spell that he was in.” But that day, Flores and Moore also managed to spend $7,017.73 at Ted Baker, $289.85 at Erewhon, $220.50 at Tory Burch, $992.25 at Coach, and $2,477.90 at the Apple Store. They dined at Nobu, too. from The Parasites of Malibu [The Cut; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:55 AM - 8 comments

She was literally the biggest story on the planet in 1952. Her story knocked the story of testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific off the front page. It blew Queen Elizabeth's coronation off the front page. A former GI, who knew from childhood that she was in the wrong body, went to Copenhagen and became Christine, who she really was all along. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 10:05 PM - 13 comments

Jiang Zemin meets the press, candidly. (slyt)
posted by clavdivs at 8:09 PM - 4 comments

UN General Assembly overwhelmingly calls for end of Israeli occupation The UNGA demanded that “Israel brings to an end without delay its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which constitutes a wrongful act of a continuing character entailing its international responsibility, and do so no later than 12 months”. || previously [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 7:31 PM - 12 comments

Ever Tried Nacho-Doms? Crispy popadoms, spicy keema, melted cheese, salsa & dips as created by Latifs Inspired. UMAMI-BOMB! Bismillah.
posted by NoMich at 5:24 PM - 21 comments