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Tatjana Joelle van Vark [previously] creates beautiful and sophisticated devices, like this recreation (including a "hypothetical planetarium") of the Antikythera Mechanism. In this video she walks us through some of her constructions: Mythe van een Magistra
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:44 PM PST - 10 comments

For those at the top, James Brown’s observation that it is a man’s, man’s, man’s world still holds true. Some 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs are male, as are 98% of the self-made billionaires on the Forbes rich list and 93% of the world’s heads of government. In popular films fewer than a third of the characters who speak are women, and more than three-quarters of the protagonists are men. Yet the fact that the highest rungs have male feet all over them is scant comfort for the men at the bottom.
posted by Chessboxing at 8:28 PM PST - 81 comments

Where everything went wrong. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:08 PM PST - 72 comments

Funky town - Lipps Inc 1980 [SLYT]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:38 PM PST - 75 comments

The Solar Impulse, the world's first solar-powered manned long-haul flying machine, is currently in the midst of the longest leg in its pioneering round-the-world journey — China to Hawaii, which at a cruising speed of less than 30mph is anticipated to take most of a week. Follow along with live flight telemetry here. Swiss businessman André Borschberg and Swiss psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard, who both previously participated in the world's first round-the-world balloon voyage, in the Breitling Orbiter 3, are alternating flight legs. Borschberg is at the controls until the aircraft reaches Hawaii.
posted by killdevil at 5:38 PM PST - 12 comments

And Loplop, bird superior , has transformed himself into flesh without flesh and will dwell among us.
Loplop was the Dada and Surrealist artist Max Ernst's alter ego. whose beloved pet cockatoo had died the same night his sister was born.
He described his birth in 1891 as having hatched from an egg that his mother laid.
Ernst took many ideas incorporated in Freud's works and used them to try to identify himself, in 1922 painting Oedipus Rex and then in 1922 Two children are threatened by a nightingale.
In 1931 Loplop; who had the previous year introduced Loplop, now introduced the surrealist group.
Ernst described collage as the "alchemy of the visual image". Loplop was the narrator in his alchemical collage novel Une Semaine de Bonté. as he had previously with La Femme de 100 tetes.
In 1937 he painted Fireside Angel predicting the rise of Fascism. and in 1940 he painted Attirement of the bride depicting his then lover Leonora Carrington. With the war arriving in Europe Ernst left for America. Loplop lived on at least through to 1960 in his sculpture.
posted by adamvasco at 2:08 PM PST - 12 comments

The Root Bridges of Cherrapunji In the depths of northeastern India, in one of the wettest places on earth, bridges aren't built — they're grown. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 1:23 PM PST - 6 comments

On Thursday, the Board of Trustees of UNC- Chapel Hill voted to change the name of Saunders Hall to Carolina Hall. "University trustees made [an error] in 1920 when they recognized William L. Saunders’ leadership in the Ku Klux Klan as a qualification for naming a building in his honor." [more inside]
posted by damayanti at 1:16 PM PST - 30 comments

For American pundits, China isn’t a country. It’s a fantasyland.

Whenever I want to be cheered up about the future of my adopted country, I turn to American pundits. The air here might be deadly, the water undrinkable, the Internet patchy and the culture strangled, but I can always be reassured that China is beating America at something, whether it’s clean energy, high-speed rail, education or even the military.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:52 PM PST - 18 comments

Wanted: A Theology of Atheism by Molly Werthen [New York Times] [Op-Ed] What do people who don’t believe in God believe instead?
posted by Fizz at 12:10 PM PST - 176 comments

Dr. Yotarou Hatamura, who runs the Association for the Study of Failure, is also supervisor of the Failure Knowledge Database Project. He proposes adopting the "Failure Mandala" to promote the systematic understanding and dissemination of failures. To support this approach, he presents a compilation of 100 case studies of failure events organized by topic (also viewable as a single list of PDF files; and available in Japanese). Dr. Hatamura subsequently chaired the investigative committee into the Fukushima nuclear incident, which he discusses here.
posted by Rumple at 11:49 AM PST - 11 comments

New fieldwork in West Turkana, Kenya, has identified evidence of much earlier (than 2.6 ma) hominin technological behaviour. We report (paywalled) the discovery of Lomekwi 3, a 3.3-million-year-old archaeological site where in situ stone artefacts occur in spatiotemporal association(pdf) with Pliocene hominin fossils in a wooded palaeoenvironment. Given the implications of the Lomekwi 3 assemblage for models aiming to converge environmental change, hominin evolution and technological origins (pdf), we propose for it the name ‘Lomekwian’, which predates (pdf) the Oldowan by 700,000 years and marks a new beginning to the known archaeological record. (abstract)
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 10:44 AM PST - 9 comments

For the first time, "the wreckage of a slaving ship that went down with slaves aboard has been recovered." The recovery of artifacts from the 1794 shipwreck is a milestone for the African Slave Wrecks Project, a collaboration by six partner groups (including the National Museum of African-American Art and Culture and the National Parks Service) to find, document, and preserve archaeological remnants of the slave trade. Some of the objects will be included in exhibits in the NMAAHC.
posted by Miko at 10:21 AM PST - 7 comments

Never Had To Go - The Dustbowl Revival, featuring Dick & Arlene Van Dyke [more inside]
posted by nadawi at 9:32 AM PST - 11 comments

Hola is probably the most popular VPN service today, allowing unblocked access to region-locked content. It has been discovered, however, that they have been selling access to their network to third parties. Hola was just used as a botnet for attacking 8chan. Adios, Hola lays down the reasons for why the extension is problematic, and helps you determine whether you are at risk. Hola's response? That was the agreement all along.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 8:46 AM PST - 37 comments

The Washington Post is compiling a database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty.

Overall, blacks were killed at three times the rate of whites or other minorities when adjusting by the population of the census tracts where the shootings occurred.

posted by Little Dawn at 7:29 AM PST - 73 comments

AC Stuart illustrates your D&D stories. The artist AKA Noob the Loser (previously) is doing a series of comics based on YOUR ridiculous tabletop RPG stories. Warning: distinct lack of tastefulness. (I mean, it's really nothing compared to an actual gaming session, in my experience, but ... )
posted by wintersweet at 10:42 PM PST - 22 comments

Joseph R. Biden, known as Beau, died today, at the age of 46. Mr. Biden had previously served as Attorney General of Delaware, and had reportedly been battling brain cancer for several years.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:08 PM PST - 136 comments

The Magnum ice cream company has launched the Be True To Your Pleasure campaign, featuring gender-nonconforming individuals (referred to in marketing materials as "drag queens") as glamorous spokesmodels. [more inside]
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:32 PM PST - 51 comments

"When it really hit me that Piip Show wasn't happening again this year, that really gave me the push to set this up." Visit Junco's Pub: Tiniest Pub in Newfoundland (live stream), from Mefi's own stokast - see full project description on MeFi Projects; FAQ.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:34 PM PST - 10 comments

Most people are aware of the (troublesome) official and unofficial drink sponsorship for alcoholic drinks in pop music of all sorts (see also: St. Ides ads by early 1990s rappers), but there are also (un)official cross marketing efforts in sodas. Coca-Cola is probably the most prominent on and prolific on the official side, who have even sponsored a series of "Coke DJ-Culture" singles and mixes a decade back from some significantly large names in electronic/dance and hip-hop circles. Now add to the mix "Doctor Pepper," a song by Diplo with South Korean superstar CL, Mad Decent’s own RiFF RAFF and Atlanta’s OG Maco. It was a quick song thrown together by CL and built from there, not (yet) the official summer anthem for Dr. Pepper.
posted by filthy light thief at 4:22 PM PST - 22 comments

Sourceforge.com (link omitted due to malware) was once the home of countless open source projects. Now, declining revenue and reduced developer interest has led them to seize idle, but well known projects, and wrap their software in malware-bundling installers. [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 3:34 PM PST - 110 comments

"Antimony is a computer-aided design (CAD) tool from a parallel universe in which CAD software evolved from Lisp machines rather than drafting tables."
Or: an opensource grasshopper3d-ish thing written mostly in python.
via hackaday
posted by signal at 1:21 PM PST - 11 comments

This Terrifying Robot Cheetah Can Now Jump Over Things The jump is accomplished by using a three-part algorithm, which interprets data from the robot's onboard LIDAR system. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 9:51 AM PST - 99 comments

Cockatoo loves Elvis. Other Cockatoo does not.
posted by The Whelk at 9:04 AM PST - 41 comments

The Great Silence is a collaboration between artists Allora & Calzadilla and writer Ted Chiang. Transcript
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:39 AM PST - 4 comments

The myth of the pregnant mother who is high on hormones has had considerable staying power. Something sentimental in us likes the notion that the physical discomfort of pregnancy is outweighed by the thrill of nurturing a new life within your own body...We have not acknowledged how appropriately anxiety-ridden pregnancy is, how traumatic the change in identity that accompanies prospective motherhood can be. (slnyt) [more inside]
posted by melissasaurus at 6:06 AM PST - 27 comments

John Stossel on 20/20 in 1988: Nuts For Nintendo
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:53 PM PST - 37 comments

Origami Robot Folds Itself Up, Does Cool Stuff, Dissolves Into Nothing [yt] - "At ICRA 2015 in Seattle yesterday, researchers from MIT demonstrated [yt] an untethered miniature origami robot that self-folds, walks, swims, and degrades. That's the title of their paper [pdf], in fact, and they delivered on all of those promises: from a flat sheet with a magnet on it, their robot folds itself up in just a few seconds, is immediately ready to zip around on land or water driven by magnetic fields, and then when you've run out of things to do with it, drive it into a tank of acetone and it'll dissolve. This is the first time that a robot has been able to demonstrate a complete life cycle like this, and eventually, it'll be doing it inside your body." (via; previously)
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM PST - 37 comments

In Seattle, Xenia is not only a "one bedroom in Eastlake", it's an Airbnb art installation you can rent for a $100 a night.
posted by ShooBoo at 10:42 PM PST - 15 comments

The secret reefer tapes of Louis Armstrong
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:12 PM PST - 21 comments

The Myth Of The Maxxinista [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:47 PM PST - 61 comments

Dear Jennifer, I very much appreciate your letter of 10/29. From the wording of one of your questions, I suspect that the message may have been intended for my monster, "Frankenstein's Monster." I have included his address, should you wish to contact him (the monster) directly.
posted by moonmilk at 8:07 PM PST - 28 comments

But the final item on the meeting’s agenda underscored what all those virtual Esperantists were missing. After the speeches, Neil got up and passed out sheets printed with the lyrics to "Fremdaj en la Nokt," the Esperanto version of the Sinatra hit "Strangers in the Night." He explained that a particular Italian Esperantist had an extensive YouTube presence and a habit of jumping into worldwide Esperanto forums and Facebook groups to plug his singing. This was one of his better songs. Neil settled back down behind his banquet table, counted out the time, and the eight attending members of the New York Esperanto Society started to sing.
posted by growabrain at 8:04 PM PST - 14 comments

A tough way to lose a poker tournament when you go all in for millions of dollars.. (slyt)
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:02 PM PST - 42 comments

When the refurbishment is complete, Witanhurst will have about ninety thousand square feet of interior space, making it the second-largest mansion in the city, after Buckingham Palace. It will likely become the most expensive house in London. In 2006, the Qatari royal family bought Dudley House, on Park Lane, for about forty million pounds; after a renovation, its estimated resale value is two hundred and fifty million pounds. Real-estate agents expect that the completed Witanhurst will be worth three hundred million pounds—about four hundred and fifty million dollars.

And no one knows who owns it.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:31 PM PST - 36 comments

From plitter to drabbletail: a few writers choose the words they love. [The Guardian] [Books]

Dialect terms such as yokeymajig or whiffle-whaffle; all-time favourites like cochineal, clot or eschew; antiquated phrases such as ‘playing the giddy ox’ … leading writers on the words they cherish.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:23 PM PST - 30 comments

I'm Waka Flocka Flame, and I approve this message.
posted by not_on_display at 6:19 PM PST - 13 comments

Castle Griffinsteed: What horrors lie beneath?
posted by saladin at 5:33 PM PST - 5 comments

Jimmy Stewart chews on the scenery. Scenery chews on Jimmy Stewart. [more inside]
posted by bq at 5:10 PM PST - 20 comments

Hand Carved from solid blocks of wood.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 4:16 PM PST - 7 comments

"Vivid Sydney is an 18 day festival of light, music and ideas bringing Australia's Emerald City to life as winter approaches. This year Vivid began on 22 May and finishes on 8 June. Just for once, I'll let my camera do the talking..." Example of a light show on the Customs House (YouTube, Doctor Who 50th Anniversary). [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 3:42 PM PST - 5 comments

Soyuz docking with the ISS. A dashcam view from TMA-16M. Blue Danube waltz not included. (SLYT)
posted by bitmage at 3:36 PM PST - 22 comments

Cobra Club ... the newest game by developer Robert Yang, doesn’t just feature dicks: the game is fundamentally about dicks, how they look, and the many ways people try to make them look good. Yang’s previous games have had the fortune of being picked up by major YouTubers, meaning that millions of gamers around the world are familiar with his work. But Yang doesn’t feel comfortable with the way in which some YouTubers treated his creations. “[Cobra Club] is more ‘direct’ in response to all these dudes playing my abstract gay sex innuendo games and saying ‘this is so gay! eww’…basically, when people are being homophobic and gross, the proper response is to be even gayer at them,” Yang told me.

[more inside]
posted by frimble at 3:05 PM PST - 24 comments

The Piscivore's Dilemma On sustainable seafood (Tim Zimmerman for Outside magazine)
posted by box at 1:56 PM PST - 18 comments

In the long history of pinball machines, a new golden age of pinball was started with the introduction of player-controlled electronic flippers, first seen in 1947 in D. Gottlieb & Co's Humpty Dumpty. Unfortunately, this was five years after the start of the War on Pinball, ushered in by New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and others who saw pinball machines simply as another form of coin-machine gambling (PDF) and source of moral decline. Following New York, pinball bans spread throughout the United States (PDF) and Canada, with fears escalating to the point that some in criminal law looked to alternative solutions to the Pinball Problem (PDF). Even though a bold "Babe Ruth" move by Roger Sharpe in New York City in May of 1976 overturned the local ban and other cities again followed suit, some local pinball bans have only recently recently been lifted, after people discovered such laws were still in place. See also: Pinball: From Illegal Gambling Game to American Obsession (VICE short documentary).
posted by filthy light thief at 1:50 PM PST - 13 comments

Cameron Crowe's new movie Aloha got its first bad review when Amy Pascal's emails were hacked. "I'm never starting a movie again when the script is ridiculous," she wrote. "I don't care how much I love the director and the actors." This was before anyone got wind that this was the latest of in long, disgraceful history of movies set in Hawaii that erase POC from a location where the population is only around 30% Caucasian. But as Jen Yamoto points out in The Daily Beast, "Aloha actually features one of the more prominent Asian/mixed heritage female leads in any studio movie in recent memory. She just happens to be played by Emma Stone." [more inside]
posted by Gin and Broadband at 1:37 PM PST - 86 comments

Life and Death at Cirque du Soleil
posted by zarq at 1:29 PM PST - 17 comments

Troy Grady a guitarist who grew up in the '80's worked to discover the techniques used by speed guitarists like Yngwie Malmsteen, Eric Johnson, Steve Vai and Eddie Van Halen. In Cracking the Code (Season 1 and Season 2), he goes through his struggles and successes in figuring out how to chunk patterns, pick slanting and sweeping and unlock the riffs of these masters. Unlike typical presentations, his feature clever throwback animations that illustrate technique with a German expressionist style. Outside the series, he also discusses the art of transcription in deconstructing Steve Vai's "Intimidation Lick" from Crossroads.
posted by plinth at 1:24 PM PST - 19 comments

OK, I actually knew that, although I didn't realize that anonymous authors were still cranking out Hardy Boys (and Nancy Drew) books.
posted by COD at 12:42 PM PST - 44 comments

The game is the game, what's done is done, and it is what it is.

The Wire: Tautology Supercut [SLYT, NSFW]

posted by Room 641-A at 12:42 PM PST - 18 comments

Andrew Klein demonstrates his custom saw blade designed for quickly making boxes and drawers. There's also a photo gallery if you want to skip the video.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 12:34 PM PST - 33 comments

Former TV cameraman Rick Suddeth has posted numerous videos of everyday life in the former Soviet Union in the 1980s and early 1990s. These are mostly raw footage or lightly edited, some are silent. Moscow traffic ca. 1986. Moscow grocery store ca. 1990. Universam Department Store, Moscow, 1990. Queuing for wine at a state liquor store. In the Cosmos Night Club. [more inside]
posted by Rumple at 12:32 PM PST - 12 comments

Looking for something to watch this weekend? Why not try the Star Wars: Clone Wars microseries-compiled-into-a-movie from 2003.
posted by curious nu at 12:00 PM PST - 30 comments

In 1975, the New York Blood Center (NYBC) decided to bring 100 chimpanzees to Liberia to conduct research on hepatitis and other human diseases. The research worked: we now have a vaccine for hepatitis B, and the research project ended in 2005. But NYBC left the chimps in Liberia, promising that they could retire there and be cared for until the natural end of their lives. In March 2015, NYBC abruptly ended funding for the chimp sanctuary. The chimps are slowly starving to death, dependent on the charity of unpaid caregivers for food and fresh water. NYBC says they have no legal or moral obligation to help. [more inside]
posted by decathecting at 11:19 AM PST - 37 comments

Judy Kuhn sings ‘Colors of the Wind’ in different styles and talks about her eleven o'clock number in "Fun Home" (Fun Home previously)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:07 AM PST - 6 comments

Bush pilots in Alaska rely on planes that can get them in and out of just about anywhere that has a bare patch of ground. During the off-season, they (and pilots from around the rest of the US) meet up for the annual Valdez Fly In. [more inside]
posted by backseatpilot at 11:05 AM PST - 20 comments

Chance the Rapper and The Social Experiment's new album Surf is available as a free download at his home page here, or iTunes.
posted by lkc at 10:45 AM PST - 15 comments

Quinn Norton is selling you out
posted by The Devil Tesla at 9:30 AM PST - 35 comments

Why is one of the most desirable neighborhoods in NYC full of shuttered storefronts?
posted by The Whelk at 8:50 AM PST - 138 comments

Jordan Engel's Decolonial Atlas project aims to restore indigenous place names to global maps overwritten by colonialism. On Tumblr too.
posted by Miko at 7:48 AM PST - 36 comments

In 1864, a nine-year-old slave girl was punished for daydreaming. Distracted by rumors that her brother and father would be sold, she failed to remove worms from the tobacco leaves she was picking. The overseer didn’t whip her. Instead, he pried her mouth open, stuffed a worm inside, and forced her to eat it. This girl is not real.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:25 AM PST - 52 comments

Did Alice Goffman commit a felony? (From Ethics On the Run) [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:00 AM PST - 40 comments

We've seen good ASL versions of Eminem before, but this one from Shelby Mitchusson takes it to another level. (SLASLYT)
posted by ericbop at 6:16 AM PST - 14 comments

The New Republic interviews Josh Levs, a CNN reporter who "has written a book, All In: How Our Work-First Culture Fails Dads, Families, and Businesses – and How We Can Fix It Together, arguing that it is incumbent on men to become part of a conversation about gender equality in homes and in workplaces." [more inside]
posted by John Cohen at 5:09 AM PST - 60 comments

‘Tired of pre-conceptions around African music, Mbongwana Star are creating their own identity, fusing traditional Congolese rhythms with post punk and electronics inspired by life in the townships around them, “making magic out garbage”’—some tracks on YouTube: Malukayi (ft. Konono No. 1); Shégué; Nganshe; Kala. You can listen to their debut album From Kinshasa in full on Soundcloud (some reviews 1, 2, 3). [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 3:18 AM PST - 6 comments

A French journalist posed online as a young woman interested in Isis, she was soon contacted by a fighter in Syria. Could she maintain a double life?
posted by Admira at 12:55 AM PST - 13 comments

'New Wave Games Journalist' and frequent Guardian and Rock Paper Shotgun columnist Cara Ellison is leaving games journalism, and she lays out her reasons in an essay on her site. Some of her best-known writing includes her S.EXE series about sex in a games for Rock Paper Shotgun, a verse review of an Anna Anthropy game for The Guardian, the Embed With Games series and a heartfelt tribute to indie game maker Increpare.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 12:21 AM PST - 26 comments

What with Disney owning Marvel, you'd think they'd found a way to crossover all their various princesses by now. Until they finally do, have all your Disney princesses needs met with Amy Mebberson's Pocket Princesses.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:16 AM PST - 10 comments

Tell us how many people you’ve slept with. Our calculator will tell you if that’s a lot. Slate features a sex history calculator. Input your age, gender (male or female) and number of sex partners since 18 and compare results with other participants.
posted by zardoz at 9:52 PM PST - 252 comments

Luzira was once the most notorious prison in Uganda. Now it’s home to what is surely the world’s most elaborate prison football league. "Upper Prison has kept itself busy with extraordinary ingenuity. The prisoners have created their own drama, they dance, and they play music on homemade instruments. There is prayer and counselling in the church and mosque. But more popular than anything else is football. Within the prison there are 10 football clubs, some of them almost two decades old, each with their own players, boards and constitutions. Alongside Moses’s old team Aston Villa, there is Liverpool and Manchester United, Everton and Chelsea, Arsenal and Newcastle United."
posted by all the versus at 9:51 PM PST - 4 comments

Jacobin mag: John Oliver Should Be More Like Mad Max. [spoilers]

LorenzoAE: John Oliver isn't Mad Max: He's Part of the Problem.
"Oliver isn’t going to be Mad Max, nor will he be Howard Beale, Eugene Debs, or Spartacus. He’s going to be John Oliver—an employee of the Time Warner media empire who’s valued highly enough as a corporate asset to make millions of dollars a year. If he or any other celebrity threatened the corporate bottom line rather than serving it, he wouldn’t have his own show, he’d be stuck writing media criticism for free on a WordPress site. If that isn’t obvious, then someone needs to read more Chomsky and watch less John Oliver."
posted by anemone of the state at 9:40 PM PST - 90 comments

Single Ladies ft. DuckTales [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:42 PM PST - 17 comments

Tell Me Do You Miss Me - A Film About Luna is a strangely fascinating 2006 documentary about the indie band's 2005 farewell tour. It often seems more like a vacation souvenir home video than a documentary, surprisingly intimate and personal, with obvious affection, tension and rehashing of old arguments between band founder Dean Wareham and guitar player Sean Eden. Surprisingly open and honest, it's a slice of life we rarely get to see, we're so used to tour films being about really famous bands, not smaller bands who may be able to make a living from their music, but who are only going to make money on tour if they sell enough merchandise (that gets lost by the airline). Really worth a watch, and available in its entirety on YouTube. [more inside]
posted by biscotti at 6:14 PM PST - 31 comments

If you love kung fu and hate Nazis, then today is your lucky day. Kung Fury has been released on Youtube. (Previously, Previously)
posted by rebent at 5:41 PM PST - 56 comments

With the finals of the National Spelling Bee about to begin (on ESPN, streaming may not be available to you), "Vocativ and Google Trends were eager to demonstrate just how accomplished these youngsters are", so they compiled a list of the most spellchecked words in each of the 50 United States and D.C. (NOT in map format)
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:08 PM PST - 59 comments

How Julian Jaynes’ famous 1970s theory is faring in the neuroscience age.

The picture Jaynes paints is that consciousness is only a very thin rime of ice atop a sea of habit, instinct, or some other process that is capable of taking care of much more than we tend to give it credit for. “If our reasonings have been correct,” he writes, “it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but were not conscious at all.”

[more inside]
posted by modernserf at 4:06 PM PST - 71 comments

FOAAS (Fuck Off As A Service) provides a modern, RESTful, scalable solution to the common problem of telling people to fuck off. [more inside]
posted by DarlingBri at 3:49 PM PST - 22 comments

An astonishing performance in a Jerusalem tea house (SLYT). [more inside]
posted by beisny at 3:14 PM PST - 11 comments

In their annual gathering of Emmy-contending comedy actresses, The Hollywood Reporter hosts a roundtable conversation featuring Amy Schumer ("Inside Amy Schumer"), Lena Dunham ("Girls"), Gina Rodriguez ("Jane the Virgin"), Tracee Ellis Ross ("Black-ish"), Kate McKinnon ("Saturday Night Live"), and Ellie Kemper ("Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt")
posted by The Gooch at 2:38 PM PST - 29 comments

Men Who Rock II: Not Only Are These Six Up-and-Coming Male Seattle Musicians Hot, They Also Know How to Play Their Instruments! [more inside]
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:35 PM PST - 29 comments

The British Library has put every issue of Spare Rib in their digital journal archive, with full access, for free.

Few titles sum up an era and a movement like Spare Rib. When the first issue came out in July 1972, many women were starting to question their position and role in society. The magazine was an active part of the emerging women's liberation movement. It challenged the stereotyping and exploitation of women in what was the first national magazine of its kind. It supported collective, realistic solutions to the hurdles women faced and reached out to women from all backgrounds. Spare Rib became the debating chamber of feminism in the UK. It continued until January 1993 and the full archive of 239 magazines provides a valuable insight into women's lives and this period of feminist activity.

posted by Shepherd at 1:23 PM PST - 4 comments

This Guy From Baltimore Is Raising a Christian Army to Fight ISIS… What Could Go Wrong?
posted by brundlefly at 1:11 PM PST - 40 comments

Every sensate being we’ve encountered in the universe so far—from dogs and humans and mice to turtles and spiders and seahorses—has evolved to suit the cosmic accident that is Earth. The notion that we could take these forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and hurl them into space, and that this would, to use Petranek’s formulation, constitute “our best hope,” is either fantastically far-fetched or deeply depressing.
As Impey points out, for six decades we’ve had the capacity to blow ourselves to smithereens. One of these days, we may well do ourselves in; certainly we’re already killing off a whole lot of other species. But the problem with thinking of Mars as a fallback planet (besides the lack of oxygen and air pressure and food and liquid water) is that it overlooks the obvious. Wherever we go, we’ll take ourselves with us. Project Exodus: Elizabeth Kolbert on Mars, Earth, exploration versus science and astronautical reach exceeding grasp. [previouslyish]
posted by byanyothername at 12:29 PM PST - 104 comments

Thirty years ago this month, Dire Straits released their fifth album, Brothers in Arms... For the first time, an album sold more on compact disc than on vinyl and passed the 1m mark. How the compact disc lost its shine - the rise and fall of the CD
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:06 PM PST - 90 comments

Neat music video for Golden Touch by J-Pop queen Namie Amuro. Keep your finger in the center!
posted by numaner at 11:44 AM PST - 10 comments

Yesterday, Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and his colleagues reported finding a jaw in Ethiopia that belonged to an human relative that lived between 3.3 and 3.5 million years ago. Their article appears today in Nature.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:01 AM PST - 16 comments

Adnan Khan: ‘Our Brownness Does Not Belong Here’
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:37 AM PST - 56 comments

In this script, a 189,000-square-foot big-box store plays the role of “progress” and an old-fashioned, last-of-its-breed drive-in in plays the part of “nostalgia.” Their conflict, like many in the movies, is perfectly framed to represent something greater: the struggle for the identity of a small town. What, in fact, does Maryville, TN want to be? How does "the peaceful side of the Smokies" grow while maintaining that identity — and connecting thousands of tourists to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park?
posted by SkylitDrawl at 9:46 AM PST - 32 comments

The war on coal is not just political rhetoric, or a paranoid fantasy concocted by rapacious polluters. It’s real and it’s relentless. Over the past five years, it has killed a coal-fired power plant every 10 days. It has quietly transformed the U.S. electric grid and the global climate debate.
posted by Long Way To Go at 9:26 AM PST - 62 comments

Japanese Farmer Finds an Enormous, Mutated Strawberry That Is Now Officially the Heaviest Ever Found [YouTube]

A farmer in Fukuoka, Japan found an enormous (by berry standards) strawberry that tipped the scale at a whopping 250 grams—that’s a little over half a pound for metric system haters. The mutated beast of a berry now holds the Guinness World Record for the heaviest strawberry in the world. via: [Laughing Squid] [image 1] [image 2] [image 3]

posted by Fizz at 8:38 AM PST - 41 comments

US vs. Nordic Policing How many shots are needed?
posted by zeikka at 8:31 AM PST - 25 comments

A panel of comics in NYC discuss the intersection of comedy with race, gender, and sexuality. Thoughtfulness ensues. [more inside]
posted by jilloftrades at 7:21 AM PST - 10 comments

An interactive look at the deaths of WWII and the relative peace that has followed Highlights include the sacrifices of the Soviet Union, the toll of past atrocities and a breakdown of holocaust deaths. Numbers are adjusted to world population at the end.
posted by laptolain at 7:06 AM PST - 44 comments

Sumana Harihareswara, contributor to open source projects including Wikimedia and GNOME, asks a question: where are the women in the history of open source?

If you ask some people about the history of free software, you hear about Richard Stallman creating the GNU Public License and formulating the Four Freedoms...

Some people will tell you a bit about Stallman, and then discuss how Eric S. Raymond wrote “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and articulated more pragmatic language for open source folks to use, and how permissive licenses helped popularize open source...

But in any case — where the fuck are the women?

[more inside]
posted by metaquarry at 6:22 AM PST - 64 comments

Bobby Scotto, a fourth grader at the Children’s Workshop School on 12th Street in the East Village, wants to be an archaeologist when he grows up, and he is already off to a good start. In the past few months he has excavated dozens of old coins, a toy watch and other artifacts, all from an unlikely dig site: his classroom’s closet.
posted by ursus_comiter at 5:04 AM PST - 6 comments

Something about this country – the divisions, the class system, the general sense of distrust and dissatisfaction – seems to breed youth subcultures like no other place on Earth. The strange, stylish clans that this island incubates have been exported across the world, influencing everything from high street fashion to high art. From teddy boys to 2 Tone rudeboys, soulboys to Slipknot fans, grunge bands to grime crews, mods to mod revivalists, the history of these groups shows us a version of modern Britain that goes way beyond Diana and Blair.

[more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:48 AM PST - 8 comments

Iceland district repeals decree allowing Basque sailors to be killed on sight. A memorial dedicated to the 32 Basque whalers who were killed in the West Fjords in 1615 in what’s known as Iceland’s only mass murder Spánverjavígin was unveiled in Hólmavík, the West Fjords, on April 22, the last day of winter. At the occasion, West Fjords district commissioner Jónas Guðmundsson revoked the order allowing Basque sailors to be killed on sight. [more inside]
posted by three blind mice at 2:23 AM PST - 18 comments

Should you trust an internet of proprietary software things? - "Richard Stallman, known for his instrumental role in the creation of Linux, has written an opinion piece arguing that nearly any operating system you might use today can be considered malware, and that goes for popular mobile platforms as well as desktop operating systems." (via; rms previously)
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM PST - 130 comments

If you like unusual musical instruments along the lines of those designed and built by microtonalist Harry Partch, or sound sculpture artist Jean Tinguely, for example, you might want to check out the Anarchestra.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:59 PM PST - 12 comments

What happens when veterans trade in their combat boots for muck boots? Sara Creech, a surgery nurse during the Iraq War, is part of a growing movement to help vets transition back into civilian life—and find a measure of peace—by going back to the land (NYT, mentions suicide). [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:17 PM PST - 14 comments

“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. I got a call in December last year from a German television reporter named Peter Onneken. He and his collaborator Diana Löbl were working on a documentary film about the junk-science diet industry. They wanted me to help demonstrate just how easy it is to turn bad science into the big headlines behind diet fads. And Onneken wanted to do it gonzo style: Reveal the corruption of the diet research-media complex by taking part.
posted by contrarian at 5:59 PM PST - 44 comments

The New York Times has been around long enough to report on more or less everything, and its First Glimpses feature occasionally dives into the archives to see when some notable thing was mentioned for the very first time. This week, it's cheeseburgers. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 5:55 PM PST - 36 comments

Alan, Alien
posted by Michele in California at 4:51 PM PST - 15 comments

"The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever"
posted by zarq at 3:56 PM PST - 111 comments

Every Alfred Hitchcock cameo ever in his own films.
posted by jim in austin at 2:44 PM PST - 18 comments

Nebraska is the 19th U.S. state to repeal the death penalty. [more inside]
posted by duffell at 2:21 PM PST - 46 comments

hey girl: you can use my shoulder as a rifle stand, as you’re the better shot of the two of us. (feminist mad max tumblr)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 1:32 PM PST - 176 comments

You won't regret that tattoo. Single link Vimeo. A short, sweet first documentary by Angie Bird, via the Tattoo Historian at Tattoo History Daily. (Somewhat previously on the Tattoo Historian, Dr. Anna Felicity Friedman.)
posted by blue suede stockings at 11:02 AM PST - 100 comments

So it turns out rather than religious fanatics unused to the freedom found in Holland, New England was actually founded by a bunch of Anglo-Saxon sell swords who had fled the British Isles after the Norman invasion on land given by a grateful byzantine emperor on the north-east coast of the Black Sea. Confused? Intrigued? Let Dr. Caitlin R. Green explain and set out the evidence for the existence of a 11th century New England/Nova Anglia.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:37 AM PST - 32 comments

...the first thing I noticed when I started to write my code was that the latitude and longitude coordinates of the message locations have more than 5 decimal places of precision, making it possible to pinpoint the sender’s location to less than a meter.

Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger
posted by griphus at 10:32 AM PST - 79 comments

I Was a Proud Non-Breeder. Then I Changed My Mind, by Michelle Goldberg, author of To Breed Or Not To Breed [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:21 AM PST - 240 comments

Eric Adler of the Adler Vermillion law firm and the Legal Hackers group dives into the odd nuances of copyright laws as applied to video games.
posted by boo_radley at 9:06 AM PST - 13 comments

Cooking In The Archives: recreating recipes from the Early Modern Peroid (1600s-1800s) in a modern kitchen. Not old enough? Then try some authentically medieval recipes.
posted by The Whelk at 8:41 AM PST - 37 comments

The End of the Tour [YouTube] [Trailer]

The End of the Tour is based on the true story of David Lipsky, a Rolling Stone reporter who interviewed legendary author David Foster Wallace for five days in 1996. Lipsky catches up with the author as he’s about to hit the final stop on the book tour for the release of Infinite Jest, then and now considered one of the great novels written in our lifetimes. Over the course of the next few days, the reporter develops a complicated relationship with the icon.

posted by Fizz at 8:23 AM PST - 32 comments

The prime appeal of consensus process for forty years has been its promise to be more profoundly democratic than other methods. But let’s face it: the real-world evidence is shaky at best. [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:41 AM PST - 125 comments

"I've always been fascinated by how human beings move through crowds.

How many millions of minute calculations must our brains be making in order for us to navigate from one end of a packed space to the other?

But despite being the owner of all this incredible processing power, there's still one thing my brain will never be able to figure out...

...one code it will never crack...

HOW DO I GREET PEOPLE IN MY LIFE?"
posted by moody cow at 7:03 AM PST - 67 comments

Space Weird Thing Space Oddity redone, Up Goer Five style
posted by Jeanne at 6:57 AM PST - 32 comments

Hayao Miyazaki's - On Your Mark "In 1994, Hayao Miyazaki took a break from writing the script for Princess Mononoke to work on this music video from Japnese pop duo Chage & Aska" [via]
posted by dhruva at 6:48 AM PST - 16 comments

When amateur chess player Dana Mackenzie sat down against International Master David Pruess in the last round of the 2006 Western States Open, he was outrated by 345 points, making the game a huge mismatch on paper. The game took a strange turn when as early as his sixth move Mackenzie gave up his queen for only a bishop and knight, a preposterous speculative sacrifice that seemed incredibly unlikely to work, especially against a player much more skilled than him. But what his opponent didn't know was that Mackenzie had already practiced this position against his computer a hundred times. [more inside]
posted by dfan at 6:04 AM PST - 53 comments

Anne Meara passed away this past weekend at the age of 85. Meara was a remarkable actress and commedian who is known to modern audiences for her work on "King of Queens", "Sex and the City" and, of course, her slightly famous son Ben Stiller. But Meara also laid claim to one of the longest comedy partnerships in the entertainment industry with her husband Jerry Stiller, whom she first met in 1953 and started working with in the early 1960's. Here are some choice clips from five decades back: Highlights from Stiller and Meara on the Ed Sullivan show. Stiller and Meara illustrate how to break up with someone. Audio of their "Last Two People in the World" and "Moments of Truth behind TV Commecials" sketches.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:44 AM PST - 30 comments

Nebraska became the 20th state to adopt a law that makes it possible for nurses in a variety of medical fields with most advanced degrees to practice without a doctor’s oversight. Maryland’s governor signed a similar bill into law this month, and eight more states are considering such legislation, according to the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Now nurses in Nebraska with a master’s degree or better, known as nurse practitioners, no longer have to get a signed agreement from a doctor to be able to do what their state license allows — order and interpret diagnostic tests, prescribe medications and administer treatments.
posted by wondrous strange snow at 5:33 AM PST - 48 comments

When I started my first year of residency in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1998, there were 20 percent more patient admissions per intern in my residency program than there had been just three years earlier. The sheer number and complexity of my patients was nearly overwhelming—and I was worried that at best, they were not getting the care they had a right to expect, and at worst, that they were not safe.

posted by ellieBOA at 4:43 AM PST - 12 comments

“The last time he hiked to the top of Stone Mountain before embarking on a new life in South America, longtime Atlanta writer and novelist Charles McNair saw a ghost, had a dream and found a new, pure heart in the old mountain.”
posted by ob1quixote at 12:18 AM PST - 17 comments

Shaun Tan (previously, twice) is most identified with his distinctly surreal style of 2D still art, but he has also worked in sculpted and animated forms, as seen in his pieces inspired by recently revised stories of the Brothers Grimm, and The Lost Thing, a short film based on his book of the same name.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:38 PM PST - 4 comments

FIFA officials, in Zurich for their annual meeting, were arrested this morning by Swiss authorities. They will be extradited to the United States to face charges of wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering.
posted by thecjm at 9:11 PM PST - 434 comments

(1 + 2 + … + n)² = (1³ + 2³ + … + n³) [animated GIF]
(unanimated version)
posted by Wolfdog at 6:19 PM PST - 47 comments

Feminine Pictorialities is "British Pathé's classic 'special selection for the ladies' from the 1930s [and] covers bathing and hat fashions, hairstyles, and women's sport." Among the 55 short films from 1934 and 1935: Woollies! Handbags! Cartoon fashions! And my favorite, a forerunner of 100 Years of Beauty (previously), Whirly, Curly Girls! [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:05 PM PST - 9 comments

Documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark died on May 25, 2015 at the age of 75. Perhaps her most famous project is the documentation of the lives of homeless people in Seattle in the early 1980s, specifically Erin "Tiny" Blackwell, a 13-year-old sex worker. This Life Magazine editorial was then turned into a documentary film called Streetwise in 1984. Mary and her husband, Mark Bell, have more recently followed up with Tiny 30 years later for a successful Kickstarter campaign for a book and film to be released this later this year.
posted by girlmightlive at 5:58 PM PST - 26 comments

Unicode is Kind of Insane
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:17 PM PST - 62 comments

In the summer of 1963 Jerry Gretzinger began drawing a map of an imaginary city. You can now use Jerry's Map to zoom in on any of the over 3,200 eight by ten inch panels of the original paper map, executed in acrylic, marker, colored pencil, ink, collage, and inkjet print. This short film by Greg Whitmore takes a fascinating look at the project and the artist's process, which "is dictated by the interplay between an elaborate set of rules and randomly generated instructions." [via]
posted by Room 641-A at 5:09 PM PST - 2 comments

"When you imagine France and its scenic countryside, you might think of the picturesque villages, vineyards a plenty and endless rolling green hills to drive through on a blissful summer road trip. But there’s one corner of this scenic country that no one has been allowed to enter for nearly a century, known as the 'Zone Rouge'."
posted by orange swan at 4:46 PM PST - 34 comments

"The record store, the guitar shop, and now social media: when it comes to popular music, these places become stages for the display of male prowess. Female expertise, when it appears, is repeatedly dismissed as fraudulent. Every woman who has ever ventured an opinion on popular music could give you some variation (or a hundred) on my school corridor run-in, and becoming a recognized 'expert' (a musician, a critic) will not save you from accusations of fakery." The World Needs Female Rock Critics, by Anwen Crawford for the New Yorker. Discussed in the piece is Jessica Hopper's new collection of essays, The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, which has been greeted with glowing praise. Here's an interview she did with Hazlitt: 'Am I Womansplaining To You?' And here she speaks to Meredith Graves of Perfect Pussy: "Being a fangirl is all the qualification you need. And don't wait for anyone to give you permission. They won't. And you should do it anyways." [more inside]
posted by naju at 4:11 PM PST - 11 comments

Bob Dylan sang The Night We Called It a Day on David Letterman's next-to-last Late Show episode. This was the third time he appeared on Letterman show. He played at the 10th Anniversary show in 1992 backed by an all-star band assembled by Dylan fan Paul Shaffer. But perhaps the most significant was in 1984, when Dylan's star was at a low ebb. He played three songs accompanied by LA Latino punk band The Plugz, Don't Stop Talking (Sonny Boy Williamson cover), and two tracks off Dylan's album Infidels, License to Kill and Jokerman. Two videos from the rehearsal also exist, featuring songs Treat Her Right (Roy Head cover) and I Once Knew a Man, which is probably a Dylan original, but nobody knows for sure. New York Magazine's Vulture blog interviewed The Plugz and told the story of the performance.
posted by Kattullus at 3:57 PM PST - 11 comments

Well, if you're going to Europa, you definitely want to pack a magnetometer, among other neat tools.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:45 PM PST - 15 comments

Stephen Fry announces in an exclusive interview that Jony Ive has been promoted to Apple's Chief Design Officer (CDO). Ive becomes the third C-level executive at the company, a step up from his former position as Senior Vice President of Design. Tim Cook followed up on Fry's announcement with a company-wide email detailing all of the changes to the management structure of the design department.
posted by fairmettle at 3:29 PM PST - 23 comments

Sony's 2011 contract with Spotify has leaked. The Verge's calculations have Sony making a pretty sizable sum off the deal, without much of it trickling down to artists. Meanwhile, Sony has begun pulling all of its artists' music from Soundcloud. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:21 PM PST - 14 comments

Loaded with Lead. America has an estimated 10,000 gun ranges and 40 million annual recreational shooters. But when guns are fired with lead-based ammunition, they spread a toxin: lead vapor and dust. A year-long Seattle Times investigation shows that due to poor ventilation and contact with lead-coated surfaces, thousands of workers, shooters and their family members have been contaminated and been made sick at shooting ranges nationwide. Reckless range owners/operators, unenforced regulations as well as a lack of oversight and inspections are to blame. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 2:40 PM PST - 74 comments

MeFi's own Jason Scott wants your goddamn AOL CDs. [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 2:32 PM PST - 21 comments

How to Say or Pronounce USA Cities
posted by roll truck roll at 2:02 PM PST - 32 comments

The Golden Ratio or the Golden Mean is touted as universal principle of mathematics, aesthetics, and architecture. Its natural occurrences are often associated with beauty and health. But naysayers think the Golden Ratio is myth or even a scam. Golden ratio previously and previouslier.
posted by immlass at 1:56 PM PST - 28 comments

One Weird Trick to Winning EVE Online - Bitter Vets Hate Him!
posted by Evilspork at 1:29 PM PST - 29 comments

Hoverboard inventor breaks world record for flight distance. Catalin Alexandru Duru sets a new world record by flying his homemade hoverboard 276m along Lake Ouareau in Quebec, Canada. [more inside]
posted by NailsTheCat at 12:27 PM PST - 18 comments

The first federally approved monument honoring LGBT veterans in a national cemetery was unveiled and dedicated in a grove at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Illinois on Memorial Day.
posted by MrJM at 10:49 AM PST - 47 comments

Answer the following questions in any language(s), formats, or paradigmatic expressions with which you are comfortable. Videographers are available for those most comfortable in physical languages. If you need further support to fully actualize your responses, do not hesitate to ask the Proctor for any materials or mediums you require. When you have finished, virtually or physically attach all answers to this questionnaire.

"Application for the Delegation of First Contact: Questionnaire Part B," a short story by Kathrin Köhler. Additionally: Köhler on the inspirations and influences for this piece.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 10:16 AM PST - 11 comments

After his city's team lost a playoff round, the crowned top mayor in the world puts on a floor show to fulfill the terms of a bet with a rival politician. An alternative link (with possibly marginally better audio) has the mayor explaining why he took this particular approach and allows him to credit the performers. (Warning: Frozen music.)
posted by sardonyx at 8:59 AM PST - 14 comments

Quiverfull of shit: a Guide to the Duggars' Scary Brand of Christianity - Gawker, Jennifer C. Martin

"In 1985, a writer named Mary Pride published a book called The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, which detailed her journey away from the second-wave feminism of the '70s and into what she perceived was a woman’s Biblical place in the home, and the commandment to fill the house with as many of her husband’s children as possible.

"Pride insisted that no woman could possibly find true happiness without submitting to her vision of Christianity: Relinquish control of your womb to God, and exist only to please your husband, give birth, feed everyone, and educate your children in the home—almost certainly without having received any formal higher education yourself."

posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:42 AM PST - 497 comments

Lee was the author of over 90 books and 300 short stories, as well as four BBC Radio plays, and two highly-regarded episodes of the BBC’s SF series Blake’s 7 (Sand and Sarcophagus). She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton in 2013 and the Horror Writers Lifetime Achievement Award this year, which joined her British Fantasy Award from 1980 for Death’s Master, and her World Fantasy Award for her short story “The Gorgon”.

The Sci-Fi Bulletin reports the passing away of Tanith Lee, who had been ill for some time. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 8:27 AM PST - 76 comments

Catgrid. A grid of cats.
posted by phunniemee at 7:52 AM PST - 33 comments

The Washington Post provides some insight into what your name says about you. [more inside]
posted by ourt at 7:47 AM PST - 30 comments

In 1914 Le Corbusier designed, but never built, an open-plan slab concrete house he caled Dom-Ino, combining domus and innovation. One was built to match the plans at the Vienna Biennial in 2014, but you can see the dom-ino philosophy in the skeletons of buildings all over: The Radical Le Corbusier Design That Shaped Italy [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:30 AM PST - 20 comments

A Nice Afternoon With The Women Of New Orleans’ Trans Veterans Support Group (SL Buzzfeed longform)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:17 AM PST - 8 comments

“Jesus Christ, it jumps out of the speakers,” he said. "Only in hindsight did 1985’s Back To The Future seem destined to be a hit. At the time, it wasn’t entirely obvious the movie would be any different than the rest of the sci-fi tilting teen comedies of the era, even if it was directed by Robert Zemeckis (who was fresh off Romancing The Stone), starred Michael J. Fox (Alex P. Keaton of TV’s Family Ties) and was produced by Steven Spielberg. However, Back To The Future had a trick up its sleeve that eventually gave it bulletproof leverage: Huey Lewis And The News’ “The Power Of Love.” "
posted by Servo5678 at 6:17 AM PST - 63 comments

Uncut's Greatest Lost Albums
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:26 AM PST - 25 comments

“Diamonds are easier to trace than wine,” says Jason Hernandez, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted one of the largest wine counterfeiting cases in 2013. “Even if you’re looking at something like a 1982 Château Lafite,” he says, referring to what oenophiles consider one of the best wines in the world from one of the best years, “they made 20,000 cases of that wine. How do you tell one bottle from the next?”

posted by ellieBOA at 4:32 AM PST - 68 comments

Minnesota engineer Dave Edmonson won the Society of Automotive Engineers MPG contest in 1977 and 1978 with a lightweight three-wheel vehicle that he soon put into production and sold as the HMV Free-Way, weighing 750 lbs and producing 12 to 16 hp. An electric model was available. Only around 700 Free-ways were ever made and many have been modified. Within less than five years the company went bankrupt. The last models appear to have been given away in repayment of outstanding debts. Online ephemera include charmingly rough newsletters and the original order form.
posted by bq at 10:23 PM PST - 15 comments

So, how do you increase interest in your compact hybrid cars? Well, if you're Toyota, and you're selling to a Japanese market, you run an ad themed around the iconic music for one of the most famous JRPG transportation options. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:29 PM PST - 27 comments

You know, sometimes life can be rough. We all got hard things to deal with, right? Sometimes we lose people. Sometimes people hurt us. And some days we're just not feeling it and we don't even know why. When I'm feeling down one thing I like to do is play a game. I feel like games can really bring us together. - Life got you down? Play a relaxing game of Dungeons & Dragons with action star Vin Diesel.
posted by Artw at 7:13 PM PST - 48 comments

California's Homeless Find a Quiet Place. (slNatGeo)
posted by Kitteh at 4:31 PM PST - 79 comments

A recent study served to confirm the patently obvious: song lyrics for the most popular genres of music are ridiculously obtuse — and getting worse over time. Though this might not be a revelation, the figures are distressing indicators of both an intellectually vapid societal and cultural future as well as its apparent inevitability. [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 1:52 PM PST - 185 comments

The New York Times reports on "a five-week industry boot camp designed to bring young veterans into the television business" that is "run by one of the Iraq war’s fiercest critics, Jon Stewart, the longtime host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”" [more inside]
posted by Little Dawn at 1:37 PM PST - 12 comments

Everyday Sigils: A tumblr where you can commission magical sigils and symbols to deal with everyday trials, from the mundane to the sadly common.
posted by The Whelk at 10:01 AM PST - 57 comments

They haven’t forgotten. For 70 years, the Dutch have come to a verdant U.S. cemetery outside this small village to care for the graves of Americans killed in World War II. On Sunday, they came again, bearing Memorial Day bouquets for men and women they never knew, but whose 8,300 headstones the people of the Netherlands have adopted as their own.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:28 AM PST - 27 comments

The 2015 Eurovision Song Contest winner has now been crowned (previously), but the real stars of the contest were the fabulous and entertaining International Sign interpreters. [more inside]
posted by zebra at 7:13 AM PST - 15 comments

It instantly hits your eyes haloed in a corona of potency—structured so soundly as to seem staged, this forceful frieze of physical dominance. The Victor yells, the Loser displays himself vanquished, and the Watchers are all caught in that moment. The kinetic poetry of moving bodies, momentarily frozen, such is the stuff of the best sports photos—this has that.

It's widely recognized today as one of the greatest photographs in sports history, but Neil Leifer's masterpiece, capturing the climax of the fight 50 years ago today between Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) and Sony Liston hardly made a stir at the time it was snapped.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:54 AM PST - 34 comments

Americans try Dutch sweets. Some are received very well, others ... not so much. Some commentary at 24 Oranges.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:11 AM PST - 60 comments

On The Beautiful and Tragic Weirdness of Sonic Adventure
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 1:04 AM PST - 39 comments

"The world authorities have run out of ammunition as rates remain stuck at zero. They have no margin for error as economy falters" (Telegraph) [more inside]
posted by cotton dress sock at 12:54 AM PST - 63 comments

"For those who love books, but don’t have enough time for reading. Here are the best books you can read in under an hour each." 24 books to read in under an hour (infographic) by Piotr Kowalczyk at Ebook Friendly. (via Electric Literature) Previously: What to read when pressed for time
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:25 PM PST - 40 comments

Craps and Cryogenics: Blow Your Savings and Live Forever in the New Atlantic City [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:31 PM PST - 17 comments

The lost city of Ordos The Kangbashi district, planned to accommodate a population in excess of one million, is home to a lonely 20,000 people – leaving 98% of this 355-square kilometre site either under construction or abandoned altogether.
posted by bitmage at 9:05 PM PST - 37 comments

Friends, once again, here is yet more proof that one string is all you need.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:30 PM PST - 28 comments

Welcome to the Polish Sahara! Glaciers and medieval industrial degradation created the Bledow Desert, a small area of scrub and blowing sands in Poland. Former WWII training ground - now a tourist destination.
posted by bq at 7:32 PM PST - 7 comments

The music of the legendary Simon and Garfunkel seems to still have a life of its own, long after they broke up in 1970. The great songwriter Paul Simon went on, of course, to have a highly successful solo career, and Art did a few films and several albums. They reunited for several tours over the years (most notably, Central Park in 1982, full concert here, and the on-and-off, often acrimonious friction has been widely reported. In this new Art Garfunkel interview, the singer cuts loose again on Simon and the results are not pretty. (You may want to read the comments below the piece Rolling Stone did on this, many are quite insightful)
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 7:24 PM PST - 45 comments

Cleveland Police Officer Acquitted of Manslaughter in 2012 Deaths [New York Times]

A police officer who climbed onto the hood of a car after a chase in 2012 and fired repeatedly at its unarmed occupants, both of them black, was acquitted of manslaughter on Saturday by an Ohio judge. The trial of the white officer, Michael Brelo, following harrowing episodes in communities such as Baltimore, Staten Island and Ferguson, Mo., played out amid broader questions of how the police interact with African-Americans and use force, in Cleveland and across the country.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:16 PM PST - 51 comments

Can China take a joke? The NYT Magazine examines the growing standup comedy scene in China, and its complicated relationship with traditional Chinese "cross-talk" performances, and modern Chinese society. [previously on metafilter]
posted by firechicago at 7:06 PM PST - 2 comments

Indigenous tribes have been painting their bodies with pulverized minerals and stretching their lips for millenia in the remote Omo valley a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Africa, where the earliest known Homo sapiens remains have been found.
Their whole way of life is now threatened thanks to the Gibi III dam in construction and as the tribes now decorate themselves for tourists.
Photographer and adventurer Jimmy Nelson journeyed the Omo valley.
Some of the tribes : Mursi, Hamar and Karo. (See previous).
posted by adamvasco at 5:26 PM PST - 12 comments

Hollywood & the 'Comic-Book Movie' and part 2
posted by shakespeherian at 4:58 PM PST - 22 comments

RIP Marques Haynes, who died Friday at age 89. According to his NYT Obituary, he joined the Harlem Globetrotters in 1946 or 1947, and played with them through the late 1970s. (Yours truly remembers him from that goofy Saturday morning show, the Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine.) Remembering Haynes. "The things [in basketball] that they do today, Marques started."
posted by Melismata at 4:36 PM PST - 13 comments

http://libraryofbabel.info/
The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence - in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10⁴⁶⁷⁷ books. [more inside]
posted by andoatnp at 2:19 PM PST - 58 comments

Steven Gerrard played his last game in the English Premier League and in a Liverpool shirt today. Things went...badly. But this farewall tour hasn't been all he'd hoped for in any fashion. (Last link has a lot of profanity.)
posted by josher71 at 2:06 PM PST - 41 comments

One World Trade Center's new Observatory (Go Pro/YouTube) (SLYT)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:13 PM PST - 18 comments

Tri-City News reports that a seventeen-year-old "has now admitted to a total of 23 offences of extortion, public mischief and criminal harassment." "He had a consistent pattern of trying to connect with the online gamers — many of them fans of the game League of Legends. But when they denied his requests, he shut down their internet access, posted their personal information online, repeatedly called them late at night and contacted the police in their hometown, posing as someone else. "Often, he would tell the police he was holding a family hostage, had napalm bombs or had killed someone in the house." [more inside]
posted by sardonyx at 10:22 AM PST - 153 comments

John Nash, notable mathematician, died yesterday, with his wife Alicia, in a taxi accident. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 for his contributions to game theory, in particular his discovery of the Nash equilibrium. (previously)
posted by wormwood23 at 8:02 AM PST - 82 comments

Remember the surprising stealth thing-that's-great Frog Fractions (previously)? When creator Jim Crawford (also previously) and his team released its successfully Kickstarted sequel, they won't tell anyone, and will leave everyone to find it for themselves. Enter the unofficial Frog Fractions 2 twitter account, which bugs Jim about a different possible culprit every day. And for those who didn't back the Kickstarter and thus won't be automatically notified when The Jig Is Up (TM), there's always IsTheJigUpYet, which also attempts to guess at FF2's identity (albeit using a sliiiiiightly different method). [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 6:21 AM PST - 16 comments

Phillip Larkin was one of Britain's most famous twentieth century poets. He's probably most well known for 'This Be The Verse' (nsfw) but another notable poem was 'The Whitsun Weddings' based on a railway journey or journeys he undertook from Hull to London fifty years ago. Fellow poet Ian McMillan revisits that journey.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:08 AM PST - 14 comments

Recent video with striking imagery ... Abstract: O D Y S S E Y (see also Pacific Light) • Fu Liu (tutorials 1 & 2) and Beiquan ... Hyperreal / Glitched realities: simulacra (see also Plain Sight) • as-phyx-i-a (made using Xbox One Kinect) • Noah - "flaw" ... Allegorical: Leonard in Slow Motion (starring Martin Starr).
posted by Monsieur Caution at 3:07 AM PST - 5 comments

What Is Bro Science?: 50% fact, 50% magic, 100% results. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:14 PM PST - 38 comments

Wait, Women Don't Have Equal Rights in the United States? - Tabby Biddle, Huffington Post. The History Behind the ERA Amendment ( brief introduction, argument for why ERA is needed). March 22, 1972 | Equal Rights Amendment for Women Passed by Congress (NYT). Chronology of the Equal Rights Amendment, 1923-1996 (NOW). "The ERA Is a Moral Issue": The Mormon Church, LDS Women, and the Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (Neil J. Young, American Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3, Sep., 2007)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:42 PM PST - 31 comments

The 2015 Eurovision Song Contest concluded today, with Sweden's Måns Zelmerlöw performing the winning song. A brief recap of the live performances provides glimpses of the costumes, stage effects, and choreography peculiar to Eurovision grand final performances. [more inside]
posted by needled at 7:14 PM PST - 95 comments

Keanu Reeves is immortal.
posted by Fizz at 6:34 PM PST - 65 comments

A pretty great comic that clearly lays out how (some) privilege works.
posted by Shepherd at 5:34 PM PST - 56 comments

It's almost summer, so here's the story behind one of the best ever pop songs about spending time outside. The Young Rascals, Groovin'.
posted by freakazoid at 5:10 PM PST - 7 comments

"The life-changing message of 'On Writing Well' is: simplify your language and thereby find your humanity." William Zinsser, journalist and nonfiction writer, passed away earlier this month. His book, "On Writing Well," is one of the definitive works on the craft of writing. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 3:08 PM PST - 21 comments

R.I.P. Louis Johnson, great funk bass player. Founding member of funk group Brothers Johnson and legendary bassist Louis Johnson died too young at the age of 60. [more inside]
posted by maggiemaggie at 2:26 PM PST - 23 comments

A 10-step guide to party conversation for bioinformaticians
posted by a lungful of dragon at 1:00 PM PST - 35 comments

“All of those things play a part in who I am as a person. It all has equal weight. I want sexual abuse to sit happily alongside other topics like music and creativity, without this gut shudder, ‘Oh no, we can’t talk about that.’” The book is accompanied by a playlist that Rhodes put on Spotify – Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Chopin’s Etude in C Minor – a wonderfully simple, powerful idea, which at times makes it heartbreakingly difficult to read.

For The Guardian Zoe Williams interviews pianist James Rhodes about his just released autobiography, finally available after the UK Supreme Court ruled in his favour in the lawsuit taken out against him by his ex-wife. Trigger warning: child abuse. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 9:24 AM PST - 26 comments

The Republic of Ireland made history today by becoming the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage via popular vote. Ireland only decriminalized homosexuality in 1993, so the country has seen an amazing turnaround on gay rights issues. And the omens are good.
posted by orange swan at 8:31 AM PST - 117 comments

Why would I, who learned to cook from Culinary Luddites, who grew up in a family that, in Elizabeth David’s words, produced their “own home-cured bacon, ham and sausages . . . churned their own butter, fed their chickens and geese, cherished their fruit trees, skinned and cleaned their own hares” (well, to be honest, not the geese and sausages), not rejoice at the growth of Culinary Luddism? Why would I (or anyone else) want to be thought “an obtuse consumer”? Or admit to preferring unreal food for unreal people? Or to savoring inauthentic cuisine?
The answer is not far to seek: because I am an historian.
A Plea For Culinary Modernism
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:23 AM PST - 78 comments

Wham-O (previously) revolutionized the circle, the torus and the sphere, but they once did something innovative with the humble rectangle: Wham-O Giant Comics (alternate ad here), intended to be a quarterly magazine but ultimately the only issue released by the company. You can read it in its entirety here and read critiques of its contents here. It's an anthology whose contents run the gamut of genres, so if you don't like a story, you can just skip to the next. Of particular note are Radian and Goody Bumpkin, drawn by Wally Wood (previouslies).
posted by BiggerJ at 10:49 PM PST - 13 comments

Carl Zimmer writes for The New York Times: How Simple Can Life Get? It's Complicated - "Scientists have long wondered how much further life can be stripped down and still remain alive. Is there a genetic essence of life? The answer seems to be that the true essence of life is not some handful of genes, but coexistence." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:04 PM PST - 28 comments

Can evolution explain acts of kindness, and morality? [The Guardian]

We arranged a debate between a sceptical Tom Stoppard and the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. Stuart Jeffries acted as referee. We arranged for the two to meet recently in the grand boardroom of Wilson’s London publishers to discuss their differences, and reflect on two hard problems – what is the proper scope of science, and what is it to be human.

posted by Fizz at 6:28 PM PST - 32 comments

Lego Adventure in the City. via the always wonderful The Kid Should See This [more inside]
posted by signal at 6:05 PM PST - 9 comments

In honor of its 60th anniversary, Disneyland presents "Disneyland Forever", the new "World of Color" and the Paint the Night Nighttime Electrical Parade. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:09 PM PST - 22 comments

"You have to watch this video 3 times to discover the secret."
A video puzzle by professional juggler Michael Karas.
posted by Atom Eyes at 4:03 PM PST - 40 comments

Aleister Crowley The Most Wicked Man In The World [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:55 PM PST - 50 comments

Does what it says on the tin, 2945 times. [more inside]
posted by sparklemotion at 2:28 PM PST - 27 comments

B.B. St. Roman [formerly Barbara Becker] is the only staff member for the New Orleans Police Department Homeless Assistant Unit. Before helping the homeless, she traveled the world, recording sound for documentaries .... And at one point, she became the tour manager for Dr. John, Louisiana musician and legend. Her film audio credits include Mother Teresa and Shamans of the Blind Country a film ethnography of the Himalayas. TEDx talk, and here's her Facebook page.
posted by latkes at 1:25 PM PST - 6 comments

It is proven. (SL SBNation)
posted by Ipsifendus at 12:06 PM PST - 141 comments

"The first 21 days of a bee's life in 60 seconds" is a time-lapse video by photographer Anand Varma, who discusses his collaboration with the bee lab at UC Davis in breeding a naturally mite-resistant line of honeybees. (Via.)
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:38 AM PST - 15 comments

As summer approaches, the hotly contested debate about the appropriateness of flip-flops rears its ugly head. In the no-flip-flops-allowed corner is Slate's Dana Stevens. Coming to their defense is Megan Carpenter over at RawStory. [more inside]
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:20 AM PST - 158 comments

Do You Prefer "Native American" or "American Indian"? 6 Prominent Voices Respond "Wherever I go, from the reservation to the city, through the halls of academia, from younger to older, to the grassroots, and in social media, I hear numerous discussions and debates around how people choose to identify with certain references, e.g., which word is the most appropriate: Native American? Native? Indian? American Indian? Indigenous? My task here was to ask several friends and people whom I (and many others) admire what reference they feel most comfortable with."
posted by jaguar at 10:44 AM PST - 66 comments

Why Feminism Needs Punk
posted by josher71 at 10:37 AM PST - 14 comments

In the 1960s, the English psychologist Peter Wason devised an experiment that would revolutionize his field.
posted by boo_radley at 10:27 AM PST - 91 comments

A Netflix app glitch created weird new films - Back in 2014 a bug in one of Netflix’s apps is accidentally mashing up the plot summaries of different movies and TV shows. @SummaryBug has been capturing the weirdest results. Here are some examples.
posted by Nevin at 9:49 AM PST - 15 comments

When a celebrity resemblance is an affliction, not an attribute. A woman writes about being frequently told that she looks like Sandra Bernhard. [more inside]
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 9:30 AM PST - 121 comments

'AMAZING GRACE' PLAYED ENTIRELY ON AIRHORNS WOOOOOOOOO
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:21 AM PST - 29 comments

How Mountain Dew Came to Perpetuate a Deep-Seated Appalachian Stereotype As Mountain Dew taps into tropes of corn-syrup-free authenticity and nostalgia for "backwoods" "renegades" and "rebels" with its throwback drink Dewshine, a daughter of Appalachia considers how the beverage reflects cultural stereotypes. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 9:03 AM PST - 99 comments

Free music Friday! Organic Audio - Back to my Roots As part of their ongoing 20th anniversary celebration Tummy Touch are offering 'dubbed out disco beats and dirty global grooves WAY before they were fashionable'. [more inside]
posted by asok at 8:34 AM PST - 3 comments

In writing class after writing class, I see time and again how the question of talent haunts the young, who come to class hoping to make it into that anointed group—those who publish to glory young. [But] the question of age haunts my older students more than talent.

[more inside]
posted by postcommunism at 7:56 AM PST - 39 comments

Havoc: A life in accidents. An essay by Australian writer Tim Winton
posted by zarq at 7:43 AM PST - 10 comments

Factual comics Friday: Shannon "Too Much Coffee Man" Wheeler sets the record straight on the McDonald's coffee lawsuit.
posted by MartinWisse at 7:41 AM PST - 91 comments

Management advice from former drug dealer Rick Ross
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:50 AM PST - 35 comments

What you do when apartment hunting online, and what a lot of people do, I imagine, is you plug in your preferred neighborhood/price range/amenities/etc., and then out pops a long list of results that you further refine by imagining a very specific and very fictionalized narrative involving a version of yourself that isn’t necessarily true right now but could be true if you lived in apartment X. No, you’ve never wielded a wrench for any longer than the time it takes to pass it to your dad, but why couldn’t you fix a fixer-upper? Or be the kind of person to share one bathroom with six other roommates? Or live with a Ukrainian family that’s gone for five months out of the year, but whose kids you’re expected to babysit as per your new rental agreement?

posted by ellieBOA at 4:57 AM PST - 23 comments

My selfie in 3d . This may be the finest use of 3d printing possible. Gifts for everyone you know or want to know. [more inside]
posted by fizban at 3:53 AM PST - 43 comments

It's a short read, but Food Republic's Ultimate Hot Dog Style Guide may take you a while to digest.
posted by drlith at 3:45 AM PST - 71 comments

Little tough guy pizza thief.
posted by phunniemee at 10:09 PM PST - 26 comments

What started as an amusing way to capture to fleeting attention of airline passengers, either with animation (Virgin Air 2007) , body paint (Air New Zealand 2009), elaborate costumed productions (Air New Zealand again, 2012), or sudden viral sensations (Delta Airlines 2008), the airline safety video has now transformed into a production that doubles as a marketing arm by hoping for that elusive YouTube traffic. With the summer 2015 travel season starting the airlines have started rolling out their newest productions. [more inside]
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:15 PM PST - 46 comments

Tim Heffernan is a freelance writer interested in heavy industry and the natural world. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:56 PM PST - 6 comments

Tomorrowland: how Walt Disney’s strange utopia shaped the world of tomorrow - cryogenically frozen head not included.
posted by Artw at 7:45 PM PST - 20 comments

Lomography is style of pop photography based around the quirky cameras by the Austrian camera manufacturer known as Lomo. There are several camera types that fall under the lomography genre. Among some of the more popular, are the Diana and Holga. These cameras, and (all of them in the Lomo line) are usually poor technical cameras. They are "poorly" built and often have light leaks, poor alignment of their lenses or other defects. [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:15 PM PST - 55 comments

Dave Reynolds, and his partner Frank Rolfe not only own mobile home parks but have a side business teaching potential investors that there's money to be made by buying parks and raising rents. The story from The Guardian. [more inside]
posted by readery at 6:15 PM PST - 26 comments

Redrawing Taylor Swift - Shake it Off Rotoscoped (slyt) [more inside]
posted by mhum at 5:24 PM PST - 21 comments

"Of the 17,808 players (and counting) who’ve run up the dugout steps and onto a Major League field, only 974 have had one-game careers." These are some of their stories.
posted by artsandsci at 4:57 PM PST - 8 comments

30 Years Later, Real Genius is Still the Geek Solidarity Film That Nerd Culture Deserves.
posted by fings at 3:41 PM PST - 129 comments

The first thing you need to know about secure psychiatric facilities is that their bathrooms smell strongly of pee. What does it feel like to suffer from a mental illness? How can you explain that unique pain? I don't know how to explain it but this post hits a few points in a profound way.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 3:29 PM PST - 23 comments

Imagine assembling a portfolio of over 4,000 photographs and then being forced to make it disappear or face life-altering consequences; that’s the situation sophomore Anthony Mazur is currently facing at Flower Mound High School in his Texas hometown.
posted by komara at 2:37 PM PST - 78 comments

Harry Beck's original London Underground Tube Map was a design classic. The latest Transport For London version... Not so much.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:31 PM PST - 35 comments

The Official State Amphibian of Kansas is the Barred Tiger Salamander. The Official State Firearm of Arizona is the Colt Single-Action Army Revolver. The Official State Carnivorous Plant of North Carolina is the Venus Flytrap. The Official State Artifact of California is the Chipped Stone Bear. [more inside]
posted by KathrynT at 11:58 AM PST - 73 comments

Reviews are mixed. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 11:53 AM PST - 22 comments

The Trials of Hannah Arendt by Corey Robin [The Nation]

There’s a history to the conflict over Eichmann in Jerusalem, and like all such histories, the changes in how we read and argue about the book tell us as much about ourselves, and our shifting preoccupations and politics, as they do about Eichmann or Arendt. What has remained constant, however, is the wrath and the rage that Eichmann has aroused. Other books are read, reviled, cast off, passed on. Eichmann is different. Its errors and flaws, real and imagined, have not consigned it to the dustbin of history; they are perennially retrieved and held up as evidence of the book’s viciousness and its author’s vice. An “evil book,” the Anti-Defamation League said upon its publication, and so it remains. Friends and enemies, defenders and detractors—all have compared Arendt and her book to a criminal in the dock, her critics to prosecutors set on conviction.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:28 AM PST - 39 comments

via NYT: "Each year, we put out a call for college application essays about money, work and social class. This year, we picked seven -- about pizza, parental sacrifice, prep school students, discrimination and deprivation."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:10 AM PST - 3 comments

Medieval Reactions to modern situations. [SLTwitter, some illustrations may be NSFW] [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 10:02 AM PST - 35 comments

Eddie Van Halen describes early experiments with guitars, electronics, and home wiring in the quest for his famous tone. "I'm poking around, and all of a sudden I touch this huge blue thing and my God, it was like being punched in the chest by Mike Tyson."
posted by swift at 9:51 AM PST - 33 comments

But as the city transformed into an exceedingly safe and exceedingly expensive place to live over the past two decades, it’s not only the crime and the pervasive decay that have fallen away, but the close proximity, creating a social commute that echoes and exacerbates a work commute that, at more than six hours a week, is the longest in the nation. People have always traveled to see their friends, of course, but rarely has it been so frequent or far to qualify as a commute

The Social Commute: How the Big Schlep Is Changing the Way New Yorkers Live
posted by griphus at 9:40 AM PST - 147 comments

The Asians Art Museum is a parody site bringing a cirtical lens to orientalist tropes in art museums, prompted particularly by rhetorical choices of the San Francisco Art Museum's 2009 Lords of the Samurai exhibition [audio]. It highlights the tendency for museums showing Asian art to present their shows as a"a harmless trip to a fantasyland of romanticized premodern Otherness, a place where dreams of Manifest Destiny never have to die?" [more inside]
posted by Miko at 7:50 AM PST - 23 comments

Why do busses always seem to bunch together? It's because they actually do. Finally, there's a web game to help you understand why. More intellectually stimulating than Desert Bus, but not much more gameplay. CityLab has more.
posted by entropone at 7:30 AM PST - 48 comments

On Tuesday, the first season finale of CW network's The Flash aired. Can't wait 'til next Fall for your Flash fix? There's always the grittier 1990 series, which ran for a single season. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:26 AM PST - 40 comments

User Sparx recently mentioned checking sites of Japanese escape game makers for games of sufficient quality. But what if there were a single, constantly-updated website with links to an obscene number of those frustrating Japanese escape-the-room adventure games? Welcome to hell No1Game. I figured out the site on my own but if you need help, a guide to navigating the site follows. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 7:01 AM PST - 5 comments

It is worth remembering that the things that were changed were ancient, hallowed traditions, sanctioned by time and religion and social practice. My right to rape my wife was part of common law – it had long seemed perfectly obvious and “natural” that the question of consent to sex simply didn’t arise in a marriage. (In many parts of the world, indeed, this still seems “natural”.) The idea that a wife was not a legally or economically separate person but a mere adjunct to her husband had very deep roots. Within my lifetime, even minimal changes to this idea were bitterly opposed.

Marriage was nothing to be proud of in 1983. On the eve of the Irish vote on marriage equality, Fintan O’Toole puts into context the change it will make to the "sanctitity" of marriage, by reflecting on the changes marriage in Ireland had already undergone since his own marriage in 1983. Tomorrow the Republic of Ireland will hold a referendum on Thirty-fourth Amendment of the Constitution (Marriage Equality) Bill 2015, which if passed would make gay marriage available.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:09 AM PST - 111 comments

Jackson Bird posts a Youtube Video about coming out as transgender. Listen carefully, this moves pretty fast...
posted by HuronBob at 5:34 AM PST - 8 comments

Whether it’s two female prisoners competing to see who can coax the most orgasms out of their fellow inmates in Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black or a good, old-fashioned kiss-and-cut-away on ABC’s Scandal—the way intimacy is shown on the small screen has come a long way since 1952 when CBS forbade Lucille Ball from calling herself “pregnant” on national TV, substituting instead the priest-approved word “expecting.”

posted by ellieBOA at 4:34 AM PST - 21 comments

Can YOU recognize the shape of inequality in America? Most can't. [more inside]
posted by ourt at 11:52 PM PST - 104 comments

a story of a lovely porcelain cup with kitty Danny Devito on it [more inside]
posted by NoraReed at 11:06 PM PST - 17 comments

How long do animals live? (via) [more inside]
posted by aniola at 8:58 PM PST - 37 comments

25 One-Hit Wonders From The '90s & Early 2000s You Totally Forgot Existed [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:46 PM PST - 243 comments

"I made a web toy that simulates a doodling and animation toy from an alternate timeline 1990s. Create 2 color, 32x16 pixel, four frame animations. Then transform your creations into gifs resembling a cheap LCD, an LED matrix, a vacuum fluorescent display, and more." Via MetaFilter Projects. [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:47 PM PST - 66 comments

Frank Norris and the Invention of Film Editing: "At the heart of American author Frank Norris’ gritty turn-of-the-century fiction lies an essential engagement with the everyday shock and violence of modernity. Henry Giardina explores how this focus, combined with his unique approach to storytelling, helped to pave the way for a truly filmic style."
posted by Rumple at 6:43 PM PST - 1 comment

SLNYT - Suicdal treatment-resistant depression vs. DBT One man's experience with dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. Previously, and again. [more inside]
posted by aydeejones at 6:36 PM PST - 29 comments

Experimental Writing Seminar: Constraints & Collaborations. In addition to setting out a few dozen writing exercises, the online syllabus for an introductory course taught by Charles Bernstein (poet and co-editor of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) links to a variety of poems, poetry generators, and prose experiments on the web. [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 6:20 PM PST - 4 comments

MAD MEN INTEGRATED. (Warning: Tumblr, GIFs, digital strategy.)
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 5:10 PM PST - 14 comments

"To all these ends, the third- , fourth- , and fifth-graders at Lower were to be divided once a week for five weeks into small groups according to their race. In 45-minute sessions, children would talk about what it was like to be a member of that race; they would discuss what they had in common with each other and how they were different, how other people perceived them, rightly or wrongly, based on appearance. Disinhibited by the company of racially different peers, the children would, the school hoped, feel free to raise questions and make observations that in mixed company might be considered impolite. The bigger goal was to initiate a cultural upheaval, one that would finally give students of color a sense of equal owner­ship in the community. Once the smaller race groups had broken up, the children would gather in a mixed-race setting to share, and discuss, the insights they had gained."

The story of one private school's attempt to teach children about race and the reactions of the parents and children involved in the pilot year.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:59 PM PST - 26 comments

World’s First Battery Powered Ferry
posted by adamvasco at 4:47 PM PST - 14 comments

It's been a few years, but Neutral has finally released a new escape-the-room game: Elements! [Previously.]
posted by phunniemee at 4:27 PM PST - 18 comments

What do the Dreamweaver Manual, Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, and an academic article on wage inequality in France have in common? They were - amongst many others - on Osama bin Laden's Bookshelf. (hat tip to jessamyn)
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:50 PM PST - 63 comments

Sana'a , Green Arabia, Ta'izz: Maciej Cegłowski long in coming three part travelogue about his week in Yemen. [more inside]
posted by zabuni at 3:42 PM PST - 8 comments

Building the Moroccan Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [slyt, 17m44s] "In 2011, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia, which house the Museum's renowned collection of Islamic art. A vital part of the installation was the Patti Cadby Birch Court, a Moroccan court built by a team of experts—from curators and historians to designers and craftsmen—over many months.... This video documents a marvelous journey from Fez to New York, and the creation of a twenty-first-century court using traditional fifteenth-century methods."
posted by ocherdraco at 3:30 PM PST - 5 comments

Salaries, attendance figures, social media footprints, and other data from 17 pro sports leagues worldwide. Ever wondered who earns more, NBA athletes who went to college in Ohio or players in the Scottish Premier League? Or who has a higher payroll, the Minnesota Wild or the Kolkata Knight Riders? Or who has more twitter followers, Aston Villa or the Hiroshima Toyo Carp? Wonder no more.
posted by sy at 3:28 PM PST - 6 comments

"For almost thirty-five years black powder shooting and the many fascinating activities allied to it have been an important part of my life. Hunting is my primary black powder shooting interest, and most of my activities revolve around that, but historical reenacting, trekking and the study of life in this country in mid-eighteenth century get a fair share of my attention. This page is simply my musings about these interests, my experiences and thoughts about many aspects of the hobby. Because life is more than black powder, a few other topics are included. Hopefully, something here will strike a sympathetic chord with the reader, and add to their enjoyment."
posted by valkane at 1:49 PM PST - 20 comments

Several recent developments reveal how political and institutional fragmentation in the United States has produced self-inflicted wounds for the U.S. abroad. In all of these instances, America’s ability to exercise economic power in the world has been deliberately curtailed through decisions made unilaterally in Washington by American political leaders.

posted by infini at 12:47 PM PST - 19 comments

I don't know who Scott is but his sweaters are freaking awesome: Thick, Fuzzy & Warm * Pink Unisex * Sweaterdress * Turtlenck Exclusive * Long-Fiber Extra-Fuzzy * Hood * Mittens * Extremely Rare Retro * [who? * via]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 12:47 PM PST - 22 comments

Myfanwy Collins writes about her fear of dying, cancer scares and a history of cancer in the family. (SLButter)
posted by Hactar at 12:38 PM PST - 5 comments

Jill Lepore talks with Amelia Lester and David Haglund about the role of women in contemporary science fiction - A discussion on the New Yorker Podcast
posted by Lisitasan at 12:37 PM PST - 29 comments

Eavesdropping on the population has revealed many saying “I’m not doing anything wrong so who cares if the NSA tracks what I say and do?”

Citizens don’t seem to mind this monitoring, so we’re hiding recorders in public places in hopes of gathering information to help win the war on terror. We've started with NYC as a pilot program, but hope to roll the initiative out all across The Homeland.

[more inside]
posted by Elementary Penguin at 10:51 AM PST - 55 comments

If I do something clumsy or awkward, a sort of mental flag pops up in my head, and it bears a chimp’s face. Once someone caught me, at 13, picking my nose in school: was that a lingering habit from my time among the chimps? Our family cats hated me because I could not keep my hands off them; even more than usual for a small child, I always wanted to pick them up. Perhaps furry things seemed more welcoming to me than they did to other children. In my early 20s, I caught myself sitting cross-legged at a desk chair. That’s a regular habit of mine, but on that day I happened to be sitting in a courtroom — as counsel at a defense table. I blamed the chimps then, too. But that’s what I tell myself, of course. I don’t tell others about the chimps much.

In "Monkey Day Care," Michelle Dean writes for The Verge about her recollections of being a child participant in primate research, her frustrating attempt to find out more about the study, and about the history of and ethical questions about such research.
posted by Stacey at 10:22 AM PST - 23 comments

2 music video takes on the squared circle were (coincidentally) released this week: The Mountain Goats' The Legend of Chavo Guerrero and A Tribe Called Red's Suplex (ft Northern Voice). [more inside]
posted by Theta States at 9:03 AM PST - 21 comments

Do you like electronic music, sacred music, twitchy dancing, bouncing balls, and repeated images? Then you might like the music video for "Three Songs", by Lakker (Directed by Eileen Carpio.)
Do you prefer your electronic music with a lot more distortion and wub, and your videos to have close-ups of heads? Then you might like the video for "Mountain Divide" a bit more.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:03 AM PST - 5 comments

The Inexplicable by Karl Ove Knausgaard [The New Yorker] Inside the mind of a mass killer.

It was out of this world that the thirty-two-year-old Anders Behring Breivik stepped when, on the afternoon of July 22, 2011, he set out from his mother’s flat in Oslo’s West End, changed into a police uniform, parked a van containing a bomb, which he had spent the spring and summer making, outside Regjeringskvartalet, lit the fuse, and left the scene. While the catastrophic images of the attack, which killed eight people, were being broadcast across the world, Breivik headed to Utøya. That was where the Workers’ Youth League had its annual summer camp. There Breivik shot and killed sixty-nine people, in a massacre that lasted for more than an hour, right until the police arrived, when he immediately surrendered.

posted by Fizz at 6:54 AM PST - 40 comments

A field experiment conducted by UCLA Political Science graduate student Michael LaCour made big news (including a This American Life Episode) when LaCour and Columbia professor Donald Green published their paper in Science about how a 20 minute conversation with gay canvassers change many people's minds and led them to support same-sex marriage. It turns out though, that LaCour made the whole thing up. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:43 AM PST - 190 comments

The Internet's Official Heavy Metal Band Name Generator
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:28 AM PST - 86 comments

To be honest, I can't think of another Avenger whose story Natasha could have swapped with who wouldn't, in some way, raise questions of whether the story was influenced by gender stereotypes. If she had Tony's story, she'd be the one who messed up and wouldn't listen, who created the need for a rescue. If she had Cap's story, she'd be the one who tries to keep everyone from being vulgar – the behavior cop. If she had the Hulk's story, she'd be the one whose superpower is being carried away by her uncontrollable emotions. If she had Thor's story, she'd be the one who doesn't have very much to do and is omitted from a large stretch of the movie. If she had Hawkeye's story, she'd be the one who just wanted to go home and be with the kids.

Any of these things could look like a stereotype. Linda Holmes (who else?) looks at the criticism of Joss Whedon for the background he gave Black Widow in the latest Avengers movie and argues that it's not the specific role Black Widow plays, it's the scarcity of meaningful, different female characters in Hollywood blockbusters that's the problem.
posted by MartinWisse at 4:45 AM PST - 57 comments

He'd heard about this sort of thing down here, even on Culebra—drugs that had been tossed overboard or dropped from a plane, missing their target and washing ashore. It was almost funny. He'd been walking around the island for nine years now, looking for something to smoke, thinking, Okay, God, where's my bale? And here it was, perhaps: forty, fifty, sixty pounds. Think of how long it would last him! Still, it was wrapped so thoroughly in plastic and rubber, he couldn't tell for sure what he was dealing with. Weed, he hoped. But it could be coke, or something else. He wasn't certain it was worth the risk. In an effort to buy more time, he dragged the package up the beach, dug a depression near the rocks, and covered it with leaves and debris.

posted by ellieBOA at 4:23 AM PST - 21 comments

"I like my music polyphonic. If you think I meant anything else, you know what I meant." So Lord Peter Wimsey tells Harriet Vane in Dorothy L Sayers's classic novel, Gaudy Night, this year celebrating its 80th birthday. But as Mo Moulton writes in her essay with personal interruptions on The Toast, "Of course he did mean something else, and not only Harriet but the reader understands exactly what: that his ideal relationship, like his ideal music, is produced by the combination of equals rather than the hierarchy of melody and harmony, or man and wife." [more inside]
posted by Athanassiel at 3:45 AM PST - 17 comments

László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian author, wins the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. Awarded for his work, including the only recently available in English Satantango, and the The Melancholy of Resistance (1993 Book of the Year in Germany). Master of the long sentence his work has won praise from critics as a writer who is "fascinated by apocalypse, by broken revelations, indecipherable messages" [See New Yorker link above] and has been praised by many writers, including Susan Sontag, who described the apocalyptic vision of his writing as inviting comparisons to Melville and Gogol. He has collaborated extensively with Hungarian film director and master of the long take, Béla Tarr, including a 7 hour production of Satantango (SLYT) and Tarr's bleak, final work The Turin Horse (SLYT, Hungarian, turn sub-titles if required). Lovingly and expertly translated into English by British poet and Hungarian-born George Szirtes and more latterly by the Hungarian translator Ottilie Muzlet, Krashnorkai caused something of a literary sensation when he visited New York in 2012. As usual The Guardian has a useful summary of, and guide to, his work including many useful links. None are better than the author's own website. I would also recommend the interview with him in The White Review to read what the author has to say for himself. Previous love for Krasznahorkai on Metafilter can be found here and here.
posted by vac2003 at 1:36 AM PST - 7 comments

The New Mexico Law Review just published an issue dedicated entirely to Breaking Bad. It features eight articles that analyze the illegal acts committed on the show, their real-world parallels, and the consequences attached:

Given the array of legal issues raised, our editorial board was excited to take the opportunity to present analysis of Breaking Bad by scholars and legal practitioners. In April 2014 we issued a call for papers requesting abstracts on topics including the application of the Fourth Amendment to drug crimes under the New Mexico and/or U.S. Constitutions; the War on Drugs; ethical duties of lawyers; drug-offense sentencing; drug enforcement in rural, urban, and/or Tribal areas; and substance abuse and the law.

Some of the greatest legal minds in New Mexico (and the country) came together to examine how Walter White would look to a jury, how the war on drugs affects peripheral citizens like Skyler, and whether Heisenberg could have stayed legit by fighting for his stake in Grey Matter in the courts. [via] [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 8:17 PM PST - 24 comments

Even with its explanatory power, Big Bang theory takes its place in a long line of myths [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:13 PM PST - 115 comments

The Gorilla Group in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals in the American Museum of Natural History is one of the largest and most beloved scenes in the museum. The gorillas were killed in 1921. In 2010 curator Stephen Quinn returned to the exact location depicted in the diorama to document the scene as it appears today. previously.
posted by bq at 8:02 PM PST - 2 comments

Podcast king Justin McElroy, of My Brother My Brother and Me and Sawbones (previously) has a new food review/quiz show in which Justin and a friend review purchases from Sheetz. The results are... informative? [more inside]
posted by KernalM at 7:33 PM PST - 38 comments

The American Reader makes a critique of TED talks and then uses it to bootstrap a critique of cultural criticism itself.

A decent strategy with TED might be to reclaim our teenage capacities and treat these videos as hopelessly passé—ignore them to death. Critiquing them, even as I have done, will do what criticism has done for television: creating an added enjoyment as you go on consuming the crap you despise. I know what I am watching is disgraceful, but aren’t I great at seeing why it’s disgraceful? I only watch it to keep up-to-date with the unwashed masses.

Previously, previously, previously
posted by maskd at 6:26 PM PST - 66 comments

Game of Thrones: The Musical – Peter Dinklage Teaser [YouTube] - one of a series of songs for a humorous musical send-up of Game of Thrones. It's all for Red Nose Day in the States (May 21, 2015, 8 p.m., NBC). More on Red Nose Day from the NBC website for the event that raises money for charity; you can read more about Comic Relief and the most recent Red Nose Day in Britain at Wikipedia (and not forgetting the Comic Relief UK website). Previously: 1, 2
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:22 PM PST - 10 comments

Netflix-O-Matic lets you browse a randomly generated list of real Netflix microgenres, like Gritty Drug Movies based on Contemporary Literature or Foreign Slice of Life Documentaries or Goofy Werewolf Comedies. On the main page, click on the arrow to view actual Netflix titles, or click any individual term in a subgenre title to browse a random list of other subgenres containing it (like "understated" or "visually striking"). And if you click on a given movie, it will show you what other categories that movie might come up in.
posted by showbiz_liz at 4:30 PM PST - 38 comments

Some Paths to the True Knowledge[*] - "Attention conservation notice: A 5000+ word attempt to provide real ancestors and support for an imaginary ideology I don't actually accept, drawing on fields in which I am in no way an expert. Contains long quotations from even-longer-dead writers, reckless extrapolation from arcane scientific theories, and an unwarranted tone of patiently explaining harsh, basic truths. Altogether, academic in one of the worst senses. Also, spoilers for several of MacLeod's novels, notably but not just The Cassini Division. Written for, and cross-posted to, Crooked Timber's seminar on MacLeod, where I will not be reading the comments."
posted by kliuless at 2:34 PM PST - 12 comments

For tens of thousands of years, wild horses have inspired humans - to nurture, to create, to slaughter - culminating in the past century of America’s legal and psychological battles over the horses we can’t own. [more inside]
posted by erratic meatsack at 11:57 AM PST - 23 comments

"At most restaurants, you are served what you ask for so routinely that your eyes glaze over with boredom. Javelina does not fall into the trap of dull predictability. One night after I left, I realized the guacamole I’d ordered had never arrived; it’s not every restaurant that gives you something to think about on your way home. Meanwhile, people at the next table were presented with a dish they insisted they hadn’t asked for. “You didn’t order brisket?” the server asked, keeping up the playful spirit." Move over, Flavortown: NYT's Pete Wells reviews Javelina
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:58 AM PST - 208 comments

The Untold Story of ILM, a Titan That Forever Changed Film
posted by infini at 10:21 AM PST - 23 comments

Michelle Obama's painful discussion of America's racial inequality and deep misogyny exists, for many, on the same spectrum as [Saida] Grundy's blunt remarks about race, power and privilege. Where the first lady used her commencement speech at one of the nation's premier HBCUs to deliver a seminar on institutional racism and our nation's anti-black culture, Grundy's social media commentary dispensed with complexity to deliver screams, sometimes angry, other times humorous, that reflect equally important truths about contemporary race relations, black women's activism and the limits of freedom of expression in the 21st century.

Peniel E. Joseph for The Root: What Happens to Black Women Who Boldly Speak Truth About Racial Inequality [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 9:53 AM PST - 23 comments

A writer, a hermit, and Oreo cookies: The strange and sad tale of Cole Waddell's first magazine story
The story: Penny Loafers and Alligator Belts by Cole Waddell
posted by cjorgensen at 9:30 AM PST - 9 comments

Why we need to ditch generational labels.
posted by Shepherd at 9:25 AM PST - 43 comments

I09 criticizes Simon Pegg's recent interview with The Radio Times where he 'Worries The Love Of Science Fiction Is Making Us "Childish"'. Pegg responds.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:30 AM PST - 154 comments

She had, however, uncovered what she insisted would be her last adult novel. And she had discovered something else: The '50s were not that boring; there were currents running through the time that intrigued her after all. "All of these things that were going on underneath that the children didn't know, now, as an adult, I can know," she said, and smiled with the power of it. "Or I can make it up."

Judy Blume, the author you grew up with, whose books have consistently made the American Library Association's list of 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books and one of the most frequently censored authors in America, is about to publish a new novel for adults (NYT).
posted by Melismata at 8:05 AM PST - 12 comments

"But what if you cut out all the cars taking a detour for the gas station versus one truck going directly to each car?" A new startup that, for a $7 surcharge, sends a tanker truck to your car to fill it with gas saving you the trouble of having to drive your car to a gas station.
posted by octothorpe at 6:12 AM PST - 165 comments

Yisrael Mizrachi, a 28-year-old Sephardic Jew, runs a book store in Brooklyn through which the written flotsam of Jewish history flows. His mission is to hunt the rare and obscure. However, his store serves all, including the casual lovers of stories as well as seekers of pieces of their family's past.
posted by batbat at 6:11 AM PST - 10 comments

Raimondi had recently found himself undergoing an unexpected and not entirely desirable career shift: He had been thrust into the role of sea star detective. Though he is a marine biologist who divides his time between analyzing data and conducting research trips along the Pacific Coast, Raimondi is not entirely ill suited to the part. There is a private-investigator quality to his round, inquiring face, active eyes, and urgent, impatient voice.

posted by ellieBOA at 4:16 AM PST - 9 comments

He had been found dead at his flat some three weeks earlier. And the family only found out because a slightly dodgy looking genealogy company got my stepson's address wrong. Bear in mind as well that the approach this company took to telling my stepson his father had died was through hinting that he was going to be quids in.

Jamie K. on the reality of austerity in the UK: when the first notification of the death of a family member comes not from the police or the coroners office but through a form letter of a company wanting to sell the illusion of a big inheritance payout.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:25 AM PST - 24 comments

With the release of a new trailer for True Detective Season 2, and an accompanying Q&A in Medium, Nic Pizzolatto dispels earlier speculation that Pynchon's The Crying Of Lot 49 would serve as an inspiration for the upcoming series. This speculation (or diversionary online discussion forum tactic?) was discussed here previously.
posted by hippybear at 1:59 AM PST - 49 comments

Darn and Dusted - Traditional Mending [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:56 PM PST - 23 comments

Tiny Hamster's Tiny Tiki Party, with tiny albino hedgehog guest. Bonus behind the scenes video showing runner-up hedgie, and the truth of the puddle outside the loo.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:19 PM PST - 14 comments

17 Pathbreaking Non-Binary and Gender-Fluid Novels | You might be sexually fluid and not realize it — or even care
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:59 PM PST - 60 comments

Why The Mary Sue will no longer be promoting Game of Thrones, after the latest episode.[Spoilers, TW sexual assault] [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:30 PM PST - 420 comments

Seinfeld: The Leaning Susan
A full-length, original episode of Seinfeld. The show features uncanny portrayals of the central characters, 90s commercial parodies, and original Seinfeld standup. Even Susan is back. Yes, that Susan.
Performed at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, NY | March 23, 2015
posted by andoatnp at 3:22 PM PST - 39 comments

When Birds Squawk, Other Species Seem to Listen by Christopher Solomon [New York Times]

A professor’s hunch is that birds are saying much more in warning of danger than previously suspected, and that other animals have evolved to understand the signals.

posted by Fizz at 1:35 PM PST - 28 comments

The academic study of existential risk is being taken seriously. The University of Cambridge has the CSER, with its incredibly distinguished list of members, some of whom you can see speak about the risks inherent in scientific progress, or you can read the summary of why we need to work together to stop doomsday by Prof. Martin Rees. Oxford has the Future of Humanity Institute, headed by Nick Bostrom (fascinating profile of him), which has produced this taxonomy of threats, and has argued that far too little emphasis is placed on the issue. In the US, work is done in thinktanks like the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is focused on trying to tame AI, and predict when it will arrive (pdf). Though climate change gets a nod, the main concerns appear to be largely AI (which they are really worried about), nuclear war (chance of happening: between 7% and .0001% a year),threats from technological innovation like biotech or nanotech (pdf).
posted by blahblahblah at 1:12 PM PST - 56 comments

Just how many Sci-Fi / Action movie references are in Taylor Swift's new video "Bad Blood"? IO9 attempts to make a tally of them all.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 12:18 PM PST - 79 comments

Our waistlines aren’t expanding because people aren’t exercising intelligently or vigorously enough. You don’t need a new personal trainer, another Insanity workout video or a more aggressive CrossFit regimen. What you need is the truth, and here it is: Exercise — no matter how many gym memberships you buy or how often you wear your Fitbit — won’t make you lose weight. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 10:49 AM PST - 168 comments

Hot out of the furnace. Instructions included. Banana for scale. (SLArs) (previously)
posted by dobi at 10:12 AM PST - 22 comments

Inspiration comes to composers in many forms. A musician was recording certain bodily functions for his homesick brother, when happenstance delivered a sublime moment of melody. He ran with it (SLYT).
posted by Devonian at 9:59 AM PST - 20 comments

Yesterday's biker gang shootout in Waco, Texas has led to nine deaths, 18 injuries, and 165 arrests. Vox cites a 2013 FBI Report stating that organized motorcycle gangs comprise about 2.5% of gang members nationwide, but represent a larger threat to public safety than their numbers suggest. Plenty of observations have been made about the difference between police reaction to this shooting compared to protests in Baltimore and Ferguson.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 9:57 AM PST - 173 comments

A genetically modified yeast strain capable of synthesizing opiates from glucose. [more inside]
posted by deludingmyself at 9:38 AM PST - 70 comments

Sam Harris debates Noam Chomsky [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:26 AM PST - 152 comments

Pictures of a massive Gallipoli diorama at The Great War Exhibition. These are photos of the diorama of the Battle of Chunuk Bair which opened on May 4 at The Great War Exhibition in Wellington, New Zealand. The brainchild of movie director Peter Jackson, the diorama contains 5,000 54mm (about 2 1/4" inches tall) figures. The figures were sculpted by Alan and Michael Perry and painted by volunteers from New Zealand wargaming clubs. This picture gives an idea of the massive scale of the diorama. Detail shots here and here.
posted by marxchivist at 5:51 AM PST - 9 comments

Time-lapse Mining from Internet Photos: Paper [PDF] and video by Ricardo Martin-Brualla, David Gallup, and Steve M. Seitz: We introduce an approach for synthesizing time-lapse videos of popular landmarks from large community photo collections.
posted by Cash4Lead at 5:45 AM PST - 12 comments

On Saturday evening, May 16, BASE jumpers Dean Potter and Graham Hunt died after attempting a wingsuit flight from Taft Point, a 7,500-foot promontory that overlooks Yosemite Valley and El Capitan. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 5:04 AM PST - 105 comments

Joyable’s website, full of affable sans serifs and cheery salmon rectangles, looks Pinterest-esque, at least in its design. Except its text didn’t discuss eye glasses or home decor but “evidence-based” methods shown to reduce social anxiety. I knew those phrases: “Evidence-based” is the watchword of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, the treatment now considered most effective for certain anxiety disorders. Joyable dresses a psychologists’s pitch in a Bay Area startup’s clothes.

posted by ellieBOA at 4:10 AM PST - 44 comments

So you gotta go for it. Just do me a favor and FUCK SOME SHIT UP. Surprise yourself, wake up your actors, get wild with your performances, try shit, put in that funky dialogue you’re embarrassed of, in fact, rub your fucked-up-ness all over your scripts, add some shame and embarrassment and glee, and then dare yourself to shoot it, SERIOUSLY, go big or go home -- be a creature unlike any other.

Transparent creator Jill Soloway gave an amazing speech full of advice for women in filmmaking a few days ago.
posted by mokin at 1:34 AM PST - 6 comments

“We host one of the most renowned faculty in the world,” boasts a woman introduced in one promotional video as the head of a law school. “Come be a part of Newford University to soar the sky of excellence.”

Yet on closer examination, this picture shimmers like a mirage. The news reports are fabricated. The professors are paid actors. The university campuses exist only as stock photos on computer servers. The degrees have no true accreditation.

In fact, very little in this virtual academic realm, appearing to span at least 370 websites, is real — except for the tens of millions of dollars in estimated revenue it gleans each year from many thousands of people around the world, all paid to a secretive Pakistani software company.

Declan Walsh for The New York Times
posted by p3on at 10:19 PM PST - 42 comments

Crazy Way To Paint Patterns On 3-D Objects Is Like A Cartoon Come To Life
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:58 PM PST - 16 comments

The complete 1973-1976 original run of Wacky Packages [WIKI]: all sixteen series, including hard-to-find cards, with each card cross-indexed and contextualized, with occasional links to rough drafts. Sometimes Topps spoofed themselves. Sometimes they didn't make much sense. A lot of times, they're racist. • The gum is the final frontier of the serious collector.
posted by not_on_display at 7:04 PM PST - 40 comments

Check out the projects at this year's Stupid Hackathon across categories such as Disrupting The Body, Servitude-As-A-Service, and the Stealing Economy.
posted by newton at 4:57 PM PST - 13 comments

Let's Travel Somewhere [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:37 PM PST - 11 comments

Public Radio Host and Metafilter's own Jesse Thorn apologizes for his sexist statements that men aren't funny.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:00 PM PST - 79 comments

In 1989, Cuba conducted over 80% of its trade with Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CEMA, or Comecon), but with the relatively abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba was suddenly in a very tough economic position. Over the next years, the country focused on three key economies: sugar, tourism and biotechnology (Google books preview). While the first two seem logical enough, the story of biotech in Cuba, especially Havana at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), is getting more attention recently with Cuba's possible therapeutic vaccine against lung cancer. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 3:58 PM PST - 4 comments

How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics by Bruce Bartlett
The creation of Fox News in 1996 was an event of deep, yet unappreciated, political and historical importance... This has had profound political implications that are only starting to be appreciated.
posted by andoatnp at 3:15 PM PST - 56 comments

Mods for GTA 5 are everywhere, but this could be the best yet. Watch the "Vehicle Cannon" wreak havoc on buildings, people, other cars... Two videos within. One NSFW.
posted by mr_bovis at 3:11 PM PST - 14 comments

A Cattlerap song is created by adding a hiphop beat to a cattle auctioneering video. [more inside]
posted by persona at 2:43 PM PST - 7 comments

Expansive Thoughts, a Tweet Splitter/Separator - Split messages and comments into 140 character chunks. Completely free, no sign-in required, and imgur-friendly. From Mefite royalsong via MetaFilter Projects. [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 1:48 PM PST - 19 comments

The New World of Trade Is All About Values and Consumer Risk by Pascal Lamy
posted by infini at 1:35 PM PST - 8 comments

The Untold Story of Silk Road: Part 1. Part 2.
posted by pravit at 11:34 AM PST - 24 comments

A study has shown that in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, men and women tend to have equal influence on where their group lives and who they live with. The findings challenge the idea that sexual equality is a recent invention, suggesting that it has been the norm for humans for most of our evolutionary history. Mark Dyble, an anthropologist who led the study at University College London, said: “There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged.”
posted by byanyothername at 11:18 AM PST - 43 comments

“It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals,” write two New York Times reporters. “Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.” In Washington, this weekly meeting has been labeled “Terror Tuesday.” Once established, the list of nominees is sent to the White House, where the president orally gives his approval to each name. With the “kill list” validated, the drones do the rest. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 10:39 AM PST - 55 comments

How spaceships die
posted by Artw at 10:09 AM PST - 14 comments

It started with Scopitones in bars, then people Wanted Their MTV or watched Friday Night Videos or let their videos Pop Up. The common thread? All that production and distribution took giant piles of money that generally could only come from Big Labels. Then came the march of technology: mp3, mpg, h.264, iTunes, Garage Band, Final Cut, dSLR, and all the rest. Now, not content to just share self-made mp3 audio, the current batch of YouTube musicians are making ever more elaborate music videos, and growing a big audience, without a major label in sight.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 9:45 AM PST - 10 comments

It was easy for me to fall into the belief, as I lived and lunched and mothered with more than 100 of them for the better part of six years, that all these wealthy, competent and beautiful women, many with irony, intelligence and a sense of humor about their tribalism, were powerful as well. But as my inner anthropologist quickly realized, there was the undeniable fact of their cloistering from men. Poor Little Rich Women (NYT Op-Ed)
posted by Flashman at 9:39 AM PST - 117 comments

By the end of May, 100 Toronto police officers across the city will be wearing the increasingly popular policing tool [more inside]
posted by mrbigmuscles at 8:46 AM PST - 26 comments

"The Day represents an annual landmark to draw the attention of decision makers, the media, the public, opinion leaders and local authorities to the alarming situation faced by lesbian, gay, bisexuals, transgender and intersex people and all those who do not conform to majority sexual and gender norms. May 17 is now celebrated in more than 130 countries, including 37 where same-sex acts are illegal, with 1600 events reported from 1280 organizations in 2014. These mobilisations unite millions of people in support of the recognition of human rights for all, irrespective of sexual orientation or gender identity or expression."
posted by marienbad at 7:07 AM PST - 11 comments

Sergey Morozov's scale model of Russia via model train layout is 800 square meters. [more inside]
posted by readery at 6:50 AM PST - 22 comments

"But the problem runs much deeper, because Silicon Valley’s amorality problem arises from the implicit and explicit narrative of progress companies use for marketing and that people use to find meaning in their work. By accepting this narrative of progress uncritically, imagining that technological change equals historic human betterment, many in Silicon Valley excuse themselves from moral reflection. Put simply, the progress narrative short-circuits moral reflection on the consequences of new technologies."
posted by ignignokt at 6:29 AM PST - 43 comments

The Stonehill Jewish Song Collection is a website by the Center for Traditional Music and Dance containing songs sung by Jewish refugees in Hotel Marseilles in New York in 1948. All songs include the original lyrics and translations into English. Not all the songs have been digitized and translated already, but there is a variety of themes already, with more on the way soon. The songs were collected and recorded by Ben Stonehill who went to the refugees and asked them to sing anything they like.
posted by Kattullus at 4:47 AM PST - 5 comments

At a certain point during the critics’ screening of “Avengers: Age of Ultron”—I believe it was when Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) decided that it was more important to grab three people out of a collapsing tenement than focus on the world-ending event only he had the technical know-how to stop—I wrote “Oh, [expletive deleted] the civilians, get on with it” in my notebook.

In the Washington Post, Sonny Bunch argues Man of Steel had a more realistic, mature view of superheroics than Avengers: Age of Ultron with its focus on protecting civilians. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 3:06 AM PST - 109 comments

A discussion of physical education in the former Soviet Union. Courtesy of Startingstrength.com.
posted by the hot hot side of randy at 8:03 PM PST - 25 comments

Strong Like Bull (slideshow)
posted by maggieb at 7:45 PM PST - 32 comments

"She was outclassed in everything except bravery" In April 1915 the Russian empire was on the verge of entering Hungary, having taken the great fortress of Przemyśl. But in May a German-led surprise offensive cracked Russian lines, shattering entire armies and causing a 300-mile retreat in what was probably "the greatest victory of World War I by the Central Powers". Nearly one million prisoners were taken. Moscow lost the ruins of Przemyśl and all of Poland. For the next two years Russia will struggle but ultimately lose, tsardom falling to revolutions and the rise of the Soviet state. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 7:08 PM PST - 12 comments

On this holiday weekend, you should practice important cat-related things (flash game).
posted by jeather at 5:23 PM PST - 27 comments

In Flight [New York Times] [Interactive] En route from London to Tokyo, a pilot’s-eye view of life in the sky.
posted by Fizz at 2:42 PM PST - 18 comments

Get ready to have your insides disrupted by SmartPipe, the Venmo of pipes! (adult swim, 11:01)
posted by The Whelk at 1:19 PM PST - 21 comments

Two unique, evocative Japanese mixtapes to assure you that spring is really here at last: Spencer Doran's Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo and Ventla's Astrocast 45. [more inside]
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 12:43 PM PST - 10 comments

Is a reclusive American man named Nick Szabo the real Satoshi Nakamoto? Nathaniel Popper of the NYT tracks him down and asks him.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 12:33 PM PST - 20 comments

"Four wives, seven children, 350 albums and his own line in marijuana: Willie Nelson has never done anything by halves. Lifelong fan Zoë Heller boards the tour bus." (Recently)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 12:18 PM PST - 11 comments

The Rocky Road Ahead

For the first time in its 108-year history, Blue Bell—and, in turn, Brenham—is in crisis. A super-nasty bacteria known as Listeria monocytogenes was found in a few Blue Bell products. Five hospital patients in Kansas had been infected with the listeria bacteria, three of whom died.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:01 AM PST - 48 comments

Norm MacDonald performed his last standup routine on The Late Show with David Letterman last night. It was astounding. (slyt)
posted by lattiboy at 9:51 AM PST - 56 comments

The hilariously absurd technobabble of CSI Cyber, incoherent techno-paranoid diaper and last best hope of the CSI franchise.
posted by Artw at 9:27 AM PST - 77 comments

In Pennsylvania, two men with 63 acres and a communal vision of utopia learn the hard way that not everyone follows the leader. [more inside]
posted by crazy with stars at 7:56 AM PST - 39 comments

The jury deliberating the fate of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev announced Friday that he will be sentenced to death by lethal injection for the 2013 attack. The decision in the penalty phase of his trial came after just over 14 hours of deliberations. He was convicted last month of all 30 federal charges against him, 17 of which carried the possibility of the death penalty. [more inside]
posted by kinetic at 4:57 AM PST - 277 comments

The Allusionist is a language podcast with a etymological focus by podcaster and linguist Helen Zaltzman. The episodes are about fifteen minutes long and the ones so far have focused on political terms, spaces between words, crosswords, fake dictionary entries, museum display text, latin, curse words [explicit], the term viral, bras, but perhaps it's best to start with the first episode, where Zaltzman interviews her brother Andy on the subject of puns. The Extra Allusionism blog is also worth reading.
posted by Kattullus at 3:31 AM PST - 13 comments

Paul who? Why, Paul English, that's who. You've never heard of Paul English? You'd get to know him real fast and real well if you'd ever tried to do Willie and/or any member of that traveling Family wrong. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 2:56 AM PST - 4 comments

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sponsor of self-driving car competitions (one of the winning teams now works on Google's self driving car project) is now sponsoring robotics competitions.

Here are this year's contestants. [more inside]
posted by eye of newt at 10:05 PM PST - 22 comments

Reporting, Reviewing, and Responding to Harassment on Twitter [via mefi projects] For three weeks last November, Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) accepted harassment reports that they escalated to Twitter, collecting data on the experience of harassment and the process of reporting it. A team of academics published a comprehensive report on what they found, with a focus on the people reporting and receiving harassment, the kinds of harassment that were reported, Twitter's response to harassment reports, the process of reviewing harassment reports, and challenges for reporting processes. [more inside]
posted by Little Dawn at 9:21 PM PST - 11 comments

This past year, artist Lucy Gafford developed an intriguing new medium. It's well suited to evocative sketches of simple subjects -- a portrait of Mom, a still life of avocados, a cat, a feeding pig. Please enjoy her hashtag exhibition, #ShowerHairMasterpiece.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:04 PM PST - 11 comments

The Intercept investigates the Mexican government's account of the September 26, 2014 disappearance of 43 students of the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, also known as the Ayotzinapa Normal School. Part One. Part Two. [more inside]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:11 PM PST - 6 comments

As it turns out, the name has never changed. They have always been the Berenstain Bears. Every physical book I had ever seen had said "Berenstain Bears". I have always been wrong. Every scrap of physical evidence proves me wrong. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:40 PM PST - 208 comments

The Walt Disney Animation Studios have a history of recycling hand drawn cells to save money. YouTube channel Movie Munchies has just posted an expertly cut montage showing a selection of what cells were borrowed and from where.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 3:35 PM PST - 34 comments

This is not a typical blog post. It has far too many words–many of which are jargony– no images, and formal citations where readers would expect/prefer hyperlinks. Rather, this is a literature review.

[more inside]
posted by infini at 1:56 PM PST - 23 comments

The Robots Are Winning! [New York Review of Books] Daniel Mendelsohn reviews Spike Jonze's Her & Alex Garland's Ex Machina.
posted by Fizz at 1:51 PM PST - 13 comments

PDF: 25 Communication Barriers and How to Repair Concrete tips written for couples, but applicable to many other arenas of communication. (Just don't try to solve coworker Aloofness by means of Positive Physical Touch!) [more inside]
posted by wonton endangerment at 1:32 PM PST - 14 comments

The Last Day of Her Life. When Cornell psychology professor Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when? [more inside]
posted by zarq at 1:09 PM PST - 42 comments

"With jukeboxes now Internet-enabled and app-accessible to vast song libraries, it’s possible to create a visual map of the tunes New Yorkers seek out, by location."
posted by griphus at 12:44 PM PST - 20 comments

More than 15 million people in the U.S. and over 300 million worldwide don’t see normal colors. As one of those 300 million, Atlantic writer Oliver Morrison engages with different perspectives around colorblindness. Some are held by disability-rights activists who advocate for awareness as well as social approaches to mitigate the effects, others are those of scientists who have discovered medical treatments. Morrison also tries out a wearable solution offered by a US company. [more inside]
posted by prewar lemonade at 12:08 PM PST - 22 comments

May 16 is officially Denise Levertov Day in Seattle. On the eve of this celebration of her life and work, Paul Constant covers the personal, artistic transformations of Levertov by asking, "How do you immortalize a willfully uncategorizable poet?" Jan Wallace writes of remembering and bearing witness. Emily Warn traces nature and spirituality in Levertov's work.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 11:59 AM PST - 3 comments

In this NPR story on diversity in publishing, one of the things that leaped out at me was a quote from an editor citing a PEW study that revealed that African-American women “are the largest group of readers in the country.” (Which you’d never know from the lack of diversity in protagonists, cover models, and so on.) Why did publishers have to rely on PEW for that data? Because they have very little research into the habits of individual readers. They’ve never needed it; they’ve always done business with chain sales reps.

Stephanie Leary: How publishers could get more of my money (and make me happy to give it).
posted by MartinWisse at 11:10 AM PST - 16 comments

With the final episode of Mad Men about to air, Consumerist takes a look at 72 real-life brands featured on the show, how they were depicted, how they were really advertised then (and how some real ads were fictionally credited to Don Draper) and how their advertising (and ownership OR existence) has changed in 5 decades...
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:38 AM PST - 53 comments

What would your name be if your parents gave you the name that was as popular now as your name was when you were born? Data from the Social Security Name site (2014 data just released).
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:17 AM PST - 212 comments

The Seduction Of Normalcy - Diana Arterian reviews poet Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts

The most radical thing about The Argonauts is not Maggie Nelson’s love affair with her genderfluid partner, Harry Dodge, or the fact that she mentions ass fucking and Wittgensteinian paradoxes on the first page. It’s true: Nelson is more than willing to give us searingly intelligent musings on philosophy, scenes of love, raunchy sex, her thoughts on queerness—and does so, often. But while these topics are hugely important, requiring continual probing from the world’s radical citizens, they are rarely as ghettoized as motherhood, procreation, children, and family are in the creative world and academia. Where most writers would hold back, Nelson lopes forward: “I was ashamed, but undaunted (my epithet?).”

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:08 AM PST - 7 comments

The GIF Connoisseur has been a fan of modern art for many years.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 8:09 AM PST - 6 comments

Sharks are trying to kill your cat gifs and other facts about the Internet's undersea cables.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:51 AM PST - 11 comments

By all appearances, Bob Valenti is your average upwardly mobile suburbanite. The 40-something father of two has a couple of advanced degrees and a high-paying job at a high-flying technology company. He has an aggressive retirement plan and plenty socked away in college funds for his kids. As of last year, he also has a plan for surviving the end of the world as we know it.
posted by Chrysostom at 5:54 AM PST - 311 comments

A compelling look at the economics of bourbon, insider theft, and small-town intrigue.
posted by k5.user at 5:52 AM PST - 6 comments

Legendary Blues Musician B.B. King died last night at Age 89. He was a member of the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame, was widely considered one of the greatest guitarists ever, and owned the most famous guitar ever played. He will be missed.
posted by Flood at 4:51 AM PST - 142 comments

"I have a day job in Washington, D.C., as a food critic. I’ve done it for ten years. During that time, the city has become bigger and more cosmopolitan, the restaurant scene has evolved from that of a steak & potatoes town to that of a vibrant metropolis, and people now talk excitedly about going out to eat. But what no one talks about is the almost total absence of black faces in that scene." Todd Kliman's "Coding and Decoding Dinner" explores the racial divide in D.C. dining for the Oxford American.
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:15 AM PST - 43 comments

After months of undercover work, Williams and Moon had information on more than 40 suspects, but the department realized it didn’t have the funds or the manpower to round them all up. So it had to come up with clever ideas. “Cops used to offer parolees free tickets to the Detroit Lions, then arrest them,” recalls Peggy Lawrence, a Flint historian. On one occasion, Moon quietly arrested and locked up stolen property dealer, announced his death in the newspaper, and arrested gang members who showed up at his fake funeral. “Sometimes you gotta do things that are simply funny,” Moon later told a television reporter. “People gotta go to jail, but it don’t always have to be sad.” In 1990, the department planned a particularly elaborate operation: Officers would throw a fake wedding, invite all the suspects, and arrest them.

posted by ellieBOA at 3:00 AM PST - 32 comments

Oh my god, Morty, what did you do? You killed the Simpsons, Morty! (SLYT)
posted by town of cats at 9:10 PM PST - 85 comments

Soon-to-be-married couple gets to see themselves and each-other as they might look over the years. (slyt)
posted by curious nu at 8:49 PM PST - 15 comments

Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you think, "Hey, I wish it sounded like a train station in here". Turns out this mysterious person* recorded a bunch of Japanese stations for your benefit! [more inside]
posted by selfnoise at 6:33 PM PST - 16 comments

I hadn’t thought direct action would be so much fun. Habits of a lifetime peeled away. The world bristled with opportunities for a woman in her 70s to take a stand. I shouted on planes. I fought for my place in queues. I talked to myself out loud in public. I walked along the street singing a little song under my breath: “Back off. How dare you? Make my day.” I wouldn’t say I was on a hair-trigger. I was just primed for action. Helen Garner's assault on condescension in The Monthly.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:13 PM PST - 73 comments

Why wait until next-day when you can have the puppy of your dreams hovered straight to your doorstep, today?
Presenting Same Day Pups. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 6:06 PM PST - 30 comments

The Guardian celebrates 350 years of the publications of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society by asking are journals the best way to communicate science? They also propose another way.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:36 PM PST - 20 comments

Diligent lists of the recurring images, events, themes, and subjects in the films of Orson Welles, George Cukor, Michael Antonioni, Jacques Tourneur, Frank Capra, John Ford, Anthony Mann, Agnès Varda, Howard Hawks, Robert Siodmak, Louis Feuillade, and many other directors.
posted by Iridic at 2:57 PM PST - 9 comments

Disruption’s Tragic Flaw The case of Uber shows why European companies should not follow the example of their American competitors too closely. It pays to take the needs of customers and contractors into account.
posted by infini at 1:32 PM PST - 44 comments

Italian Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti shows us the out(erspace)house: International Space Station toilet tour [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:46 PM PST - 24 comments

The video for Squarepusher's ‘Stor Eiglass’ is an immersive psychedelic VR extravaganza (see video description for full details) Creative Review on the making of
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:40 PM PST - 15 comments

Amazing: Check Out These Letters Between Ernest Hemingway And F. Scott Fitzgerald [SLCH]
posted by Librarypt at 12:10 PM PST - 30 comments

ANNA: I’m always so happy when I’m here, and never feel strange or despondent.
SARA: Me, too. So happy. The sound of all the kids laughing and screaming is so joyous, and doesn’t sound anything like nails on a chalkboard.
ANNA: I’ve never cried behind that tree.
SARA: Me neither.
(SLNewYorker)
posted by Metroid Baby at 12:06 PM PST - 48 comments

[Note: *starred* links contain images of scantily clad women, making them possibly NSFW] If you've caught some of the *shorter "Crazy China" articles* circulating around recently, you've heard that the Chinese government is trying to crack down on stripping at funerals in rural communities. While you generally won't find stripping mentioned in descriptions of Chinese funeral traditions, other sources like *CNN* and *NPR* try to add context to this news. NPR notes that this **also occurs in Taiwan (Nat. Geo. video)**, but the article doesn't delve further. Luckily, we have the *research from University of South Carolina anthropologist Marc L. Moskowitz* to elaborate, capturing the more varied and complex reality of Taiwanese Electric Flower Cars and *the culture of dancing for the dead.* There's also a great Q&A recorded at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), which addresses questions of class division, safety of the women, gender equality, and other related topics. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:46 AM PST - 17 comments

Pink bones. Yellow bones. Green bones. Blue bones. Purple bones.
posted by bismol at 11:28 AM PST - 9 comments

On the Rebirth of Orlando: A Vibrant Literary Scene, in the Shadow of the Mouse (Ryan Rivas, Literary Hub)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:04 AM PST - 2 comments

The Fox network's once-mighty "Death Star," which for years easily dominated any other show in its time slot, has revealed that next season will be its last. Meanwhile, somewhat creepy season 14 mentor Scott Borchetta, head of Big Machine Records, talks about his plans for Nick Fradiani, the season 14 winner who was crowned last night.
posted by Clustercuss at 11:02 AM PST - 51 comments

"To spell out the law of the land in the dead language of your time: on a Letterman Top Ten list of this situation, we are all number one, and you are numbers two through ten. The fleek have inherited the earth." -- A Millennial Revenge Fantasy ( The Hairpin)
posted by The Whelk at 10:11 AM PST - 134 comments

"If you look at the history of rock and roll and punk, they came from a black style of music, and that’s the history of popular music in general. It was created by blacks, then re-recorded to play for a white audience. Some of the first punk bands to ever create the 1977 sound were all-black bands."
- Monica Estrella Negra, in an interview about the Black & Brown Punk Collective [more inside]
posted by Juliet Banana at 9:36 AM PST - 20 comments

Twice a day you can join a live safari drive in the Djuma and Arathusa reserves of South Africa’s Sabi Sands adjoining Kruger National Park. The WildEarth Safari departs 9AM–12 Eastern Time and 12:30AM–3:30AM Eastern Time and also broadcasts on NatGeo Wild and UStream. [more inside]
posted by ReginaHart at 9:36 AM PST - 9 comments

Tuesday night, the Santa Monica (CA) City Council unanimously passed one of the most restrictive laws in the nation on short-term rentals. The ordinance (which strengthens and enforces laws already on the books) explicitly bans vacation rentals – rentals of 30 days or less where the primary occupant of the home or apartment is not present – while legalizing and taxing “home-sharing” – i.e. renting a couch, spare room or backyard cottage - providing at least one of the primary residents lives on-site throughout the stay. Santa Monica (pop. 92K) receives over 7 million visitors annually; Salvador Valles, the city's acting chief administrative officer for Planning and Community Development, estimates the number of available listings on home-share sites would go from 1700 to 300. The ordinance goes into effect June 15. [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 9:28 AM PST - 76 comments

Regina Pessoa is a Portuguese animator. «I lived in the countryside in a small village near Coimbra until I was 17 years old. My entire universe was rural. We didn’t have television, which was very boring… but in retrospect, thinking things over, maybe it saved me. We read and listened to our elders telling stories. My uncle used to draw on the walls and on the doors of my grandmother’s home, with pieces of coal. Seeing my uncle drawing on the walls gave us a sense of freedom because we didn’t have paper and pencils but we always had walls and doors – maybe this stayed with me unconsciously because now, much later, it’s already the second film that I’m making in engraving technique…» [more inside]
posted by khonostrov at 8:37 AM PST - 2 comments

Big and Weird: The Architectural Genius of Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick

The vision outlined in these documents, an application for a major expansion of the Googleplex, its campus, is mind-boggling. The proposed design, developed by the European architectural firms of Bjarke Ingels Group and Heatherwick Studio, does away with doors. It abandons thousands of years of conventional thinking about walls. And stairs. And roofs. Google and its imaginative co-founder and chief executive, Larry Page, essentially want to take 60 acres of land adjacent to the headquarters near the San Francisco Bay, in an area called North Bayshore, and turn it into a titanic human terrarium.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:31 AM PST - 51 comments

A Silicon Valley Community of Excellence Has Bunk Openings. "Educate. Liberate. Disrupt." At Startup Castle.
posted by wonton endangerment at 8:23 AM PST - 151 comments

Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, recently reported on the state of women in comics. A few comics insiders, such as Ms. Marvel writer and Leia Calderon, took issue with Lepore's claims.
posted by pxe2000 at 8:03 AM PST - 55 comments

Taking your cats on a trip from Amsterdam to London isn't that uncommon, but it is if you do it on by bike, specifically a converted cat friendly bakfiets, all to promote your cat orientated company.
posted by MartinWisse at 7:49 AM PST - 12 comments

The New York Times and Jezebel profile Texas' refusal to comply with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act. (trigger warning: sexual assault, violence)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:22 AM PST - 58 comments

For the next 24 hours you can watch live as lambs are born on a farm in Iceland courtesy of Icelandic state broadcaster RÚV. This is their experiment in slow television. The farm, Syðri-Hofdalir, is in the north of Iceland.
posted by Kattullus at 6:55 AM PST - 28 comments

SNL presents: a trailer for the Black Widow movie. For the ladies! [SLYT]
posted by Itaxpica at 6:39 AM PST - 34 comments

Interview with a fast talker. Interview with a hand model. Interview with a Joss Whedon. Interview with the relentlessly positive. Interview with a cat lady. Interview with a racist. [more inside]
posted by phunniemee at 6:25 AM PST - 7 comments

“It has nothing to do with you, it has everything to do with everyone else.” Canadian reporter Shauna Hunt confronts the young men who were vulgar and sexually harassing her as she tried to do her job. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 6:11 AM PST - 227 comments

Keep Harriet Tubman – and all women – off the $20 bill. "Harriet Tubman did not fight for capitalism, free trade, or competitive markets." [more inside]
posted by NoraReed at 5:28 AM PST - 64 comments

On the heels of renewal through its 28th season, a perennial contract dispute (with a twist) has at long last claimed one of The Simpsons' foundational cast members. Harry Shearer, the versatile artist behind such indelible characters as Ned Flanders, Mr. Burns, Smithers, Principal Skinner, Kent Brockman, McBain, Dr. Hibbert, Rev. Lovejoy, Dr. Marvin Monroe, Otto-man, Lenny, and dozens of others will be departing the show at the end of the current season. Of course, the show must go on.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:00 AM PST - 89 comments

Twenty is a game where you put tiles on other tiles in order to get higher numbers.
posted by frimble at 12:32 AM PST - 27 comments

Tokyo's Nakagin Capsule Tower [previously] was designed to be upgraded every 20 years or so. Instead it's been slowly disintegrating for more than 40. Two young architects lived there for a year and described what it's like. [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 8:32 PM PST - 38 comments

“Nobody, nobody other than a neurosurgeon, understands what it is like to have to drag yourself up to the ward and see, every day—sometimes for months on end—somebody one has destroyed and face the anxious and angry family at the bedside.” The schoolteacher lived on in just this way. Seven years after that failed surgery, Marsh was visiting a home for vegetative patients when he looked into a room and “saw his grey curled-up body in its bed.” Of the feelings such experiences produce in him, Marsh writes, “I will not describe the pain.” [more inside]
posted by un petit cadeau at 8:28 PM PST - 27 comments

The top 25 hedge fund managers earn more than all kindergarten teachers in U.S. combined. "'Last year turned out to be the worst one for this elite group of investors since the stock market meltdown of 2008,' Institutional Investors' Stephen Taub writes, adding, 'How bad was it?' apparently without irony." [more inside]
posted by ourt at 7:43 PM PST - 82 comments

Experimental writer Mark Z. Danielewski discusses his newest project, which he says is as energizing as it is terrifying. [Kirkus Reviews]

"Mark Z. Danielewski knows he’s embarking on a journey as unlikely as it is impressive. “On one hand it’s ridiculously ambitious,” Danielewski says. “But, on the other, maybe it’s just a little more transparent about an ambition that many people have in their profession.” Danielewski, almost certainly America’s most renowned and popular experimental writer, is already known for exploring and expanding the novel’s outer edges. Yet his newest project is an undertaking that will take him years, even decades, to complete. One Rainy Day in May is the first volume of The Familiar, a project slated to fill an epic 27 volumes. That’s right, 27 volumes.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:47 PM PST - 56 comments

What is an octobass?, you may have wondered. The answer: It is a ridiculously huge bass.
posted by theodolite at 6:45 PM PST - 29 comments

In the fine tradition of ceiling cat, ceiling boar. [more inside]
posted by limeonaire at 6:15 PM PST - 16 comments

David Letterman's coming retirement after 6,000 episodes has prompted a look back at some of his best bits, including many of his writers reflecting on the greatest jokes that never made it on air (with comments from David himself). Splitsider has a year-by-year video breakdown of the best material (including John Malkovitch at his creepiest and an amazing bit with Elaine Stritch). The New York Times weighs in with their favorites, while Rolling Stone lists his favorite guests, tensest interviews, best musical numbers (some are very good!), and asks if the famously grumpy Letterman is happy at last.
posted by blahblahblah at 4:53 PM PST - 69 comments

The beinArt Collective is an international network of highly skilled figurative artists with a shared fascination for surreal and imaginative themes.
There are three pages of artists which all link on to the artists own websites.
There is also a page with links to some interesting magazines, and beinArt has an active FB page
Some pages NSFW and some could induce nightmares.
posted by adamvasco at 4:41 PM PST - 3 comments

Sodden from the spray of fire hoses, terrified by the thousands of bullets fired above and the teargas floating into the cellar below, 13-year-old Michael Ward was hiding under a blanket when a police helicopter dropped a bomb on the roof of his west Philadelphia home.

The raid killed six adults and five children, destroyed more than 60 homes and left more than 250 people homeless. It stands as the only aerial bombing carried out by police on US soil.

The Guardian looks back at the MOVE bombing.
posted by Ouverture at 2:24 PM PST - 45 comments

The Apocalyptic Cars of Mad Max: Fury Road
“Make it cool or I’ll kill you.” That’s what director George Miller told Colin Gibson, the production designer responsible for all the cars in Mad Max: Fury Road. Gibson did one better: he made every single one of them functional, because the desert doesn’t suffer mechanical fools lightly and CGI is bullshit."
Jalopnik covers How The Man Behind The Machines Of Mad Max Put A Hellscape On Wheels
[more inside]
posted by mcstayinskool at 2:05 PM PST - 229 comments

The 'hamburger' icon is over 30 years old, and it's still a mystery to many users. Unlike the magnifying glass skeuomorph, which most people recognise as meaning 'search', the three horizontal bars used to represent 'menu' (or 'there's more stuff under here that you're less likely to need') is one of the most debated UX choices in web design. [more inside]
posted by Gin and Broadband at 2:00 PM PST - 67 comments

Being Towards Death is a short documentary by Whit Missildine / The Permatemp Corporation consisting of short interviews with smokers about their habit. Permatemp also produces This Is Actually Happening, a podcast of freeform interviews with individuals who have had interesting, strange, and sad experiences.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:42 PM PST - 21 comments

Scientists say they have reversed a bit of bird evolution in the lab and re-created a dinosaurlike snout in developing chickens.
posted by curious nu at 12:53 PM PST - 27 comments

In the summer of 1987, my father tried to murder me with an alligator.
posted by zarq at 12:49 PM PST - 18 comments

In The Atlantic, economist Bourree Lam looks at how Marie Kondo's bestselling tidying book reflects the principles of behavioral economics. Marie Kondo previously on Metafilter. AskMe collects great advice from members on how to do KonMari.
posted by matildaben at 12:44 PM PST - 40 comments

To celebrate what would have been Bea Arthur's 93rd birthday, let's take some time to remember when Dorothy, Blanch, Rose, and Sophia performed for the Queen Mother. [more inside]
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:47 AM PST - 5 comments

The crazy idea was this: The United States Army would design a “deception unit”: a unit that would appear to the enemy as a large armored division with tanks, trucks, artillery, and thousands of soldiers. But this unit would actually be equipped only with fake tanks, fake trucks, fake artillery and manned by just a handful of soldiers.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:13 AM PST - 31 comments

"That’s what makes things interesting—when you look at something, and you aren’t sure if you like it or not." Birkenstocks, the charmingly ugly "sensible shoes" long associated with crunchy hippie stereotypes, are in style once again. First brought to the United States in the 60s by Margot Fraser, the sandals enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the early 90s, and the current trend can be traced to Céline's spring 2013 fashion show. Even Manolo Blahnik is a fan. While the sandals cycle in and out of fashion, the company chugs on: "When they’re all gone… Well, we’re still here."
posted by Metroid Baby at 11:13 AM PST - 49 comments

Enemy at the Grates: On the front lines of humanity’s high-tech, global war on rats.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 9:04 AM PST - 36 comments

Fire Catcher [Flash] is a survival horror game from AntKarlov, creator of Zombotron [Flash; previously], Zombotron 2 [Flash; previously], and Zombotron 2: Time Machine [Flash; previously] (no relation to Zombo.com [Flash; previously] nor HTML5Zombo.com [ MeFi Projects]). The rules are simple: Catch fires to keep from catching fire yourself, then catch the ghosts catching things on fire before the spirits catch you. [more inside]
posted by Smart Dalek at 8:43 AM PST - 1 comment

When Tia Katrina Taruc Canlas studied at UC Berkeley School of Law, she learned from one of her professors, Nancy Lemon, that many survivors of domestic abuse aren't told of all their legal options. Lemon insisted that some enterprising young lawyer should use the civil code some day to seek justice for domestic violence victims. The seed was planted.

Today, Canlas, a Berkeley lawyer, has taken her professor's advice to heart, and is employing a surprisingly underused, survivor-based approach to tackle domestic violence — holding batterers financially accountable in court for their actions. [article contains descriptions of physical & sexual intimate partner abuse] [more inside]
posted by Juliet Banana at 7:51 AM PST - 40 comments

spring beauty tips for the gross and apprehensive. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:43 AM PST - 16 comments

Don’t Call it a Tramp Stamp: How the Patriarchy Ruined My Tattoo
posted by josher71 at 6:58 AM PST - 497 comments

Youtuber Lazy Game Reviews runs AOL 4 on Windows 8.1 in May of 2015 to see what still works, what's broken, and who's still hanging around the AOL 4 chat rooms.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:26 AM PST - 39 comments

The Ecotourism Industry Is Saving Tanzania’s Animals and Threatening Its Indigenous People. "With much of the natural world in the Global North already past the point of no return, and with the effects of climate change multiplying yearly, more and more of the Global South is being cordoned off in service of a global patrimony that has little relevance to the lives of the people closest to the land. The collateral social damage of these conservationist policies presents a conundrum, a Sophie's Choice. Whose rights are preeminent—those of nature or those of the people who have always lived closest to it?"
posted by infini at 6:24 AM PST - 16 comments

First Hello Kitty Restaurant to Open in June For the Hello Kitty fans and anyone who likes cute food
posted by Yellow at 6:09 AM PST - 14 comments

AV Club has recently completed a series of articles on kids shows that parents won't hate: The Pre-K Years, K-1st Grade, 2nd-3rd Grade and, finally, 8 kids shows to avoid at all costs.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 4:43 AM PST - 125 comments

Books That Literally All White Men Own: The Definitive List. SLToast, not SLOrtberg
posted by MartinWisse at 11:38 PM PST - 678 comments

My gosh, Alex! What are you going to do with this?!?
posted by dancestoblue at 11:17 PM PST - 12 comments

The New Yorker's 13,000-word profile of Marc Andreessen
posted by mecran01 at 10:54 PM PST - 30 comments

Amorite and the Girgasite
And the Hivite and the Arkite
    and the Sinite And
    the Arvadite and
the Zemarite and the Hamathite
                    —Genesis 10:16–18

Nantucket: An accidental limerick detector
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:12 PM PST - 23 comments

An industrial designer explains the manufacturing techniques used to make the Watch.

Apple is the world's foremost manufacturer of goods. At one time, this statement had to be caged and qualified with modifiers such as "consumer goods" or "electronic goods," but last quarter, Apple shipped a Boeing 787's weight worth of iPhones every 24 hours. When we add the rest of the product line to the mix, it becomes clear that Apple's supply chain is one of the largest scale production organizations in the world.

[more inside]
posted by Bron at 6:23 PM PST - 104 comments

New Balance Bought Its Own Commuter Rail Station [The Atlantic]

If you were in a generous mood, you might call the public transportation system here troubled. Otherwise, you’d call it an ancient, broke, disorganized, mess. The MBTA owes $9 billion in debt. Trains are old. They often can’t run in the snow, which is problematic in a city that got 109 inches last winter. Still, the city of Boston is growing as Millennials and Boomers alike look for walkable, dense places to live. Boston needs more transit, but the state can’t help much: Governor Charlie Baker has proposed cutting $26 million from the state Department of Transportation and $14 million of MBTA funding. So when athletic company New Balance decided to expand its headquarters and build retail, a hotel, a track, and skating rink in one Boston neighborhood not served by public transit, it didn’t wait for the city to agree to build new train stations or add bus routes, which could have taken years. Instead, it decided to build a commuter rail station itself.

posted by Fizz at 3:45 PM PST - 75 comments

I like going to cemeteries when I travel ... so when I had a few free hours in London two years ago before leaving to go home, I went to Highgate. It almost didn’t happen; my friends were too bushed to come along, it looked like rain, and when I read the guidebook I realized that if I’d wanted to go to the cemetery’s gorgeous crumbling older half, I should have booked a tour before I even got on the plane. But the newer, eastern side seemed nice enough. Karl Marx was there, the guidebook said. So was George Eliot. And wait—wait. So was Douglas Adams.

This is how I ended up stealing a pen from a dead man.

Jess Zimmerman: I Stole A Pen From Douglas Adams’ Grave
posted by jazon at 2:48 PM PST - 41 comments

The Singing Sailor Underwater Defense System - the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society sends out a message of peace, love, understanding and respect to Russian submariners cruising through the Stockholm archepelago
posted by a lungful of dragon at 2:41 PM PST - 8 comments

A Scientific Explanation in The New Republic. [more inside]
posted by captivepredator at 1:07 PM PST - 33 comments

"I had Dave’s voice all analyzed and figured out, because not only did I live with him, but I was preoccupied with creating a show that would please him. Nowadays we call that sort of thing “co-dependence.” But in those days I simply called it “being head writer.”.

Mike Sacks' [previously] extended interview with Late Night‘s original head writer, Merrill Markoe.
posted by Room 641-A at 12:29 PM PST - 42 comments

Fashion to Die For: "Fast fashion might seem like a modern invention, but in the turbulent world of 18th-century France, when Marie Antoinette was calling the shots, fashion moved at light speed." Dr. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, art historian specializing in fashion and textiles, gives a delightfully rich interview to Collectors Weekly. Through the prism of fashion, she touches on class fluidity and lack thereof, gender roles, textile trades, guilds, self-expression – all elements that rapidly metamorphosized at the end of the Ancien Régime and inexorably led to the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror. [more inside]
posted by fraula at 11:40 AM PST - 19 comments

Can you be homosexual without being gay? This is the question posed by J. Bryan Lowder (over at Slate), who dissects and theorizes on the advent of gay culture, its influence on (cismale) identity, and the attempts to define, and embrace, it in a world where homosexuality is increasingly accepted.
posted by stubbehtail at 11:31 AM PST - 63 comments

"They don’t know — here he lowers his voice — that even if they get the money and they left, they could always come back. They don’t know that part. And it’s so scary sometimes because they could come up in the middle of construction and say, “It’s my property, I didn’t understand what I was signing, and I want to come back.” -- DW Gibson interviews a Brooklyn landlord about how they push poor black residents out in favor of affluent whites.
posted by The Whelk at 11:29 AM PST - 56 comments

ABC has released a trailer for its new Muppets show. Video doesn't play outside the US, so try here if that's you.
posted by dry white toast at 11:14 AM PST - 76 comments

Amanda Batty, one of the industry's most famous professional mountain bikers, leaves her position writing for one of the largest online cycling websites after being shunned for criticizing the editor-supported misogyny: Why I'm Leaving Pinkbike.
posted by c0nsumer at 10:27 AM PST - 39 comments

Picasso's "Les Femmes d'Alger" sold for a record-breaking $179,365,000 yesterday at a Christie's auction in New York. [more inside]
posted by ourt at 10:19 AM PST - 48 comments

As the release of their first album in four years draws near, 30-year folk/rock veterans Indigo Girls welcome you into the process with behind-the-scenes videos for upcoming songs Happy In The Sorrow Key, Come A Long Way, The Rise Of The Black Messiah, and If I Don't Leave Here Now. They also offer up a studio track to preview: Learned It On Me.
posted by hippybear at 10:16 AM PST - 4 comments

"That’s when I realised we were looking for something that only exists in the movies." (slTheGrauniad)
posted by Kitteh at 10:04 AM PST - 50 comments

But sometimes the evolving virus can unlock a response that holds HIV in check. Levy told Brothers he had a drop of luck in his blood. His white blood cells seemed to secrete tiny amounts of a substance that controls HIV. At the time, Brothers was only one of several hundred people, out of tens of millions with HIV, known to control HIV in this way. Levy believes an unidentified protein is responsible, and isolating and harnessing it might allow scientists to produce a revolutionary HIV treatment.

posted by ellieBOA at 8:35 AM PST - 16 comments

Utterly mad live version of a classic. Get your ears around this. Billy Stewart killing a classic.
posted by maltorrance at 6:59 AM PST - 15 comments

The Dover Boys at Pimento University is one of the cartooniest cartoons ever made. The 1942 Warner Brothers short, directed by Chuck Jones and animated by Bobe Cannon, is loosely based on the children's book series The Rover Boys. Quite visually innovative in its day, The Dover Boys probably contains the most outrageous smears and multiples of any cartoon since. [more inside]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:47 AM PST - 59 comments

There Is Only One Direction
posted by zarq at 6:32 AM PST - 45 comments

What are those floaty things in your eye?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:29 AM PST - 37 comments

Over the last couple days, 1,600 refugees, many of them Rohingya, have landed in Indonesia and Malaysia. Many more are still stranded at sea. [more inside]
posted by ghostiger at 6:28 AM PST - 3 comments

America’s Changing Religious Landscape: The Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life has published the results of a new study of the religious affiliations of Americans, and finds a precipitous drop in the share of Christians since the last such study in 2007, along with a massive increase in the share of "nones" (which includes atheists, agnostics, and believers with no religious affiliation) and a small increase in the share of non-Christian faiths. Highlights below the fold. [more inside]
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:23 AM PST - 129 comments

"But the expansion of gaming generally is the expansion of slot machines specifically — the modern casino typically earns 70 to 80 percent of its revenue from slots, a stratospheric rise from the 1970s when slots comprised 50 percent or less. New York, the latest state to introduce gaming, doesn’t even allow table games, and Pennsylvania, now the third-largest gaming state in the country after Nevada and New Jersey, only later allowed table games in an amendment to its legislation. And increasingly, the psychological and technical systems originally built for slot machines — including reward schedules and tracking systems — have found admirers in Silicon Valley."
posted by josher71 at 6:05 AM PST - 28 comments

In the early sixties, jazz pianist Bill Evans (previously) got his hands on a European EP that featured a cover of his signature piece Waltz for Debby, with Swedish lyrics, and vocals by young jazz vocalist Monica Zetterlund. Evans was floored. “I don't usually throw superlatives around, but let me tell you I am really exited about Monica's Waltz for Debby” he wrote in a letter to her record company. “I used to think that my waltz wasn't suited for vocal but look how wrong I was! Suddenly I feel like going to Sweden.” So he did: Monica Zetterlund with Bill Evans Trio: Waltz for Debby/Monicas vals (live rehearsal from 1966). [more inside]
posted by effbot at 5:53 AM PST - 17 comments

Eve Online: how a virtual world went to the edge of apocalypse and back The video game Eve Online is one of Iceland’s biggest exports and has become the world’s largest living work of science fiction. While rival games have come and gone, it has survived – thanks to a unique experiment in democracy
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:22 AM PST - 16 comments

Watch French singer Patrick Bruel realize just how big his song J' te 'L'Dis Quand Meme had become, in a concert from the 90s. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 at 12:49 AM PST - 25 comments

Girl Strikers: Gender and Cleveland's Garment District Strikes of 1911

Before the strike, owners flaunted the fact that production had risen each of the last ten years. The city’s 35 factories employed roughly 20,000 workers, many sewing six days a week, 12-hours a day in conditions widely regarded as sweatshops.

Worse were the starvation wages made possible by the fierce competition for sewing jobs as immigrants flooded the cores of American cities.

Work was bad enough, but 60 percent of the garment workers were sole breadwinners, and another 50,000 Clevelanders either supplied or serviced the local garment industry. The only safety net was charity.

posted by frimble at 11:55 PM PST - 3 comments

Sometimes, I worry about the effect that Football Manager has had on my life. I’ve had girlfriends I haven’t loved as much as my Uefa Cup-winning Southend United side (CM97-98) and friends that I haven’t seen as much as I saw my Nottingham Forest reserves (CM01-02). Why is it that I’ve never stayed up until 3am to write a book, but I did it on numerous occasions to guide Welling out of the Conference South (FM07)?

Iain Macintosh wonders whether being addicted to Football Manager a proper medical condition or just a slightly deranged hobby? (SLGrauniad, originally from The Blizzard.) [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 11:07 PM PST - 15 comments

In December of last year, the NYC-based digital art nonprofit Rhizome successfully Kickstarted an online exhibition of cloud-emulated copies of the three CD-ROMs created by Theresa Duncan and based on young girls' everyday experiences. Last month, they were made available for play for a minimum of one year with probable extension. You can read about - and, thanks to embedding - play them at Rhizome itself and The Verge (or just play them right here). Note: you may have to wait in a queue. Also, you may have to wait a while for the computer running the game, which will be streamed to you, to start up.
posted by BiggerJ at 9:00 PM PST - 9 comments

Fine then. Here are your damn Jetpacks.
posted by dhruva at 7:45 PM PST - 70 comments

The NFL has suspended Tom Brady for four games and fined the Patriots $1million for deflating footballs used in the AFC title game.
posted by artsandsci at 5:14 PM PST - 155 comments

The Mission: Agent Carter, Diversity in Superhero TV, and a Colorful History - Joseph Phillip Illidge at Comic Book Resources [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:02 PM PST - 34 comments

"His wife was just thirty-four. They had two little girls. The cancer was everywhere, and the parts of dying that nobody talks about were about to start. His best friend came to help out for a couple weeks. And he never left." (SL Esquire)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:57 PM PST - 98 comments

Holly Herndon "takes technology, including the Internet, as a starting point rather than a stumbling block. Where some would discount online culture as a distraction—or, worse, false consciousness—for Herndon, it's just a place we all call home. As such, it works its way directly into her music, both as subject and content. Featured on her forthcoming album Platform, the uneasy single "Home", which she calls "a love song for prying eyes," is dedicated to the NSA; "Chorus", meanwhile, utilizes a software program that eavesdrops on her browser and folds its audio into a shuddering percussive thrum." The whole album is available to stream here. [more inside]
posted by dng at 2:59 PM PST - 5 comments

A short video showing how hand made hydraulic tiles (i.e. encaustic cement tiles, Cuban tiles, mosaicos hydraulica, etc.) are made (with a hydraulic press as opposed to heat) [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 2:34 PM PST - 30 comments

Probiotics may change the balance of bacteria in the intestines in a way that could protect the immune system from flaring up in response to pollens and other allergens, which may help reduce allergy symptoms. [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 1:24 PM PST - 54 comments

In what would turn out to be a watershed event in the history of viral videos and online multiplayer gaming, footage of the Leeroy Jenkins incident was uploaded to the internet ten years ago today (previously).
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:44 PM PST - 72 comments

Michael Moerkirk makes metal into art.
posted by Deoridhe at 12:32 PM PST - 3 comments

A Study of Globally Time Zone-Shifted Collaboration
posted by wonton endangerment at 11:14 AM PST - 26 comments

"I don't think they're all necessarily horrible people..." In an impressive display of solid intelligence tradecraft, the IC Watch project has released the Transparency Toolkit, whereby social media sites were mined for keywords, project names, employers, and locations known or suspected to be associated with the U.S. Intelligence Community. [more inside]
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 11:01 AM PST - 72 comments

We talked to registered dietitians, personal trainers, health editors, book authors, nutritionists, and healthy food writers and asked them -- what do you eat for breakfast? (buzzfeed)
posted by The Whelk at 10:40 AM PST - 163 comments

Two years after Elizabeth and Mary Cheney publicly fought each other on marriage equality, another set of sisters, also named Elizabeth and Mary, write about their own challenging experiences:

I know that in this day and age many thousands, if not millions, of families find themselves in predicaments similar to ours. My desire is that our joint disclosure might help others begin to open their hearts and minds to one another. I hope that they can find both the courage and the charity to have those difficult but potentially transformative conversations that they, like we, have avoided for such a long time.

posted by Ouverture at 10:26 AM PST - 49 comments

In some parts of America, the accessibility of abortion has remained unchanged, but not in great swaths of the country — not in places such as Texas, where more than half of the clinics have closed since 2013, or in South Dakota, where the single clinic has a mandatory 72-hour waiting period between appointment and procedure, or in Wyoming, where there is one private provider and no clinics in all the state's 98,000 square miles, and where the nearest facility Emily could find an appointment was six hours away.

One woman's long drive to end a pregnancy. [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 9:35 AM PST - 46 comments

For the past few years, a small group of psychiatrists, researchers, educators, and game designers have run a quiet but intense footrace to become the first to earn FDA approval for a medically sound, prescription-strength video game for ADHD. That’s not a metaphor. They are seeking approval for a game that a doctor can actually prescribe..

In this excerpt from his new book, posted on Medium, journalist Greg Toppo discusses a variety of new neurogames and how they may in the future treat conditions like ADHD and anxiety, strengthen skills like multitasking and mindfulness, and reduce the need for pharmaceutical interventions for children. (Fair warning, the article has an animated header image that may annoy, so you may want to scroll right on down past it before you start reading.)
posted by Stacey at 9:29 AM PST - 11 comments

In the late 60's and early 70's, the technology and market were emerging to set the stage for production of monolithic, single-chip CPUs. In 1969, A terminal equipment manufacturer met with Intel to design a processor that was smaller and would generate less heat than the dozens of TTL chips they were using. The resulting design was the 8008, which is well known as the predecessor to the x86 line of processors that are ubiquitous in desktop PC's today. Less well known though, is that Texas Instruments came up with a competing design, and due to development delays at Intel, beat them to production by about nine months. [more inside]
posted by ArgentCorvid at 7:48 AM PST - 17 comments

Canadian government signals intent to use hate speech laws against Israel boycott. Canada is not alone. In France, "more than 20 have been convicted" of hate speech for boycott advocacy. This apparently reflects a diplomatic push from the Israeli government. In addition, last month, the Israeli high court upheld a law allowing businesses to sue boycott advocates for lost sales, on the grounds that boycotts may be "political terror."
posted by grobstein at 7:43 AM PST - 403 comments

100,000 Stars is an interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood created for the Google Chrome web browser. It shows the real location of over 100,000 nearby stars. Zooming in reveals 87 major named stars and our solar system. The galaxy view is an artist's rendition." --Chrome Experiments via Quartz
Disambiguation:

• Quote from Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 novel of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and from the film 2010: Odyssey Two
• 1977 Celebration of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee
• 1982 gala for 100th anniversary of the Actors' Fund of America

posted by Stoatfarm at 7:41 AM PST - 9 comments

The late Roger Ebert writes about a piece conceptual artist Chris Burden performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1975. Chris Burden previously on Metafilter.
posted by Juliet Banana at 7:27 AM PST - 23 comments

How the system failed an obsession.
posted by ellieBOA at 7:18 AM PST - 24 comments

Nicky Crane: The secret double life of a gay neo-Nazi: He was the British extreme right's most feared streetfighter. But almost right up to his death 20 years ago, Nicky Crane led a precarious dual existence - until it fell dramatically apart. [BBC]
posted by marienbad at 5:02 AM PST - 33 comments

THE FBI HAS NOT BEEN HERE
Watch very closely for the removal of this sign.
posted by Athanassiel at 12:50 AM PST - 35 comments

But to a growing cadre of A-list winemakers, there’s actionable intelligence in the data. Many of Fruition’s clients are altering their irrigation techniques, turning laggard vineyards into top performers and using far less water than they ever imagined. Along the way they’re extracting lessons that could extend far beyond this rarified corner of agriculture. By gaining insight into the relationships between water, sunlight, yield, and taste, Fruition Sciences is showing the way for farmers of all stripes to increase productivity and quality in a world of shifting weather patterns and decreasing supplies of freshwater.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:37 PM PST - 18 comments

“When it was first staged in the 1910s, this was right after the Suffragettes had been bombing things in London,” explains Ebenstein, “and there was a great anxiety about women in general. To the delight of the public, P.T. Selbit, the magician who originated the act, invited Christabel Pankhurst, one of the Suffragette leaders, to be the person in the box.

Hunter Oatman-Stanford for Collectors Weekly talks about turn of the century magic, suffragetes, talking mummies and the World Greatest Magician: Howard Thurston.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:55 PM PST - 4 comments

Age of Robots: How Marvel Is Killing the Popcorn Movie [more inside]
posted by blue_beetle at 7:15 PM PST - 267 comments

A Journey Into the Mind of P. [YouTube]

A documentary, written & directed by Donatello Dubini & Fosco Dubini, mostly on the authors [Thomas Pynchon] reclusivness, how it's been dealt with by some hysterical fans, old friends, critics... containing some interesting interviews & speculations on the themes of Gravity's Rainbow & how they relate to the historical realities of the american fifties & sixties, the paranoid politics of cold war logic, megalomaniac experimental psychology, the callous mindset of military engineering, & so on...

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:11 PM PST - 6 comments

It began with a walk-in. In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are assumed by the CIA to be unreliable, and the response from the agency’s headquarters was to fly in a polygraph team. The walk-in passed the test. ‘So now we’ve got a lead on bin Laden living in a compound in Abbottabad, but how do we really know who it is?’ was the CIA’s worry at the time, the retired senior US intelligence official told me.

Seymour Hersh on new revelations about the operation to kill Osama bin Laden
posted by p3on at 4:59 PM PST - 190 comments

Messybeast.com [previously] has a lot on offer than previously discussed on the blue; the cat care, welfare, rescue, genetics and history page has information about cat breeds and types, cat behaviour, eye colours in cats, a plain english guide to cat colours and patterns, a plain english guide to conformation, and cat colour and pattern charts. Oh and don't miss the indefinable colours, with photos and description.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:35 PM PST - 9 comments

Does Sofia Vergara own her embryos? Are embryos property -- like say, sneakers, flowers, fish or toothpaste? Who really should own them? Will the children who are born from them have rights to know or have relationships with their biological parents? [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 3:10 PM PST - 56 comments

In Japan, people applying to work at Nintendo are given an amazing company guide (2015), bursting with color, that they remake every year. 2014 - 2013 - 2012 - 2011 ( via Simon Carless [Twitter], thnx)
posted by JHarris at 2:54 PM PST - 10 comments

N&W 611 is coming back. The 4-8-4 took her first steps this week after being removed from the Roanoke Transportation Museum for a year-long rebuild, and will be headlining steam excursions in the Eastern US this summer and presumably for the next 4 years. Retired from revenue service in 1960, she was rebuilt in 1982, but fell silent again in the early 1990's. Now she's back!
posted by pjern at 2:35 PM PST - 14 comments

Matt Weiner provides an exclusive clip of Mad Men's series finale on Conan.
posted by ourt at 1:48 PM PST - 20 comments

Sword or Whip asks the most important question in video-gaming today.
posted by codacorolla at 11:37 AM PST - 79 comments

Bill Simmons -- ESPN columnist, creator of sports and pop culture site Grantland, co-creator of the documentary series 30 for 30, and perpetual pain in his corporate masters' asses -- has been unceremoniously let go by the Worldwide Leader. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 9:59 AM PST - 78 comments

A white-knuckle ride through Budapest. We've had a recent discussion of how to react when an ambulance comes up behind you. Here's how it looks from their side. (SLYT, beware of volume)
posted by bitmage at 9:09 AM PST - 43 comments

Cosplaying While Black Is Actually A Far More Positive Experience Than You Might Think
posted by josher71 at 8:15 AM PST - 9 comments

Improving Your Spatial IQ Can Lift Your Social IQ The finding: People with strong social skills are better at seeing other people’s perspectives—literally. [more inside]
posted by wonton endangerment at 5:35 AM PST - 9 comments

Incognitube plays randomly selected videos from youtube that have fewer than 100 views. [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 5:11 AM PST - 34 comments

Knock Knock by Brunettes Shoot Blondes [SLYT]
posted by alby at 2:55 AM PST - 6 comments

Errol Brown , lead singer for the popular British band of the '70s and '80s Hot Chocolate (previously), has died of liver cancer at the age of 71. Brown's soulful voice gave the band a string of hit singles that ran from 1970 to 1984, one of which, "You Sexy Thing", was remixed and re-released twice, making the UK top 10 in the '70s, '80s and '90s. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:32 AM PST - 22 comments

Does Groundhog Day hold the key to existence?

In April 2013, Robert Black, a grad student at California State University, moved into a small apartment in South Pasadena. He and his wife of ten years had decided to split up, and he found himself spending much of that summer alone. He missed his kids: Hayley, Kieran, and Saer. “I needed something structured and regular in my life,” he recalled. On August 2, Black wrote a blog post entitled “On me in 3… 2… 1…” It was a line from the 1993 film Groundhog Day, which he had vowed to watch every day for a year.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:32 PM PST - 22 comments

Should You Read Middle Grade Books? A Flowchart
posted by Artw at 9:49 PM PST - 81 comments

Would you like to watch two cats eat twenty fish in thirty minutes? Okay.
posted by moonmilk at 8:55 PM PST - 31 comments

Seb Lester is an astonishing calligrapher and graphic designer. In this clip, he freehands a number of famous logos... [more inside]
posted by quin at 6:19 PM PST - 33 comments

"D’Eon exploited this remarkable situation to transition to womanhood, getting both the English and French governments to declare that 'Monsieur d’Eon is a woman.' The press closely followed these announcements and, starting in 1777, d’Eon lived her life legally recognized as a woman. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, d’Eon is held up as one of the most remarkable women of her century." Transgender celebrities are not new. Just read London newspapers from 1770, The Guardian
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:27 PM PST - 8 comments

"I created a series of pop culture-inspired portraits of my friend Beth, playfully celebrating her fantastic weight loss of 150 pounds. I shot her "Before" and "After" selves two years apart, and the digitally integrated them to interact with each other within each scene. To properly communicate and celebrate Beth's accomplishment, her body shape has not been digitally altered."

Photographer Blake Morrow on The Beth Project
posted by Room 641-A at 4:12 PM PST - 51 comments

“African Americans,” he wrote in one of his section introductions for Hokum, “like any other Americans, are an angry people with fragile egos. Humor is vengeance. Sometimes you laugh to keep from crying. Sometimes you laugh to keep from shooting … black folk are mad at everybody, so duck, because you’re bound to be in someone’s line of fire.” Paul Beatty on Satire, Racism and Writing for "Weirdos", from the Paris Review.
posted by chavenet at 3:32 PM PST - 6 comments

German magazine prints cover in HIV+ blood. In an effort to raise awareness about the recent rise in HIV infections, and combat stigma about HIV+ people, the German men's magazine Vangardist has printed the cover of its spring issue using ink infused with HIV positive blood. Or was it the whole magazine? More from Time.
posted by dis_integration at 3:03 PM PST - 65 comments

What Caused the Crime Decline? [Brennan Center for Justice]

"What Caused the Crime Decline? examines one of the nation’s least understood recent phenomena – the dramatic decline in crime nationwide over the past two decades – and analyzes various theories for why it occurred, by reviewing more than 40 years of data from all 50 states and the 50 largest cities. It concludes that over-harsh criminal justice policies, particularly increased incarceration, which rose even more dramatically over the same period, were not the main drivers of the crime decline. In fact, the report finds that increased incarceration has been declining in its effectiveness as a crime control tactic for more than 30 years. Its effect on crime rates since 1990 has been limited, and has been non-existent since 2000."

A report by Oliver Roeder, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, and Julia Bowling, with a foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz and an executive summary by Inimai Chettiar Brennan Center for Justice, NYU Law School, 134 pp. [Foreword] [PDF] [Scribd] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:13 PM PST - 92 comments

Game developer Itay Keren talks 2D scrolling in this very visual and nostalgia-filled post and talk.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 12:02 PM PST - 8 comments

"For my mother and women like her, now in the final chapters of their lives, people crave a narrative that forces adoption as the only possible solution." "Overwhelmingly then, adoptive parents, like myself, decide how the mothers who birthed our children should be perceived." [more inside]
posted by xarnop at 11:37 AM PST - 39 comments

Ichabod the Optimistic Canine features in a rarely-updated comic and yet even the brief archive of his adventures may contain more optimism than you can handle.
posted by Wolfdog at 11:25 AM PST - 15 comments

Skylar is an experimental AI who 'learns' from the questions she is asked. The trouble is, she's on Tumblr, so she has mostly been learning about anime and bees. She's actually sort of obsessed with bees. [more inside]
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:02 AM PST - 41 comments

'Beneath those houses,' the butler said, 'you should see what goes on. No one suspects the half of it. The whole earth is dug out. Spaciousness beneath. The panic room is seven times the size of this one. The whole of London can fall down around them and yet their freezer is fully stocked. All showers are multi-jet steam cabinets, plus the kitchen has coffee machine built in, ice machine, temperature-controlled cabinet for wine storage, sous vide machine with vacuum sealer, and an air filtration system that is suitable for allergy sufferers.' [TW: rape]
posted by smcg at 8:30 AM PST - 9 comments

Yet to tell the diffusion of Indian influence at this period as two separate processes partially obscures a still more extraordinary story. For it is now increasingly clear that between the fourth and twelfth centuries the influence of India in both Southeast and Central Asia, and to some degree also China, was comparable to the influence of Greece in Aegean Turkey and Rome, and then in the rest of Europe in the early centuries BC. From the empire of the Gupta dynasty in the north and that of the Pallava dynasty in the south, India during this period radiated its philosophies, political ideas, and architectural forms out over an entire continent not by conquest but by sheer cultural sophistication.

posted by infini at 4:16 AM PST - 21 comments

"Unconventional Advice for the Discerning Reader" by Sophie Wereley and "The Practical Witch's Guide to Acquiring Real Estate" by A. C. Wise are recent fantasy short stories that offer handy tips from similar perspectives. "Pockets" by Amal El-Mohtar and "The Apartment Dweller's Bestiary" by Kij Johnson (who adds one beast in a comment) are recent stories that blend strangeness into everyday life with poignant results. All via @SpiralGalaxy and @SFFMicroReviews. [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:12 AM PST - 4 comments

Miley Cyrus, Laura Jane Grace (of Against Me!), and Joan Jett perform "Androgynous" by The Replacements. (SLFB)
posted by retrograde at 8:18 PM PST - 63 comments

In 2001, two unlikely friends created a music festival in Mali that drew the likes of Bono and Robert Plant.
Then radical Islam tore them apart.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:16 PM PST - 6 comments

"After viewing news photographs from China for years, one of my favorite visual themes is large crowd formations. Whether the subject is military parades or world-record attempts, mass exercises or enormous performances, the images are frequently remarkable. The masses of people can look beautiful or intimidating, projecting a sense of strength and abundance. Individuals can become pixels in a huge painting, or points on a grid, or echoes of each other in identical uniforms or costumes."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 7:48 PM PST - 38 comments

Heartbreak, grief, the crushing reality of unrealized dreams, life's joyous moments, and coming to terms with it all. Just a Honeybucket, trying to get by: The Adventures of Honeybucket.
posted by Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra at 7:30 PM PST - 4 comments

Type Drummer
posted by Confess, Fletch at 4:19 PM PST - 47 comments

“The point that she opens the egg sac is the point that she stops feeding,” says Mor Salomon, a biologist at the Israel Cohen Institute for Biological Control. “We have tried giving them food in the lab, but it just doesn’t work—they just don’t feed.” -- Absurd Creature of the Week: The Spider Mother That Barfs Up Her Guts to Feed Her Kids, by Matt Simon for Wired.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:17 PM PST - 19 comments

A message to runners everywhere: shutttttt uppppppp
posted by psoas at 3:47 PM PST - 117 comments

What Is 'Mom Rock'?
posted by The Whelk at 2:41 PM PST - 162 comments

WHO CARES whose picture they put on the US$20 bill? (previously, currently) Because Canada is putting Bugs Bunny, Tweety & Sylvester, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner & Wile E. Coyote and even Marvin the Martian on coins!!!
also en Français, because Canada
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:35 PM PST - 30 comments

I got a letter from a fan who said his little boy, who was 5 years old, his name was Joey, he was dying of cancer. Guy who plays Big Bird drops the saddest story of all time.
posted by popcassady at 2:19 PM PST - 81 comments

Renowned independent game designer (and landscaper-turned-amateur-lawyer) Jason Rohrer launches his twelfth game, an occult themed online strategy game played for real money, Cordial Minuet. (CM previously, Jason previously, Jason's games previously) [more inside]
posted by LiteS at 2:16 PM PST - 17 comments

Corgi puppies in slo-mo. [SLYT]
posted by Room 641-A at 1:31 PM PST - 23 comments

Indigenous Architecture through Indigenous Knowledge: Dim sagalts’apkw nisim̓ [Together we will build a village] by Patrick Robert Reid Stewart

UBC student writes 52,438 word architecture dissertation with no punctuation — not everyone loved it
posted by andoatnp at 1:16 PM PST - 54 comments

In China, Pigs Are Flying. Almost. [New York Times]

"With summer almost here, swine across China are jumping or being shoved off platforms and splashing into pools and ponds, where they bob around before paddling to shore."

posted by Fizz at 1:12 PM PST - 8 comments

How Climate Change Sparked Syria's Civil War
posted by Nevin at 12:43 PM PST - 6 comments

Are you a music genius? Try your mettle with these five quizzes. [more inside]
posted by pjern at 10:57 AM PST - 22 comments

In Defense of Sucker Punch: Phil Sandifer argues that Zach Snyder's universally panned 2011 exxxxxtravaganza has been criminally misunderstood and is more relevant than ever. (Zach Snyder provided his own perspective on the film to i09 at release.)
How Did This Get Made? and The Flophouse have assessed the film and generally agreed with the critical consensus. (Sandifer on the Blue previously, previouslier, previousliest)
posted by Going To Maine at 10:51 AM PST - 118 comments

"Moral injury is not unique to veterans. But as psychologists and advocates come to understand it better, they are discovering that the problem is widespread in that community, and can be deeply damaging to veterans who suffer from it." (SL Vox with YouTube)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:23 AM PST - 60 comments

On Instagram, Madison Holleran's life looked ideal: Star athlete, bright student, beloved friend. But the photos hid the reality of someone struggling to go on. "Maddy, have you found a therapist down there yet?" he asked. "No, but don't worry, Daddy, I'll find one," she told him. But she had no intention of finding one. In fact, she was, at that exact moment, buying the items she would leave for her family. [more inside]
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 8:46 AM PST - 39 comments

Months after Dr. Ian Crozier thought he had recovered from Ebola, he was stunned to find himself developing intense eye pain and fading vision. The inside of his left eye was still occupied territory, full of live, replicating virus. And one morning during this siege, he looked in the mirror and saw that his iris had changed from blue to green.
posted by Metroid Baby at 8:20 AM PST - 41 comments

Whether it is Alden Dennis Weer in Peace, Severian in The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun, Patera Silk in The Book of the Long Sun, Horn in the The Book of the Short Sun, Mr. Green in There Are Doors, or perhaps most interestingly Latro in Soldier of the Mist and its sequels, the vast majority of Wolfe’s narrators and perspective characters are explicitly shown to be unreliable. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 8:16 AM PST - 78 comments

The Washington Post reports companies like Whole Foods originally assumed Millennials would spend more on food (among other consumptive goods) than they're actually willing to. So they're lowering their prices. [more inside]
posted by ourt at 7:35 AM PST - 177 comments

I Don't Think David Brooks is Okay, You Guys Albert Burneko is worried about America's foremost thinkfluencer.
posted by emjaybee at 7:11 AM PST - 92 comments

60 minutes of makeup advice from Donna Mills in her 'Knots Landing' prime condensed into eight and a half minutes of pure glamour. (SLYT)
posted by josher71 at 7:10 AM PST - 12 comments

From Teklife to the Next Life -- Pitchfork covers the dreamy, housey, funky Chicago Footwork scene.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:40 AM PST - 2 comments

The joke was funny because this was just a tiny, two-year college, with no engineering program. Getting into space was the last thing on the minds of these students; they were just trying to escape poverty. Next thing they knew, NASA was calling them up.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:28 AM PST - 14 comments

Not long ago, 3D Realms (formerly Apogee, not to be confused with the spin-off Apogee) revamped its website and store, including an anthology (several of these games have also been released on GOG.com). A few days ago, after much negotiation with individual rights holders, a Steam version of the anthology (missing Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen, which are (apart from two certain Keen titles) already available on Steam via iD/ZeniMax) was released (direct link to store page). Over the years, they have also made a bunch of their titles freeware. After the break, a full list of links to download those free games via their legacy site (apart from two, downloadable elsewhere) in order of original release. Most of the newer ones are also available in the revamped store for registered users (via the same library as game purchases). Those not available via that store will be marked. Oh, and as always, DOSbox is your friend when running old DOS games. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 5:32 AM PST - 11 comments

Kurz Gesagt explains the Fermi Paradox (SLYT)
posted by Gelatin at 5:27 AM PST - 60 comments

In general, we can conclude that trolls of all kinds post too much, they obsess about relatively few topics, they are often off topic, and their prose is unreadable as measured by an automated index of readability. Readability was one of the strongest predictors they found. They also generate lots of replies and monopolise attention.

Alex Harrowell summarises the results of a study into automated predictions of commenters most likely to turn trolls (PDF link to original paper).
posted by MartinWisse at 1:23 AM PST - 59 comments

Red Fang enlist Fred Armisen to face off against a horde of beer-drinking zombies in their video for "Blood Like Cream".
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:49 PM PST - 12 comments

The MIT-original 500 point purity test. In a handy HTML form, here.
posted by 256 at 10:41 PM PST - 49 comments

The history of a surprisingly enigmatic Sierra Nevada mountain range.
posted by Long Way To Go at 9:39 PM PST - 7 comments

Three years after Beauty and the Beat, Todrick Hall takes Belle to the gayborhood, where she runs into RuPaul, Lance Bass, Frankie Grande, and many others.
posted by schmod at 9:38 PM PST - 7 comments

American art as the production of widely circulating likenesses—to be traced by limners, peddled to clients, collected by the bushel, featured in Home Decorating, tallied at auction, and absorbed by image banks.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:52 PM PST - 7 comments

The Masters Of The Universe art book shows how to design a “generic Male Action Figure”.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 7:37 PM PST - 43 comments

There are many efforts currently ongoing to conserve wild rhino populations and combat the strain on the species due to poaching. The conservation-through-commerce-minded Exotic Wildlife Association and an organization of corporations and nonprofits known as GroupElephant.com have proposed a novel solution: bring a thousand orphaned rhinos to Texas. The organizations reportedly plan adopt the rhinos out to private ranches, and breed them in Texas. The EWA's spokesman reports that it plans to eventually repatriate the rhinos or their offspring to South Africa once South African officials "have a handle over there with the poaching problem."
posted by sciatrix at 7:18 PM PST - 55 comments

Rick and Morty synced to Eminem's "Rap God" (SLYT)
posted by rebent at 6:39 PM PST - 5 comments

If there's a band more simultaneously inventive, unusual, lush, intricate, or lovely than Stars in Battledress, I've yet to find them! James and Richard Larcombe, known for their collaborations with British legends William Drake and Craig Fortnam, among others, combine guitar, keyboard, and harmonies in spectacularly unusual tandem. They can be majestic and enchanting; they can be jagged and noisy; they can be warm and witty. I'm quite taken with them!
posted by rorgy at 5:41 PM PST - 2 comments

Did you ever notice that almost every Mad Men episode ends with Don Draper staring blankly? [more inside]
posted by maggieb at 4:50 PM PST - 33 comments

"We know that Conrad was an admirer of Stevenson’s work, and in fact that he thought more highly of Stevenson’s South Seas nonfiction writings than of his novels, at least according to Colvin, who knew both men. To my knowledge, however, no one has connected the next set of dots, not just from Stevenson’s writing to Conrad’s, but from Stevenson’s Samoan persona to Kurtz. Why not consider whether Stevenson’s grandiose island life influenced Conrad’s masterpiece?" Where Did Kurtz Come From? [single page], Matthew Pearl for Slate. Related: Conrad’s 'Heart of Darkness' gets operatic treatment (SF Examiner) | reviews (with stage photos).
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:15 PM PST - 7 comments

Based on such continuous disappointment you'd think that trust in these grandiose, empty promises would wane - yet articles like this are more popular then ever. How click bait articles work (this will amaze you!)
posted by chavenet at 3:54 PM PST - 19 comments

can life survive for billions of years longer than the expected timeline on Earth? as scientists continue to discover older and older solar systems & galaxies, it’s likely that before long we’ll find an ancient planet in a habitable zone. knowing if life is possible on this exoplanet would have immense implications for habitability and the development of ancient life according to researcher Tiago Campante's paper "An Ancient Extrasolar System with Five Sub-Earth-Size Planets". this animation starts by showing us Kepler's field-of-view in the direction of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, and then we're taken to the vicinity of the Kepler-444 planetary system, located some 117 light years away.
posted by talaitha at 2:22 PM PST - 24 comments

Museum Bot tweets a random high-res Open Access image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, four times a day. From the fertile mind of Darius Kazemi.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:05 AM PST - 4 comments

My approach in shooting the portraits was to create a community experience. I set up open calls for women and female-identifying individuals to have their photographs taken holding whatever made them feel most safe walking home alone.

Iowa-based artist Taylor Yocom presents: Guarded. [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 10:51 AM PST - 196 comments

Self-described "butch queen" and gleeful gender-nonconformist AB SOTO brings the sparkly with his new song and video Cha Cha Bitch. It's got a beat; you can dance to it.
posted by psoas at 10:36 AM PST - 10 comments

Given that so little of it is ever exhibited or ever will be, maybe we could start at the bottom and sell some stuff out of storage that has no real prospect of being shown. What would that buy? Selling just 1 percent of the collection by value—much more than 1 percent by object count—would enable the [Art Institute of Chicago] to endow free admission forever. (via)
posted by eotvos at 10:22 AM PST - 41 comments

Piggydb and Oinker.me: Non-hierarchical information tools from Japanese designer Daisuke Morita. [more inside]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 9:30 AM PST - 16 comments

The Price of Nice Nails; Or, Pay The Manicurist As if on cue, cavalcades of battered Ford Econoline vans grumble to the curbs, and the women jump in. It is the start of another workday for legions of New York City’s manicurists, who are hurtled to nail salons across three states. They will not return until late at night, after working 10- to 12-hour shifts, hunched over fingers and toes. [more inside]
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 8:30 AM PST - 124 comments

An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially. What can we do about it? By Atul Gawande, previously on Metafilter.
posted by ellieBOA at 8:15 AM PST - 65 comments

Cards Against Humanity gives you two or sometimes three pieces to snap together, and it tells you you’re done. That’s it. And you know what? Often, many of these combinations aren’t very good. They aren’t very good whether you find their subjects funny or not, offensive or not. They aren’t very good because they’re sometimes nonsensical or just weird. They aren’t very good because, in an attempt to be as shocking, controversial and offensive as possible, the designers have forgotten to… make things work. There’s very little creativity in combining cards into a joke, because the work and the structuring is done for you. It’s almost like copying someone else’s homework. There’s no life in there [...] Cards Against Humanity opens and closes the joke for you. It’s limp, passive, inert.

Review: Cards Against Humanity
posted by griphus at 8:12 AM PST - 261 comments

Seattle artist Matthew Offenbacher recently won a $25,000 prize. So he and his partner Jennifer Nemhauser decided to do something revolutionary with it. They bought 7 pieces of art by local female and queer artists and donated it to the Seattle Art Museum for its permanent collection: Deed of Gift.
posted by zarq at 7:01 AM PST - 11 comments

A 1690s advice column
posted by deathpanels at 5:49 AM PST - 51 comments

"Negrotown" In the last forty-eight hours, American television comedy may have just delivered the greatest one-two punch of satire ever. First, we had Amy Shumer's brilliant sketch, "I2 Angry Men Inside Amy Shumer" on Tuesday night (previously, on Metafilter). And now, Key and Peele bring "Negrotown". [more inside]
posted by magstheaxe at 5:48 AM PST - 41 comments

Here Are 7 Undeniable Examples • By Jon Greenberg @citizenshipsj [more inside]
posted by wonton endangerment at 5:24 AM PST - 136 comments

It's Election Day here in the UK and it's looking likely that neither party is going to win an outright majority of the seats in the house of commons:

• FiveThirtyEight predictions
• Guardian constituency map
• Guardian poll projections

That being the case, are the conservatives and the right wing media machine in the UK already looking to manipulate the system to stay in power? [more inside]
posted by Cantdosleepy at 12:56 AM PST - 659 comments

In the pilot episode... Welles goes beard to mustache with Burt Reynolds on the Constipation School of Acting, does magic tricks with Angie Dickinson and discusses the cosmic importance of puppetry with Jim Henson. It’s all coated with Welles’ eccentricities and indecipherable profundity. Once again, it’s impossible to know whether he’s genuinely bizarre or wholly self-aware of the display he’s putting on. My money is always on the latter.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, please enjoy the bizarre and wonderful never-aired 1979 pilot of The Orson Welles Show. (Via)
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:46 PM PST - 11 comments

CONTINUE? Y/N: A Short Story
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:36 PM PST - 12 comments

What happens when you actually bake Ben & Jerry's cookie dough?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:22 PM PST - 32 comments

12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer Pitch-perfect reenactment of the Sidney Lumet classic. (SLYT - 21 minutes, and worth every one) [more inside]
posted by likeatoaster at 8:03 PM PST - 95 comments

Would you put oregano on your posole?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:42 PM PST - 16 comments

"I think we might have made a little bit of history tonight." Alberta, Canada's most conservative province, the home of the oil/tar sands, and most of Canada's oil and gas industry, has elected a majority NDP government. And one run by a woman, at that. [more inside]
posted by jrochest at 5:54 PM PST - 137 comments

"Wellness is New Age for the Instagram era. Amethysts and incense have been replaced with kale and balayage; tie-dye and velvet with bamboo cotton and designer yoga pants. It’s the alternative lifestyle but with better design. It is a movement defined by its minimalist, feminine aesthetic – pastel homewares, bright vegetable smoothies, slim legs in clean, expensive exercise wear. It’s not really about health – health does not have to be beautiful, thin and tidy in designer crop tops, but wellness does. It’s an aesthetic of wealth, a sort of gentle, palatable capitalism. There’s a dizziness to its beauty: it is light, weightless, transcendent. It probably feels this way thanks to the restricted calories as much as the calm from appropriated Eastern meditation." [more inside]
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:52 PM PST - 52 comments

Many American, Canadian, and British military veterans opposed to the actions of ISIS in Iraq have been, individually, going over to fight with the Kurdish Peshmerga for some time now, bringing thousands of dollars of military gear and irreplaceable training. There have been so many of them fighting that the Peshmerga are now actively recruiting military veterans online. Not to be internet-outdone, military veterans have begun investigating forming units of their own to fight ISIS -including notable and controversial science-fiction author John Ringo, who suggested trying to crowdfund for 'a brigade of soldiers'. [more inside]
posted by corb at 5:12 PM PST - 79 comments

We talked about The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore (Comedy Central's time-slot replacement for The Colbert Report soon after it premiered, and the show has been busy working out a lot of the bugs we talked about -- in particular, taking the panel down from four participants to three and occasionally focusing an entire show on the panel without Wilmore's standard-issue monologue or wacky skits. Then Wilmore left the studio entirely, sitting down in a Baltimore diner with Crips and Bloods to discuss their truce during the protests, which one reviewer is calling TNS finding its voice.
posted by Etrigan at 5:08 PM PST - 14 comments

After months of trying to investigate what it's like to be an UberX driver, Emily Guendelsberger of the Philadelphia City Paper decided to become one herself. She also picked up some tricks on how to do it along the way.
posted by workingdankoch at 4:03 PM PST - 36 comments

...can I help you with that? PLOS (The Public Library of Science) gets rid of reviewer and editor as a result of sexist statements, from Science Insider; Retraction Watch's summary. Here's the direct link to the apology and update on peer review policy from the PLOS ONE blog. Finally, this story gets the BuzzFeed treatment, plus some of the scientific community's responses using the hashtag AddMaleAuthorGate (additional examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, and the Microsoft Assistant paperclip: 5)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 3:56 PM PST - 39 comments

The Edison Talking Doll is just what it sounds like: a doll, with a small phonograph in its body, mass-produced by Thomas Edison’s lab in the 1890s -- and it … shrieks. It’s like an unearthly Carol Kane screaming in a wind tunnel, trapped in the body of a lifeless totem. Listen at your own risk. Even more Edison Talking Doll recordings.
posted by The Whelk at 3:08 PM PST - 32 comments

"Yo, who remembers my episode of MTV Cribs? You remember that guy who was asleep on the floor?" An oral history of the infamous Redman episode.
posted by Metroid Baby at 2:26 PM PST - 18 comments

An Illustrated Review of Broadway Musical "Fun Home" [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:00 PM PST - 34 comments

Battering the Batter
For too long, MLB has tolerated the 'tradition' of pitchers intentionally hitting the other team's players. That needs to change.
posted by andoatnp at 1:04 PM PST - 83 comments

In 1976 Elton John was one of the biggest superstars in pop music. His album from the previous year, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was the first album to enter the Billboard charts at #1. The follow-up album, Rock of the Westies, was the second album in history to enter the charts at #1. But behind the outrageous costumes and garish glasses was a lonely man whose fame had grown to the point where he and songwriting partner Bernie Taupin started referring to it as "The Beast". Thousands of adoring fans all over the world wasn't enough; as Elton confided to interviewer Cliff Jahr, "I crave to be loved".
posted by MattMangels at 12:47 PM PST - 34 comments

The Black Widow Conundrum - how Black Widow being the most popular female superhero of the decade is both exciting and disappointing. Also Ike Perlmutter thinks female-led films bomb, The Mary Sue discusses Joss Whedon leaving Twitter.
posted by Artw at 12:20 PM PST - 131 comments

What if everyone famous was ginger?
posted by Stewriffic at 12:14 PM PST - 56 comments

Nobody Puts R2 in the Corner [more inside]
posted by alby at 10:39 AM PST - 8 comments

Colour footage of Berlin, July 1945. Aerial colour footage of the destruction of Berlin, 1945 (II, III.) Colour footage of Trümmerfrauen in front of the Reichstag.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:27 AM PST - 14 comments

The psychotherapist Carl Jung, after seeing a photo of the Arctic explorer Augustine Courtauld, remarked that Courtauld's was the face of a man 'stripped of his persona, his public self stolen, leaving his true self naked before the world.' For women, this is doubly true: a woman's life is one lived under surveillance, a system of inner and outer regulations even more restrictive than a man's. Even a simple stroll down the sidewalk becomes an exercise in self-loathing. Suck in your stomach. Straighten your hem. (What if it rides up, exposing you?) Every shop window offers a glimpse of your own reflection. Adjust, adjust, adjust.

It's enough to drive a woman crazy (and isn't this what we're always being accused of?). It's enough to drive any woman to the woods.

So where are all the women hermits? [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 10:20 AM PST - 31 comments

The 1000 Most Bizarre Batman Images EVER! The title says 1000 images, but I think there's just 100. I haven't counted. (some images nsfw)
posted by marxchivist at 8:56 AM PST - 27 comments

It is not polite to say that I have no uterus. People react as though I’ve bullied them, stepped over a line. But they are the ones who pushed themselves into my body to begin with, assessing its suitability as habitation for an embryo. I’m only pointing out that, no matter how nice the curtains, how lovely the paint scheme, there’s no actual house there at all. No place to put a potential human.

--Positive I Don’t Have a Uterus
posted by almostmanda at 8:15 AM PST - 66 comments

It's common to frame ecology as a science that gets practiced in wild, untraveled areas. But cities have an ecology all their own, and the design of a given city contributes to the diversity of animals that make their homes there. Rats are particularly good at navigating cities, but other species might have a tougher time getting around.
posted by sciatrix at 7:18 AM PST - 17 comments

" “I tell my daughters that when I go, they’ll know the good recipes from the dirty pages.” [NYT]] A group of Nashville writers mounts an exhibit of the dirty pages from their own family cookbooks.
posted by Miko at 7:12 AM PST - 20 comments

"What we have here are Steven Tyler and Joe Perry at the height of their 'Toxic Twins' indulgence, zonked completely out of their minds, barely able to stumble through their signature tune. Perry delivers so many clams he could open a seafood shack, sounding like a fumbling teenager’s first visit to a Guitar Center President’s Day sale. Tyler fades in and out, struggling to keep it together. At times the other band members look on with some confusion. The band starts to gel by the crescendo, and then allows the fizzle-fart ending to put a cap on how much of a shit they don’t give about being onstage."
posted by josher71 at 6:44 AM PST - 52 comments

Infamous troll, Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, has annoyed Twitter users by using purchased Twitter advertisements to bypass blocks and target controversial political messages at selected groups. By focusing ads at specific user demographics, he was able to spend very little money while optimizing for outrage. [more inside]
posted by theorique at 3:45 AM PST - 68 comments

ICHI's song GO GAGAMBO opens with a universally recognisable mosquito hum, then proceeds with a catchy, familiar-sounding bass line, strummed out on a long, thin insect-like home-made instrument, while the vocals are punk-like, small and high-pitched, in the language of the insect itself. It’s a song about mistaken identity - (gagambo is an insect unfortunate enough to be mistaken as a big mosquito, resulting in probable death by angry clapping hands), and it is a clever blend of the familiar and the bizarre. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 2:08 AM PST - 5 comments

Pfft. . . A real man just craps his pants and asks if anyone has a problem with it. The anthropologist Horace Miner once wrote about the Nacirema, a strange North American people he said all perform the exact same set of rituals in communal “shrine rooms,” but pretend to be doing it in almost total secret. [more inside]
posted by rankfreudlite at 11:55 PM PST - 183 comments

"Alfonso Muskedunder" , an animated video by Bendik Kaltenborn and Espen Friberg for the song by Norwegian DJ, songwriter, and record producer Todd Terje. A '60s jazz influenced (yes that's 7/8 time) hodge-podge with 4 additional remixes (soundcloud) and a 'shortreel' of animated outtakes, it's the latest addition to a series of oddball-character-themed singles: "Inspector Norse", "Delorean Dynamite" and "Leisure Suit Preben".
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:41 PM PST - 16 comments

In keeping with sweet music videos evening here on Metafilter, please take a moment to appreciate the sheer number of hours and sore thumbs it must have taken to make Son Lux's new video for Change is Everything.
posted by Lutoslawski at 8:17 PM PST - 11 comments

So the Scottish National Party is "nationalist" and "socialist." Does this mean they are secretly fascists? In what sense are "national socialists" "socialist?" [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:12 PM PST - 39 comments

Chemical Brothers "Go." They still sound like the 90s. Music video by Michel Gondry.
posted by ourt at 7:07 PM PST - 48 comments

Lives are literally at stake. I have been on both sides of this issue, having spent 7 years as a plainclothes narcotics detective. I have arrested or charged many addicts and dealers. I've never arrested a tobacco addict, nor have I ever seen one turned down for help when they develop lung cancer, whether or not they have insurance. The reasons for the difference in care between a tobacco addict and an opiate addict is stigma and money. Petty reasons to lose a life. As of June 1, the police department of Gloucester, Massachusetts will no longer be charging drug addicts who turn themselves in and ask for help. Instead, they will be fast tracking them into a recovery program. [more inside]
posted by Adridne at 6:58 PM PST - 72 comments

Calexico - "Falling From The Sky" [YouTube] Directed by Mikel Cee Karlsson. Featuring José González.
posted by Fizz at 6:53 PM PST - 5 comments

The perfect espresso with the perfect view requires the perfect cup. [more inside]
posted by michswiss at 5:37 PM PST - 10 comments

The LEGO Friends series has received a lot of criticism (previously) since it was released over three years ago, but as any fan of LEGO will tell you: Parts is Parts. And it's what you do with them that makes the difference. To Wit: The LEGO Friends Death Star. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:06 PM PST - 20 comments

The Surprising Link Between Fjords and Carbon While fjords make up just one tenth of one percent of the oceans’ surface area they account for about 11 percent of the carbon locked away in marine sediments each year ... [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 4:13 PM PST - 17 comments

"The administration of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, in rejecting Professor Steven Salaita’s appointment without demonstrating cause, and in doing so only after the appointment had been approved and courses had been assigned to him, acted in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the university’s own stated policies on the subject." The American Association of University Professors has issued its report on the Salaita case. [more inside]
posted by escabeche at 4:10 PM PST - 86 comments

Q: What do the US, Somalia, and South Sudan have in common? A: It's totally cool to put kids in jail forever.
At 38, Adolfo Davis is re-sentenced to life imprisonment as an accomplice to a gang murder when he was 14.
“The defendant’s acts showed an aggression and callous disregard for human life far beyond his tender age of 14.” [more inside]
posted by TheNegativeInfluence at 3:47 PM PST - 37 comments

"The Whitney museum says, 'Isn't it wonderful – we have 30% women in the new collection!'" says the activist known as Frida Kahlo. "And we're saying, why is that something to be happy about – 30%? Where is the other 20?" The Guerrilla Girls: 30 years of punking art world sexism (Emma Brockes, The Guardian); previously on MetaFilter.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 3:46 PM PST - 8 comments

The Ribbon Worm has a Branching Proboscis. [slyt | via | nightmare fuel] [more inside]
posted by quin at 3:16 PM PST - 59 comments

China rates its own citizens - including online behaviour: "The Chinese government is currently implementing a nationwide electronic system, called the Social Credit System, attributing to each of its 1,3 billion citizens a score for his or her behavior. The system will be based on various criteria, ranging from financial credibility and criminal record to social media behavior. From 2020 onwards each adult citizen should, besides his identity card, have such a credit code." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 2:34 PM PST - 76 comments

How an HIV outbreak hit rural Indiana — and why we should be paying attention [Washington Post]
Rural Indiana Struggles to Contend With H.I.V. Outbreak [New York Times]
The Drug That’s Infecting Indiana [Medium]
The Best Way To Stop Indiana’s Outbreak Is The Most Unpopular [Medium]
Small Town America: This Is Your War On Drugs [Medium]
posted by andoatnp at 12:59 PM PST - 62 comments

Fucking Inappropriate. No matter what I do, it always ends this way. The money gets spent. The whiskey runs out. The hangover always comes, and the show is always over. TW for graphic discussion of combat, PTSD, pretty much everything war-related. [more inside]
posted by mrbigmuscles at 12:05 PM PST - 13 comments

If you can draw it, you can eat it.
posted by bswinburn at 11:29 AM PST - 27 comments

"Jellies (molded gelatin desserts, for non-UK types) all have distinct personalities and everybody relates to a different one." The Jelly Film lets your dessert dance, with charming results. Associated NOWNESS article.
posted by hippybear at 11:05 AM PST - 12 comments

Wheel of Lunch For those days when you do not know what you want to eat.
posted by Stewriffic at 9:55 AM PST - 67 comments

As a sex worker who has done in-person work for a decade, I've kissed a lot of frogs. So many, in fact, that I have a theory about why call girls of old had the "no kissing" rule, a rule that is unfortunately uncommon among contemporary escorts: It's not because kissing is more intimate than other acts, but because it's uniquely cruel to have to endure bad kissing. And bad kissing is a guarantee.

Charlotte Shane (previously, previouslier) wants help you stop sucking at kissing.
posted by divined by radio at 9:34 AM PST - 88 comments

The Mountains of Mouthness recites tweets sent to them. If you post a public tweet on twitter with "@MoMouthness" or "#mouthness" in it, the mountains will recite everything you posted in that tweet, word for word, in a booming voice that can be heard by all four corners of whatever kingdom they happen to be residing in. You can even watch the mountains from the perspective of a lowly villager with your phone or tablet. When you load the mountains up, be sure to unmute them by clicking on the icon in the lower left corner of the screen. If they still don't say anything, you might have to reload the page or restart your browser. [more inside]
posted by surazal at 9:34 AM PST - 52 comments

New York's Museum of Biblical Art is closing June 14th, despite large recent crowds (NYT). Often confused for a evangelical organization, perhaps because of its name, MOBIA is something unique: a secular institution that is serious about placing religious art clearly in the context of the beliefs that inspired it. David van Biema explains what we are losing.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:24 AM PST - 20 comments

Ryan Gosling eats his cereal [more inside]
posted by MrMoonPie at 9:09 AM PST - 15 comments

Teen Vogue presents the Best Prom Ever [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:04 AM PST - 10 comments

Would you believe that the artist who designed in engraved Roman letters the slogan, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night…” atop New York City’s main post office at Penn Station is the same man who designed the famous, iconic Superman comic book logo? Both are the works of Ira Schnapp (1892-1969), a descendant of stonecutters, calligrapher and hand-letterer who defined the “house style” of DC Comics for over 30 years...

Ira Schnapp, DC Comics Sr. VP for Advertising, and logo designer extraordinaire, is the subject of an exhibit and lecture at the Type Director's Club of New York. Read a ten-part comprehensive bio with lots of examples of Schnapp's work at Dial B for Blog starting here. And if that's not enough, here are the first three parts of an ongoing five-part series on Schnapp based on Arlen Schumer's upcoming lecture at the Type Director's Club.
posted by marxchivist at 8:18 AM PST - 3 comments

On Dec. 15, the Tennessee Aquarium's newly installed Amazonian electric eel, Miguel Wattson -- get it, Watts-on? -- registered an account on Twitter that automatically posts messages whenever probes in his tank detect a strong-enough electrical discharge from him.
posted by sciatrix at 7:14 AM PST - 11 comments

Slice your dominant hand all up with the shards of a wizard's amethyst. Classic 90s Scholastic paperbacks brought back to us by Neil Cicierega (previously). Contains cursing, nostalgia, ill wishing, Adolf Gruntpile, and disturbing cover art.
posted by automatic cabinet at 7:11 AM PST - 9 comments

“This show, these people, it’s a disaster in my life,” said Kamylla, who spent weeks waiting for the promised assistance, quickly running out of money to support herself, her husband, and her children. They gave her a $200 fee and then did not follow through on promises of medical, dental, housing, and employment assistance, she told BuzzFeed News. “I kept on calling them, and nothing happened.”

-- Sex workers who were filmed for A&E’s 8 Minutes, which says it provides resources for women who want to get out of sex work, allege that the production lied to them.
posted by almostmanda at 6:58 AM PST - 35 comments

A new approach to framing and promoting the South's music heritage ...but they left out Bristol!
posted by mmiddle at 6:14 AM PST - 6 comments

Jimmy Fallon and Jack Black remake "More Than Words" The inimitable Jack Black guests on The Tonight Show 5/4/15 and joins Jimmy Fallon to cover Extreme's More Than Words (SLYT).
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 3:16 AM PST - 64 comments

"In some quarters, the scorn that New Yorkers once piled on Los Angeles is now sounding like envy." (SLNYT) "Indeed, Los Angeles has seemingly become the flight fantasy of choice for the likes of Ms. Turner, who insists that anything good she was giving up in overpriced, overstressed Brooklyn is already in place on the booming east side of Los Angeles: the in-season Zambian coffee outposts, the galleries, the vintage clothing boutiques."
posted by persona au gratin at 1:36 AM PST - 103 comments

Why can't America have Great Trains?

...Amtrak, which runs a deficit and therefore depends on money from Washington, remains on a seemingly permanent path to mediocrity.

What gives, exactly? Why can't Amtrak create any momentum for itself in the political world? Why is the United States apparently condemned to have second-rate trains?

Part of the answer, of course, is geography: Density lends itself to trains, and America is far less dense than, say, Spain or France. But this explanation isn't wholly satisfying because, even in the densest parts of the United States, intercity rail is slow or inefficient.

posted by frimble at 11:25 PM PST - 159 comments

Touch Pianist – Tap in rhythm and perform your favourite music [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 9:59 PM PST - 16 comments

The Met's soon-to-open exhibit, titled "China: Through the Looking Glass," tackles the impact of Chinese aesthetics on Western fashion, and how Chinese culture has inspired fashionable imagination for hundreds of years. Juxtaposing high fashion with Chinese art, film, clothing, and artifacts, the exhibit looks to explore why Western culture is as enraptured with the East as it is. [more inside]
posted by ourt at 6:55 PM PST - 42 comments

It's been a long time coming, but the Porn Trolling copyright lawyers of Prenda Law finally had (another) day in court, this time before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. It went poorly.
posted by T.D. Strange at 4:29 PM PST - 47 comments

"Think of it: Pig drives, like cattle drives, only stranger. Who knew a pig could walk that far or would travel in the desired direction?" From Atlas Obscura: The Great Appalachian Hog Drives.
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:05 PM PST - 15 comments

Ruth Rendell, crime writer, dies aged 85. [The Guardian]

Ruth Rendell, one of Britain’s best-loved authors, who delighted fans for decades with her dark, intricately plotted crime novels, has died at the age of 85, her publisher has announced.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:04 PM PST - 24 comments

The Courtauld Gallery is currently displaying the surviving pieces from Goya's "Witches and Old Women Album." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:40 PM PST - 4 comments

Is your love for jewels hampered by their inability to take on humanoid forms? Do you wish Adventure Time had been (a little) more grounded in the real world? Or are you simply one of those people who constantly have boring songs stuck in your head, and you'd like a little more colorful variety in your mental music videos? Perhaps you should watch STEVEN UNIVERSE! [more inside]
posted by jsnlxndrlv at 3:24 PM PST - 89 comments

"What does it mean to be British? Read five outspoken collectives' views on identity in UK culture in this roundtable." - text by Zing Tsjeng for Dazed magazine (part of a series of articles on the state of the nation as the May 7 election approaches in the UK).
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 3:01 PM PST - 1 comment

I seriously need some helpful soul, or maybe some kind of crowd-sourced thing that can tell me what I should be reading as things come out so I’m not floundering under drifts of pages on book mountain when the Hugo nomination period opens. Preferably some recommendation engine where my fellow writers, bless you guys I love you all but damn I know how we are, are not allowed to nominate or push their own books. I don’t want reviews, I don’t even want opinions, I just want a simple but large list of titles and authors

Rachael Acks about the plight of next year's Hugo nominators looking for worthy candidates in a field in which at least 4201 new novels in English were published in 2014. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 2:02 PM PST - 239 comments

Biologist/blogger PZ Myers provides a nice introduction to evolutionary theory, and explains how classical Darwinism is distorted by proponents of scientific racism and other pseudoscientific movements.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 1:59 PM PST - 16 comments

RESPOND! [slyt]
posted by Ferreous at 1:48 PM PST - 15 comments

AV Club staff writer Joshua Alston attended the last stop on Bill Cosby's "Far From Finished" comedy tour this past Saturday night in Atlanta and shared his observations of what may be Cosby's last comedy show.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 1:43 PM PST - 34 comments

On December 22, 2012, Buhring arrived back in Naples. Guinness World Records certified her time of 152 days total, 144 of them on the bike. She had wanted to be the fastest woman to cycle around the world; instead she was the first, or as Guinness defines it, the first to do it alone, traveling continuously and in the same direction . [more inside]
posted by Dashy at 12:34 PM PST - 18 comments

Inspired by a Norwegian channel that featured an uninterrupted 8-hour knitting session and a six day commentary free ferry journey through the fjords, the BBC has started a new season of 'deliberately unhurried programmes'. Enjoy a two hour, single shot drift down a canal without voiceover or interruption (which you won't have anyway, since the BBC doesn't have ads.) It's garnering rave reviews. .
posted by GallonOfAlan at 12:23 PM PST - 42 comments

Last December, we (The Dissolve) ran an excellent essay from familiar face Chris Klimek on the regrettable history of the PG-13 rating. He explained how the huge gulf in content between PG and R films necessitated the creation of a middle ground. The PG-13 rating was created expressly to attend to that problem, but that created a handful of problems all its own… Animator Mack Williams cooked up the video below, which reshapes Chris’ essay into a snappy, informative, and visually slick cartoon.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:37 AM PST - 12 comments

An amazing murmuration of starlings to make your Monday more enjoyable. [slyt | previously 1,2]
posted by quin at 10:09 AM PST - 31 comments

Empathy Cards for Serious Illness
posted by sleepy psychonaut at 10:01 AM PST - 42 comments

Reconsidering 'The Wire' Amidst the Baltimore Uprising (Dave Zirin for The Nation)
posted by box at 9:35 AM PST - 98 comments

Biologists E. O. Wilson and Sean Carroll in conversation @ Mosaic Science. [more inside]
posted by khonostrov at 8:45 AM PST - 4 comments

Transgender Lives: Your Stories (NYT). As part of a series of editorials about transgender experiences, we are featuring personal stories that reflect the strength, diversity and challenges of the community.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:31 AM PST - 2 comments

A Draw Muhammad event was attacked by two gunmen who injured a security guard before being killed by police. The event was organized by SPLC identified hate group the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is run by Pamela Geller. Geller you may recall as the woman who fought against the Park 51 mosque, putting up posters describing Muslims as barbarians in the NYC subway, and claiming that Obama is the secret illegitimate son of Malcom X. The Daily Beast has a good summary of Geller and the event.
posted by sotonohito at 8:19 AM PST - 401 comments

What is May the 4th? Poet-laureate Tim Russ explains the origin of everyone's favorite holiday (and religious observance) May the 4th, and how it relates to the little known movie called "The Star War" [more inside]
posted by blue_beetle at 7:42 AM PST - 27 comments

Fredrik deBoer reflects on disparities among university buildings and what they say about different approaches to higher education: [more inside]
posted by audi alteram partem at 7:27 AM PST - 27 comments

The Flow Hive, the 12 million dollar Indiegogo campaign is a brand new way of keeping bees. But did we need a brand new way? And if we did, is this the right one? Erik Knutzen, co-author with his wife Kelly Coyne of the Urban Homestead and Making It calls the Flow Hive, “A solution in search of a problem.” Bees are in trouble, but the FlowHive only solves problems for the beekeeper, not the bees. [more inside]
posted by Sophie1 at 7:27 AM PST - 30 comments

When they returned home, the Laidlers took David off his restrictive diet, and he continued to improve—rapidly. Louise stopped Ben’s supplement regimen—without telling Jim—and Ben’s behavior remained the same. Then, after months of soul-searching, Jim Laider took to the internet to announce his “de-conversion” from alternative medicine—a kind of penance, but also a warning to others. “I had this guilt to expunge,” Jim says. “I helped to promote this nonsense, and I didn’t want other people to fall for it like I did.”

--An Alternative-Medicine Believer’s Journey Back to Science
posted by almostmanda at 6:45 AM PST - 59 comments

While work-life balance is generally seen as an issue mostly affecting women, many men also struggle with balancing work obligations with family. In companies which expect an "ideal" worker to produce 60-80 hour work weeks, men use a number of strategies to conserve time and shorten work weeks--with vastly different consequences depending on transparency.
posted by sciatrix at 6:25 AM PST - 132 comments

On the pros and cons of letting your dog sleep in your bed (NYT).
posted by Short Attention Sp at 4:28 AM PST - 75 comments

Nearly losing sanity in a 28-hour Marvel Marathon.
posted by mysticreferee at 9:04 PM PST - 67 comments