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Ancient Roman 'Pen' Was a Joke Souvenir (LiveScience): During an archaeological excavation at a Roman-era site in London, researchers found around 200 iron styluses used for writing on wax-filled wooden tablets. One of those styluses, which just debuted in its first public exhibition, holds a message written in tiny lettering along its sides. The inscription's sentiment, according to the researchers who translated it, is essentially, "I went to Rome and all I got you was this pen." [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 9:35 PM PST - 47 comments

For the first 123 games of the 2007 season, the Baltimore Orioles' pitching staff was doing fine. Really! They weren't bad! Everything was OK. Then came August 22, 2007, which Alex Rubenstein and Jon Bois chronicle in Dorktown #2: The night that destroyed the 2007 Baltimore Orioles forever [more inside]
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 8:53 PM PST - 7 comments

Maybe non-chess people will like the first page. Chess people be like - more footnotes ! A great funny chess piece, if you like that, yea ! Found elsewhere, had to share. Kind of concerned about flooding his traffic but, but so good, great even. If you click anyway, get to where he describes forfeit "like the king’s poor diet and lifestyle choices leading to a death by natural causes". Read the rest in a John Cleese voice. Then GRAPHS !
posted by epjr at 7:07 PM PST - 15 comments

Newly Released Nixon Tapes Capture Ronald Reagan Calling African Delegates “Monkeys”. Despite what the GOP might tell you today, racism was always part of the party.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 2:48 PM PST - 62 comments

Nonprofit AF imagines the answers on grant proposals if non-profits were brutally honest with funders (Part 2, Part 3) [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 2:37 PM PST - 17 comments

Har Mar Superstar performs a live Baconcert at a Wendy's in Minneapolis (twitter) Ever the iconic performer, Har Mar Superstar knows how to have a good time, including changing up the lyrics to better profess his love of Wendy's and frosties! [more inside]
posted by jillithd at 1:30 PM PST - 13 comments

Watch pills in water dissolve, expand, bubble, and explode under a macro lens. The pills again, highlights reel [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:40 AM PST - 8 comments

Seamus Blackley wants to make old-school bread. (Twitter; Threadreader unroll here.) How old would that be? "Just now, the dormant yeast I collected this week from Ancient Egyptian artifacts (with help from @drserenalove and @rbowman1234) is being fed grain for the first time in four and a half thousand years." Starring antiquities, autoclaves, and an actual loaf of Old Kingdom bread. Via kottke.org.
posted by MonkeyToes at 11:19 AM PST - 34 comments

As China's service-sector surged circa 2014 (Invstopedia) and was continuing the shift in 2017 (Forbes), the country also continued to struggle to control its pollution problems (Forbes, 2017), because "China’s air pollution is influenced by a wide variety of physical and chemical factors; the problems are a lot more complex than most realize." But a recent study reports that China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge (Ars Technica, June 30, 2019). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:22 AM PST - 16 comments

This Tiny Traveling Bookstore Wanders the French Countryside "He had originally thought about opening a brick-and-mortar bookshop but decided he wanted one that could travel to French country towns whose bookstores have often closed. He also wanted a space where he could live during his travels."
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 7:53 AM PST - 19 comments

How prescription art is lifting people out of depression: From singing together to being read to in a library, an arts participation scheme is transforming lives in Denmark [sl Guardian Upside]
posted by ellieBOA at 7:42 AM PST - 8 comments

[Tarantino] seems to have gone out of the way to make fun of my father and to portray him as kind of a buffoon.” - On Bruce Lee's appearance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Jen Yamato, LA Times.
posted by Think_Long at 7:35 AM PST - 75 comments

The National Cathedral weighs in on the current Trump/Republican rhetoric.
posted by aloiv2 at 5:02 AM PST - 37 comments

For the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, Google created a tribute to Margaret Hamilton by positioning over 107,000 mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Facility in the Mojave Desert to reflect the light of the moon, instead of the sun.
posted by growabrain at 1:57 AM PST - 17 comments

Three songs by 100 gecs: “money machine”, “800db cloud”, “stupid horse” (Album review)
posted by Going To Maine at 9:56 PM PST - 21 comments

It may feel like we just did this, but it's time for the second set of Democratic presidential primary debates in Detroit, with the first round starting at 8 p.m. ET tonight, July 30th. The largest field of any political party's presidential candidates hopes to make their case to the American electorate—and to voters in the crucial 2020 swing state of Michigan. [more inside]
posted by zachlipton at 4:30 PM PST - 875 comments

How much did a long-ago murder in Africa influence Delia Owens’ first novel? [more inside]
posted by fever-trees at 4:15 PM PST - 1 comment

Shenmue 3, Evil Genius 2, Mechwarrior 5, Star Control: Origins and Ghosts of the Precursors – sequels to beloved videogames, one and all. But Rock Paper Shotgun asks: Why are so many old games coming back? Is it really just money and nostalgia?
posted by adrianhon at 2:34 PM PST - 35 comments

...the federal government has official advice for you. The United States Copyright Office, a division of The Library of Congress, evidently gets so many inquiries about "protecting" Elvis sightings that the subject warrants its own entry on its FAQ page. Not sure what this says about America or Americans, except both are weird, yo.
posted by BadgerDoctor at 2:27 PM PST - 16 comments

How the misadventures of Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson shaped anthropology.
posted by sapagan at 1:49 PM PST - 4 comments

Wild boars are moving into Barcelona -- and other cities. [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 12:38 PM PST - 48 comments

Enter Sandman in the style of Let's Dance era David Bowie.
posted by adept256 at 10:09 AM PST - 35 comments

Communities are creating food access, markets, and opportunity in the southeastern Appalachian foothills. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:34 AM PST - 10 comments

'Never On Tuesday': The Real Story Of The Bizarre Nicolas Cage Cameo That Lit Up The Internet
posted by Etrigan at 8:57 AM PST - 26 comments

Throughout his career, Alan Dershowitz has been a major and controversial figure in American jurisprudence, having served as counsel to a number of notable figures such as Claus von Bülow, OJ Simpson, and recently Jeffrey Epstein, many of whom were charged with sexual crimes - a topic that has been an interest of his. A new longform article from The New Yorker goes over Dershowitz's history with regard to the litigation of sexual crimes, his longstanding relationship with Epstein, and the allegations against Dershowitz by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who is suing Dershowitz for defamation. (SLNew Yorker) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:51 AM PST - 82 comments

The state of Oklahoma has a compact with Indian tribal leaders that gives the tribes a monopoly on casino games in Oklahoma in exchange for a percentage of revenue from the games. This compact is set to expire at the end of this year, with conditions for auto-renewal. On July 8, in an opinion piece in the Tulsa World and without consulting the tribes in the agreement Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt asserted that the compact would be renegotiated. The Inter-Tribal Council has given a response. [more inside]
posted by Quonab at 8:22 AM PST - 13 comments

The rise of the lawn to dominance in suburbia represents one of the most profound transformations of the landscape in American history. If it does not quite rival in its scale the Great Plow Up of the Southern Plains that precipitated the Dust Bowl (American Heritage) or the massive deforestation of the Midwest and South during the nineteenth century (American Forests), then it is at least not far behind. How did this transformation come to be? American Green: How did the plain green lawn become the central landscaping feature in America, and what is the ecological cost? (Longread) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:59 AM PST - 36 comments

Incorporating weaving into architecture is not a new idea but Alison Grace Martin (NYTlink) is helping elevate the profile of weaving in a new, more techincal dimension. [more inside]
posted by larthegreat at 7:52 AM PST - 3 comments

How does one classify the emotions? In an Atlas or an Enyclopedia? Around a Wheel? As a Tree? In a Periodic Table? What is an emotion anyway?
posted by misteraitch at 7:05 AM PST - 4 comments

Overlook Trail hiker notebook offers ‘slice of humanity’ Roy Tennant has been a trail steward for the Sonoma Overlook and Montini Preserve Trails for almost ten years. He maintains a blog about the trail. In it, he shares pages from the hiker notebooks that sit on a bench at the top of the overlook.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:44 AM PST - 3 comments

Origami Simulator – fold, unfold, and play with models in your browser. [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 4:27 AM PST - 12 comments

Someone May be Taking Advantage of You . In Understanding Contemporary Forms of Exploitation: Attributions of Passion Serve to Legitimize the Poor Treatment of Workers, researchers found that people consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on a weekend, work unpaid, and handle unrelated tasks that were not in the job description. [more inside]
posted by Little Dawn at 11:43 PM PST - 53 comments

An old word with new developments. What to Know A rising usage of furry refers to people who have a keen interest in, or even dress up as, anthropomorphic animal characters, like those often seen in comics, games, and cartoons. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:29 PM PST - 26 comments

Hosted by Rebecca Nagle, an Oklahoma journalist and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, the This Land podcast provides an in depth look at how a cut and dry murder case opened an investigation into half the land in Oklahoma and the treaty rights of five tribes and how this unique case could result in the largest restoration--or the largest loss--of tribal land in US history. [more inside]
posted by flug at 7:03 PM PST - 11 comments

The next big thing in gaming could be using VR to believably inhabit non-humanoid bodies:

Virtual reality offers the unique possibility to experience a virtual representation as our own body. In contrast to previous research that predominantly studied this phenomenon for humanoid avatars, our work focuses on virtual animals. In this paper, we discuss different body tracking approaches to control creatures such as spiders or bats and the respective virtual body ownership effects.

posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:39 PM PST - 23 comments

DOTA, Fortnite, Overwatch, step aside for the new ruler of esports: the Farming Simulator League. Make sure you’re down with the kids by learning about the epic “rush tactic … which is when you steal away all the harvesters or bailers so that your opposing team is stranded in their field empty-handed. This hoarding strategy has apparently worked at least once already, to ‘brutal’ effect,” and watching the FSL intro video. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 1:08 PM PST - 27 comments

A few weeks back I decided to push back on Twitter against the idea that Freud’s work was discreditable because, as a young man, he took a lot of cocaine. I have an interest in this question because, as a young man, I took a lot of cocaine. But that wasn’t quite my point. My point was if we to discredit those theorists who have done a lot of cocaine, we will be left with the stoners, which would, moreover, be a boring monocrop to harvest.

–Coke Theory/Weed Theory, and Some Possible Alternatives by Grace Lavery.
posted by Kattullus at 12:46 PM PST - 24 comments

When ‘Going Outside Is Prison’: The World of American Hikikomori: "Luca lives with his parents outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, though he might as well live anywhere. That’s because the only times the 21-year-old leaves his room is to buy Camels, which he smokes in his garage. Mostly he spends his time in his room posting on Reddit, gaming, and watching anime. He sleeps all day, wakes up at six in the evening, and pops Benadryl around nine in the morning so he can go back to sleep. He’s been reliving the same exact day — almost every day — for close to a decade."
posted by bookman117 at 12:21 PM PST - 123 comments

This collection of photos was first printed circa 1957 at a neighborhood drugstore in North Philadelphia. The photographs capture special moments during a same-sex commitment ceremony, including the exchange of rings in front of witnesses, an officiant leading the ceremony, the first kiss, dancing, opening of gifts, cutting of the cake and more. The owner of the drugstore deemed these particular wedding photos to be inappropriate and refused to return the photos to the grooms. 60 years later, the photos were found.

Dear Gentlemen, your 60 year old wedding pics are ready. Full set of pictures at OneArchives.
posted by Rumple at 12:08 PM PST - 16 comments

Ships passing under the Duluth Aerial Lift Bridge generally give a horn salute that's answered in turn by the bridge operator. Get your horn on with some salute compilations: Captain's Salute 2018 Shipping Season: Part 1 | Part 2; Ship Salutes in Duluth, MN - 2009-2017; and A Decade of Captain's Salutes. For a current view of ships (with sound) heading into or out of the harbor, there's the Duluth Harbor Cam, with a live bridge view view and canal view, along with an upcoming ship schedule. [Potential volume warning for all video links] [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:53 AM PST - 13 comments

Cartoonist Lucy Knisley (previously, previously, and others) has chronicled the life, agonies, opinions, and antics of her beloved cat, Linney, for years. (many more Instagram links inside) [more inside]
posted by castlebravo at 11:18 AM PST - 26 comments

This land is your land, this land is our land, it belongs to you and me. We’re here, we’re not going back, we’re raising our kids here. It’s our country now…. We’re not letting the bastards take it back. It’s our America now.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 11:12 AM PST - 5 comments

The Oakland A's are trying to solve baseball's attendance issues,a year in it looks like a large success, having doubled the number of plan holders. With the new season plan you get access to every home game, even if you sold your ticket to a seat, as well at 50% off concessions. [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 10:03 AM PST - 15 comments

Marianne Williamson Isn’t Anti-Science As Much As She’s Pro-Feelings. Also, she shouldn’t be president.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:59 AM PST - 28 comments

In the fall of 2018, 26-year-old American missionary John Allen Chau traveled to a remote speck of sand and jungle in the Indian Ocean, attempting to convert one of the planet's last uncontacted tribes to Christianity. The islanders killed him, and Chau was pilloried around the world as a deluded Christian supremacist who deserved to die. Alex Perry of Outside Magazine pieces together the life and death of a young adventurer driven to extremes by unshakable faith. [more inside]
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:58 AM PST - 17 comments

Carmen Papalia is a blind artist whose medium is social interactions, particularly surrounding accessibility. As part of thinking about accessibility and how our public spaces prioritize the needs of certain people over others, Papalia has variously replaced his long cane with a 15-ft long version, a high school marching band, a set of red cords, and a loudspeaker. Lately, he has been working on Open Access, in which he suggests thinking of accessibility as a creative, long-term process[...] not just about the built environment, but about ideas of agency and power. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 9:50 AM PST - 6 comments

WinRed is a Trump-endorsed GOP competitor to ActBlue that launched in June. Republican candidates were not rushing to use it until the GOP 'strong-armed' them with a cease-and-desist letter to shut down the venerable fundraising platform give.gop--one consultant calls it a 'travesty'--and remove its domain registry (it has since been relaunched as right.us). [more inside]
posted by box at 9:22 AM PST - 29 comments

A look at overnight stays at US National Parks: When should you pitch your tent? Or when is it better to opt for lodging? When should you visit to avoid the crowds? Let’s have a look! (Source)
posted by holmesian at 9:17 AM PST - 6 comments

For some, grocery shopping can be sensory overload — there's music playing, machines whirring, cashiers and customers chatting. To remedy that, a grocery store in Nelson, B.C. has implemented sensory-friendly shopping on Sunday nights to create a safe environment for customers who require calm surroundings. "I think we underestimate sometimes how many people would appreciate a little bit more quiet in their lives," said David Reid, marketing and communications manager at the Kootenay Co-op. Grocery stores across Canada are taking guidance from provincial Autism Societies, turning down lights and reducing noise to create a less stressful and overwhelming experience for adults and children with autism or other conditions that require low sensory environments.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 8:35 AM PST - 39 comments

What It’s Like to Live in a California Ghost Town -- To be an off-season caretaker of Bodie, California (winter population: 5), you need a high tolerance for cold, solitude, and two-hour grocery runs. (Citylab) // Braving 42 winters in Yellowstone -- Stephen Fuller revels in winter’s relative peace, and the balance it brings to Yellowstone’s hectic summer season. “I think solitude – or quietude – is an increasingly rare commodity.” (BBC) // Grunge has a collection of other solitary jobs around the world. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:14 AM PST - 10 comments

"And then suddenly the door to hell opens, and Garcin has an opportunity to leave... only, he doesn't." (YouTube link) Philosophy Tube himself, aka Oliver Thorn, created this stunning work of YouTube, in which he discusses Sartre, Descartes, Shakespeare, and himself. [more inside]
posted by Kybard at 5:56 AM PST - 20 comments

with Billy P, the Bilateral Amputee. [more inside]
posted by carter at 5:52 AM PST - 10 comments

We often hear words like “burden” and “strain” attached to conversations about refugees, but what if we replaced those words with “potential”, “opportunity” and “service”? [more inside]
posted by smoke at 4:14 AM PST - 21 comments

November 27, 1984, Dr. Merlin Tuttle shares bats on Late Night With David Letterman. This 10m15s clip features one of (for me) the most memorable soundbites/moments on Letterman back in the day. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:19 PM PST - 14 comments

The renowned Yiddish song collector and performer Ruth Rubin wrote in her notebooks “[The Yiddish folk saying] ‘Tsu zingen un tsu zogn’ [To sing and to say]…derives from the time when the Jewish ‘Spielmänner’ (the Jewish minstrels of the Middle Ages) would recite their bardic tales set to a chant. In the Yiddish vernacular, it has come to mean a person who has a lot to complain about.” 

In 1947, she began documenting traditional Yiddish singers primarily in New York City and Montreal. Switching to magnetic tape in the 1950s (which, in addition to improving  audio fidelity, did away with the time restrictions of recording to disc), Rubin eventually amassed a collection of over 2,500 Yiddish folk songs. The collection is now available through the Ruth Rubin Legacy online exhibition of the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of Sound Recordings at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:43 PM PST - 10 comments

"William Kurelek was an artist of extremes. As no Canadian artist before him or since, Kurelek attracted, through his at once sentimental and monstrous imagery, the attention of both popular audiences and seasoned critics."—Andrew Kear's William Kurelek: Life & Work is a wonderfully thorough exploration of an artist with many facets. Kurelek expressed his struggles with depression, schizophrenia, eye pain, and hospitalization in works like The Maze and I Spit on Life. He was devoted to Canadian subjects, often pastoral images of Ukrainian-Canadian culture, the prairies, and children (books like A Prairie Boy's Winter remain vivid to some of us). [more inside]
posted by sylvanshine at 7:53 PM PST - 10 comments

Before the advent of digital graphics, television and movie producers wanting high-tech animations had the option of using analog computers to process video signals. The characteristic look of 1970s and early 80s video graphics was primarily thanks to the Scanimate, a sophisticated analog computer which produced instantly-recognizable 3D animated text and colorful patterns. [more inside]
posted by biogeo at 7:12 PM PST - 22 comments

"Now, nobody can tell me when I’m done making up for lost time. Nobody can tell me how to spend my time. Nobody can tell me what I’m allowed to do inside my own skull." Taffy Brodesser-Akner on the opposite of mindfulness.
posted by Mchelly at 1:12 PM PST - 57 comments

What swimming taught me about happiness (SLNYT). “When I swim, I feel that I have all the time in the world, in part because much of what marks time — my everyday life — vanishes the moment I step in the water.” [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 12:35 PM PST - 15 comments

“My grandparents’ unconditional love became abruptly very conditional when my grandfather and I had the biggest fight he’d ever had with anyone, on the birth of his great-grandchildren, my twin daughters.

I nearly got disowned over my decision not to pass on the family name.” Essay by Nato Green.
posted by Kattullus at 12:31 PM PST - 72 comments

When you build a turbine engine at home without CNC, you can put it on a beautiful 1:16 scale Eastern Lockheed L-1011 TriStar model, or you can put it on your bike.
posted by clawsoon at 11:35 AM PST - 36 comments

"I have no friends so I like to take famous dance scenes from movies and put songs that are the same tempo on top of them" — a thread — featuring Love Actually vs Billie Eilish, Napoleon Dynamite vs Cher, The Breakfast Club vs Shakin' Stevens, Titanic vs Arctic Monkeys, Mean Girls vs That's So Raven, Mr. Bean vs Ariana Grande, Ferris Bueller's Day Off vs Boney M. and lots more!
posted by bitteschoen at 9:51 AM PST - 42 comments

Everyone's hiring practices are broken, and yours aren't any better. I’m sure lots of people have very passionate opinions about the right and wrong way to hire. Quite frankly, I’ve lost all interest in hearing about people’s opinions and anecdotal experiences. Until and unless someone does a rigorous scientific study evaluating different interviewing techniques, preferably using a double-blind randomized trial, there’s no point in beating this dead horse further. Everyone’s hiring practices are broken, and yours aren’t any better.
posted by aleph at 9:17 AM PST - 65 comments

Chaser the border collie dies at 15 Chaser was a border collie trained to recognize 1000+ nouns has died at 15. He was trained by a psychology professor, John W. Pilley. [more inside]
posted by kathrynm at 8:39 AM PST - 30 comments

The New York Public Library blog presents the literary tattoos of NYPL staff. Featuring Roald Dahl's Matilda, a photorealistic depiction of Franz Kafka, Patience (or possibly Fortitude) the lion, and more.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:55 AM PST - 10 comments

Thomas Game Docs looks at the music that inspired Koji Kondo to create some of the most memorable music for the super mario bros and zelda games. *Bonus* The Nintendo Special Big Band performance at the 2017 Nintendo Switch Experience
posted by Dreamghost at 2:27 AM PST - 7 comments

What a sensational day to transport industrial equipment. These fellas on the boat are looking to borrow their neighbor's excavator.
Many more reviews in the same Australian style.
Previously (by me? - Can't find the link).
posted by growabrain at 12:51 AM PST - 16 comments

Speaking to the British magazine Drugstore Culture, Koenig says, “It’s a nostalgia for shopping trips with your mom when you were just a little kid, with tinny Madonna playing in the background. But the unease arises when that background noise becomes the only sound around, and gets your full attention. It can make you feel like you’re somewhere you don’t belong, like you’re locked in after hours. Some people also say it makes them feel like they’re in the apocalypse.” THE TEENS WHO LISTEN TO ‘MALLWAVE’ ARE NOSTALGIC FOR AN EXPERIENCE THEY’VE NEVER HAD (Mel) Music For Dead Malls (Zadig The Jasp)
posted by The Whelk at 11:48 PM PST - 66 comments

Many cannabis users claim that edibles have a much stronger effect than inhaled weed, and there may be a pharmacological reason for it. Whatever the cause, there are many stories of edibles gone wrong.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:49 PM PST - 89 comments

From Bob Dylan to David Bowie to The Beatles, the legendary Beat writer’s influence reached beyond literature into music in surprising ways. [Longreads] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:16 PM PST - 13 comments

Senegalese musician Salliou playing the cas cas, Gorée Island, Dakar, Senegal. January 5th 2018. The instrument is made by connecting two small, bean-filled gourds with a string. Another video of Salliou, also filmed for the Music of Senegal documentary. (via) [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:13 PM PST - 7 comments

Because AI Said So - The Blue's own zittrain dons a sandwich board to warn us of the dangers of "intellectual debt": accepting answers proffered by "AI" (and often building upon them) without bothering to understand the principles, or lack thereof, upon which they're built – a veritable house of punch cards! [more inside]
posted by leppert at 6:51 PM PST - 18 comments

44 years ago, Spencer, Tracy and Kong were The Ghost Busters (intro), paranormal detectives. The show ran for 15 episodes (playlist), and reunited Forrest Tucker (Kong) and Larry Storch (Spencer) in roles similar to their characters in F Troop (season 1 intro) from a decade prior. Then, with the success of Ghostbusters in 1984, Filmation resurrected the original Ghostbusters (intro), where the tech-savvy gorilla Tracy was now joined by the sons of Spencer and Kong for 65 episodes (playlist) of fully animated fun (VHS cover) in 1986. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:56 PM PST - 28 comments

The Minnesota Twins have reached 200 home runs in just 103 games this season. The previous record was held by the 2005 Texas Rangers who took 122 games to reach 200.
posted by soelo at 2:02 PM PST - 25 comments

These food vendors make the most money at the Great Minnesota Get-Together
posted by Etrigan at 1:53 PM PST - 21 comments

Attention YouTube: The Clock is ticking! The Youtuber's Union (started by Jorge Sprave, previously) has combined with IG Metall (Europe's largest union) to demand fairness from Youtube. [more inside]
posted by 445supermag at 1:34 PM PST - 13 comments

• What Do You Call the Corner Store? [Atlas Obscura]

“Every city has something like this, the anchor tenant in many city-dweller’s mental maps of their neighborhood. But in many places, you’d be laughed out of the building for calling it a “convenience store”. It’s a bodega. It’s a packie. It’s a party store. What you call the store on the corner says a lot about where you live.”

[more inside]
posted by oulipian at 12:57 PM PST - 100 comments

A barely-detected asteroid just buzzed the Earth. First glimpsed by Brazil's SONEAR Observatory just before it arrived, 2019 OK (JPL, Wikipedia, The Sky Live) raced by "at a speed of nearly 55,000 miles (88,500 kilometers) per hour. The closest it came to Earth was just under 45,000 miles (72,500 km), a safe distance, but still much less than the distance between the Earth and Moon." [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 12:12 PM PST - 42 comments

Print impressions of Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave’, each one subtly different in colour and tone, can be found in collections around the world – which lets us compare museums and galleries' digitisation and copyright policies. Spoiler: The Library of Congress comes out top!
posted by adrianhon at 9:50 AM PST - 13 comments

Ip Man: How to Write Superman A video essay by Accented Cinema, a channel by Chinese-Canadian filmmaker, Yang Zhang, that 'spotlights films outside Hollywood". [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 8:01 AM PST - 13 comments

On Petite Noir, Beyoncé and What Artists Owe Each Other — an in-depth essay by Malaika Eyoh on the accusations that Beyoncé’s music video for "Spirit" is more than slightly inspired by "La Maison Noir", a 2018 video by South African artist Petite Noir. [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 6:00 AM PST - 4 comments

“Oh, god,” says one friend when I bring up Taco Tinder. Within a few minutes, she’s sent me a handful of screenshots from Hinge mentioning tacos that she’d swiped through at that very moment. Other friends — men and women, most of them straight — say tacos were mentioned in anywhere from a third to 80 percent of bios they see.

Why is everyone on Tinder so obsessed with tacos?
posted by Vesihiisi at 11:08 PM PST - 73 comments

Flying Squirrels? - Are Technica looks at the intense technological and technical flight skills required to provide the iconic travel-guide-style coverage of today's Tour de France. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:06 PM PST - 7 comments

Jump in the pool and step back to 1986 with poolside.fm 2.0, with your music and video clips now infused with classic Mac OS flavor. [more inside]
posted by zachlipton at 5:47 PM PST - 10 comments

Redesigning Women is the debut single from country music supergroup The Highwomen: Grammy winner Brandi Carlile, Americana star Amanda Shires, Grammy winner Maren Morris, and Grammy nominee Natalie Hemby. The video features the band and friends (a veritable who's who of female country stars, including Tanya Tucker, and Wynonna Judd) making a bonfire from the detritus of feminine stereotypes. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:14 PM PST - 16 comments

Beginning in 2012, operatives used a federal PAC to target small-dollar donors, claiming they’d use the money to oppose Barack Obama. But that’s not what happened.
posted by gryftir at 4:53 PM PST - 30 comments

Filmmakers with local heroes and digital technologies are disrupting Hollywood’s global advantage.
posted by Mrs Potato at 4:52 PM PST - 3 comments

Every Windows 3.1 theme. (SLimgur) [more inside]
posted by curious nu at 4:34 PM PST - 20 comments

Thirteen mystery writers discuss their favorite murders from their own works. Content advisory: Brief descriptions of deaths, ranging from amusing to icky to horrible. Also, spoilers galore. [more inside]
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 2:16 PM PST - 24 comments

Twenty-five years ago, Hollywood was enjoying a pipeline to success as clean and unobstructed as any. The paperback legal thrillers of author John Grisham featured in supermarkets across the nation, and starting with The Firm in 1993, were taking over movie theaters, too. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 1:09 PM PST - 32 comments

Helping Underprivileged Kids:

Dale Schroeder lived simply for his entire life. He grew up poor, never married or had kids, and worked as a carpenter at the same company for 67 years. He owned just two pair of jeans and drove a rusty old Chevrolet truck. Shortly before his death in 2005, Schroeder told his attorney, Steve Nielsen, that he wanted to use his savings to help poor students in Iowa go to college. "I said, 'How much are we talking about, Dale?'" Nielsen told KCCI. "And he said, 'Oh, just shy of $3 million.' I nearly fell out of my chair."

Helping Homeless People:

Make an appointment at Steller Hair Company and owner Katie Steller will offer you a seat in one of ten flame-red chairs. All are stationary. Her eleventh chair - the one she hauls to street corners in the back of her Nissan - is not. “If fear is contagious, why can’t kindness be?” the hair stylist asks.

posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:09 PM PST - 6 comments

Meet Balam.

Balam.
Loves .
Coffee.

He's not a big fan of Disney. He suffers for his art, his adoring public, the demands of fame, but relies on the love and support of his mom. You can learn more with #ConversationsWithBalam.

Just don't mention the sweater.
posted by endotoxin at 1:03 PM PST - 6 comments

Matthew Dear - "Bunny's Dream" // A delightfully psychedelic music video for Matthew Dear from NYC-based Sam Rolfes (previously)., where he controls the characters and camera all at once. [more inside]
posted by raihan_ at 12:29 PM PST - 4 comments

In 2011, a 19-year-old college student named Zach Wahls delivered an impassioned defense of marriage equality in front of the Iowa House of Representatives. Wahls's speech, which cited his experience growing up as the son of a lesbian couple, went viral and caught the eye of then-23-year-old Chloe Angyal, who wrote for the irreverent feminist blog Feministing. Her post about Wahls's video was entitled Marry Me, Zach Wahls. Wahls declined the proposal but agreed to meet for an interview the next time he was in New York, after which he and Angyal stayed in touch. This week, after a multi-year, largely-long-distance relationship, the couple announced their engagement. [more inside]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:25 PM PST - 13 comments

In 2016, philosopher Eleanor Gordon-Smith decided to stop and persuade the men who catcalled her on the streets of Sydney to reconsider their behavior. She had mixed success, making for a compelling radio segment on This American Life. Ultimately her experience led to her new book Stop Being Reasonable, a study of the limits of reasoning, how we often get it fundamentally wrong, and how some of us change our minds.
posted by cross_impact at 11:21 AM PST - 26 comments

JaboOody Dubs has been kicking around the internet for a while. Previously noted in metafilter comments for old-school bite-size Billy Mays, Anthony Sullivan, and other informercial dubs. There are dozens. But what do comedy dubbers and Youtube personalities with so much time on their hands do when they're not doing infomercials? Endless game playthroughs, MST3K-style B-movie riffs, and this delightful gem, a brutal 7-hour deconstruction of Super Seducer, which is "the world’s most realistic seduction simulator" by "renowned seduction guru Richard La Ruina", who gets his just desserts here. And then another 5 hours of Super Seducer 2. So if you like cathartically cringing for 12 hours at the cringiest PUA creep on earth, this is for you. NOT SAFE FOR WORK, children, non-fans of depressingly stupid manchild humor, or anyone really.
posted by saysthis at 10:21 AM PST - 2 comments

What happens when [chronic lyme disease] becomes an identity? This version of Lyme has no consistent symptoms, no fixed criteria, and no accurate test. This Lyme is a kind of identity. Lyme is a label for a state of being, a word that conveys your understanding of your lived experience. Lyme provides the language to articulate that experience and join with others who share it. In the world of chronic Lyme, doctors are trustworthy (or not) based on their willingness to treat Lyme. Tests are trustworthy (or not) based on their ability to confirm Lyme. Lyme is the fundamental fact, and you work backward from there. Lyme is a community with a cause: the recognition of its sufferers’ suffering — and, with it, the recognition of Lyme. [more inside]
posted by dismas at 9:32 AM PST - 55 comments

Two kids in suburban Minneapolis spotted a gigantic fish while tubing down the creek and decided to catch it with some rope. They succeeded, and there was much rejoicing. [more inside]
posted by Maarika at 9:03 AM PST - 34 comments

Public school students in South Dakota will notice something different on their first day back to school — the national motto, "In God We Trust," prominently inscribed on walls in stencil or paint. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:34 AM PST - 68 comments

Pioneering Scottish archaeologist Alexander Henry Rhind was born on this day in 1833. Often overlooked due to his early death aged 29, Rhind is best known due to the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, the most extensive mathematical document preserved from ancient Egypt. He was also the first to systematically excavate a broch, a type of Iron Age drystone hollow-walled structure unique to northern Scotland, publishing a detailed plan and the finds from Kettleburn. Suffering from tuberculosis, Rhind travelled to Egypt and his Thebes, Its Tombs and Their Tenants became the first publication of a systematically excavated and recorded ancient Egyptian tomb. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 8:20 AM PST - 2 comments

Take an $8800, NASA-approved interface glove (GECO) running on $250,000 worth of computer hardware, then replicate the performance in a consumer-grade toy with parts costing less than $26 (commercial). The twist? “We had about nine months to get it done,” Chris Gentile, one of the engineers behind Mattel’s fondly-remembered (clip from The Wizard) but ineffectual Power Glove (playing Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!), tells mental_floss. An Oral History of Nintendo's Power Glove (2017) Another video: the gaming historian spends a half hour to tell the story.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:58 AM PST - 16 comments

"The Muppet Movie is 40 now. And I could tell you that makes me feel old, but it doesn't. It oddly makes me feel just right. The music has been with me from when I was little until right now, and I can still listen to it and discover new things. How could you not?" Mefi's own Linda Holmes writes about the glories of The Muppet Movie and its music, 40 years on. [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 7:49 AM PST - 37 comments

Hey, do you want to see things spinning? Sometimes lots of things? Sometimes a few things? Sometimes in orbit! Look no further! Click things to make them bigger! Keep clicking to add them to your Spinventory and get a fresh set of Spinning Things! [more inside]
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:10 AM PST - 5 comments

Craft brew sales are up and major brew sales are down. PBR tries its hand at hard coffee to recapture some lost ground. Made with alcoholic malt beverage, PBR's hard coffee "kind of tastes like Starbucks' Frappuccino, honestly" and is being trialled in limited US markets to mixed reviews. "I could probably take it to work and no one would know!" says one taster.
posted by stillmoving at 12:54 AM PST - 62 comments

Fresh out of the vaults (sort of): New Prince Video: Holly Rock, the original Prince version of a song given to Sheila E. for the Krush Groove soundtrack album, which is in and of itself a pretty rare item. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:55 PM PST - 5 comments

“I’ve been to In-N-Out, just like millions of other people, and I don’t get it,” said John Hamburger, who runs Franchise Times, an industry publication.
posted by aloiv2 at 8:42 PM PST - 188 comments

Zia McCabe, keyboardist of the Dandy Warhols, is now also a Portland real estate agent.
posted by escabeche at 6:31 PM PST - 35 comments

In which Patrick (H) Willems attempts to re-evaluate Joel Schumacher's Batman films (slyt) Do the colorful and campy Schumacher takes on Batman deserve a fresh look after two decades of grimmer and darker superheros? Willems attempts to makes the case for them.
posted by octothorpe at 5:17 PM PST - 49 comments

I walked into the Shelby County Probate Court because I wanted to affirm myself in an official capacity, to become closer to who I was. What I didn’t expect was for my name changing process to be such a unique shared experience with everyone else in that room. Other than newlyweds, there is no celebrated milestone or cultural script that leads you to believe you will ever find yourself in a courthouse signing away a name you’ve carried around for a couple of decades or more. But here we all were. We all named ourselves, and demanded to be recognized. We bore witness to each other.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 4:38 PM PST - 18 comments

In the following list of 50 must-read fantasy books by women, you’ll find a range of sub-genres represented, from portal fantasy to epic fantasy and everything in between.
posted by curious nu at 4:08 PM PST - 80 comments

Comic Code is a monospaced font (suitable for programming) designed after a popular typeface that you may have heard of.
posted by schmod at 1:07 PM PST - 30 comments

That’s the mission that Elliot Advisors, the hedge fund that purchased B&N for $638 million in June, has handed to freshly appointed CEO James Daunt. A 55-year-old Englishman, Daunt has spent nearly three decades in the bookselling business. For most of that time, he was exclusively Team Indie, overseeing an idyllic, boutique book-buying experience as the founder of Daunt Books, which has six locations in well-heeled neighborhoods in London.
posted by Etrigan at 12:58 PM PST - 22 comments

How USDA distorted data to conceal decades of discrimination against black farmers: "Here, we present Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Stucki’s two-year investigation into the ways agricultural census data were distorted to depict a fictional renaissance in black farming. This false narrative inflated USDA’s record on civil rights and further hurt black farmers—the very people the department claimed it had made historic efforts to help." [CW: racist language.]
posted by jocelmeow at 12:47 PM PST - 5 comments

“But the most important stories that will gradually be yielded from these materials will concern the looting of public resources, which institutions across the West have continued to facilitate despite the incalculable damage that results to entire populations. In 2016 Bullough summarized the Yanukovych affair – and much else – as follows: “If it was difficult for a Brit to discover that a registered address at 29 Harley Street was meaningless, it was even harder for a Ukrainian… investigative journalists in Kiev could see that a piece of state-owned land in a forest outside the capital had been illegally privatised, but they did not know who by.” This London Firm Helps The Wealthy Hide Assets - Or Steal Them. Thankfully We Have 15 Years Of Their Client Communications
posted by The Whelk at 12:46 PM PST - 4 comments

The newcomers to Berlin were thrown under the weight of newfound political obligations to their countries of origin. Dislocating the Arab future from the grip of the political bankruptcy and moral morass in the Arab world might appear remote and relegated to the domain of quixotic dreams. But does it need to be that way? As communities are unsettled, resistances triggered, a chorus of voices fired up, waves of bodies set in motion for justice, and a range of emotions roused even when they no longer have an appetite, can the continued onslaught on reality not also reinvigorate political thought? [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 12:45 PM PST - 2 comments

On April 2, 2017 comics artist Branson Reese posted a 4-panel strip titled "The Person Who Discovered Sharks" to his Twitter feed. Several science-minded respondents immediately took to the replies to express their consternation at the strip's questionable description of shark skin as being "smooth" rather than rough—some of them quite vehemently and with receipts. The debate raged for days but the artist was tenacious and would not be swayed. And thanks to his courage and determination, it can now definitively be said that shark skin is indeed "smooth as hell."
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:44 PM PST - 57 comments

Woodstock '99 Was a Violent Disaster That Predicted America's Future The well-documented, pervasive misogyny of Woodstock '99 is more relevant to America in 2019 than the "free love" politics of its original iteration.
posted by josher71 at 12:17 PM PST - 25 comments

They said you could leave electric scooters anywhere — then the repo men struck back (SLVerge)
posted by snortasprocket at 11:07 AM PST - 143 comments

Bob Geldof's African fund, 8 Miles, which invests exclusively in African startups, began setting up subsidiaries in Mauritius, a tax haven in the Indian Ocean that is roughly 6,000 miles from London. 8 Miles, it seems, was trying to avoid taxes that would have otherwise gone to the African governments and people the company aimed to help. Investigative reporting at Quartz breaks the scandal based on the recent "Mauritius leaks" treasure trove of documents received by the ICIJ
posted by Mrs Potato at 11:06 AM PST - 18 comments

Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium have recorded all-time national temperature highs for the second day running and Paris has had its hottest day ever as the second dangerous heatwave of the summer sears western Europe. The extreme temperatures follow a similar heatwave last month that made it the hottest June on record. Scientists say the climate crisis is making summer heatwaves five times more likely and significantly more intense. [more inside]
posted by roolya_boolya at 9:48 AM PST - 94 comments

Rachel Browne of Global News writes on the rise of the Satanic Temple in Canada
posted by Shepherd at 8:28 AM PST - 23 comments

Why not escape, for a moment, from Britain's sweltering heat and febrile politics into a shed of one’s own? Perhaps a tiki bar, an artist’s studio, an allotment shed made entirely out of old pallets, or a mobile space agency – all from the 2019 Shed of the Year shortlist! [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 8:15 AM PST - 17 comments

Laina Morris, who became famous as the "Overly Attached Girlfriend" via a viral video in 2012, announced this week that she was departing YouTube . In an emotional announcement video, she spoke at length about depression, anxiety, and the problems that come with internet fame. Her video included clips from her private video journal, filmed over the past seven years, which documenting her mental health challenges, her search for help, and the pressure she felt to constantly perform for her online fans.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 7:56 AM PST - 11 comments

White woman claims she invented the hair bonnet, black Twitter tells her to go back to Wypipostan — the "NiteCap" created by Sarah Marantz Lindenberg costs nearly $100 (the company also sells scrunchies for $32) and is also available on Goop. [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 7:46 AM PST - 38 comments

The Downton Abbey theme (seen in the Downton Abbey intro), but played only on piano; but played on classical guitar; but played on twin harps; but it's the metal version (set to the show intro, with the longer version on Bandcamp); but it's Bill Bailey's Jamaican Dub Reggae version (with a bit on different sirens first, from Michael McIntyre's Easter Night at the Coliseum -- IMDb; BBC One; Daily Motion).
posted by filthy light thief at 7:46 AM PST - 3 comments

Horse pedicure on imgur, with many other interesting links from reddit. Horseshoeing on Youtube
posted by growabrain at 6:51 AM PST - 9 comments

ON A HOT APRIL MORNING in Shingle Springs, California, volunteers inside a gym at Ponderosa High School are painting teenagers with fake blood. Others hold battery-powered fans a few inches from their faces to mess up their hair. A man dressed as the Grim Reaper peruses a folding table laden with peanut butter pretzels, gummy bears, and doughnuts. Evan Chavez, an 18-year-old senior, and Ella Beezley, a 17-year-old junior, are waiting their turn at the makeup station. “I’m in the car with Alex—as the passenger—who’s the drunk driver,” explains Chavez. “And I get critically injured and helicoptered to the hospital.” ... “I’m the passenger in the other car, and I get hit and die,” says Beezley, who will have a large head wound applied above her wide hazel eyes. “I’m dead on the scene.” Andy Wright for Topic on whether the Every 15 Minutes program prevents teenage drunk driving. via Nicole Cliffe
posted by ChuraChura at 6:49 AM PST - 15 comments

The Pulp Librarian explains Letraset, the dry transfer kit that revolutionized graphic design by bringing a plethora of fonts to the masses. Ever wonder what happened to Letraset? You can still find letraset sheets on Esty.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:24 AM PST - 26 comments

The pale woman with frizzy grey-streaked hair commands her on-and-off partner of over 20 years, Jimmy – who is from one of the few white families in East Jackson – to fetch her purse. He plops it on to her lap; she struggles to get at an old piece of paper folded up in her wallet. She slowly unfolds it to present her birth certificate. “Negro”, it reads, next to each of her parents’ names. She looks up triumphantly, victory in her periwinkle eyes. “It’s a legal document,” she says. [SLGuardian]
posted by atlantica at 6:13 AM PST - 18 comments

The 101 people, ideas and things changing how we work today (via Kottke)
posted by Stark at 3:29 AM PST - 14 comments

How do you dress for a dance with death? If you were a 14th century Samurai, the pressure was on to go into battle with a kabuto (helmet) that subscribed to a fiercely maximalist vision. These incredible creations varied in form and detail depending on the owner and era, but they were always big, bedazzled, and meant business on the battlefield.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:56 PM PST - 23 comments

Let's try out the Apollo program's tool for defecating, shall we?
posted by Chrysostom at 8:21 PM PST - 35 comments

Yesterday, the new Overwatch hero, Sigma, went live on Blizzard's test servers. Fans soon found themselves "confused and horrified by Sigma’s bare feet," and questioned their presence in the hero's design. Today, an artist who worked on the design had a comment. [more inside]
posted by Caduceus at 1:10 PM PST - 46 comments

Dr. Charli Carpenter is spending her summer "vacation" visiting migrant concentration camps. Follow her blog posts (individual links below the fold) at Lawyers, Guns & Money, and her Twitter feed for more frequent updates. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 12:26 PM PST - 6 comments

The Ice Bucket Challenge, a grassroots effort that went viral, brought a sudden $115 million to the ALS Association. Five years later, it’s out to tell the public what it’s accomplished with all that money.
posted by Etrigan at 12:10 PM PST - 13 comments

The Man with the Golden Airline Ticket "My dad was one of the only people with a good-for-life, go-anywhere American Airlines pass. Then they took it away. This is the true story of having—and losing—a superpower." by Caroline Rothstein
posted by readinghippo at 10:59 AM PST - 52 comments

Rutger Hauer, star of Blade Runner, dies aged 75 [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 10:52 AM PST - 130 comments

New research shows that hunting, fishing, and foraging for traditional Native foods help nourish tribal members—but first they need access to their ancestral lands. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:16 AM PST - 4 comments

The family dog of Gideon Kidd, the 10-year-old Iowa boy behind the popular Twitter account I've Pet That Dog, has gotten his last pets. "Walter loved everything except baths and vegetables. He had the ability to swallow a cheeseburger in one gulp, while simultaneously spitting out the lettuce and tomato intact. He would do anything for bacon or ham." [more inside]
posted by drlith at 9:37 AM PST - 16 comments

If Capitalism is not sustainable and always trends towards monopolies or greater control of market share by a single entity, can we use late stage capitalism to explain why the recent Disney live action remakes are terrible? Sure, why not: LATE STAGE DISNEY by Renegade Cut ( 20:41)
posted by The Whelk at 8:43 AM PST - 32 comments

Two-Bit History praises how the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project and the legendary BBC Micro demystified computers by explaining the principles that computers rely on to function – in contrast to Codeacademy, where “after a course or two … you understand some flavors of gobbledygook, but to you a computer is just a magical machine that somehow turns gobbledygook into running software.” [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 8:12 AM PST - 25 comments

Avril Corroon has been collecting samples of mould from rental accommodation and using it as bacteria starter culture to make cheese. "The idea is to juxtapose precarious living standards with that of wealth, gentrification and thinking about where money is invested and where it is disinvested, and how often products are all made from a type of exploitation."
posted by Amberlyza at 8:02 AM PST - 22 comments

Jill Lepore, professor of American History at Harvard, wrote about Jane Franklin, and her mother. (In October, 2013, Lepore’s “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin” was published; it would become a National Book Award for Nonfiction finalist, and was ranked one of the best books of the year on rosters from The Boston Globe to NPR to The New York Times to Time magazine.) [more inside]
posted by Cozybee at 7:34 AM PST - 2 comments

I found Bigfoot ... maybe -- I spent a weekend with the Bigfoot Field Research Organization searching for the large primate. We didn’t find the elusive creature. Or did we? Matt Blitz writes for Popular Mechanics, documenting his experiences, and recapping the research efforts of others, to find Bigfoot in Ohio, home to Bigfoot enthusiasts (Cincinnati Refined), if not the sasquatches themselves. Ohio is "teeming" with sightings (Travel Channel), from amateurs and the Sasquatch Research Team at Bigfoot Ohio.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:27 AM PST - 27 comments

A love letter to Beth Ditto
posted by mippy at 7:08 AM PST - 4 comments

It started with an anonymous letter to the St Pancras coroner in North London. Wasn’t there something a little odd, the writer asked, about just how hastily Elizabeth Thomas had been buried? Elizabeth was only 27 years old when she died on October 28, 1808, and was buried next day at St Mary’s parish church in Islington. By November 1 – just three days after her death – a headstone was already erected on the grave, Elizabeth’s date of death carved firmly into its surface. “She had no fault, save what travellers give the moon,” the stone read. “Her light was lovely, but she died too soon.” [via mefi projects]
posted by ellieBOA at 5:07 AM PST - 12 comments

Yushi Li, a photography-focussed artist talks about two of her projects, My Tinder Boys and Your Reservation is Confirmed, which allow her to use her work “to explore sexual desire”. (NSFW) [more inside]
posted by greenhornet at 2:54 AM PST - 7 comments

On Friday July 5, Tunisian Prime Minister Youssef Chadad banned “access to administrations and public institutions to anyone with their face covered." The law affects Muslim women who choose to wear a face covering for religious reasons. What are some of the different types of head and facial coverings some Muslim women choose to wear? More at the BBC.
posted by Mrs Potato at 6:12 PM PST - 25 comments

Testosterone influences both emotions and decision-making, so what about it's influence on decisions made by people weighing moral issues? A team of researchers from the University of Austin found it doesn't seem to do much. (Ars Technica) [more inside]
posted by Outside Context Problem at 5:20 PM PST - 24 comments

A Japanese man has posted videos of himself feeding stray cats. Every day (almost). For eight years.
posted by korej at 5:09 PM PST - 19 comments

The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge: A Harvard Law professor who teaches a class on judgment wouldn’t seem like an obvious mark, would he? (SL:The Cut) [more inside]
posted by General Malaise at 4:50 PM PST - 71 comments

All Star but it's Old Town Road.
All Star but it's Take Me Home, Country Roads.
All Star but it's Space Oddity.
posted by cortex at 2:08 PM PST - 41 comments

On Wednesday, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller will testify before Congress about his Report On the Investigation Into Russian Interference In the 2016 Presidential Election (EPUB) (PDF vol. I, vol. II). U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler believes there is “substantial evidence” that President Donald Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors, and he plans to ask Mueller to present those facts at the hearing. After Mueller requested guidance, Trump's DOJ instructed him not to answer a wide variety of questions in a letter sent Monday. The DOJ also signaled they don’t intend to place lawyers in the room during his testimony, instead relying on Mueller to self-police his remarks, confident that he still wishes to let "the office’s written work speak for itself". [more inside]
posted by Doktor Zed at 12:00 PM PST - 496 comments

When the movie came out 15 years ago, she was Hollywood royalty. It’s been a long road back.
posted by Etrigan at 11:52 AM PST - 40 comments

Michelle Garcia, for Out Magazine, on Our August cover star, Caster Semenya: The Athlete in the Fight of Her Life. “There’s this long history of policing women’s bodies, trying to draw bright and clear lines, based on these normative ideas of what women’s bodies should look like and what sex traits they should have. They’re women because they’re being regulated. The fact that they’re regulating her is because she’s a woman. And then they’re trying to police even further in the category about what is appropriate for a woman’s body and performance.”
posted by ChuraChura at 11:39 AM PST - 18 comments

In response to his YouTube channel Innuendo Studios hitting 200k subscribers, YouTuber Ian Danskin has released a video of a number of deleted segments from several of his videos - some were cut for time, others because the idea just didn't gel. All are both amusing and insightful. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:24 AM PST - 2 comments

Peloton’s multi-billion dollar valuation has led to a flurry of social “connected fitness” trainers aiming at rowing, boxing, cardio, weight training and much more (The Verge). They’re all focused around the same thing: live and on-demand classes with leaderboards and virtual high-fives that give you the feeling of being in a bustling class, but while you’re home alone. Convenience and community – can you have it all? [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 7:56 AM PST - 63 comments

Instead of hoping for a motivated billionaire to hack the planet to stave off climate change (previously), we could combat climate change by cutting beef (and lamb) production (CNN, Nov. 2018). "Beef is widely recognized as the most climate-damaging of all foods" (CNN, Nov. 2015). 25% of the land in the United State used for grazing cattle, and pastures account for 71.6% of land use after deforestation in South America (Mongabay News, May 2016). "Across the globe, beef consumption is seeing rapid growth, fed by cheap imports and served by an industrialized agricultural global trade model that's been linked to a host of environmental impacts, climate change chief among them" (Pacific Standard Magazine, Oct. 2017).
posted by filthy light thief at 7:21 AM PST - 54 comments

"Microsoft is shutting down its e-books service, and all the DRM books people bought from them will thus vanish into thin air. Microsoft will provide refunds to those affected, but that isn’t remotely the point. The point is that all their users’ books are to be shut off with a single poof! on Microsoft’s say-so. That is a button that nobody, no corporation and no government agency, should be ever permitted to have."
posted by BekahVee at 6:07 AM PST - 81 comments

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was born on 19 June 1964 in New York and is still known by his family as Al.. He will very shortly become the 16th Prime MInister of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II and the 77th overall, having been chosen over contender Jeremy Hunt by 92,153 of the 159,320 membership of the Tory Party as their leader. [more inside]
posted by Devonian at 4:06 AM PST - 408 comments

¡Me Llamo Alma! is a series of practical Spanish lessons, beginning with How To Dispose Of A Body. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:09 PM PST - 24 comments

"Women’s time has been interrupted and fragmented throughout history, the rhythms of their days circumscribed by the sisyphean tasks of housework, childcare and kin work – keeping family and community ties strong. If what it takes to create are long stretches of uninterrupted, concentrated time, time you can choose to do with as you will, time that you can control, that’s something women have never had the luxury to expect"
posted by Lycaste at 7:24 PM PST - 49 comments

Go get your kleenex and take your first look at Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers, in the first full trailer for A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood. [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:14 PM PST - 78 comments

Please take a moment to pay respects to the patriarch of New Orleans's first family of funk, Poppa Funk, Art Neville, who passed away today. [more inside]
posted by fingers_of_fire at 4:17 PM PST - 32 comments

"It’s the story of a half-black, half-Jewish heroine’s search for her father; a postmodern dismantling of the Greek myth of Theseus; a send-up of American myths of racial purity and authenticity; a tall tale featuring a teenage heroine who one-ups Pam Grier in badassery, Albert Einstein in brilliance, and Cary Grant in nonchalance; and an exuberant and acrobatic experiment with language itself." --Scott Saul on Oreo by Fran Ross, in a wide-ranging essay on the author. [LARB] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:42 PM PST - 6 comments

Reddit thread: I’m cooking one meal from every state in the USA, what meal best represents your state?
posted by growabrain at 2:41 PM PST - 112 comments

Yesterday the New York Times published a fascinating article on the “peculiarly Dutch summer rite” of "dropping", ie. driving your kids to the woods at night and leaving them alone to find their way back home, a "beloved scouting tradition". But the best part is reading the responses on Twitter... [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 1:44 PM PST - 48 comments

Printed borders inside books predate moveable type, and briefly flourished alongside it. This is a short and sweet article about metalcut borders, a technology that was invented to be robust enough to use (and reuse, and reuse, and reuse) as part of a moveable-type setup. [more inside]
posted by janell at 1:09 PM PST - 4 comments

Radical, author and humorist Paul Krassner dead at 87 [more inside]
posted by Ideefixe at 12:56 PM PST - 30 comments

Access this episode on Lawfare’s blog page and also wherever you receive podcasts. 1st podcast episode of an in-depth explanation of the Mueller Report. More to come weekly.
posted by surely at 12:04 PM PST - 1 comment

Jane Mayer, one of the leading scribes of the #MeToo movement (despite not getting her share of the credit), turns her attention to the scandal and resignation of Al Franken with "A close look at the accusations against the former senator".
posted by Etrigan at 11:48 AM PST - 108 comments

The West’s understanding of globalization and interdependence is increasingly outdated. It imagines a global system in which Western countries radiate their influence all over the world but influence is never reflected back at them. Yet the rebalance of economic and political power has made that idea obsolete. And the phenomenon of populism in Europe and the United States is showing why.
posted by Mrs Potato at 9:39 AM PST - 20 comments

Shit’s Totally Fucked: A Mutual Aid Explainer (7:45) How to help in the current crisis beyond voting or calling your representatives via community bail funds, immigration support networks, labor donation, and more.
posted by The Whelk at 9:08 AM PST - 15 comments

The Last Days of the Appalachian Poverty Tour: When I first meet Jack, he tells me he stopped giving poverty tours years ago and has generally stopped talking to the media about them. He says that if we take this tour together, he won’t stop at anyone’s home; he doesn’t want to expose anyone like that again. He tells me he’s agreeing to do this one last tour only because of who I am: a single, disabled mother with my own lived experiences of poverty. For Topic magazine, writer Alison Stine gives a history of the Appalachian poverty tour.
posted by Stacey at 8:34 AM PST - 13 comments

China forced one horror game publisher to close, but the whole region felt it (Rock Paper Shotgun). Devotion, a highly-rated Taiwanese horror game launched in February was discovered to contain off-handed derisive references to China’s President, Xi Jinping. A firestorm of criticism ensued, and its effects are still smouldering...
posted by adrianhon at 7:47 AM PST - 4 comments

According to [José Manuel Castro López], stone and its properties are often mythologized in Galician culture. Inspired by this, he finds that his work is more impacted by magic than technique: “It is not the sculptor who acts, but the wizard, the druid,” he tells The Creators Project, “My relationship with the stone is not physical, but magical. It recognizes me, it obeys me…we understand each other. My stones are not lifeless. They manifest themselves.” (Vice) Stones Carved to Appear Like Wrinkled Fabrics by José Manuel Castro López (This Is Colossal). See also: Imgur gallery.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:13 AM PST - 8 comments

... slouches towards Westminster to be born? Well, probably Boris Johnson. He'll find plenty on his plate when he arrives, so let's have a new Brexit thread up and running in time to greet him. [more inside]
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 6:04 AM PST - 94 comments

"Surely, I will cancel this trip, I thought, as I shopped for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee. Surely, a person who calls off a wedding is meant to be sitting sadly at home, reflecting on the enormity of what has transpired and not doing whatever it is I am about to be doing that requires a pair of plastic clogs with drainage holes."
posted by Catseye at 4:23 AM PST - 72 comments

Scuba Shooters is a community of underwater photographers who take awesome photos.
posted by Little Dawn at 8:55 PM PST - 5 comments

What’s remarkable about vertical drama is that it’s not just any scripted content cropped for a vertical aspect ratio. These shows are specifically imagined for the mobile screen from the ground up. [more inside]
posted by monospace at 8:51 PM PST - 24 comments

Twitter user @jazz_inmypants says

everyone please share your favorite not-english word or phrase. here’s one i just learned.

“Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy"

Language: Polish

English Equivalent: “not my problem”

Literal: “not my circus, not my monkey”

posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:22 PM PST - 100 comments

Ringed by riot police, around 1,000 pride marchers walked defiantly through the streets of the northeastern city of Bialystok as thousands of nationalist football "ultra" fans, far-right groups and others threw flash bombs, rocks and glass bottles. [It's the faces of the marchers in the top photo... determination and joy and so young...]
posted by hippybear at 7:26 PM PST - 17 comments

My mother won a ticket to the Moon. In 1969 Mrs Anna Dabbs won a ticket for a flight to the Moon. She never got to go. Her son, journalist Alastair Dabbs, conducts a hard-hitting investigation in which he names names. Reputations are ruined. History is set straight. (SLRegister)
posted by thatwhichfalls at 5:07 PM PST - 5 comments

Tor.com runs a column in which writers talk about non-writing things (and, sometimes, how they relate to writing). How to do karate in a victorian dress, for example. Or how about a firefighter's guides to fighting dragons and phoenixes. [more inside]
posted by Cozybee at 10:28 AM PST - 4 comments

"To all the non-tennis-playing men who think they can win a point against Serena Williams, watch this..." (full video here)
posted by bitteschoen at 9:03 AM PST - 127 comments

“Communities most affected by both crime and incarceration are overpoliced and underprotected. In 2018, the NYPD made 808 arrests for rape, but over 5,000 arrests for fare evasion. To remedy this, the city should facilitate community oversight of police and prosecutors, and significantly expand the scope and funding of its participatory budgeting program with a focus on communities that experience the most crime. “ Incarceration Is Always A Policy Failure
posted by The Whelk at 8:51 AM PST - 22 comments

“It became such a mess that the government as a whole just said f---ing bury this,” says Paul Craine, who was a DEA agent in Bogotá in the late ’90s. “If we try to unravel this, we’re going to have to prosecute FBI agents, DEA agents, prosecutors. It was so crazy, where do you even start?” ... “Without being presumptuous, I think I am one of the top money launderers who ever worked for the government,” Vega says. “But I have something that is called integrity.”
posted by chappell, ambrose at 7:02 AM PST - 10 comments

Now that Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has wrapped up with Spider-Man: Far From Home, the first half of its Phase 4 films and TV shows was unveiled at SDCC 2019, including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings with Simu Liu as Shang-Chi and the HK legend Tony Leung as The Mandarin; Natalie Portman picking up the big hammer in Thor: Love and Thunder; Mahershala Ali becoming Blade; Wanda joining Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and so much more. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 6:54 AM PST - 71 comments

After two decades of research and development, WA 38 lands this fall. It could disrupt an entire industry. It's an apple. [more inside]
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 12:15 AM PST - 47 comments

“I find myself reflecting on other women depicted as monstrous for their hunger; Pandora and her box, Snow White and her apple. The appearance of lacking desire goes beyond the bounds of etiquette or being ‘ladylike’ and instead crosses into the realm of a moral imperative. Which is to say, a just, good, decent woman is a woman who is free of any type of hunger, be it physical hunger for food, hunger as desire, or hunger as ambition. Conversely, a woman sickened with sin is one who is riddled with said hungers, reduced to a gaping mouth never satisfied.” Nina Li Coomes on faith and desire. CW: contains descriptions of disordered eating
posted by Grandysaur at 11:21 PM PST - 7 comments

"What's in a name? An analysis of American baby naming trends from 1918 to 2018", by Jay Lewis, is a series of interactive info-graphics on everything: [more inside]
posted by sylvanshine at 9:25 PM PST - 46 comments

After years of erasure and dehumanization, Indigenous youth will finally have something for themselves in Molly of Denali, the first nationally distributed children's show to feature an Alaska indigenous person as the main character and protagonist (US PBS show website, Canadian CBC show website). [more inside]
posted by inflatablekiwi at 8:18 PM PST - 16 comments

Whether boxed or from scratch, traditional or modern, mac and cheese is a renowned American comfort food. [more inside]
posted by hilaryjade at 7:29 PM PST - 48 comments

Trying to hide out from the heat wave? Here's a little project -- the "Escape From The Haunted Mansion" Board Game. It's a paper craft project which is a 3D Haunted Mansion that is also a board game. So you can build it, and then you play it! Multiple pages of PDF files get printed, cut, glued, and then admired while you try to escape! [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:09 PM PST - 7 comments

Greig Johnson (previously) offers a beginner's guide to playing the ancient, elegant instrument known as the shenanigan. More of his work can be found on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:53 PM PST - 8 comments

Star Trek: Picard The full trailer for the new Star Trek: Picard series has been released. [alternate US-accessible link] [more inside]
posted by crossoverman at 3:07 PM PST - 157 comments

The mayor of Idyllwild, California, was born into public service. He took office at just 11 weeks old and spends nearly every day engaging with his constituents and spreading his hopes for world peace. He does it largely in the nude, though he wears a tie and an array of hats. Mayor Maximus Mighty-Dog Mueller II, age six, is a golden retriever on a mission: “In his heart, he would like to see peace on Earth in his lifetime.” [more inside]
posted by roger ackroyd at 2:09 PM PST - 17 comments

He did the monster mash, he explained why bird is the word, and now…
Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads. Fish heads, heads heads, eat them up, yum!
David Buck returns to Tedium to write about Barnes & Barnes’ classic weirdo tune: “Eat Them Up, Yum!”
Tired of reading? Perhaps you’d like to watch the band’s semi-autobiographical / music video collection VHS tape: “”Zabagabee: The Best of Barnes & Barnes”
posted by Going To Maine at 2:00 PM PST - 14 comments

Three artists and a pair of curators came together at The New York Times to attempt to make a list of the era’s essential artworks.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 11:13 AM PST - 25 comments

Patriotic Singing Group Responds to Trump’s “Go Back to Your Country” Amber Ruffin (of "Amber Says What", more on that inside) and the Go Back to Your Country Girls perform their hit song about people telling them to go back to their country despite them all being American citizens. From Late Night with Seth Meyers. [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 10:07 AM PST - 19 comments

In the race to make the continent teched-up, there are numerous cautionary tales that the continent needs to learn from. Otherwise we run the risk of repeating them and the cost of doing so is too high. To that effect, this piece outlines three major lessons that those involved in designing, implementing, importing, regulating, and communicating technology need to be aware of.
posted by Mrs Potato at 9:37 AM PST - 6 comments

“The idea is to stress the samples from both healthy and ill patients using salt, and then compare how each sample affects the flow of the electrical current. Changes in the current indicate changes in the cell: the bigger the change in current, the bigger the change on a cellular level. A big change is not a good thing; it’s a sign that the cells and plasma are flailing under stress and incapable of processing it properly. All of the blood samples from ME/CFS [myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome] patients created a clear spike in the test, whereas those from healthy controls returned data that was on a relatively even keel.” [more inside]
posted by jocelmeow at 7:19 AM PST - 12 comments

Emily Short thinks about games made for specific recipients or small groups of friends. “Many of my favorite games to write have been written for specific people … The first computer game I ever completed, I wrote for my little brother because he was bored with math. It was a dungeon where the monsters asked you arithmetic questions as a form of combat. Astonishingly he liked it, which shows you something about the power of personalization. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 6:42 AM PST - 13 comments

The Life Scientific is a BBC radio program where Professor Jim Al-Khalili talks to leading scientists about their life and work, finding out what inspires and motivates them and asking what their discoveries might do for us in the future. [more inside]
posted by poxandplague at 1:55 AM PST - 2 comments

Teen Girl Activists Take On Skeptical Boys and Annoying Buzzwords -- NPR interviewed ten young activists at the Girl Up 2019 Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., this week. Girl Up (official YouTube videos) is a campaign founded by the U.N. foundation that promotes activism for 13- to 22-year-olds to work for the health, safety and education of girls.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:40 PM PST - 3 comments

"Tag cleaners , as they call themselves, drown out gore, harassment, and more by flooding a user’s tagged photos with pleasant images. It’s benevolent spam. The most prolific accounts are usually reposting the same images ad nauseam in quick bursts." [more inside]
posted by Little Dawn at 9:39 PM PST - 7 comments

"Invisible" Sound Design in Breath of the Wild (slyt) [more inside]
posted by Caduceus at 6:15 PM PST - 10 comments

His Dark Materials, Extended Trailer. The BBC and HBO released a glimpse of their adaptation of Philip Pullman's fantasy series, apparently due out later this year. The cast includes Hamilton's Lin-Manuel Miranda as the Texan aeronaut. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 5:18 PM PST - 52 comments

We all know about the ability of electric eels to stun their prey with a powerful shock. But how did the eels evolve this power? It didn't start as a weapon: the electric eel's knifefish ancestors, like its modern cousins, used weak electric pulses to talk to one another just as we use weak pulses of pressure to create sounds. (They're not unique, either--six lineages of fish have evolved this ability.) But electric fish like the knifefish aren't the only ones listening under the water: there are plenty of electroceptive predators paying attention, too. In a story that starkly resembles the pressures on acoustic communication, electric fish have to modify their signals to avoid being overheard. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 4:59 PM PST - 18 comments

How to Make Preserved Lemons in the Workshop
posted by clawsoon at 2:45 PM PST - 51 comments

When, through the nighttime murk of the Amazon River, an electric eel locates a feeder fish, what happens next is instantaneous: A jolt of electricity surges through the fish’s nerves. Its muscles contract simultaneously, and it is transformed into a living, floating statue. This is roughly the same reaction that women born between Labor Day 1985 and New Year’s Eve 1991, approximately, exhibit when exposed to the opening seconds of the Spice Girls’ debut single “Wannabe.” Pharmacists, statisticians, probation workers, bank tellers, event planners, bartenders, psychologists, paralegals, market research analysts, junior members of Congress, phlebotomists, journalists — in the void between the salutatory “Yooo!” and the song’s first plonked-out musical note, all of these become temporarily incapacitated, frozen between heartbeats with lightning in their blood. Caity Weaver writes for the NY Times Style Section on the Spice Girls Generation
posted by ChuraChura at 2:22 PM PST - 28 comments

"Let's talk about peeing in space." Lots of fun facts in this Twitter thread by writer Mary Robinette Kowal, debunking the idea — put forth by some readers in response to her essay in the NYT on women astronauts — "that women couldn't go into space because we lacked the technology for them to pee in space" and explaining in detail how "we didn't have the technology for men to pee in space when they started either." (Also: extra fun facts on pooping, and farting, and belching, and periods in space.)
posted by bitteschoen at 1:14 PM PST - 27 comments

Tituss Burgess (of Kimmy Schmidt and Pinot Noir fame) has released a video for his song 45. (Video. Lyrics.) The video features actor Daniel J. Watts, an empty mansion, Tituss in a straight jacket, and some weird eye makeup. [more inside]
posted by kinsey at 12:56 PM PST - 6 comments

The story of how The Sims (EA, 2000) ended up facililtating gay relationships - despite an earlier decision by the developers not to allow it. Also how an unscripted same sex kiss between background characters led to The Sims becoming the talk of E3 in 1999. (SLNew Yorker)
posted by gemmy at 12:27 PM PST - 7 comments

The Spanish-Basque rock band Hesian's cover of Alaitz & Maider's song "Amets bat" ("A Dream"). The video includes a clip of Alaitz and Maider singing verse four of the song starting about 1:40. (previously) [more inside]
posted by nangar at 11:38 AM PST - 2 comments

Mourning The Impending Death Of The Communal Random Movie On Cable [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 11:26 AM PST - 82 comments

The surprisingly engrossing history of How The Milwaukee Bucks And A Former Wedding DJ Won The T-Shirt Cannon Arms Race.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:11 AM PST - 4 comments

All 555 Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas simultaneously.
posted by kenko at 11:04 AM PST - 30 comments

"This essay argues that socialists can effectively shape political debate in alliance with social democrats. I will limit my arguments, for the most part, to the rhetorical level, while recognizing there are larger questions about the relationship between socialists and social democrats that are essential to discuss. The battle over rhetorical space within key alliances is nonetheless central to winning political contests, which is why I focus on it here." Shifting Alliances: Socialists, Social Democrats, and the New U.S. Left
posted by The Whelk at 11:02 AM PST - 11 comments

The award-winners and top 100 entries from the Audubon Society's annual Photography Awards. That is all.
posted by drlith at 10:58 AM PST - 11 comments

University of Bonn research assistant Erik Wade informs us of a hitherto little-known clade:

Thread: everyone knows that medieval art is filled with snails fighting knights, but there's actually a whole medieval snail ecology and society, from snail-birds to snail-monks. And, ofc, snail-cats.

Twitter | Threadreader
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:44 AM PST - 14 comments

The monster in this case is not one person, it was created when lots of people, even with great intentions, publicly disagreed with you at the same time. Even kind feedback can come off as caustic and mean when there is a mob of people behind it. No matter how nicely they say it, when a large group of people you really respect publicly challenge something you’ve done it can feel like a personal attack. 1600 words from Sara Chipps at Stack Overflow.
posted by cgc373 at 10:41 AM PST - 29 comments

Former college and professional football quarterback Jared Lorenzen has passed away at the age of 38. Known as "The Pillsbury Throwboy" and "The Battleship Lorenzen" for his size as a quarterback, his most notable contribution to pop culture was serving as the inspiration for CLARENCE BEEFTANK in Jon Bois' Breaking Madden series. Unsurprisingly, Bois has written a touching eulogy for Lorenzen and the feats he was capable of on the field.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:20 AM PST - 11 comments

The story of the invention of the black box flight recorder with subterfuge and ridicule. And stubbornness and humour.
posted by plonkee at 9:54 AM PST - 2 comments

There are fascinators, and then there are fascinators. Maor Zabar makes hats that really stand out, from sea creatures to bugs to fast food. He also has a shop on Etsy - but the prices are high.
posted by Mchelly at 9:51 AM PST - 8 comments

Otamere Guobadia writes for Dazed about sexual fluidity, in his own life and in our expectations of celebrities who come out (or don't). "Man” and “woman” as described in our sexual orientations are not only necessarily imperfect characterisations, but they are flexible and porous categories; in our lifetimes and indeed in our everyday, our desires weave many times in and out of them. I have desired bodies that both uphold these categories, and bodies that fail them entirely, and everybody in between. I have had men wolf whistle at my skinny jean-clad legs as I walked down the stairs of a double decker bus, only for their leering to turn to agitation and anger when the rest of my torso came into view. Desire is a silly and changeable thing. [more inside]
posted by Stacey at 9:29 AM PST - 8 comments

Hollis B.Worth, (née Anne Hollister Bulleit) is known to thousands in the spirits industry as the “First Lady of Bourbon” and as the face of the Bulleit brand that is named after her family. [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 9:16 AM PST - 18 comments

In the 1980s, One of the World's Cellphone Hot Spots Was ... Zaire Now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC
posted by Mrs Potato at 9:01 AM PST - 4 comments

This epposide of my favorite WFMU show is a three-hour fever dream.
posted by thursdaystoo at 8:57 AM PST - 7 comments

An Ode to ‘On the Beach,’ Neil Young’s Most Beautiful (and Most Depressing) Album Forty-five years after its release, Young's melancholic search for meaning in a chaotic world feels more relatable than ever. [more inside]
posted by porn in the woods at 8:33 AM PST - 27 comments

UK based-brothers JP and Mike Andrews began taking aerial photographs of the Earth after a year-long trip experiencing the incredible landscapes found in the Australian Outback. Using a drone, the pair have continued to capture natural and manmade scenes across the world, stumbling upon unique patterns that can only be discerned from above. (Instagram feed)
posted by bondcliff at 6:54 AM PST - 8 comments

The Digital Antiquarian on the overreach of the company behind King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, and Outpost. From the execrable “love theme” song Girl in the Tower that debuted with King’s Quest VI to misadventures on the Sega Genesis CD, Sierra’s fall was years in the making…
posted by adrianhon at 6:04 AM PST - 19 comments

In Ísafjörður, the capital of Iceland’s remote Westfjords region, a Lutheran pastor compared eiderdown to cocaine. “I sometimes think that we are like the coca farmers in Colombia,” he said. “We [the down harvesters] get a fraction of the price when the product hits the streets of Tokyo. This is the finest down in the world and we are exporting it in black garbage bags.”

–The Weird Magic of Eiderdown by Edward Posnett, adapted from his book Strange Harvest. Bonus video: Motherless Eider ducklings playing with human children.
posted by Kattullus at 4:54 AM PST - 14 comments

Australia's friendliest dog reunited with owner after 5 days lost in the desert. [more inside]
posted by freethefeet at 3:42 AM PST - 5 comments

"Let's talk about the point after WW2 where the Knights Hospitaller, of medieval crusading fame, 'accidentally' became a major European air power." A twitter thread by John Bull.
posted by um at 12:03 AM PST - 20 comments

Nathan Gelgud honors Dame Iris Murdoch, born 100 years ago this week, with a graphic appreciation of his “favorite writer” in the NYRB. Elsewhere online: “Iris Murdoch at 100” in The Guardian, “On the Centennial of Iris Murdoch’s Birth, Remembering a 20th-Century Giant,” in The New York Times, and “The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch,” in the Jesuit review America. [more inside]
posted by LeLiLo at 10:48 PM PST - 5 comments

Achieving that photoreal look, the thing that trompes your oeils into thinking you might be watching a nature documentary, wasn’t simply a matter of employing space-age visual effects. Favreau and his crew shot The Lion King as one would any conventional movie: with dollies, cranes, and other tools that let cinematographer Caleb Deschanel get just the right angles. There were even lights and cameras. It’s just that the cameras and lights were nowhere to be found. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:23 PM PST - 52 comments

Children have been crushed and killed by home elevators for decades. Regulators could reduce the danger but haven’t.
posted by ContinuousWave at 9:09 PM PST - 10 comments

Wild stevia grows in remote northeastern highlands along the border of Paraguay and Brazil. While not exactly unpleasant, the plant’s aroma is often referred to as “goat’s scent” by indigenous populations. The pungency does not suggest sweetness. “Western scientists did not ‘discover’ the usefulness of this plant—they were introduced to it by the Guaraní.” [...] Without the help of the Guaraní, there would be no stevia industry. But the plant is now critically endangered in the wild. [The] Guarani hope a lawsuit will help them save stevia’s native habitat and rescue the wild plant from extinction. The Indigenous Tribes Fighting to Reclaim Stevia From Coca-Cola (Atlas Obscura long read) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:15 PM PST - 3 comments

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot "The stoner icons who first hit the screen 25 years ago in CLERKS are back! When Jay and Silent Bob discover that Hollywood is rebooting an old movie based on them, the clueless duo embark on another cross-country mission to stop it all over again!"
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 5:57 PM PST - 90 comments

With the recent arrival of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" to Netflix, the internet was again seized by one of the most squabbled-over animes of all time. But if there is anything about NGE that the internet can agree on, it's that the opening theme song and video, "A Cruel Angel's Thesis", totally kicks ass. Its hyper-paced and heavily-layered editing is at once prototypical AMV eye-candy, while also being a solid narrative deconstruction of a show you'll never really understand. As with other anime fan edits, it quickly became popular to re-cut other anime in the same style. But it was its discursive potential, mixed with the totally over-the-top tunes, that made the "Cruel Angel's Edit" such a powerful meme outside of anime, and has inspired a series of truly high-effort good-posts over the years re-rendering all aspects of culture. Here are some of the internet's best, and below the fold some honorable mentions: Arthur | King of the Hill | Diner's, Drive-ins, and Dives | Regular Show (original) | Super Mario 64 | Marianne Williamson | Drake and Josh | Hey Arnold! | Steam Summer Sale | The Legend of Zelda | Windows 98 | 2018 World Cup [more inside]
posted by grillcover at 5:31 PM PST - 41 comments

Fernando Lemos, a naturalised Brazilian Painter, started experimenting with photography in 1949 making a series of Surrealism inspired photographs.
“The information from abroad that reached us was very poor, hardly any. On Man Ray, I don’t think he knew anything about him. However, he also had that genius, he knew how to manipulate reality and objective data without obeying its rules and conventions".
An interview, an article and a gallery.
( ART - some images NSFW).
posted by adamvasco at 5:17 PM PST - 2 comments

Annette Choi at FiveThirtyEight charted where 906 foul balls landed. She's clearly mapped out the most dangerous places to sit.
posted by meech at 4:54 PM PST - 16 comments

The Ringer staff has ranked the 40 "best" Disney songs. Needless to say, the list is wrong, but at least they had the decency to put all the songs on one page, so you don't have to click through. They also made a video in which they discussed some of the contenders, including some songs that didn't make the list. [more inside]
posted by Huffy Puffy at 4:07 PM PST - 41 comments

“ MEEEEEEEEEEEEMORY! .. ..” It’s a trailer, for the Live Action Movie version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Musical about Cats. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 3:14 PM PST - 251 comments

The uncle was able to speak fluent English, and pointed out that he couldn’t swim because of his wheelchair. “So what?” replied the muscular gentleman, causing his friend to repeat “It’s Waikiki, ain’t it?”
posted by robcorr at 2:49 PM PST - 20 comments

The magic, irsascible, and deeply conflicted father of modern comics is calling it a day. His work was groundbreaking, dense, mystical, playful, and occasionally, uh, earthy. [more inside]
posted by lumpenprole at 1:24 PM PST - 59 comments

One Lord substituted for another. Edward Millar and John Semley consider The Wicker Man (1973; previously) and folk horror (previously) in light of anti-Enlightenment culture and reactionary movements. (SLBaffler)
posted by doctornemo at 1:11 PM PST - 12 comments

We want to end the taboo: how the US Womens National Soccer Team (USWNT)) used science to overcome period-related performance deficits during the World Cup.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:36 PM PST - 15 comments

Ralph Lazo (November 3, 1924 – January 1, 1992) was the only known non-spouse, non-Japanese American who voluntarily relocated to a World War II Japanese American internment camp. (Wikipedia)
posted by Chrysostom at 12:31 PM PST - 7 comments

Thirtythree dead and thirtysix injured in an arson attack on anime studio Kyoto Animation this Thursday morning. Confirmed as the worst post-war massacre in Japan, the news hit anime fans hard, with #PrayForKyoani trended worldwide on Twitter. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 12:09 PM PST - 61 comments

IT Chapter Two [YouTube Trailer] Stephen King's tale of childhood, growth, and evil clown that haunt your dreams comes to a conclusion in part two of the remake of his horror novel IT. Previously and Previously-er. [more inside]
posted by RolandOfEld at 11:33 AM PST - 14 comments

As the genre continues to dominate, some programmers from the “easy listening” format are contemplating how to put rap into rotation.
posted by Etrigan at 11:02 AM PST - 26 comments

ELLE magazine profiles "revenge porn lawyer" Carrie Goldberg ahead of her new book, Nobody’s Victim, in which she expands on the story of how she became the kind of attorney she had needed when she was younger, reveals some of the darker moments of her life, and weaves together stories of her major cases — like suing the dating app Grindr, and representing accusers of Harvey Weinstein — with her analysis of how the law interacts with harassment, porn, power, and privacy. [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 10:59 AM PST - 6 comments

The blistering sight of a chicken in a tutu. Chickens in tutus. More chickens in tutus. #chickentutu
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 10:05 AM PST - 20 comments

“Everybody I talked to at my McDonald’s — along with the many other fast-food workers I interviewed — had had food items thrown at them.“ (Vox) “My body is grudgingly adjusting to the job, but my brain isn’t. I’ve started dreading the monotony even more than the pain. There is literally nothing to do out in the mod but pick. ” (Lit hub) Excerpts from On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger. “The app, in its eagerness to appear streamlined and just-in-time, had simply excised the relevant human party in this exchange. Hence the satisfied customer could fantasize that his food had materialized thanks to the digital interface, as though some all-seeing robot was supervising the human workers as they put together his organic rice bowl.” The Automation Charade: The rise of the robots has been greatly exaggerated. Whose interests does that serve?
posted by The Whelk at 9:34 AM PST - 30 comments

Climaginaries is a three-year research project exploring innovative and creative ways of envisioning what a post-fossil world might look like, and the means through which it can transpire. Through different techniques of imagination, from modeling and scenario techniques to experimentations, visions of societal transformation and cultural representations (e.g. literature, film, art), Climaginaries explores (1) the transformative capacity of imaginaries; (2) how compelling narratives are told; and (3) how they can shape and enable efforts to confront climate change. [more inside]
posted by sockermom at 8:20 AM PST - 14 comments

GBDuro 2019 was the first of an annual self-supported ride across the United Kingdom, using a route that includes roads, gravel trails, singletrack and everything in between. Organised by The Racing Collective, it was won by a pro rider Lachlan Morton who had his first steps into ultra racing documented in a beautiful and inspiring short film. [more inside]
posted by Stark at 6:18 AM PST - 9 comments

Ai Weiwei: Can Hong Kong’s Resistance Win? (NYT) “The youth of Hong Kong, who have grown up well informed by the internet, are keenly aware of the stark alternatives before them. They are accustomed to freedom, personal rights and access to information. They know what they want, what they are defending and the nature of the opposition they face. They have watched the freedoms of Hong Kong — in the media, education, housing, commerce and elsewhere — slowly slip away, and they know that the Communist Party stops at nothing in pursuing its interests.” [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 5:55 AM PST - 19 comments

Andriy Dubchak is one of the only photojournalists to have covered the conflict in eastern Ukraine from its beginning. In this article, he shares deeply personal memories from the front lines
posted by smoke at 4:08 AM PST - 3 comments

Perhaps a little late, maybe many of you already saw it, but this Dublin Bus Pride video sweetly bridges the gap between the queers that came before us and the younger queers coming up. [more inside]
posted by nikaspark at 10:04 PM PST - 19 comments

Netflix actually lost subscribers (Vulture) in the US this quarter; this hasn't happened since the DVD days of 2011. Maybe it's due to 2019's higher prices (Variety). Global subscriptions continue to grow, however, and most watchers are already outside the US: the next 100 million subscribers might come from India (hindustan times), and today the company announced a cheaper mobile plan there (NYT). [more inside]
posted by sylvanshine at 8:38 PM PST - 71 comments

This was the fifth day of protests in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where thousands have gathered to call for the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. Last week, corruption charges were filed against Rosselló and 900 pages of private messages were leaked - peppered with a number of sexist and homophobic remarks and making light of the death toll from Hurricane Maria. Rosselló has so far refused calls to resign. The police chief, Henry Escalera, made a statement on Monday claiming that the PRPD will defend democracy in Puerto Rico (meaning, in this case, the governor) "with the last drop of blood" (Spanish language source). [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore at 8:18 PM PST - 32 comments

"I still am struck at that assertion of power, the arrogant nonchalance of someone who travels to work with nothing on his person but his phone, his wallet, and his keys. Since the spill, I notice them all the time — in particular, on my way home one night, a tall, dark-haired Italian model–type man in a super-slim suit and long, narrow shoes who seemed not to have room on his person for an extra credit card, let alone a stack of paper towels cadged from the bathroom at work, just in case. He looked like he believed he was Important, and maybe he was. The message encoded in empty spaces where a briefcase or a backpack might have been was this: I have people to carry things for me. Golf caddies. Bell hops. Assistants. Women."
posted by Lycaste at 7:33 PM PST - 94 comments

Tattoos, tans and techno: the photographers capturing the unseen Beirut.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 7:05 PM PST - 5 comments

During this year's Amazon's Prime Day promotion, camera equipment with street prices ranging from $500 to $13,000 were briefly sold for $94.48, leading to a feeding frenzy, some users having their accounts suspended for the suspicious activity of buying too much. [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 6:37 PM PST - 25 comments

Kids in America want to be YouTubers. Kids in China want to go to space. With the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing just days away, a post on the NasaWatch blog gave details on a new Harris Poll survey. The survey found that children in the US and the United Kingdom were 3x as likely to want to be YouTubers or vloggers as astronauts when they grow up. 56% of kids in China said they wanted to be an astronaut. [more inside]
posted by zooropa at 6:31 PM PST - 55 comments

Breakfast (Cyriak, YT) The newest from Cyriak, this remix of British PSA actor Richard Massingham's short Pedestrian Crossing goes in all the directions you would expect of Cyriak.
posted by CrystalDave at 6:12 PM PST - 17 comments

Created in 1956, Design for Dreaming [10m video] is an industrial short film performed entirely in song, in which a dreaming woman is whisked away by a masked man to the General Motors Motorama, then a Kitchen of the Future, then off to romance on the highway. It makes about as much sense as that sounds like. [more inside]
posted by tocts at 6:11 PM PST - 18 comments

"Loving ourselves points us to capacities of resilience, compassion, and understanding within that are simply part of being alive." A curated collection of links with inclusive materials so that many groups of folks can access a space of self-compassion. Be well, care for yourselves in troubled times. [more inside]
posted by fairlynearlyready at 3:18 PM PST - 18 comments

Il grande scrittore siciliano, autore della fortunata serie di romanzi sul commissario di Vigata, è morto oggi a 93 anni. Dai romanzi al teatro fino alle prese di posizione sulla politica, l'Italia piange uno dei suoi più grandi autori contemporanei. Nessun funerale pubblico, ma da giovedì 18 luglio dalle ore 15 chi vorrà potrà dare l'ultimo saluto al cimitero Acattolico a Testaccio a Roma dove sarà sepolto Andrea Camilleri, writer of the wildly popular Inspector Montalbano books, has died at the age of 93. [more inside]
posted by PussKillian at 3:01 PM PST - 16 comments

Pee Wee's Jurassic Adventure
posted by OverlappingElvis at 2:37 PM PST - 7 comments

Vinicunca or Winikunka (Wikpedia), also called Montaña de Siete Colores (Trip Advisor), Montaña de Colores or Rainbow Mountain (Atlas Obscura), is a naturally colorful mountain. The rise in average temperatures in the Andean region has caused the snow on mountain to melt away, exposing these sedimentary layers. Studies done on samples taken from the site indicate that the colors exhibited are due to diverse mineral composition (Rainbow Mountain Peru blog), leading to numerous Instagram visitors (Insta x2). Tourists have also shared their views via Google Streetview panoramas, allowing you to virtually hike along to the final vista, in (hypersaturated) sun or snow
posted by filthy light thief at 2:14 PM PST - 1 comment

Smuggling 20,000 USB sticks loaded with the latest Hollywood films might seem like an unlikely way to try to overthrow the North Korean regime—but that’s exactly what Flashdrives for Freedom has in mind.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:20 PM PST - 20 comments

Asst. Professor of Anthropology Dr. Helina Woldekiros studies ancient chicken bones. Her research spans the discovery of the earliest known instances of domesticated chickens arriving in Africa via ancient trade routes from Asia, as well as the development of a long legged meatier thighed African chicken preferred for courtship rituals.
posted by Mrs Potato at 12:42 PM PST - 6 comments

New Urban Regulations for the City of Rome

"Exasperated by the sometimes louche behaviour of tourists, city authorities are cracking down on eating snacks in public places and even bouncing pushchairs and wheeled suitcases down the staircases of historic monuments such as the Spanish Steps." [more inside]
posted by shenderson at 12:39 PM PST - 16 comments

Jumping a bicycle over the Tour de France peloton, like you do.
posted by cortex at 12:37 PM PST - 34 comments

The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is a Netflix special by comedy rap group The Lonely Island. Billed as a "visual poem",[1] the special is directed by Mike Diva and Akiva Schaffer and stars Andy Samberg and Schaffer as Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, respectively. It is presented as a rap album written and performed by Canseco and McGwire in the 1980s, when the pair was known as the Bash Brothers while playing for the Oakland Athletics [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 12:20 PM PST - 11 comments

Notre-Dame came far closer to collapsing than people knew. This is how it was saved.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:03 PM PST - 19 comments

Stevens served 35 years on the Supreme Court and became a leading liberal voice. He died Monday, aged 99, after a stroke. Stevens was nominated by Gerald Ford in 1970 and came to the Court as a moderate midwestern Republican. He was a staunch defender of the separation of church and state and later would be a voice against the death penalty*, in favor of affirmative action, and in favor of abortion rights. Recently, he spoke against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, called for the repeal of the second amendment, and threw out the first pitch at a Cubs game, which he described as the highlight of his career. [more inside]
posted by stillmoving at 12:02 PM PST - 26 comments

In 1956, evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane posed a question to anthropologists: “Are the biological differences between human groups comparable with those between groups of domestic animals such as greyhounds and bulldogs…?” It reads as if it were posted on social media today. The analogy comparing human races to dog breeds is not only widespread in history and pop culture, but also sounds like scientific justification for eschewing the social construction of race, or for holding racist beliefs about human nature. Here we answer Haldane’s question in an effort to improve the public understanding of human biological variation and “race”—two phenomena that are not synonymous. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 9:40 AM PST - 50 comments

“Before all else, we must pursue a vision of the common good (by whatever charitable means we can) that presumes that the basis of law and justice is not the inviolable right to private property, but rather the more original truth taught by men such as Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose of Milan, and John Chrysostom: that the goods of creation belong equally to all, and that immense private wealth is theft – bread stolen from the hungry, clothing stolen from the naked, money stolen from the destitute.” What Lies Beyond Capitalism? A Christian Exploration (Plough)
posted by The Whelk at 9:04 AM PST - 21 comments

She Caught Bullets with Her Bare Hands — and Made Magic’s Glass Ceiling Disappear: When her husband died and left her penniless, audacious Adelaide Hermann transformed from lowly assistant to "the Queen of Magic."
posted by Etrigan at 8:55 AM PST - 4 comments

Baz Furnell draws mandalas. Do you want to draw mandalas like Baz Furnell? [more inside]
posted by jacquilynne at 8:34 AM PST - 9 comments

60 carats of meteorite-made glass. Guillotine signet rings. Bejeweled fox heads. Victorian crystal pendants with "a Westie who apparently was just caught pooping in a shoe." All these and more in Dearest, a newsletter by Monica McLaughlin on unusual antique and estate jewelry. [more inside]
posted by joyceanmachine at 7:48 AM PST - 13 comments

For 35 years, a scientist and his team have been taking the pulse of 10 coastal glaciers. The diagnosis is in. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 7:21 AM PST - 10 comments

Brain hardware support for Bayesian processing spotted. “We have never seen such a concrete example of how the brain uses prior experience to modify the neural dynamics by which it generates sequences of neural activities, to correct for its own imprecision. This is the unique strength of this paper: bringing together perception, neural dynamics, and Bayesian computation into a coherent framework, supported by both theory and measurements of behavior and neural activities,” says Mate Lengyel, a professor of computational neuroscience at Cambridge University, who was not involved in the study.
posted by aleph at 6:53 AM PST - 12 comments

Your toaster probably has more processing power, but can it get you to the moon? An appreciation of the Apollo Guidance Computer. [more inside]
posted by backseatpilot at 6:13 AM PST - 30 comments

99 Percent Invisible goes on a delightful road trip across the US to investigate the true mystery of our time: who has the world’s greatest ball of twine, how were they made, and who really made them? [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 4:12 AM PST - 24 comments

What if striving to be great is what's holding you back? “Good is the enemy of great” is one of the most popular self-improvement expressions there is... It sounds appealing and rolls off the tongue nicely, but there’s a good chance it’s downright wrong."
posted by smoke at 4:07 AM PST - 45 comments

Nahre Sol explains really clearly how you can go from simple to complex when composing music for the piano. [more inside]
posted by Stark at 3:34 AM PST - 6 comments

How to: change your car's oil, change a flat tire, flush your radiator and cooling system, jump-start a car, fix a running toilet, replace a kitchen faucet, diagnose and fix clogged drains, fix a blown fuse and reset a circuit breaker, install a light fixture, patch and repair drywall, and find wall studs
posted by Cozybee at 11:46 PM PST - 33 comments

New research analyzing camera footage shows the bystander effect may be largely a myth.
posted by blue shadows at 11:03 PM PST - 22 comments

Relive last year's brief, dizzying green screen tattoo fad with work by tat2worthy: glasses; joshhermantattoo: TV; leerowlett_tattooer: Rick and Morty (alternate animation), dragon eye, Game of Thrones; Heathur Sawyer: Betty Boop; danowartattoos666: Rick and Morty (alternate animation), TV (alternate animation); inky_blinders: Ghostbusters, TV; madame.liesl: Gameboy. (All links to artist Instagram posts. SFW.)
posted by not_the_water at 7:43 PM PST - 16 comments

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

"What is new is that I have decided, at the age of 60, that I am a goddamn knockout. Like Dorothy at the end of the film version of The Wizard of Oz, I had the power I sought all along. I rub my thighs together — sorry, couldn’t resist — and tell myself over and over that I am beautiful and, what do you know, suddenly I am." Crime novelist Laura Lippman reflects on aging, eating, wanting, and leaping in her Longreads essay, "Whole 60." [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:47 PM PST - 40 comments

At least 12 states require sex offender registration for public urination; five apply it to people charged with offenses related to sex work; 29 require it for consensual sex between teenagers. According to Human Rights Watch, people have been forced to spend decades on the registry for crimes they committed as young as 10 years old. An article by Michael Hobbes
posted by latkes at 4:15 PM PST - 20 comments

I almost blurt out that my daughter fills her heavy bags with books and printouts filled with bizarre words, setting off across the country like an itinerant salesman. That she's a pitiful girl who eats a meal in her tiny car after class, takes a cramped nap, and comes back home to immerse herself in books and writing again until she falls asleep. These unspoken words pound me in the chest like an assault. And now here she was, paying me a rent that was more of a bribe, having barged in with some strange girl and shaming her parents. The words are about to leak out of my mouth. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 2:15 PM PST - 14 comments

The Roaring Twenties in the United States was a time of numerous publicity stunts. One such example was Richard E. Byrd’s 1928-1930 Antarctica Expedition, which was sponsored by mass media (JStor Daily article) and the companies who provided typewriters to candy, paper to Byrd’s desk. His first exploration was recorded and presented in With Byrd at the South Pole and documented by Byrd in Little America : aerial exploration in the Antarctic, the flight to the South pole (documentary and book on Archive.org). But he was not the only self-promoter on that journey: meet the teen who snuck aboard a polar expedition (Nat Geo), a scrappy Polish American kid from New York’s Lower East Side named Billy Gawronski (New Yorker).
posted by filthy light thief at 1:20 PM PST - 5 comments

We've scoured the U.S. to find the least interesting and most skip-worthy destination in each state and Washington, D.C. We’re prepared for the fact that we’ll anger many locals, and we mean no offense with these choices. It’s likely we included many folks’ favorite detours. But just because you have a fond memory of a place doesn’t mean it’s worth anyone else’s time. And you can be sure that if it claims to be the world’s “largest” or “best” of anything, it made the list.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:58 PM PST - 222 comments

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

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

"I made the worst ever 1-1 remake in Mario Maker 2"
posted by cortex at 12:09 PM PST - 47 comments

Purple fairy wrasse named Wakanda discovered on reef in twilight zone "Scuba divers have discovered a new fish – a vibrant purple fairy wrasse. They have named it Cirrhilabrus wakanda" [New Scientist] [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 11:22 AM PST - 10 comments

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

The BBC tells the story of separating a pair of conjoined infant twins, from funding and visa issues to surgeries to aftermath.
posted by Catseye at 11:04 AM PST - 4 comments

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

In 2007, Colombia became aware of a peculiarly destructive invasive species making its home in its rivers: the hippopotamus. Descendents of a cocaine kingpin's menagerie, the hippos had been quietly breeding unchecked for more than a decade. Now they are spreading. Colombia is unsure how to handle the situation, having attempted culling, castration, and capturing the hippos to limited success. Hippos powerfully influence the environment in their native Africa, leading ecologists to worry about the impact to Colombia's native flora and fauna. A few biologists wonder whether the hippos might provide a replacement for long-extinct megafauna. Previously, previously.
posted by sciatrix at 9:38 AM PST - 27 comments

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

Forget Synthetic Meat, Lab Grown Dairy Is Here
posted by jacquilynne at 7:16 AM PST - 35 comments

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

She still wonders why no one ever asked her to come on the show herself. Content from historian Sarah Milov's forthcoming book on the history of The Cigarette was used exclusively as fodder for a segment on public radio's "Here & Now." The segment, America's Complex History with Tobacco, was presented by three men: two historians and the NPR host. Milov's name, nor her book, were ever mentioned. [more inside]
posted by KleenexMakesaVeryGoodHat at 6:29 AM PST - 27 comments

Sweet pickin' and singin', live from the Tohoku University Bluegrass Club. (mlyt)
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:29 AM PST - 7 comments

Tom7 invents and tests a variety of very bad chess-playing algorithms.
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:02 AM PST - 13 comments

Filipino food in general is having a moment in the spotlight (see restaurants Jeepney Filipino Gastropub and Bad Saint in Washington DC. A particular purple tuber that has long been a staple of Filipino desserts is now popping up all over Instagram. [more inside]
posted by brilliantine at 5:44 AM PST - 22 comments

SPY INTRIGUE is one of the finest and bravest things ever produced in the [interactive fiction] medium: personal and true, technically masterful in both code and design, literary in the best sense. - Emily Short [more inside]
posted by value of information at 3:43 AM PST - 17 comments

About Disabilities, Accommodations, and School . "Because of her reaction, I assumed all professors might view my health condition as a nuisance. I became skilled at performing wellness, enough so that even people in graduate school made sly comments like, I’ve never seen you this way after reading my personal essays about my neurological symptoms, as if they, too, needed reassurance that what I had experienced was real."
posted by Little Dawn at 11:36 PM PST - 21 comments

Maybe you wanna start getting ready for nanowrimo, maybe writing is for all year round. Either way, I've got around 50 links bookmarked just for you [more inside]
posted by Cozybee at 10:50 PM PST - 20 comments

Best Buy tops the list of "most sustainable U.S. companies." Barron's and Calvert Research and Management teamed up to produce the list, culled from the 1,000 largest publicly held U.S. companies. The scores aren't based on only environmental sustainability. It's more about overall corporate responsibility.
posted by NotLost at 8:44 PM PST - 37 comments

Food scientist and YouTuber Ann Reardon (How To Cook That) decided to evaluate the claims in a scaremongering viral video about detecting "fake foods". Unsurprisingly, the video's claims were nonsense. [more inside]
posted by biogeo at 7:15 PM PST - 33 comments

Both the fans and the media companies want to cheat a little. The media companies want to parade their Web savvy in the marketplace and they want to funnel all the ‘Net traffic into a few commercial sites. The fans want to have freedom of speech and assembly in sites of their own choosing and to have fewer constraints on the use of copyrighted materials than in any other medium. - Keidra Chaney on What it Feels Like for a Fangirl in the Age of Late Capitalism.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:45 PM PST - 4 comments

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

It's taken him three months longer than usual but the Adam Cadre's 2019 Lyttle Lytton Contest Winners are here! [more inside]
posted by Navelgazer at 4:11 PM PST - 21 comments

Going home with Wendell Berry The integration of the various animals and crops into a relatively small acreage becomes a formal problem that is just as interesting and just as demanding as the arrangement of the parts of a novel. You’ve got to decide what comes first, and then you work your way to the revelation of what comes last. But the parts also have to be ordered. And if they’re ordered properly on a farm, something even more miraculous than most art happens: you have sustainability. Each thing supports the whole thing. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 4:03 PM PST - 10 comments

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

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

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

"If you conduct a quick internet search on “history of data visualization,” you’ll nearly always see Florence Nightingale included in the annals of history. Why? It’s not like a Nightingale Rose chart is easy to read, or a cinch to make, or even all that common. One clue to the answer lies in the fact that she is most often the only woman on such lists." Beyond Nightingale: Being a Woman in Data Visualization
posted by everybody had matching towels at 1:10 PM PST - 7 comments

A video game streamer SmyleeKun and the group “Shitposting cause im in shambles” created an event, titled Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us, on Facebook. The event is set to take place on September 20, 2019 at 3am. Attendees will meet at the Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa Valley, Nevada before proceeding to Area 51 itself. Well, attempting to proceed, anyway. The initial plan was simple: "If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens." As the number of people who say they'll attend has grown past a million, there have been a number of proposals and expanded plans kicked around on a related Facebook group, and in r/memes, where about half of the posts are related to Area 51 now. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:06 PM PST - 72 comments

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

"Lizzo is a joyous inspiration – but body positivity has come too late for the likes of me" – Grace Dent in The Guardian: "There was no such thing when I was a teen in the 80s... As Lizzo paraded gloriously with her flute at Glastonbury last month, a paean to body positivity, a poster girl for billions of proud, perfectly-imperfect young women worldwide, I finally accepted that, when it comes to radical self-acceptance, I have missed the boat."
posted by bitteschoen at 11:58 AM PST - 32 comments

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

Against the background of London's housing crisis, Joel Golby of Vice presents the Rental Opportunity of the Week. [more inside]
posted by Catseye at 10:32 AM PST - 30 comments

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

When China took action to protect its borders from foreign plastic pollution by effectively shutting its doors to plastic waste imports in the beginning of 2018, it threw the global plastic recycling industry into chaos. As waste began piling up in ASEAN nations, leaders stepped up to send containers "back where they came from" - the United States (the world's leader in plastic waste creation), Japan, the UK, and Germany, among others. As more Asian nations ban foreign plastic waste, a full fledged global crisis is ongoing for the "developed" world.
posted by Mrs Potato at 9:25 AM PST - 48 comments

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

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

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

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

Is Netflix bad for the environment? How streaming video contributes to climate change - "Driving an electric car, choosing train travel or using less plastic — we know there are many things we can do to be less of a burden on the world's environment. But would you be willing to give up on streaming video?" [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 5:49 AM PST - 73 comments

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

From LA Times: The official spicy snack power rankings
posted by too bad you're not me at 8:52 PM PST - 30 comments

A short Twitter thread about how secrets spread, by Melissa Caruso.
posted by Caduceus at 8:17 PM PST - 39 comments

Your cat is scanning, but is your dog working for you? With N. Potter's Enterprise Dog Power (YT) Treadmill (1881), your dog could be churning butter (YT), grinding stones, and separating cream. A brief history of dogs and treadmills. Previously. #animalsandsurfaces
posted by sylvanshine at 5:46 PM PST - 11 comments

Blown Away, a glass blowing reality competition show, made the leap from cable TV to Netflix this weekend. No doubt you’ll want to binge the show, but what if you want to see more of the contestants' work? Step inside for links to their websites, instagram feeds, etc. [more inside]
posted by jacquilynne at 5:31 PM PST - 27 comments

Cat Planet, a music video that took over half a year to make by Uchikubi Gokumon Doukoukai (Google Translated) [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 5:10 PM PST - 10 comments

In fact, as the rest of the book industry found itself in a post-millennial free-fall, cookbooks were selling better than ever. This is because, coinciding with the rise of the Internet, cookbooks reinvented themselves. What once were primarily vehicles for recipes became anything but: the recipes still mattered, but now they existed in service of something more—a mood, a place, a technique, a voice. Cookbooks of the pre-Internet age remain essential, of course. But, to my mind, the best cookbooks of the twenty-first century are among the very best ever written. [Helen Rosner, writing for The New Yorker, rounds up The Best Cookbooks of the Century So Far.]
posted by nightrecordings at 4:15 PM PST - 72 comments

Should you boycott Amazon Prime Day? [The Verge] “It’s Amazon at its most Amazonian — fast, cheap, convenient, and totalizing. Prime Day draws you in, not just to Amazon Prime membership but to a whole world of seamless consumerism. It’s the kind of intra-corporate pride that was on display in the bizarre concert series, and much of the company’s messaging around Prime Day in general. But is Amazon really something to be proud of?” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:00 PM PST - 60 comments

The whole year is a near-blackout, except that I remember how each day carried my baby closer to life and her closer to death.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 1:36 PM PST - 5 comments

Back in 1996, Brent Huffman noted that finding information and pictures of unusual animals online was far more difficult than he thought it should be. The empty niche of an all-encompassing ungulate site was readily apparent ... and so UltimateUngulate stepped in to fill the void, first as small personal project (April 1999 archive) to the present-day UltimateUngulate.com, from the Asian water buffalo, Addax, and Aders's duiker toWhite-tailed gnu aka Black wildebeest, wild yak, Zebra duiker, not to mention Pygmy hippopotamus, Water chevrotain and Visayan warty pigs.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:00 PM PST - 5 comments

#Viernesdeilustracion is a popular hashtag on twitter and instagram for Mexican illustrators to share their work, and every week there's a different theme. This Friday it was 'Traditional Mexican Outfits'; a few of the submissions: one, two, three, four.
posted by dinty_moore at 12:57 PM PST - 5 comments

Defunctland's six-part series on the life and career of Muppet creator Jim Henson finishes today. The series in its entirety: The History of the First Muppet Show, Sam and Friends | The Curse of Sesame Street | The History of The Muppet Show | The History of Fraggle Rock | The History of Muppet Babies | The Final Jim Henson Hour
posted by jocelmeow at 11:14 AM PST - 13 comments

Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by Melismata at 11:12 AM PST - 91 comments

The independent Atlantic League became the first American professional baseball league to let a computer call balls and strikes on Wednesday at its all-star game. "About 45 minutes before first pitch, the public address announcer directed fans to look up at the black screen hanging off the face of the upper level behind the plate and joked that they could blame the computer for any disagreements over calls."--ESPN
posted by sardonyx at 11:11 AM PST - 15 comments

Wouldn't it be cool if there was a shawl that was also a star chart? Seven years ago, Audry Nicklin built that idea into a pattern that became a virally appealing star map shawl (with some modifications), depicting the constellations as viewed from the North Pole. Nicklin later added a Southern Skies version as viewed from Antarctica. But the newest knitter pulling the stars into her tapestry has perhaps an even more ambitious vision: software engineer Sarah Spencer recently produced a 300 sqft tapestry of star charts centered around our Earth. (Previously.)
posted by sciatrix at 9:47 AM PST - 14 comments

You may not realize it, but bounty hunting is still alive and well in America in 2019. It's fueled by old laws, loose guidelines, and not-great money. In order to get a closer look inside the world of "bail enforcement agents," writer Jeff Winkler got licensed and spent months working as a BEA. What he found was a mess for pretty much everyone caught up in a broken system. A long read from GQ. "No other job is more American," writes the author. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 8:47 AM PST - 13 comments

Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Recommendations, a database of queer science fiction and fantasy books. Search by genre, content, identity, and many other categories.
posted by zamboni at 8:06 AM PST - 18 comments

The One who are but don't exist: Being Nubian and Kenyan.
I never thought much about national identification cards until it was time to get my own so I never imagined that it would be an experience that would change my life forever, or one that I would be writing about five years later.
( From The Elephant via a friend.) A little more about the Nuba peoples and Previously.
posted by adamvasco at 7:43 AM PST - 6 comments

The Mueller Report From Business Insider, adapted by Mark Bowden, author of "Black Hawk Down", with illustrations by Chad Hurd, art director at "Archer." [more inside]
posted by bunderful at 6:12 AM PST - 11 comments

Tony Thomas, an outfielder for the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs, took advantage of a new rule (currently being tested in the independent Atlantic League at the behest of Major League Baseball) allowing a batter to steal first on a wild pitch.
posted by Etrigan at 5:51 AM PST - 18 comments

Did you ever think to yourself, "Hey, I probably could make a video card if I really tried?" No? Well, maybe you could! Here's Part 2.
posted by JHarris at 5:15 AM PST - 17 comments

A Big Master Plan for Google's Growing Smart City - "Google sibling company Sidewalk Labs has revealed its master plan for the controversial Quayside waterfront development—and it's a lot bigger."[1,2] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:26 AM PST - 32 comments

Montreal-based indie-folk one-man-band Coatseller released his new album Sun last week, after documenting his recording process on his "Once Upon a Synth" YouTube channel over the last month.
posted by ob1quixote at 9:30 PM PST - 4 comments

Beaver and Steve is an absurdist webcomic about a beaver named Beaver and a... dinosaur... lizard... thing named Steve. Also, it was last updated in 2008, but there's almost 350 strips to read.
posted by moonmilk at 8:02 PM PST - 7 comments

For the first time ever, physicists have managed to take a photo of a strong form of quantum entanglement In a paper published today (July 13, 2019 ) in the journal Science Advances, a team of physicists from the University of Glasgow describe how they have made Einstein's spookiness visible in an image for the first time.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 7:03 PM PST - 24 comments

One player spent 10 years exploring every corner of Eve Online
posted by slater at 6:36 PM PST - 18 comments

After Hitler came to power in 1933, Charlotte Beradt, a Berlin-based journalist, began to awaken night after night bathed in perspiration, teeth clenched in terror. On one of these nights, after dreaming of being hunted “from pillar to post” by storm troopers, a new thought arrived: what if she wasn’t the only one? What if the things that appeared in her nightmares were also being visited upon other people? This startling thought set in motion the seeds of a research project. Beradt quietly began to query people about their dream-life, documenting the nocturnal visions the regime had induced as "new and explicit proof of the dictatorship." [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 5:59 PM PST - 10 comments

People Share Their Secret Anonymously One of the projects from the YouTube Channel of Thoraya Maronesy, who asks personal questions to complete strangers. Their answers are filled with laughter and tears, sorrows, strength and joy. [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 4:15 PM PST - 7 comments

Ever found yourself wondering about the first flavors of Jell-O? Or which flavors you could have used to make a gelatin salad in 1965? No? Mid-Century Menu's creator has long been bothered by these and other Jell-O-related questions, and has, at last, assembled The Timeline of Jell-O Flavors From 1897 to 1997. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:05 PM PST - 23 comments

Nóra Békés is a graphic designer born in Hungary who currently resides in the Netherlands. Her work focuses on both typography and the (re-)interpretation of archives over time. She explores a wide range of topics in her art, including the internet, borders, globalized identity, and repetition and craft. [more inside]
posted by sockermom at 4:04 PM PST - 1 comment

Teens Taking AP Exams Are Battling For Their Right To Meme
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:05 PM PST - 36 comments

As Ebony’s archive goes up for sale, a look back at the lush ’70s style of the founder. Meanwhile, the funky 1970s Ebony test kitchen - where Ebony editor Charlotte L. Lyons tried out recipes for the magazine’s “A Date with a Dish” column - is moving out of storage to be featured in an upcoming exhibit from New York’s Museum of Food and Drink. Former Ebony Magazine Food Editors share their Ebony Test Kitchen stories. [more inside]
posted by nightrecordings at 2:09 PM PST - 4 comments

Every song for nearly 40 years by Pet Shop Boys has analysis and interpretation by Wayne Studer, Ph.D. The front page is a bit opaque, so try "Click Here To Go To..." at the top of the page for a menu.
posted by hippybear at 1:35 PM PST - 17 comments

How To Drink is "a show about making drinks and how to drink them". Featuring classic cocktails like the Moscow Mule, cocktails from TV, books, and movies like the Dude's White Russian, and inspired by them, like the Game of Thrones-inspired Prince That Was Promised. Featuring also rants and raves about 80s movies, wry tasting note commentary, and a devotion to making the most delicious possible version of any drink. [more inside]
posted by capricorn at 12:56 PM PST - 12 comments

Hello and welcome to the gail.com FAQ. “The happy accident of mistakenly logging onto gail.com. Gail knows you were trying to go to gmail but typed “gail.com” instead, and she’s fine with it. Reading her FAQ and seeing the morals and levity that have guided Gail through the strange evolution of her website — from online CV to artifact memorializing her victory over corporate maraudeurs — is a much needed reprieve from the general sinkhole the internet has become. Which made me curious: is Gail’s page a statement? A finger in the eye of a stilted, capitalist system? Or someone simply wanting to exist freely on the web?” [via: The Outline]
posted by Fizz at 12:56 PM PST - 25 comments

StarCraft: Cartooned (trailer) is now live at Blizzard's online store as an official add-on to 2017's StarCraft Remastered. It redraws every single piece of art in the classic RTS game to look and animate like a children's cartoon, without otherwise changing the core gameplay (Ars Technica). Specifically, StarCraft: Cartooned looks like a Carbot Animations cartoon (fandom wiki)—because the YouTube channel in question, operated by Canadian artist and animator Jonathan Burton, was tapped to create Blizzard's first full cosmetic overhaul mod (gameplay with commentary) for a retail game (following his unofficial mod [fandom]), in the style of his StarCrafts cartoons (YT playlist).
posted by filthy light thief at 12:50 PM PST - 8 comments

What is happening in Sudan and Algeria is not a repetition of Arab springs, but a wave that learns from the lessons and mistakes of the past.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 12:28 PM PST - 3 comments

Today is the 15th anniversary of the release of the band They Might Be Giants' 10th studio album, The Spine, which was released alongside the EP The Spine Surfs Alone. The first track off The Spine, Experimental Film, had a music video featuring Homestar Runner.
posted by Caduceus at 12:20 PM PST - 6 comments

12 Shark Facts that May Surprise You . 50 Shocking Facts about Sharks. 100 Shark Facts. (Amazing shark facts you haven't heard a million times)
posted by dinty_moore at 11:36 AM PST - 9 comments

The same tech that's used to create deepfake photos is now being used in videos, like this one featuring Keanu Reeves. How the tech works (with Tom Cruise).
posted by Foci for Analysis at 10:37 AM PST - 13 comments

Is economic growth compatible with ecological sustainability? A new report from the European Environmental Bureau finds that efforts to decouple economic growth from environmental harm, known as ‘green growth’, have not succeeded and are unlikely to succeed in their aim. [more inside]
posted by Caractacus at 9:35 AM PST - 15 comments

The secret language of trees (animation.) "Learn how trees are able to communicate with each other through a vast root system and symbiotic fungi, called mycorrhizae: Most of the forest lives in the shadow of the giants that make up the highest canopy. These are the oldest trees, with hundreds of children and grandchildren. They check in with their neighbors, share food, supplies and wisdom gained over their lives, all while rooted in place. How do they do this? Camille Defrenne and Suzanne Simard explore the vast root system and intricate communication of trees." [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 9:15 AM PST - 13 comments

Sudan’s street protests have inspired another revolution—in art. Sudanese visual artists have taken a high-profile position in the protest movement producing paintings, murals and graphic art that document this radical period in the country’s history. ~ via
posted by Mrs Potato at 8:17 AM PST - 5 comments

On Friday Khruangbin released their latest record Hasta El Cielo, a dub/remix version of their 2018 release Con Todo El Mundo. The trio from Houston, Texas, draws from a wide range of influences including (but not limited to) Thai funk, gospel, surf rock, psychedelic rock, classic soul, and other music from around the world. The result is "dreamy, instrumental music." [more inside]
posted by jzb at 7:13 AM PST - 8 comments

In 1990, the BBC approached Kevin Godley to make a short film to cap off a concert - something "featuring musicians from various cultures singing and playing together". Godley had a different idea - an hour-long video based on some "chain tapes." He'd record a couple basic demo tracks and then sending them around the world for different artists to riff on and add to the track before sending it on. The result, the hour-long film One World One Voice, is simultaneously a window into global music circa 1990, an appeal to environmental awareness and global unity, a collection of fascinating mashups, and the thing that Kevin Godley says is "the most significant piece of work I've done". [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:51 AM PST - 7 comments

In 2018 the BBC Proms made an effort to highlight women composers of classical music. There are some well-known names such as Alma Mahler, Clara Schumann and Delia Derbyshire (creator of the original Dr. Who theme) as well as less-familiar past and contemporary composers.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 11:39 PM PST - 2 comments

Hubert Airy illustrated his experience of progressive migraine auras (National Geographic) in 1870. There was no concept of migraine at the time—he referred to it as transient half-blindness. A modern opthalmologist calls it "an iconic illustration ... It's so precise, like a series of time-lapse photographs." [more inside]
posted by sylvanshine at 8:54 PM PST - 54 comments

When the so-called House of the Century rose from the swampy earth back in the early 1970s, it arrived as a vision of the future, a biomorphic experiment in modern living. Back then it was a bright white jumble on the shoreline, and depending on your angle of approach, it looked like either a man's erect genitalia or a giant schnoz.
posted by latkes at 7:54 PM PST - 18 comments

Where are all the Bob Ross paintings? Why can't you buy one? What happened to them? An 11 minute video from the NY Times.
posted by moonmilk at 7:52 PM PST - 29 comments

The Sleep Blanket, A visualization of [Seung Lee]'s son's sleep pattern from birth to his first birthday. Crochet border surrounding a double knit body. Each row represents a single day. Each stitch represents 6 minutes of time spent awake or asleep. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 7:50 PM PST - 12 comments

Four hundred years ago, Basil Valentine created a cipher. He believed he was on the trail of the philosopher’s stone. He designed twelve keys describing the steps required to find it. His later keys were conjecture, but his early ones can be replicated. [WaPo] [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 5:53 PM PST - 4 comments

December 1934, Theresa Wallach and Florence Blenkiron left London for South Africa on 600cc single-cylinder Phelon & Moore Panther motorcycle with sidecar and trailer. They rode straight through Sahara desert without a compass in record breaking time, arriving in Cape Town in July 1935. [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 5:52 PM PST - 4 comments

“The person delivering the cut direct would make eye contact with the other party upon meeting them, acknowledging their bow or salutation with nothing but a hard stare and a stony silence. To be a true cut direct, there must be no doubt that cutter was fully aware of the presence of the cuttee and was deliberately cutting them.” Not brutal enough for you? How about the cut infernal as defined “BY A MEMBER OF THE WHIP CLUB ASSISTED BY Hell Fire Dick”?
posted by sallybrown at 3:52 PM PST - 33 comments

Meet Lori, a tiny dinosaur that may help explain how birds evolved flight The newly described dinosaur, reported today in the journal PeerJ, specifically comes from a layer of roughly 150-million-year-old rocks called the Morrison Formation, which covers a vast swath of the western U.S. centered on Wyoming and Colorado.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 3:13 PM PST - 4 comments

Journey to the microcosmos is a YT channel dedicated to microscopy and the diminutive denizens (heterotrophs as well as autotrophs) of that minuscule world. Marvel at the mighty Stentor! Partake in the thrill of the chase! But first all, enjoy the beautiful pictures by microscopist James Weiss.
posted by bouvin at 2:44 PM PST - 7 comments

In correctional facilities across America, inmates cluster around tables in the common room to play games like Dungeons & Dragons. D&D has become so widespread, some correctional facilities even have specific rules that address it. Even in states where RPGs are allowed, restriction on the use of dice can complicate gameplay. In an effort to crack down on gambling, most correctional facilities in America don't allow offenders to use or create dice. But as they say, necessity is the mother of invention.
posted by sciatrix at 2:13 PM PST - 31 comments

7 Incredibly Adorable Animals Unique to Hokkaido, Japan [more inside]
posted by tofu_crouton at 2:10 PM PST - 9 comments

CHAI is Mana, Kana, Yuuki, and Yuna, a four piece pop/punk/rock band from Nagoya. Their Neo-Kawaii attitude of inclusion and celebrating our imperfections attempts to dismantle and subvert notions of cuteness that its members feel are so repressive in Japan. Neo-Kawaii is exemplified by their song N.E.O. (live version), from the 2017 album PINK. More from PINK: Boyz Seco Men, Horechatta. Their 2019 album PUNK continues the theme, with a more expansive sound: Choose Go!, Great Job, I'm Me, Curly Adventure, Future. [bandcamp, (Spotify: PUNK, PINK), live stuff] Positive + Negative = POGATIVE!
posted by HumanComplex at 12:50 PM PST - 8 comments

How One Community Brought Child Mortality Down From 154 to 7 Per 1,000 Live Births (NPR) A seven-year trial in Mali provided house calls and health care at no charge for pregnant women and young children. The results, recently published by British Medical Journal Global Health, inspired the president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta to make announce unprecedented health reforms (7D News). Free contraceptives will also be provided across the country as tens of thousands of community health workers are introduced in a bid to provide more localised healthcare to Mali’s population of 18 million people (The Guardian). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:36 PM PST - 2 comments

The proliferation of hate sites online has been something that we all have seen with our own eyes, but there's a hidden side to it all - the companies who provide hosting and support for them, who rarely get mentioned. Gizmodo reporter Aaron Sankin looks into the companies who provide the hosting for hate sites. (SLGizmodo) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:15 PM PST - 26 comments

Buzzfeed's Delia Cai explains why Barbie is the ultimate influencer. Could it be that all the secrets of understanding Instagram influencer culture can be found on the account of a plastic doll?
posted by zeusianfog at 11:30 AM PST - 7 comments

Dragon Quest Builders 2 Is Much More Than A Minecraft Clone [Kotaku] “Dragon Quest Builders 2 makes me feel like a creative genius. It accomplishes this bold feat through use of brilliant game design. In summary, no, it is not a “Minecraft Clone. Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a full-length Dragon Quest game, which just so happens to supplement its cutscenes, exploration, and combat elements with cutely robust city planning mechanics. And, yes, perfectly fleshed-out, endlessly rich Minecraft building. [...] Dragon Quest Builders 2 is bigger, longer, deeper, and magnitudes more narratively exciting than the first.” [YouTube][Launch Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:07 AM PST - 12 comments

OBBLOG 2: Logic blocks toy box: "OBBLOG contains all the possible logic gates with two inputs and one output." example: binary tree [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:06 AM PST - 1 comment

This week in space. The human race and its machines have been busy with projects beyond the Earth's atmosphere.

On Monday the Indian Space Research Organization (previously) plans to launch Chandrayaan 2, an orbiter, lander, and rover aiming to explore the Moon's south pole. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 10:55 AM PST - 6 comments

If I had a penny for every time I was blacklisted and somebody told me, “You will never work again,” I’d be super, super wealthy. 'The thing they kept saying to me was, “Aren’t you grateful? How come you’re not grateful?” I’m like, “Do you ask your white filmmakers that? I wrote this film, and there was a bidding war, and I gave it to you, and you keep telling me I need to be grateful?”'
posted by xingcat at 10:49 AM PST - 3 comments

Black Forest Wood Co's Instagram has video after video of strangely beautiful resin pouring over wood and turning those results into furniture. Want a table? Here's their regular website.
posted by mygothlaundry at 10:33 AM PST - 10 comments

It’s Shocking How Badly New York City Is Failing Cyclists. "For [Robyn] Hightman, riding a bike was everything: It represented work, recreation, and family. But the city Hightman had embraced so completely wound up fatally failing them."
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:47 AM PST - 73 comments

Guthrie police had quite the surprise when they pulled over a car with an expired tag – the car turned out to be stolen, and police said they found a canister of radioactive uranium, a rattlesnake, and an open bottle of Kentucky Deluxe whiskey. Not to mention the passenger's unlicensed handgun.
posted by jocelmeow at 9:44 AM PST - 35 comments

Save Our Food. Free the Seed. Just 50 years ago, some 1,000 small and family-owned seed companies were producing and distributing seeds in the United States; by 2009, there were fewer than 100. Thanks to a series of mergers and acquisitions over the last few years, four multinational agrochemical firms — Corteva, ChemChina, Bayer and BASF — now control over 60 percent of global seed sales. (slnyt)
posted by poffin boffin at 9:33 AM PST - 7 comments

The legend of the Skate Patrol, guardians of Golden Gate Park
posted by dinty_moore at 8:45 AM PST - 4 comments

"The West Virginia teachers’ strike emerged as one of the clearest visions of the new labor movement. It inspired education strikes in other states, including Kentucky and North Carolina. But understanding the strike requires knowing a century of southern West Virginia history, notably its infamous labor uprisings, from the Mine Wars of the 1920s to big coal’s union-busting campaigns of the 1980s. When momentum to strike built in early 2018, teachers in West Virginia’s coal country were among the first to mobilize and put action to a vote. In a Facebook group, they used coal country’s labor history to portray the strike as not only urgent and just, but also natural—something that people like them had been doing for generations. " Finding the Future in Radical Rural America by Elizabeth Catte author of "What You're Getting Wrong About Appalachia" with responses from Ash-Lee Woodward Henderson (The work is happening , how do we support it?), Hugh Ryan (Radical Rural Queer Spaces), Jessica Wilkerson (Appalachia's Women Activists), Bob Moser (Genuine Change is happening in the South) and more. Catte's concluding essay.
posted by The Whelk at 8:42 AM PST - 4 comments

With the launch of AEW, WWE has real competition for the first time in years. As history shows, this is great news for wrestling fans. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:34 AM PST - 10 comments

part 1, part 2, cheat sheet
posted by Cozybee at 8:30 AM PST - 13 comments

A popup window that's also a working trombone. [Only works in desktop browsers]
posted by schmod at 7:31 AM PST - 16 comments

A step-by-step tutorial to receiving GOES-16 weather satellite images for under $200. [more inside]
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:25 AM PST - 12 comments

If you find yourself suddenly transported back to 1866 New York, you may have some questions. Chief among those, of course, is the primary concern - "What should I eat?" [more inside]
posted by backseatpilot at 7:14 AM PST - 7 comments

Let the Fruit Bats show you the power of B-roll in: Gold Past Life (SLYT)
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:32 AM PST - 7 comments

Gibbons meet a hedgehog.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:31 AM PST - 15 comments

Derek Lowe on unexpected legacies in chemical labs. [more inside]
posted by metaquarry at 5:57 AM PST - 47 comments

The Pollination Secrets of Florida’s Most Elusive Flower: He set up trail cameras he hoped would be triggered by a large moth but never were; he sat on ladders, infrared camera in hand, for hours on end waiting to press the shutter when the moths appeared, but they never did. Houlihan slept in the swamp, donating countless drops of blood to south Florida mosquitos. By the time Stone asked for his help, Houlihan was about to give up. “My first response was kind of like, ‘Good luck,’” he says. But he knew Stone and liked the idea of spending a few months climbing trees, so he agreed to give the project—and the mosquitos—one final summer.
posted by Stacey at 5:24 AM PST - 5 comments

The Trial of Bill Burns Under Martin's Act (SLYT). The British folk singer and researcher Jon Wilks revives a forgotten 1820s ballad about animal cruelty and the earliest UK legislation created to counter it. Click the video's "Show More" link for info on the song's origins. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 4:43 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

The World's Most Awkward Interview (YouTube, 3:19)
posted by yaymukund at 3:19 AM PST - 10 comments

Why focusing too narrowly is bad for us . The 10,000-hour rule says intense, dedicated practice makes perfect – at that one thing. But what if breadth actually serves us better than depth?
posted by smoke at 2:28 AM PST - 37 comments

What happens to Spelling Bee champions when they get old? "It's like knowing someone who won a $50,000 scratch-off lottery ticket, or a girl who won Miss America.” [more inside]
posted by Gin and Broadband at 1:09 AM PST - 26 comments

Video games from the 8-bit era hold a certain timeless appeal, and many gamers still enjoy the iconic pixelated graphics with their limited color-palettes. But what if you take the video out of the video game? Some classic (and modern) games without their video make an enjoyable challenge for a skilled player, leading to the "blindfold challenge" becoming increasingly popular with speedrunners. One such player recently became the first to beat the original Legend of Zelda's Second Quest while blindfolded. [more inside]
posted by biogeo at 12:08 AM PST - 4 comments

A longform look at the people who travel cross-country to trawl discount bins for resellable oddities. Nomads travel to America's Walmarts to stock Amazon's shelves (The Verge) [more inside]
posted by Umami Dearest at 10:08 PM PST - 30 comments

Are Humans OP? In this series (more or less), TierZoo (previously) considers whether any of the current animals builds in this crazy little game we call lifeOutside are overpowered and maybe need a nerf. (CW: Sometimes shows filmed or animated animal on animal (humans are animals) violence mostly drawn from documentaries.) [more inside]
posted by Caduceus at 4:56 PM PST - 13 comments

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of David Bowie's "Space Oddity", and assisting in the celebration is secret glamster Barbara Millicent Roberts. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:08 PM PST - 25 comments

"Maybe rather than falling in love with his twin, Narcissus showed the pool his butt, peering over his beautiful shoulder to get the view from behind. Yet we prefer to think of Narcissus gazing at his lovely face for hours, wasting away (or drowning, depending on your mythological source) because he needs to be punished for his self-love. It’s a story with a moral, one that cautions against vanity and beauty. It’s also a story about the power of reflection, and we keep telling it because it keeps being relatable." The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Mirrors [more inside]
posted by everybody had matching towels at 12:58 PM PST - 3 comments

Remember the TV show Red Dwarf? Well the AA [Auto Recovery Service] hopes you do! That's it. I have no idea why Red Dwarf [ A relatively obscure, British, scifi sitcom - which is now over 30 years old ] is being used to sell a car recovery service but... Well it's a thing that's happened. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 12:56 PM PST - 62 comments

Workplace productivity tools such as Asana, Jira, and Slack are starting to infiltrate family life.
posted by COD at 11:27 AM PST - 117 comments

Coquina (Wikipedia) is a sedimentary rock that is composed of fragments of invertebrate shells, and it has been used as a building stone in Florida for over 400 years. At a distance, it might appear like a coarse sandstone, and it is very porous, requiring extensive preparation to use as a building material, such as in Castillo de San Marcos (YouTube clip). But its porousness can be a benefit, as seen in The Mystery of Florida's Cannonball-Eating Spanish Fort (Atlas Obscura), where coquina behaves very differently when struck by cannonballs or bullets. The material was studied recently, and here's the full report on The Impact Response of Coquina: Unlocking the Mystery Behind the Endurance of the Oldest Fort in the United States (Journal of Dynamic Behavior of Materials).
posted by filthy light thief at 11:25 AM PST - 18 comments

The Wealth Detective Who Finds the Hidden Money of the Super Rich, Bloomberg[possibly paywalled], Ben Steverman - "Thirty-two-year-old French economist Gabriel Zucman scours spreadsheets to find secret offshore accounts." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:00 AM PST - 8 comments

Take four minutes and twenty seconds out of your day to enjoy Buddha the obese cat receiving treadmill hydrotherapy—set to "Staying Alive." (You can hear the therapists encouraging him in the original video. Sadly, he passed away due to a congenital heart defect later that year.)

Youtube has many other examples of hydrotherapy for cats:

A weak kitten
Nazzanin, the turkish van
Morph the cat getting hydrotherapy treatment for his arthritis
Luna Attends Hydrotherapy

And because no post is complete without dogs: Underwater Treadmills Help To Heal Dogs
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:51 AM PST - 22 comments

"In the summer of 1969, the first American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam. Their war was over, but mine was just beginning."
posted by thursdaystoo at 10:27 AM PST - 6 comments

Tom Crowther's lab at ETH Zürich has put together an analysis of how the climate of global cities will change by 2050.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:14 AM PST - 8 comments

Nintendo's New 'Switch Lite' Doesn't Actually Switch [The Verge] “The Switch Lite — the newly unveiled spinoff of the full-sized Switch console — doesn’t actually “switch.” Instead of the detachable controllers and TV dock that allows the standard Switch to shape-shift between a TV console, portable gamepad, and a mobile multiplayer machine, the Switch Lite has a much narrower focus on just one of those experiences — but that’s not a bad thing. Instead, it shows that the Switch’s audience and appeal extend to a different market than what the full-sized version currently serves.” [YouTube][Reveal Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:43 AM PST - 37 comments

A pipeline’s promise is fulfilled for white ranchers while tribal communities are left waiting. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:14 AM PST - 4 comments

‘Siberian Maldives’ is actually a toxic dump, Instagrammers warned. [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 7:28 AM PST - 45 comments

Your data could be at the centre of the fight against big tech (NYT) - "Furman, a Harvard professor advising the British government on tech regulation, said that rather than relying on antitrust law alone, countries should create a dedicated regulator for the tech industry, to match those covering the banking, health and transportation sectors of the economy. He said a watchdog with expertise in the field could better review a company's behavior and use of data on a case-by-case basis." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 7:11 AM PST - 8 comments

LegalEagle presents key 2019 SCOTUS cases in a straightforward format. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:57 AM PST - 6 comments

Behold Owlkitty! You don't know Owlkitty? She's only been in all you favorite movies! John Wick! Titanic! The Matrix! Iron Man! [more inside]
posted by zabuni at 12:33 AM PST - 5 comments

"Reckoning with my Mother's Kidnapper" (Gay Mag) - This haunting and hard story about a young woman, kidnapped and assaulted, has so many raw truths going for it. From Roxane Gay's new publishing endeavor with Medium, so you know it's very good. "Pleasing is how smaller creatures slip away to safety. We flatten and wiggle, if we have to, to get away. We can’t charge or block, we must deflect instead. We must be a little slippery."
posted by amanda at 9:16 PM PST - 8 comments

Pizza Hut Training Video 1988 "I was the single camera operator for this instructional video series from 1987-88, that was produced in a Chicagoland area, industrial test kitchen for Pizza Hut/PepsiCo.. Original recording on 3/4 inch U-Matic videotape."
posted by CrystalDave at 9:15 PM PST - 41 comments

A galaxy roughly 2.5 billion light-years away has a pair of supermassive black holes The titanic duo can help astronomers predict when the historic first detection of the background 'hum' of gravitational waves from supermassive black holes will be made and whether there truly is a 'final parsec problem'
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 8:21 PM PST - 24 comments

Baseball pitcher and author Jim Bouton has passed away at 80, after a long battle with cerebral amyloid angiopathy. [more inside]
posted by delfin at 8:21 PM PST - 21 comments

RIP Elmore "Rip" Torn. Rip Torn, a prolific actor best known for HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show” and the “Men in Black” franchise, died Tuesday at his home in Lakeville, Connecticut, his representatives said. He was 88. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:57 PM PST - 64 comments

Queer voices in palaeontology (Nature magazine) - "Riley Black, who came out as transgender and non-binary this year, describes the challenges of cultivating diversity in a discipline with an ‘Indiana Jones’ image.". [more inside]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 12:28 PM PST - 5 comments

Back To The Land: How “re-wilding” can help turn the tide of climate change (The Nib) A 4.5-million-hectare national park in Chile is being brought back to life by restoring the land to nature. (Al Jazeera) Rewilding complex ecosystems (Science, Harvard summary) Ditch the lawn and rewild your garden (Guardian) Lessons from my neighbor’s rewilded lawn (medium) How can cities rewild? The Depavement movement. Rewilding, previously.
posted by The Whelk at 11:25 AM PST - 35 comments

Fifty years ago, at a time when America was divided on questions of war, race, and gender, Alice de Rivera decided that she was fed up with John Jay High School, the local public school in Brooklyn. She was especially strong in math and science, and she scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on a city-wide math examination, but her high school was poor in those subjects, where Stuyvesant High School, a nearby specialized public school, excelled in those topic. But it was boys-only. How a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools (New Yorker) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:05 AM PST - 7 comments

The First Responders - "The black men from Pittsburgh who made up America's original paramedic corps wanted to make history and save lives - starting with their own." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:36 AM PST - 10 comments

The adventures at Lazy E Farm (belated multiple link Tumblr): Today Goofus the Peacock killed a mouse | Their first great flirtation | It’s not that the peacocks are smarter, but for some reason they care about things that don’t matter. | And they're jumpy about things they don't understand [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:03 AM PST - 21 comments

A detective’s quest reveals how one idealistic fisheries observer may have collided with criminals and desperate migrants—and paid for it with his life. (cw: human trafficking, murder, rape) [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 8:59 AM PST - 3 comments

Last week, I sat down with four of the foreign-born players in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) to discuss their experiences playing in Korea. - Sung Min Kim
posted by Think_Long at 8:50 AM PST - 13 comments

A bright orange bird was rescued from the highway. Turns out it was just a seagull covered in curry. [CBS News] “When strangers reported finding a bright orange bird alongside a highway, a British wildlife hospital didn't know what to expect. As they later found out, the potentially exotic bird they thought they'd be encountering was actually just a seagull covered completely in curry. [...] The hospital even named him "Vinny" after Vindaloo curry. Members of the hospital's veterinary team "bravely" bathed him to clean his feathers. After some reluctance, he let them scrub him. Photos from the hospital show Vinny's dramatic transformation –– from orange to mostly white.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:47 AM PST - 35 comments

A four foot long alligator has been spotted in Chicago's Humboldt Park Lagoon. In the face of significant public interest, the Chicago PD gently discourages amateur reptile hunters from attempting a citizen's arrest.
posted by merriment at 7:24 AM PST - 35 comments

"There is indeed a healthy audience for thrillers without violence towards women." The Staunch book prize is "For A Thriller In Which No Woman Is Beaten, Stalked, Sexually Exploited, Raped Or Murdered." It was launched in 2018 by Bridget Lawless (IMDB, Twitter, Amazon). [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 7:21 AM PST - 38 comments

99 D&D Female Character Art Pieces (more on Pinterest; account required to view larger art) - [n.b. MeFite-compiled list of credits]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:03 PM PST - 63 comments

While there is no indication that Mueller does not wish to appear before Congress on July 17, Attorney General Barr says the DOJ will support Mueller if he “doesn’t want to subject himself” to congressional testimony, and the DOJ will seek to block any attempt by Congress to subpoena members of the special counsel’s team. In the meantime, the House Judiciary Committee votes this week to authorize a bevy of new subpoenas, including for Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general; Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser; John F. Kelly, the former White House chief of staff; Rod J. Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general who appointed Mr. Mueller; Corey R. Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager; David J. Pecker, who as the head of American Media took part in a hush money scheme; and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and adviser. [more inside]
posted by Little Dawn at 6:19 PM PST - 1627 comments

Quin believed that he could perceive people’s most essential nature just by looking at them; he also believed that, in the same way, he could know what they most wanted to hear or, rather, what they would most respond to. A creeping psychological horrorerotica take on the Sad Boner Confessional, This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill is a read.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 4:53 PM PST - 57 comments

Betamax Salesman Training Video 1977
posted by slater at 4:37 PM PST - 25 comments

Maybe California fails to adapt to climate change; maybe California will get desperate enough to try, and there will be a way. And afterwards, if life goes on, there will be different social stresses. [more inside]
posted by clew at 4:36 PM PST - 5 comments

THE SIMPSONS - Russian Art Film Version
posted by dobbs at 4:15 PM PST - 23 comments

"In the past 20 years, a disturbing number of Southern Baptists with formal church roles have engaged in sexual misconduct, a new investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News reveals. They were pastors. Deacons. Youth pastors. They left behind more than 700 victims. Read and hear the stories of those victims, and learn the depths of the crimes and misconduct of the church leaders they trusted." Starting in February 2019, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News released a six-part report about widespread sexual abuse in Southern Baptist Churches. (link goes to a landing page) [more inside]
posted by Caduceus at 3:44 PM PST - 25 comments

So, Gutenberg Didn’t Actually Invent the Printing Press -- On the Unsung Chinese and Korean History of Movable Type
posted by Chrysostom at 2:43 PM PST - 42 comments

The female gaze behind the Iron Curtain: "The history of photography behind the Iron Curtain is lesser-known and so the work of female photographers tends to fall even further through the cracks. Polish photographer Zofia Rydet is perhaps the most famous female photographer of the communist period." How one photographer produced an invaluable record of communist Poland: "Walking from door to door for over 20 years, she took more than 30,000 pictures, creating a project on a scale never seen before in Poland." Her work: Zapis socjologiczny ("Sociological Record" 1978-1990), and Dokumentacjach ("Documentations" 1950-1978). [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:55 AM PST - 5 comments

The Philosophical Origins of Patriarchy. This is an excellent piece by Christia Mercer (@christiamercer8): "Ancient intellectual greats like Plato, Hippocrates, and Aristotle laid the foundations on which centuries of sexism were built. Although these Greek authors did not invent sexism, their writings contained ideas and arguments that were used to rationalize a particularly virulent form of misogyny. Once these ancient trend-setters devised arguments for female subjugation in the name of a divine good, it became self-confirming in the sense that women were taken to be naturally inferior to men, treated differently from birth, and trained to subjugate themselves, which itself further supported views about female imperfection and the disempowerment that entailed..." [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 11:18 AM PST - 13 comments

“This pattern means that some of Yuma’s migrant students miss a few months of each academic year, spending the early fall and late spring in other school districts or studying independently. Increasingly, however, couples split up to allow their children to complete the academic year in a single location.“. For Children of Migrant Farmworkers, High School Graduation Takes a Village (Civil Eats) “The work requires human hands. It's hard, monotonous labor that supports an industry worth approximately $990 billion—and feeds the nation. Many Americans, maybe most, don't think about that, Anciso says. "You go and have your salad but don't realize someone's breaking their back to harvest that." Most shocking of all, hundreds of thousands of these workers are minors—and it's perfectly legal.” The Young Hands That Feed Us (Pacific Standard) The Future Of Food Is Cooperatives (Food Tank)
posted by The Whelk at 11:03 AM PST - 1 comment

Marie Claire has a new series on women and migration, and to date has three long articles online: 1. Claudia Patricia Gómez González, an indigenous Guatemalan, was killed crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. Will her family ever get justice? // 2. What Happens to Victims of Domestic Violence Seeking Asylum in the United States? Trump’s calls for a border wall won’t make it harder for domestic violence survivors to find refuge in the U.S.—a new ruling is already doing that. Marie Claire goes to Tijuana to see what women fleeing abuse endure in seeking asylum. // 3. What Happened to the Nigerian Migrants Who Died on a Boat to Europe in November 2017? The news cycle moved on, but the town that became the final resting place for 26 migrant women has not forgotten them.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:38 AM PST - 2 comments

The Human Power Plant "is a multi-disciplinary research project into the possibilities of reducing energy demand in a modern society. If people have to generate their own power, they are much less likely to waste it. How would the world look like if all energy was supplied by humans? Could we maintain a modern lifestyle with human power alone?" [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:01 AM PST - 44 comments

German-Kurdish research team came upon a surprising discovery as ruins emerge from the waters of the Tigris River. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 8:54 AM PST - 23 comments

When Impersonation Becomes Transformation In the year 2000, “reality TV” still sounded to most people like an oxymoron, a bizarre new genre that was half entertainment and half psychological warfare, where neither audience nor participants were quite sure which of them were the combatants. The show Alex appeared on, Faking It, had a simple set-up: each week a participant with an archetypical identity would be tasked with learning a skill that jarred with that identity. The participant had four weeks to perfect that skill before being sent to a real event where they would have to pass undetected by experts asked to spot the imposter. [more inside]
posted by helmutdog at 8:46 AM PST - 24 comments

New Coke Didn’t Fail. It Was Murdered. Far from the dud it’s been made out to be, New Coke was actually delicious—or at least, most people who tried it thought so. Some of its harshest critics couldn’t even taste a difference. It was done in by a complicated web of interests, a mixture of cranks and opportunists—a sugar-starved mob of pitchfork-clutching Andy Rooneys, powered by the thrill of rebellion and an aggrieved sense of dispossession. At its most fundamental level, the backlash wasn’t about New Coke at all. It was a revolt against the idea of change. That story should sound familiar. We’re still living it.
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:02 AM PST - 128 comments

In America, the freedom of movement comes with an asterisk: the obligation to drive. It’s no secret that American public policy throughout the 20th century endorsed the car—for instance, by building a massive network of urban and interstate highways at public expense. Less well understood is how the legal framework governing American life enforces dependency upon the automobile. To begin with, mundane road regulations embed automobile supremacy into federal, state, and local law. But inequities in traffic regulation are only the beginning. Land-use law, criminal law, torts, insurance, vehicle safety regulations, even the tax code—all these sources of law provide rewards to cooperate with what has become the dominant transport mode, and punishment for those who defy it.
posted by xingcat at 7:50 AM PST - 60 comments

Silent film clip appears to show Louis Armstrong as a teenager according to jazz historian James Karst, writing in 64 Parishes. The magazine has uploaded the eight-second clip to YouTube. Gwen Thompkins writes about the footage for The New Yorker in the short essay An Eight-Second Film of 1915 New Orleans and the Mystery of Louis Armstrong’s Happiness.
posted by Kattullus at 1:04 AM PST - 19 comments

Sony celebrates 40 years of Walkmans with Walkman in the Park, a temporary exhibit at Ginza Sony Park.
posted by adept256 at 10:48 PM PST - 16 comments

Fossil of ancient four-legged whale with hooves discovered. The giant 42.6m-year-old fossil, discovered in marine sediments along the coast of Peru, appears to have been adapted for a semi-aquatic lifestyle. Its hoofed feet and the shape of its legs suggest it would have been capable of bearing the weight of its bulky four metre long body and walking on land. Other anatomical features, including a powerful tail and webbed feet similar to an otter suggest it was also a strong swimmer.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:32 PM PST - 27 comments

Bob Dylan released one album in 1966. It was recorded across the first half of the year and was released on June 20. On July 29, he wrecked his motorcycle and disappeared for quite a while. Blonde On Blonde [Wikipedia article with vastly expanded background and context] is (contestedly) regarded by some as the best rock album ever recorded. It is also rock's first studio double album. Side One: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (Everybody must get...), Pledging My Time (even Dylan gets the blues), Visions Of Johanna (they're all that remain), One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:53 PM PST - 23 comments

Last year, Tatiana Vishnivetskaya, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, and her team drilled deep into the Siberian permafrost. As usual, they were seeking singled-celled organisms: the only life-forms thought to be viable after being frozen for millennia. They placed the material on petri dishes in their room-temperature lab and noticed something strange: hulking among the puny bacteria and amoebæ were long, segmented worms, still alive after 41,000 years.
posted by ragtag at 6:33 PM PST - 38 comments

Cool 3D World (previously) has some interesting animations, including

Jacob and the Giraffe;
Q-Tip; and
Chefs.

Many of these are NSFW.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:37 PM PST - 31 comments

An Oral History of the Third-Party Video Game Controller [Fanbyte] “Looking at my two official Sony Playstation 4 DualShocks, it’s hard to remember a time when such uniformity was unheard of amongst game controller collections. Decades ago, any given console’s set of game pads would likely be composed of a mishmash of official models and misshapen, third-party monstrosities. We all had at least one controller reserved for guests — a plastic accident with sticky buttons, unresponsive joysticks, and an ironic name like The Dominator or The Professional.”
posted by Fizz at 2:14 PM PST - 24 comments

"We’ve all played by the shore and built castles in the sand, but seem to forget what happens next: The ocean always wins." The Los Angeles Times has a special report on adaptation strategies for sea level rise and the struggles communities are facing as they confront the need for "managed retreat": The California coast is disappearing under the rising sea. Our choices are grim. You can also play the role of mayor in the accompanying The Ocean Game as you battle the inevitable arrival of the sea.
posted by zachlipton at 12:31 PM PST - 56 comments

How to run a small social network site for your friends by Darius Kazemi, 2018-2019 Mozilla Fellow
This document exists to lay out some general principles of running a small social network site that have worked for me. These principles are related to community building more than they are related to specific technologies. This is because the big problems with social network sites are not technical: the problems are social problems related to things like policy, values, and power. [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 11:47 AM PST - 23 comments

While sports can be fun, sports can also be politics by another means. As you may have heard, the US won the Women’s World Cup yesterday (YT highlights), against the Netherlands by a score of 2-0. Kim McCauley argues that the USWNT’s queerness matters as everyday pride. Sally Jenkins says the USWNT "is after something far more subversive than just better pay". Stephanie Yang explores how the Women's World Cup helps queer fans find community. Franklin Foer has called star Megan Rapinoe the "new Muhammed Ali" for her outspoken commitment to social justice. [more inside]
posted by migrantology at 11:42 AM PST - 18 comments

Finally he shook his head and said frostily, “Well, maybe you two are just serrated knife people.’’
posted by Chrysostom at 10:18 AM PST - 91 comments

Before his resignation in late 2017, Uber's then-CEO Travis Kalanick faced more than his fair share of scandals. But by far the most (read: least) important of these was Kalanick's oft-repeated claim that, at one point, he "managed to rack up the second highest Wii Tennis score in the world" (Uber.com archived) .... Ars dug deep to get at the truth of this claim, publishing a 3,000-word expose that proved definitively (read: probably) that Kalanick was really just confused about what it means to have a "high score" .... Now [...] new information has come to light that has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of this important (read: pointless) story yet again. Behind the 12-year-old Wii Sports hoax that briefly fooled the Internet (Ars Technica)
posted by filthy light thief at 10:15 AM PST - 2 comments

In a surprise move by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) US Attorney's office and the FBI, financier and sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on Saturday on charges of sex trafficking, with his arraignment occurring this Monday morning. The SDNY has credited the reporting by the Miami Herald for pushing the case into the light and giving them the start to the indictment. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:11 AM PST - 635 comments

She defended her land against a mine in Guatemala. Then she fled in fear for her life. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 6:23 AM PST - 2 comments

I Think We're Alone Now (Tiffany) 2019
posted by The Whelk at 10:43 PM PST - 51 comments

Rebecca Black was, at age 13, the singer of Friday, the most popular (and most-mocked) video on YouTube in 2011 (Katy Perry, concerned about the internet bullying, invited Black to star in her video Last Friday Night). Today she is 22 and talks to BuzzFeed video about her viral fame at 13 and what came after. (Previously on MetaFilter: Friday, Saturday, copyright dispute.) She now has a YouTube channel.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:54 PM PST - 46 comments

I said to my boyfriend, “Cooking is really stupid.” He said that he knew what I meant. I said that I was never cooking again. He said he thought that was a great idea. I said, “I have to make homemade tomato sauce with Christine on Saturday. And I have to make some more galettes because the last ones sucked.” “That sounds like a lot of cooking,” he said. “I know,” I said. “I’m going to make the galettes and the sauce, and then I am never cooking again.”
posted by Grandysaur at 3:05 PM PST - 115 comments

Chinese Railroad Workers in North America. "In order to provide food for the workers, a network of growers, and local Chinese importers established a trans-Pacific supply chain. Food included rice, preserved meats; dried fish, shrimp, and other shellfish; dried legumes; dried noodles, preserved vegetables, dried seaweeds, and teas... As the work moved through Nevada, the Central Pacific had two train cars labeled “China Store,” from which goods could be purchased... Food was so important that the Chinese cooks were paid more than unskilled workers." (Key Questions) [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:49 PM PST - 6 comments

Are mechanical keyboards really good for gaming? [Eurogamer] “When it comes to PC gaming peripherals, stats and specs drive purchases. Gaming monitors became popular because they offered lower latency or higher refresh rates, while gaming mice boasted higher sensitivities and improved tracking accuracy. Yet this quantitative trend doesn't seem to apply to one peripheral in particular: mechanical keyboards. No single stat separates mechs from their non-mechanical counterparts, yet mechanical keyboards are routinely recommended over alternatives that cost a fraction of the price. Why is this the case? Are there genuine gaming advantages? The answers lie in how mechanical keyboards went from niche accessories known only to retro enthusiasts to a key part of the multi-million dollar esports industry in only a few years.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 1:48 PM PST - 59 comments

The Vivid Inner Worlds Of Animals. "'An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.' That's from philosopher Martin Buber. If you've ever looked into a dog's eyes, you've seen it. There's something there, whether happy or sad or worried — all part of that something that appears to be consciousness and emotion. Despite groans of anthropomorphism, a growing number of scientists and writers say it's not your imagination. Animals have a far deeper internal life than we've known." [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 12:50 PM PST - 29 comments

They haven’t bothered to do that with SUVs. For the past 10 years. American consumers have increasingly opted for cars that make drivers safer and pedestrians more vulnerable, as pedestrian deaths have reached crisis levels. More than 65 percent of new vehicles sold in the United States are pickups or SUVS, up from 49 percent a decade ago. (Ford has all but stopped U.S. production of cars.) The SUV revolution, a Detroit Free Press/USA Today investigation concluded last summer, is “a leading cause of escalating pedestrian deaths nationwide.” Last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released projections for roadway fatalities in 2018: For the second year in a row, overall traffic deaths fell, while pedestrians fatalities rose, and cyclist deaths jumped by 10 percent over 2017. “America’s roads are safe increasingly for only those who drive on them,”
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:23 AM PST - 50 comments

Bob Dylan released two albums in 1965, The second was recorded June-August, and released Aug 30. Just the opening song alone changed the trajectory of American popular music. Highway 61 Revisited (Wikipedia page with links to individual songs for background and reception): Side One: Like A Rolling Stone (so much vitriol, so perfectly expressed); Tombstone Blues (an existential cry, if nothing else); It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (even Dylan gets the blues); From A Buick 6; Ballad Of A Thin Man (Something is happening and you don't know what it is...) [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:18 AM PST - 22 comments

Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' to tackle climate crisis - "Research shows a trillion trees could be planted to capture huge amount of carbon dioxide."[1,2] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 12:21 AM PST - 65 comments

Sixty years ago, Héctor Germán Oesterheld completed the first serialization of Juan Salvo in El Eternauta (fan-made animation "trailer") with artwork by Francisco Solano López, depicting the fictional events that followed a deadly snowfall that covered Buenos Aires and the surrounding metropolitan area in 1957. Oesterheld's criticism of Argentinian government, in this political sci-fi comic and his other writings (Google auto-translation; Google books preview), lead to the disappearance of him and much of his family (Paste Magazine). Translated into Croatian, Greek, French and Italian, The Eternaut was finally translated into English in 2015 (Comicsbeat, with preview). In Argentina, El Eternauta lives on in public spaces. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:52 PM PST - 5 comments

Social media has become a space where my own family and friends have turned into censors - Richard Akuson, a Nigerian-trained attorney, activist, creator of Nasty Boy magazine and now-asylum-seeker writes about the scrutiny he receives from his family of his lifestyle from thousands of miles away.
posted by Toddles at 9:13 PM PST - 13 comments

How a video game community filled my nephew’s final days with joy A touching story of how a gaming community came together for a young player's final days
posted by k8t at 9:18 AM PST - 22 comments

“The secret museum in every city is a grocery store. It’s where you can grab and squeeze and not-at-all-weirdly smell indigenous produce. The fishmonger runs an aquarium. The butcher is a zookeeper. But groceries also hoard the culture’s guilty pleasures — its Netflix-and-chill snacks are in its potato-chip flavors (my native London favorite was a packet of sea-salt-and-Chardonnay-wine-vinegar crisps, and Marmite ones always hit the spot, too).”

The Best Way to Tour a City Is Through Its Grocery Store
posted by Vesihiisi at 6:28 AM PST - 124 comments

Amaury Guichon cuts his dessert creations in half. Cross section of a whale rib, This Typewriter, and 100's other amazing Things Cut In Half (Reddit, but just the highlights). Previously. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 5:33 AM PST - 10 comments

DC Comics has just launched a new Lois Lane series portraying her as a hard-nosed reporter who gets thrown out of the White House press room for daring to ask awkward questions about refugee camps. It's written by Gotham Central's Greg Rucka, drawn by Mike Perkins, and so far it looks pretty good. Here's a preview.
posted by Paul Slade at 3:23 AM PST - 24 comments

My feet are here, My mind is back there, My heart gets bigger, Here I am An utterly charming video.
posted by chapps at 11:39 PM PST - 4 comments

Bob Dylan released two albums in 1965. The first was recorded Jan 13-15, released on Mar 22. The cultural flint-and-steel that this album was is probably difficult to assess from our current age. Bringing It All Back Home (WikiPedia link with links to individual songs for background and reception): Side One: Subterranean Homesick Blues [video] (This is the one with the cue cards), She Belongs To Me (Just who is "she" anyway?), Maggie's Farm (A clear cry for independence that extends across multitudes), Love Minus Zero/No Limit (A song for Sara Lownds, Dylan's soon-to-be wife), Outlaw Blues *missing in action*, On The Road Again, Bob Dylan's 115th Dream [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:19 PM PST - 46 comments

The problem with "most livable" city rankings is they all look pretty similar, from Monocle's top 25 and Mercer Mobility Exchange's top 10 for 2019, or Economist Intelligence Unit top 50 for 2018 (via Business Insider) -- they're very white, and very western. City rankings are a window onto the projected tastes of a highly specific elite... it’s hard not to wonder why these rankings tend to tap wealthy, smaller cities when larger, less wealthy ones may be making more radical, transformative improvements in life quality. (Citylab) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:48 PM PST - 31 comments

Sargassum is a rust-colored seaweed that floats. In the Atlantic Ocean, the two dominant species have now expanded so much, likely due to agricultural runoff from the Amazon or Mississippi, that blooms practically stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to West Africa. The seaweed provides a habitat for hundreds of species of fish and hatchling sea turtles, seahorses, crabs, shrimps, snails, and nudibranchs. But excessive amounts of it are washing ashore and blanketing beaches, with significant environmental and economic consequences. [more inside]
posted by sylvanshine at 4:20 PM PST - 10 comments

Destroyer of worlds [Tortoise Media] How a childhood of anger led the founder of 8chan to create one of the darkest corners of the internet.

“The anger and hate that spews from 8chan is not a conscious extension of the anger and hate of its creator – though he had plenty – but an inevitable byproduct of the dark structure he built. The story of 8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, is a perfect expression of this: born with a profound disability and shuttled in and out of foster care, his creation of the site was born not out of cold calculation or political ambition, but from a need to find community in loneliness. 8chan is a monster, but its creator had no idea what it would become. He was just a kid.”

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:46 PM PST - 51 comments

Here's the first episode of a YouTube series about a nice robot bowler called E.A.R.L. On the other hand, BowlBot 5000 is not so nice. (BowlBot via BoingBoing)
posted by zaixfeep at 2:29 PM PST - 10 comments

Brown v. Board of Education was sabotaged from the start. That busing has long been presented as an independent evil worthy of bipartisan resistance in both white and black communities represents the triumph of a false narrative packaged to excuse one of the ugliest and most destabilizing realities of American society: the extent to which raw racial prejudice and the protection of white supremacy have divided the nation since its founding through today.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 1:26 PM PST - 29 comments

The Forgotten Tale of How Black Psychiatrists Helped Make 'Sesame Street' - "The children's television show entranced preschoolers—and helped teach impressionable black kids."
posted by kliuless at 1:01 PM PST - 7 comments

An Indigenous feminist approach to facilitating academic Q & A.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:19 PM PST - 20 comments

Mitchell Feigenbaum, physicist who pioneered chaos theory, died in New York City on June 30 at the age of 74. Among his many accomplishments, he was the first to discover that many different physical systems follow a common “periodic doubling” path to chaos, paving the way for the emergence of the discipline known today as chaos theory. [more inside]
posted by mondo dentro at 12:18 PM PST - 12 comments

"When we, as DMs, present a part of our world to the players, it’s all too easy to go, 'You know, like the [insert culture here]' and trust our players’ (perceived) knowledge and (probably biased) perceptions of that thing inform their understanding of that thing in the context of our game." The author of the Crossing the Verse tabletop roleplaying blog writes about representation and cultural appropriation when running TTRPGs. The essay discusses ideas from a video by MeFi favorite Lindsay Ellis and one by Innuendo Studios (previously).
posted by Caduceus at 11:57 AM PST - 13 comments

“Coccidioidomycosis or cocci (pronounced “coxy”) thrives in dry, undisturbed soil; it becomes airborne when that soil is disturbed—whether it’s by dirt bikes, construction crews, or farmers putting in new fruit or nut orchards. It can travel on the wind as far as 75 miles away. Years of climate change-fueled drought and a 240 percent increase in dust storms appear have led to a swift rise in the number of people diagnosed with the illness across the Southwest. According to the California Department of Public health, new cases in the state rose 10 percent between 2017 and 2018.” Climate Change-Fueled Valley Fever is Hitting Farmworkers Hard (Civil Eats)
posted by The Whelk at 9:49 AM PST - 8 comments

People In Asia Are Sick Of Western ‘Begpackers’ Asking Locals To Fund Their Travels For Them [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 8:26 AM PST - 86 comments

100 People Try Durian
posted by peeedro at 6:34 AM PST - 80 comments

So let's defund the University of Alaska A 41% budget cut is likely to happen unless 3/4 of the legislature votes to override his veto. “It’s the dismantling of public education as we know it,” Starr Marsett, the president of the Anchorage School Board, said Wednesday. [more inside]
posted by kathrynm at 6:05 AM PST - 38 comments

Kate Edwards helps game developers think about the geography and symbolism in their games in an interview with RPS and a talk from GDC 2016. [more inside]
posted by Stark at 5:56 AM PST - 6 comments

NPR has looked at 46 alternative (American) anthems, starting a year ago, discussing the history and meaning of individual songs, from "America the Beautiful" to "To Be Young, Gifted and Black". For ease of review, the full list is also included below the break, with links to individual tracks on YouTube, or enjoy the playlist from NPR on Spotify and Apple Music. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:06 PM PST - 43 comments

The Tree of 40 Fruit is a project by artist Sam Van Aken to graft 40 different kinds of heirloom stone fruit onto one tree. [more inside]
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 8:35 PM PST - 22 comments

Enter FutureBook. Join a new, future-oriented social media site, Ordinary Citizen! Get the appropriate news you like. Learn about the vacations and health treatments that are just right for you. Learn about PetCaptcha. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 7:59 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Comedic actor Arte Johnson has died, age 90. Johnson was known for playing creepy insectivore Renfield in Love At First Bite, a damned DJ on Night Gallery and many characters on the original Laugh-In. [more inside]
posted by zaixfeep at 1:25 PM PST - 35 comments

Celebrate the history of the United States with The Firesign Theatre (here spelled Theater) on their first album Waiting For The Electrician Or Someone Like Him [42m]. Presented in two sides from the perspective of 1968, the first side contains Temporarily Humboldt County (in which the American Natives confront outsiders for the first time), W.C. Fields Forever (in which the American Natives encounter the then-rising Counter Culture), and Le Trente-Huit Cunegonde (in which the American Natives face the possibilities of the future of the US). [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 12:30 PM PST - 24 comments

The story of the high-school journalist whose scoop ostensibly stopped his school's use of prison labor forever (mostly in his own words, because of course he was willing to be interviewed for it). [more inside]
posted by queen anne's remorse at 12:24 PM PST - 10 comments

Muslims of early America - "Muslims came to America more than a century before Protestants, and in great numbers. How was their history forgotten?"
posted by kliuless at 12:24 PM PST - 12 comments

For people who want/need to hack their own Insulin Pumps: From Scott Hanselman's blog: "You probably didn’t see this coming, [Tidepool] announced an agreement to partner with our friends at Medtronic Diabetes to support a future Bluetooth-enabled MiniMed pump with Tidepool Loop. Read more here: Translation? This means that diabetics will be able to choose their own supported equipment and build their own supported FDA Approved Closed Loop Artificial Pancreases.
posted by aleph at 12:15 PM PST - 4 comments

Reason to Worry? (SL NPR) [more inside]
posted by Caduceus at 10:30 AM PST - 53 comments

Rails, waterways, pipes, bridges, airports, electricity, even the internet – America is falling apart. (the Nib)
posted by The Whelk at 9:31 AM PST - 54 comments

In "10 Life Tips from Henry the Dog," Daniel Shumski, cookbook author extraordinaire, learns a lot from his foster dog. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 9:05 AM PST - 5 comments

MAD magazine to stop publishing issues with new content this fall [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 6:40 AM PST - 79 comments

In March, Queen Elizabeth opened Bush House, to house creative research, on the King's College London campus. On the day, some students were blocked from entering KCL buildings. They were told that they had been identified as 'troublemakers'. KCL has just published an independent review, which acknowledges that the university breached its own policies and that the security measures taken overstepped the authority of the team involved.
posted by Grinder at 6:23 AM PST - 3 comments

Hi and welcome to User Inyerface, a challenging exploration of user interactions and design patterns. To play the game, simply fill in the form as fast and accurate as possible.
posted by Vesihiisi at 5:03 AM PST - 43 comments

Bruce Milne and Andrew Maine's Fast Forward cassette magazine documented the post-punk scene of the early 80s. The tapes interspersed interviews with music and were packaged with printed artwork in a soft case and distributed through record shops. In that pre-internet era Fast Forward helped spread sounds and ideas among music communities. Archived it offers a valuable resource for people interested in post-punk. [more inside]
posted by shoesfullofdust at 7:17 PM PST - 8 comments

Choosing your child's school usually starts with choosing where you live. And choosing where you live starts with looking at the grading of schools. But what if that grading was skewed implicitly and maybe purposefully toward the white rich neighborhood school rather than the economically and racially diverse school that may also provide the education that will result in the child going on to college? [more inside]
posted by tafetta, darling! at 6:32 PM PST - 33 comments

It’s a troll and performance art, all at once. [Polygon] ““GamerGirl Bath Water” is exactly what it sounds like: the remains of what [cosplayer Belle] Delphine uses to clean herself. Delphine is selling it for $30, though she warns people to be careful with the liquid. “This water is not for drinking and should only be used for sentimental purposes,” the page reads. Delphine did not respond to a request for comment, so we don’t know how many people are actually purchasing the bottled water.”
posted by Fizz at 5:59 PM PST - 89 comments

Wood gas vehicles are cars that run on trees. [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 5:31 PM PST - 21 comments

Stephen “The Ghost Who Talks” Walker, veteran Australian community radio presenter and cultural figure, has passed away. Walker was a long-running volunteer presenter, and later programme manager, on Melbourne community radio station 3RRR, and had shaped the station and the culture of Australia's vibrant community radio scene. His long-running programme, Skull Cave, ran for three hours on Friday afternoons; on it, he adopted the persona of The Ghost (loosely based on the comic-book character The Phantom), and played a broad variety of music and interviewed artists on air. Walker had been compared to John Peel for his influence, and became the first radio presenter to be inducted into the Music Victoria Awards Hall of Fame in 2011. [more inside]
posted by acb at 4:24 PM PST - 5 comments

"For #pridemonth I’m doing 30 days of #gay icons in collage portraits. First up: the effervescent #DorisDay..." Matt Hinrichs is a designer, artist, and collector living in Phoenix, Arizona. This year to celebrate Pride Month he created a different paper collage of a gay icon and posted it to Instagram every day. The results are pretty amazing. (Note: all links go to Instagram. Individual collages linked inside.) [more inside]
posted by web-goddess at 3:42 PM PST - 4 comments

On this website, you’ll learn the basics of using synthesizers (or synths). No prior experience or equipment is required; you’ll do everything right here in your browser. Go on, nobody else is working today either. [more inside]
posted by chinese_fashion at 1:45 PM PST - 11 comments

Costco is one of the world’s largest retailers, boasting 770+ locations and 245,000 employees. Last year, it had more than $140B in sales. But unlike many of its counterparts on Fortune’s Global 500 list, Costco has risen to the top by flying in the face of traditional wisdom.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:31 PM PST - 128 comments

20 years ago today, Mark Sandman, frontman for the low-rock band Morphine, collapsed on stage during a concert in Palestrina, Italy. The story of the man (trailer, imdb) and the band ( imdb). [more inside]
posted by logicpunk at 10:56 AM PST - 44 comments

In 1998, as the New York Times reported at the time, An exhibit opening on Ellis Island next month will revisit an ugly chapter of modern history: the story of tens of thousands of families who, because of their ancestry, were forced from their homes during World War II and corralled into camps, encircled by barbed wire and guarded by armed sentries. The exhibit concerns the involuntary incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese descent, the majority of them United States citizens, from 1942 to 1946, and its title is ''America's Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese-American Experience.'' Even before it opens, the exhibit has inspired an emotional debate over those two stark words in the title: concentration camp. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 10:13 AM PST - 51 comments

Bringing Back the Rich Grasslands of the Southeast [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:11 AM PST - 7 comments

What's more fun than a game you can play with words? If you're asking the dictionary, the answer is nothing ... which is why we are talking about kangaroo words today. (Dictionary.com, with ten tests of your ability to identify the hidden words) Kangaroo words contain the letters of a synonym in the correct order. The synonyms nestled inside a kangaroo word are called joey words. (ProEdit.com, with some bonus twin kangaroos joeys, and anti-kangaroos) Appendix: Kangaroo words (Wictionary list)
posted by filthy light thief at 10:10 AM PST - 4 comments

“Here, the truth is made plain: the childlike nature of corporate branding isn’t a random trend, but part of the mindset that consumers ought to be treated like children. Details are the sinister machinations of faceless authority figures; friendly colors and geometric letters like those on a toddler’s building blocks are comforting by contrast. That each brand looks more or less like the next is only for the better: the world is a little smaller that way, less likely to confuse or frighten. As Jesse Barron wrote for Real Life magazine in 2016, “We’re in the middle of a decade of post-dignity design, whose dogma is cuteness.” Cuteness, employed as these companies do, talks down to you without words.” The Corporate Logo Singularity (Baffler)
posted by The Whelk at 9:28 AM PST - 13 comments

Leah Broussard, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the search for "mirror matter". In a series of experiments she plans to run at Oak Ridge this summer, Broussard will send a beam of subatomic particles down a 50-foot tunnel, past a powerful magnet and into an impenetrable wall. If the setup is just right — and if the universe cooperates — some of those particles will transform into mirror-image versions of themselves, allowing them to tunnel right through the wall. And if that happens, Broussard will have uncovered the first evidence of a mirror world right alongside our own.
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:11 AM PST - 23 comments

Zero Rupee Note Also: Wikipedia. [more inside]
posted by kathrynm at 8:57 AM PST - 10 comments

Hardox In My Body - Bring it on! (SLYT)
posted by theodolite at 6:29 AM PST - 14 comments

What if email tracked where you are, without your permission? "It is disappointing then that one of the most hyped new email clients, Superhuman, has decided to embed hidden tracking pixels inside of the emails its customers send out. Superhuman calls this feature “Read Receipts” and turns it on by default for its customers, without the consent of its recipients. "
posted by xingcat at 6:26 AM PST - 44 comments

The Hidden Heroines of Chaos - "Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory. Their previously untold story illustrates the changing status of computation in science." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:19 AM PST - 4 comments

“When I saw TikTok, I instantly went: This is how it’s done,” Sueco told me on the phone earlier this month. “[The musician doesn’t] need to make the content, they have other people making the content for them. It blows up and becomes a meme organically on this app.”
It is widely known that Tik-Tok broke “Old Town Road” and now it’s the number one song in the country.
Writing for The Ringer, Alyssa Bereznak looks at how Bytedance’s platform is colliding with the music business: “Memes Are the New Pop Stars: How TikTok Became the Future of the Music Industry”
posted by Going To Maine at 10:37 PM PST - 24 comments

“'[Larry] is a subject that was funny at first but now is actually hard to deal with, as I am in a relationship. Me and Harry are best friends. People look into our every move — it is actually affecting the way me and Harry are in public.' Facing the negative consequences of certain 'Larries’' actions, 'Larry' became the poster child of fandom taken too far." (SLPolygon)
posted by Caduceus at 10:11 PM PST - 81 comments

Nike is shelving a plan to sell sneakers emblazoned with images of an early version of the American flag after former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick complained to the company. Various conservatives are having conniptions over Nike wisely realizing its mistake, with Arizona's governor threatening to withdraw tax incentives to Nike to build in AZ. The problem isn't the flag itself per-say, but the fact that multiple hate groups including III% and the KKK have used the "Betsy Ross" flag as a logo or as letterheads. Betsy Ross herself is largely a myth, and is unavailable to comment.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:45 PM PST - 76 comments

Protest season is here for Portland, OR! On Saturday, June 29th, the first major rally of the summer began, with an estimated 300 people from various leftist groups (Rose City Antifa, the Portland Democratic Socialists of America chapter, and Popular Mobilization), showed up to Lawnsdale Park to confront the city's arch-nemesis, Patriot Prayer, an extremist right-wing group from across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington, and their allies, the Proud Boys, a white nationalist hate group. [more inside]
posted by gucci mane at 7:42 PM PST - 46 comments

The fact checkers’ rules limit them to interpreting the world in various ways, which puts them at odds with anyone who is trying to change it.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 5:33 PM PST - 33 comments

“Every time you slice into the canon, girls rush out like ghosts. . . . It takes a tiny inkling of a tiny person in the vast cavern of history and tries to pull the plug on their aura of singular, masculine genius. I can only offer a method, and it isn’t even mine. Can the past one hundred years be written through the lives of the wives, girlfriends, mothers, daughters, workers, and spinsters?” Audrey Wollen on reading Rilke without reading Rilke.
posted by sallybrown at 2:12 PM PST - 22 comments

Complexity explained offers a set of articles, systems, and interactive toys that explain aspects of the new field of complexity science, from the emergence of the blob, to the reasons for traffic jams, to the dynamics of herd immunity.
posted by blahblahblah at 12:41 PM PST - 24 comments

Stop Calling Games 'Metroidvania' [Kotaku] “Let’s talk about one of my least favorite words in the video game lexicon: metroidvania [wiki]. A portmanteau combining the video game titles Metroid and Castlevania, it takes two made-up video game titles that are pretty cool and evocative on their own and inelegantly mashes them into something worse. And now, that word is one we use to talk about a whole genre of incredible video games. Let us count the ways the word is a disaster. Aesthetically, it’s miserable and inefficient, five syllables in the mouth and rakish in the ear.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:39 PM PST - 65 comments

10 Shocked Cats
20 Angry Cats
31 Hard-Working Cats

and because no post is complete without dogs:

21 Heartwarming Images Of Cats With Dogs That Prove No Matter The Difference, Love Is Love
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:26 PM PST - 15 comments

Angélica Negrón is the New York Botanical Garden’s composer-in-residence for 2019. [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:58 AM PST - 4 comments

The Heart Still Stands - Red Fawn Fallis found love and purpose on the Dakota prarie. She thought it would save her life- instead, she went to prison [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:49 AM PST - 4 comments

In Defense of Dabbling: There’s value in trying things without commitment (Medium)
posted by not_the_water at 10:45 AM PST - 49 comments

Mi'kmaq speakers create new immersion curriculum [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:06 AM PST - 3 comments

When 40 percent of the world’s population is projected to own a smartphone by 2021 (Statista), the sheer amount of e-waste produced (Earth 911) can be staggering, but on the bright side, smart phones have combined around 50 different devices and uses (Gecko and Fly), which means dematerialized consumption, and increased efficiencies from technological advances in general in the same period as the rise of the iPhone (Wired).
posted by filthy light thief at 10:04 AM PST - 19 comments

Representative Omar’s legislation would enact universal debt cancellation — which means every single outstanding student loan, federal or private, would be wiped out. (Truth Out) Sanders is right: Republican tax cuts cost more than forgiving student debt (Guardian Data Blog) Omar: “10 years ago, we bailed out Wall Street. Now it’s time for Wall Street to bail out the American people.” (Splinter) Low Income People Have More Student Debt Than Realized. (PPP) How student debt devoured my life (The Week) Over 100 Academics Endorse Sanders Student Debt Cancellation and Tuition-Free College Plan (Common Dreams) What Free College Really Means (NYT) The Case For Free College (2) (Current Affairs) Canceling all college debt will make us smarter and richer (CNN) [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 9:04 AM PST - 114 comments

The wisdom and weirdness of feminist utopian novels… (Lyta Gold, Current Affairs).
posted by sapagan at 8:43 AM PST - 25 comments

Sly Fox, which has offices in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is Louisiana’s only all-female detective agency, and its team is made up of women of different races from different backgrounds. The agency specializes in cases of child custody, infidelity, insurance fraud and workers’ compensation fraud, gathering evidence for clients ranging from everyday people to what Joseph calls “super lawyers” — attorneys who handle high-profile, multimillion-dollar lawsuits. [more inside]
posted by bookwo3107 at 8:29 AM PST - 2 comments

So the President F*cking Hates My Girlfriend (and 10 Other Things I Want You to Know Before the World Cup Semifinals) by Sue Bird
posted by Lord_Pall at 7:14 AM PST - 32 comments

Deer antlers are a 'controlled' form of bone cancer growth - "Deer can completely regenerate an organ. No other mammal has that ability." (Science! ;) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM PST - 22 comments

Fantastic arctic fox: animal walks 3,500km from Norway to Canada "Epic journey by female fox includes fastest movement rate for species ever recorded" [The Guardian]
posted by readinghippo at 10:28 PM PST - 18 comments

Solo artist Elise Trouw plays every instrument in live loop mashups. Foo Fighters Meets 70's Bobby Caldwell. Radiohead Meets The Police.
posted by adept256 at 9:54 PM PST - 14 comments

WNYC and On The Media and the Eviction Lab at Princeton University come together for a 4-part series (~170m total) The Scarlet E, about the social and economic problems created by mass eviction as currently experienced in the US. The above page has links for all episodes that include download and transcript links, such as for Part I: Why?
posted by hippybear at 9:10 PM PST - 13 comments

At the border with William T. Vollman Uplifting their heads, my fellow citizens applauded, cheered, and murmured to one another. A woman’s spectacularly eye-shadowed peepers were shining with excitement. The lady who had caught me not applauding now repeatedly turned to glare at my laptop’s clickety-clack. (Had I been outed as a media agent?) A white-haired old man shared yet another secret with a middle-aged blonde’s ear, which neither twitched nor wiggled. A man in a pinstriped shirt was beaming, and a man in a soft sweater leaned thirstily forward. Ladies and gentlemen, I dub this democracy!
posted by mecran01 at 7:26 PM PST - 10 comments

Pop Music Theory is an introduction to music theory and songwriting basics, comprising about 50 short lessons. [more inside]
posted by sylvanshine at 6:55 PM PST - 2 comments

Finlandia Hymn on 4 Electric Toothbrushes A Finnish fellow makes music with various appliances and equipment: "I turn different devices into instruments and I make them play music together. So far I've mostly played electronic toothbrushes and credit card machines but there's more to come!" [more inside]
posted by condesita at 4:59 PM PST - 12 comments

Sarah has a YouTube channel that may seem familiar to you.
Sarah's Beauty Routine
A haul video
A makeover
Sarah's daily routine
What's in my bag?
Bloopers
[more inside]
posted by obtuser at 4:08 PM PST - 18 comments

The Atlanta Nap Ministry/ the Bishop/facebook/instagram/Street Theater
posted by bq at 2:34 PM PST - 3 comments

A Devil's Dictionary for the Silicon Age [SLGuardian]
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 12:40 PM PST - 20 comments

How ‘Subtle Asian Traits’ Became a Global Hit: "Powered by global immigration and the borderless procrastination magnet of social media, the Facebook group has become a gathering place for laughs and reflection on the complicated experience of first generation Asian immigrants who have grown up reconciling the expectations of their heritage and the identity of the country they call home. [more inside]
posted by storytam at 12:22 PM PST - 29 comments

By Julia Carrie Wong for The Guardian: A quarter of a century after the first dot-com boom, the battle for San Francisco’s soul is over and the tech industry has won. But what happens when the victors realize they don’t particularly like the spoils? Tech workers are increasingly vocal about their discontent with the city they fought so hard to conquer. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 12:18 PM PST - 102 comments

The Strange Politics of Facial Recognition [The Atlantic] “Your face is no longer just your face—it’s been augmented. At a football game, your face is currency, used to buy food at the stadium. At the mall, it is a ledger, used to alert salespeople to your past purchases, both online and offline, and shopping preferences. At a protest, it is your arrest history. At the morgue, it is how authorities will identify your body. Facial-recognition technology stands to transform social life, tracking our every move for companies, law enforcement, and anyone else with the right tools. Lawmakers are weighing the risks versus rewards, with a recent wave of proposed regulation in Washington State, Massachusetts, Oakland, and the U.S. legislature.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:07 PM PST - 14 comments

This is my game. It is a good simple platformer that I spent over 1 Year Making. It is my first Steam game so I purposely made it very small. In fact, the entire game fits on this one screen. What you see here is the entire game. Your goal is to get through it as fast as you can. [...] What I wasn't expecting was to have every challenge totally torn apart by Speedrunners. They attacked my game like a hundred little ants taking down a grasshopper.
posted by smcg at 10:26 AM PST - 19 comments

The terrifying unknowns of an exotic invasive tick. Last summer, in a town just outside New York City, a tick bit a man. This ought to sound unexceptional. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:00 AM PST - 56 comments

Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth Part I - Part II :: We say Tolkien invented orcs as we know them today. More precisely, he synthesized their nature from various traditional characterizations—not of mythical beings, but of real-life humans. Some of those characterizations came from popular European conceptions of the greatest threats to Western civilization. Others came from pseudoscientific frameworks of racism, some of which Tolkien would have encountered in his academic training. But Tolkien would meet the most germane theory to his orcs in his military service with the British Army: the fallacy of the martial race. content warnings: racism, colonialism/imperialism, examples of racist images, cultural conflation, sexism, sexual violence
posted by anastasiav at 9:56 AM PST - 78 comments

As the U.S. trucking industry is facing critical shortage of drivers (NPR), more than 30,000 Indian-American Sikhs have entered the trucking industry in 2 years (CBS News, 2018). Sikh drivers are transforming U.S. trucking. Take a ride along the Punjabi American highway (Los Angeles Times with a short video). As the number of drivers of Indian heritage increase, so do the number of Indian food restaurants in truck stops -- for example, One Of The State’s Best Restaurants Is Hiding Inside A Nebraska Truck Stop (Only In Your State), a peak inside the Punjabi-style Indian restaurant in Overton (Lexington Clipper-Herald).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:23 AM PST - 38 comments

Optical scientist Janelle Shane has helped demonstrate the inevitability of our AI dominated dystopian future by using the (scarily plausible) GPT-2 model from Open AI to show that AI tends to prefer names that sound like ships from Iain M Banks novels. [more inside]
posted by Eleven at 6:53 AM PST - 37 comments

Grubhub is using thousands of fake websites - up to 23,000 domains are allegedly used - to upcharge commission fees from real businesses. This includes listing phone numbers that don’t belong to the actual business, and using logos and food photos without permissions. Example: restaurant's real site vs. Grubhub's fake site.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:56 AM PST - 92 comments

Eviction Quilts "You are never far away from that idea that this material represents real lives and real losses for these people. You never want to lose sight of that. The material has been transformed into something that hopefully is looked upon as beautiful. It holds within it a tension: This beauty comes from tragedy. The signage with the quilt tells how it's made, its source. The quilt is not complete without this knowledge, that it came from tragedy." [more inside]
posted by bunderful at 5:12 AM PST - 17 comments