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blankonblank.org takes unheard interviews with famous musicians, innovators, authors, Hollywood stars and cultural icons and animates them. Interviews include everyone from Johnny Cash to Carol Burnett, Tupac Shakur to Farrah Fawcett, and Tim Gunn to Al Jaffee. blankonblank.org previously and previously. (Most interviews are ~5 minutes long.)
posted by Room 641-A at 8:30 PM PST - 9 comments

The Missing Borges "Seven years ago, a stolen first edition of Borges’s early poems was returned to Argentina’s National Library. But was it the right copy?"
posted by dhruva at 8:27 PM PST - 29 comments

Bonfire of the Humanities. "Nobody goes to Timbuktu, right? Patrick Symmes did, to discover what happened when jihadi rebels set out to burn one of the world’s finest collections of ancient manuscripts. Bouncing around by truck, boat, and boots, he got an intimate look at West ­Africa’s most mythic locale." [Via] [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 6:30 PM PST - 15 comments

American Football, the quintessential emo/math-rock band of the 90's, has announced their first two shows in 15 years. [more inside]
posted by gucci mane at 4:50 PM PST - 18 comments

VIPUKIRVES™ is a new Finnish axe, translates as "lever axe" in English.
posted by Meatbomb at 4:44 PM PST - 80 comments

That's right folks, Field of Dreams is 25 years old. W.P. Kinsella reflects on how his novel "Shoeless Joe" was adapted into the timeless baseball/father-son movie, including how he made peace with the studio changing the name of J.D. Salinger's character. [more inside]
posted by dry white toast at 3:38 PM PST - 91 comments

The Value of a Sherpa Life - Grayson Schaffer reports on Friday's Everest avalanche that claimed the lives of 16 Sherpas in an instant. "And, yes" he says, "there is something that needs to be done about it." In the wake of this devastating tragedy, many Sherpas are threatening a strike and the government is mulling total closure for the upcoming season, which has 335 permits in the queue. Footage of the avalanche. Previously, in The Disposable Man: A Western History of Sherpas on Everest, Scaheffer spoke of the high risks, low pay and shocking mortality rate: "... no service industry in the world so frequently kills and maims its workers for the benefit of paying clients." [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive at 3:36 PM PST - 66 comments

Life Sentences: The Grammar of Clickbait
posted by oceanjesse at 3:33 PM PST - 21 comments

The gutters in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park are made out of old headstones. Placed by the WPA program back in the late 1930s, the stones are said to be broken headstones and markers from unclaimed graves.
posted by flyingsquirrel at 3:22 PM PST - 19 comments

White Power and apocalyptic cults- Pro-DPRK Americans revealed: An in-depth examination by Nate Thayer of the history, ideologies and personalities of American pro-North Korea political organizations.
posted by a louis wain cat at 12:28 PM PST - 100 comments

A few miles off the coast of Japan lies "Battleship Island," or Gunkanjima (軍艦島), the Japanese nickname for Hashima Island, due to its resemblance to the Japanese Tosa battleship. The island was formerly a densely populated coal mining town, purchased by Mitsubishi in 1890, but by the 1960s the coal was running out, and in 1974 the island was quickly vacated as Mitsubishi offered residents jobs elsewhere. Now, the island is an urban explorer's dream, though the island is not completely open to the public for tours. Last year, Google trekker walked the island, providing a virtual tour of the island. And if the roughly 40 year old ruins aren't foreboding enough, Bryan James put together a Chrome experiment called Hashima Island: Forgotten World, based on the Google maps tour of the site.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:11 PM PST - 15 comments

Obsessive practice isn't the key to success. Spaced, interleaved, varied practice is.
posted by shivohum at 11:21 AM PST - 45 comments

[Fritz Lang's] Metropolis and the posters of Boris Bilinsky.
posted by griphus at 11:02 AM PST - 11 comments

Comedians talk about psychedelic drugs:

00:10 - Doug Stanhope
05:07 - Joe Rogan
07:56 - Bill Hicks
13:22 - George Carlin
15:34 - Duncan Trussell
posted by gman at 9:04 AM PST - 34 comments

Revision Demoparty was held this past Easter weekend. It's considered to be a rebirth and spirital heir of the Breakpoint Demoparty, and, arguably the flagship "Demoscene" event of the year. A lot of groups and individuals bring their A game to show off the most inspiring, technically-intense and memorable demos to the world. Every year has highlights and it's a big deal when a brand new platform gets a demo, but this year, the wildest demo went in an entirely unexpected direction: space. [more inside]
posted by jscott at 8:56 AM PST - 7 comments

Why Are Twenty Far-Away States Trying To Block The Cleanup Of The Chesapeake Bay? After 30 years of attempts, a serious initiative to save the bay exists in the form of an EPA-led plan that limits the amount of agricultural nutrients entering the bay. This pollution causes the "dead zones" in the bay, which are so low in oxygen virtually no animal life can survive. A group of twenty-one Attorneys General, including the AG of Alaska and Wyoming, "argue that the cleanup plan raises serious concerns about states’ rights, and they worry that if the plan is left to stand, the EPA could enact similar pollution limits on watersheds such as the Mississippi." Their actions are in line with the wishes of The American Farm Bureau, a powerful agricultural interest group. [more inside]
posted by spaltavian at 8:52 AM PST - 57 comments

Nik Freeman has created a map, based on census data, to illustrate the 47% of the United States where nobody lives.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:11 AM PST - 113 comments

In Boiler Room's Beats Unraveled video series, Binkbeats (previously) performs live versions of electronic music songs that he loves. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 6:45 AM PST - 8 comments

In early April, hundreds of Somali speaking Kenyans were arrested in a supposed anti-terrorist sweep in Eastleigh, Nairobi after an alleged Al Shabaab attack left six dead. The people arrested were taken to a local football stadium and kept in cages, unless they could afford to bribe the police. For The New Inquiry Aaron Bady uses Kenyan and other news sources to explain the background to these razzias, why Somalis are often the victim of police extortion and how this impacts Kenya as a whole. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 3:34 AM PST - 11 comments

Easter is the most famous movable feast in our calendar. Its date appears to change unpredictably from year to year, and different branches of Christianity disagree on when exactly it should be marked. In some years, like 2014, western Christians and the Eastern churches (such as the Greek and Russian communities) celebrate Easter on the same Sunday – but that is not always the case. [via BBC]
posted by marienbad at 1:10 AM PST - 84 comments