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Eric Schneiderman has risen to fame as a champion of women's rights. He's now been named as a serial abuser of women, and resigned hours after women's accounts were published. (Warning: graphic descriptions of physical violence)
posted by stillmoving at 9:13 PM PST - 120 comments

Meet the ancestors… the two brothers creating lifelike figures of early humans. "Dutch twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis are showing their uncanny models in museums all over Europe. Adrie discusses how their creations are realised and the extreme reactions they can provoke." [more inside]
posted by JamesBay at 8:28 PM PST - 28 comments

Normcore Jedediah Purdy

The proliferating “crisis-of-democracy” literature, like the Fast and the Furious franchise, has only one plot. And, like the crash-up car-chase movies, it has not let this fact slow its growth. How Democracies Die, by Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and The People Versus Democracy, by Harvard instructor Yascha Mounk, are just two of the emblematic titles, along with entries by George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum (Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic), political theorist and Clinton adviser William Galston (Antipluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy), and a three-handed work, One Nation After Trump, by commentators E.J. Dionne, Norman Ornstein, and Thomas Mann. Readers may already have noticed that all these authors are, like your reviewer, white men credentialed by the establishment institutions whose “liberal tears” are jet-fuel in the engines of Trumpism. One of the telling things about the crisis-of-democracy literature is that it presents itself as the voice of the reason, calling the people back to their principles. It isn’t clear who is listening.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:19 PM PST - 24 comments

The art and joy of video game photography [Eurogamer] “The capacity for taking handsome screenshots in games has expanded significantly in the past decade. When I first began reviewing games, I would have to drive for more than two hours to the magazine's offices in order to use the expensive kit (a PC with a fussy, arcane trails of cable that, with a tap of the space bar, could freeze-frame whatever was showing on the PlayStation 2 screen) needed to take console game screenshots. (In the truly olden days of video game magazines, an actual SLR camera was used, often attached to a black out cone, that stretched between its lens and the television's bezel). No more. Today the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch both come with dedicated screen-capture buttons that allow anyone to capture a digital sunset, cloud formation, or explosive special move and, if they so desire, print it out and hang it on the wall.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:08 PM PST - 14 comments

Ready to get way more interested than you thought in the old bricks of Baltimore? There's a project in Baltimore where local residents are hired to deconstruct old abandoned rowhouses and save the construction materials for reuse/architectural salvage. They have a really great detailed blog, about building practices, and local history, and what you find when you take apart old houses.
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:58 PM PST - 9 comments

What happened when a bank glitch gave a 24-year old Australian man access to unlimited funds for two years.
posted by fings at 1:33 PM PST - 102 comments

Hail the matriarch: the world’s only colony-building beetle

Truly Oz is Oz.
Well, lethally venomous fauna aside... [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 1:23 PM PST - 3 comments

They packaged the parks as pristine wilderness devoid of human life.
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:54 PM PST - 14 comments

It began with a demand by students for the right to sleep with each other. And it ended in one of the greatest upheavals in French society since the revolution: Paris, May 1968.
One brick thrown in Paris... and its crash was heard around the world. Beauty was in the street with Graffiti, slogans and Posters from the Uprising, many designed and distributed by the anonymous collective L'Atelier Populaire.
[more inside]
posted by adamvasco at 11:49 AM PST - 8 comments

"From 14th-century reliquary crosses to 19th-century papal miters, from a 2013 to 2014 Dolce & Gabbana gown inspired by Byzantine mosaics to a 2001 to 2002 Galliano gown modeled on papal dress, the exhibit will trace the development of a distinctly Catholic aesthetic from the sacred world to the secular. But what exactly is the Catholic aesthetic? And what is it about Catholic theology that has created it? To an extent, the Catholic aesthetic is like pornography: You know it when you see it." The Met Gala’s theme is “Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. What exactly does that mean?
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:39 AM PST - 55 comments

Matana Roberts talking about the genesis and production of her Coin Coin project on African American history. Matana Roberts makes jazz works that include sound collage and multimedia elements. Her central project is a projected 12 part series called Coin Coin, about slavery and African American history. Three installments have been released so far. You can listen to Coin Coin on her Bandcamp page, along with other works like For Standing Rock...
posted by OmieWise at 9:00 AM PST - 2 comments

#juuling All the rage these days is Juul, an e-cigarette device that the teens just love and that is making up a huge part of the e-cigarette market. While Chuck Schumer tries to ban it, Jia Tolentino does the hard work of seeing what all the fuss is about.
posted by dis_integration at 8:54 AM PST - 218 comments

“Every night in New York, an army of private garbage trucks from more than 250 sanitation companies sets out across the five boroughs picking up the trash from all manner of businesses. Racing to complete long and often circuitous routes, the trucks crisscross the city at breakneck speeds. The human toll is substantial: Since 2010, there have been 33 deaths attributed to private garbage trucks across the city. Sanitation Salvage trucks, now involved in two deaths in six months, have failed federal safety inspections at a rate that’s four times the national average. “ To the press he was a “daredevil homeless man” who “came out of nowhere” but an investigation revealed he was Mouctar Diallo, an off the books private sanitation worker whose death was covered up. TREATED LIKE TRASH (ProPublica)
posted by The Whelk at 8:47 AM PST - 13 comments

Oleksandr can do an unusual trick. 7 minutes, narration in simple German, but even if you can't follow the narration, Oleksandr's trick is visual in nature and language-independent. He takes a few minutes to stretch and warm up first.
posted by Wolfdog at 8:14 AM PST - 35 comments

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Kanye West (via atlantic.com)
posted by Ipsifendus at 6:22 AM PST - 54 comments

Jesper Koll argues that Japan has a form of capitalism that works. "Japan’s economy is working well and deserves more attention as a model for 'capitalism that works.' Most importantly, the system is very good at bringing up the bottom of the income pyramid and generating exceptional inclusion for all in financial wealth creation. This is why there will not be a nationalist-populist movement in Japan — the system is working. Yes, Japan does deserve the Nobel Prize for applied economics."
posted by gen at 2:30 AM PST - 73 comments

So when Trump won the presidential election, the true-blue data believers dismissed his victory as the triumph of rhetoric over fact. His supporters had succumbed to a nativist tale with cartoon villains like “cheating China” and a shadowy cabal of Rust Belt-razing “globalists.” [more inside]
posted by kmt at 12:58 AM PST - 40 comments