MetaFilter

The Body’s Most Embarrassing Organ Is an Evolutionary Marvel — And yet we have very little idea where anuses come from., The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu, 5/18/2021 [alternate archive link]. “...The appearance of the anus was momentous in animal evolution, turning a one-hole digestive sac into an open-ended tunnel. Creatures with an anus could physically segregate the acts of eating and defecating, reducing the risk of sullying a snack with scat; they no longer had to finish processing one meal before ingesting another, allowing their tubelike body to harvest more energy and balloon in size. Nowadays, anuses take many forms...” Don’t miss the ‘death farts’ reference. Although Joseph Pujol’s unique musical talent is not mentioned, Wikipedia has a passable article.
posted by cenoxo at 7:42 PM PST - 53 comments

The Tonight Show with guest host Kermit the Frog and guests Vincent Price, Bernadette Peters, Leo Sayer, Dr Michael Fox and lots and lots of Muppets. Commercials included. (SLYT)
posted by pyramid termite at 6:43 PM PST - 17 comments

For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s... Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.

David Koon writing in Arkansas Times in 2015. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 12:57 PM PST - 30 comments

Matthew Salesses writes about dystopian novels and catharsis for Catapult.
posted by eotvos at 9:30 AM PST - 16 comments

TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is promoting homophobia and anti-trans violence TikTok’s recommendation algorithm appears to be circulating blatantly anti-LGBTQ videos, some of which encourage targeted violence. This isn’t the first time TikTok’s opaque algorithm has been caught recommending far-right content, including accounts promoting dangerous movements.
posted by plant or animal at 7:57 AM PST - 48 comments