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This groundbreaking new ad [60s] depicts the challenges faced by transgender people in accessing public restrooms—and highlights the lack of state and federal nondiscrimination protections for transgender people. The ad will have its national TV debut on FOX News Channel next Thursday, July 21, during the final night of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. It will air nationwide again on MSNBC during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia one week later.
posted by hippybear at 6:47 PM PST - 56 comments

NYT: Congress Releases Secret 9/11 Document Detailing Possible Saudi Ties to Al Qaeda

The 28-page document (.pdf) is a wide-ranging catalog of possible links between Saudi officials and Qaeda operatives. It details contacts that Saudi operatives in Southern California had with the hijackers and describes the discovery of a telephone number in a Qaeda operative’s phone book that was traced to a corporation managing a Colorado home of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

[more inside]
posted by Existential Dread at 3:56 PM PST - 61 comments

Home Free ‘You have a guy there who’s really good at the law. We need him in the law library.’
posted by Michele in California at 3:46 PM PST - 11 comments

A condensed history of white rappers
posted by Artw at 3:05 PM PST - 135 comments

"But for her power wheelchair, Jerika Bolen is every bit an active 14-year-old girl – a hopeless romantic with shiny purple hair, a love of alternative music and an addiction to Facebook. She has a maturity and wisdom that belies her age, and on a recent spring day, as other 14-year-olds were finishing their final year of middle school and making summer plans, Jerika told her mother she was ready to die."
posted by AFABulous at 2:30 PM PST - 14 comments

An attempted military coup is underway in Turkey. According to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, "Some people illegally undertook an illegal action outside of the chain of command." The Turkish military claims they have taken over the government, "in the name of democratic order, adding that all existing foreign relations will continue and human rights will remain." [more inside]
posted by Drinky Die at 2:15 PM PST - 417 comments

Netflix’s sci-fi throwback Stranger Things is Yesterday’s Summer Blockbuster Today [A.V. Club] Stranger Things is stylish, beguiling, and eminently bingeable, but it isn’t skeptic-proof. The Duffer brothers, who previously worked on Fox’s surprisingly compelling Wayward Pines, should know by now that open-ended supernatural mysteries are going to dissuade some viewers, particularly those who have felt duped by such stories in the recent past. But anyone willing to push through their resistance will find a borderline hypnotic show that could be to this summer what USA’s Mr. Robot was to last summer: a hyper-stylized niche series that feels essential even at its wobbliest. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:02 PM PST - 51 comments

The US Fish and Wildlife Service has a plan to save endangered black footed ferrets from sylvatic plague by dropping vaccine-laced M&Ms from drones to prairie dogs in Montana. (Guardian) [more inside]
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 1:15 PM PST - 24 comments

Marriage and economics have never been independent of one another. The relationship between the two in the affairs of men and women is memorably dramatised in this story by Narendranath Mitra, one of Bengal’s greatest short-story writers. And the narrative time of the story and the arc of the romances within it are marked, too, by the cycle of the seasons in a rural economy, as seen through the life of the protagonist, Motalef, a tapper of palm-trees.
posted by infini at 9:10 AM PST - 5 comments

"We live in the Genius age, where every line of text and every bit of information is now annotated, searchable and definable. The digitization of music has served as a mass cataloging project for anyone interested in dissecting a track down to its molecular makeup. Supernumerary sounds on records, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can usually be traced to its source." - Who Was the Baby on Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?”
posted by nadawi at 9:06 AM PST - 22 comments

Serious Eats' J. Kenji López-Alt has done the math, and Ghostbusters' 35-foot-long, 600lb Twinkie just isn't possible. [more inside]
posted by uncleozzy at 8:49 AM PST - 58 comments

"To me, the great triumph of The Count (the ongoing study, undertaken by The Lilly Awards in partnership with The Dramatists Guild, that asks the question, “Who is being produced in American theaters?”) is that it names and quantifies a reality that without data can be dismissed as speculation. Work by women writers is incredibly underrepresented in the American theater."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:54 AM PST - 8 comments

Democracies end when they are too democratic. - Andrew Sullivan
Britain’s democratic failure - Kenneth Rogoff How American Politics Went Insane - Jonathan Rauch
It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses - James Traub [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:44 AM PST - 73 comments

Channel 4's trailer for the 2016 Rio Paralympics (YouTube) just may be the best thing you see today. Via DangerIsMyMiddleName's twitter.
posted by middleclasstool at 7:39 AM PST - 25 comments

Keeping classic games in print is a surprisingly risky and difficult business... [The] truth is that we've also done a pretty terrible job of maintaining our legacy. We've cheapened our games, to the point where anything older than a decade is assumed free. [...] If we can't keep our history alive, we risk forgetting our roots and losing a part of what made games great. But don't despair! If music can survive MP3s, games can survive this.

"It's Just Emulation!" - The Challenge of Selling Old Games (YouTube)
posted by griphus at 7:02 AM PST - 75 comments

Yesterday, all the episodes of Dan Harmon's new show Harmonquest went up on Seeso. The first episode is on Youtube for free. In Harmonquest, Dan Harmon, Jeff Davis, and Erin McGathy play D&D in front of a live audience, and their hijinks and misadventures are animated. Each week, they're joined by a hilarious comedy guest. Ep. 1's guest is Paul F. Tompkins, and other guests include Patton Oswalt, Ron Funches, and Kumail Nanjiani.
posted by Maecenas at 6:58 AM PST - 30 comments

Culture, not biology, decides the difference between music and noise. “Consonance seems like such a simple phenomenon, and in Western music there’s strong supposition that it’s biological... But this study suggests culture is more important than many people acknowledge.” Study originally published in Nature.
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:29 AM PST - 74 comments