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Four dead, an ever-expanding list of suspects, dozens of detectives on the case. Three years after the fact, a mysterious shooting in the French Alps has evolved into one of the most confounding, globe-spanning criminal investigations in decades.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:01 PM PST - 59 comments

Homeland gets pranked. Season 5 of Golden Globe winning TV show Homeland (currently showing on Showtime) has Carrie living in Berlin, so it was largely filmed in Germany, even some bits that appear to be in other countries. The crew built a very convincing set of a middle-east refugee camp that is first seen in episode 2, and for added authenticity they hired local German arabic graffiti artists to give the walls authentic arabic graffiti. Trouble is, the artists actually wrote slogans such as "Homeland is racist" and "This show does not represent the views of the artists". [more inside]
posted by w0mbat at 8:07 PM PST - 107 comments

Meditation has gotten hip again. With events like Wisdom 2.0, DIY apps, trendy in-person sessions/ networking, and even free 10 day sessions, the backlash has begun.
posted by JiffyQ at 7:02 PM PST - 48 comments

"There’s a long and noble tradition of literary critics misunderstanding Joseph Conrad. Partly that’s because he is such a complicated, dense and fascinating writer. Far more words have been written about him than he ever wrote himself – and not everyone can get it right all the time. Especially when you throw combustible postcolonial issues into the mix." [Sam Jordison - The Guardian] [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:38 PM PST - 34 comments

Legendary and Warner Bros. announce some forthcoming movies: "The initial trio of films are 2017’s KONG: SKULL ISLAND; GODZILLA 2 in 2018; and then GODZILLA VS. KONG, arriving in theaters in 2020." [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 4:08 PM PST - 59 comments

Girls don't want boys. Girls want equal pay and sick beats
posted by boo_radley at 3:54 PM PST - 23 comments

In the United States today, thousands of children under 18 have recently taken marital vows — mostly girls married to adult men, often with approval from local judges. In at least one case, a 10-year-old boy was legally married. [more inside]
posted by melissasaurus at 2:59 PM PST - 94 comments

I Have Gone to Bed Early: Translating Proust by Dan Piepenbring [The Paris Review]

Richard Howard, who turns eighty-six today, first appeared in The Paris Review in our thirteenth issue—from the summer of 1956. Since then, several of his poems and translations have found their way to these pages, and in 2004, J. D. McClatchy interviewed him for our Art of Poetry series. In our Summer 1989 issue, George Plimpton spoke with Howard about translating Proust.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 1:03 PM PST - 14 comments

After thirteen seasons, Stephen Fry has announced he is stepping down as host of the BBC panel show QI. He will be replaced by Sandi Toksvig.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 12:59 PM PST - 57 comments

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared #5 Has Arrived [more inside]
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:33 PM PST - 44 comments

Don't feel like using Nate Silver's new statistical prediction model CARMELO to figure out if your NBA team will be any good this season? Maybe this fact will help instead: The most important contribution an NBA basketball player can make to their team is no longer thought to be scoring points. Like, at all. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:21 AM PST - 49 comments

"Yousef Al Otaiba is the most charming man in Washington: He's slick, he's savvy and he throws one hell of a party. And if he has his way, our Middle East policy is going to get a lot more aggressive." - Ryan Grim and Akbar Shahid Ahmed [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:11 AM PST - 22 comments

In May 1991, ABC launched a half-hour drama series called "My Life and Times." The premise: An 85 year old man living in a retirement community in 2035 looks back on his life and shares his experiences with friends and family. Framing sequences were set in 2035 while the bulk of the episodes featured flashbacks to the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. The show begins on April 9, 2035. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:54 AM PST - 21 comments

It's 1983, time to watch Computer Show. There are only a couple of episodes uploaded to Youtube, but the first one features custom art work site Lumi, and the second explores Reddit. [more inside]
posted by zabuni at 9:41 AM PST - 23 comments

"I am a hetero white cis man working to take the space I have in the world and make it feminist... I know that it should be rapists' responsibility to not rape instead of survivors' responsibility to not get raped, and I know that by virtue of being a dude who doesn't talk to other dudes about rape I am complicit in rape culture, but I just have no idea where to begin. Can you talk to me about talking to rapists about rape?" [cw: potentially triggering language abounds]
posted by divined by radio at 9:16 AM PST - 37 comments

NYC restauranteur Danny Meyer is eliminating tips at his 13 restaurants. "Significantly increased" prices will make up the difference. (More from NYTimes.)
posted by ndg at 8:59 AM PST - 112 comments

Earlier this month, Youyou Tu was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for her discovery of artemisinin, also known as qinghaosu. She is the first Chinese Nobel recipient for work that was done in mainland China. Dr. Tu's studies were done in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, a politically precarious time for Chinese academics, which adds a layer of historical complexity to her work. It is difficult to overstate the importance of artemisinin to anti-malarial efforts. Unfortunately, artemisinin-resistant strains of malaria are already beginning to appear only thirty years after the drug was introduced.
posted by sciatrix at 8:51 AM PST - 15 comments

“What do I think is the American dream? There is no dream for anyone who isn’t a lawyer or banker,” he said. “Everyone else, we are getting a raw deal. Immigrants taking all our jobs. Only jobs we get is keeping the rich happy: we release fish downstream for work, they catch them upstream for fun.” (slGrauniad)
posted by Kitteh at 8:42 AM PST - 97 comments

August: Caleb Madison solicits crossword submissions for a new daily feature at Buzzfeed.
September 30: The Observer publishes a profile of Buzzfeed’s Puzzle Editor.
October 3: “You Won’t Believe How Much Of This Crossword You Can Finish”
October 6: “You Won’t Believe How Much Of This Mini Crossword You Can Finish”
October 12: Madison explains “why in the world [Buzzfeed is] launching a crossword,” and the puzzles start arriving in earnest: “The 9 Celebrities Discover Their Inner Princess Puzzle”, “That Crossword Where 20 Minutes In, He Gives You That Look”, and “That Puzzle When You Can’t Escape Pumpkin Spice Season”
December: People write letters to The Awl about how they hate themselves because they aren’t crossword puzzle constructors. Previously
posted by Going To Maine at 8:26 AM PST - 10 comments

For the first time, a Jamaican writer has won the Man Booker Prize for the best original novel written in English. Marlon James' 680-page A Brief History of Seven Killings is a fictional oral history of three decades of Jamaican life, using the real-life attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 as its jumping-off point. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:56 AM PST - 14 comments

A real-life version of Mjǫllnir, made with a bit of sufficiently advanced technology.
posted by jedicus at 7:28 AM PST - 27 comments

Carey Lander, keyboardist for Scottish indie band Camera Obscura, has passed. Carey died of Sarcoma, and she asked everyone to give for those who would come after. She was 33.
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:35 AM PST - 42 comments

Why SQL is neither legacy, nor low-level, nor difficult, nor the wrong place for (business) data logic, but simply awesome! (allegedly)
posted by MartinWisse at 6:34 AM PST - 138 comments

A Hitchcock mashup where Kubrick is the villain. / Un mashup hitchcockien dont Kubrick est le méchant.
posted by growabrain at 6:13 AM PST - 11 comments

In 1992-1994 and 2005-2009, Yuka Makino studied the lopping practices in the oak forests of Garwhal, Himalaya. Her PhD dissertation (PDF) contains a fascinating prologue describing the practical and ethical issues for conducting ethnographic research in an area where distrust of outsiders runs high and where gender and caste norms are strictly enforced. One afternoon, several children came and were chatting with us when a 10-year-old girl joined us. Though she still took part in the conversation in a loud voice, she stood at the edge of the veranda, far away from the door. (...) I realized that she was a Scheduled Caste girl and if she had stood at the doorway her shadow would have fallen into the room and may have touched my assistant’s plate of food, contaminating or polluting it. I let her stand there so that neither she nor my assistant would feel uncomfortable. [more inside]
posted by elgilito at 5:52 AM PST - 7 comments

DIY Computer Control Panel. That is all.
posted by marienbad at 5:25 AM PST - 26 comments

what makes a good community?

The thing is, reaching the goal of a diverse community is a step-by-step process. There are no shortcuts. Each step has to be complete before the next level of cultural change is effective. It’s also worth noting that each step along the way benefits all community members, not just diverse contributors.

Sarah Sharp writes about community building, shortly after her recent departure from linux kernel development.
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 4:40 AM PST - 24 comments

If someone had told me even a few years ago that such a thing wasn’t pure coincidence, I would have had my doubts about that someone. Now, however, I reserve my doubts for the people who still trust. There are so many ghosts in our machines—their locations so hidden, their methods so ingenious, their motives so inscrutable—that not to feel haunted is not to be awake. That’s why paranoia, even in its extreme forms, no longer seems to me so much a disorder as a mode of cognition with an impressive track record of prescience. --Walter Kirn on modern paranoia in The Atlantic [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:54 AM PST - 33 comments