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An empty Paris hotel now shelters the homeless - "In normal times the Hotel Avenir Montmartre is a tourist magnet with its views of the Eiffel Tower and the Sacre Coeur church, but COVID-19 has scared off the usual guests. Instead, the hotel has opened its doors to the homeless." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:26 PM PST - 11 comments

Alison Lurie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who blended mordant wit and boundless empathy to chronicle the lives of women searching for self-knowledge and self-fulfillment while going about the business of everyday life, died Dec. 3 at a hospice facility in Ithaca, N.Y. She was 94. The death was confirmed by her husband, Edward Hower. He did not cite a specific cause. [more inside]
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 8:33 PM PST - 21 comments

Want to see a crocheted illustration of the importance of reducing the R-value? Norwegian biostatistician Kathrine Frey Frøslie explains in this 4-minute video.
posted by Quietgal at 7:14 PM PST - 19 comments

Born in 1822 to a prominent family in Talbot County, Mary Elizabeth Banning moved with her older sister and widowed mother to Baltimore in 1855. Alongside tending to her ailing family members, she cultivated her penchant for the study and illustration of natural objects, especially mushrooms. After some correspondence with leading botanists of her time, in 1868 she began to write and illustrate a complete catalogue of the fungi of Maryland. The project took her more than twenty years and resulted in a manuscript of scientific descriptions accompanied by 175 detailed, 13" by 15", original watercolor illustrations of mushroom species, many of which previously unknown. [more inside]
posted by progosk at 4:36 PM PST - 13 comments

Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?
posted by Ahmad Khani at 2:36 PM PST - 43 comments

Traditionally, people who click on articles ranking various Mr. Darcys are one of two types: a MacFadyen through the mists person or a Firth in the drink person. Therefore, I must apologize now, as both are tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me. Don’t @ me, Firth-hive. In honour of the 25th anniversary of the beloved 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, Emily Temple ranks all the Mr. Darcys she cares about in LitHub. Features (among others) a life-sized Mr. Darcy cake and Mr. Darcy as played by a Jack Russell Terrier.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 2:28 PM PST - 57 comments

In 1872 the U.S. economy was growing as the young nation industrialized and expanded westward. Then in the autumn, a sudden shock paralyzed social and economic life. It was an energy crisis of sorts, but not a shortage of fossil fuels. Rather, the cause was a virus that spread among horses and mules from Canada to Central America.
posted by ShooBoo at 1:22 PM PST - 5 comments

Archie Thomas stumbled across solitary windfall fruit that could be cross between cultivated apple and European crab apple. Thomas admitted he may be biased, but said he thought the apples tasted great. “Tart but not wincingly-so, and with enough sweetness to eat raw … They speak of the terrain of Wiltshire; unimproved chalk grassland and chalk streams,” he added. As for the name, Thomas said he felt pressure to get it right: “I have too many ideas. My seven-year-old son wants me to call it Cristiano Ronaldo but that’s not happening. My wife, Hannah, is the apple of my eye, so she’s in contention.” (via The Guardian)
posted by Bella Donna at 12:04 PM PST - 23 comments

Warner Bros. will launch every 2021 movie on HBO Max at the same time they hit theaters -- CNBC; Warner Bros. Smashes Box Office Windows, Will Send Entire 2021 Slate to HBO Max and Theaters -- The Hollywood Reporter; ‘Dune,’ ‘Matrix 4,’ and Every 2021 Warner Bros. Film to Debut on HBO Max and in Theaters at Same Time -- Indiewire
posted by valkane at 11:36 AM PST - 93 comments

Shedd, Oregon. December 25, 1948. “Dear Friends,” wrote Marie Bussard, a homesick mother of three. “Now that Christmas is here again... we find that there is too much news to fit into a note on each card. We have borrowed this idea of a Christmas News Letter from our friends the Chambers and the Danns.” So they’re the ones to blame. A year-end ritual we have learned to love and hate simultaneously, the holiday newsletter has always been Americanish—efficient, egalitarian and increasingly secular.
posted by sciatrix at 11:21 AM PST - 16 comments

organism.earth is an audio-visual experience for meditating on space, and the earth, and us.
If you’d like a more structured, user-friendly experience check out the library of texts and audio excerpts used to create the site.
Curated by u/CuratorOfTheLibrary
posted by Going To Maine at 10:36 AM PST - 7 comments

Imperial wars overseas always come home eventually, and they do so in complex ways. The fact that millions of people listen to Jocko Willink, buy Black Rifle Coffee Company merchandise, and dabble in more extreme fringes is a product of decades spent elevating not just military service writ large but violent combat overseas against ill-defined Others. For every Jocko Willink, there’s an Eddie Gallagher, the SEAL who was convicted of and then recently pardoned for war crimes after becoming a cause célèbre for large swathes of the online right [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 10:17 AM PST - 38 comments

Arecibo observatory collapse video footage Incredibly a drone was conducting a remote inspection of the Arecibo observatory support cables at the exact moment it collapsed. (video on twitter)
posted by GuyZero at 9:24 AM PST - 39 comments

A host on a morning talk-radio news show quits after racist threats. Supriya Dwivedi, host on Toronto AM talk-radio station 640 CFMJ, resigned after enduring increasingly aggressive threats from listeners. Her resignation follows months of online harassment which she contends in a complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission was feebly-addressed by her employer Global and its parent company Chorus Entertainment.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 9:07 AM PST - 25 comments

"Mr Collett contended that from an engineering perspective, the arrangement of goods within the building was the spatial layout of a makeshift bomb on the scale of a warehouse, awaiting detonation." Forensic Architecture, a research group based at the University of London, investigates the Beirut Port explosion and publishes its findings. (Forensic Architecture previously on the blue) [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:03 AM PST - 9 comments

Oisín Moran explains how he made his self-quoting tweet
posted by Stark at 8:46 AM PST - 5 comments

"Satan?"
"Hi... Two Zero Two Zero?"
"Please, call me 2020."
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 8:20 AM PST - 8 comments

“He convinced Netflix to pull his old sketch show from streaming by saying it made him feel bad. Funny how that works.” (Medium)
posted by girlmightlive at 8:14 AM PST - 33 comments

Yes it's that Sally Ride story, put to beautiful song. [previously]
posted by phunniemee at 7:55 AM PST - 9 comments

"BBC Dad" Robert E. Kelly (previously, previously) "knows something about interruptions" so he made an ad for Twitter (1-minute subtitled video) to help advertise Twitter’s new conversation settings. (People can mark individual tweets so that "Everyone", "People you follow", or "only people you mention" can reply (which means that, if desired, a user can make a tweet un-reply-able). Twitter started testing this feature early this year and now it's apparently available for all users.) Yes, his kids are in the ad.
posted by brainwane at 6:27 AM PST - 9 comments