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Amazon. Etsy. eBay. Lots of companies appeared in David and Ina Steiner’s E-commerce newsletter. Only one tried to take them out. Previously 1, Previously 2, and Previously 3.
posted by momochan at 7:05 PM PST - 10 comments

Tired of migrants arriving from Africa, the E.U. has created a shadow immigration system that captures them before they reach its shores, and sends them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias. [slNYorker] [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 5:42 PM PST - 16 comments

It began as the soundtrack to a Cirque du Soliel Vegas show, but became something much more. With George Martin and son Giles Martin at the helm, The Beatles 2006 album Love became much more than just a rehash of familiar material. It became a massive mashup project covering the entire Beatles career. [George & Giles Martin: Remixing The Beatles Sound On Sound, medium read] Here's the full album on Vimeo [1h20m,], probably the preferred listening experience. But also a YouTube playlist with each track separated. Oh, and here are the original liner notes to the album. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 12:57 PM PST - 17 comments

Don Miller, a resident of rural Indiana, spent a lifetime collecting of tens of thousands of archeological artifacts, showing it off to visitors. His method of obtaining the artifacts though was not quite legal. How the FBI Discovered a Real-Life Indiana Jones in, of All Places, Rural Indiana.
posted by borkencode at 10:08 AM PST - 25 comments

"They had asked about the top-tier package, with full coverage from any damage incurred from acts of kaiju. The yearly cost was more money than I’d ever made in my life." "One Hundred Seconds to Midnight" by Lauren Ring (published this year; available as audio and text) is a suspenseful speculative story about air travel and human decency. Naomi Shihab Nye's short poem about those same subjects, "Gate A-4", starts: Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: "If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately." [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 7:37 AM PST - 11 comments

How A NYTimes Reporter Collects Royalties From Hundreds of Musicians (slyt)
posted by BungaDunga at 6:57 AM PST - 49 comments

"Now we’re going to put our zillion-dollar telescope on top of a stack of explosive material and turn things over to fate." Current scheduled launch date December 22 To look back in time at the cosmos’s infancy and witness the first stars flicker on, you must first grind a mirror as big as a house. Its surface must be so smooth that, if the mirror were the scale of a continent, it would feature no hill or valley greater than ankle height. Only a mirror so huge and smooth can collect and focus the faint light coming from the farthest galaxies in the sky — light that left its source long ago and therefore shows the galaxies as they appeared in the ancient past, when the universe was young. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 4:27 AM PST - 63 comments

The face that started a revolution. The Sistine Chapel of impressionism. A new kind of hero. A troubled vision. More explorations of what make other famous works of art great from James Payne's YouTube channel.
posted by blue shadows at 2:49 AM PST - 5 comments