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My friend Karla and I bought a book called And the Bride Wore White, a guide to remaining sexually pure. Three chapters of And the Bride Wore White are titled as follows: “Satan’s Big Fat Sex Lies,” “Satan’s Second Big Fat Sex Lie,” and “Satan’s Biggest, Fattest Sex Lie.” The book explained to me why condoms don’t work, why everyone isn’t “doing it,” and that oral sex is just as bad as intercourse. The author painstakingly outlined her own sexual foibles and missteps, honesty that I appreciated. I was ready to learn. I read the book steadily — during study breaks, walking through the hallways, before I went to sleep. Karla and I met at her house and talked about the different chapters while her mother brought us garden-grown beefsteak tomatoes that looked like hearts. We swore to strive for purity in every way possible. No more touching. No more being touched

Carmen Maria Machado writes about growing up, sexual assault, Christianity, family, realising your own queerness and more.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:49 PM PST - 38 comments

Daniel Torday: A Writer in the Family

Are divisions of history arbitrary? Is it true they never coincide with eras of “artistic achievement”? What gets me on this first page of Glass in Antiquity isn’t so much the single-mindedness of that claim. It’s the one-sentence paragraph that follows: “For this reason it has been impossible not to overstep the bounds suggested by the title of this book.” It is not a question being asked. It’s an answer, and one of intention: There are moments, dear reader, in this book about ancient glass called Glass in Antiquity in which you’ll find … glass that’s not ancient.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:17 PM PST - 1 comments

In December last year, the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai began to erupt again. By January, an island had begun to form. Now three men have visited the island and taken the first pictures of the new island. More photos, including before/after aerial views showing the new fish-shaped island with its central lake of green. However, scientists warn the formation is unstable - the volcano may not have finished erupting.
posted by Athanassiel at 10:52 PM PST - 18 comments

"The aerial cinema experts at Teton Gravity Research release the first ultra HD footage of the Himalayas shot from above 20,000 ft. with the GSS C520 system, the most advanced gyro-stabilized camera system in the world. Filmed from a helicopter with a crew flying from Kathmandu at 4,600 ft. up to 24,000 ft. on supplemental oxygen, these are some of the most stable, crisp, clear aerial shots of these mountains ever released, which include Mt. Everest, Ama Dablam, and Lhotse."
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 8:55 PM PST - 19 comments

It has taken nearly five years, but Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality [alternative link, previously] has reached its pre-penultimate chapter. The final chapter, 122, is due to post on March 14th, 2015 (Pi Day), at 9AM Pacific Time. Wrap parties are planned for many places across the world.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:51 PM PST - 107 comments

Advice from a former writing teacher.
posted by anothermug at 7:55 PM PST - 78 comments

How the Female Stars of The Breakfast Club Fought to Remove a Sexist Scene, and Won [Vanity Fair; excerpt from upcoming John Hughes biography]
posted by julen at 7:47 PM PST - 71 comments

Flaisch macht Flaisch: Instructions unclear, cat's got my dick. mlkshk and Reddit explain a 16th century German nun joke. [more inside]
posted by maryr at 7:29 PM PST - 26 comments

Douglas Starr, in Blood, quotes the British Secretary of War, asked in 1937 what the nation proposed to do about a mass blood supply. The secretary was dismissive. Blood could not be stored for long or in great quantities, he said. On the hoof was better. “It was more satisfactory to store our blood in our people.” Janet Vaughan did not agree, and Janet Vaughan did something about it. Her medical director gave her £100, and she sent off her assistants in taxis to find all the tubing that London shops could provide.

Longreads profiles Janet Vaughan, a British scientist who found better treatments for anemia than arsenic using herself as a test subject, was a major force in creating London's first blood banks using cheap tubing and ice cream trucks, studied emergency nutrition in a post-liberation concentration Nazi death camp, and continued active research into blood and radiation into her eighties, while occasionally serving as a model for Virginia Woolf characters.
posted by Stacey at 7:00 PM PST - 6 comments

Confessions of A U.S. Navy Blue Angel Gives you a firsthand account of how Commander Shaun "Linus" Swartz became a member of the U.S. Navy's Flight Demonstration Team, AKA the Blue Angels.
posted by KillaSeal at 6:10 PM PST - 18 comments

This Jay Is Evolving in a Very, Very Weird Way. As she gathered more and more data on different populations of the island scrub jays around Santa Cruz Island, Katie Langin, a biologist at Colorado State University, had a revelation: The birds, members of one single species, had split into two varieties in different habitats. Ever since Darwin and his famous finches, biologists have thought that in order for a species to diverge into two new species, the two populations had to be physically isolated. Those finches, for instance, each live on a different Galapagos island, where their special circumstances have resulted in specialized bill shapes. Yet the two varieties of island scrub jay (they haven’t technically speciated—yet) live on the same tiny island. If they wanted to meet each other for a brunch of acorns and/or pine nuts and perhaps later some mating, they could just fly right over. [more inside]
posted by jaguar at 6:04 PM PST - 11 comments

Death Attends The Matinee
posted by Drinky Die at 5:54 PM PST - 29 comments

Although he's been out of the games industry for years, Keiji Yamagishi (known as the original composer for Ninja Gaiden[YT] and Tecmo Bowl[YT] among other soundtracks) has kept busy with work on ringtones and other music compositions. After contributing to a compilation put out by the game music label Brave Wave, he decided to put out a full album with label founder Mohammed Taher. You can listen to the first track on Soundcloud. (warning, may melt speakers/face) [more inside]
posted by selfnoise at 5:11 PM PST - 12 comments

NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission is set to lift off today, March 12, at 10:44 p.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. (NASA TV launch coverage) [more inside]
posted by Rob Rockets at 3:37 PM PST - 10 comments

"He did terrible things but it did not define him as our friend and the person we knew" The Seattle Met explores the life of a loved and respected young man behind a tragic bank robbery attempt.
posted by KGMoney at 2:21 PM PST - 46 comments

Suspense was a thriller-style radio drama that ran on CBS from 1942 to 1962 and is widely considered to be one of the greatest Old Time Radio (or "Golden Age Of Radio") series and model for "The Twilight Zone". In addition to theme music by Bernard Herrmann and scripts by leading mystery authors of the day, Suspense also featured a stunning roll call of big-name Hollywood stars, often playing against type or in more lurid material then the movie studios would allow. While nearly all 947 episodes are available online (exhaustively comprehensive previously) the sheer number of episodes can be daunting. Old Time Radio Review is halfway through the series with a convenient rating system to finding the best - why not enjoy these Youtube versions of a few episodes starring Judy Garland, Lucille Ball, Robert Taylor, Orson Wells, Agnes Moorehead (again), Cary Grant, and more
posted by The Whelk at 2:05 PM PST - 31 comments

Meet Alex, a seven-year-old boy who loves superheroes and riding his bike. He was also born with a partially developed right arm. (SLYT)
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 1:12 PM PST - 34 comments

"The path, a meter wide, traverses the gorge at a height of over 100 meters above the torrents below ... Now the pathway is well over 100 years old and is at varying stages of decay. Several sections have fallen away entirely, leaving behind only the supporting iron bars." This is El Caminito del Rey, possibly the most dangerous hike in the world. A video of the hike. Another, this one in first-person and filled with butt-clenching moments. And another, in hi-def.
posted by jbickers at 12:59 PM PST - 34 comments

"You can’t remain static, or you go backward" Residents of Slab CIty (previously) debate how to handle the potential sale of state land. [more inside]
posted by 99_ at 11:35 AM PST - 14 comments

Over one hundred years ago, Lizzie Borden became infamous for supposedly brutally killing her parents with an ax. Few know that she was actually acquitted of the crime, and there was little evidence in fact suggesting that she had done it. Why was Lizzie maligned in history and the press? Some feminist interpretations, such as Carolyn Gage's, argue for another look at the story, suggesting that prejudice, not evidence, ruled the day. Fortunately for those interested, the advent of the internet has provided many opportunities for passionate scholarship and the presentation of evidence, providing the interested observer closer looks at the case, the trial [1] [2] , a potential plethora of suspects and at Lizzie herself.

She had taught a Sunday school class for Chinese men and had also taught classes for young women who worked in the mills. She participated in many women's groups at her church and had been a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, a hotbed of feminist organizing in its day. She had been elected a member of the board of the Fall River Hospital, a rare appointment for a woman, and in 1891 was a board member of the Good Samaritan Hospital... In other words, Lizzie had a full life outside the home at a time when employment opportunities for middle-class women were severely restricted.

posted by corb at 11:32 AM PST - 32 comments

"There are several ideas of what happened here this evening. It could have been a fantastic promotion stunt, or a demonstration against the film establishment, but a lot of people think it was actually a motion picture being produced here at the film festival. The only thing sure is that the 13th annual San Francisco Film Festival got off to a smashing start." That's a bit of reporter humor, which accurately captures the diverse goals and ideas behind Pie Fight '69, a most memorable yet virtually forgotten piece of San Francisco's cinema history. The film from a half dozen cameras, run by members of Grand Central Station independent film collective, was lost until 1999. The rediscovered film was cut into a short documentary, which you can see on Archive.org, YouTube, and Vimeo.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:39 AM PST - 2 comments

#16: Used a magnifying glass made of a hairpin and wine to read names of spies from a watch.

A list of all the problems solved by MacGyver [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 10:13 AM PST - 43 comments

"What I couldn't say" by Anita Sarkeesian, part of the "What I couldn't say" session at the All About Women Festival at the Sydney Opera House this week [more inside]
posted by hydropsyche at 9:45 AM PST - 80 comments

Coding Like a Girl - sailor mercury at Medium:

"Apparently, presenting as feminine makes you look like a beginner. It is very frustrating that I will either look like not a programmer or look like a permanent beginner because I have programmed since age 8. I have basically always wanted to be a programmer. I received undergrad and grad degrees from MIT. I’ve worked as a visiting researcher in Honda’s humanoid robotics division on machine learning algorithms for ASIMO.

"I don’t think that any of these things make me a better programmer; I list them because I am pretty sure that if i were a white man with these credentials or even less than these credentials no one would doubt my programmer status."

[more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:26 AM PST - 130 comments

Body By Derby is a figure study of active derby athletes. No nudity, but may be NSFW anyway. [more inside]
posted by rtha at 9:10 AM PST - 23 comments

A grand parade of terrific female Irish writers, put together by the Irish Times. Complete with poster (pdf) (an earlier version)
posted by Segundus at 9:03 AM PST - 3 comments

Then I thought, hrm, a lot of what I know out of the Little Red Songbook is quite possibly more recent: what portion of it would Steve know? Long story short (you should all know how I roll by now), this has led to a week of researching the shit out of things to date particular songs, then listening carefully to as many versions of them as I could find to find the version that would be closest to the version Steve would've known it as. And the next thing I knew, I had a mix.
posted by sciatrix at 9:01 AM PST - 19 comments

Anna May Wong was the first Chinese-American movie star, first appearing as an extra in 1919. Her first leading role came in 1922's Toll of the Sea, the first color feature made in Hollywood. She continued appearing in films until 1960, the year prior to her death. [more inside]
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:58 AM PST - 5 comments

Terry Pratchett, best known for the Discworld series consisting of about 40 books, died today after a long, well publicized battle with Alzheimer's in which he's also been outspoken on right to die issues.
posted by dmd at 8:42 AM PST - 636 comments

Bill Watterson, the famously reclusive creator of Calvin & Hobbes, has given his longest interview to date, to be published in the exhibition catalog for the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum's exhibit, Exploring Calvin & Hobbes.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:23 AM PST - 29 comments

What's the scariest thing in the world? Ask your teenage daughter. Ninja Pizza Girl is a game from independent game studio Disparity Games.

I’m pitching my idea for "baddies" to the Disparity Games design think tank. It consists of me, my wife and however many of our daughters happen to be in the room at the time.… Raven looks up. "Robots aren’t scary Dad.… Zombies aren’t scary either."

I’m getting a little tetchy with this unreceptive design group. I ask Raven, "So what are teenage girls scared of?"

Raven thinks for a moment. She looks sad. "Other teenagers," she says.

[more inside]
posted by Lexica at 5:25 AM PST - 12 comments

Three years ago, for the 50th birthday of the interrobang, a punctuation mark combining both the shape and the meaning of a question mark and an exclamation mark, Nora Maynard interviewed Penny Spekter, the widow of its creator, about typography and working as a woman in advertising in the 1960s. [more inside]
posted by frimble at 1:43 AM PST - 16 comments