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How hipster is your music taste?
posted by griphus at 8:25 PM PST - 109 comments

DC comics has announced a "restructuring" of their Vertigo imprint and has eliminated Shelly Bond's role as Vertigo Vice President & Executive Editor. Bond was also involved in setting up Wild Animals, Gerald Way's DC imprint which uses many early Vertigo characters. Meanwhile previous Vertigo head Karen Berger has returned to comics editing a book for Image.
posted by Artw at 6:30 PM PST - 62 comments

What does the life of an average 29 year old American look like? (SLAtl)
posted by R.F.Simpson at 5:22 PM PST - 54 comments

A growing number of parents in Illinois who are unable to access necessary mental health treatment through Medicaid are voluntarily abandoning custody to the state so their children can get the care they need for severe mental illness. [more inside]
posted by drlith at 4:59 PM PST - 17 comments

Paracelsus, the father of modern toxicology, held that "The dose makes the poison.” Substances considered toxic are harmless in small doses, and conversely an ordinarily harmless substance can be deadly if over-consumed. Going a step beyond Paracelsus, hormesis is the idea that small doses of ordinarily harmful stressors actually improve a variety of outcomes by stimulating defense or repair mechanisms. Below a certain dose the stressor acts beneficially, there is a threshhold dose where the stressor has no net effect, and past that point the net effect is deleterious. [more inside]
posted by Across the pale parabola of joy at 4:02 PM PST - 30 comments

Arizona Central reports that the Phoenix Department of Streets has been distributing to kids bicycle safety comics that use very explicit visuals of injuries from bicycle accidents. Warning: I'm not kidding when I say they are explicit.
posted by agatha_magatha at 3:46 PM PST - 90 comments

It's Spring of 1971 and you're a student at UC Berkeley, where artist-in-residence Sun Ra is offering a lecture series entitled "The Black Man In The Cosmos." The Weather Underground is blowing up bathrooms. The Ed Sullivan Show is grinding to a halt. As the weeks roll on, Charles Manson will get the death sentence (later reduced to life in prison) and the Rolling Stones will drop Sticky Fingers. But you? You're in the pocket of something Next Level and way above all that noise. Sometimes Ra hauls in his keyboard and treats the class to extended solos. Mostly he delivers his own signature blend of arcane afrofuturistic dharma: Part One. Part Two. Part Three. Part Four. [more inside]
posted by Bob Regular at 1:48 PM PST - 16 comments

At this week's UN General Assembly Special Session on drug policy - scheduled after lobbying by Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia, whose leaders are calling for a more “humane solution” to the drugs problem that goes beyond a focus on enforcement and criminalization - Canada's Health Minister Jane Philpott announced that Canada will begin the process of legalizing and regulating marijuana in spring 2017.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:03 PM PST - 124 comments

Victoria Wood - comedian, actress, singer and songwriter, screenwriter and director - has passed away at 62 on 20 April 2016, after a short battle with cancer. [more inside]
posted by NordyneDefenceDynamics at 1:01 PM PST - 42 comments

Eat to grow longer! Don't run into other snakes! When longer, hold the mouse button for a speed boost!
posted by numaner at 12:31 PM PST - 81 comments

How Jerry Brown Quietly Pulled California From The Brink [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:12 PM PST - 43 comments

Message in a bottle, promising finder a shilling, bobs up after 108 years “We found an old shilling, I think we got it on eBay. We sent it to her with a letter saying thank you.” [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 12:02 PM PST - 11 comments

Once a centre of industry as well as a prosperous port, the city is now synonymous with the misery of migrants, and its residents are not enjoying their notoriety.
posted by Kitteh at 11:46 AM PST - 7 comments

Steven Universe is a pretty popular Cartoon Network show with pretty odd scheduling -- its second season mostly aired in week-long "StevenBombs", with one new episode airing each weeknight, with sometimes months between Bomb weeks. This isn't because the animators are backlogged or the censors are combing through it for naughty bits. Instead, it's a conscious strategy of combining binge-watching and appointment-television scheduling to maximize fan reaction. And it seems to be working.
posted by Etrigan at 11:40 AM PST - 30 comments

First, as you are a woman, stop crying.
posted by amnesia and magnets at 11:27 AM PST - 16 comments

An industrial estate on the outskirts of a sleepy spa town in deepest Powys, Wales, may not strike you as the obvious place to find an ambitious little hydrogen vehicle maker with plans to revolutionise the way we power, drive, and own our cars.
posted by veedubya at 10:58 AM PST - 23 comments

Last Men Standing. The stories of eight men who aren't supposed to be here. Diagnosed with HIV in the 1980's, when that was a death sentence, they are now living lives they never expected to have. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:23 AM PST - 8 comments

From psych-pop band Fever the Ghost and Tasmanian animator Felix Colgrave (previously), a new and fantastic voyage: SOURCE. [more inside]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 10:16 AM PST - 2 comments

Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew announced that Harriet Tubman, a black woman who helped to free slaves via the Underground Railroad, will replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the US $20 bill. This is a change from earlier plans to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 with a woman. The new bill designs “should be ready by 2020.”
posted by Rangi at 9:58 AM PST - 263 comments

Access Together crowdsources accessibility information about businesses and other venues. The site is relatively new, and coverage outside of NYC is sparse, but contributing is easy.
posted by jedicus at 9:38 AM PST - 1 comments

AP: South Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of 'vagrants'. [no graphic pictures but deeply unpleasant]

Choi was one of thousands — the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled — rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea's arrival as a modern country. ... The owner of Brothers, Park, received two state medals for social welfare achievements and sat on a government advisory panel. His version of his story even inspired a 1985 television drama about a man's heroic devotion to caring for what were called "bottom-life people."

posted by grobstein at 9:36 AM PST - 16 comments

Earlier this month, the Disney cable network Freeform (formerly ABC Family) announced they had greenlit an upcoming live-action series about the Marvel teenage superheroes Cloak and Dagger. In response, comic artist Kate Beaton has used Twitter and her comic “Hark A Vagrant” to draw attention to the impracticality of Dagger’s costume, notably the Tit Window. (See also The Hawkeye Initiative, discussed previously.)
posted by bibliowench at 9:16 AM PST - 70 comments

Pop culture is filled with brilliant female characters who know everything and can do anything — except save the day.
posted by chaiminda at 8:58 AM PST - 62 comments

"When we punish others, we're advertising our own moral character" is one of the assertions made in this piece on Vox that offers a number of explanations for the question of "why it's so easy to get sucked into fights on the internet."
posted by MoonOrb at 8:47 AM PST - 22 comments

A Decade of Viral Dance Moves
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 7:08 AM PST - 19 comments

Chronas is a history project linking Wikipedia and Wikidata that lets you use a time slider at the bottom to see how the world looked any given date during the past 2000 years, watching realms grow and disappear. Video describing how it works. If you click on the countries/regions/empires shown, then it will show you the appropriate Wikipedia entry. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 2:42 AM PST - 24 comments

After leading with a cover story criticizing Xi Jinping (otoh) The Economist has been censored in China; Time too and now Medium. [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:48 AM PST - 24 comments