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Some yet-to-be-revealed celebrity is releasing a book in July that the publisher is promising will be a blockbuster. But Variety can report for certain that this mystery author is not, as rumored, Taylor Swift.
posted by Etrigan at 9:02 PM PST - 15 comments

PetaPixel makes a pretty strong case that yes, a photograph can change the world. In less time than it's going to take me to write this sentence I have thought of at least ten remarkaly powerful images. I think that the earth shot from space, that magical image of this magnificent, beautiful blue ball -- we're so lucky. Stop, for just a second, humor me here, look at our beautiful home -- we're so lucky. But I know there are ugly things also, that someone caught on film -- cough if up, move us, either to tears or to joy, or, best, tears *of* joy. Can a photograph change the world? (Show your work.)
posted by dancestoblue at 8:51 PM PST - 12 comments

New demon catshark species discovered off coast of Western Australia. The senior curator of the CSIRO's Australian National Fish Collection, Will White, said the creature's distinctive white iris was a rare feature for deepwater sharks. "Normally, they're always very dark — either dark green or just black eyes," he said. "It has been found only in one other deepwater shark species — a member of a closely related species from New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea." Dr White said the characteristic could help to establish links between similar species. The shark, which lives hundreds of metres below the ocean's surface, is seldom seen.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:49 PM PST - 12 comments

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom changes the conversation By Mike Mahardy [Polygon] “If, as with music, movies, TV, or books, we can look at Tears of the Kingdom as a dialogue between creator and audience, then Nintendo has effectively changed the conversation. Historically, when Zelda players asked Nintendo, “Can I do this?” the answer was usually “no” or “not yet.” Breath of the Wild often answered in the affirmative, but Tears of the Kingdom takes that response one step further: When pressed as to whether something is possible in this enormous, absurd, mysterious world, Nintendo doesn’t just try to say “yes.” It strains to say “yes, but also...””
posted by Fizz at 7:15 PM PST - 193 comments

This is handy if you live in New York City, and a useful example for folks in other areas with lots of different zones, districts, etc.: "The NYC Boundaries Map is a tool for viewing and querying overlapping administrative boundaries in NYC." Give it an address and (example) it'll tell you which districts it's in for 12+ different slices, e.g., police precinct, school district, Community District (which Community Board covers it), legislative districts for city and state representatives, ZIP codes, etc. Source code and a longer prose explanation available on GitHub.
posted by brainwane at 6:24 PM PST - 4 comments

Chapter 1: The Myth of the Childhood Obesity Epidemic (in full). And a delightful interview with Virginia Sole-Smith on her new book Fat Talk. Chapter 5 excerpt (on the diet culture of doctors) in TIME, and Chapter 9 excerpt (on fathers) in The Atlantic.
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:01 PM PST - 68 comments

The Last Gamble of Tokyo Joe by Dan O’Sullivan is the story of Ken Eto, who grew up the son of a fanatical Christian convert in California, was sent to a Japanese internment camp during World War II, and after getting involved in illegal gambling, rose through the ranks of the Chicago mob. And then his story really started.
posted by Kattullus at 1:52 PM PST - 14 comments

Nataki Garrett to Leave Oregon Shakes Amid Emergency Fund Drive Like many theaters, the legendary Oregon Shakespeare Festival has suffered due to the pandemic, and the periodic fires going on in the region. But even with that, they are out of money and the local population has been resistant to having an African-American director, Nataki Garrett. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:10 AM PST - 130 comments

Enlinko and Unrelated Words are solo games of semantic connections between random words. The TikTok #gotitchallenge, demoed on YouTube by Hank & John Green, is a similar 2-player game. "What is My Thought Like?" was an eloquent multiplayer game of connections between random words, once common (1786, 1789, 1790, 1806, 1831, 1849, 1855, 1858, 1863, 1867, 1871, 1875, 1904, 1913, 1917, 1922), mentioned in 1750, and essentially the same as "Le Jeu de la pensée" in 1701. But Semantle and Pimantle (previously) are semantic connection games too, according to a FAQ resembling "French Toast" and the 20 Questions variant "Plenty Questions" (co-invented by MeFi's own moonmilk and re-invented on TikTok as "Guess the Word"). 20 Questions appears in English in 1796 and 1799, maybe inspired by "Les Douze Questions" (1788).
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:02 AM PST - 9 comments

At category 4 or 5, Cyclone Mocha is set to strike an area of land filled with refugee camps on the Myanmar coast of the Bay of Bengal. The camps are near the ocean and low in elevation. The last similar storm in strength and location (Nargis, 2008) killed over 100,000. In contrast to some sorts of natural disasters, hurricanes come with warning. The Red Crescent relief fund.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:28 AM PST - 3 comments

Pask Makes A Mid-Century Table: a chill and genial Aussie woodworker narrates his way start to finish through a very pretty one-off dining table project that I absolutely did not start watching just because of the tiling table top pattern. Includes a brief cameo by a placid, sleepy surprise python, because Australia.
posted by cortex at 8:27 AM PST - 24 comments

The strands of medicine, consciousness expansion, intoxication, addiction, and crime were tightly entangled in fin-de-siècle Paris, where ether and chloroform circulated among bohemian demi-mondaines alongside morphine, opium, cocaine, hashish, and wormwood-infused absinthe ... Literary references to ether abounded, either as a signifier of decadence or as a literary prop to shift a realistic narrative into the landscape of dreams and symbols, where its dissociative qualities became a portal to strange mental states, psychological hauntings, uncanny doublings, and slippages of space and time. from The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Mike Jay
posted by chavenet at 7:36 AM PST - 3 comments