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“The gimmick is that heterosexuality is a disaster, toxic masculinity is killing the world, and there are ways out of it aside from fascism or festering away in a lonely bedroom until you are eaten by your starving pitbull or your own insecurities ... The work that the Fab Five are doing for the luckless, loveless men of Georgia is girlfriend work. It is emotional labor, domestic labor, the work that anyone who has ever dated a straight man will recognize.“ [more inside]
posted by Grandysaur at 11:44 PM PST - 93 comments

"Let's compare 28 different "sky cultures" to see differences and similarities in the shapes they've seen in the night sky"
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:34 PM PST - 16 comments

36 NEW SHOWS OF THE HELLISH MID-SEASON TV OF 1979 (slyt) [more inside]
posted by theodolite at 9:31 PM PST - 105 comments

With an exotic cast of characters plenty of chaos and insanity, British humor and definitely NSFW dialogue, [more inside]
posted by Redhush at 8:52 PM PST - 1 comments

As humans gain an ever-increasing understanding of animals’ ability to think, feel, and experience pain, many of us are asking whether eating meat is morally acceptable. Can you care for animals and also eat them? There’s a difference between compassion and sentimentality and, after all, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. As I’m grilling steaks later, trying to visualize the cow killed for this meal, I wrestle with the question. (Ephrat Livni, Quartz)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:50 PM PST - 22 comments

A history of Braun Design [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [more inside]
posted by unliteral at 8:41 PM PST - 10 comments

From a servant sporting goalie gloves to a 16th-century child soldier in studs, the self-portraits of Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop reframe African revolt through the lens of foot
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:57 PM PST - 2 comments

Got a pet? Send me a photo and I’ll TOONIFY them.... A twitter thread by magferret that is some of the most fun with animals ever found on the internet.
posted by hippybear at 7:38 PM PST - 5 comments

"Their order is such that they may well be said to have a common wealth, since all they do is common without any private respect. Nihil norunt nisi commune: They work for all, they watch for all, they fight for all…And all this under the government of one Monarch, of whom above all things they have a principal care and respect, loving reverencing, and obeying her in all things.” So wrote the Rev. Charles Butler in his 1609 masterwork, The Feminine Monarchie, Or the Historie of Bees. The book was the first of its kind, an exhaustive treatise on the bee, and especially notable for its radical, carefully-observed proposition: That the leader of this complex society was, in fact, a queen. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:05 PM PST - 4 comments

Abby Johnston writes about her mothers habit of leaving her loving, hand-written notes When I was fifteen, while searching for childhood photos of myself for a project with my dance team, I found another tucked inside a photo album that had been sitting at the top of my closet for years. The notes came unexpectedly, and with them, electric shocks of realization: they often turned up when I wasn’t searching for anything at all. The few times I tore through my possessions in moments of desperation or longing, trying to apply logic to her hiding spots, they never surfaced.
posted by dancestoblue at 6:35 PM PST - 8 comments

Fire in Cardboard City (slyt)
posted by dobbs at 5:26 PM PST - 13 comments

"We really didn’t know how to exercise political power, but we thought we’d have fun with it. And we didn’t like pay toilets." How four high school students created CEPTIA, the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, and were instrumental in ending the burgeoning pay toilet industry in the mid-70s, and kicking off a few citywide bans in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and others. A few first-person accounts on Steve Froikin's blog: the networking, the song, "we never had a 'shit in'" [via]
posted by jessamyn at 4:34 PM PST - 28 comments

U.K. Supreme Court judges "reluctantly" upheld lower court rulings that a joyless marriage is not adequate grounds for divorce without the spouse's consent. Tini Owens has been petitioning for divorce since 2015, but her husband's refusal has prohibited the divorce from going forward. "The appeal of Mrs Owens must be dismissed. She must remain married to Mr Owens for the time being,” the supreme court judge Lord Wilson said in the majority ruling. “Parliament may wish to consider whether to replace a law which denies to Mrs Owens any present entitlement to a divorce in the above circumstances.” The case has brought the lack of "no fault divorce" law into the spotlight.
posted by stillmoving at 3:19 PM PST - 33 comments

Breaking the Ice is an 87-minute long mixtape of rare Icelandic funk- and soul-inspired music from the 60s, 70s and 80s, made by Iceland-born, Oakland-based DJ Platurn, with the crate-digging assistance of his cousin Sveimhugi, and his father's extensive record collection. Released by Needle to the Groove Records, the project started life as a three-part series on the webzine Nerdtorious (parts 1, 2, 3). For more about Breaking the Ice, you can read an article by Brandon Roos, an interview with DJ Platurn by Marke B, a short introduction by DJ Platurn to eight of the seventy records in the mix, or watch a six-minute mini-documentary before diving into the mix. [via RÚV]
posted by Kattullus at 2:34 PM PST - 7 comments

It started as a mystery. Why aren’t women playing adult co-ed sports? And why, once they start, do they so often drop out? The mystery actually started as a question to myself, but it was a different question: Am I crazy?, I texted a friend after a particularly frustrating Friday night soccer game a couple of years ago with my co-ed team... Were the guys really not passing to me, or was I just not as open to receive a pass as I thought I had been? ... And why didn’t any of the other women there seem to be angry?

I know now that I wasn’t crazy, and I wasn’t alone... Most, if not all co-ed leagues are set up to render women as second-class athletes.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:06 PM PST - 98 comments

Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller has packaging that gamers with disabilities can open without their teeth [The Verge] “Microsoft has clearly focused on accessibility for the controller, but it’s also revealing this week that it has taken a unique approach to the packaging for the product. People spend hours watching gadget unboxings on YouTube, but you rarely see a box that’s designed to be opened as easy as possible. That’s a design consideration that Microsoft has taken to heart for its new Xbox Adaptive Controller packaging. “A lot of these limited mobility gamers are actually used to opening packages with their teeth,” explains Mark Weiser, a packaging designer at Microsoft. The Xbox Adaptive Controller packaging can be opened a variety of ways, and it’s now even easier with or without the use of teeth.” [Previously.] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:06 PM PST - 25 comments

The death toll from a fire that ripped through a Greek coastal town stood at 80 on Wednesday as frantic relatives tried to track down people missing from the inferno and coroners began the grim task of identifying bodies. While the source of the devastating fire in the resort town of Mati is unknown, the fires now (or were recently) burning in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Latvia, and elsewhere are wildfires encouraged by hot, dry weather. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 11:52 AM PST - 50 comments

Mefi’s komara has been sculpting tiny skulls and leaving them out in public as free art for people to find and claim. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:05 AM PST - 49 comments

Mama Merganser is raising 76 ducklings on a lake in Minnesota. Photos by Brent Cizek.
posted by jeather at 9:30 AM PST - 17 comments

The most likely historical legacy of a no-deal Brexit will be the final refutation of the common British misconception that the UK is still a global superpower, possibly accompanied by Scottish secession and re-entry to the EU, Irish reunification in some sort of federal system, re-acquisition of Gibraltar by Spain, and the disintegration of the Conservative (and possibly Labour) parties at the next general election. I just hope I'm still alive at the end of it.

Charlie Stross (cstross) weighs up "That Sinking Feeling" in relation to Brexit.
posted by rongorongo at 9:05 AM PST - 231 comments

Far beneath the deeply frozen ice cap at Mars’s south pole lies a lake of liquid water—the first to be found on the Red Planet.
posted by thecjm at 7:28 AM PST - 37 comments

First Assassination Markets Appear on Prediction Platform Augur - "Now that assassination markets are here, a fierce debate has emerged in cryptocurrency circles over what — if anything — should be done about them, as well as who should be held responsible for these clearly-illegal death markets."
posted by kliuless at 6:28 AM PST - 39 comments

Rodents in idents: famous movie scenes recreated with marmots (Groundhog Day and The Big Lebowski not included) in TV idents made for French TV channel France 3 (2018). Previous France 3 idents: marmot musicians (2015) (SLYTs).
posted by elgilito at 5:23 AM PST - 3 comments

Metafilter fave Ask a Manager gets a question from a reader still in school: "Will my taste in office supplies seem weird or unprofessional?" Their dad thinks so. Alison disagrees. The internet agrees with Alison with evidence.
posted by like_neon at 2:03 AM PST - 73 comments