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One Sunday a month, Nancy Falaise closes the doors of her Montreal salon to lead a workshop for young girls of color struggling to love their natural hair.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:36 PM PST - 10 comments

"I didn't know it at the time, but that fall my body was the site of international debate about sex, work, poverty, and consent." Lorelei Lee writes for N+1 on the consequences and complexity of criminalizing of sex work. content warning: sexual assault
posted by ChuraChura at 3:48 PM PST - 10 comments

In the summer of 2013, Matt Straw attended a wedding at Heritage Hall, a brownstone building in East Vancouver known for its elegant ballroom, stained glass chandeliers and historic clock tower. But all anybody could talk about was that urinal.
posted by Etrigan at 12:44 PM PST - 75 comments

“The afterlife of slavery is not only a political and social problem but an aesthetic one as well.” The writings of MacArthur Fellow Saidiya Hartman "bear witness to lives, traumas, and fleeting moments of beauty that historical archives have omitted or obscured." An excerpt of Professor Hartman's most recent monograph, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments was published on the New Yorker website earlier this year, and Professor Hartman spoke about her work and her working process on the Critical Inquiry podcast in 2018.
posted by mustard seeds at 12:38 PM PST - 3 comments

'A silent act of resistance': the hidden tattoo studios of Tehran: Tattoo artists are regularly arrested in Iran and sentenced to fines, lashes or imprisonment – yet they are in huge demand among young people. “I consider tattooing as a medical treatment for my generation,” [Soheil Aflaki] says. “It’s a way to heal the psychological wounds you sustain while living in a culture in crisis.”
posted by not_the_water at 12:18 PM PST - 4 comments

British Wildlife Photography Awards 2019 winners [The Guardian]
posted by readinghippo at 11:08 AM PST - 14 comments

If you saw ESPN's College Gameday broadcast from Ames, Iowa, you might have noticed an Iowa State University football fan holding a sign asking for help replenishing his Busch Light fund. It worked! People sent money to Carson King's Venmo. And then more did. So many, in fact, that he decided one case of beer was plenty, and he was giving the rest to the University of Iowa Stead Family Children's Hospital. Then Busch matched his donation. Then Venmo matched it. And people kept giving, until the pledged amount topped a million dollars. [more inside]
posted by Caxton1476 at 11:06 AM PST - 21 comments

New York Magazine is effectively taking a minority stake in the privately held Vox Media Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem and Tom Wolfe worked for the magazine, which has won 44 National Magazine Awards and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in criticism.
posted by Bee'sWing at 10:36 AM PST - 20 comments

Microsoft introduces a new, more powerful Excel lookup function called XLOOKUP. [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 9:42 AM PST - 103 comments

For the soundtrack of sadness and bitter(sweet) nostalgia from Soviet sci-fi films that promised a bright and glorious future, here's 1 Hour Of Melancholic Sovietwave [via Mltshp]. If you check out YouTuber Truckfighter, you'll find three more hour-long mixes of Russian Doomer Music: volumes one, two and three. But who is that bleak looking cartoon dude with the beanie, stubble and a cigarette, and what is a doomer? KnowYourMeme covers doomer, noting some of the memes include antisemitic slurs and ideas, and Mel Magazine takes a deeper dive into 4chan’s ‘doomer’ memes, "a strange frontier in online extremism," with "depressing" music as its soundtrack. And as usual, the far right smuggles ‘ironic’ racism within their memes (where if you scrape away the irony, you're left with racism). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:40 AM PST - 11 comments

Sayonara Wild Hearts is the wickedly neon bisexual fever dream of a pop album I didn’t know I needed [Polygon] “Sayonara Wild Hearts doesn’t waste any time getting the player into its gorgeous, techno-pop-driven dreamscape. The main character is transformed into her strong and fashionable alter ego in the opening moments of the story, as she tries to track down renegade tarot cards, who are also strong and fashionable women. You don’t need to think about any of this much, should you choose not to. According to the voice over (performed by Queen Latifah, would you believe it?), you must chase the tarot deck through obstacle-laden tracks, riding everything from a skateboard to a high-jumping deer and guiding them left and right across a twisting, humming path. Occasionally, you deliver a flurry of timed punches against fabulously posed enemies by tapping buttons in time with the music.” [YouTube][Launch Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:34 AM PST - 26 comments

"I couldn’t stand Bruce Springsteen when I was younger. It’s all my dad would listen to, morning and night, in the car or the house, while cleaning or gardening. He’d sing along and play air guitar, sometimes air harmonica or saxophone when those instruments showed up on a song. Bruce’s voice was synonymous with my father’s. I took no interest and made no attempt to listen, finding it easier to rebel against the music than it would have been to actually rebel against my dad, which I had no reason to do in the first place." Lucy Dacus reflects on The Boss, image, and rebellion, and covers Dancing In The Dark. [more inside]
posted by everybody had matching towels at 6:33 AM PST - 29 comments

Watercolor is pigment in transparent media. Gouache is pigment in opaque media. Hajra Meeks paints two copies of an art nuevo drawing. Riety paints a face with each. The Art Hive paints two tigers. (youtube links)
posted by rebent at 6:26 AM PST - 8 comments

Clarence Thomas's Radical Vision of Race - "Thomas has moved from black nationalism to the right. But his beliefs about racism, and our ability to solve it, remain the same." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:19 AM PST - 22 comments

Behind the beatific image of Tibetan Buddhism lies a dark, complicated reality. But is it one the Western gaze wants to see?
posted by Mrs Potato at 5:49 AM PST - 20 comments

THERE IS A TAVERN HERE. INSIDE THE TAVERN, YOU SEE VALIS. SELECT AN OPTION:
- GO (N)ORTH
- GO (E)AST
- (R)EVERSE ENGINEER A CUSTOM CPU FROM A SINGLE PROGRAM [more inside]
posted by metaquarry at 5:39 AM PST - 15 comments

The world is running out of space for cemeteries. It would take a cemetery the size of Las Vegas to hold all those expected to die in the next 20 years in the US alone. What's the alternative? From Australia to Germany to Japan, a new funerary tradition is taking hold: natural burial. [more inside]
posted by rednikki at 3:46 AM PST - 44 comments