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Chinti: a short animated film about an ant who finds a picture of the Taj Mahal. Written, directed, and animated by Natalia Mirzoyan (previously).
posted by eruonna at 11:58 PM PST - 4 comments

"What's in a Necronym?" by Jeannie Vanasco: "Whether the knowledge affected van Gogh—that he shared both his name and birthday with a dead sibling—remains unknown, the guide said. 'Does anyone have any questions?' he asked. My mind filled with loud, hurried thoughts and just as suddenly emptied, like a flock of birds scattering from a field." [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 9:34 PM PST - 27 comments

The Sad Fading Away of the Refugee Crisis Story [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:37 PM PST - 39 comments

Ikea Hack: $22 Standup Desk. "Interested in trying a standing desk but put off by the price? Check this out. Colin Nederkoorn, founder and CEO of Customer.io, has designed a simple base that can raise a monitor and keyboard up to standing desk height. Even better, it's constructed out of Ikea furniture that'll only run you $22. Nederkoorn named his creation the Standesk 2200." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 6:16 PM PST - 50 comments

The All Blacks today became the first team to defend the Rugby World Cup. After the match a young eight year old fan ran onto the field to join the celebrations and took a heavy tackle from security - what happened next is pure gold.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 5:56 PM PST - 29 comments

Tillman, the Skateboarding English Bulldog who became an Internet celebrity, has left the Boardwalk. He was 10 years old in centripetal years.
posted by Smart Dalek at 5:49 PM PST - 14 comments

Geekfilter: A series of video lectures on how Python works under the hood. (MLYT)
posted by JHarris at 4:43 PM PST - 9 comments

Norwegian sketch comedy actors together with two random rappers wandering the beach in LA make magic together.
posted by leotrotsky at 3:56 PM PST - 10 comments

Cheap coffee is one of America's most unsung comfort foods. It's as warming and familiar as a homemade lasagna or a 6-hour stew. It tastes of midnight diners and Tom Waits songs; ice cream and cigarettes with a dash of Swiss Miss. It makes me remember the best cup of coffee I ever had. Even though there was never just one best cup: there were hundreds. [SLSeriousEats]
posted by papayaninja at 2:30 PM PST - 187 comments

Every day this month, the wacky graphics folks at Baboon Creation (with Motion Designer Simon Lagneau) have posted an animated gif showing an iconic horror character in a 'walk cycle' (or float or bounce, depending on the character). From Frankenstein's Monster on the 1st to Michael Jackson Zombie on the 31st, all in a cartoonish style that's more spoopy than spooky. (Day 17: the Addams Family's Cousin Itt) Still, they call it "31 Horror Days"; I can't disagree or the monsters'll get me.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:37 PM PST - 10 comments

After more than two decades of being dismissed as music for parents and tourists, roots reggae is relevant again in Jamaica. A group of young artists is repopularizing the genre in a new wave that has been named the Reggae Revival. (Revival is a controversial word here, I would learn, but more on that later.) There are enough of them to call it a movement, the best-known being the singers Protoje, a 33-year-old from St. Elizabeth, and Chronixx, 23, from St. Catherine. - Meet the Millennial Musicians Behind Jamaica’s New Movement
posted by beisny at 1:34 PM PST - 7 comments

In “Anything for a Witness”, the most recent episode of the Everything Is Stories podcast, Lois Gibson, relates the story of her career, loving faces, and her general thoughts on being the greatest forensic artist of our time. (Includes intense descriptions of sexual violence.) This closes a loop with “Burden of Proof”, the podcast’s first episode, in which a former videographer for COPS and former crime scene photographer describes their careers affiliated with the law. Inside, a few more of the crime episodes that have been a staple of the freeform, well-produced, interview podcast. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 1:09 PM PST - 1 comment

Gamerbee vs. Infiltration. Gamerbee vs. Momochi. Some details inside. [more inside]
posted by neuromodulator at 12:08 PM PST - 14 comments

dancinggoths
posted by gwint at 11:38 AM PST - 9 comments

With a clause in complex contracts that few people read, corporations have insulated themselves from lawsuits and locked Americans into a system where arbitrators overwhelmingly favor business. (SLNYT)
posted by crazy with stars at 11:35 AM PST - 26 comments

Blue Monday - a sci-fi short story by Laurie Penny for Motherboard all about cats, Internet videos, and emotional contagions.
posted by The Whelk at 11:25 AM PST - 11 comments

Released in 1971, 666 is the third and final Aphrodite's Child album, a two record concept concerning the biblical Apocalypse. The singer (now deceased) went on to become this guy. The keyboard maestro went on to become this guy. But the album itself remains one of the creepiest, strangest, best examples of so-called progressive rock ever released. And that [infinity] track featuring Irene Papas on vocals -- that's genuinely terrifying in the right/wrong situation.
posted by philip-random at 11:16 AM PST - 20 comments

Elephants pulverize giant pumpkins during 2015 Squishing of the Squash
posted by jaguar at 9:40 AM PST - 20 comments

"The legal system is practically infested with cases about people who buy houses full of termites and find out too late. These are run-of-the-mill lawsuits that can turn on the wording of the contract and the jurisdiction the house was sold in. Stambovsky v. Ackley is basically the same, except ghosts." Sarah Jeong, writing for Motherboard. [more inside]
posted by Banknote of the year at 9:27 AM PST - 6 comments

Meltdown at the Walrus by Jane Lytvynenko and Jesse Brown [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:13 AM PST - 15 comments

How did a funky R&B guitarist and singer get signed on to a spook-tacular music video? No, I'm not talking about Ray Parker Jr.'s very Halloween-appropriate music video for "The Other Woman", but his later video for the scary-funny movie, Ghostbusters. Screen Crush has the inside story on the making of Ghostbusters theme song video (alt source: Daily Motion). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:05 AM PST - 13 comments

Despite the press conference, the case was fairly low profile. It received more attention back in Canada than it did in Los Angeles, where the suspicious disappearance of a young woman — though not exactly common — wasn’t a rarity either. And with no news to report as the days went on, coverage of her disappearance basically ceased. That was, until February 13, when the LAPD summoned the public’s help again. This time, the department released a video. They wouldn’t confirm it at the time, but the video was taken by the Cecil Hotel’s elevator security camera in the early hours of February 1. It was, it turns out, the last known footage of Lam. And it was so strange, so creepy, so inexplicable that the release turned the case inside out.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 9:03 AM PST - 46 comments

The Stone Tape is a television play, first broadcast on the BBC as a Christmas ghost story back in 1972. It was written by Nigel Kneale, best known as the writer of Quatermass. BBC radio is broadcasting a new adaptation tonight (along with an adaptation of The Ring)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:01 AM PST - 14 comments

Cartoon Research takes an in-depth look at the 1952 Donald Duck short, Trick or Treat, directed by Jack Hannah and starring June Foray (previously) as yet another Witch Hazel. [more inside]
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 7:41 AM PST - 2 comments

Lake Street Dive covers Queen for Halloween. Gets even better than the original at 2:35 or so. Wait for it.
posted by Stewriffic at 7:20 AM PST - 24 comments

Grey Hooded Figure

Location: Broughton Astley (Leicestershire) - B581, Broughton Way
Type: Haunting Manifestation
Date / Time: 11 August 2014, 22:30h
Further Comments: Two people watched as a grey hooded figure walked out in front of their car, forcing them to brake sharply. The figure crossed the road and dissipated near a gate. Both witnesses were left shaken.

The Paranormal Database collects and categorises crowdsourced accounts of paranormal phenomena from all across the United Kingdom. Read spooky reports of haunted hospitals, rail and London Underground ghostlore, haunted coalmines, scary trees, haunted hotels and pubs, road ghosts, royal ghosts, school ghosts, spooky goings-on in prisons, haunted shopping centres, and haunted TV studios, among many other categories. [more inside]
posted by Sonny Jim at 7:06 AM PST - 12 comments

Jezebel ran a Scary Story contest this year, here's the wonderful (though sometimes badly edited) results. Need more? Then check out last year's winners, especially the one titled "Look at Me".
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:15 AM PST - 19 comments

The greatest trick the prop ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist. A look at the hidden power of film props and how filmmakers use the everyday (and not so everyday) objects in their scenes to enhance cinematic storytelling. [slVimeo]
posted by ellieBOA at 2:03 AM PST - 33 comments

Many have heard of Brian Eno and David Byrne's album "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts," but perhaps fewer have read the Book by Amos Tutuola, or its companion book "The Palm Wine Drinkard," described as "Aside from the transmogrified strangeness of folk and fairy tales ... unlike almost anything else in print."
posted by boilermonster at 11:43 PM PST - 13 comments

meanwhile, Abe Vigoda is still kickin' it. Albert Francis "Al" Molinaro was an American actor in television and films, most notably as Al Delvecchio,[1] the owner of Arnold's on Happy Days and its spin-off show Joanie Loves Chachi. He was 96 years old. The cause of death was gallstones Molinaro had decided not to have surgically removed due to his age, Molinaro’s son told TMZ. Molinaro died in a Wisconsin hospital. [more inside]
posted by shockingbluamp at 7:53 PM PST - 29 comments

Smithsonian Magazine has an article about a "Datacycle" (nicknamed "Frankenbike") created by a "tinkerer" and climate scientist that is being used by the Seattle Transportation Department and its consultants Alta Planning + Design to update their Bicycle Master Plan. Includes a fun video of the bike on local trails.
posted by agatha_magatha at 3:31 PM PST - 9 comments

At McKamey Manor, people pay to be kidnapped, bound, masked, slapped, stomped on and held under water over an eight-hour ‘tour’. But unlike other ‘extreme haunts’ of the same variety, here there’s no safe word to make it stop [more inside]
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 3:19 PM PST - 137 comments

"Unknown even to the majority of parliament, by 1972 the CBNRC had grown to employ some 600 people—slightly smaller than the Department of Justice, and about half the size of the Canadian Forces unit for military signals intelligence. Every successive federal government vehemently denied that Canada engaged in any international espionage, while the CBNRC secretly helped to fight and even escalate the Cold War."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:28 PM PST - 4 comments

Why I Don't Throw a Vulcan Salute
posted by jillithd at 2:20 PM PST - 61 comments

Twitch, the social media platform for video games, just launched ‘Twitch Creative': a section of the site dedicated to non-gaming videos from artists. There you'll find people creating paintings or illustrations, composing songs, designing costumes, and even glass blowing. To celebrate, Twitch is holding an 8-day marathon livestream of every single Bob Ross The Joy of Painting episode.
posted by zarq at 1:59 PM PST - 44 comments

The Idaho Potato Museum is a unique museum which appropriately showcases Idaho’s Famous Potatoes®. Located in the old Oregon Short Line Railroad Depot you’ll discover the world of potatoes®. [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 1:56 PM PST - 16 comments

Social insects are the most altruistic animals we know of, always ready to give their lives for Queen and Colony. Or... almost always. Possibly deranged researcher Kevin Loope collected colonies of yellow jacket wasps from the wild and video-taped instances of matricide, when workers turn on the queen and kill her. His study helped confirm the hypothesis that this happens most often when all the wasps have the same father.
posted by clawsoon at 12:39 PM PST - 25 comments

Flash Javascript Friday Fun: Wander around an island defending yourself against wildlife, crafting shelter, and digging for treasure in Wayward. [more inside]
posted by mccarty.tim at 12:11 PM PST - 17 comments

As Heroin Use by Whites Soars, Parents Urge Gentler Drug War Noting that “junkies” is a word he would never use now, he said that these days, “they’re working right next to you and you don’t even know it. They’re in my daughter’s bedroom — they are my daughter.” [more inside]
posted by futz at 11:49 AM PST - 125 comments

As the main supplier of fashion prints to nearly half a continent, the textile company has continued to dominate that fashion scene there for almost 170 years. How’d that happen? Rooted in European colonialism and a testament to African ingenuity, creativity, and cultural pride; it’s a surprising story…

posted by infini at 11:38 AM PST - 28 comments

Twitch Installs Arch Linux — Remember how chaotic Twitch Plays Pokemon was? Now we have a much harder challenge: install Arch Linux. Every ten seconds, the most popular keystroke in Twitch chat will be entered into an Arch Linux virtual machine. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 11:35 AM PST - 46 comments

ESPN is suspending publication of Grantland, effective immediately. The ambitious website hosted writing from a long list of witty, intelligent contributors on sports and pop culture, including Rembert Browne, Katie Baker, Mark Harris, Molly Lambert, and Mark Lisanti. Grantland was launched by Bill Simmons, whose contract with ESPN was not renewed earlier this year after almost 15 years with the company after Simmons was publicly critical of ESPN and the NFL.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 11:21 AM PST - 109 comments

Meet the Grindr Rabbi Who Says the Gay Sex App Can Bring Jews Together [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:53 AM PST - 10 comments

In 2007, Kazakh economist Dmitriy Dey fired up Google Earth to see if he could find any ancient pyramids around his hometown of Kostanay. He didn't, but what he did find was just as unexpected: a crossed square and threefold swastika. Over the next few years, he discovered more and more geoglyphs, including nearly a hundred "mustache mounds." These finds were initially dismissed or ignored by mainstream scientists, but NASA has just released their own imagery of the structures and instructed ISS astronauts to try to collect more.
posted by theodolite at 10:49 AM PST - 21 comments

Google will be folding its Chrome operating system into Android, according to The Wall Street Journal and independently confirmed by The Verge. Google is denying this, according to The Guardian, saying it is "committed to Chrome OS and it is likely Android and Chrome OS will co-exist with tighter integration between the two for the foreseeable future". Chromebook-like small laptops running Android such as the Pixel C are not uncommon, though they tend to dual-purpose as tablets and be more expensive than machines running the browser based operating system.
posted by Artw at 9:29 AM PST - 54 comments

Equity in Publishing: What Should Editors Be Doing? "My job as an editor is to publish the best writing—wait for it—by a variety of writers. With regards to Best American Poetry, we're correct to call out the clear conflation of "best" and "white"—too often "We just published the best writing we could find" is a terrifying excuse for not publishing diversely. And this diversity—no, this equity, because I don't just acquire a writer of color and call it a day, returning to white business as usual—does require work." [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 9:21 AM PST - 5 comments

Today, the Google homepage brings you the “2015 Global Candy Cup” doodle, in which flappy-bird-esque witches collect candy. May the best color (Green) win.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:43 AM PST - 25 comments

We've previously talked about the Langley School Music Project, Dondero High School's Pop Concerts, PS22's choir, and Chapel Hill's Chorus Project. Now we have first graders at the Grundschule Am Lemmchen in Mainz Mombach singing, playing, and acting out Kraftwerk's iconic single Roboter. [SLYT, if you ignore my links to previous school music groups.]
posted by naturalog at 8:09 AM PST - 10 comments

What it says on the tin. This seems like the kind of thing at least 75% of MetaFilter would enjoy - a podcast by cats. Not to be confused with Purrrcast which is a podcast about cats.
posted by pyro979 at 6:44 AM PST - 27 comments

Henry Bendinelli has been skiing for 70-some years. A short docu by filmmaker Riley Hooper, about a 91 year old guy.
posted by growabrain at 6:12 AM PST - 7 comments

It appears Witt imagined a world where all police departments and hospitals have a sort of spider lab. When a patient or inmate behaved strangely, that person's blood would be fed to a spider, which would then be left overnight to build a web. In the morning, a careful look at the spider's handiwork would provide answers. "Aha! My webs indicate this inmate over here is a laudanum addict, and this poor patient is suffering from schizoaffective disorder," a chin-scratching lab technician might have said.

Unfortunately, the only result was "that spiders hate the taste of schizophrenia urine", which is useful if you are schizophrenic, want to get rid of a spiderweb and don't have a home-made flamethrower available.
posted by jeather at 5:58 AM PST - 46 comments

The Funky Little Football Phone That Sold a Million Magazines.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:11 AM PST - 33 comments

BBC: "If you're white, male and poor enough to qualify for a free meal at school then you face the toughest challenge when starting out in life. That's what the Equality and Human Right Commission (EHRC) has said in "the most comprehensive review ever carried out on progress towards greater equality in Britain"."
posted by marienbad at 3:00 AM PST - 79 comments

The ‘driest place on Earth’ is covered in pink flowers after a crazy year of rain. The Atacama Desert in Chile, known as the driest place on Earth, is awash with color after a year’s worth of extreme rainfall. (SLWaPo, plenty of pics, not a slideshow)
posted by hippybear at 2:17 AM PST - 23 comments

Friends call Constable Collins Rain Man or Yoda or simply The Oracle. But to Scotland Yard, London’s metropolitan police force, he is known as a “super recognizer.” He has a special gift of facial recall powers that enables him to match even low-quality and partial imagery to a face he has seen before, on the street or in a database and possibly years earlier.[slNYT]
posted by ellieBOA at 1:45 AM PST - 30 comments

A series of 55 animated vintage book graphics by Henning M. Lederer
posted by leibniz at 1:27 AM PST - 4 comments

Homestar Runner Dot Net ("It's Dot Com!") returns for another Halloween, with the House that Gave Sucky Tricks (YouTube link).
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:48 AM PST - 13 comments

Webcomicker Kris Straub is no stranger to creepypasta, from his classic of the genre "Candle Cove" to his ongoing comic "Broodhollow", and for Halloween this year he has come up with another snapshot of local TV gone very wrong: "local58.info"
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:25 AM PST - 12 comments

Celebrate like it's October 31, 1994! This music video is a cover of TLC's classic song "Creep" from 1994 and features a pumpkin-headed Creeper, a time/space portal, psychedelic flowers, silk pajamas, and a seductive mysterious crystal. What could possibly go wrong?!
posted by nangsta at 10:44 PM PST - 3 comments

"It's an explosive virus. It replicates like crazy ... and it destroys everything in its path, so, how is it just hanging out in the testes for like nine months?"
posted by latkes at 10:04 PM PST - 9 comments

Paradox Interactive, makers of complicated strategy games like Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings 2, have purchased White Wolf Publishing and all its IP from EVE Online makers Crowd Control Publishing, announcing plans to move forward with the IP Commentary and analysis are available from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Venture Beat, and PC Gamer, and Obsidian have tweeted in response to the calls for them to be hired to make Bloodlines 2.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:40 PM PST - 40 comments

Back in 1972, there was no internet, no Marvel Cinematic Universe. But there was vinyl. The Amazing Spider-Man - A Rockomic - From Beyond The Grave is an example of early media for kids with a turntable. René Auberjonois leads a cast of amazing actors for this Spidey adventure.
posted by valkane at 9:26 PM PST - 12 comments

"I never would have believed it, until one night I woke up around three o'clock in the morning. I felt something cold against my shoulder. It was the ceiling. I was looking down at my own body." Julianne Moore and other actors ask you to think about "the paranormal, one of the biggest issues of our age" in this ad for Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series of books. Curious about unexplained phenomenon? Tales of events, dismissed as chance, coincidence, or imagination, but what if they aren't? How could you explain it? How did these ads (if not the books) get so popular? Fittingly enough, it may have just been fated in the stars. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:58 PM PST - 40 comments

In 1977 NBC produced a one-off TV movie, Halloween with the New Addams Family, a revival of the 1960s series with virtually* all of the original TV actors. [via] [more inside]
posted by figurant at 7:57 PM PST - 6 comments

Facebook, funeral homes and the feeding of our lives as we fade away. A horror story by Andrew F. Sullivan for Hazlitt.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:30 PM PST - 1 comment

Floundering company thrown a $1 billion dollar lifeline. With teachers and other public worker on strike for better pay, the message seemed to be money for a beloved corporation and austerity for everyone else. Bombardier has lost over $4.9 billion dollars in delayed C Series passenger jet program but the Quebec government is investing taxpayer money in the company. But really, it's less a bailout, QC Premier Phillippe Couillard says, and more an investment. An investment that the taxpayers of La Belle Province are footing the bill for even as taxpayers in other provinces are angry for services not rendered. In the wake of this news, Bombardier stock has taken a tumble.
posted by Kitteh at 4:27 PM PST - 51 comments

I was lucky that he merely threatened me. A journalist from Newsweek actually was deported from a different tax-haven island (Jersey) for her reporting there, and was banned from re-entering the island, or any part of the U.K., for nearly two years. Even though her story was unrelated to the financial-services industry, it was expected to bring negative publicity to the island, threatening its reputation as a place to do business. The message was therefore quashed by banishment of the messenger. The wealth-management industry does not mess around. Inside the Secretive World of Tax-Avoidance Experts.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 4:14 PM PST - 23 comments

Back to the Source is a documentary by Cédric Hauteville about Historical European Martial Arts, which is the modern study and practice of historical western fighting techniques as documented in period texts. [more inside]
posted by usonian at 2:29 PM PST - 14 comments

A paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science details how photo data from Flickr can be used to predict people's movements. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:18 PM PST - 10 comments

If you've always wanted to visit Bogotá, Colombia, here's an extra reason to visit! To promote KitKat's launch in Colombia, Nestle installed 20 billboards. These are no ordinary billboards. [more inside]
posted by cynical pinnacle at 1:50 PM PST - 15 comments

Jose Ahonen does magic tricks for dogs. [more inside]
posted by Ned G at 12:21 PM PST - 50 comments

How Johannes Kepler saved his mother from the stake.
posted by steinwald at 12:09 PM PST - 14 comments

The girl in the closet. The doomed nurse. The cave creature. Just a few of the best jump cuts in horror movie history.
posted by gottabefunky at 11:44 AM PST - 96 comments

Here is the rather strange story of how American-made specialized film was salvaged from a spy balloon and sent to take the first-ever pictures of the far side of the moon by the Soviet space program, and how those photos were then faxed back to Earth, line by grainy line. Long read and/or audio podcast. [more inside]
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:32 AM PST - 13 comments

"In December 1900, a boat called Hesperus set sail for the island of Eilean Mor, one of the seven islets (also known as the “Seven Hunters”) of the Flannan Isles off the coast of northwestern Scotland. Captain James Harvey was tasked with delivering a relief lighthouse keeper as part of a regular rotation. The journey was delayed a few days by bad weather, and when Harvey and his crew finally arrived, it was clear that something was awry. None of the normal preparations at the landing dock had been made, the flagstaff was bare, and none of the keepers came to greet the Hesperus. The keepers, as it turned out, weren’t on the island at all. All three of them had vanished. " [more inside]
posted by davidjmcgee at 11:07 AM PST - 35 comments

Raif Badawi's website, Free Saudi Liberals, hosted discussion of the importance of separating religion from politics. It was shut down in 2012 after his conviction on charges of insulting Islam, for which he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1000 lashes. He received 50 lashes in January of this year, but further flogging has been postponed due to his worsening health. This week, the European Parliament awarded him the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, the latest in a string of honors from journalism, human rights, and writers' organizations.
posted by Etrigan at 10:27 AM PST - 25 comments

How to Spot Manipulation - PsychCentral
How to Pick Up on Manipulative Behavior - Basic guide from WikiHow
Are You Being Manipulated? Keys to Hidden Aggression - Good Therapy.org
Psychological Manipulation Resources - Band Back Together
Eight Ways to Spot Emotional Manipulation - cassiopaea.com
Subtly Controlling Behavior - Abuse and Relationships [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:48 AM PST - 85 comments

Bot-ston is a Twitter bot which creates new verses in the style of Gaston's song from Beauty and the Beast.
posted by ActionPopulated at 9:03 AM PST - 26 comments

Paul Ryan Is Elected House Speaker [The New York Times] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:53 AM PST - 127 comments

RIP singer Diane Charlemagne, probably best know as the vocalist on Goldie's classic drum and bass track 'Inner City Life'. Among her many other contributions across a wide range of music she had top ten hits with the Urban Cookie Collective with 'The Key, The Secret' and 'Feels Like Heaven'
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:06 AM PST - 9 comments

China will allow all couples to have two children, a Communist Party leadership meeting decided on Thursday, bringing an end to decades of restrictive policies that limited most urban families to one child. It is estimated that the one-child policy prevented the births of 400 million children since its adoption.
posted by Sir Rinse at 5:54 AM PST - 128 comments

Songs From A Mountain Goats Album In Which Cicero Is Not Mentioned And Everybody’s Marriages Work Out [SLtoast]
posted by schmod at 5:52 AM PST - 155 comments

3m55s of the most clever ball handling you will see all season.
posted by hippybear at 1:53 AM PST - 28 comments

Weird, or future, or both! There's the "car-like thing," the "three-seater with a swiveling cabin," the boat that's not a boat, the one with eight wheels, an "extreme super pickup truck" with scissor doors, a sidestep into the Toyato RV-2, and the one with the cute little head on the dash. [more inside]
posted by goofyfoot at 10:48 PM PST - 24 comments

The Radical Life of Rosa Luxemburg
– A graphic novelization of the revolutionary life and legacy of “Red Rosa.” (previously) [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:25 PM PST - 7 comments

Forgotten Silver tells the story of pioneering filmmaker Colin McKenzie. This legendary New Zealander created the worlds first colour film and first talking film. He created the first tracking shot and captured footage of a pre-Wright brothers flight. This "documentary" made by Peter Jackson & Costa Botes caused a furore in New Zealand when it was released 20 years ago today. Watch the first 10 Minutes for free. Rent or buy here. [more inside]
posted by Start with Dessert at 10:25 PM PST - 14 comments

At the end of a quiet road, behind a veil of twisted black oak trees, there was a house. A woman lived there. On bitter nights like this one, she sat by the fire and read until she grew tired enough for sleep. But on this night, as her lids grew heavy, she was startled by a sound. A sound she wasn’t accustomed to hearing these days. Who could be calling, she wondered? And this late? She rose from her chair and picked up the phone.

“Hello?” [more inside]
posted by pwally at 9:06 PM PST - 47 comments

NPR: Despite a 2009 law designed to prevent this from happening, "since January 2009, the Army has 'separated' 22,000 soldiers for 'misconduct' after they came back from Iraq and Afghanistan and were diagnosed with mental health problems or traumatic brain injury. As a result, many of the dismissed soldiers have not received crucial retirement and health care benefits that soldiers receive with an honorable discharge."
posted by beagle at 6:30 PM PST - 44 comments

New York’s Dominican Consul General revoked Díaz’s Order of Merit last week, calling him “anti-Dominican.” Díaz was accused Thursday of being "antidominicano" by the Dominican Republic's consul in New York, Eduardo Selman. Díaz has also been stripped of the Order of Merit awarded to him by the Dominican Republic in 2009. Diaz lost the award after he and Edwidge Danticat were in Washington, speaking to congress about the anti-Haitian initiatives in the Dominican Republic. (These were discussed previously on MetaFilter.) [more inside]
posted by frumiousb at 4:53 PM PST - 8 comments

A cat's inherent dignity being so assaulted is delightfully photogenic.
posted by smoke at 4:39 PM PST - 42 comments

How to catch a match fixer.
posted by josher71 at 3:18 PM PST - 16 comments

Thiiisss! Issss....Jeffpardy
posted by cortex at 2:10 PM PST - 78 comments

Kevin Kelly spent two weeks in Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in far west China. “This area has more in common with the culture of Turkey than with Beijing. It's kebab with chopsticks. But this is really China. In fact it is the largest province of China.“ Here are 120 photos of the "Silk Road".
Kevin Kelly loves to travel: Read the “Previous Lives“ part on his bio. 
KK's Asia travels on Metafilter before, here and here. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 1:05 PM PST - 36 comments

Alison Green of Ask A Manager interviews a prison librarian
posted by bq at 12:24 PM PST - 14 comments

A military surveillance blimp has come free of its mooring at Aberdeen Proving Ground near Baltimore and is now floating over Pennsylvania while fighter jets monitor it. Of course the blimp has a Twitter account.
posted by exogenous at 12:23 PM PST - 68 comments

Joanna Newsom's new album Divers (Divers, Leaving the City, Sapokanikan) is too much for The Fragile Ears Of Men [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:17 PM PST - 149 comments

The film Alien Nation was a hit in 1988, so the fledgling Fox Network figured building off its success with a human-alien buddy cop show was a can’t-miss concept.... [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:32 AM PST - 86 comments

"Shaye Saint John videos are the internet's answer to outsider art, and they've been flippantly relegated to just another thing in "that weird part of YouTube." There's no big artist reveal, no studio-backed film adaptation, no corporate sponsorship. She posted videos on YouTube, and then one day, she stopped."

[more inside]
posted by anazgnos at 10:21 AM PST - 11 comments

Whipping. Frothing. Puking. Puking while tripping. Delayed puking then death. Conditional puking.
posted by bismol at 10:04 AM PST - 48 comments

Suspended Fifa president Sepp Blatter has suggested there was an agreement in place for Russia to host the 2018 World Cup - before the vote took place. The 79-year-old told Russian news agency Tass of a "discussion" in 2010 about future World Cups.
posted by marienbad at 9:16 AM PST - 46 comments

First, Kill the Witches. Then, Celebrate Them. by Stacy Schiff [The New York Times]

Among the oldest settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and for years among the wealthiest cities in America, Salem had many claims to fame. It preferred not to count the witchcraft delusion among them; no one cared to record even where the town had hanged 19 innocents. It addressed the unpleasantness the New England way: silently. When George Washington passed through Salem in October 1789, he witnessed neither any trace of a witch panic nor of Halloween. Sometimes it seems as if the trauma of an event can be measured by how long it takes us to commemorate it, and by how thoroughly we mangle it in the process.

posted by Fizz at 8:43 AM PST - 50 comments

Called "2g Tuesday, Facebook will give employees super slow internet speeds once a week so they can better understand markets like India
posted by artsandsci at 8:28 AM PST - 58 comments

Put Your Makeup On So They'll Like You (slMedium)
posted by Kitteh at 8:27 AM PST - 98 comments

By analysing the language of popular magazines, TV shows and self-help books and by conducting interviews with men and women in different countries, scholars including Eva Illouz, Laura Kipnis and Frank Furedi have demonstrated clearly that our ideas about love are dominated by powerful political, economic and social forces. Together, these forces lead to the establishment of what we can call romantic regimes: systems of emotional conduct that affect how we speak about how we feel, determine 'normal' behaviours, and establish who is eligible for love – and who is not.
posted by divined by radio at 7:35 AM PST - 23 comments

Twitter user and occasional Metafilter poster leyawn has created a choose-your-own-adventure game in tweets and GIFs using his own pixel art. Click the profile links to advance the story! [more inside]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:35 AM PST - 6 comments

A 5-year study of 333 Australians found those with the short-short version of the 5-HTTLPR promoter of the SERT serotonin transporter gene were more likely than other adults to be depressed if they had suffered abuse as a child. However, if they hadn't suffered childhood abuse, they were likely to be happier than the rest of the population. This may help resolve inconsistent previous results about the effects of the allele.
posted by clawsoon at 7:32 AM PST - 3 comments

Mira is a sixth grade student in NYC. In this century's answer to a lemonade stand, she started a business hand-crafting memorable, nearly unbreakable passwords.
posted by Mchelly at 6:55 AM PST - 64 comments

Media watchdog and advocacy group GLAAD (the acronym doesn't stand for anything anymore) has released the 2015-2016 edition of its Where We Are On TV Report, breaking down the overall diversity of main and recurring characters on broadcast, cable, and (for the first time) streaming scripted television shows. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:32 AM PST - 4 comments

We’d like to publish a story you wrote! - Cool! What do you pay? Oh, we can’t afford to pay, but EXPOSURE! - How about no. Wil Wheaton being propositioned by big media.
posted by klausman at 6:18 AM PST - 67 comments

"These are books that should get the essence of Halloween going and give people a sure scare!" Goodreads' list of 536 books to get your fright on.
posted by valkane at 5:46 AM PST - 16 comments

It was late 2011. Haley was a 32-year-old phone tech earning about $35,000 a year, and he was in a sour mood. Price had noticed it, and when he spotted Haley outside on a smoking break, he approached. "Seems like something's bothering you," he said. "What's on your mind?"

"You're ripping me off," Haley told him.

Remember the Guy Who Gave His Employees a $70,000 Minimum Wage? Here’s What Happened Next., by Paul Keegan, Slate (originally for Inc.) [previously]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 1:44 AM PST - 74 comments

"Are Think Tanks Undermining Australian Democracy? The past decade, for example, has seen powerful American think tanks (link is external), headed by political elites and backed by significant philanthropic funding, fundamentally re-shape key aspects of schooling. This has raised serious questions about whether elite economic and political actors are ‘working through’ think tanks to undermine democratic processes and the ideals of representative democracy."
posted by man down under at 11:58 PM PST - 13 comments

Garfield minus Garfield Plus Lying Cat. (SLTumblr) In this remixed comic, Jon Arbuckle lives with a very different but equally dubious feline.
posted by immlass at 10:27 PM PST - 21 comments

Do you know Dagny Taggart? She's a character in Atlas Shrugged. She's also a best selling author of language learning ebooks on Amazon. According to her bio, she speaks 15 languages, which she picked up in her life of traveling the world. There's just one problem: the author Dagny Taggart doesn't exist. She is the pen name for a group of anonymous authors who were hired by an Argentine "Amazon entrepreneur" and a follower of k(indle) money get rich schemes. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:16 PM PST - 18 comments

Lion cubs Found in nearly perfect condition. More from the excellent Siberian Times
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 8:25 PM PST - 17 comments

Amber Rose wrote the book on it: How to Be a Bad Bitch [more inside]
posted by triggerfinger at 6:17 PM PST - 30 comments

To commemorate the last decade’s worth of failures, we organized and analyzed the data we’ve collected. We cannot claim—nor can anyone, really—to have a definitive, comprehensive database of debacles. Instead, from the incidents we have chronicled, we handpicked the most interesting and illustrative examples of big IT systems and projects gone awry and created the five interactives featured here. Each reveals different emerging patterns and lessons. Dive in to see what we’ve found. One big takeaway: While it’s impossible to say whether IT failures are more frequent now than in the past, it does seem that the aggregate consequences are worse. [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 5:21 PM PST - 61 comments

What's the 13.5? Why, it's 十三五 - China's 13th Five Year Plan. And here's a happy, chirpy pop song and video to explain it all. (slyt)
posted by Devonian at 3:32 PM PST - 48 comments

The crossword community has lost another of the greats: Henry Hook. The New Yorker ran a profile of Hook in 2002, calling him "the Marquis de Sade of the puzzle world." [more inside]
posted by Shmuel510 at 2:14 PM PST - 21 comments

Sketchnotes, Graphic Recordings, Visual Notes, you may have seen them at the last conference or big corporate meeting you attended: beautifully hand drawn notes that summarize big ideas using simple visuals. This Web 3.0 generation has adopted the term "sketchnotes" which was coined by interface designer, illustrator, and author Mike Rohde. The field is actually called Graphic Recording which is "capturing everyone’s most salient points and making them stick", as described by experts at ImageThink. Practitioners call themselves all sorts of things, Sketchnote Artists, Visual Note Takers, Graphic Recorders, Scribes, Visual Notes Artists, Live Sketch Artists, Group Graphics Practitioners and more. [more inside]
posted by bobdow at 1:59 PM PST - 13 comments

You’ve seen a painting of Norbert Grupe. A heavy, creased brow and shoulder-length hair framing a frightening scowl, the massive work hung in the fictional Manhattan Museum of Art in Ghostbusters II. [...] Most people will only ever know Norbert Grupe as Vigo the Carpathian. But Norbert Grupe—a Nazi soldier's son, boxer, professional wrestler, failed actor, criminal, and miserable human being who was never so happy as when he could make someone hate him—was once a man so beautiful that other men wanted to paint him.

posted by Faint of Butt at 1:54 PM PST - 16 comments

The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp: What the future of low-wage work really looks like. "In the years since Amazon became the symbol of the online retail economy, horror stories have periodically emerged about the conditions at its warehouses—workers faced with near-impossible targets, people dropping on the job from heat or extreme fatigue. This isn’t one of those stories." (SLHuffPost)
posted by Melismata at 1:52 PM PST - 76 comments

Wes Anderson scenes and their symmetry through centering
posted by glaucon at 1:02 PM PST - 19 comments

Sex, Drugs, And V-Neck Tees: Inside The Cult Of American Apparel
posted by almostmanda at 12:13 PM PST - 12 comments

AIRBNB vs. BERLIN
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:05 PM PST - 17 comments

Claire Boucher / Grimes has released the first music video for two of the (relatively) guitar-heavy tracks from her upcoming fourth album, Art Angels: “Flesh Without Blood/Life in the Vivid Dream” (She has also been sharing cover art sketches for all of the album’s tracks on her tumblr.)
posted by Going To Maine at 11:37 AM PST - 30 comments

"When a student at Spring Valley High School, South Carolina captured a cellphone video of a police officer flipping over a student and her desk, then throwing the student across the room, the video quickly got national attention: people were alarmed that a police officer in a school would do that to a teenager who didn't pose a threat."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:23 AM PST - 279 comments

It's GWAR's turn again for the AV Club's Undercover and this year they're hitting the only Cyndi Lauper tune on Tipper Gore and the PMRC's filthy fifteen; folks, I present GWAR covering "She Bop"
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:00 AM PST - 28 comments

A cracker that escaped the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was recently sold at auction for £15,000 ($23,000), making it the most valuable biscuit in the world.
posted by 0bvious at 9:44 AM PST - 47 comments

"From 1936 to 1966, the “Green Book” was a travel guide that provided black motorists with peace of mind while they drove through a country where racial segregation was the norm and sundown towns — where African-Americans had to leave after dark — were not uncommon. ... The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which is celebrating its 90th anniversary, this year digitized its Green Book collection." (Previously.) [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 9:41 AM PST - 13 comments

In which we explore Picard's specific relationship with Earl Grey. Hot.
posted by hippybear at 9:13 AM PST - 62 comments

The Lost Girls: 'Misdiagnosed, misunderstood or missed altogether, many women with autism struggle to get the help they need.' Part of Spectrum's Sex/Gender in Autism special report. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:09 AM PST - 33 comments

Charlotte Brontë sketch identified as self-portrait. [The Guardian]

A sketch of a woman’s head by Charlotte Brontë, previously thought to be of another pupil drawn while the author was at boarding school in Brussels, has been identified as a self-portrait. The literary biographer Claire Harman said the drawing, which she suggests shows Brontë looking into a mirror, preceded the novel Jane Eyre, in which the protagonist also draws herself in a similar fashion. The sketch dates from 1843, four years before Brontë published Jane Eyre, one of English literature’s great masterpieces, and when the young writer was suffering the agonies and insecurities of unrequited love.

posted by Fizz at 8:35 AM PST - 13 comments

Recently, PBS' NewsHour ran a segment about the overwillingness of some schools to suspend even kindergarten students, in part driven by the desire to boost scores by pushing out weaker students. The segment focused in particular on the charter chain Success Academies, which has been particularly unrepentant in the use of suspensions at early ages. The PBS reporter, John Morrow, had spoken with a number of families, but only found one willing to go on camera: Fatima Geidi and her son, Jamir. Why there was reluctance became clear very quickly, as the head of Success Academies, Eva Moskowitz, publicly posted Jamir's disciplinary record on the charter's website in response, very much likely in contravention of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:00 AM PST - 65 comments

Reducing consumption of added sugar, even without reducing calories or losing weight, has the power to reverse a cluster of chronic metabolic diseases, including high cholesterol and blood pressure, in children in as little as 10 days, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco and Touro University California. (SLScienceDaily)
posted by Huck500 at 7:52 AM PST - 27 comments

Get an in-depth look at what it takes to be a referee in MLS. (Warning: Auto playing video) Related: Behind the Scenes: See how PRO monitors its refs on matchday
posted by josher71 at 7:50 AM PST - 8 comments

30 Years of NES, 30 Interesting NES Facts.
posted by curious nu at 7:37 AM PST - 9 comments

Philip French iconic Film Reviewer for the Observer (Sunday Guardian) has died aged 82.
On his retirement after 50 years as a critic The Wrap asked him some questions and here is an interview and some of his work.
posted by adamvasco at 7:23 AM PST - 7 comments

Depending on whom you ask, the use of the active voice over the passive is arguably the most fundamental writer’s maxim, thought to lend weight, truth, and power to declarative statements. This absolutist view is flawed, however, because language is an art of nuance. From time to time, writers may well find illustrative value in the lightest of phrases, sentences so weightless and feathery that they scarcely even seem to exist at all.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:00 AM PST - 30 comments

What You're Really Asking When You Ask 'Where Are You From?'
posted by signal at 6:35 AM PST - 182 comments

Down Cemetery Road (1964), from the BBC Monitor series, in which Larkin was interviewed by John Betjeman. - A casual conversation that halts and resumes in Larkinland. [more inside]
posted by unliteral at 6:13 AM PST - 3 comments

But when it’s done—and it’s almost done—there will be no more Anguses, no more Lemmys. The bloody-minded, death-demolishing longevity of AC/DC and Motörhead cannot be counterfeited or repeated. Lemmy once roadie’d for Jimi Hendrix; these days, retiring postshow to his tour-bus bunk, he reads P. G. Wodehouse.

Twilight of the headbangers.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:41 AM PST - 51 comments

When he first started recording as the Weeknd, Tesfaye was an unlikely star. "I was everything an R&B singer wasn't," he says. "I wasn't in shape. I wasn't a pretty boy. I was awkward as fuck. I didn't like the way I looked in pictures — when I saw myself on a digital camera, I was like, 'Eesh.'" Instead of his face, his album art and videos featured black-and-white photos of artful nudes — a topless girl in a bathtub, a woman's ass in a party dress. The aesthetic was American Apparel-style hipster catnip, right down to the Helvetica font.
posted by ellieBOA at 5:41 AM PST - 11 comments

Internet of Shit. Laugh now, while you can still buy a toaster that doesn't have Linux on it. The Internet of Things previously: 1, 2
posted by jklaiho at 5:14 AM PST - 87 comments

When a Washington couple failed a paternity test, they thought the fertility clinic had used the wrong sperm. But the clinic was pretty sure it hadn't. A more detailed fertility test showed that the father wasn't the father -- his never-born twin brother was. [more inside]
posted by jeather at 5:09 AM PST - 43 comments

BBC Four Presents three programmes about the psychedelic era of British pop: Psychedelic Britannia, 60s Psychedelic Rock at the BBC, Arena - Magical Mystery Tour. Tune in, turn on, chill out.
posted by marienbad at 5:08 AM PST - 9 comments

How an episode of The Simpsons is made.
posted by chavenet at 2:59 AM PST - 19 comments

Bundesliga Fashion - nach ungefähr dreissig Sekunden fängt die Party an
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:52 PM PST - 16 comments

In 1929, two years after his historic solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne photographed archaeological sites in the American Southwest and Mayan sites in Central America (Google books preview) as a side-gig while Charles helped set North America air mail routes. Almost 80 years later, Erik Berg re-visited those same Southwestern sites, as seen in the exhibition Oblique Views: Archaeology, Photography, and Time (media bank) and book Oblique Views: Aerial Photography and Southwest Archaeology. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:08 PM PST - 4 comments

Ben Ziek competes for Punniest of Show in the 2015 O. Henry Pun-Off. (He Wins) [more inside]
posted by rebent at 7:57 PM PST - 18 comments

Grant Morrison on his plans for editing Heavy Metal.
posted by Artw at 7:55 PM PST - 16 comments

Why Bottled-in-Bond Whiskey Is the Best Deal In Booze
posted by Stewriffic at 7:29 PM PST - 57 comments

. . . I've got a bridge to sell you," says the dadjoker in your life when expressing doubt. But why exactly do we speak of selling the Brooklyn Bridge? Because, in the Ellis Island days, people did indeed sell famous landmarks to recent immigrants. NYT. One George C. Parker, between 1883 and 1928, was in the Brooklyn Bridge-vending business full time. [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 5:09 PM PST - 5 comments

Buy Nothing Day has a long history but it's what one expects from a magazine like Adbusters, not a large retailer with $2B in annual sales. But REI plans to close on "Black Friday" and suggests people opt outside. People outside of the US can continue to live their lives as normal.
posted by GuyZero at 4:54 PM PST - 59 comments

Medium's Steven Levy asks for ideas on how to end age discrimination in tech companies. Readers respond. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 3:45 PM PST - 65 comments

On Monday, October 26, SXSW Interactive made the call to cancel two sessions for the 2016 event: "SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community" and "Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games." We had hoped that hosting these two discussions in March 2016 in Austin would lead to a valuable exchange of ideas on this very important topic.

However, in the seven days since announcing these two sessions, SXSW has received numerous threats of on-site violence related to this programming.

[more inside]
posted by SansPoint at 3:38 PM PST - 243 comments

In some areas (e.g., Pittsburgh, Raccoon City), zombification is now more common than attending college or serving in the military and must be understood as a modal life course event. Even if one is “objectively” a mindless animated corpse, one cannot really be said to be fulfilling one’s cultural role as a zombie unless one shuffles across the landscape in search of brains.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 1:24 PM PST - 26 comments

Atlas Obscura (?!) presents an inventory of cinematic worms by size, smallest to largest (SLYT)
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 1:01 PM PST - 16 comments

You thought your last flight was rough? Watch these hurricane hunters fly directly into the eye of Patricia.
posted by pjern at 12:43 PM PST - 13 comments

The SLJ900/32 Segmental Bridge Launching Machine. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:26 PM PST - 12 comments

On October 28, 1962, U.S. strategic (i.e., nuclear) forces were at DEFCON 2 due to the Cuban Missile Crisis, including missiles on Okinawa, Japan. That evening, the operators of those missiles received launch instructions. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 12:11 PM PST - 93 comments

Ursula LeGuin's Anarchist Aesthetics [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:01 PM PST - 26 comments

Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:51 AM PST - 10 comments

Psychologist Carol Dweck (previously and previously) looks at how educators are (mis)interpreting her research on growth vs. fixed mindsets, and shares her reflections about what works and what doesn't.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 11:42 AM PST - 5 comments

Archaeologists have discovered one of the richest Mycenaean Greek tombs ever found: a mostly intact shaft grave in Pylos dating from 1600-1400 BC. [SLNYT]
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 11:35 AM PST - 15 comments

"GetYourCare.org was created to show that women have real choices when it comes to health care," the site says. "All across America, thousands of low-cost health centers offer women and their families high-quality health care." A press release from the Alliance Defending Freedom claimed that the facilities listed on the map "typically offer the full range of women's health services without all the scandal of Planned Parenthood." But in an investigation into the facilities, RH Reality Check has found that these "real choices" include hundreds of elementary, middle, and high schools; clinics that provide care for homeless people; nursing homes; pediatrics centers; and even the D.C. jail. [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 11:10 AM PST - 47 comments

26-year-old radio producer Ana Adlerstein was walking in Oakland when she was catcalled by 51-year-old Jerome. She pulled a microphone and her, Jerome, and Jerome’s son’s mother had a short conversation.
After some wrangling, Ana got Jerome into the studio and the conversation continued. Love + Radio presents: “An Old Lion, or a Lover’s Lute”
posted by Going To Maine at 10:50 AM PST - 17 comments

Sandwiched between Brazil’s hosting of the 2014 soccer World Cup and the Olympic Games next summer in Rio de Janeiro, the Indigenous Games are being advertised as a low-budget, low-key alternative to the marketing-hyped and TV-driven sports culture of the 21st century.
posted by Tom-B at 9:59 AM PST - 6 comments

The most cut-off man on Earth. The story of Slava, a meteorologist who works at the most remote weather station on Earth and in a time capsule all his own.
posted by Kitteh at 9:49 AM PST - 21 comments

On November 13, 2015, astronomers will get the chance to observe an object that will hit earth at 6:20 UTC, around 65 kilometres from the southern tip of Sri Lanka. This little guy is rare - even though there are many pieces of space junk in orbit around the earth, none of the artificial objects in distant orbit are known to have made the return trip to Earth. [more inside]
posted by cynical pinnacle at 9:45 AM PST - 17 comments

How do you learn to keep your balance when skydiving? Take lessons in a wind tunnel
posted by growabrain at 9:35 AM PST - 14 comments

What America’s immigrants looked like when they arrived on Ellis Island.
posted by chunking express at 8:58 AM PST - 31 comments

The AV Club provides 13 Old Time Radio dramas to scare the pants off you this Halloween
posted by The Whelk at 8:47 AM PST - 15 comments

Robin: And just to clarify, Nicky, your recording equipment is live right now, yeah?
Nicky: Yes.
Robin: So if, Perry, you really meant what you said about this being declassified, you won't mind saying it right now.
Col. Eubanks: Can we sit down first, or...?
Robin: Right after you repeat the thing. On the record.
Col. Eubanks: The NSA would like to hire Cypher to decode a message we have reason to believe was transmitted by an extraterrestrial. Now can we sit down?
The Message Podcast, Episode One [more inside]
posted by davidjmcgee at 8:37 AM PST - 25 comments

Pumpkin boats, whether captained by avant-gourd record-smashers or costumed squads of competitive squashbucklers, have sprouted up as part of fall festivals across North America. The splashing pumpkins have been spotted in Tualatin Oregon, Elk Grove California, Salt Lake City Utah, Cooperstown New York, Damariscotta Maine, and Lake Pesaquid in Nova Scotia, home of the Windsor Pumpkin Regatta.
posted by oulipian at 6:51 AM PST - 12 comments

Old NYC Mapping New York City (and beyond) using old photos from the NYPL.
posted by ColdChef at 6:47 AM PST - 12 comments

Lenin Statue in Ukraine Turned Into Darth Vader [The New York Times]

A statue of Vladimir Lenin in Odessa, Ukraine, has been refashioned into Darth Vader. A Ukrainian artist, Alexander Milov, whose work appeared at Burning Man this year, transformed the statue in response to recent decommunization laws, which require the removal of Communist symbols in Ukraine. Lenin’s face has been covered by Darth Vader’s mask, and his coat has been turned into a cape. The helmet also reportedly serves as a Wi-Fi hot spot.

[Image] [Image 2] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:25 AM PST - 18 comments

The deadly legacy of HIV truthers [more inside]
posted by zarq at 5:57 AM PST - 72 comments

"Ask horror-movie buffs to name their favorite decade for the genre, and you’ll likely receive a variety of answers. The ’30s had several of Universal’s classic roster of monsters. The ’40s had Val Lewton. The ’70s had zombies, and giant sharks, and Texas chain saw massacres. (The ’70s is a good choice.) But at the risk of speculating wildly, it seems safe to assume that not too many hypothetical fans would single out the current or previous decade as horror’s finest. Classics take time to solidify, reputations take a minute to build, and hindsight is 20/20. Plus, you know, Uwe Boll." [more inside]
posted by valkane at 4:13 AM PST - 226 comments

The voluntary nature of friendship makes it subject to life’s whims in a way more formal relationships aren’t. In adulthood, as people grow up and go away, friendships are the relationships most likely to take a hit. You’re stuck with your family, and you’ll prioritize your spouse. But where once you could run over to Jonny’s house at a moment’s notice and see if he could come out to play, now you have to ask Jonny if he has a couple hours to get a drink in two weeks. [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 3:27 AM PST - 58 comments

Mosuo, Kingdom of Daughters Not All Chinese Want Sons
posted by Yellow at 2:24 AM PST - 3 comments

The Macabre Practice of Binding Books in Human Skin: Whether a reminder of mortality, a strange souvenir, or a punishment for a crime, the impetuses behind anthropodermic bibliopegy are as varied as the lives of their skin donors.
posted by frumiousb at 1:33 AM PST - 21 comments

Novelty twitter account @MaudDiBucks posts Dune quotes with the word "pumpkin" strategically inserted. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by isthmus at 9:54 PM PST - 29 comments

But even then, Beckmann will be there before you, and seem more at ease. And in how he stands and where he’s chosen to stand, it’s also clear that he can leave, that he can move out the door just to his right. Again, the sense that he belongs here, that he knows better than you how to dress and what to do, gives the impression that you aren’t an audience viewing him, but that he is giving you an audience instead. He belongs, we don’t, or don’t so well as he. Max Beckmann's 1927 Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, appreciated by Harvard art historian Joseph Koerner. [more inside]
posted by escabeche at 8:31 PM PST - 6 comments

A Beginner's Guide to the Synth is a nice long write-up to the history of the synthesizers, from their origins up to the present, with embedded sound samples. For a deeper dive into the history of the hardware, learn the secrets of the synths from Sound on Sound.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:54 PM PST - 13 comments

The website of Carl A. Eckelman, Ph.D., Professor of Wood Technology at Purdue University. Probably more than you wanted to know about joinery and cabinetmaking.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 6:55 PM PST - 29 comments

The improbable emergence of Nell Zink.
posted by holmesian at 3:45 PM PST - 9 comments

"Though there appears to be no definitive research on gender and gibberish, it became clear to me that girls are drawn to gibberish and the dozens of other secret languages and language games, also called argots and ludlings, because using them builds social bonds." Jessica Weiss, "The Secret Linguistic Life of Girls: Why Girls Speak Gibberish." [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:40 PM PST - 57 comments

Hideo Kojima's new game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, is the video game analogue of Jonathan Franzen's books: technically dazzling, but built upon a bed of sophmoric ideas.
posted by reenum at 2:30 PM PST - 74 comments

9 Cities Around the World That Are Going Carfree
posted by aniola at 2:21 PM PST - 58 comments

Everything I Needed to Know about Poetry I Learned from #KPOP
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:53 AM PST - 9 comments

The American Theatre Wing presents, Working in the Theatre: Marie's Crisis
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:09 AM PST - 5 comments

Jen Monroe and Brian Sweeny, the curators of the Listen To This! album blog, have collaborated with Self-Titled Magazine on an eclectic mix of Japanese synth pop that will go perfectly with your personal end-of-Summer / Fall weather: OMG JAPAN (Track list and liner notes)
posted by Going To Maine at 10:42 AM PST - 6 comments

Electronic music 101: What is Acid House? What is Deep House?
posted by josher71 at 10:37 AM PST - 16 comments

In Heaven There Is No Beer, That's why we drink it here...
posted by jonmc at 10:13 AM PST - 9 comments

The battle of Agincourt was fought on a muddy field in northern France 600 years ago on Sunday – St Crispin’s Day, October 25th 1415. Legend says Agincourt was won by arrows. It was not. It was won by men using lead-weighted hammers, poleaxes, mauls and falcon-beaks, the ghastly paraphernalia of medieval hand-to-hand fighting. It was fought on a field knee-deep in mud, and it was more of a massacre than a battle. [more inside]
posted by PlusDistance at 9:44 AM PST - 62 comments

"We know that we are not alone in this obsession with sound, which is why we are inviting you to take our Golden Ears challenge..." [more inside]
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:51 AM PST - 19 comments

That Thing: A True Story Based on The Exorcist (Adam Sturtevant, Electric Literature)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:41 AM PST - 16 comments

"In a stunningly short slice of history, we’ve gone from food allergies being met with ignorance or indifference in the restaurant world to their domination of the discussion between server and diner, starting with the greeting and continuing all the way to dessert. ... After witnessing enough diners who make a big fuss about how their bodies can’t tolerate gluten and then proceed to order a beer or dig into their date’s brownie dessert, fatigued chefs and managers are beginning to adopt a less accommodating approach. But the people who may ultimately pay the price for this pushback won’t be the “free-from” fabulists. They’ll be those with serious conditions."
posted by Johnny Assay at 8:40 AM PST - 142 comments

Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up
This fall, Gross marks her 40th anniversary hosting "Fresh Air." At 64, she is "the most effective and beautiful interviewer of people on the planet," as Marc Maron said recently, while introducing an episode of his podcast, "WTF," that featured a conversation with Gross. She’s deft on news and subtle on history, sixth-sensey in probing personal biography and expert at examining the intricacies of artistic process. She is acutely attuned to the twin pulls of disclosure and privacy. ‘‘You started writing memoirs before our culture got as confessional as it’s become, before the word ‘oversharing’ was coined,’’ Gross said to the writer Mary Karr last month. ‘‘So has that affected your standards of what is meant to be written about and what is meant to maintain silence about?’’ (‘‘That’s such a smart question,’’ Karr responded. ‘‘Damn it, now I’m going to have to think.’’) [more inside]
posted by Frayed Knot at 8:13 AM PST - 51 comments

The challenge: if people would only know, hear, and see what poets did, then at least some of them would realize too how cool literature can actually be. - Three projects which engage in popularizing, mediating, and digitally archiving contemporary Hungarian poetry. [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 6:14 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

... by the BBC.
posted by Paul Slade at 4:59 AM PST - 7 comments

In June 2009, the filmmaker Myles O'Reilly nestled Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh in The Back Loft in Dublin, with a camera, a reel to reel recorder, a laptop, a fiddle, a five stringed viola and a hardanger, and what followed was a short series of five beautiful improvisations and a little bit of gardening banter
posted by salishsea at 1:22 AM PST - 5 comments

WARNING WARNING: Scientist discovers puppy-sized spider in rainforest
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:58 PM PST - 114 comments

Chuck Berry was born in 1926. Here he is performing Johnny B Goode: The date is April 14, 2014.
posted by growabrain at 8:48 PM PST - 20 comments

Why self driving cars MUST be programmed to kill. [more inside]
posted by blue_beetle at 6:42 PM PST - 135 comments

Maureen O'Hara, Irish-born star of The Quiet Man and more, dies aged 95. [The Guardian] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:10 PM PST - 39 comments

An owl and his robot friend sing and dance to The Monster Mash. SLYT
posted by howfar at 6:05 PM PST - 7 comments

To support their latest album the band Dawes recently held a competition in Paris where fans uploaded videos lip synching the lyrics to the song “All Your Favorite Bands"” for a chance to cover his/her favorite classic rock song with the group. The winner was a woman named Paloma, and her favorite classic rock song is Lay Lady Lay and here is their version.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:47 PM PST - 5 comments

This week, in an article for The Nation, Bill McKibben reports the story of how two separate teams of reporters at Inside Climate News and The Los Angeles Times have, “reached the same bombshell conclusion: ExxonMobil, the world’s largest and most powerful oil company, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the mid-1980s, and then spent the next few decades systematically funding climate denial and lying about the state of the science.”
posted by ob1quixote at 5:02 PM PST - 70 comments

In early 2010, experimental multi-instrumentalist and headgear innovator Buckethead (previously) released It's Alive, the first of a series of albums called "Buckethead Pikes" sold directly to fans "from a small kiosk inside the Bucketheadland park." While things started out slowly, with a release now and then squeezed in between other commitments, by 2014 Buckethead had left most of the bands he'd been playing with, and was releasing on average one pike per week. And he has kept going; earlier today, Buckethead released pike album #199 8 Days Til Halloween: Flare Up, with #200 not very far away. [more inside]
posted by effbot at 4:05 PM PST - 10 comments

Bill Keith, creator of melodic bluegrass and the mechanical wonders that are Keith Banjo D-Tuners (used here), has left us.
posted by scruss at 3:22 PM PST - 8 comments

On Friday, South African university students achieved a historic victory; after a week's protest they ensured there would be no fee increases at universities in 2016. This has been led by women. [more inside]
posted by infini at 12:29 PM PST - 9 comments

A house overlooking the Sunset Strip played host to a generation of comics like Sam Kinison, Andrew Dice Clay, & Robin Williams, launching dozens of careers and about as many drug problems
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:46 AM PST - 12 comments

Hello Kitty's newest friend is an egg named Gudetama, who is unmotivated because he realizes he only exists to be eaten. He has a twitter account (really, he does). Each episode ends with the gudetama song and dance, and there is a handy playlist of 18 short shorts with English subtitles. If you want some more talking food, try some KogePan, or burned bread (unofficial fansite), which also has a handy playlist of the 10 episodes, but organized in reverse order. (KogePan previously, but the links are dead.)
posted by filthy light thief at 10:15 AM PST - 55 comments

The Hot Dog Report: Everyone makes jokes about chicken lips in their hot dogs but someone finally tested a wide variety of brands to see what they're really made of. [more inside]
posted by LizBoBiz at 10:01 AM PST - 120 comments

Reversed video of a backwards running competition. (SLYT - h/t reddit)
posted by benito.strauss at 8:14 AM PST - 37 comments

Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900) - "In 1840, Aivazovsky traveled to Rome, where he became friendly with Nikolai Gogol. He also received high praise from the Roman critics, newspapers, and even Pope Gregory XVI. The pope purchased Aivazovsky's 'Chaos' and hung it in the Vatican... [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:59 AM PST - 10 comments

As Valve prepares for the general release of a divisive PC gaming controller (and Microsoft readies their "Elite" version of the popular-on-PC Xbox One Controller), perhaps it's time to revisit the strange history of our attempts to make the ideal dedicated controller for PC games. [more inside]
posted by selfnoise at 5:04 AM PST - 71 comments

Amazon Reviewer #1, Harriet Klausner (previously) has passed away at age 63. At the time of her death she had over 31,000 reviews to her name, none of them negative.
posted by MartinWisse at 4:02 AM PST - 37 comments

"Cold Little Bird," a very good and very disturbing story by Ben Marcus. [SLNYer]
posted by gottabefunky at 10:05 PM PST - 75 comments

The day Iceland's women went on strike. "Forty years ago, the women of Iceland went on strike - they refused to work, cook and look after children for a day. It was a moment that changed the way women were seen in the country and helped put Iceland at the forefront of the fight for equality." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 7:45 PM PST - 19 comments

Murphy Anderson, long time artist for DC Comics has died at age 89. Anderson began his career at Fiction House in 1944 and then drew the daily Buck Rogers newspaper strip for two years. He began his long career at DC comics around 1950, he drew covers and stories for their science fiction and superhero comics and enjoyed stints on drawing costumed heroes like The Spectre and Hawkman. He was greatly admired as half of the "Swanderson" team when he inked Curt Swan's pencils on Superman. [more inside]
posted by marxchivist at 7:18 PM PST - 7 comments

Rus (from Ukraine) and Alla (from Russia) just spent six months travelling the US in a Subaru and took lots of pretty pictures. They visited: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada , New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
posted by desjardins at 6:52 PM PST - 32 comments

Unfinished story… [The Guardian] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:47 PM PST - 4 comments

Elderly Cat. A comic by MeFi's own Alison Wilgus.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:33 PM PST - 40 comments

How women revolutionised 1670s fashion from Lapham's Quarterly. Mantuas.
posted by goo at 3:55 PM PST - 9 comments

Veganism has been edging into the mainstream for years now, coaxed along by superstar believers like Bill Clinton and Beyonce. But lately, as plant-eating has blossomed and gained followers, influential vegans are laboring to supplant its dowdy, spartan image with a new look: glamorous, prosperous, sexy, and epidermally beaming with health.
posted by Kitteh at 1:57 PM PST - 201 comments

Chroma key liquid stripping. (Vimeo, NSFW) [more inside]
posted by numaner at 1:11 PM PST - 38 comments

mimic - [ab]using Unicode to create tragedy Replace a semicolon (;) with a greek question mark (;) in your friend's C# code and watch them pull their hair out over the syntax error [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 11:34 AM PST - 83 comments

Welcome to Home of the Brave. I’m [Peabody-winning journalist and sometime This American Life and NPR correspondent] Scott Carrier. A couple weeks ago I was watching Donald Trump on television wondering how and why anyone would want him to be President of the United States. He’s a rude, arrogant condescending, chauvanistic egomaniac. What if he were president and got angry and had a fit? But then I realized I don’t actually know any Trump supporters, so I decided I should drive around Nevada and find some. (He also drives around a little bit of California.)
posted by Going To Maine at 11:12 AM PST - 72 comments

Today's NYT sports section trolls Cubs fans with a 1908-inspired front page. The cover. More, from Talking New Media.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:51 AM PST - 53 comments

Pulling back the curtain on Carlos Castaneda, one of America’s most secretive and popular authors. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:41 AM PST - 59 comments

"On the shores of Payette Lake are crates full of beavers, part of a shipment to be dropped in the primitive area by parachute from an airplane." A clip from Fur for the Future, a recently rediscovered documentary from 1948 about Idaho Fish and Game parachuting beavers into the state's backcountry.
posted by oulipian at 9:14 AM PST - 28 comments

Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell writes about first encountering Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea as a child, the power and depth of the story and everything he still loves about it as an adult.
posted by Otto the Magnificent at 9:07 AM PST - 54 comments

RockPaperShotgun asks the British game industry how they would make a game out of The Great British Bake Off.
posted by Artw at 9:06 AM PST - 23 comments

Between 1973 and 1983, Vincent Price starred in twenty-two episodes of radio horror for the BBC. Price claimed the stories were drawn from his own reminiscences, though certain plots bear strong resemblances to classic pieces by Roald Dahl and Bram Stoker. Click on and listen, if you can afford...THE PRICE OF FEAR. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 9:00 AM PST - 18 comments

Magical Realism: Northern Exposure 25 Years Later
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 8:47 AM PST - 48 comments

DaveYard Shift plays mariachi covers of video game songs. Released thus far: "Bloody Tears" from Castlevania 2, "Gerudo Valley" from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, "Dark World" from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, "Dr. Wily Stage" from Mega Man 2, "The Moon" from Ducktales, and a medley of tunes from Kirby Super Star, Tetris, and Super Mario World.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:37 AM PST - 10 comments

Need to slow down? Here is the very first episode of The Joy of Painting, in which Bob Ross encourages viewers to take a walk in their own happy little woods. (SLYT)
posted by swift at 7:19 AM PST - 36 comments

The streaming service Shout Factory has a treat in time for Halloween: The VHS Vault!. These are VHS rips of classic 80s horror movies: Sleepaway Camp, Night of the Demons, Day of the Dead, Class of 1984, and Exterminators of the year 3,000. There's also the documentary Adjust Your Tracking about VHS collectors.
posted by codacorolla at 6:58 AM PST - 23 comments

The Federal Communications Commission is putting caps on the rates that inmates pay for phone calls, after a 14-year campaign by advocates for prisoners and their families. The order caps per-minute fees at 11¢ in state or federal prisons, and up to 22¢ a minute in local jails, depending on the size of the facility, while also capping the various fees that have been common on inmate calls to this point. [more inside]
posted by almostmanda at 6:20 AM PST - 49 comments

Zack Parsons, Something Awful's resident writer of much weirdness (oldest articles in that listing may be misattributed) has resumed his beloved series with Steve Sumner (the Max to his Sam), WTF D&D. While Zack still writes for Something Awful, he and Steve's reviews of weird pen-and-paper RPG sourcebooks and art, and their rollicking RPG campaigns, have resumed on Zack's new site, The Bad Guys Win, which also features other new articles from Zack (all of the new WTF D&D, currently a two-part adventure in the Ravenloft setting starring Steve as an idiot monk, is collected under Games). [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 5:56 AM PST - 15 comments

San Patricio & Barra De Navidad will experience equivalent EF5 tornado & 20 foot tsunami at same time. After a remarkable burst of intensification, Hurricane Patricia is headed to the Mexican coast with 200 mile per hour (320 kph) sustained winds. It is the strongest hurricane on record in the Western Hemisphere.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:35 AM PST - 127 comments

Some ways we can read Elsa: "Cold and Hungry: Discourses of Anorexic Feminity in Frozen," "Disney's Frozen and Autism," "Reading Frozen as a Feminist," and "Disney's Frozen: Gay or Schizophrenic?"
posted by thetortoise at 5:05 AM PST - 59 comments

Watch Adele’s Emotional, Technologically Groundbreaking Video for “Hello”. The video stars The Wire’s Tristan Wilds.
posted by chavenet at 3:43 AM PST - 50 comments

The Leeroy Jenkins Hearthstone card in 12 languages.
posted by Drinky Die at 11:13 PM PST - 29 comments

Meet Bastian, a German WWII soldier collectible doll. Also meet Bastian Schweinsteiger, the 31-year old Der Mannschaft current captain and Manchester United star, who is certainly not amused by the similarities.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:15 PM PST - 72 comments

In the wake of Turing/Martin Shkreli's 5000x price hike of Daraprim, reaction sets in regarding the need for reasonable prices on FDA-generic drugs. [more inside]
posted by bookdragoness at 7:07 PM PST - 24 comments

Maybe Jesus could walk on water, but anybody can walk on this non-Newtonian fluid (SLYT)
posted by Quietgal at 5:10 PM PST - 23 comments

In a new video, sponsored by Similac as part of its #endmommywars campaign, seven mothers discuss the judgments they receive and the judgments they make about other mothers.
posted by melissasaurus at 4:23 PM PST - 93 comments

People prefer food in sexist packaging. Putting unhealthy food in macho masculine packaging, or healthy food in feminine-themed packaging, makes it taste nicer, and people are willing to pay more for it. According to a new paper(Direct paper link)
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 4:03 PM PST - 79 comments

An interview from 1980 where Rolling Stone talks with George Lucas about his views on movie making, the difficulty working with studios, and the possible and tenuous future of the franchise. (context: previously) [more inside]
posted by SpacemanStix at 3:23 PM PST - 70 comments

A Tribute to Zombies in Movies - the latest: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (MLYT NSFW)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:47 PM PST - 27 comments

In one of the more ill-conceived marketing stunts of the '70s, Telly Savalas visits Birmingham. Telly visits Aberdeen. Telly visits Portsmouth.
posted by veedubya at 11:56 AM PST - 74 comments

"What is Social Anxiety Disorder?": The Atlantic's Olga Khazan interviews Stefan G. Hofmann, the director of the Social Anxiety Program at Boston University. (SLTheAtlantic)
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:23 AM PST - 161 comments

Sweden school attack: horror as sword attacker kills teacher and pupil. [The Guardian] [Article contains graphic descriptions of violence.] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:22 AM PST - 48 comments

The latest thing is Recipes as animated GIFs:
Pull-out monkey bread
Avocado & Eggs breakfast
Better than sex brownies
Homemade Nutella
Apple roses
Pizza dip
PES guacamole
Mozzarella sticks
Archer's Margarita
[more inside]
posted by growabrain at 11:20 AM PST - 100 comments

What 12,000 Emails Tell Us About Being Hillary Clinton “… right now I’m fighting w the WH operator who doesn’t believe I am who I say I am and wants my direct office line even tho I’m not there and I just (g)ave him my home # and the State Dept # and I told him I had no idea what my direct office # was since I didn’t call myself and I just hung up and am calling thru Ops like a proper and properly dependent Secretary of State – no independent dialing allowed.”
posted by OnceUponATime at 11:11 AM PST - 84 comments

Laverne Cox will star as Frank-N-Furter in Fox's TV reboot of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Previously. Meanwhile, fans have proposed various dream casts.
posted by the_blizz at 10:10 AM PST - 101 comments

The Two Asian Americas. "If Asians sometimes remain silent in the face of racism, and if some seem to work unusually hard in the face of this difficult history, it is not because they want to be part of a 'model minority' but because they have often had no other choice." (SLNewYorker)
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 9:54 AM PST - 18 comments

And yet, for all there is to worry about — and we old folks love nothing more than worrying about the sex lives of young people — campuses are still filled with college kids excited about one another and the thrill of a night that’s just beginning. To them, college sex isn’t a headline but something real. In an attempt to get past the existing media narratives, and the moralizing that comes with them, New York asked college students what they think about the campus-sex climate. Or, rather, how they experience it.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:21 AM PST - 17 comments

It all starts with the seed. Top growers know their pumpkins' lineage back generations, and the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth keeps records.

Ron Wallace was the first person to grow a one-ton pumpkin. He's going for 2,500 pounds next. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:55 AM PST - 20 comments

YouTube metal guitarist Rob Scallon covers Slayer's "Raining Blood", "War Ensemble", and "Angel of Death", and Metallica's "Battery", on banjo.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:29 AM PST - 32 comments

Benjamin Dixon writes about the death of Corey Jones, a Florida musician who was shot and killed by a plainclothes officer in Florida on Sunday morning, after Jones' car had broken down on the side of the highway. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:35 AM PST - 78 comments

"We all know tech is excluding most people from participating. But one group is actually over represented. And we’ve been conspicuously silent." Metafilter's own Anil Dash asserts that "Asian American men who work in tech are benefitting from tech’s systematic exclusion of women and non-Asian minorities" and gives some recommendations about what they should do about it.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:56 AM PST - 23 comments

On behalf of the MeFites of Norway: It has come to our attention that somebody has let slip that "totally Texas" (in Norwegian "helt texas") is used as an expression to convey that some event is crazy or totally out of control. After decades, the Americans now know. An investigation into the leak will be made. Thank you.
posted by Harald74 at 6:16 AM PST - 132 comments

In FieldWorkFail, scientists working in the field share their more embarassing stories !
posted by Blasdelb at 6:05 AM PST - 34 comments

Over a hundred years after his death (it was supposed to be a hundred but you know how people can be), The Autobiography of Mark Twain has been released in its entirety (Volume One previously). [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 5:33 AM PST - 9 comments

In preparation for the upcoming exhibition Scholar, courtier, magician: The lost library of John Dee at the Royal College of Physicians (January 2016), the RCP museum's twitter has posted some gifs showing details from some of the books that will be on display for the first time. [more inside]
posted by halcyonday at 5:32 AM PST - 14 comments

One year ago, the Saturday Night Live family lost one of its greatest talents when Jan Hooks passed away at the age of 57. Though there are many SNL players that fade into obscurity once their term at Rockefeller Center is up, most people are surprised that, aside from a recurring role on 30 Rock, Jan Hooks had pretty much disappeared since the turn of the 21st century. Grantland provides a bittersweet look back into her history and into what happened during those years.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 4:35 AM PST - 27 comments

The idea behind Cookbook Club is a simple one—a group of friends all make recipes from the same book and gather to share the results, a crowdsourced feast. But there's a bit of magic to Cookbook Club that I didn't anticipate when I attended my first meeting, walking into an unfamiliar house clutching a bowl of pumpkin seed dip from Diana Kennedy's The Essential Cuisines of Mexico.

posted by divabat at 1:25 AM PST - 11 comments

That time Samuel Beckett made a movie with Buster Keaton.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:36 AM PST - 8 comments

Who was the woman behind Pippi Longstocking? Freshly released wartime diaries along with a new biography reveal Astrid Lindgren, author of some of the world's most beloved children's literature, to be as radical and determined as her best-known character.
posted by ellieBOA at 12:28 AM PST - 21 comments

OCTOBER 22 IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!!!" EVERY YEAR WE GET TOGETHER AND MAKE SALMON FOR TOAST, EVERY YEAR WE GET A CROCKETY BLOAT, EVERY YEAR WE GET DRUNK ON THE DOCKS, AND EVERY YEAR WE HAVE SEX WITH OUR CAPS LOCKS!!!! [more inside]
posted by nickmark at 10:17 PM PST - 132 comments

TT Games has made a number of LEGO-based games, often LEGO versions of other franchises. These include cutscenes that recreate some version of movie scenes, which initially didn't include dialog, as seen in these collections of cutscenes from Lego Star Wars : The Complete Saga and Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. That changed with LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, but things really got fun with LEGO Jurassic World (with all Jurassic Park movies). "So, you two, um, dig up dinosaurs?"
posted by filthy light thief at 7:35 PM PST - 18 comments

When I visit Lake Michigan, I feel staggering incredulity: How is this not an ocean? Driving between cities around its 1,400 miles of shoreline—say, from Chicago to Grand Rapids—emphasizes the lake’s vast scroll, since the only way to go is around. A new map captures that experience.

posted by cthuljew at 7:14 PM PST - 72 comments

How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power. by Bijan Stephen. [more inside]
posted by zabuni at 4:09 PM PST - 11 comments

Adam and Jamie announce the end of their classic Mythbusters series in this week's Entertainment Tonight. [more inside]
posted by fairmettle at 3:43 PM PST - 94 comments

During Governor John Kasich’s tenure, abortion access in Ohio has dramatically decreased from 14 abortion providers to 8 as Kasich and the GOP-led legislature have passed a startling number of restrictions on Ohio’s abortion providers and Planned Parenthood. [more inside]
posted by mostly vowels at 3:26 PM PST - 118 comments

Where do ‘good’ or pro-social institutions come from ? Why does the capacity for collective action and cooperative behaviour vary so much across the world today ? How do some populations transcend tribalism to form a civil society ? How do you “get to Denmark”?
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 2:01 PM PST - 30 comments

An excerpt from Carrie Brownstein's memoir. "Sometimes the dull detritus of our pasts become glaring strands once you realize they form a pattern, a lighted path to the present." - from "Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl," scheduled to be published this month. [more inside]
posted by areaperson at 1:16 PM PST - 11 comments

The Color of Debt: How Collection Suits Squeeze Black Neighborhoods — a ProPublica investigation into racial disparities in debt collection lawsuits [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 1:07 PM PST - 16 comments

One mathematician’s formula suggests that all-male lineups don’t “just happen,” despite what conference organizers might claim. "...in any conference with over 10 speakers, say, it would be extremely rare to have no female speakers at all—less than 5 percent chance, depending on one’s assumption about the percentage of women in mathematics as a whole."
posted by sharp pointy objects at 12:08 PM PST - 71 comments

You think City on Fire is big? A reading list of really, really big books.
posted by janey47 at 11:22 AM PST - 97 comments

What do we really know about Osama bin Laden's death?

I saw this as more of a media story, a case study in how constructed narratives become accepted truth. This felt like a cop-out to [Seymour Hersh], as he explained in a long email the next day. He said that I was sidestepping the real issue, that I was ‘‘turning this into a ‘he-said, she-said’ dilemma,’’ instead of coming to my own conclusion about whose version was right. It was then that he introduced an even more disturbing notion: What if no one’s version could be trusted?

posted by Rustic Etruscan at 11:01 AM PST - 96 comments

You can browse the largest assembled astronomical image of all time, 46 billion pixels, in a Google Maps-like interface covering the Milky Way. There are a lot of stars.
posted by clawsoon at 10:46 AM PST - 8 comments

Haven't you always wanted to eat your own teeth? Now you can.
posted by The Whelk at 10:29 AM PST - 28 comments

This closes the door on one of the biggest potential challenges to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s second attempt at capturing the Democratic nomination. Back in August, Mr. Biden was already running for president in the invisible primary. Like most candidates who test the waters, he didn’t find enough support to justify entering the race.
posted by Sleeper at 10:26 AM PST - 211 comments

The Strange, Short Story Of Washington State’s Income Tax

People were so excited about the income tax that they voted twice. First, they changed the state constitution to allow the tax. Then voters approved the tax – 70 percent in favor. In the time between the two votes, something significant happened: People had received their income tax forms in the mail. Suddenly the tax wasn't just a theory. The form was daunting, and newspapers suggested people might need professional help to fill out the form.

posted by Existential Dread at 8:47 AM PST - 9 comments

Yo Zushi: Many of those calling out cultural appropriation of all kinds – from clothing and hair to musical genres – seem to share this proprietorial attitude, which insists that culture, by its nature a communally forged and ever-changing project, should belong to specific peoples and not to all. Banks is doubtless correct to feel this “undercurrent” of racial persecution by an industry that prefers its stars to be white and what they sell to be black, yet there is also truth in the second part of that undercurrent: “Y’all don’t really own shit.” When it comes to great movements in culture, the racial interloper is not wrong. None of us can, or should, “own” hip-hop, cornrows, or the right to wear a kimono.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:34 AM PST - 348 comments

A woman who suddenly lost her best friend in a car crash shops at a store filled with unclaimed airport luggage. "When I first looked at [The Unclaimed Baggage Center]'s website months ago, I felt that same twinge of, 'It's a store full of lost stuff? That sucks.' I figured I would write a quirky piece about a kooky store, to compensate for the inherent sadness. But my world changed this summer, and now I'm here in Alabama, and the idea of losing stuff on an airplane feels decidedly less heavy."
posted by Amberlyza at 8:27 AM PST - 7 comments

Periods? Risqué. Women in bikinis selling plastic surgery? Not in the slightest. [more inside]
posted by jeather at 7:56 AM PST - 53 comments

Diabetes-related peripheral arterial disease is rapidly overtaking trauma as the leading cause of amputation, a trend made all the more horrifying by the racial disparity in amputations and the way in which lack of access to quality primary care converts treatable PAD into amputations.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:20 AM PST - 21 comments

Doc Brown: We're descending towards Hill Valley, California at 4:29 PM on Wednesday, October 21st, twenty-fifteen.
Marty: Two thousand fifteen?! You mean we're in the future!
posted by leotrotsky at 6:22 AM PST - 130 comments

"In New York City, the police now maintain an unknown number of military-grade vans outfitted with X-ray radiation, enabling cops to look through the walls of buildings or the sides of trucks ... The NYPD will not reveal when, where, or how often they are used."
posted by tocts at 4:45 AM PST - 45 comments

"A growing number of people on low incomes are now living in shared housing - known as "houses in multiple occupation" - where each room is rented separately. But there's concern that many tenants are living in poor conditions." [SLBBC]
posted by marienbad at 4:11 AM PST - 55 comments

A traditional Japanese cover of "Smooth Criminal", led by flautist Yoshimi Tsujimoto.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 4:07 AM PST - 20 comments

There was no question of where to bring Mubarak. Mother of Mercy is the only fully functional hospital in Nuba, which is about 3,000 square miles. The hospital is overseen by a onetime college nose guard from upstate New York named Tom Catena. Just as there are rules in Nuba for what to do in an Antonov raid, there is a rule for what to do with the victims of the bombing if they are still alive: get them to Doctor Tom as fast as you can.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:04 AM PST - 4 comments

Touching Extremes (and the 2001–8 archive, housed separately) houses a wealth of reviews of obscure, avant, experimental, or otherwise not-terribly commercial music by Massimo Ricci, formerly of Bagatellen and Paris Transatlantic (both defunct), and occasionally still also of The Squid's Ear. [more inside]
posted by kenko at 6:53 PM PST - 11 comments

Among other things, Vin Diesel is known for being an avid Dungeons and Dragons player. He's even gotten to play his own D&D character in the movie The Last Witch Hunter. But until recently, we hadn't been able to watch him play it live. To remedy that, the folks at the Nerdist and Geek and Sundry got Diesel and a few other people together to play D&Diesel, an exciting half hour full of natural twenties and growling. [more inside]
posted by Maecenas at 6:24 PM PST - 42 comments

It's the trailer that everyone has been waiting for and everyone is talking about... VENTURE BROS. SEASON 6
posted by Artw at 6:00 PM PST - 42 comments

Vinyl Terror & Horror are Camilla Sørensen and Greta Christensen, two Danish DJs now based in Berlin. They are not your average DJ duo. [more inside]
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:54 PM PST - 11 comments

During that excruciating waiting period, players stake out their preferences. “We’ll give a rundown of the donuts, look at them all and extend them through a combine, like the NFL combine,” safety Harrison Smith says. Donuts are judged on factors such as crispiness, size and frosting distribution. The Minnesota Vikings' Donut Club has an executive board, membership cards, and a strongly enforced set of donut rules.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 5:41 PM PST - 25 comments

The Astronaut Instruction Manual [via mefi projects from Mefi's own Mike Mongo] [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:27 PM PST - 10 comments

When is it socially acceptable to wear black tights? (slTheGrauniad/The Guardian)
posted by Kitteh at 4:08 PM PST - 112 comments

Amazon has posted (on Medium, natch) an aggressive response to the “everyone at Amazon is miserable but also paid well but also crying all the time” story in the New York Times [Previously]. This story and its aftermath represent a bit of a trap, particularly in discussions on Twitter: If you think the original story contained both valuable information and flaws, your default position is to go to bat for the Times; if you read this story as a portrait of a tough workplace written to cast it in the worst possible light, but acknowledge that it contained some worrying anecdotes, then your tendency will be to defend Amazon.

But these too reveal themselves as proxy positions. It’s not story versus story, or publication versus tech company. It’s media versus tech. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:37 PM PST - 103 comments

How to fit a bicycle tyre without using tyre levers
posted by Lanark at 1:40 PM PST - 39 comments

Yesterday, NASA launched a website hosting daily images of the full, sunlit side of the Earth. They're taken by the EPIC camera attached to the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) that's sitting in L1, ~1,500,000 km from Earth. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 1:39 PM PST - 15 comments

The Cold War gift that keeps on giving. Just testing the the Davy Crockett may have contaminated 12,000 acres around Fort Carson with uranium and depleted uranium residue. “In the general mindset of the era, it was deemed a requirement for more covert, squad level nuclear weaponry…called the ‘Davy Crockett,’ it was a 155mm caliber tactical nuclear recoilless gun” With an explosive yield of .01-.02 kilotons, or the equivalent of 10 to 20 tons of TNT the Davy Crockett was developed for covert units to destroy Soviet infrastructure, engage tank formations or repel larger units. As the largest conventional ordinance has a blast yield of 11 tons of TNT and was short ranged, very inaccurate and likely to expose users to radioactive fallout and contaminate large areas for years, the weapon was wisely discontinued. Previously [more inside]
posted by Smedleyman at 1:28 PM PST - 38 comments

On Dec 8, 9, 10 1973 Frank Zappa and the Mothers did a legendary stink at the Roxy in Hollywood Ca. The result if these shows is one of the greatest live albums ever produced, even though the voracious tinkerer Zappa dubbed some odds and ends onto Roxy and Elsewhere LP. (The virgin recordings were later released as Roxy by Proxy), but the holy grail of this event was a never seen video broadcast originally intended for German tv, because certainly nothing like this could ever have aired in the us in 1973. All that changed on Oct 14th when Roxy: The Movie premiered at the Egyptian theater in Los Angeles. It will be released on dvd/blue ray Nov. 1st, 2015
posted by silsurf at 11:04 AM PST - 32 comments

Paula Deen channels Madonna on Dancing With The Stars. For some reason. [more inside]
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:52 AM PST - 50 comments

Though it was erroneously attributed to Vonnegut, Mary Schmich first lit the flame, imploring the youth today to wear sunscreen. Baz Luhrman fanned the fire with his hit rallying anthem, Everyone's Free (To Wear Sunscreen). And today? Well, today it was announced that all that sunscreen is massacring coral reefs around the world.
posted by tittergrrl at 10:16 AM PST - 57 comments

The Story of Technoviking. July 8, 2000. Matthias Fritsch put down the camera on his lap on the back of a DJ van at Berlin's Fuckparade. Unknowingly, he recorded a dancer that became one of the first massively popular internet video memes, at a time downloading stamp-sized MOV and RM files was still norm. But TECHNOVIKING was not pleased, and a lawsuit left Fritsch bankrupt. This is the full story, as told by the creator of the original video with guest artists, sociologists and lawyers, how he (and Technoviking) lost control of their images, the implications of remix culture, the propagation of internet memes, and the impact of the internet on privacy rights. (Slightly NSFW censored private bits, 5 minutes in.)
posted by lmfsilva at 10:16 AM PST - 27 comments

She told the family of a severely disabled man that she could help him to communicate with the outside world. Then, she says, they fell in love. [more inside]
posted by Aubergine at 10:08 AM PST - 62 comments

Visual Literacy in the Age of Open Content by Allana Mayer [JSTOR]

We have similar stories all throughout history: the moment when a perception—whether a literal way of seeing or a figurative mode of thinking—is assaulted and fundamentally shifts, a non-reversible alteration, a displacement from one’s old ways. Western society has seen plenty of moments like these, moments where a perceptive or critical threshold has been crossed.

posted by Fizz at 10:05 AM PST - 4 comments

The mayor of Lewiston, Maine recently made headlines when he called for the state to publish the name and address of anyone receiving welfare benefits. The idea of publicly shaming people for receiving government assistance is not new. But when these stories do arise, we rarely stop to think about what we mean when we say someone is "on welfare." In 1983, Mimi Abramovitz tackled that question head-on in a paper provocatively titled "Everyone is on Welfare." Almost 20 years later, she updated the paper for the new millennium. (Also available on Researchgate). [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 9:56 AM PST - 72 comments

The American Cancer Society released new guidelines today recommending that women start getting the tests later, at age 45, and only every other year. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:37 AM PST - 17 comments

Do I Creep You Out? [more inside]
posted by Cookiebastard at 7:52 AM PST - 19 comments

The Person-Guy is the cause of every evil and frustration in your life. The Person-Guy only wears odd socks, because he thinks that wasting our limited lifespan sorting them into matching pairs is indicative of a potentially authoritarian neurosis. The Person-Guy has a minor vocal tic, and it sends you into strange daylight fantasies; tearing out his throat with your bare hands, feeling the frantic little pulses of blood as they spurt and froth around your claws and then go cold. The Person-Guy likes all the same things you like, which is why you hate him. The Person-Guy is not reading this article. Only you are reading this article.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:20 AM PST - 104 comments

The Can Do bar came about because sex workers had been advocating for [workers' rights] and working under shitty conditions for years...One day a group of sex workers here in Chiang Mai said, 'Actually the government doesn't get it, nobody understands what we're talking about, we're going to have to build it ourselves, we can't wait anymore.' And so they pooled their money and raised a million baht [almost $30,000] between them all and created the bar. Charlotte England at Vice writes about the only bar in Thailand, and maybe anywhere, owned and run by a sex workers' collective.
posted by Stacey at 6:17 AM PST - 6 comments

"I am somebody. I am God's child. I may not have a job, but I am somebody. I may be Black, but I am somebody. I may not have an education, but I am somebody. You may not respect me, but I am somebody. I may be a Puerto Rican, but I am somebody. I may be an Indian and my land was stolen, but I am somebody." The history of the chant. [more inside]
posted by thetortoise at 5:25 AM PST - 1 comment

Six months after we first discussed Zappo's planned move to a Holocracy, how is it going? When the deadline arrived on the last day of April, 14 percent of the company, 210 people, took the [severance] offer. Twenty of them were managers, I was told, out of a total of 246. It was a difficult day. Tear-stained faces replaced the typical smiles on the Zappos campus. [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:36 AM PST - 178 comments

"We received a letter from Poland containing a really weird CD. Written on the disc is what looks like a product key, however upon examining the contents of the CD it’s quite clear that this is a puzzle of some sort." More, from the Washington Post.
posted by jbickers at 4:29 AM PST - 34 comments

Sauropod dinosaur may have whipped its tail like Indiana Jones
posted by curious nu at 4:10 AM PST - 10 comments

Indian comedy group All India Bakchod teams up with dating site TrulyMadly to present the Creep Qawwali (a form of Sufi devotional music), lamenting online and offline creepy guys. [more inside]
posted by divabat at 2:15 AM PST - 21 comments

In Conversation With Sarah Silverman.
posted by feelinglistless at 1:13 AM PST - 9 comments

The following message is transmitted at the request of North American Aerospace Defense Command. Two nuclear missiles are heading for the United States. Take shelter now. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:56 PM PST - 79 comments

Ayman Rostom had a penchant for nostalgic productions in his music, which isn't surprising given how he studied his brother's tapes of Yo! MTV Raps back in the day, which lead to his career as Dr. Zygote and his own Boot Records label (Bandcamp). More recently, he's taken the handle The Maghreban and embraced stripped-down house-type beats that he releases on his Zoot Records label, though in his new video for Now Easy, the focus is on his love of oldschool drum'n'bass. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:33 PM PST - 4 comments

The first and final full trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, first sequel to the Star Wars trilogy has been posted. [more inside]
posted by entropicamericana at 7:35 PM PST - 555 comments

Netflix will be making four 90-minute Gilmore Girls episodes, written by series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. Lorelai, Rory, Emily, and Luke are expected to return. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:25 PM PST - 70 comments

Many of those who went to see Furious 7 earlier this year went because it was, by all accounts, a raucous good time. And there were also a number of us who were extremely curious about how they were able to finish the film after the tragic death of star Paul Walker. Variety currently has an article up on the methods used to replicate Walker for certain scenes and, most intriguingly, an imgur gallery has been posted of all the shots that were completed after Walker died.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:23 PM PST - 25 comments

Nora Young on CBC's Spark interviews Scot Yount, who was hit by a drone during a parade, and Joe O'Neil, whose quadrocopter crashed onto a police van in London, ON (podcast). With drone-related accidents on the rise, the US DOT has formed a task force to create a registration process. Registration could begin as soon as the holiday season, DOT officials said Monday.
posted by GuyZero at 3:25 PM PST - 107 comments

Or, how not to carry an injured player from the pitch. [SLAuntie]
posted by marienbad at 2:15 PM PST - 24 comments

Robert Crumb talks to The Observer about misogyny, sex, fame, cartooning and getting older in a sprawling interview.
posted by Artw at 2:12 PM PST - 70 comments

Half-heard whispers. A creaking door. A missed step. From Vertigo to Videodrome, the scariest movies exploit our greatest – and most basic – fears. Fear Itself - BBC Documentary (SLYT NSFW)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:36 PM PST - 7 comments

I Thought I Told You To Shut Up. In 1977 David Boswell created comic book anti-hero Reid Fleming, the World’s Toughest Milkman. 30 years later, the big screen Hollywood adaptation remains in contractual limbo. Narrated by Academy Award-Winner Jonathan Demme. Previously on M-F, with that comment .
posted by growabrain at 1:21 PM PST - 30 comments

At all levels of government, (except the presidency) the republican party is arguably in a stronger position. than it has been since the reconstruction. Matt Yeglesias argues that the democratic party is in deep trouble.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 1:14 PM PST - 119 comments

We’ve all followed the sad news about Lamar Odom… [It’s] prompted lots of journalists to ask a natural question: Who made Reload?… I’ve yet to see one proffer anything more than a skin-deep answer… Here are the simple steps I took to begin answering the question… My goal is to help you become a better consumer of the press, so that when you read paper-thin accounts like the above, you stop and say: “Hey! That’s not real journalism.” Only with that kind of pressure will the media improve.
With a few quick searches, Blake Ross took the press to task and solved a mystery.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:14 PM PST - 41 comments

Closure of POC Yoga due to hate, death threats a tragedy for all people of color.

For the past 5 years Teresa has been involved in a beloved community collective called POC Yoga. The collective offered monthly to weekly yoga classes for people of color. It was also a safe space for lesbian, bisexual, gay, queer, and trans friendly, and open to people of all ages, body sizes, abilities, genders, and experience. But not anymore. Due to an unauthorized September post advertising their class on the online social network Nextdoor that was then critiqued by conservative talk show host Dori Monson, POC Yoga and Teresa were suddenly met with angry white protest that escalated into national ire and multiple death threats.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:48 AM PST - 156 comments

"Roe v. Wade — the 1973 Supreme Court opinion legalizing abortion — started in Texas. Now, as abortion rights are under unprecedented attack, it’s Texas that could trigger the end of Roe v. Wade. At stake: The reproductive rights of millions of American women, across the entire country." Shuttered: The End of Abortion Access in Red America, with support from EHRP, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
posted by milquetoast at 9:47 AM PST - 54 comments

What it’s like to earn a living as a research subject in clinical trials Today, Stone no longer relies on strangers in bars—instead, he’s a part of a small community that shares info about study opportunities. Stone says he sends mass texts whenever he sees a new study online. In exchange, the group does the same for him. The members of this group call themselves guinea pigs, or lab rats. They also call themselves professionals.
posted by sciatrix at 8:32 AM PST - 33 comments

The Lomax Kentucky Recordings [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:20 AM PST - 7 comments

Young pianists from around the world have gathered in Warsaw for the 17th International Chopin Competition, which is now in the second day of its final round, streaming live beginning in half an hour. Today, Eric Lu, Szymon Nehring, and Georgijs Osokins will enter the octagon Warsaw Philharmonic to interpret the piano concerto in E minor, op. 11. [more inside]
posted by theodolite at 8:18 AM PST - 10 comments

Black Deaths Matter: A Generation of African Americans Are Buried in Racism

In Richmond, Virginia, two nearby African-American cemeteries, East End and Evergreen, are obscured by creeping kudzu. The cemeteries are within view of Richmond’s city-owned Oakwood Cemetery, which holds the remains of an estimated 17,000 Confederate soldiers. Brian Palmer, a journalist, is working on a film that follows a group of local volunteers who hope to reclaim East End. He learned that the gulf between the neglect in East End and the meticulous perpetual care in Oakwood is supported by contemporary public policy: The state government allocates funds to the Daughters of the Confederacy, a private group, to provide for the maintenance of Confederate soldiers’ graves in Oakwood and dozens of other state cemeteries.

posted by zombieflanders at 8:16 AM PST - 26 comments

Inside Grand Central's Secret Sub-Basement, Which Nazis Nearly Destroyed [autoplaying video] [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 7:57 AM PST - 15 comments

Vetch (dropbox PDF link) is the first known literary journal for transgender poets and prose writers.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:03 AM PST - 5 comments

Get ready for the upcoming NBA Season with a refresher on the rules through the NBA Video Rulebook [more inside]
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:32 AM PST - 17 comments

"From a certain angle, the premise seems almost cruel: invite prisoners on death row to design their own memorials — ways for them to be remembered after they’ve been executed. This means asking them to confront not just their own mortality, but the state’s hand in ensuring it; to imagine not only the reality of their deaths, but a time beyond it. Yet, if Life After Death and Elsewhere suggests anything, it’s that this process may offer a release. These men are already thinking about death, after all — two paintings that feature the grim reaper assure us of that. Now at least they have somewhere to channel their thoughts."
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:28 AM PST - 5 comments

In the House of the Seven Librarians [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:49 AM PST - 7 comments

*Norse God Family Tree* *The Emu War* (previously) *Headless Folk of the French Revolution* *How Voltaire broke the lottery* *Mummy Brown and other Historical Colors* *Management Secrets of Genghis Khan* -- just some of the Veritable Hokum dredged from history and served up in comics form by Korwin Briggs.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:07 AM PST - 28 comments

An 8-bit Malcolm in the Middle game, in 2015, for some reason, by Alec Robbins
posted by naju at 9:45 PM PST - 15 comments

June, 1987, Wembley Arena London, While My Guitar Gently Weeps. There are a few artists that you might recognize..
posted by HuronBob at 8:36 PM PST - 69 comments

Derek Hugger makes moving sculptures. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:47 PM PST - 8 comments

There is a club among atomic scientists who have worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. How much plutonium in the body does it take to join the club? Enough so that it comes out in your urine.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:25 PM PST - 21 comments

The Swedish Chef sings Sia's Chandelier (SLSoundCloud)
posted by schmod at 7:20 PM PST - 12 comments

Animated Chocolate Cake (YT) by Alexandre DUBOSC.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:47 PM PST - 12 comments

One Texas lawyer is helping companies opt out of workers’ compensation and write their own rules. What does it mean for injured workers? [more inside]
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:53 PM PST - 100 comments

The role of the modern librarian, and other things. Interviewed by Erica Heilman, in which Jessamyn elaborates on librarians and libraries, the people they help, some of their needs, teaching tech and online skills in a rural community, and the balance of the online and the offline life. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 1:36 PM PST - 24 comments

"We’re now in the home stretch of Canada’s federal election campaign — at seventy-eight days, the longest in modern Canadian history and the most important since 1988, when free trade with the United States was the defining issue. For the first time in Canadian history, it is a close three-way race between the ruling Conservatives, the centrist Liberals, and the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP)." [more inside]
posted by flex at 11:36 AM PST - 1416 comments

Life behind the Three Gorges Dam

The major themes of the China story - unprecedented socioeconomic change, environmental crises, the thirst for energy, the destruction of historical and cultural heritage - are all here, framed against the backdrop of millions of ordinary Chinese struggling to cope with the powerful man-made and natural forces beyond their control. Would the huge sacrifices be worth it in the end...

Photo-Essay, over time, by Singaporean photo-journalist Chua Chin Hon
posted by infini at 10:11 AM PST - 5 comments

The TI-83 graphic calculator is still a standby for mathematics education in America. This Mic.com article looks at some of the causes and effects of that fact. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 9:38 AM PST - 92 comments

Published in 1931, Игрушки Картошки is a Russian book of toys you can make out of potatoes (and matches, and the occasional stick). [more inside]
posted by benito.strauss at 9:08 AM PST - 13 comments

An influx of Indian users ruffles Quora. Responding to the question “What turns people off about Quora?,” the user David Stewart wrote, in 2013, “The large, and steadily increasing, Indian presence.” The answer has earned him over 3,400 upvotes. [more inside]
posted by splitpeasoup at 7:52 AM PST - 153 comments

On 20 February 1947, the first animal made it into space aboard a captured Nazi V-2 rocket. That animal was a fruit fly, accompanied by several compatriots from the same species. Their rocket reached an altitude of 108 kilometers and then parachuted safely back to Earth after completing their 3 minute and 10 second mission. All hail Earth's pioneering space travellers!
posted by fairmettle at 7:23 AM PST - 23 comments

"Loadingicon are small, trippy-looking color-limited .gifs that would make good or at least interesting animated icons or loading screens.
Gifs posted should be a closed loop, and animated either by hand or computer.
Gifs drawn from film, television, or other video sources are not allowed. Reposts or posts that otherwise aren't a good fit may be removed at the mods' discretion.
[more inside]
posted by growabrain at 7:04 AM PST - 12 comments

Fruit of good labours. [Times Literary Supplement] Earliest known draft of King James Bible discovered by Jeffrey Alan Miller, assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

The draft appears in a manuscript notebook formerly belonging to Samuel Ward (1572–1643), who was part of the team of seven men in Cambridge charged with translating the Apocrypha. At the time of his selection as a translator, probably in 1604, Ward was still a young Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1610, though, he became Master of Sidney Sussex, a post he held until his death. Today, a trove of Ward’s notebooks and other manuscripts survive in the college’s archives, and among them is a small notebook now identified as MS Ward B.

posted by Fizz at 4:42 AM PST - 22 comments

More subtly, offscreen sound is used to withhold the "Prestige," or the payoff, of each man's greatest trick. (Originally, the word prestige meant "illusion," especially one that dazzles the eyes.) Alfred's first, minimal version of the Transported Man is shown only in part. We see the setup with Robert watching avidly and Cutter elsewhere in the audience, skeptical. But we don't see the Prestige phase of the trick. Nolan keeps the camera on Cutter while we hear the second door open and the bouncing ball being caught by the duplicate Alfred. Nolan thereby makes the trick itself vague, to be revealed in full later. Conveying the illusion through offscreen sound also emphasizes the contrasting reactions of Cutter, who is unimpressed, and Robert, who considers it "the greatest magic trick I’ve ever seen." [more inside]
posted by smcg at 2:44 AM PST - 31 comments

A series of dark commercials (purportedly) for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes have appeared on Youtube as part of a "Tony is Back" campaign. Kellogg's is not amused.
posted by adamrice at 9:29 PM PST - 80 comments

A new ad for Barbie tries to get away from the stereotypes (via kveller)
posted by jb at 7:09 PM PST - 60 comments

Exoho - Past Lives [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:58 PM PST - 2 comments

The making of X-Com, Julian Gollop's squad based tactical game. Many subsequent games have taken the XCOM name, often of dubious qaulity, to the point when an XCOM FPS almost had Gollop crowdsourcing his own remake. Fortunately Firaxis did a "very very good" job with it's XCOM: Enemy Unknown" , though Gollop would have done a few things differently. A sequel, XCOM 2, is on the way, and will show "what happens when you lose Enemy Unknown. [more inside]
posted by Artw at 5:10 PM PST - 53 comments

"[S]atellites and GPS are vulnerable to cyber attack. The tools of yesteryear—sextants, nautical almanacs, volumes of tables—are not. With that in mind, the [U.S. Naval] academy is reinstating celestial navigation into its curriculum." A navigation expert speaks about the importance of a lower-tech approach. Want more? Celestial navigation in the classroom. Build your own sextant!
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:52 PM PST - 34 comments

The Lonely Death of George Bell (slnyt) Incredibly well-researched, in-depth article on all the people affected by the death of a random man late last year, from the city workers charged with disposing of him and his things, to the people who knew him. Surprisingly moving, it is full of small uplifting moments.
posted by maggiemaggie at 3:21 PM PST - 48 comments

The Us and Them Podcast from West Virginia Public Broadcasting is dedicated to exploring America’s cultural divides. It was partly driven by host Trey Kay’s friendship with Alice Moore (episode one), a major player in the 1974 West Virginia Textbook War that tore up the state in Trey's high-school years. (Episode two, which won a Peabody when originally aired on Studio 360.)
Alice made a reappearance in the podcast during the recent prolonged defeat of the Confederate Flag (episode nine). She also got a brief mention in episode ten, in which American foreign correspondents of color Roopa Gogineni and Mike Onyiego visited Louisiana to report on the flag war.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:03 PM PST - 9 comments

Table turning Twitter account illustrating the absurdity of women having it all.
posted by The Noble Goofy Elk at 1:35 PM PST - 72 comments

The new song and video by the psychedelic pop band from Liverpool is on Vimeo and YouTube. A discussion of the video, with screenshots and storyboards. The Stealing Sheep website and twitter; also, wikipedia. More on the video: Nowscopitone, Guardian, folkradiouk, Frontview. The video credits.
posted by Wordshore at 12:22 PM PST - 19 comments

“I understood that Nixon couldn't be frozen in the world of the tapes — he belonged ‘in the arena.’ And that made him a natural for Twitter.” Justin Sherin analyzes how and why he imitates Richard Nixon on Twitter as @dick_nixon.
posted by Rangi at 11:45 AM PST - 15 comments

A new season of Going Deep With David Rees begins next month. To help promote the show, Rees will eschew social media, taking his campaign on the road. [more inside]
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 11:18 AM PST - 12 comments

"Mom Commercial", featuring Cole Escola.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 9:15 AM PST - 19 comments

A few days ago, a reddit user posted a thought-experiment about living in Las Vegas and working in San Francisco, commuting four days a week by airplane. Their back-of-the-envelope calculations have them saving about $1100/month. The posting was picked up by CityLab, and is leading to some interesting discussions. [more inside]
posted by math at 8:41 AM PST - 164 comments

ΦφΦϕ⊕​ΦΦϕΦ​ΦϕΦφΦ⊗⊗Φ⊕ΦΦϕΦΦϕϕΦφΦ⊗ [more inside]
posted by lemuring at 6:12 AM PST - 10 comments

An outer space trip. Strum.
posted by Mblue at 4:07 AM PST - 6 comments

If you spend any amount of time thinking about the business world and how women work within it, you must listen to The Broad Experience podcast. There are currently 70 episodes, hosted by the very smart, inquisitive, and (perhaps most importantly?) British, Ashley Milne-Tyte. I feel like I have never heard these kinds of discussions between women that are as erudite, insightful and pull no punches like these conversations that she is hosting. [more inside]
posted by amanda at 11:04 PM PST - 14 comments

Hüsker Dü were caught on tape on September 5, 1981 at the 7th St Entry, Minneapolis, MN, blazing through a familiar set they'd recorded weeks earlier for Land Speed Record. Set 1

The real surprise is when they returned to the stage later that night to showcase the slower, more melodic side of the band, complete with four unreleased tracks. Set 2. [more inside]
posted by porn in the woods at 8:40 PM PST - 17 comments

"To help shed some more light on this subject matter, here are 12 terms related to sexual and romantic identities that are beginning to receive more attention in the media but that are still regularly absent or erased from conversations currently taking place in popular culture." Noah Michelson sheds light on sexual and romantic identities in a beginner's primer at Huffington Post.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:06 PM PST - 107 comments

Use this handy chart to figure out who hates who, who's friends with who and why. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 7:22 PM PST - 36 comments

"That’s all chivalry is: basic guidelines for how not to be a sack of shit. And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die." Myths Retold (previously) clears up a few errors about chivalry. It's a handy guide to privilege, human decency, history, and Arthurian legend ("It turns out you’re not even allowed to see the grail if you thought about a boob once"). [more inside]
posted by babelfish at 6:53 PM PST - 39 comments

Who Owns Chicken Tikka Masala? Complicating a popular origin story.
posted by Miko at 5:15 PM PST - 31 comments

"Our findings provide compelling evidence for the existence of fungal infection in the central nervous system from Alzheimer's disease patients, but not in control individuals." Nature magazine just published a study that claims that Alzheimer's disease is caused by fungi. If this is true, this is amazing and incredibly exciting. (By the way, I've just noticed that our very own cstross was the one who shared it on Twitter.)
posted by Cobalt at 4:28 PM PST - 65 comments

He's-at-homes The dildos of the wives of the whalers of Nantucket. Except this isn't exactly about that, really, it's about loneliness, fading port towns, myth making and removing women from history.
posted by Helga-woo at 3:31 PM PST - 46 comments

Not just any rock: curling stones' special granite comes from Scotland

From the study of his run down house, David B. Smith pointed to where the sea crashed against the west coast of Scotland. "Out there," he said, "is Ailsa Craig." Not even a dot on the horizon could be spotted, but the 73-year-old retired judge and curling historian extraordinaire knew the exact location of the island that supplies the granite for the Olympic curling stones.

Ailsa Craig is where curling stones are born, but also a protected bird sanctuary, and home to a historic light house and golf course. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:25 PM PST - 10 comments

Camus' Web. by Jacob Eugene Horn [McSweeney's Internet Tendency]

Wilbur the pig was unhappy. In the two short months that he had been alive, Wilbur was certain he experienced the peaks and valleys of happiness and despair. When he was but a runt, he was free to prance about, but now that he was under the care of Farmer Zuckerman he was confined to a simple pig pen.

posted by Fizz at 1:38 PM PST - 4 comments

Braxae Vintage Co. is an Etsy shop with over 700 vintage beaded and sequined dresses, jackets, tops, and the rare pant suit for sale. You can also browse the hundreds of items the shop has already sold. [more inside]
posted by maryr at 1:17 PM PST - 7 comments

Relive the excitement of connecting to the internet with the noise of a 56k modem, from Monkey Dust
posted by growabrain at 12:51 PM PST - 61 comments

Worried that FifiCortexieKins has wandered off into the woods mousing and is lost? The cat GPS tracker allows you to monitor the location, and previous ramblings, of your cat. It weighs 25 grams, is claimed to be precise to three metres, contains a sim card, and incorporates a microphone and speaker so you can converse with your cat wherever they are. (Ad contains the French for meow)
posted by Wordshore at 12:05 PM PST - 46 comments

"Examining aggregated, de-identified information about people in the U.S. on Facebook, we look at the total number of people who came out on each day. We define “coming out” as (1) updating one’s profile to express a same-gender attraction or (2) specifying a custom gender ."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:31 AM PST - 34 comments

In The War of 2050, The Robots Call The Shots [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:00 AM PST - 23 comments

She was missing for over two years and was the subject of intense speculation.
posted by woodvine at 10:40 AM PST - 29 comments

Shinichi Mochizuki and the impenetrable proof - "Fesenko has studied Mochizuki's work in detail over the past year, visited him at RIMS again in the autumn of 2014 and says that he has now verified the proof. (The other three mathematicians who say they have corroborated it have also spent considerable time working alongside Mochizuki in Japan.) The overarching theme of inter-universal geometry, as Fesenko describes it, is that one must look at whole numbers in a different light — leaving addition aside and seeing the multiplication structure as something malleable and deformable. Standard multiplication would then be just one particular case of a family of structures, just as a circle is a special case of an ellipse." (previously: 1,2; via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 9:34 AM PST - 33 comments

Under the name Attaboy Clarence/The Secret History Of Hollywood, Adam Roche creates very long, very in-depth podcasts about classic Hollywood how it relates to broader sociopolitical trends. Clocking in at 171 minutes, Hunting Witches With Walt Disney goes into the background, motivations, and effects of the Red Scare in Hollywood and the House Of Un-American Activities. The nearly 3 hour long podcast spans a cast of characters including Budd Schulberg, Elia Kazan, John Garfield, Dorothy Comingore, Edward Dymytryk, Dalton Trumbo, Walt Disney, Humphrey Bogart, and of course, Howard Hughes
posted by The Whelk at 9:04 AM PST - 5 comments

Star Wars Showerheads Will Let You Bathe In Vader’s Tears [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 8:50 AM PST - 60 comments

A $2 photo purchased at a junk store has been verified as only the second known image of Billy the Kid. It may sell for $5 million.
posted by COD at 8:14 AM PST - 52 comments

After a long wait, PC developer/publisher/hivemind Valve have finally begun to roll out their big push for the living room space.  [more inside]
posted by selfnoise at 7:54 AM PST - 105 comments

Scott Alexander writes a lot. He's a psychiatrist, but talks about all kinds of stuff (in his about page, he calls out cognitive science, psychology, history, politics, medicine, religion, statistics, transhumanism, corny puns, and applied eschatology). Every time I read something of his, I'm struck by how reasonable he is. Evidently, I'm not alone: his posts each attract hundreds of comments. And he gets linked here a good bit. So a long-time reader of his combed through all his writings of the past decade-or-so and assembled this best-hits list. It's going to take me several happy months to get through it.
posted by AABoyles at 7:25 AM PST - 140 comments

The Untold Story of The Ermahgerd Girl
posted by Fuzzy Monster at 7:11 AM PST - 58 comments

Watch the Skies is a megagame which throws hundreds of players into the roles of world governments, corporations, the media, alien races and even the pope (Oh, don't forget the Whales) in a day long game of alien invasion* [more inside]
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 5:28 AM PST - 26 comments

SLYT, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, 1976. Have fun. It's just a little joyful thing.
posted by disclaimer at 12:23 AM PST - 20 comments

After years of allowing transgender children to join only on a case-by-case basis, the Girl Guides of Canada have released new guidelines(pdf) that make their stance on the issue clear and official: "All persons who live their lives as female are welcome to join the organization." [more inside]
posted by ladyriffraff at 11:01 PM PST - 44 comments

"Since the mid-20th century, endless towers of flashing, throbbing neon have defined Hong Kong’s landscape as much as Victoria Harbor and the skyline of densely packed high-rises. 'When you think of Hong Kong and visual culture, one of the first things that comes to the fore is neon signs,' said Aric Chen, the design and architecture curator of M+, a museum that is collecting images of Hong Kong’s neon signs online and some of the signs themselves as they are retired, including the neon cow. The Hong Kong immortalized in the films of Wong Kar-wai, the director of 'In the Mood for Love' and 'Chungking Express,' is awash in neon, Mr. Chen said. 'If his representations of Hong Kong in the popular imaginations are seminal, which I think they are,' he said, 'you can’t separate that image from the neon ambient glow.' But the neon of Hong Kong’s streets is dimming." (Previously).
posted by SpacemanStix at 10:12 PM PST - 16 comments

MacArthur Genius Grant award winner Michelle Dorrance is a tap dancer. Here she is performing on Colbert with the house band, Stay Human. This is really beautiful. She is a tap dancer, musician and choreographer breathing new life into a uniquely American art form in works that combine the musicality of tap with the choreographic intricacies of contemporary dance. Dorrance uses her deep understanding of the technique and history of tap dancing to deconstruct and reimagine its artistic possibilities. [more inside]
posted by bobdow at 10:10 PM PST - 12 comments

Feministing has done an article on Flirtmoji's recent release of 15 vulva emoji, realistically asymmetrical and in a variety of pleasant colors. Designer Katy McCarthy did an interview on her work on these sexually explicit emoji and the necessity of inclusivity.
posted by bile and syntax at 7:35 PM PST - 39 comments

"If she had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited." Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing.
posted by headspace at 6:17 PM PST - 111 comments

Umair Haque on Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It):

Can we create a better web? Sure. But I think we have to start with humility, gratitude, reality — not arrogance, privilege, blindness. Abuse isn’t a nuisance, a triviality, a minor annoyance that “those people” have to put up with for the great privilege of having our world-changing stuff in their grubby hands. It will chill, stop, and kill networks from growing, communities from blossoming, and lives from flourishing.

posted by metaquarry at 5:46 PM PST - 93 comments

How Dogs Forge A Bond With Rio’s Homeless That Is Life-Saving For Both.
posted by adamvasco at 5:29 PM PST - 4 comments

The Cut [NYMag] speaks to seven doctors who practiced on the cusp of Roe. Many are still practicing. [more inside]
posted by melissasaurus at 5:07 PM PST - 9 comments

Researchers at Stanford produce real-time, photo-realistic expression transfer. [Auto plays with sound]
posted by klausman at 4:50 PM PST - 36 comments

Reflections of the past is an award-winning photo series by commercial advertising photographer Tom Hussey. [more inside]
posted by Dashy at 3:12 PM PST - 11 comments

Here’s the story that people like to tell about the way we sleep: Back in the day, we got more of it. Our eyes would shut when it got dark. We’d wake up for a few hours during the night instead of snoozing for a single long block. And we’d nap during the day. Then—minor key!—modernity ruined everything. Our busy working lives put an end to afternoon naps, while lightbulbs, TV screens, and smartphones shortened our natural slumber and made it more continuous. All of this is wrong, according to Jerome Siegel at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much like the Paleo diet, it’s based on unsubstantiated assumptions about how humans used to live.
posted by sciatrix at 3:10 PM PST - 43 comments

The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. [more inside]
posted by pjern at 2:39 PM PST - 32 comments

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. Collaboratively mapping connections in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. (Via)
posted by immlass at 1:32 PM PST - 9 comments

History v Historical Fiction by Jane Smiley [The Guardian] Historical fiction is not a secondary form – I was condescended to by a conservative historian who cannot see that he too constructs stories.

“The condescender was Niall Ferguson, a conservative historian about 15 years younger than me, who wanted to be sure that I understood that the historical novel is all made up, but that historical non-fiction, written by historians is truth. He referred to his research. I referred to my research. He wasn’t convinced. I suggested that the demands of history and fiction are slightly different – that since a novel is a story, it must be complete, and since a history must be accepted by the reader as accurate, it must be incomplete.”

posted by Fizz at 1:30 PM PST - 40 comments

"Desiderata" is a 1927 poem by Max Ehrmann. It's been subjected to misattribution and mutation (the second Google result is a typo-ridden version that's lurked on a .edu site since 1996 and substitutes "Neither be critical about love" for "Neither be cynical about love" and "Be careful" for "Be cheerful". Even Snopes prints a version with "careful" rather than "cheerful.) Daniel Nester digs into the history of the poem in a piece published on the website of the Poetry Foundation.
posted by larrybob at 11:08 AM PST - 64 comments

How space travel became the unofficial religion of the USSR [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:24 AM PST - 16 comments

The Non-Judgmental Guide to Getting Seriously Into Tea (slSeriousEats) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 10:15 AM PST - 93 comments

Be Suspicious Of Online Movie Ratings, Especially Fandango's — FiveThirtyEight.com notices a consistent pattern in Fandango movie ratings, and warns against the perils of relying on ratings provided by companies trying to sell you the product being rated. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 9:29 AM PST - 184 comments

A delightful exposition on probability and related paradoxes. [more inside]
posted by andrewcooke at 8:43 AM PST - 27 comments

Nathan Fielder, host of Nathan for You, talks to AV Club writer John Teti's mother, who expressed a strong dislike for Fielder on a podcast last year. [more inside]
posted by coreywilliam at 8:10 AM PST - 8 comments

There are at least three emoji-based programming languages: 🍀 (aka 4Lang; bubblesort example), Emojinal, and HeartForth (stack-based, for extra obscurity; factorial example). [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 8:05 AM PST - 28 comments

To put an exclamation point on the Chicago Cubs winning their first postseason series at Wrigley Field in the 100 year history of Wrigley Field, rookie Kyle Schwarber hit a dramatic 400+ foot shot over the new video scoreboard in right field... [more inside]
posted by eriko at 7:18 AM PST - 169 comments

The green Orion slave girl. Star Trek's almost-forgotten 1965 original pilot contained a sequence that would later become iconic: the dancing, seductive green Orion slave girl. Getting her to stay green, though, was a different matter entirely. [more inside]
posted by zooropa at 6:25 AM PST - 28 comments

We tell women to have sex with as many partners as they desire while neglecting to tell men to study up on female anatomy. But who wants sex if it’s not good? A woman’s right to say ‘meh’
posted by almostmanda at 6:20 AM PST - 182 comments

The Drone Papers-The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars. [more inside]
posted by nevercalm at 6:17 AM PST - 52 comments

At the beginning of October, the Toronto Blue Jays at long last clinched the AL East division, ending a record 22-year drought [prev.]. Meanwhile, after a disastrous, injury-plagued 2014 season, the Texas Rangers rebounded from a late-summer nadir to improbably win the AL West title. The two teams collided in a best-of-five series -- Texas won two, then Toronto. It all came down to Wednesday night's showdown. Tied 2-2 after six, the 7th inning proceeded to unravel over the next 53 minutes in increasingly bizarre and dramatic fashion. To wit: A freak accident. A controversial call. Roars and brickbats from the crowd. The mayor tweets for calm. A comedy of errors. A violent slide. An epic home run, and an even more epic bat flip. Benches clear. Players ejected. Fans arrested. And the slap-ass heard 'round the world. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 6:15 AM PST - 109 comments

...or, how a woman would have to ask Gorbachev to tear down this wall.
posted by nightrecordings at 4:06 AM PST - 37 comments

Why Don't Queer Butch Women Exist in Games? Meanwhile, Julie Compton wonders Why Hollywood Can't Get with Butch Women. And Jack Halberstam asks, Is the Butch Back?
posted by thetortoise at 1:07 AM PST - 40 comments

Four dead, an ever-expanding list of suspects, dozens of detectives on the case. Three years after the fact, a mysterious shooting in the French Alps has evolved into one of the most confounding, globe-spanning criminal investigations in decades.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:01 PM PST - 53 comments

Homeland gets pranked. Season 5 of Golden Globe winning TV show Homeland (currently showing on Showtime) has Carrie living in Berlin, so it was largely filmed in Germany, even some bits that appear to be in other countries. The crew built a very convincing set of a middle-east refugee camp that is first seen in episode 2, and for added authenticity they hired local German arabic graffiti artists to give the walls authentic arabic graffiti. Trouble is, the artists actually wrote slogans such as "Homeland is racist" and "This show does not represent the views of the artists". [more inside]
posted by w0mbat at 8:07 PM PST - 98 comments

Meditation has gotten hip again. With events like Wisdom 2.0, DIY apps, trendy in-person sessions/ networking, and even free 10 day sessions, the backlash has begun.
posted by JiffyQ at 7:02 PM PST - 46 comments

"There’s a long and noble tradition of literary critics misunderstanding Joseph Conrad. Partly that’s because he is such a complicated, dense and fascinating writer. Far more words have been written about him than he ever wrote himself – and not everyone can get it right all the time. Especially when you throw combustible postcolonial issues into the mix." [Sam Jordison - The Guardian] [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:38 PM PST - 34 comments

Legendary and Warner Bros. announce some forthcoming movies: "The initial trio of films are 2017’s KONG: SKULL ISLAND; GODZILLA 2 in 2018; and then GODZILLA VS. KONG, arriving in theaters in 2020." [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 4:08 PM PST - 59 comments

Girls don't want boys. Girls want equal pay and sick beats
posted by boo_radley at 3:54 PM PST - 23 comments

In the United States today, thousands of children under 18 have recently taken marital vows — mostly girls married to adult men, often with approval from local judges. In at least one case, a 10-year-old boy was legally married. [more inside]
posted by melissasaurus at 2:59 PM PST - 91 comments

I Have Gone to Bed Early: Translating Proust by Dan Piepenbring [The Paris Review]

Richard Howard, who turns eighty-six today, first appeared in The Paris Review in our thirteenth issue—from the summer of 1956. Since then, several of his poems and translations have found their way to these pages, and in 2004, J. D. McClatchy interviewed him for our Art of Poetry series. In our Summer 1989 issue, George Plimpton spoke with Howard about translating Proust.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 1:03 PM PST - 13 comments

After thirteen seasons, Stephen Fry has announced he is stepping down as host of the BBC panel show QI. He will be replaced by Sandi Toksvig.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 12:59 PM PST - 57 comments

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared #5 Has Arrived [more inside]
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:33 PM PST - 44 comments

Don't feel like using Nate Silver's new statistical prediction model CARMELO to figure out if your NBA team will be any good this season? Maybe this fact will help instead: The most important contribution an NBA basketball player can make to their team is no longer thought to be scoring points. Like, at all. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:21 AM PST - 49 comments

"Yousef Al Otaiba is the most charming man in Washington: He's slick, he's savvy and he throws one hell of a party. And if he has his way, our Middle East policy is going to get a lot more aggressive." - Ryan Grim and Akbar Shahid Ahmed [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:11 AM PST - 22 comments

In May 1991, ABC launched a half-hour drama series called "My Life and Times." The premise: An 85 year old man living in a retirement community in 2035 looks back on his life and shares his experiences with friends and family. Framing sequences were set in 2035 while the bulk of the episodes featured flashbacks to the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. The show begins on April 9, 2035. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:54 AM PST - 21 comments

It's 1983, time to watch Computer Show. There are only a couple of episodes uploaded to Youtube, but the first one features custom art work site Lumi, and the second explores Reddit. [more inside]
posted by zabuni at 9:41 AM PST - 23 comments

"I am a hetero white cis man working to take the space I have in the world and make it feminist... I know that it should be rapists' responsibility to not rape instead of survivors' responsibility to not get raped, and I know that by virtue of being a dude who doesn't talk to other dudes about rape I am complicit in rape culture, but I just have no idea where to begin. Can you talk to me about talking to rapists about rape?" [cw: potentially triggering language abounds]
posted by divined by radio at 9:16 AM PST - 31 comments

NYC restauranteur Danny Meyer is eliminating tips at his 13 restaurants. "Significantly increased" prices will make up the difference. (More from NYTimes.)
posted by ndg at 8:59 AM PST - 108 comments

Earlier this month, Youyou Tu was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for her discovery of artemisinin, also known as qinghaosu. She is the first Chinese Nobel recipient for work that was done in mainland China. Dr. Tu's studies were done in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, a politically precarious time for Chinese academics, which adds a layer of historical complexity to her work. It is difficult to overstate the importance of artemisinin to anti-malarial efforts. Unfortunately, artemisinin-resistant strains of malaria are already beginning to appear only thirty years after the drug was introduced.
posted by sciatrix at 8:51 AM PST - 12 comments

“What do I think is the American dream? There is no dream for anyone who isn’t a lawyer or banker,” he said. “Everyone else, we are getting a raw deal. Immigrants taking all our jobs. Only jobs we get is keeping the rich happy: we release fish downstream for work, they catch them upstream for fun.” (slGrauniad)
posted by Kitteh at 8:42 AM PST - 91 comments

August: Caleb Madison solicits crossword submissions for a new daily feature at Buzzfeed.
September 30: The Observer publishes a profile of Buzzfeed’s Puzzle Editor.
October 3: “You Won’t Believe How Much Of This Crossword You Can Finish”
October 6: “You Won’t Believe How Much Of This Mini Crossword You Can Finish”
October 12: Madison explains “why in the world [Buzzfeed is] launching a crossword,” and the puzzles start arriving in earnest: “The 9 Celebrities Discover Their Inner Princess Puzzle”, “That Crossword Where 20 Minutes In, He Gives You That Look”, and “That Puzzle When You Can’t Escape Pumpkin Spice Season”
December: People write letters to The Awl about how they hate themselves because they aren’t crossword puzzle constructors. Previously
posted by Going To Maine at 8:26 AM PST - 8 comments

For the first time, a Jamaican writer has won the Man Booker Prize for the best original novel written in English. Marlon James' 680-page A Brief History of Seven Killings is a fictional oral history of three decades of Jamaican life, using the real-life attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 as its jumping-off point. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:56 AM PST - 14 comments

A real-life version of Mjǫllnir, made with a bit of sufficiently advanced technology.
posted by jedicus at 7:28 AM PST - 25 comments

Carey Lander, keyboardist for Scottish indie band Camera Obscura, has passed. Carey died of Sarcoma, and she asked everyone to give for those who would come after. She was 33.
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:35 AM PST - 42 comments

Why SQL is neither legacy, nor low-level, nor difficult, nor the wrong place for (business) data logic, but simply awesome! (allegedly)
posted by MartinWisse at 6:34 AM PST - 132 comments

A Hitchcock mashup where Kubrick is the villain. / Un mashup hitchcockien dont Kubrick est le méchant.
posted by growabrain at 6:13 AM PST - 11 comments

In 1992-1994 and 2005-2009, Yuka Makino studied the lopping practices in the oak forests of Garwhal, Himalaya. Her PhD dissertation (PDF) contains a fascinating prologue describing the practical and ethical issues for conducting ethnographic research in an area where distrust of outsiders runs high and where gender and caste norms are strictly enforced. One afternoon, several children came and were chatting with us when a 10-year-old girl joined us. Though she still took part in the conversation in a loud voice, she stood at the edge of the veranda, far away from the door. (...) I realized that she was a Scheduled Caste girl and if she had stood at the doorway her shadow would have fallen into the room and may have touched my assistant’s plate of food, contaminating or polluting it. I let her stand there so that neither she nor my assistant would feel uncomfortable. [more inside]
posted by elgilito at 5:52 AM PST - 7 comments

DIY Computer Control Panel. That is all.
posted by marienbad at 5:25 AM PST - 25 comments

what makes a good community?

The thing is, reaching the goal of a diverse community is a step-by-step process. There are no shortcuts. Each step has to be complete before the next level of cultural change is effective. It’s also worth noting that each step along the way benefits all community members, not just diverse contributors.

Sarah Sharp writes about community building, shortly after her recent departure from linux kernel development.
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 4:40 AM PST - 23 comments

If someone had told me even a few years ago that such a thing wasn’t pure coincidence, I would have had my doubts about that someone. Now, however, I reserve my doubts for the people who still trust. There are so many ghosts in our machines—their locations so hidden, their methods so ingenious, their motives so inscrutable—that not to feel haunted is not to be awake. That’s why paranoia, even in its extreme forms, no longer seems to me so much a disorder as a mode of cognition with an impressive track record of prescience. --Walter Kirn on modern paranoia in The Atlantic [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:54 AM PST - 33 comments

Thoreau was kind of a dick. Actually, more than "kind of." He was, in fact, a huge, total dick. (OK, he was a strident and powerful abolitionist. But somehow he managed to be a dick about that too.) [more inside]
posted by neroli at 6:47 PM PST - 111 comments

What's the Difference Between Data Science and Statistics? — Not long ago, the term "data science" meant nothing to most people-even to those who worked with data. A likely response to the term was: "Isn't that just statistics?" These days, data science is hot. The Harvard Business Review called data scientist the "Sexiest Job of the 21st Century."  So what changed? Why did data science become a distinct term? And what distinguishes data science from statistics?
posted by tonycpsu at 5:20 PM PST - 37 comments

The Planet Hunters citizen science project has flagged a star 1400 light years away in the constellation Lyra that exhibits irregular, asymmetrical changes in brightness which have been difficult (but not impossible) to explain via natural phenomena. Mainstream media coverage is rushing to ask whether the behavior might indicate alien intelligence at work. But Reddit (and Betteridge) are skeptical.
posted by richyoung at 4:09 PM PST - 75 comments

Putin Bets Big on Aggressive Syria Policy As the UK government denies reports that RAF pilots have been given the green light to shoot down hostile Russian jets in Syria.
Iraq has begun bombing Islamic State insurgents with help from a new intelligence center with staff from Russia, Iran and Syria.
Russia is using electronic warfare to cloak its actions in Syria from Isis and Nato.
What happens if Russia decides to go into Iraq. How to respond to Russia in Syria while avoiding World War Three.
Meanwhile Shiites in Iraq Hailing Putin for Syria Push.
posted by adamvasco at 3:51 PM PST - 136 comments

The Seventeen Faces of Julian Vandervelde [more inside]
posted by Drinky Die at 3:44 PM PST - 12 comments

Tonight's Debate debate will be the first time a major news event will be broadcast live in virtual reality. That might not be such a good idea. Here is the When, the Where, the Who and How to Watch. [more inside]
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:53 PM PST - 1412 comments

Why are glasses so expensive? [SLYT] According to Forbes, "Today more than 80% of major eyewear brands, including the world’s No. 1 seller, Ray-Ban, [and Oakley] are designed and retailed (over 7,000 stores US alone) by Luxottica" (2012). [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 12:17 PM PST - 199 comments

Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:10 PM PST - 25 comments

I want to complain to the studio execs who commissioned the current season of "21st century"; your show is broken. I say this as a viewer coming in with low expectations. ... Whose idea was it to hire the ghosts of Philip K. Dick and George Orwell as showrunners anyway? A review of the current season of reality by noted author (and MeFi's own) Charlie Stross.
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:49 AM PST - 48 comments

...if I’m honest with myself, I would be lying if I didn’t say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn’t want to seem “difficult” or “spoiled.” At the time, that seemed like a fine idea, until I saw the payroll on the Internet and realized every man I was working with definitely didn’t worry about being “difficult” or “spoiled.”

Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence on the wage gap between male and female actors
posted by The Gooch at 11:17 AM PST - 130 comments

Yes, THAT Daily Mail... This is a great article considering it is from the Daily Mail. A comprehensive study may have revealed how the long neck of the giraffe evolved.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 11:11 AM PST - 10 comments

The Runner’s High: It’s Like Smoking Weed [High Times]

Research on mice [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] has confirmed that a “runner’s high” arises from a release of anandamide, a neurotransmitter that stimulates the same cannabinoid receptors that cannabis does. If you have ever run, biked, lifted weights, or performed any kind of physical exercise, you may have noticed a sense of euphoria and the feeling you are relieved of physical pain and anxiety. They thought it came from β-endorphin, but now scientists have confirmed that anandamide is most likely the cause.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:09 AM PST - 38 comments

The independent online magazine announced it was acquired by the media conglomerate. The indie-rock tastemakers, on the verge of their 20th birthday will join Vogue, Wired and Vanity Fair for an undisclosed sum. [more inside]
posted by lmfsilva at 10:55 AM PST - 39 comments

Pop Culture Pulsar: The Science Behind Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures Album Cover
posted by zamboni at 10:43 AM PST - 13 comments

Artist Tom Kucy raided the NASA Apollo Project Archive of photos to create a short film titled "Ground Control".
posted by msbutah at 10:32 AM PST - 3 comments

ThatNordicGuy spends his free time combining photos of celebrities.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:50 AM PST - 35 comments

99 Luftballons played on a red balloon (SLYT)
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:42 AM PST - 17 comments

President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa. "It seems to me as if democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level. And it [applies] to everyone. It’s the human image. It’s not any loyalty or tradition or anything else; it’s being human that enlists the respect, the love of God being implied in it."
posted by leesh at 8:59 AM PST - 30 comments

Librarian Edith Edi Campbell posted to her Facebook page about “Large Fears,” a Kickstarter-funded children’s book for queer black boys, “I would say there are so few books for queer black boys, but there are too few books for all our marginalized young people.” Children’s writer Meg Rosoff responded: “There are not too few books for marginalised young people. There are hundreds of them, thousands of them. You don’t have to read about a queer black boy to read a book about a marginalised child. The children’s book world is getting far too literal about what ‘needs’ to be represented. You don’t read Crime and Punishment to find out about Russian criminals. Or Alice and Wonderland to know about rabbits. Good literature expands your mind. It doesn’t have the ‘job’ of being a mirror.” [more inside]
posted by touchstone033 at 8:55 AM PST - 48 comments

Thurston Hopkins was a British photojournalist. Here is his black-and-white photo essay from the 1950's called Cats of London.
posted by colfax at 8:32 AM PST - 8 comments

How could anyone possibly screw up Ferris Bueller's Day Off? By turning it into a sitcom. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:24 AM PST - 55 comments

From activist Palestinian OGs, to Black Hebrew hitmakers from remote desert outposts, to goofy trap about food, rap in Israel and Palestine is a melting pot of voices and perspectives. Mike Skinner of the Streets for Noisey Magazine investigates Hip Hop In The Holy Land. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:55 AM PST - 3 comments

From W. Kamau Bell: "First of all, Doc McStuffins is about a seven-year-old black girl. That basically makes the title character the Diahann Carroll of children’s TV. How many other children’s TV shows have a black female lead character? Hint: The answer is “not nearly enough.” Second of all, Doc McStuffins is a doctor for her stuffed animals and toys. And that may sound merely adorable to you, but I’m raising a pair of black girls who will one day be powerful black women. And Doc McStuffins is the reason that my four year old could say the words “stethoscope,” “otoscope,” and “sphygmomanometer” when she was two years old."
posted by ChuraChura at 6:43 AM PST - 25 comments

The silence over the Thabo Sefolosha trial is deafening...and mystifying. [more inside]
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:29 AM PST - 29 comments

The message he wants the developing world, especially the Islamic world, to receive from Iran is simple: you can be a safe, advanced and prosperous state without depending on America.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:55 AM PST - 14 comments

Counting the closures of rural inns, high-street noise boxes, sticky-carpet boozers of the backstreets, it can be said that roughly 30 pubs shut every week in the UK; a rate of decline that, as one group of worried analysts has calculated, would mean total elimination of the British pub by the 2040s.[sl longform grauniad] [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:08 AM PST - 82 comments

INSIDE AN FBI HOSTAGE CRISIS from the Wall Street Journal. [Warning: graphic violence, disturbing images and video]
posted by chavenet at 3:08 AM PST - 17 comments

Bury St Edmunds is a small, polite market town in rural eastern England. Better known for its ruined abbey, beer, sugar beet, and being the sort of place Margaret Thatcher ought to keep a tea shop, in 2002 local resident John Peel declared its music scene "the new Seattle". Yeah. How did THAT turn out?
posted by bebrogued at 2:20 AM PST - 14 comments

John Grant [previously] has a new album coming out soon, Grey Tickles, Black Pressure. He released the lead video, Disappointing [NSFW], a while back, but it might have flown under your radar. It certainly did mine.
posted by hippybear at 2:03 AM PST - 17 comments

Pardon My French: 561 covers of English-language hit songs, sung in French (by native French speakers of varying musical abilities) in the most literal word-for-word translations over chiptune instrumentals. Includes classics such as L'éclair de Jacques Qui Saute (Les Pierres qui roulent), Sexuelle Guérison (Marvain La-Joie) or Le Paradis des Bandits (Yo Sympa). Includes MP3s, lyrics and links to the original songs for earbleach. BAISE OUAIS ! [more inside]
posted by elgilito at 1:47 AM PST - 11 comments

Tourism, video games, and federal bureaucracy in the ongoing tragedy of Centralia, PA.
posted by figurant at 1:13 AM PST - 22 comments

Sunset Silhouette Selfies
posted by Mitheral at 12:49 AM PST - 3 comments

"It was hard work maintaining a light buzz for so long, but it paid off. When Rihanna’s manager, Jay Brown, appeared to tell me that this was one of her first interviews in years I just laughed. And then choked. Because here she was." — Miranda July interviews Rihanna for the NYT Magazine's Greats Issue. (SLNYTM)
posted by heeeraldo at 11:22 PM PST - 25 comments

Here's fifty lanes of automobile traffic in Beijing. Here's a bike traffic jam at CicLAvia in Los Angeles, and on New York's 5th Avenue the traffic is afoot.
posted by aniola at 11:15 PM PST - 22 comments

Sly Stone leaping and kicking the air in his ultra-70s platform heel boots. Thelonious Monk at the piano, a weapon slung across his shoulder and surrounded by the accoutrements of underground resistance. Bruce Springsteen grinning and leaning on his buddy, sax man Clarence Clemmons. If you're any kind of music fan, these iconic album cover images will probably be familiar to you. And they are only the tip of the iceberg: there were so, so many more designed for Columbia Records, over the years, by art director John Berg, who has just passed on at the age of 83. So long, John, and thanks for all those killer record covers.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 11:07 PM PST - 7 comments

Previous efforts to revamp Playboy, as recently as three years ago, have never quite stuck. And those who have accused it of exploiting women are unlikely to be assuaged by a modest cover-up. But, according to its own research, Playboy’s logo is one of the most recognizable in the world, along with those of Apple and Nike. This time, as the magazine seeks to compete with younger outlets like Vice, Mr. Flanders said, it sought to answer a key question: “if you take nudity out, what’s left?”

Playboy to stop printing nude photos as of the March 2016 issue. (SLNYT) [more inside]
posted by Shmuel510 at 8:20 PM PST - 94 comments

Patrick Haggerty was a teenager in rural Dry Creek, Washington, in the late 1950s. He remembers the day he first had a conversation with his father about being gay. [more inside]
posted by nadawi at 5:58 PM PST - 8 comments

For Reuters, Neil Hall and Angus Berwick tell the tale of Lincolnshire hermit Rachel Denton. In 2006 Denton formally committed to living the rest of her days in solitude after a lifetime as a teacher and Carmelite nun. In addition to keeping a garden and raising chickens, she makes time in her routine to update her Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles.
posted by ob1quixote at 5:35 PM PST - 6 comments

"The room was upholstered in crimson and oatmeal and decorated with Socialist Realist frescoes of industrious maidens. A hefty multipointed star descended from the ceiling like a satellite returning from space. Above the tables a pair of identical life-size plaster statues of Soviet schoolgirls faced each other in the manner of temple guardians. They drummed on drums with a look of patriotic ecstasy; crimson blindfolds bound their eyes. Taking a swig of kvas, a fermented bread beverage that's slightly reminiscent of root beer, I wondered whether the statues were intended to be a political statement, nostalgic kitsch, or just a really ambitious exercise in color coordination." - The Surreal Thrill Of Moscow Dining by Alex Halberstadt
posted by The Whelk at 5:15 PM PST - 13 comments

Here's a 5 min. Youtube clip with some tile makers and brick layers creating ceramic art with oriental motifs & Arabic music in the background
posted by growabrain at 4:36 PM PST - 15 comments

On this Columbus Day, consider what the world truly looked like before the arrival of the West. [more inside]
posted by glaucon at 4:23 PM PST - 33 comments

"FABRICATIONIST DEWIT REMAKES THE WORLD" is a work of interactive fiction that tells the story of a synthetic being who, after a sleep of centuries, receives an unexpected visitor—along with a new role in the Great Project.
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:56 PM PST - 5 comments

So I lived my life flying around the world, telling people how to do things I had sometimes never done myself, while everyone suddenly seemed to believe I was a real programmer because of things I did that were mostly not related to programming in the first place. One day, I was stuck in an airport coming back from a conference, furiously typing at a terminal, when an odd, gentle voice asked me: If you please, design me a system!
posted by modernserf at 3:33 PM PST - 38 comments

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ladybird books, eight new titles are being produced. However these are targeted at adults, and may not be entirely serious in nature... [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 3:24 PM PST - 8 comments

A journey through the architecture and urban landscape of Chicago – from industrial zones to Mid-Century suburbs and all points between. [more inside]
posted by davejh at 2:55 PM PST - 6 comments

Comedienne Kathleen Cameron does Hamilton: An American Musical, via Instagram (SL Instagram)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:44 PM PST - 66 comments

Social network giant Facebook paid just £4,327 ($6,643) in corporation tax in 2014, its latest UK results show. Its most recent Companies House filing shows the company as making a pre-tax loss of £28.5m last year, but the firm also paid its 362 UK staff a total of £35.4m in share bonuses.
posted by marienbad at 2:27 PM PST - 24 comments

Rates of all types of addiction — not just alcohol — are elevated in aboriginal peoples around the world, not only in America. It’s unlikely that these scattered groups randomly happen to share more vulnerability genes for addiction than any other similarly dispersed people. But what they clearly do have in common is an ongoing multi-generational experience of trauma.

No, Native Americans aren't genetically more susceptible to alcoholism.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:44 PM PST - 63 comments

"There are two kinds of women: those who knit and those who unravel. I am a great unraveler. I can undo years of careful stitching in fifteen gluttonous minutes. It isn't even a decision, really. Once I see the loose thread, I am undone. It's over before I have even asked myself the question: Do I actually want to destroy this?" [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 11:32 AM PST - 17 comments

Watching him direct is akin to witnessing an athletic performance. Soderbergh walks, jogs, runs, sits, lies on the floor, and hangs half off dollies while PAs grip his ankles. “When I tell other cameramen what goes on with Steven, they’re flabbergasted,” says Soderbergh’s longtime second cameraman, Patrick O’Brien, who works on only about 30 percent of The Knick — usually when Soderbergh needs him to gather extra close-ups in a scene with a lot of characters, operate a crane that he’s sitting on, or shoot the other side of a two-person conversation. [more inside]
posted by octothorpe at 10:58 AM PST - 13 comments

The world's coral is suddenly and rapidly starting to die - "This is only the third time we've seen what we would refer to as a global bleaching event. [The prior events] were in 1998 and 2010, and those were pretty much one year events. We're looking at a similar spatial scale of bleaching across the globe, but spanning across at least 2 years. So that means a lot of these corals are being put under really prolonged stress, or are being hit 2 years in a row." Can 'manually breeding supercorals capable of living in increasingly inhospitable waters' help in time? (via/via)
posted by kliuless at 9:56 AM PST - 17 comments

Meet the Superstar Architect Transforming NYC’s Skyline [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:45 AM PST - 10 comments

But people who decide to study this violent history, people who write it all down — we’re also people who need to mail in tax forms, or put on a pot of coffee, call our dads. This can be difficult work, this act of entering the pre when you live in the post, and then having to be a person, and hand something in by a deadline, and walk away and study and do it again. For writers of colour who choose to study or tell the stories of their own communities, this in-between space is made more stark by the fact that they work within a system that often speaks about them, for them, but not with them.
posted by sciatrix at 9:43 AM PST - 3 comments

A serial novel written in real time by Joshua Cohen, with illustrations by Leon Chang.

PCKWCK is a reinterpretation of Charles Dickens' first serial novel, The Pickwick Papers. That's about all we know so far, because it hasn't been written yet. Beginning Monday, October 12th at 1pm EST, Joshua Cohen will write PCKWCK over five days in front of the entire internet. Every day from 1pm-6pm EST visitors to www.PCKWCK.com will be able to watch Cohen write in real time, offer feedback that may affect the outcome of the novel, and talk with Cohen and other readers in a chat room.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:39 AM PST - 14 comments

Two-spirit people, body sovereignty and gender self-determination
posted by kamikazegopher at 9:30 AM PST - 13 comments

The Maine lobster haul has been growing and growing since the early 1990s, and no one is certain of why. Now there are fears of a pending bust, but without knowing the reason for the boom, no one can confidently predict whether the bust will happen either.
posted by Etrigan at 8:56 AM PST - 43 comments

How the women of Umatilla, Oregon took over the city's government - in 1916.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:14 AM PST - 6 comments

In reality the Washington D.C. football team has a racist name, an asshole owner, and ruined one of the most promising rookie quarterbacks to ever play in the league. Jon Bois uses Breaking Madden to get fictional revenge by burning Washington to the ground. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 8:14 AM PST - 41 comments

On this day one hundred years ago, the German army executed Edith Cavell. She was a British nurse who had worked in Belgium before the First World War, and then helped Belgian, French, and British men escape the country during the German occupation. A military court found her guilty of actively aiding the enemy in wartime, and ordered her execution. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 7:01 AM PST - 26 comments

String (or yarn) and nail art can pretty straight-forward - use nails to set anchors for string and make something. You can make more complex patterns, like this string art clock by Aline Campbell, or multi-colored geometric patterns by Mahmoud Al-qammari. But it takes more skill and patience to make a giant portrait, as done by Zenyk Palagniuk, in the style of Kumi Yamashita.
posted by filthy light thief at 5:49 AM PST - 16 comments

The Amsterdam Klezmer Band performs their Klezmer rap song 'Chassid in Amsterdam'. Lyrics (in Dutch/Jiddish) in the description. [more inside]
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:13 AM PST - 22 comments

Input/Output (SLVimeo) - A new short from Terri Timely and Park Pictures which defies description
posted by CrystalDave at 11:17 PM PST - 17 comments

Given the success I am having with students, one might think that the Mathematics Department leadership would be expressing curiosity about how I am achieving that success. Instead, Craig Evans in early 2014 asked me "If you had a job at McDonalds and came along with all these new ideas, how long do you think you'd carry on working there?" The fact that the now Interim Chair of the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department should compare undergraduate education to fast food reveals everything you need to know about how students are regarded by the leading clique of men at the helm of the Mathematics Department of the number one public university in the world. [more inside]
posted by un petit cadeau at 9:30 PM PST - 85 comments

"Every society struggles to care for people with mental illness. In parts of West Africa, where psychiatry is virtually unknown, the chain is often a last resort for desperate families who cannot control a loved one in the grip of psychosis. Religious retreats, known as prayer camps, set up makeshift psychiatric wards, usually with prayer as the only intervention." NYTimes. Links contain upsetting images and video. [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 9:16 PM PST - 6 comments

A man takes his car for a drive through town. Stuff happens (SLYT).
posted by scalefree at 8:18 PM PST - 60 comments

The Economist's Quality of Death Index for 2015 was published last week. It attempts to measure the quality of palliative care in 80 countries. The top three countries (in order) are Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. And the bottom three countries? Philippines, Bangladesh, and Iraq. Here is The Economist's summary and here is the full report.
posted by Sir Rinse at 6:37 PM PST - 14 comments

(slvimeo) Richard Thompson is renowned among cartoonists as the "artist's" cartoonist. Little known to all but those close to him is the extent of his extraordinary art, a gift so rare that it compelled "Calvin and Hobbes" creator, Bill Watterson, to break an almost 20 year silence and declare, "Now I have a reason to read comics again". Cul de Sac, his comic strip, from the beginning.
posted by ladyriffraff at 6:28 PM PST - 25 comments

Guillermo del Toro’s House of Horrors [SLNYT]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:08 PM PST - 19 comments

Three of the four largest global accountancy firms in the U.K. have announced changes to their hiring processes. In particular, Deloitte announced that it will "begin using a school-blind hiring process to help address unconscious bias." Interviewers will no longer have access to details of an applicant's school or university until an offer has been made. The announcement marks the start of Deloitte’s inaugural Social Mobility Week. [more inside]
posted by cynical pinnacle at 3:20 PM PST - 34 comments

Liu Bolin is the invisible man. He paints his entire body to exactly match the scenery behind him and is camouflaged so well it is sometimes almost impossible to spot him.
More of his art and a TED and previous.
posted by adamvasco at 1:12 PM PST - 19 comments

The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential Election — They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 1:01 PM PST - 40 comments

An unusual rock formation in Chattanooga appears perilously balanced; but more than thirty people can stand on its top at one time. It's called Umbrella Rock. In one of the earliest picture of Umbrella Rock is of soldiers taken in 1863. Today, of course, it looks different. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 11:24 AM PST - 27 comments

Michael Twitty is becoming one of the most transformative figures in the world of food. Reinterrogating and recreating African-American history in the context of American culinary history through his blog Afroculinaria, Twitty argues for "culinary justice" in food writing and the conversation on food history. His project (and forthcoming book of the same name) The Cooking Gene is in part a product of his Southern Discomfort Tour, a journey retracing the preservation and transmission of culinary knowledge before, during and beyond slavery. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 9:58 AM PST - 8 comments

Gaiman and Buckingham return to finish their saga - "Many comics legends have worked on Miracleman, but no run on the series is as fondly remembered as Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham's, cut short before its time. But now Marvel isn't just remastering Gaiman and Buckingham's original comics, but letting them finish the story they began 25 years ago." [previously: 1,2,3; also btw...] (via/via)
posted by kliuless at 9:41 AM PST - 33 comments

Dr. Geoffrey Marcy, a prominent exoplanet researcher employed as a professor at UC Berkeley, has been found to have repeatedly violated sexual harassment policy. The full report has not been made public, but according to a report by Buzzfeed, the result is that he is to be given "clear expectations concerning his future interactions with students" or risk further punishment. Dr. Marcy has put an apology letter on his web page. Dr. Michael Eisen, a biology professor at UC Berkeley, has posted an article about the contradictions between the Berkley sexual harassment training and institutional consequences. Dr. Janet Stemwedel writes in Forbes about the differences between institutional and community responses in this case.
posted by demiurge at 9:36 AM PST - 93 comments

Of all the questionable assumptions that prop up the Myers-Briggs indicator, this one strikes me as the shakiest: that you are "born with a four letter preference," a reductive blueprint for how to move through life's infinite and varied challenges.
posted by Lycaste at 9:05 AM PST - 114 comments

The Wheel of Time Reread by Leigh Butler [TOR.COM]

Hello! Welcome to the introductory post of a new blog series on Tor.com, The Wheel of Time Re-read. This is in preparation for the publication of the next and last book in the series, A Memory of Light, which is scheduled to be published this fall. My name is Leigh Butler, and I’ll be your hostess for the festivities. I’m very excited to be a part of this project, and I hope you will enjoy it as well.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:40 AM PST - 31 comments

A woman is arrested for trespassing after doing yoga poses for photos on the live tracks of the Washington DC metro, months after photographs surfaced. Barely a month before her arrest, in a nearby DC suburb, a train runs over a teenager who was posing for photographs with his girlfriend. [more inside]
posted by nightrecordings at 6:26 AM PST - 128 comments

Can you recognise all of the forty different anime in this video without looking at the crib sheet?
posted by MartinWisse at 5:24 AM PST - 29 comments

In 1970, a young graduate student at MIT demonstrated SHRDLU, an interactive artificial intelligence program which could understand simple English sentences in order to manipulate and describe objects within a simple "block world". It was heralded as a huge breakthrough, leading to predictions that comprehensive "Strong AI" was just around the corner. This optimism proved to be premature, being followed a few years later by the first so-called "AI Winter" of disappointment and funding cuts. But the student, Terry Winograd, went on to Stanford and continues to be influential not just in computer science but also in ethics, cognitive science, natural language and even design. But you might know him better as the PhD. thesis advisor for a guy named Larry Page who was working on some kind of techniques for finding relevant web pages.
posted by mr.ersatz at 3:44 AM PST - 18 comments

Despite its aging interface and its slightly misleading name, The Old Fulton New York Postcards site is an amazing tool for anyone doing any kind of historical research. It is a huge searchable archive of american and canadian newspapers.
posted by sciencegeek at 3:11 AM PST - 5 comments

Charleston to 'Cantina Band' Last night's episode of Strictly Come Dancing, the UK version of Dancing With Stars was a Hollywood special which included this two minutes of joy in which Kellie Bright & Kevin Clifton danced the charleston dressed at Luke and Leia. With lightsabers. Other films included Pulp Fiction, Pretty Woman and Ghost. [alt link for Star Wars dance]
posted by feelinglistless at 3:07 AM PST - 10 comments

The "Lube Olympics" makes slippery bid to rival 2020 Tokyo Games — featuring popular Greece sports like group sumo, tug-of-war, giant balls relay, sliding underneath the sheets and so much more
posted by a lungful of dragon at 1:58 AM PST - 13 comments

In real time: the Northern Lights over Tromsø, Norway, earlier this month. Also on Vimeo.
posted by Wordshore at 1:57 AM PST - 12 comments

The Fader recently collected insights from artists associated with 12 microgenres of the past 15 years, from electroclash to vaporwave, but they left out sound samples. That's remedied, below the break. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:05 PM PST - 34 comments

RED 4K Video of Colorful Liquid in Space. "Once again, astronauts on the International Space Station dissolved an effervescent tablet in a floating ball of water, and captured images using a camera capable of recording four times the resolution of normal high-definition cameras. The higher resolution images and higher frame rate videos can reveal more information when used on science investigations, giving researchers a valuable new tool aboard the space station. This footage is one of the first of its kind. The cameras are being evaluated for capturing science data and vehicle operations by engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 9:40 PM PST - 16 comments

How Bourbon is Made
posted by axiom at 8:00 PM PST - 29 comments

U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:54 PM PST - 32 comments

The finalists for Canada's Governor General's Literary Awards have been announced. Winners to be announced Oct. 28. Categories, as usual, are fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, children's literature (text and illustrated), and translation.
posted by anothermug at 7:33 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Lou Reed was a monster
posted by y2karl at 6:08 PM PST - 157 comments

“Every cliché was born for a reason. But why does a cop need a doughnut?” Cara Giaimo, in Atlas Obscura: The Long, Sweet Love Affair Between Cops and Doughnuts.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 6:02 PM PST - 24 comments

Hobart® Mixer - Learn The Basics About Hobart Mixers | Making maple icing for donuts using a Hobart H-600 T commercial mixer | A200 Hobart Service | An upstart: Ferneto Planetary Mixer
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:56 PM PST - 51 comments

In the early sixties, Chrysler built a concept car that included a turbine engine in a body built by Ghia. They provided the cars to families for extended test drives. The Olson family loved theirs. [more inside]
posted by dfm500 at 3:09 PM PST - 35 comments

The Speed of Animals. If you're six feet tall, 10 miles per hour probably doesn't feel very fast. But what if you were just six inches tall, like a squirrel? It would feel quite a bit faster. This site shows the actual speeds of animals and how fast they would be going if they were your size.
posted by Bistle at 2:17 PM PST - 46 comments

SHARP and Tomotaka Takahashi have announced a new phone, a cute robot that interacts with you. (via)
posted by rebent at 1:13 PM PST - 40 comments

If you love grit in your R&B and funk in your guitar, you might love the deep, deep soul of singer/guitarist Lee Moses. (Wikipedia) Born in Atlanta, Moses worked with producer Johnny Brantley, recording only a handful of singles in the late 60s and one album, Time and Place, in 1971. A remastered anthology of his work was released in 2007 under the same title. [more inside]
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 12:48 PM PST - 2 comments

The Washington Post has a puzzle to see how well you understand social networks. The day’s political issue: whether baseball caps are fashionable. More explanation and the solution below the jump. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 12:19 PM PST - 19 comments

Last October, the Mostly Honorable Judge Kara Brown of Jezebel took up her gavel to make very official rulings on whether the concept of "shade" is being overused in the media. Last Friday, Judge Brown retired Shade Court, saying "I feel that I’ve done all I can for these people." [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 12:00 PM PST - 27 comments

A controversial talk by Tuck Ngun at the ongoing American Society of Human Genetics 2015 meeting in Baltimore presented evidence of epigenetic mechanisms associated with homosexuality in discordant male twins (i.e., one gay, the other straight). The conference organizers and news outlets quickly trumpeted that scientists had discovered epigenetic markers capable of predicting the sexual orientation of a male; however, the reaction of scientists at the meeting was less enthusiastic. Ed Yong at the Atlantic wrote a particularly thorough takedown. Criticisms centered around the small sample size (37 pairs of twins), the fact that the samples were taken from saliva (whereas you'd expect epigenetic variants influencing sexuality to occur in the brain), and the fact that the predictive model they developed was not terribly predictive (67% accuracy). [more inside]
posted by infinitemonkey at 11:35 AM PST - 79 comments

Premature birth and problem pregnancies near fracking wells A new study in the US's 'fracking capital' Pennsylvania has found that pregnant women who live near gas fracking wells are far more likely to give birth prematurely or develop problems during their pregnancies. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:59 AM PST - 18 comments

A year ago, someone took a well-composed photo of a fight in Ukranian Parliament. This prompted the creation of a small subreddit that finds photos (many soccer-related), that look like they're from the Renaissance - r/AccidentalRenaissance. Here are a few post samples: Pence & Morse * Ukraine * The Orchestration of Heisenberg * Maldini * The Accused, Etc.
posted by growabrain at 9:32 AM PST - 45 comments

"Caring for a patient suffering from dementia means coming to terms with the frustrating paradoxes of memory and language." A thoughtful, philosophical first-person essay. [more inside]
posted by Charity Garfein at 9:08 AM PST - 16 comments

"HOW DID J.R.R. Tolkien create The Lord of the Rings? The simple answer is that he wrote it. He sat down in a chair in 1937 and spent more than a dozen years working on what remains a masterwork of fantasy literature and a genius stroke of immersive worldbuilding. The more complicated answer is that in addition to writing the story, he drew it. The many maps and sketches he made while drafting The Lord of the Rings informed his storytelling, allowing him to test narrative ideas and illustrate scenes he needed to capture in words. For Tolkien, the art of writing and the art of drawing were inextricably intertwined." [more inside]
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:46 AM PST - 15 comments

The state of mental health in Bangladesh - a photo essay. Other photos from Bangladesh by Allison Joyce.
posted by tavegyl at 8:39 AM PST - 1 comment

A Highly Irregular Children’s Story: David Gates reviews The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, a children's book by Donald Barthelme. [Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1976]
posted by Lorin at 10:54 PM PST - 5 comments

Because, at 1:32 am, you need to feel a bit of the Rhythm of Life.
posted by HuronBob at 10:35 PM PST - 47 comments

Refuse to share a pencil, reject a boy, say no to your imprisoned dad — all of these can get a teen girl killed in El Salvador's gang war - "Aby, whose best friend disappeared, is still staying at home. Her latest aspiration is to be the director of NASA." Warning: Some of the depictions and images in this story are graphic. [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 9:41 PM PST - 17 comments

WeWork Used These Documents To Convince Investors It’s Worth Billions
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:41 PM PST - 43 comments

For three years, Mother Jones has been litigating a defamation suit over a piece that drew attention to the political activites of wealthy billionaire Frank VanderSloot. "This was not a dispute over a few words. It was a push, by a superrich businessman and donor, to wipe out news coverage that he disapproved of. Had he been successful, it would have been a chilling indicator that the 0.01 percent can control not only the financing of political campaigns, but also media coverage of those campaigns." [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 6:19 PM PST - 29 comments

In August, Mara Willaford and Marissa Johnson disrupted a Social Security rally in Seattle and upstaged Bernie Sanders. This week, they gave their first local interview to Real Change, a weekly progressive newspaper sold by self-employed vendors, many of them homeless.
posted by bq at 3:41 PM PST - 21 comments

The tragic tale of Mt Everest’s most famous dead body is part one of a two part BBC article centered around the story of Tsewang Paljor, known as "Green Boots", whose body has remained for 20 years near the summit where he died. Part two is Death in the clouds: The problem with Everest’s 200+ bodies [more inside]
posted by danny the boy at 3:28 PM PST - 75 comments

MeFi's own The Whelk reviews common pasta shapes for The Rumpus. I can only assume he recused himself from judging conchiglie due to the family resemblance. [via mefi projects]
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:39 PM PST - 119 comments

Kowloon Walled City exist in the space between the atmospheric gloom of Neurosis, the sludgy twang of late-period Godflesh, and the echoing space of Low. Kurt Ballou of Converge interviews Scott Evans of KWC on the process of recording their excellent new album Grievances.
posted by Existential Dread at 12:17 PM PST - 17 comments

Jason Baca has been the cover model for over 400 romance novels. What is his life like? "Things get a little weird" he admits. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 10:22 AM PST - 134 comments

...as someone who is invisibly sick, I often feel pressure around the clear boundaries I have in my head of what my disease really means, and how to convey that to others
posted by lonefrontranger at 9:40 AM PST - 11 comments

"One broader implication of this is that no one should take the NSA seriously when they say they are only collecting “metadata” on whom someone contacts, rather than the content of the communication. Social network metadata is incredibly powerful." How to tell whether a Twitter user is pro-choice or pro-life without reading any of their tweets
posted by COD at 9:23 AM PST - 47 comments

The trailer for the Coen Brothers' "Hail Caesar!", a caper set in Golden Age Hollywood, has been released.
posted by The Whelk at 8:56 AM PST - 123 comments

Chick-fil-A and the Politics of Eating: In recent days, the complicated politics of urban consumerism have been playing out most visibly, with the arrival of Chick-fil-A, a totem of red-state habits, in New York City. Created by a conservative Christian child of public housing, S. Truett Cathy, in Georgia, in the mid-20th century, Chick-fil-A has come under fire during the past few years over comments made by the founder’s son Dan Cathy, the company’s president, in opposition to same-sex marriage. [more inside]
posted by wondrous strange snow at 8:46 AM PST - 249 comments

The 2015 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet "for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011." [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:42 AM PST - 5 comments

In case you have any spare cash lying around. "I could hear the pedal squeak every time John Bonnam hit the bass drum."
posted by freakazoid at 8:40 AM PST - 78 comments

The Jefferson Grid (SLIG) [more inside]
posted by cirrostratus at 8:07 AM PST - 6 comments

Thirty-three civilians showed up to Paisley Park late last night. [more inside]
posted by jillithd at 8:05 AM PST - 13 comments

@sadtopographies: An Instagram account cataloging the most unfortunately named places on Earth, from Shades of Death Road in New Jersey to Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya (or "Where the devil urinates") Hill in Australia and everywhere in between.
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:53 AM PST - 12 comments

On Pop-Up Porno, dating horror stories are lovingly animated as pop-up books.
posted by frimble at 7:52 AM PST - 10 comments

Yes, he would have turned 75 today. Links abound. Here are a few.
posted by Sir Rinse at 7:35 AM PST - 32 comments

Oregon Shakespeare Festival Launches Three-Year Shakespeare Translation Commissioning Project [Oregon Shakespeare Festival]

OSF is commissioning 36 playwrights and pairing them with dramaturgs to translate 39 plays attributed to Shakespeare into contemporary modern English between now and December 31, 2018. By seeking out a diverse set of playwrights (more than half writers of color and more than half women), we hope to bring fresh voices and perspectives to the rigorous work of translation. Play on!

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:24 AM PST - 52 comments

Did you mark Fluffernutter Day yesterday? Part of the cuisine of New England, a fluffernutter is a sandwich made with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff, usually served on white bread. The name was invented by an ad agency in 1960. Also called a Liberty Sandwich, it been proposed as the official state sandwich of Massachusetts. There are many variations e.g. Reese's Pieces and Nutella, and... [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 4:50 AM PST - 80 comments

Jim Dickinson was a musician, producer, and writer based in Memphis. A lifelong curator and steward of American music until his death in 2009, he fronted the band Mud Boy & the Neutrons and contributed to albums by Sleepy John Estes, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Albert King, Big Star, the Replacements, and many others. [This] essay...was adapted from his memoir The Search for Blind Lemon. [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:29 AM PST - 6 comments

I’ve been given instructions for my meeting with Sananda Maitreya. 1. Please don’t mention the name “Terence Trent D’Arby”, as it is painful for him. 2. Please don’t make any comparisons with Prince regarding his name change, which occurred in 1995 after a series of dreams. 3. Please don’t ask him things like, “What songs do you think would make a good single from your new album, Rise of the Zugebrian Time Lords?” “I was killed when I was 27”: the curious afterlife of Terence Trent D’Arby
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:55 AM PST - 35 comments

Getting a Job, a Short Story by Your Parents
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:36 PM PST - 239 comments

He introduced the rest of the world to Cajun foods Chef Prudhomme introduced the world to Cajun foods. Blackened red - fish was his most noted dish. He really will be missed. He had a great personality.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 8:29 PM PST - 46 comments

If you are a human being who poops from your butt, you should consider viewing this informative Squatty Potty commercial. (Relevant previously.)
posted by swift at 8:11 PM PST - 63 comments

Dominique Nicosia builds a Violin (slvimeo)
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:09 PM PST - 18 comments

Why Iraq Needs Music: Zuhal Sultan On Starting The Iraqi Youth Orchestra - "You know, we all need our basic needs — we need food, we need shelter and we need education — but we also need to be human."
posted by kliuless at 7:49 PM PST - 1 comment

Towards a Classification of Tech-Induced Mental Disorders
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:39 PM PST - 10 comments

Geraldo Rivera interviews the Hell's Angels (1974) (Direct video link) [more inside]
posted by jonmc at 7:37 PM PST - 7 comments

A nonviolent drug offender who was granted clemency after 22 years adjusts to life on the outside. "I believe in your ability to prove the doubters wrong." - President Obama [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation at 6:18 PM PST - 13 comments

While the end of Sábado Gigante's 53 year television run has received heavy press coverage, earlier this year another foreign-language television show ended a 53 year reign with a single host: Finland Calling. [more inside]
posted by Turkey Glue at 6:04 PM PST - 6 comments

Hip Hop is evolving, take a look at Raury he's 18 and his work so far draws on on Gospel, Hip Hop, alt folk, Rap and Freakfolk Raury is a free-spirited singer, rapper, guitarist, songwriter, and producer who was raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia, roughly 20 miles outside Atlanta. He mixes alternative folk, rap, and electronic music while counting the diverse likes of Chance the Rapper, King Krule, and Lorde as contemporaries. He's a trippy kid who has sort of a "new age poor swamp people" optimistic view on life. It's sort of contagious. Check out this companion track to Devil's Whisper, God's Whisper. it's Beck, The Flaming Lips, Violent Femmes, Kanye, and a little bit Rocky Horror Picture Show! How does it translate to live performance? Check him out on Late Night With Colbert and check out the fun and weird bit on Sway In The Morning as Raury freestyles over Outkast's "Elevators" He's also made some straight out of the 80's stealing from the 70's feel good pop with Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine
posted by bobdow at 5:45 PM PST - 22 comments

Rose Eveleth writing in Eater's Future Week: Why the 'Kitchen of the Future' Always Fails Us.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 4:29 PM PST - 57 comments

A contemporary fictional account of promoting contemporary fiction.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:23 PM PST - 4 comments

We Talked to the CEO Behind Those Ridiculous “Sexy” Halloween Costumes.
posted by GuyZero at 2:41 PM PST - 176 comments

There is actually a way to guarantee Harper’s defeat. Here’s how.
posted by joannemerriam at 1:51 PM PST - 79 comments

American Democracy is Doomed is a Vox long(ish)read by Matthew Yglesias summarizing the work of Juan Linz on constitutional crises in presidential democracies (previously), which combined with constitutional hardball and ideological polarization threaten to destroy American democracy (#nottheonion). As Yglesias describes the problem, it's primarily structural, an inevitable result of rules that have failed in every other country that has tried them. (We're 30 for 30 so far.) (All but the first link are pdf.)
posted by anotherpanacea at 12:49 PM PST - 97 comments

Benny Hill This makes all YouTube videos better by speeding them up and adding Yakkity Sax music. Technology has advanced from the last Benny Hill-ifier on MeFi in 2008, when speeding up technology did not yet exist. Some suggestions: Car chases! Light saber duels! Dirty Dancing (forward in three minutes for maximum enjoyment)! Donald Trump!
posted by blahblahblah at 12:38 PM PST - 29 comments

After a drunk man pummels a Pepper robot greeting customers at a store in Japan, robotics ethicists call for a new type of legal protection that would apply specifically to robots.

As more-advanced robots can already react to basic stimuli, navigate complex environments, and use specialized “intelligence” to accomplish narrowly defined tasks, they present themselves as far from human but also as something rather different from a toaster or basic tool. Weng calls for a set of laws to guide human interaction with robots as they become more common and more social. He argues that they are a “third existence,” after people and property, deserving of their own legal protections.

[more inside]
posted by Existential Dread at 12:06 PM PST - 89 comments

The risk here is not that millions of people in Britain are suddenly going to die of thirst. It is that after all those years in which humans settled by rivers and thrived, we are now locked in conflict with our natural surroundings. Either the humans or the rivers have to suffer. At the moment, it is the rivers, although in the longer term a sick river will produce less water, so the humans will end up in trouble as well. (longformGrauniad)
posted by Kitteh at 11:43 AM PST - 12 comments

Marvel Studios is following up on that mid-credits scene from Ant-Man by announcing a sequel for 2018, titled Ant-Man and the Wasp. [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:32 AM PST - 106 comments

Dabbawalla: Fast, efficient, and proud, Mumbai’s teams of home-to-work lunch couriers connect families through meals cooked with love. [more inside]
posted by Shouraku at 10:31 AM PST - 22 comments

"Under the 'Crime and Safety' section of the site, the tone is much less neighborly. There, residents frequently post unsubstantiated 'suspicious activity' warnings that result in calls to the police on Black citizens who have done nothing wrong." [more inside]
posted by goatdog at 10:28 AM PST - 88 comments

Matthias Buchinger, sometimes called Matthew Buckinger, described himself as "the wonderful Little Man of but 29 inches high, born without Hands, Feet, or Thighs." Despite being born (in Germany in 1674) with limbs "more resembling fins of a fish than arms of a man," he was renowned for his works as a calligrapher and micrographer (remarked for details illustrated in psalms written in characters of different sizes), builder of whimsey bottles (the oldest known "mining bottle"), and called the most extraordinary conjurer of all time. People may have initially gathered to see a tragedy, but instead were presented with an astounding range of impressive skills. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:54 AM PST - 6 comments

If you leave your boarding pass in the seat-pocket in front of you after your flight has landed, someone else could upload it to this site, and you might be surprised at how much they could find out about you.
posted by John Cohen at 9:22 AM PST - 36 comments

The Passion of Nicki Minaj: "To put down a woman for something that men do, as if they're children and I'm responsible, has nothing to do with you asking stupid questions, because you know that's not just a stupid question. That's a premeditated thing you just did." [SLNYT]
posted by divined by radio at 9:16 AM PST - 54 comments

Happy Cephalopod Appreciation Day! October 8 is Cephalopod Appreciation Day, the eighth day of the month celebrating those with eight tentacles. But it's not just a mere day of squidly homage, it's an entire week! [more inside]
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 9:04 AM PST - 21 comments

"Maybe you didn’t hear me. I really, really, really want it." Or, "The four conversations you can have with a small child."
posted by Narrative Priorities at 8:50 AM PST - 81 comments

Every year, Forest and Bird New Zealand holds a vote for the (New Zealand) Bird of the Year. Will you vote for the cheeky kea, the fantail, the bellbird, the little blue penguin, the famous kakapo, the melodious kokako, the NZ robin, the plucky pukeko, the tui, the curious weka or one of the other contenders?
posted by scodger at 8:17 AM PST - 25 comments

"A BuzzFeed News investigation into Texas judicial practice found that with no public defenders present, traffic court judges routinely flout the law, locking up people for days, weeks, and sometimes even months because they did not pay fines they could not afford. The result is a modern-day version of debtors prison, an institution that was common two centuries ago but has been outlawed since the early ’70s."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:50 AM PST - 42 comments

"There is no good answer to being a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question." In "The Mother of All Questions", Rebecca Solnit writes for Harper's about being asked to justify her own (and Virginia Woolf's) childlessness, and more broadly about how to define happiness and a meaningful life.
posted by Stacey at 6:35 AM PST - 39 comments

Twenty Hours and Ten Minutes of Therapy Reflections at 50 on being young, scared, and coming out. Allison Green taped the therapy sessions she had when she was 23. Years later, she listened to them and wrote about what, and who, she heard.
posted by listen, lady at 6:22 AM PST - 10 comments

The Scotiabank Giller Prize presents its 2015 shortlist. The five titles were chosen from a longlist of 12 books announced on September 9, 2015. One hundred and sixty-eight titles were submitted by 63 publishers from every region of the country. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:33 AM PST - 7 comments

Svetlana Alexievich is the latest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature: "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time". Alexievich is a Belarusian writer and is unusual among Nobel laureates in that she is primarily a non-fiction writer. Her most famous book is Voices from Chernobyl, and you can read an extract in The Paris Review. You can read more about her books on her website and read excerpts in English. John Lloyd wrote a long review of her book Zinky Boys for the London Review of Books. And you can read an interview with her on the home page of her American publisher, Dalkey Archive.
posted by Kattullus at 4:14 AM PST - 24 comments

Few people afford Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Cartoon Network’s strange, seminal comedy, its rightful place in the pantheon. But from its bargain-basement launch in 1994 to its place at the center of the wildly popular Adult Swim lineup in the 2000s, it helped introduce cringe comedy to the American viewing public, deconstructed the idea of the talk show beyond repair for a generation of comedians, and changed the look and feel of the entire animation art form.

posted by cthuljew at 11:25 PM PST - 95 comments

How Poker Player Annie Duke Used Gender Stereotypes To Win Matches - "By the time she got to that championship game 10 years later, she had also figured out a way to make people pay, quite literally, for the stereotypes they had about her." (previously)
posted by kliuless at 6:54 PM PST - 66 comments

The Reinvention of Black
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:48 PM PST - 26 comments

The winner of the Great British Bake-off Season 6 (spoilers!) [more inside]
posted by dhruva at 5:52 PM PST - 54 comments

Extreme phone pinching is the latest trend sweeping social media networks, and it involves holding your expensive phone over perilous locations.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:41 PM PST - 56 comments

Male engineering student Jared Mauldin, a senior at Eastern Washington University, wrote a letter to the editor of The Easterner expounding on the differences between him and the women entering his program. [more inside]
posted by headnsouth at 3:57 PM PST - 49 comments

Steve Rannazzisi discusses with Howard Stern how a lie told by a young comedian seeking acceptance snowballed into a career-threatening scandal.
posted by Knappster at 3:49 PM PST - 61 comments

A new trend in headwear is taking China by storm. The New York Times is on the case. [more inside]
posted by theodolite at 2:12 PM PST - 60 comments

The Sherlock special trailer (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:55 PM PST - 56 comments

The University of Antarctica has a central campus consisting of 400 acres in a built-up area around University Peak, Victoria Land. The official founding occured on Antarctic Independence Day (23 June 1961), when it became Antarctica's first (and still its only) university.
posted by Johnny Assay at 12:44 PM PST - 29 comments

Earlier this year, legendary actor Brian Blessed withdrew from the Guildford Shakespeare Company's production of King Lear due to complications with an existing heart condition. And so to see his name trending on Twitter this morning was a cause of some alarm to his fans - until it was revealed that not only was he not dead, he was on BBC Radio 4 talking about a 1963 incident in which he helped a woman deliver her baby in a public park. [Warning: some birth details]
posted by angeline at 11:54 AM PST - 60 comments

Author and historian Bob Arnebeck writes about early American history and its Founding Fathers' "relationships with men beyond conventional propriety." Featured characters include war hero and Washington D.C planner Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the first inspector general of the US Army Baron Von Steuben , and Alexander Hamilton. Bonus: Revolutinary America's tolerance for homosexuality by Victoria A. Brownworth.
posted by The Whelk at 11:51 AM PST - 25 comments

If you watch only one completely-realized, well-lipsynched, full-length video mashing up Spongebob Squarepants clips with Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" this year, make it this one.
posted by not_on_display at 11:24 AM PST - 36 comments

From today's Atlantic magazine: a treatise on the economic history of leftovers, and how America's overall rise to the status of economic superpower lead to their downshift from "budget-minded lifesaver" to "butt of jokes." [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:09 AM PST - 87 comments

Was Hamlet fat? Isaac Butler (previously) investigates for Slate.
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:34 AM PST - 24 comments

On October 1st, Davey Wreden (creater of The Stanley Parable, previously) released The Beginner's Guide. "It lasts about an hour and a half and has no traditional mechanics, no goals or objectives. Instead, it tells the story of a person struggling to deal with something they do not understand." [more inside]
posted by erratic meatsack at 10:08 AM PST - 15 comments

Harvard's debate team won the world championship in 2014 and the national championship in 2015, but lost to a team at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility, a maximum-security state prison. The debate program at Eastern is part of the Bard Prison Initiative, which teaches classes in six prisons across New York "to redefine the relationship between educational opportunity and criminal justice." [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 10:06 AM PST - 44 comments

The rebooting of Riverdale continues apace today with the release of "Jughead" by Erica Henderson and Chip Zdarsky, and the reviews are highly positive. [more inside]
posted by Ipsifendus at 9:03 AM PST - 26 comments

"It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain." [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 9:03 AM PST - 49 comments

SABMiller may have rejected Anheuser-Busch InBev's latest offer, but some analysts think an eventual merger is inevitable. [more inside]
posted by dis_integration at 8:14 AM PST - 45 comments

Following the 2014 implementation of a strict photo voter ID law and a 54% increase in the cost of a driver license earlier this year, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency cited budget cuts as the instigating factor for the recent closure of 31 driver license bureaus across the state. As of last week, every county in Alabama where black citizens currently comprise more than 75% of registered voters has had its driver license office closed. [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 8:01 AM PST - 125 comments

The story of Peter Norman, the Australian sprinter and third man in the Black Power salute picture from the 1968 Olympic Games. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:45 AM PST - 14 comments

The District would become the most generous place in the country for a worker to take time off after giving birth or to care for a dying parent under a measure proposed in the D.C. Council. Under the legislation introduced October 6, "almost every part-time and full-time employee in the nation’s capital would be entitled to 16  weeks of paid family leave to bond with an infant or an adopted child, recover from an illness, recuperate from a military deployment or tend to an ill family member," according to The Washington Post. [more inside]
posted by kat518 at 7:21 AM PST - 32 comments

When the Kashmir earthquake struck in October 2005, Tabinda Kokab was a teacher in a remote village close to the epicentre. She recalls the day that changed her life, and how it forced her to throw off the expectations that Pakistani society had placed on her as a woman. [more inside]
posted by daisyk at 7:21 AM PST - 5 comments

The MSF (Médecins sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders) Trauma Center in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was attacked by US forces on October 3^rd. The rationale for the attack remains unclear, with differing accounts being given by US officials. MSF has condemned the attack, in which at least twenty-two people were killed, and called for an independent inquiry into the bombing. [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:56 AM PST - 162 comments

This Friday, people will be able to go to the theater and see yet another interpretation of J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan". Such news does not necessarily excite Barrie fans, given the middling results of some past interpretations (and Pan isn't being received much better). But the AV Club's Ryan Vlastelica argues they can take heart that the best "Peter Pan" movie was already made... in 2003.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:22 AM PST - 43 comments

Manoj Bhargava the inventor of 5 Hour Energy Drink (prev), wants to spend his billions fixing the world's problems. [more inside]
posted by readery at 5:45 AM PST - 24 comments

To Revoke or Not: Colleges That Gave Cosby Honors Face a Tough Question by Sydney Ember and Colin Moynihan [New York Times]

Few people in American history have been recognized by universities as often as Mr. Cosby, whose publicist once estimated that the entertainer had collected more than 100 honorary degrees. The New York Times, in a quick search, found nearly 60. But now, as dozens of women have come forward to accuse Mr. Cosby of sexual assault, colleges across the country are confronting the question of what to do when someone who has been honored falls from grace.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:26 AM PST - 58 comments

For 40 years, Joel Dreyer was a respected psychiatrist who oversaw a clinic for troubled children, belonged to an exclusive country club, and doted on his four daughters and nine grandchildren. Then, suddenly, he became a major drug dealer. Why?
posted by ellieBOA at 3:34 AM PST - 15 comments

networkeffect.io appears to be an internet art installation, with themes of connectedness and impermanence.
Caveat: Chrome only, and requires sound. Even so, worth it.
posted by ChrisR at 11:07 PM PST - 18 comments

SuperSisters! This 1973 deck of 72 trading cards each featured a different famous woman (although Anita Bryant, Phyllis Schlafly and Angela Davis were not included...and a number of others, including Jane Fonda, declined respond when asked to participate). Peruse the whole deck at the University of Iowa Digital Libraries!
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 8:17 PM PST - 16 comments

You've seen @everyword. Now here's every nonword.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:32 PM PST - 32 comments

28 years after the first version, and 20 years after perl 5, Larry Wall unveiled perl 6 at a meeting on Monday night in San Francisco. [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 6:10 PM PST - 74 comments

The Map of Literature. Martin Vargic, creator of the Map of the Internet 1.0, has created an insanely detailed "National Geographic" map of Literature, where "Jurassic Park is located between 1984 and Clear and Present Danger on the continent of Thrillers, a stone's throw away from H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 5:38 PM PST - 6 comments

The Pernicious Rise of Poptimisim, by Saul Austerlitz.
posted by grobstein at 5:32 PM PST - 101 comments

The Principles of Argumentation - Pan African Studies Department - California State University, Northridge
Using Rhetorical Strategies for Persuasian - Purdue
Four Argument Strategies - Ethical Realism
38 Ways To Win An Argument—Arthur Schopenhauer - India Uncut
How to win Arguments – Dos, Don’ts and Sneaky Tactics - Lifehack
How to Win Every Argument - Eric Barker, Time (with TED talk by Daniel Cohen) [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:26 PM PST - 17 comments

Tinycup Needleworks, by Britt "Hutch" Hutchinson, interviewed, also: instagram.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:46 PM PST - 2 comments

NPR: 3 Questions With The Guy Who Hates Renoir
posted by schmod at 2:57 PM PST - 137 comments

Childcare costs on par or higher than rent is not a new story, it is well established that childcare costs have been skyrocketing in recent years. [more inside]
posted by larthegreat at 12:48 PM PST - 71 comments

Bodybuilders Go To This Tiny Town To Cheer Themselves Up When They're Feeling Sad (slyt) [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 12:24 PM PST - 31 comments

Felines of New York, inspired by Humans of New York, will show you what authentic cats are really thinking. [more inside]
posted by glaucon at 11:29 AM PST - 20 comments

Dallas County district attorney Susan Hawk's life fell apart after she took office: divorce, depression and thoughts of suicide. After she fired some of her most experienced staff and amid allegations of erratic or unstable behavior, she vanished from public view in late July. Nine weeks later, she re-emerged to announce that she had undergone two months of treatment at a mental health facility for Major Depressive Disorder. She says she’s ready once again to serve. Is she up to the job? (Some links in this post discuss suicide / suicidal ideation. Some readers may find linked content disturbing.) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:17 AM PST - 105 comments

Bros Funding Bros: What's Wrong with Venture Capital. "What really matters is that we are in the midst of a technological renaissance that will be much farther reaching than any of us can predict if we invest correctly. Our generation has an opportunity, in our lifetime, to put a massive dent in human suffering and make trillions of dollars in return. ... We need a wake up call on Sand Hill Road. We need to recapture our potential and open the doors." [more inside]
posted by annekate at 10:50 AM PST - 22 comments

Comcast is famously bad at customer service, "winning" Consumerist's Worst Company in America award for 2014 and 2010. In particular, it's famously bad at letting customers go. But for the low, low price of $5, AirPaper will cancel your service for you. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 9:51 AM PST - 92 comments

Two short videos from last year's RISE Lantern Festival outside Las Vegas. This year's evnt is scheduled for this weekend in the Mojave desert. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 9:05 AM PST - 14 comments

...a net positive. We often hear about how much strike will cost the economy, however new research suggests the London underground train strike of early 2014 may have positive effects as it forced commuters to find different routes to work, many of which they stuck with. Researchers were able to access 200 million data points from the Oyster Card system that allows access to the London transport system to conclude about 5% of travellers switched their route after finding a new route during the strike, suggesting a lack of experimentation concerning the available options. Short paper here.
posted by biffa at 8:46 AM PST - 18 comments

As a tenth-anniversary surprise, Stephenie Meyer released a genderswapped version of Twilight this morning, in which Bella and Edward are replaced by Beau and Edyth. EW calls it a Twilight Surprise. Cleolinda (of Movies in 15 Minutes fame) is doing a read-along on Twitter under the hashtag #sparkletime.
posted by suelac at 8:36 AM PST - 100 comments

Scott Waters is a 66 year old American, artist, photographer and ex-Apple Computer employee. He recently took a trip in England (Portreath, Redruth, Wadebridge, Padstow, Ashby de la Zouch, Little Eton, and Oxford) and listed his observations on Facebook. It went viral; coverage in Cosmopolitan, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, and the Metro. Naturally, some people disagree. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 7:42 AM PST - 250 comments

Europe's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), has struck down the 15-year-old Safe Harbour agreement that allowed the free flow of information between the US and EU.
posted by XtinaS at 7:36 AM PST - 18 comments

Mother Jones: How the Media Inspires Mass Shooters, and what it can do to prevent copycat attacks
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:31 AM PST - 123 comments

This is Professor Wangari Maathai. The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The first Kenyan woman to earn a doctoral degree. An icon of Kenya’s democratic movement who repeatedly put not just her mind but also her body on the line in order to secure a better future for Kenyans and their natural environment. But Maathai’s standing in Kenya is definitely ambiguous. She is beloved by feminists and environmentalists, and tolerated by everyone else... Women are expected to look backwards on guidance on what it means to be “good” – where “good” is primarily defined by men – but not too good because that makes women less interesting to men. This was not Wangari Maathai.

posted by ChuraChura at 7:30 AM PST - 5 comments

Chantal Akerman the director of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles died yesterday evening. Le Monde says she commited suicide. Her last film No Home Movie was shown last summer at the Locarno International Film festival.
posted by SageLeVoid at 6:52 AM PST - 39 comments

"That sound you hear at 11 a.m. Tuesday — those exultant cheers swiftly muffled by mouthfuls of English muffin, bacon, egg and cheese? They are the victory cries of thousands of McDonald’s breakfast lovers, who for the first time in 43 years will (officially) be able to consume Egg McMuffins at whatever time of day they deem fit. These are heady times, people." By Sarah Kaplan. SLWashPost.
posted by valkane at 5:35 AM PST - 142 comments

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur B. McDonald of Canada share the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in neutrino oscillations ("metamorphosis in neutrinos" in the press release), in which neutrinos switch flavors as it propagates through space. The finding has a large impact on the standard model, as it requires neutrinos to have non-zero mass.
posted by oheso at 4:49 AM PST - 22 comments

Your Drunk Neighbor: Some rich asshole. (Oh, and that's "Some rich asshole" for those of you without the browser add on)
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:47 AM PST - 18 comments

Football in the Phillipines has been largely an unsuccessful project. But is it Azkals' (street dogs) time to shine? Maybe, but it's a long way to the top if you want to kick and rush.
posted by josher71 at 3:49 AM PST - 1 comment

Inside the connected future of architecture.
posted by ellieBOA at 1:42 AM PST - 32 comments

Vankadarath Saritha, Delhi's first female bus driver - "Women have been to space so why can't we drive a bus?"
posted by kliuless at 12:12 AM PST - 9 comments

Real estate brokerage Marketplace Homes has begun using its ZipTours application to allow buyers to tour homes for sale in the Detroit area under the supervision of an agent video chatting on their smartphone. After providing photo ID and a facebook account, the buyer receives a code to open the lockbox and can tour the home with their remote agent. [Alt link for possible paywall problems]
posted by polymath at 12:02 AM PST - 15 comments

Hail to the Pencil Pusher — American Bureaucracy's Long and Useful History [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 8:20 PM PST - 23 comments

A Cockatiel learns to sing the Chocobo Song, sings constantly (SLTwitter)
posted by rebent at 7:48 PM PST - 19 comments

How Internet Magic Helped A Quirky Cartoonist Find Success [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:36 PM PST - 59 comments