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Q-carbon is a new phase of solid carbon.
posted by klausman at 11:16 PM PST - 45 comments

The Internet is blowing up over this 70's "radical lesbian separatist" shirt. i-D has the story. [more inside]
posted by ourt at 8:57 PM PST - 45 comments

Legofy is a python program (hosted on github) that takes a static image or gif and makes it so that it looks as if it was created by 1x1 LEGO bricks. For example: a gif; a small work of art; a large work of art; recursive LEGO-ification. [via reddit]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:24 PM PST - 10 comments

How Writing 'A Design For Life' Saved Manic Street Preachers [Youtube] / Live Jools Holland 1996 performance
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:03 PM PST - 16 comments

Lin-Manuel Miranda freestyling with George Takei and the cast of Allegiance. George Takei and Lin-Manuel Miranda at the Ham4Ham ticket lottery having a six minute roundtable on civics, democracy, reclamation of history, allegiance, and endurance. [more inside]
posted by moonlight on vermont at 5:08 PM PST - 16 comments

Delaney on Joyce Frank Delaney reads James Joyce's Ulysses a little bit at a time, explaining as he goes. The podcast began in 2010 and is still going strong.
posted by kingless at 5:06 PM PST - 15 comments

"His palms were bloody, knees beat, cross was heavy, there's wine on his torso already" From BuzzFeed.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:39 PM PST - 28 comments

"So as much as A Charlie Brown Christmas is about the significance of the religious tradition as what Christmas is "really about," it sees that tradition at least in part as a gateway to, and an inspiration for, other actions. It doesn't only suggest Christmas is really about the Bible story; it suggests Christmas is also really about friends, dogs, cooperating, the beauty of humble things, singing out loud, and hope." Linda Holmes, "'A Charlie Brown Christmas' At 50," for NPR's Monkey See. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 1:42 PM PST - 57 comments

My Dark California Dream. Confusing one’s own youth with the youth of the world is a common human affliction, but California has been changing so fast for so long that every new generation gets to experience both a fresh version of the California dream and, typically by late middle-age, its painful death. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 12:48 PM PST - 50 comments

The Beggar CEO and Sucker Culture castigates employers who think their employees should do extra work for free.
posted by chrchr at 12:01 PM PST - 201 comments

This week’s cover, “Mirror:” a collaboration between The New Yorker (Ware) and the radio program “This American Life" (Glass) and Hanna Rosin.
posted by OmieWise at 11:18 AM PST - 26 comments

This week is Art Basel Miami Beach -- the United States' leg of the three-city Art Basel art fair, at which "267 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa show significant work from the masters of Modern and contemporary art, as well the new generation of emerging stars." Also in attendance will be scores or hundreds of exceptionally well-heeled art collectors, plus three US presidential apsirants. [more inside]
posted by notyou at 10:47 AM PST - 7 comments

So long as I was smoking, I would never reach the point where there would be nothing more to be done. Emmett Rensin on the peculiar self-management of anxiety.
posted by Zarkonnen at 10:41 AM PST - 14 comments

The Weird World Of Military Nicknames is a (mostly lighthearted) article from a site that focuses on the British armed forces: "Of course the fresh-faced recruit is too junior to protest, if s/he even understands the black humour behind their re-christening. The nickname may stick with them for the rest of their career, and will be used all the more if it particularly upsets the poor soldier / sailor / airman lumbered with it." [more inside]
posted by taz at 10:26 AM PST - 64 comments

Eugene Tssui designed the “Fish House” – based on the tardigrade, a segmented marine microanimal – for his parents in Berkeley, California. But that’s not the only interesting thing about him. . . . [more inside]
posted by ferdydurke at 9:53 AM PST - 11 comments

The AIDS Reporting of Jeff Schmalz, and How It Transformed the New York Times. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:45 AM PST - 4 comments

The Seahorse Society of New South Wales is a support organization for transvestites. While it has been around since 1971, this year marks the first time that press has been invited to the annual ball. William Verity reports for A(ustralian) Broadcasting Corporations’s Earshot:

• The half-hour program
• Verity’s brief write-up

posted by Going To Maine at 9:10 AM PST - 4 comments

"her challenges point to a need for tech companies to openly examine patterns of hostility toward underrepresented employees that stem from no apparent cause other than irrational bias." [more inside]
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:37 AM PST - 11 comments

Asha Leo of Refinery29 travels around the world to learn about international fashion subcultures and the way fashion affects society worldwide. So far she's met Gothic (and other) Lolitas in Amsterdam, Moroccan expat culture, hijra in India, Hasidic designers in Brooklyn, Korean matchy-matchy fashion for couples, and the highly colorful world of Japanese decora.
posted by divabat at 8:17 AM PST - 6 comments

National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García on what teachers do
posted by aniola at 7:36 AM PST - 29 comments

Ever wonder how quickly you could get from London to Winnipeg a hundred years ago? Turns out it's 5 to 10 days, according to an "isochronic" map from An Atlas of Economic Geography, compiled by John G. Bartholomew in 1914. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:17 AM PST - 36 comments

Windyty is a very pretty way of visualising current and forecast weather data from around the globe.
posted by Dim Siawns at 5:32 AM PST - 11 comments

In 1958, James Brazier was beaten to death by sheriff's deputies and police officers in Dawson, Terrell County, Georgia. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:55 AM PST - 10 comments

Kobe Bryant to retire after this season. [Los Angeles Times] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:02 PM PST - 72 comments

These photos are why I'm trapped in Tokyo forever now is an animated photo essay about ... some kind of Tokyo.
posted by grobstein at 7:55 PM PST - 14 comments

For a British band to tour America it costs 7000 dollars to even get into the place and the visas arrive so late so you have to cancel your flights and gigs and rebook everything losing money and gigs before you even get there between flight reschedules . [more inside]
posted by lmfsilva at 6:32 PM PST - 71 comments

Why 'MacBeth' seems to play better onscreen than onstage.
posted by shakespeherian at 5:45 PM PST - 18 comments

Step One: Read this article. [more inside]
posted by ourt at 5:25 PM PST - 3 comments

Born on Tatooine. Recently got into photography.
posted by ladyriffraff at 4:33 PM PST - 13 comments

The Winners (and a small flock of runners-up) have been named in the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:17 PM PST - 16 comments

Were you thinking of buying a board game for someone this holiday season? Snakes and Lattes would like to help you pick just the right one.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:23 PM PST - 61 comments

Heather Lindsley's "Werewolf Loves Mermaid," Sunil Patel's "The Merger," and Emil Ostrovski's "Tragic Business" develop humorous situations from SF/F motifs: cryptid romance, intergalactic business negotiations, and the cycle of death and rebirth, respectively. Lincoln Michel's "Dark Air" combines common weird fiction / horror situations with a very dry, very dark sense of humor. Naomi Kritzer's "So Much Cooking" is a serious SF story about a grave possibility, but it brings the matter home via a witty parody of a cooking blog.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 11:44 AM PST - 9 comments

WikiTravel calls The Shanghai Sightseeing Tunnel "A slow-moving tram, through a comically low-tech tunnel of antiquated 80's era rope lights, lasers and car dealership ilk inflatables." YMMV. [SLYT, lots of blinking lights]
posted by Room 641-A at 10:22 AM PST - 29 comments

After 18 years in operation, after a federal law mandating that hospitals work to prevent needle-stick, and after two successful lawsuits resulting in BD paying more than $400 million for violating anti-monopoly statutes, Retractable Technologies made only $34 million in global sales last year. BD, with an inferior, more expensive product, sold $8.4 billion, the payouts to its competitor serving only as the cost of doing business. In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control estimated 380,000 needle-sticks at hospitals every year. Today, they estimate 385,000. “You turn on the TV and watch politicians talk about unleashing the power of the free market, that’s absurd,” Shaw says. “The American public is being denied a free market, being denied competition.”

We need a new antitrust for a new predatory era.
posted by ennui.bz at 8:07 AM PST - 27 comments

Miniature Superheroes Brought To Life Through Absurd Scenarios. (More from VSEOK)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:06 AM PST - 17 comments

Nigerian AfroSFF writer Wole Talabi shares links to his favourite 10 short stories of 2015 with a short intro.
posted by infini at 6:02 AM PST - 11 comments

The Porn Business Isn't Anything Like You Think It Is [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:29 AM PST - 46 comments

Sending and receiving emails are important parts of his job. On average, he gets an email every 45 minutes. Sometimes, the interval between emails is only two minutes. Other times, it’s three hours. Although many of these emails are unimportant or stress-inducing, some of them are fun. Before long, whenever Michael S has an internet connection, he starts refreshing his email inbox every 30 minutes, and then every five minutes and then, occasionally, every two minutes. Before long, it’s a compulsive tic – the pecking pigeon of web usage.

If the internet is addictive, why don’t we regulate it?
posted by rorgy at 4:19 AM PST - 42 comments

Before people were doing things to Garfield, they were cutting up Nancy strips and playing Five Card Nancy (previously). Recntly, playing it the old-fashioned way (and not wi-- wow, is this still up? I remember when it was this big) has become a lot easier - earilier this year, classic Bushmiller Nancy strips began rerunning on GoComics. And if those are booster packs, Random Acts of Nancy (previously) is the one-per-pack uncommon/rare card. And, of course, there is the greatest of them all.
posted by BiggerJ at 12:05 AM PST - 12 comments

The Beer Mile recorded lowered to 4:51.9. Lewis Kent has retaken the Beer Mile (a mile/four laps run with a 355ml beer downed before every lap) record with a run of 4:51.9. (previously record by James Nielsen.)
posted by skynxnex at 8:35 PM PST - 31 comments

My son, the mass murderer: ‘What did I miss?’ [The Guardian] In 2006, Charlie Roberts walked into an Amish school in Pennsylvania and killed five young girls. His mother talks about trying to comprehend his actions.
posted by Fizz at 4:41 PM PST - 39 comments

This Is Not Porn (.net) (previously here) has been showing "rare, candid, funny, beautiful, strange and awesome celebrity photos" for five years. But now the site has added a category for debunking fake celebrity photos, whether through a frivolous use of photoshop, a malicious use of photoshop, or simply a misidentification. Also, don't miss the collection of gifs.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:14 PM PST - 9 comments

In March of 2010, programmer Eric Fry discovered a cheap digital tuner from Realtek could be modified to receive more than mere TV and FM Radio. Much more. [more inside]
posted by endotoxin at 1:54 PM PST - 36 comments

Did you buy a gold plated dildo on Black Friday? Are you sure? [more inside]
posted by jacquilynne at 1:43 PM PST - 46 comments

The IKEA dictionary explains the origin of over 1200 IKEA product names.
posted by jedicus at 11:13 AM PST - 48 comments

Chris Hadfield meets Randall Munroe - a conversation between the astronaut and the cartoonist.
posted by moonmilk at 9:37 AM PST - 24 comments

Cabinet Battle #1, explained
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:51 AM PST - 65 comments

The deadly shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic is part of a disturbing trend.

Three people were shot dead and nine injured Friday at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic, the first time since 2009 that anyone has been killed in an incident linked to activity at an abortion clinic. The attack comes amid an exponential increase in threats and violence against abortion providers since the release of a series of viral—and widely debunked—videos.

[more inside]
posted by the turtle's teeth at 6:00 AM PST - 367 comments

Is this scary or awesome or what?
posted by holist at 11:40 PM PST - 37 comments

No Damned Computer is Going to Tell Me What to Do! - The Story of the Naval Tactical Data System, By David L. Boslaugh, Capt USN, Retired

It was 1962. Some of the prospective commanding officers of the new guided missile frigates, now on the building ways, had found out that the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) was going to be built into their new ship, and it did not set well with them. Some of them came in to our project office to let us know first hand that no damned computer was going to tell them what to do. For sure, no damned computer was going to fire their nuclear tipped guided missiles. They would take their new ship to sea, but they would not turn on our damned system with its new fangled electronic brain.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:07 PM PST - 23 comments

300 Kate Bush Impersonators Pay Tribute to the Wuthering Heights Video. There is an instructional dance video, if you'd like to recreate this at home. And the original, for your reference. (Open Culture has the backstory.)
posted by frumiousb at 5:25 PM PST - 73 comments

"Don't Push Your Luck" is the newest release from L.A. funk and soul band, Orgone. More tracks over at Soundcloud.
posted by Room 641-A at 5:25 PM PST - 5 comments

The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2015 The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
posted by Fizz at 2:54 PM PST - 27 comments

Laurel Randolph comes up with Simpsons inspired recipes for Paste Magazine - Clove And Tom Collins Pie - Little Meatloaf Men - Üterbraten - Thanksgiving edition.
posted by The Whelk at 9:40 AM PST - 59 comments

The XKCD comic for 11/24/15 is this game. The goal seems to be collecting as many gold coins as you can and put them in a coin.. depositor. (protip: you can keep pressing up to keep jumping up through the air. Hoverboard technology is sweet) [more inside]
posted by numaner at 8:33 AM PST - 46 comments

Endless Sky is a space trading and exploration game, dubbed as a spiritual successor to Escape Velocity. It's free to play, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, completely open-source (GPLv3), and available on Steam. [more inside]
posted by schmod at 8:19 AM PST - 36 comments

Thinking about getting your life together in 2016 with planners? Not only do you have many types of planners to choose from, you can also dive into the sparkly, colourful, washi-tape-and-sticker covered world of planner decoration. Let's begin! [more inside]
posted by divabat at 6:45 AM PST - 82 comments

Apparently, they don't break down enough. Wonder why there are so few electric cars on the road? Dealers hate to sell them. They make three times as much from service as from selling cars, and the darn things just won't break down.
posted by musofire at 6:24 AM PST - 112 comments

Ever long to get away from it all? The Hermitary is a web directory for all things hermit-related. Look up local hermits or hermits from lore, literature and history, or discover present-day hermits on the web. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 5:33 AM PST - 5 comments

Internet trolls have learned to exploit our over-militarized police. It's a crime that's hard to stop — and hard to prosecute.
posted by Pendragon at 2:38 AM PST - 92 comments

That powerful scene is one of many in a 90-minute film that amounts to a relentless, religious repudiation of the Islamic State and the opening salvo in a global campaign by the world’s largest Muslim group to challenge its ideology head-on. The challenge, perhaps surprisingly, comes from Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population but which lies thousands of miles away from the Islamic State’s base in the Middle East.

(SLNYT)
posted by destrius at 11:23 PM PST - 31 comments

100 Best Photographs Taken Without Photoshop (or, at least, 100 pretty cool photographs that are well worth scrolling through if your turkey coma doesn't allow for any serious reading.)
posted by jacquilynne at 10:27 PM PST - 33 comments

Caitlin Stasey talks about beauty and sexism in the entertainment industry. (SLYT) (NSFW swearing) [more inside]
posted by imaginary_mary at 8:40 PM PST - 15 comments

Michael Dukakis would very much like your turkey carcass. In his tidy Brookline kitchen, the state’s former governor and onetime Democratic presidential nominee has had a quirky but endearing tradition legendary among family and friends. He collects Thanksgiving turkey carcasses to make soup for his extended family for the year to come.
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:20 PM PST - 61 comments

David Bowie's Greatest Collaborations
posted by Artw at 5:57 PM PST - 28 comments

Forensic Pseudoscience

This past April, the FBI made an admission that was nothing short of catastrophic for the field of forensic science. In an unprecedented display of repentance, the Bureau announced that, for years, the hair analysis testimony it had used to investigate criminal suspects was severely and hopelessly flawed.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:29 PM PST - 46 comments

Korean Buddhist temple cooking has been preserved by Buddhist nuns for over 1,600 years. One of its practitioners, Jeong Kwan, has been celebrated by chefs such as Eric Ripert from Le Bernardin in New York City. Korean temple cuisine is vegan, made without meat, fish, dairy, garlic, or onions. Layers of flavor are achieved through use of fermented, pickled, and dried ingredients. The preparation and consumption of the food are seen as part of Buddhist practice. [more inside]
posted by needled at 4:40 PM PST - 12 comments

Thankful for Friendship: the story of Marimo the cat and Fuku the owl
posted by infini at 2:17 PM PST - 7 comments

Betting Big on Literary Newcomers [The Wallstreet Journal] The publishing industry’s hunt for the next blockbuster has given rise to an elite new club: the million-dollar literary debut.

The need to secure one of the few must-read books of the year has given rise to an elite new club: the million-dollar literary debut. At least four literary debut novels planned for 2016 earned advances reported at $1 million or more, a number agents say is striking in the world of highbrow fiction. At least three such debuts were published this year, and two in 2014. “City on Fire,” by first-time novelist Garth Risk Hallberg, came out last month amid a flurry of publicity after receiving a nearly $2 million advance from Alfred A. Knopf, one of the largest ever for a literary debut.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:16 PM PST - 26 comments

Inner Gallactic Lovers

"Inner Galactic Lovers" is a collaborative project between Kutiman and Fiverr. This original song was produced by Kutiman, with music created by the contributing Fiverr users.

Fiverr (website) Fiverr (Wikipedia) Kutiman: previously, previously, previously, previously, previuously, previously.
posted by nangar at 12:53 PM PST - 3 comments

The term sakuga (作画) refers to a series of well-drawn movements in animation found in both western and Japanese animated shows. [more inside]
posted by chrono_rabbit at 12:51 PM PST - 9 comments

The 10 Best Black Friday Deals at Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon, by Vice Magazine and a Very Special Guest Writer.
posted by rorgy at 12:14 PM PST - 51 comments

"...judging from the looks on all of your faces, I seem to be the only one who thought there was a problem. Am I correct? Wow. All right. Unbelievable." The Cranberry Sauce Has Something To Say (SLNewYorker)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 12:04 PM PST - 36 comments

Whether you know the basic story or not, you may enjoy Mark Steel's lecture on Beethoven's life for its entertaining (and decidedly informal) presentation.
posted by Wolfdog at 11:33 AM PST - 7 comments

In the early 1960's, drugs like LSD and psilocybin found their way out of university labs and onto the street -- and their value as medicine was lost as their status as protest and party drugs emerged. Mass recreational use, conservative political forces and a continuing media frenzy ensured the vilification of hallucinogens – until drugs like LSD and magic mushrooms were completely outlawed in 1970. Serious medical research would not begin again until the early 21st century, four decades later.

Turn on, tune in, and heal thyself - CBC's Ideas presents High Culture, a 3-hour (2--3) series examining the use of psychedelics to curb anxiety, alcoholism, and depression. [more inside]
posted by mannequito at 11:31 AM PST - 22 comments

A College Guide for Homeless Students (by Resilience.org) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:19 AM PST - 6 comments

In honor of Thanksgiving, Sports Illustrated presents their 2015 Turkeys of the Year slideshow.
posted by The Gooch at 10:03 AM PST - 8 comments

From the Brothers McElroy and The Worst Idea of All Time comes a new holiday tradition: Til Death Do Us Blart. Every American Thanksgiving, from now until the end of linear time, the five hosts (and their cursed successors) will watch and review Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. An eternal pocast, released annually. The first episode is now available.
posted by kmz at 7:52 AM PST - 30 comments

The new Raspberry Pi Zero is so cheap and so small the first 10000 of them are being given away free on the cover of a magazine. [more inside]
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 6:55 AM PST - 105 comments

This Thanksgiving marks 50 years since the famous Alice's Restaurant Masacree. Guthrie still views the antiwar classic as an "anti-stupid" song. He has returned to the scene, the former church, which is now the Guthrie Center. Tonight PBS will air a 50th anniversary concert with Guthrie singing the song in its original form. [more inside]
posted by graymouser at 6:36 AM PST - 24 comments

Journalist Owen Jones meets one of his twitter trolls. (SLYT) (NSFW swearing)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:47 AM PST - 20 comments

Hi friends! Soon I´m back om my feet, and we shall se each other again! #sharegavle #gavlegoat And thus begins the live cam from Gävle Sweden, and the construction of the Christmas Goat has begun!
posted by hippybear at 2:30 AM PST - 31 comments

Niloufar Ardalan, star of women's futsal, has been granted permission to travel abroad by an Iranian court, overturning her husband's veto. Ardalan, captain and top goal scorer of her national team, was prevented by her husband from travelling to the AFC championship where her team nevertheless triumphed against Japan.
posted by Segundus at 11:22 PM PST - 10 comments

The Turkey Hotline Exists and Here is Everything You Need to Know About It - well, it's six key facts about the Butterball's Turkey Talk-Line, including that it started in 1981, and a reminder that it was featured in The West Wing. To make your references a bit more current, here's Stephen Colbert's call to the hotline this year and part two. Butterball's not the only game in town - you can also contact the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline, or hear a pre-recorded message from Rob Zombie and PETA. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:55 PM PST - 18 comments

It was reported today that Masae Aida, better known by her screen name Setsuko Hara, died 05 September 2015, aged 95. Hara starred in Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), Tokyo Story (1953), and 98 other movies including a fruitful 12 year collaboration with Yasujiro Ozu. Despite being one of the biggest stars in Japan, in 1963 she walked away from her acting career, living in seclusion for the rest of her life.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:39 PM PST - 20 comments

In a recent Dazed article, artist Audrey Wollen explains "Sad Girl Theory" and how it's empowering women on the internet. [more inside]
posted by ourt at 6:15 PM PST - 83 comments

Thanksgiving is coming up and preparation is crucial don’t let this be like last year when your uncle tricked you into admitting that “Yes Mussolini did make the trains run on time I grant you that ok.” A woke guide to winning the annual familial debate “Thanksgiving”
posted by koeselitz at 6:13 PM PST - 39 comments

How I Fell Face First for an Epic IRS Scam: I received a call on my home phone recently from someone who identified himself as Officer Jason Dean with the Investigative Bureau of the Department of Treasury. He said an arrest warrant had been issued in my name for failure to respond to IRS Notice CP503 — a third reminder — informing me that I owed $5,347 in back taxes. He said my home and cell phones were being traced and I should not attempt to leave the city. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:24 PM PST - 77 comments

NATO-Russia Tensions Rise After Turkey Downs Jet [The New York Times]

Two big powers supporting different factions in the Syrian civil war clashed with each other on Tuesday when Turkish fighter jets shot down a Russian warplane that Turkey said had strayed into its airspace. The tensions immediately took on Cold War overtones when Russia rejected Turkey’s claim and Ankara responded by asking for an emergency NATO meeting, eliciting more Russian anger and ridicule. After the meeting, the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, called for “calm and de-escalation” and said the allies “stand in solidarity with Turkey.”

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 1:23 PM PST - 136 comments

Epigenetic Signaling Induces Species-Specific Head and Brain Growth in Flatworms Scientists have succeeded in inducing one species of flatworm to grow heads and brains characteristic of another species of flatworm, without altering genomic sequence.
posted by Michele in California at 1:22 PM PST - 12 comments

Sure, we may be a little weird compared to our close relatives for not having a baculum (penis bone), and maybe that's the sort of thing you want to explain for whatever reason, but does human penis size and shape need a uniquely human story? Assuming it's correlated to the vagina like it probably is in many other species, then no it doesn't... unless the size and shape of the human vagina has an exceptional story. Does it? We wouldn't know. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 12:42 PM PST - 45 comments

I don't remember buying these gaudy mother fuckin shoes but am i gonna wear em? you bet your ass [more inside]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 12:18 PM PST - 92 comments

The story of Kane Robinson, the man who supposedly stole £240 million from the music industry. Kane Robinson was a kid who loved the web and the Arctic Monkeys. His music forum Dancing Jesus became the target of the largest anti-piracy case ever seen in the UK.
posted by jontyjago at 12:07 PM PST - 5 comments

Dogs in the snow. (slyt)
posted by ladyriffraff at 11:36 AM PST - 17 comments

How Chuck Jones drew "The White Seal" (YouTube) / Animator Chuck Jones on creative work and not comparing yourself to others (YouTube)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:25 AM PST - 4 comments

In Photos: A Beauty Pageant for Holocaust Survivors (Haaretz)
Thirteen women compete in the third annual beauty contest for survivors of the Nazi effort to exterminate European Jews.

Winner of Holocaust survivor’s beauty contest: The Jew will never disappear from the world (JPost)
Title from the Daily Mail.
posted by andoatnp at 10:14 AM PST - 8 comments

I never imagined that photos of bread baking could so thoroughly gross me out. It’s “Not Impossible” To Bake Sourdough Bread Using Vaginal Yeast, But You Probably Shouldn’t Eat It
posted by palegirl at 8:56 AM PST - 168 comments

With the changes in formats occurring at Gawker Media, several of the niche sub-sites are being shuttered. One of the more notable is Jezebel's Kitchenette, which had focused on the trials and tribulations of the food service industry, at all tiers. The highlight of Kitchenette was the regular Behind Closed Ovens column, in which site runner C.A. Pinkham would publish stories of the weird, rage-inducing, and just outright insane world of food service. As a final hurrah, Pinkham has published a list of the best 30 BCO stories from the year, some of which may make you rethink about eating out. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:57 AM PST - 75 comments

For the first time in 35 years, an Chicago police officer has been charged with first-degree murder for an on-duty fatality, in this case, that of 17 year old Laquan McDonald. Last night, the city of Chicago released the dash-cam footage that had been kept out of the public eye for more than a year, showing Mr. McDonald being shot 16 times by a Chicago police officer. A second video, which was taken by a security camera at a nearby Burger King, was allegedly deleted by the police. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:34 AM PST - 307 comments

Is it a Pokémon, or is it big data?
posted by Going To Maine at 7:20 AM PST - 29 comments

Jim Henson's early journals reveal some surprising back stories.
posted by like_neon at 7:08 AM PST - 22 comments

Voices of the Food Chain Farmers are the iconic symbols of the food system, but food production, processing, and distribution make up nearly 15% of the American workforce. Today, StoryCorps and the Food Chain Worker Alliance are sharing videos of conversations from workers in different industrial sectors of the food system, showing how food labor crosses boundaries of culture, language, and experience. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 6:20 AM PST - 3 comments

The first trailer for Captain America: Civil War premiered last night on Jimmy Kimmel.
posted by Kitteh at 6:12 AM PST - 172 comments

The Organization for Transformative Works, a fan-run organization that hosts significant fandom-culture projects including one of the biggest fanfiction archives around, a fandom wiki, and a peer-reviewed academic journal, just had their 2015 Board elections, the first since 2011 - and, like its predecessor, was very contentious before, during, and after the election. [more inside]
posted by divabat at 4:47 AM PST - 30 comments

Need to wrap an odd-shaped gift? Create a box for it! Measure it up, choose a template and print it. This page is a resource for DIY artists, graphics designers and everyone who likes paper crafts. It contains an ever-growing number of templates for gift boxes and increasingly more other interesting things that can be made out of paper. What makes this site special is that the templates are all dynamic: you can customize almost all dimensions. All templates are free, no login is required. [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 4:30 AM PST - 14 comments

"Thanksgiving weekend in the United States is a four-day festival of overindulgence: Giant meals, giant balloons representing pop-culture favorites, giant savings at the big box store on Friday morning. As we did in 2013, The A.V. Club aims to contribute to this tradition of extreme consumption with a guide to some TV shows worth tasting, snacking on, or straight-up devouring this weekend."
posted by valkane at 3:19 AM PST - 57 comments

If you're like a whole buncha other folks out there who haven't heard nearly enough (or even any) of the music of America's perhaps least-known MAJOR soul man, then I've got the cure right here. Right here in this little Metafilter post. Yes indeed I do. Thirty eight songs of the great, great Solomon Burke. Just sit back and let it rain down on you, brothers and sisters.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:13 AM PST - 8 comments

Gaming for Millennials: "Games such as Mass Effect allow a millennial to spend hours modelling my own face but prettier, something that has become important to me after years of Mad Men era advertising deriding my own self-image in order to have me buy their beauty products in a feeble attempt to feel better. Mass Effect also enables me to go out into a world of arseholes to battle some made-up concepts in order to gain made-up currency, something I imagine Wall Street executives braying over as they have a butler hold their dick at a urinal. What an outlandish idea! How could it be applicable to the real world."
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 2:11 AM PST - 45 comments

Defining and describing the population of ISIS supporters on Twitter Although much ink has been spilled on the topic of ISIS activity on Twitter, very basic questions remain unanswered, including such fundamental issues as how many Twitter users support ISIS, who they are, and how many of those supporters take part in its highly organized online activities. ... We set out to answer some of these important questions using innovative techniques to create a large, representative sample of accounts that can be clearly defined as ISIS supporters, and to attempt to define the boundaries of ISIS’s online social network. [SLPDF] [via]
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth at 11:47 PM PST - 3 comments

Emily Anthes on drug testing and pregnancy

Because it has long been considered unethical to include expectant mothers in clinical trials, scientists simply don’t know whether many common medicines are safe for pregnant women. Of the more than 600 prescription drugs that the US Food and Drug Administration approved between 1980 and 2010, 91 per cent have been so meagrely researched that their safety during pregnancy remains uncertain.

Over the last few years, however, a small, tight-knit group of ethicists, including Lyerly, have become determined to reverse this longstanding scientific neglect of pregnant women. Science and society, they argue, have got it utterly wrong: our efforts to protect women and their fetuses have actually put them both in jeopardy. “Ethics doesn’t preclude including pregnant women in research,” says Lyerly. “Actually, ethics requires it.”

posted by frimble at 10:40 PM PST - 41 comments

David Gibbons talks Watchmen vs Dark Knight Returns - part of a series of posts on The Dark Knight Returns.
posted by Artw at 9:18 PM PST - 40 comments

Pixar's new film, The Good Dinosaur, is the second animated dinosaur film to come out in time for Thanksgiving. The previous one came out 22 years ago, with executive producer credits for Steven Spielberg and a whole host of stars lending their voices to the film, telling the story of dinosaurs coming to New York City. And it bombed. Let's go back in time and look at We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:49 PM PST - 22 comments

“The Bitter Southerner never shies away from grand pronouncements, but when we make one, we try hard to make sure it’s based on substance. As the holidays — that special time of year when calories don’t count — approached, we wanted to challenge a great Southern food writer to do the impossible: Define the most essential Southern dishes, the ones that speak most clearly about who we are. Today, North Carolina writer Sheri Castle — the only person alive who can legitimately claim to have read every recipe ever published in Southern Living magazine — takes the big leap.”
posted by ob1quixote at 6:54 PM PST - 96 comments

Nick Rowe is a Canadian macroeconomist at Carleton University. He's the most prolific of several bloggers at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, a group (mostly macro) economics blog. He often writes on, often colorful, (for a macroeconomist) thought experiments and analyses probing intuitive understandings of 'money,' and generally on the topic of exactly what money and monetary policy are: Is money a liability? Was Milton Friedman a crypto-communist? Can we actually avoid helicopter money? Could we have an economy with negatively valued money? How many markets are there? And of course, what if Chuck Norris was a central banker? He also writes on the nominal GDP level targeting, mentioned previously.
posted by PMdixon at 4:39 PM PST - 26 comments

Set it and rock out to it; Spotify times playlists to your turkey's suggested cooking time.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:21 PM PST - 8 comments

Cinemassacre brings us the trailer to the long-awaited film adaptation of the infamously terrible and bizarre Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde for NES.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:18 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

In the Great Green Room: This dovetailed with another observation: my students are not as puzzled by Stein as I expect them to be. Stein writes: “Glazed Glitter. Nickel, what is nickel” and my students recognize the moment of wondering. This habit of wonder is familiar in part because we have been raised on the lists of Goodnight Moon. [more inside]
posted by frumiousb at 3:57 PM PST - 5 comments

Hitting Home: The hard truth about Australia's domestic violence crime wave (comments best ignored) Documenting the epidemic of domestic violence in Australia. Sara Ferguson's report into domestic violence can be seen on ABC iView (probably need a proxy) Also - These women had a right to be safe tells the story of the victims that have died in 2015. [more inside]
posted by mattoxic at 2:58 PM PST - 14 comments

The Toast continues its annual celebration of People's Sexiest Man Alive.
posted by psoas at 2:42 PM PST - 14 comments

10 ways to map Northern Virginia. 12 ways to map the midwest. Which states are in "The South?"
posted by schmod at 2:19 PM PST - 86 comments

"StoryCorps is an oral history project that has collected 65,000 stories from 100,000 participants since 2003 using sound booths and mobile studios. However, with the newly developed StoryCorps mobile app, the booth is no longer needed. Now anyone with a mobile phone can record an interview and upload the audio to the StoryCorps archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress." [more inside]
posted by yueliang at 1:44 PM PST - 12 comments

A colorization of the Munsters opening sequence [more inside]
posted by ilama at 1:34 PM PST - 25 comments

We asked refugees: What did you bring with you?
posted by infini at 1:27 PM PST - 7 comments

Alien 3's perfect shot [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:12 PM PST - 137 comments

After Breast Cancer Diagnosis, a Baking Blogger Uses Cake to Tell Her Story About a year into blogging, one of Sung’s cakes went viral: a cupcake version of the Very Hungry Caterpillar...and Sung’s social media following exploded ...She was even approached by a publisher to write a cookbook. And then..."I felt a thickening of flesh where my breast meets my rib cage, and I was like, ‘Huh. That could just be my rib?’ [But] it turned out that there were two tumors in there.”
posted by Michele in California at 12:58 PM PST - 3 comments

When workers first arrived on the lot that Monday morning, they got a message through a security guard or a colleague or a handwritten sign taped up to the wall: Don’t turn on your computer. Later, someone might pop in and deliver the latest directive fourth-hand: “Unplug your computer from the wall.“ Which plug? The network cable? The power cord? Who knows? Just unplug everything. Says one worker: “It was all the hysteria of not knowing.” --One year later, what it was like to work at Sony when all their internal systems got hacked.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 12:50 PM PST - 16 comments

I would argue that Faerie endeavors to cultivate in readers a quality of attention that registers the most diminutive details, that perceives the world as though under a spell. (SLNYT) [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:46 AM PST - 10 comments

25 years of climate talk history in one comic: Richard Monastersky & Nick Sousanis explore the history of climate treaty negotiations in Nature's special Paris Climate Talks issue. The goal of the Paris Talks is to limit emissions so that Earth won't warm by more than 2°C, and there are many reasons to be optimistic about the prospects for an agreement - but what will it really take to limit warming to 2°C??
posted by dialetheia at 11:43 AM PST - 18 comments

The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems.
The world that scrolls past you on Twitter is not the real world.
You cannot calibrate your sense of what’s valuable and necessary to the current fashions in your field.

Bret Victor: What can a technologist do about climate change?
posted by modernserf at 11:25 AM PST - 16 comments

"Two years ago, Finnish illustrator and designer Vesa Lehtimäki put out a 38-page hardcover book of photos of Lego-built scenes showing imagined scenarios on the snow planet Hoth. It was a delightful collection of pictures full of levity, depicting AT-AT Walkers kicking through fresh powder, snowtroopers on skis, and Chewbacca covered in snow. Today, Lehtimäki is back with an expanded collection of Lego Star Wars photography, titled Small Scenes from a Big Galaxy." [more inside]
posted by lharmon at 11:09 AM PST - 5 comments

Photos: A Look Inside The 128-Year-Old Eldridge Street Synagogue [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:40 AM PST - 14 comments

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois (BCBSIL), the largest health insurance company in the state, announced in October that it is discontinuing it’s popular Blue PPO provider plans for individuals. BCBSIL says the move was made to keep affordable plan options for all individual plans, citing “applicable laws” requiring plan rates to be based on total medical cost of all members. This move affects only self-insured individuals, while those in group plans continue to have access to the traditional broad PPO network of doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies. [more inside]
posted by Bunglegirl at 10:37 AM PST - 101 comments

The Paris-based magazine Télérama have published a conversation between Thom Yorke and author/activist George Monbiot. Yorke is a professed fan of Monbiot's writing, and throughout the interview, the two men discussed climate change.Throughout the conversation, Yorke and Monbiot discuss how they've responded to climate change in their day-to-day lives—becoming vegetarian, Radiohead's carbon neutral touring initiative, and so on. Yorke said that for a time, figuring out how to reduce his carbon footprint became an obsession.
posted by Fizz at 8:40 AM PST - 9 comments

Sorry We're Closed is "an awareness project by designer and educator, Kelly Holohan", designed to bring attention to LGBTQ human rights around the world. It's on at the AIGA Philadelphia, but you can see the posters here.
posted by greenish at 8:30 AM PST - 2 comments

Shoemaking (the job of a cordwainer) is a very particular blend of artistry and science. Here are some masters at work: Emiko Matsuda at Foster & Son; artisans at Saint Crispin's; and at Paul Parkman. [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 8:23 AM PST - 12 comments

The Frankenburb: Retrofitting most suburbs is less likely than having a few successful ones remain as they are while many more simply fail outright.
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:08 AM PST - 93 comments

"Jane the Virgin is doing some of the most serious, most valuable work I’ve seen in a long time, and that work is rooted in a radically frank depiction of new motherhood." Links may contain spoilers, but also this show is very silly so knowing some things that happen will probably not ruin your enjoyment of the rest of it [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 7:08 AM PST - 17 comments

Faig Ahmed mixes traditional carpet-weaving with 3D sculpting and computer display glitches. It really ties the centuries together.
posted by Etrigan at 6:11 AM PST - 15 comments

Ashley Terrill was in hiding the first time I heard her voice, splitting time between her Los Angeles home and a $600-a-night room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Terrill had locked her laptop and phone in a secret vault, and would only contact me on disposable phones—all because, she claimed, the estranged co-founder of Tinder was trying to destroy her. And that fear was mutual. [more inside]
posted by rorgy at 4:03 AM PST - 37 comments

In 1993 the BBC produced a television series known as "From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring." One episode in particular stands out for shining a rare light on the peculiar practice of badge engineering cars to reflect subtle gradations in status. The result is somewhere between the Maysles' Salseman and Easton Ellis' American Psycho.
posted by basicchannel at 10:48 PM PST - 37 comments

"Thus far we've discussed the history of adding oysters to stuffings. But historic precedent doesn't automatically equate with deliciousness. In the case of oyster stuffing, though, I'm telling you now that deliciousness is guaranteed." (Daniel Gritzer - Serious Eats)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:30 PM PST - 33 comments

November 29th marks the 25th anniversary of the US H1-B visa, a highly-coveted three-year employer-sponsored visa for skilled workers that can eventually lead to a Green Card - eventually. SmithsonianAPA presents a collection of art about the H1-B experience, primarily from people that have held or are holding H1-B visas (mostly South Asians, since Indians make up the majority of H1B applications), as well as some H-4 dependent spouses. H1-B visa holders are also sharing their experiences on Twitter. (previously)
posted by divabat at 8:18 PM PST - 20 comments

This time of year, many of us will make a pilgrimage to see our families. Halls will be decked, candles will be lit, and ancient stories will be told. Hopefully everything for you will be hugs, warmth, light, and reconnection with the people you love. But if you are dreading dealing with that one jerk relative or bracing yourself for an onslaught of intrusive questions and and awkward topics, here’s a guide to keeping your cool and choosing your battles when everyone around you is making it weird.
posted by sciatrix at 8:07 PM PST - 98 comments

The Secret History of the Mongols is the oldest surviving Mongolian-language literary work, and is regarded as the single most significant native Mongolian account of Genghis Khan. Linguistically, it provides the richest source of pre-classical Mongolian and Middle Mongolian, and while you can read it in various translations, it can be quite a slog. That's why Mongolian rappers Gee of/with Click Click Boom team up with Jonon to present a musical version of Mongolian History, in Mongolian. Luckily, there are English subtitles to this video, but there's still a gap between knowing the words and knowing what they mean. With that, you can find a collections of links as annotations below. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:38 PM PST - 11 comments

The Black Friday sale you wish you could shop.
posted by Neely O'Hara at 7:35 PM PST - 36 comments

Playing in the Red: College athletic departments are taking in more money than ever – and spending it just as fast — a Washington Post report on how perennial NCAA powerhouses and aspiring contenders alike are using student fees to pay for exploding athletic department budgets. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 7:30 PM PST - 41 comments

Felipe Smith is the creator of Peepo Choo (warning auto-loading video ad), but you might know him as the writer of the All New Ghost Rider. He also happens to be the only black writer working at either Marvel or DC Comics.
posted by ladyriffraff at 6:17 PM PST - 9 comments

"If you are a regular in the pubs around Spitalfields, you may have noticed a man come in to collect bottletops from behind the bar and then leave again with a broad smile, clutching a fat plastic bag of them with as much delight as if he were carrying off a fortune in gold coins. This enigmatic individual with the passion for hoarding bottletops is Brazilian artist and Spitalfields resident Robson Cezar, and he needs to collect thousands because he makes breathtakingly intricate pictures with them." His work reveals the beautiful possibilities of the bottle cap. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:11 PM PST - 6 comments

I have built a working miniature replica of the patriarchy in my mind. I would like very much to bust it up or burn it down. But I am afraid I don’t know how. Though I do have some ideas.

Claire Vaye Watkins On Pandering. [cached version]
posted by palegirl at 3:35 PM PST - 140 comments

As part of the one-hour special Adele at the BBC hosted by Graham Norton, the program featured an audition of Adele impersonators demonstrating their talents. Among the performers was a mild-mannered nanny calling herself Jenny. Actually, that's probably not the name they know her by.
posted by Errant at 2:31 PM PST - 51 comments

The Double Life of John le Carré James Parker reviews John le Carré: The Biography, by Adam Sisman: [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:39 PM PST - 23 comments

The British Museum is relaunching its YouTube channel. It's currently considering four themed series, and will pick the one - or ones - that get the most likes. The overview video sets the stage. Here are the four exemplars offered for your consideration: [more inside]
posted by Devonian at 1:26 PM PST - 12 comments

Why I Haven't Had a Conventional Christmas in 20 Years
posted by josher71 at 12:54 PM PST - 30 comments

Steve Meretzky has released a treasure trove of (minimally redacted) Infocom working documents. Written from 1981 to 1987, these internal documents were instrumental to Jason Scott when producing his documentary GET LAMP and have now been released on the Internet Archive. They include business memos, playtester notes, design documents, mockups by their packaging designer, and a tantalizing look into the elements of games that got cut or never fully developed. Stanford University has the originals.
posted by jackbishop at 12:50 PM PST - 23 comments

We asked former Republican speechwriter [for Mark Sanford, an experience he describes in The Speechwriter] Barton Swaim to write a ​totally pandering stump speech for an imaginary GOP presidential candidate — one who ​espouses only positions that a majority of Republicans agree with. ​Here’s the speech he wrote, including notes to explain his phrasing, behind-the-scenes pro tips on appealing to Republican voters and the data he used to decide which positions to take.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:48 AM PST - 67 comments

So Amazon opened a new bookstore, and Paul Constant covered it for the Seattle Review of Books and ended up writing an eloquent defense of independent bookstores. [more inside]
posted by touchstone033 at 10:47 AM PST - 34 comments

We've seen 'All-Natural' Fire Tornadoes and 'Home-Made' Fire Tornadoes, but The Slo-Mo Guys have finally brought us a Slow-Motion Fire Tornado.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 10:43 AM PST - 6 comments

When You’re Just Drawn That Way: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Interestingly enough, the only two women to comment on/protest this objectification are the two women explicitly drawn to be objectified sex symbols: Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit.
posted by Michele in California at 10:33 AM PST - 46 comments

When it comes to housing, Australia and Berlin are worlds apart. In Australia, as in much of the English-speaking world, housing is treated as primarily a vehicle for investment and wealth creation, a state of affairs which began with the privately-financed speculative building of colonial times, and is firmly entrenched in the culture; 70% of Australians own their own homes, and the “Australian Dream” is still widely held to be home ownership, though these days the home may well be a trendy inner-city apartment rather than the traditional bungalow on a quarter-acre block. In Berlin, however, the vast majority of residents are renters, and they have considerable political clout, as they have had for decades. [more inside]
posted by acb at 10:29 AM PST - 22 comments

Donald Trump isn't funny anymore. Currently leading the polls in part due to a reaction to the Paris attacks that saw him inciting hatred against Muslim Americans with defamatory lies, Trump has eased off calls for a database of Muslims in favor of a new target, Black Americans, retweeting fake crime statistics provided by neo-nazis and supporting the beating of black protestors at his rallies. Let’s be clear, millions of Americans love Trump and are perfectly fine with him advancing racist lies. writes activist Shaun King, It’s ugly, but this, ladies and gentlemen, is America. 2015.
posted by Artw at 9:54 AM PST - 766 comments

In the ten years it ran on ABC, it seemed like everybody who was anybody had been a guest star on "The Love Boat". Well, not quite, and one weird Tumblr now exists to fix that... Love Boat Insanity inserts pictures of those who missed the Love Boat into the familiar logo - people who were doing other things, or the producers would not have approved of, as well as others who were too young at the time, or too old or too dead or just purely fictional. Over 850 guest stars so far...
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:31 AM PST - 29 comments

What We Owe the Students at Princeton A Crooked Timber discussion of naming public architecture and engineering in the context of the recent Princeton controversy over Woodrow Wilson.
posted by kingless at 9:23 AM PST - 37 comments

"Enya emerges from the shadows wearing a full-length black taffeta dress and a velvet shrug. She’s 54, but she has the skin of someone much younger — or someone who spends most of her time in an Irish castle. She looks like a mix of Deanna Troi and my mom, which is to say, she is the most beautiful woman in the world. She appears, nods as the room applauds her, and disappears without a word. “Now, for a light mingle,” the exec announces." -- Anne Helen Petersen on Enya, her avoidance of celebrity, her history, her massively successful career, and her castles.
posted by The Whelk at 9:05 AM PST - 66 comments

Every Philip Seymour Hoffman Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best By Nathan Rabin [Vulture.com]

“...we figured this would be a good time to delve deep into Hoffman’s filmography to determine what art of Hoffman’s is objectively, definitively better than his other art. In making our selection, we considered both the quality of the film as well as Hoffman’s performance. Though we strived to be as complete as possible, we were not able to see Mockingjay Part 2 ahead of this article, nor were we able to track down two of his most obscure early films, Szuler and Joey Breaker, left behind in VHS format. We still, however, had an awful lot to sift through, much of it awfully good.”

posted by Fizz at 7:48 AM PST - 49 comments

"I can still hear him signing off his show similar to the way he concluded his letter to Amy Melder: “You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There is no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.” Some have suggested that this message sought to instill children with a sense of self-importance, but to believe that is to fundamentally misunderstand Fred Rogers. At the core of Rogers’ mission was the paradoxical Christian belief that the way to gain one’s life is to give it away." (SL Atlantic)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:09 AM PST - 36 comments

Electronic composer Dan Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, has just released his long-awaited new album, Garden of Delete. But he hasn't just released an album - he's created an entire, detailed, sorta disgusting lore. [more inside]
posted by nerdfish at 6:03 AM PST - 6 comments

"Given that we still have so far to go, why am I telling people they should stop writing secure messaging tools? Because we have too many other tools we also need." Decentralized collaboration is how programmers work on software projects; it's also a good model for nonprofits, NGOs, and distributed teams of all kinds, especially ones which operate in risky environments or have powerful adversaries, according to this essay by Eleanor Saitta, a security consultant, systems thinker, and activist. She lists a number of system properties such teams need (decentralization, offline-friendliness, end-to-end encryption, etc) and two dozen ideas for needed tools: mind mapping, wiki, map-based storytelling, work assignment and tracking, reference management, and so on. [more inside]
posted by mbrock at 3:07 AM PST - 20 comments

You may have heard about n-grams, which identify particular strings of text in a large corpus (an n=3 n-gram could be "plate of beans"). You probably have played with Google Ngram search which lets you look through millions of books to see the first use of the phrase, or when it was most popular (though be warned, recent research shows some limitations, such as the false popularity of a certain expletive in the 1700s). The newest is the Reddit ngram search by 538, which lets you chart the rise and fall of things progressive and regressive. I await more insights in the discussion...
posted by blahblahblah at 9:01 PM PST - 20 comments

Heavenly Nostrils by Dana Simpson. It all started when Phoebe skipped a rock across a pond and accidentally hit a unicorn in the face. Improbably, this led to Phoebe being granted one wish, and using it to make the unicorn, Marigold Heavenly Nostrils, her obligational best friend. [more inside]
posted by ladyriffraff at 5:19 PM PST - 19 comments

Feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of feeding your holiday guests? Maybe you should refresh yourself on "How to Feed an Army" (1901). Perhaps a history lesson on feeding the troops would inspire you? (Break out your P38.) Ever wonder about the nutritional content of combat rations? Can sailors bring ship-grown lettuce to the table? [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:17 PM PST - 24 comments

In preparation for police raids tonight in Brussels, Belgian authorities asked journalists not to tweet using #brusselslockdown. The response has been a hundred thousand photos of cats.
posted by nickrussell at 3:11 PM PST - 115 comments

As we enter Thanksgiving week in one of the most politically-charged environments in recent memory, Saturday Night Live reminds us to steer the dinner-table conversation toward something that everybody can agree upon -- Adele's new album is pretty great.
posted by schmod at 1:47 PM PST - 42 comments

"Once upon a time, in a tiny home, lived three ball brothers: Biita, Biisuke, and Biigoro. The three lived happily together but one day.... What?! Two of the brothers were taken!"

And so begins Biisuke Ball's Big Adventure, where one little ball braves a Rube Goldberg machine and larger-than-life enemies to rescue his ball brothers and bring them home. (Turn on closed captioning for subtitles in English.) [SLYT]
posted by Room 641-A at 12:04 PM PST - 8 comments

Kaizo Trap is an animated story about love, determination, and overcoming nearly impossible obstacles. Mostly that last thing. It pays tribute to ultra-difficult platformers like Kaizo Mario World and the speedrunners they inspire to achieve impressive results through brutal trial and error, as well as tool-assisted speedruns that make the impossible look easy. The title "Kaizo Trap" refers to a particular trope within these unfairly difficult games. Note: the first link has a photosensitivity warning and maybe more cartoon violence than you might expect. [more inside]
posted by knuckle tattoos at 11:59 AM PST - 18 comments

Politics and the New Machine, Jill Lepore, New Yorker-"What the turn from polls to data science means for democracy." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:11 AM PST - 10 comments

Remember the prototype lunar rover that was believed to be scrapped but was recovered by a junkyard owner? It just failed to sell at auction, and could be yours if you have an amount of money more than $30000 burning a hole in your pocket.
posted by Artw at 9:47 AM PST - 10 comments

Ms. Mari has been called a total jerk, but the Shiba Inu is also a good sport in costumes and scenarios, as seen in inosemarine's numerous YouTube videos. Some popular picks: an unhelpful cooking assistant in 邪魔されクッキング | rejected affections in 柴犬の拒む瞬間６連パチュー　6 running fire that a dog refuses and more in 柴犬の拒む瞬間５連パチューー　５ running fire that a dog refuses | Mari keeps her person attentive with water in 浪人させない犬.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:57 AM PST - 9 comments

The knighthood of Star Wars is neither Galactic nor an Order. "In the Star Wars films, the Jedi Order and their Galactic Republic are an undemocratic, ineffective government maintained by a combination of religious awe and martial force. Nobody elected their Council - they noisily resent any outside input at all - yet each member of their entire order is a roving diplomat plenipotentiary, general, judge, and executioner. Their members are spirited away as toddlers, promised that they are chosen by a higher, ineffable power, and trained to act without emotion while training them in personal combat and the ability to telepathically manipulate "the weak-minded". They are trusted despite the fact that this power can corrupt - not only in the traditional way, but in a metaphysical one, transforming these unemotional, unaccountable warlord-judges into monstrous super-powered spree killers. "
posted by Sebmojo at 8:56 AM PST - 95 comments

Your Social Media Posts Are Fueling the Future of Police Surveillance - Any posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other location-tagged social media uploaded in [an] area will appear on a display at police headquarters. An uploaded Vine from one block away could show someone running away, and give the cops a starting point for their investigation. How long until that hypothetical situation is a reality? “We’re 100 percent there,” says Lee Guthman, head of business development at Geofeedia, a location-based social media monitoring site.
posted by nevercalm at 6:57 AM PST - 46 comments

Sibelius: Symphony No. 3 [YouTube]. There is no imagery and no drama—except that of the musical events themselves—for you to lose yourself in. This is like Haydn. You can't do anything with it except listen to it.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:41 AM PST - 7 comments

Greek New Testament Papyrus discovered on eBay. (NY Times)
posted by colfax at 6:21 AM PST - 13 comments

Start your day with a video and some ridiculous numbers: The Slow Mo Guys spin a CD at 23,000 RPM and film it at 170,000 FPS.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:53 AM PST - 17 comments

Reddit has a section devoted to robots that are shitty. [more inside]
posted by Meatbomb at 5:28 AM PST - 29 comments

The Baltic’s BDI index, which gauges the cost of shipping resources including iron ore, cement, grain, coal and fertilizer, has dropped to 498 points and is over 95 percent down from its all-time high of 11,793 points in 2008 before the financial crisis first hurt the sector. This index can be used as an overall economic indicator as it shows where end prices are heading for items that use the raw materials that are shipped in dry bulk. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that what the index is measuring isn’t the use of those commodities, but the shipping of them. Judging by wait times at the Panama Canal, you'd think things are busy but that traffic jam seems to be easing. [more inside]
posted by karst at 10:05 PM PST - 23 comments

Professor of Mathematics Izabella Laba's "A Response to … " Scott Aaronson's "Words Will Do". An exchange between a mathematician and a computer scientist, on the use of terms including: privilege, hegemony, false consciousness, mansplaining, etc., and the general problem of clear communication, when the social sciences are applied towards political causes. [more inside]
posted by polymodus at 8:43 PM PST - 111 comments

Today we're republishing one of Sansara's most recent and important albums for a Western audience, together with translations of the songs, thirty-one articles, and twenty-four video clips. The album's title - "Igla" (Needle) - carries a specific meaning in the context of Russian rock. It's a reference to a prior generation and therefore to any (ongoing) hope of building meaningful linkages today. For audiences across Russia, that simple noun will undoubtedly suggest a famous cinematic melodrama of 1988, in which rock legend Viktor Tsoi played a young man whose life is tragically shackled to the local drug trade.

He is killed seconds before the credits roll.
posted by rorgy at 7:27 PM PST - 4 comments

The Many Facets of Hamlet: Hamlet's most famous monologue, spliced together from performances by Mel Gibson, Laurence Olivier, David Tennant, and Kenneth Branagh. [more inside]
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:23 PM PST - 28 comments

10 cellphone/tablet accessories you can DIY. 10. Car docks. 9. Styluses. 8. Rubber Cases 7. Touch Screen Gloves 6. Mini-Charging Tables 5. Headphones with Remote Controls 4. Portable USB Chargers 3. Screen Protectors 2. Portable Speakers 1. Stands and Docks. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 5:50 PM PST - 9 comments

It's time once again for The Literary Journal's Bad Sex in Fiction Award nominees (previously here: 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, because we love it!) The Guardian (in Guarniad style) has a collection of NotVerySafe CannotBeUnseen HiYoTriggerWarning excerpts, including first-time novelist Morrissey's "giggling snowball of full-figured copulation" and sex-writing veteran Erica Jong's "Adam just discovering Eve’s pussy". It doesn't get much badder.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:46 PM PST - 64 comments

Stephanie is a painter and illustrator of fantastical art or as she puts it - painted reality.
posted by ladyriffraff at 4:22 PM PST - 11 comments

"Bland, horrible, almost always dry: turkey is an awful choice for a main course." Here's my tip for your Thanksgiving turkey prep: throw it in the garbage, by Dave Bry (SLTheGuardian)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:15 PM PST - 136 comments

JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources. It also has a tumblr.
posted by kenko at 2:52 PM PST - 21 comments

Nebulae run through a tilt-shift filter come out looking tiny and adorable and precious.
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:48 PM PST - 25 comments

Metafilter favorite Tony Zhou is back with a video about everybody's favorite visual comedian, Buster Keaton. [more inside]
posted by nushustu at 1:49 PM PST - 12 comments

11 robots whose designs were inspired by animals plus more in depth coverage on that roach inspired robot. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 12:02 PM PST - 7 comments

"Looks more like a Pokemon than a real animal, right? But the 'blue dragon" is quite real. It's actually named Glaucus atlanticus and is a small sea slug found in in tropical and temperate waters throughout the world. One recently washed ashore in Queensland, Australia." [more inside]
posted by yueliang at 11:41 AM PST - 19 comments

The Cult of the Toto Toilet

“I’ve had conversations about washlets with people and it’s always, ‘How good is your life now?’” Ms. Poh said. “It’s about the heated seats. Your life is really good when you have a heated toilet seat.”

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:02 AM PST - 111 comments

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Art of Translation No. 4 [The Paris Review] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:25 AM PST - 19 comments

The CIA’s WWII Guide to Creating Organizational Dysfunction Perfectly Describes Your Toxic Workplace (and the link to the full 1944 document at cia.gov)
posted by ShooBoo at 10:19 AM PST - 29 comments

Less than half of FIFA’s national federations have girls soccer programs. Those that do exist give a girl less access to facilities, less support, and poorer development pathways than her brother. She will play in competitions with less investment, minimal promotion, and consequently fewer fans than the all-important male versions. Media coverage will amplify this skew, battling age-old preconceptions and making her all but invisible in the mainstream. Administrators preoccupied with the men’s game will struggle to meet her needs. (SLNYT)
posted by josher71 at 6:02 AM PST - 17 comments

Frank Rich discusses Todd Haynes's new adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, Carol.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:49 PM PST - 27 comments

What was it like to be a Nintendo game play counselor? The A.V. Club interviews three former Nintento Hotline gameplay experts.
posted by figurant at 10:42 PM PST - 25 comments

You've tuned back into Radio FLTR, where we're digging up more hits from the past and doin' a monster song with ya on this beautiful November night. Here's that young dreamboat with the wacky expressions, Bobby Pickett doing the Monster Mash back in 1964 on American Bandstand, two years after his hit was first released, when he first cashed in on two hits at once - songs about dancing and monster mania. Bobby "Boris" Pickett didn't rest on those laurels in '62, but swiftly came back with a whole album of monster songs that same year .... [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:35 PM PST - 13 comments

Le Petit Théâtre Dior: An exhibit of miniature Dior creations was mounted in China earlier this year. [more inside]
posted by jacquilynne at 9:15 PM PST - 4 comments

Ian McKellen gives an hour long presentation featuring some of the amazing women he's worked with over his 50 year acting career.
posted by h00py at 7:24 PM PST - 8 comments

"Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said he planned to take two months of paternity leave after his daughter is born this year, amid a debate about work-life balance at technology companies." (NYT)
posted by New Year at 5:18 PM PST - 81 comments

2 Clintons * 42 years * $3 Billion: A Washington Post investigation reveals how Bill and Hillary Clinton have methodically cultivated donors over 40 years, from Little Rock to Washington and then across the globe. Their fundraising methods have created a new blueprint for politicians and their donors.
posted by growabrain at 4:05 PM PST - 66 comments

Today at TEDxCUNY, protestors took the stage in honor of Sonia Guinansaca, a migrant queer poet whose speech was pulled this week. (protest begins before the 7 minute mark of the video)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:03 PM PST - 17 comments

Gorgeous time-lapse video of South Africa and its wildlife. [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 2:42 PM PST - 14 comments

November 20, 2015 is the seventeenth annual International Transgender Day of Rememberance and ends Transgender Awareness Week. [more inside]
posted by ladyriffraff at 2:12 PM PST - 26 comments

For fourteen years, Snuffleupagus was the urban legend of Sesame Street -- Big Bird's even bigger friend only ever interacted with him, and their attempts to convince the adults of the Street always ended in humorous failure. But then the writers realized that Snuffleupagus needed to be seen. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 1:29 PM PST - 57 comments

The Slow Demise of a Unicorn Everybody knows how the first tech boom went bust. But this time around, something's different. More than 100 tech start-ups are currently valued at more than $1 billion dollars, if you go by what VCs and other early investors have paid to buy ownership stakes. Unlike in the early 2000s, very few of today's unicorns have gone public, so there's no way to know what the market really thinks they're worth. Lately though, it seems like the hype train may be coming of the rails. So what happens to those companies now? The New York Times profiles Living Social to find out.
posted by Diablevert at 1:11 PM PST - 63 comments

R3 Music Box is a YouTube channel that delivers peaceful music box versions of anime, movie, and video game themes, plus tons of J-pop, K-pop, and more.
posted by knuckle tattoos at 12:14 PM PST - 13 comments

True Sportsmanship. True Teamwork. CJ and Kennedy at the Derby City Cup.
posted by MrGuilt at 12:08 PM PST - 1 comment

Adrienne Rose Johnson at Buzzfeed: I Tried To Make Cheetos And Discovered That It’s Actually Impossible.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 12:02 PM PST - 92 comments

Captivating bird portraits by Australian wildlife photographer Leila Jeffreys. Extensive interviews and more photos here and here.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 11:50 AM PST - 9 comments

Joseph Gordon-Levitt takes lip syncing seriously. Joseph Gordon-Levitt arrived on Lip Sync Battle with a mission. It's been over two years since his epic battle on The Tonight Show where he set the gold standard for celebrities mouthing words, and a lot has changed since then. The bit grew into a full-fledged show on Spike, and became grander, more spectacular, and the network's biggest hit. [more inside]
posted by Windigo at 11:40 AM PST - 30 comments

1971: Fifth grader David Simon offers up a prayer: "Dear God, if you let Mike Epstein hit a home run right now, I will never, ever skip Hebrew school again." And lo, Mike "SuperJew" Epstein did indeed smack one deep into the upper deck. But less than a month later Simon was once again skipping Hebrew School.

It is now nearly half a century since a small boy asked his god to hang a Vida Blue pitch for his hero, and neither team with which he has allied himself has to this moment returned to a World Series. His foregone conclusion: "I gotta get right with God."
posted by zarq at 10:38 AM PST - 29 comments

Suck, Again: Updated every WEEKDAY, twenty years ago. A newsletter reissue of Suck.com. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 10:22 AM PST - 33 comments

It really hit me, an image that I was like a taxi driver, floating around in this metal coffin in the city, seemingly in the middle of people, but absolutely, totally alone. - Paul Schrader

Behind the scenes of Taxi Driver.
posted by porn in the woods at 10:09 AM PST - 13 comments

"Turning the concept of authenticity on its head, genuine forgeries — whether created with the intention of deceiving or not — are riding the crest of the art-scene zeitgeist, and commanding sums in excess of figures fetched by the so-called ‘original greats’ " - The Fake's Progress by Stuart Husband
posted by The Whelk at 9:57 AM PST - 4 comments

The New York borough that once symbolized urban decline is safer and more stable—but most Bronxites' lives are still precarious.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:39 AM PST - 21 comments

When Fiona Ingleby took to Twitter last April to vent about a journal’s peer-review process, she didn’t expect much of a response. With only around 100 followers on the social-media network, Ingleby — an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK — guessed that she might receive a few messages of support or commiseration from close colleagues. What she got was an overwhelming wave of reaction. Social media has enabled an increasingly public discussion about the persistent problem of sexism in science.
posted by sciatrix at 9:30 AM PST - 11 comments

I want to direct good stories. I don't care whether it's a guy fighting a giant freakish eagle or he's trying to decide what to do about his divorce. I don't know why women are marginalized to talk about love and fashion.

The Women of Hollywood Speak Out (NYTMag).
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:23 AM PST - 50 comments

Take a slice of cake and cut it in two. Eat one half, and let a friend scoff the other. Your blood-sugar levels will both spike, but to different degrees depending on your genes, the bacteria in your gut, what you recently ate, how recently or intensely you exercised, and more. The spikes, formally known as “postprandial glycemic responses” or PPGR, are hard to forecast since two people might react very differently to exactly the same food.
But Eran Elinav and Eran Segal from the Weizmann Institute of Science have developed a way of embracing that variability. By comprehensively monitoring the blood sugar, diets, and other traits of 800 people, they built an algorithm that can accurately predict how a person's blood-sugar levels will spike after eating any given meal.
posted by hippybear at 9:12 AM PST - 36 comments

Begin Again: On Endings in Nonfiction by E. V. De Cleyre [Ploughshares.org]

Talking, or writing, about endings is hard—whether it’s the end of a marriage, the end of a life, or the end of a book (lest one spoil the conclusion). Life rarely offers sudden and definitive endings or epiphanic conclusions. Rather, events leading up to the end seem to be a slow unfolding, occasionally bleeding into a new beginning. For writers of nonfiction, dealing with actual occurrences often means there is no definitive end, and even if there were (such as a death), there comes the aftermath—the grief, the coping, the rebuilding.

posted by Fizz at 9:08 AM PST - 2 comments

Marwencol: the incredible WWII art project created by a cross-dresser who was beaten up by bigots [more inside]
posted by aldurtregi at 8:35 AM PST - 17 comments

I Would Rather Be Herod’s Pig: The History of a Taboo - "The story of how pigs became the world’s most divisive meal." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:30 AM PST - 32 comments

A day in the life of a 90s kid, set to the music of that great 90s man Aaron Carter. Pogs and Pez! Mechanical claws! It's like BOOM! Brought to you by Neil Cicierega, the trinity ghost of 90s past, present, and future.
posted by rorgy at 7:55 AM PST - 28 comments

Punk, we greasy teens soon learned, was once the rightful province of a worthy few able to discern reality from simulacrum, irony from sincerity, punks from poseurs, shit from Shinola. Punk was diametrically opposed to massification; like an ailing Victorian child, it would die if exposed to the slavering crowd.
posted by latkes at 7:45 AM PST - 42 comments

Mic.com: 12 Years Later, Here's What Happened to the Viral Mastermind Behind 'The End of the World'
posted by divabat at 6:00 AM PST - 107 comments

The Berlin Transportation Authority has built a website where you can see all of the trains, trams, buses and ferries moving through the city in real-time. Real-time map of Berlin subway system. [more inside]
posted by colfax at 5:15 AM PST - 16 comments

Mechanical Techno Demonstration by Graham Dunning
posted by a lungful of dragon at 1:08 AM PST - 16 comments

One longtime resident of Williamsburg posted on Facebook that she now felt uneasy in a neighborhood where she had always felt so safe.
If, as in Paris, extremists were going to concentrate on harming the young and urbane, out enjoying stylish consumer pleasures, Williamsburg seemed to possess horrific potential as a focus of interest.

Anxiety Returns to the Surface in New York.
posted by four panels at 10:14 PM PST - 60 comments

Photojournalists put their lives on the line every day, after all, and a photograph is less likely to contain bias, right? "With his new photobook War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict, David Shields is taking aim at what he characterizes as the “war porn” routinely seen on the front page of America’s most respected paper of record." [more inside]
posted by the_querulous_night at 7:33 PM PST - 17 comments

We Rate Dogs (SLTwitter) [more inside]
posted by triggerfinger at 6:30 PM PST - 13 comments

Too bad! This time, it's 100 Years of Dinner -- from roast beef and potatoes to quinoa and salmon.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:28 PM PST - 47 comments

Hours ahead of its release, Netflix (not ABC) unveiled the full Jessica Jones title sequence. #JessicaJones [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:02 PM PST - 73 comments

Movies often portray suspension bridges being destroyed (for example) but often make basic mistakes that reveal a lack of understanding of how these structures work. This article by structural engineer Alex Weinberg, P.E. aims to fix this.
posted by AndrewStephens at 5:56 PM PST - 48 comments

David Bowie invites you to enjoy his new 10-minute video and single, "Blackstar" [SLYT]. Synopsis: Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah.
posted by FelliniBlank at 5:10 PM PST - 88 comments

The original Taco Bell location opened in Downey, CA in 1962, closed in 1986 and passed through several other hands before the property owners decided to lose the tiny take-out stand. That's when Conservation Groups and Taco Bell's management decided to save the building by physically moving it 45 miles to TB's corporate HQ in Irvine.
AND YOU CAN WATCH IT HAPPEN LIVE HERE TONIGHT! [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:09 PM PST - 28 comments

In the 80s, an arcade game called Dragon's Lair was released (previous). It was done in full hand-drawn animation at a time when most games looked like this. The animation was done by Don Bluth (who would later become known through movies like Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, All Dogs Go To Heaven and Anastasia.) The story of the game concerned Dirk the Daring's efforts to rescue the sleazily-dressed Princess Daphne from a dragon in an enchanted fortress. While the technology offered a limited number of options for how to play, there were plenty of ways to die. Otherwise, the game was basically a short cartoon series with each episode triggered by in-game actions. A successfully played game looked something like this. [more inside]
posted by Peregrine Pickle at 4:19 PM PST - 81 comments

272 pages of names^[PDF] suitable for almost any improvised game or story: names for biker gangs and surf guitar bands, names for gnolls and gun molls, names for Swedish smugglers and names for Shetland Islanders, names for Miskatonic students and names for people who are almost, but not quite, British. All names arranged in twenty-item tables for D20 convenience. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 3:06 PM PST - 17 comments

You might know that mefites are making levels in Super Mario Maker. But in a shocking twist, so are game developers! Every Wednesday for the past ten weeks, Polygon has been recording a different designer putting together, commenting on, and playing through an all-new level in their video series “Devs Make Mario”. (YouTube playlist) List of episodes within. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 12:29 PM PST - 52 comments

Theo Sanson has completed a nearly-500-meter slackline walk between the Rectory and Castleton Tower in Utah. The film is short, but breathtaking as the line disappears into the sky. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 12:19 PM PST - 19 comments

Analyzing 1.1 Billion NYC Taxi and Uber Trips, with a Vengeance Related: Taxi app test-drive: Uber, Lyft, Gett, Arro vs. hailing a yellow cab by hand
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:07 PM PST - 3 comments

Amanat's editing résumé includes some of Marvel's most instrumental and inventive titles: Hawkeye (writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja) presented a witty and crucial resurgence for the character; Ms. Marvel (Wilson and Alphona) is the crown jewel of Amanat's career and Marvel's wondrous hit; and Captain Marvel (DeConnick and artist Dexter Soy) became the pioneer of what's become a golden age for the woman superhero.
posted by Shmuel510 at 12:00 PM PST - 7 comments

the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the nation's first genetically altered animal -- a salmon engineered to grow twice as fast as its natural counterpart.
posted by psycho-alchemy at 11:15 AM PST - 114 comments

Unlike Schulz, Watterson was unable to reconcile his creative ambitions with the lucrative opportunities that success had opened up. He was every bit Schulz’s artistic heir, but he had little interest in inheriting the fertile commercial landscape that Schulz had so carefully cultivated. Twenty-five years later, their disagreements come across as equal parts quaint and timely — a remnant from the last era when newspaper cartoonists commanded widespread readerships and profitable product lines, and an ageless meditation on what selling out and authenticity mean in a commercial art form. -- Luke Epplin in the LA Review of Books on Bill Watterson, "failed revolutionary".
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:58 AM PST - 90 comments

The revolutionary potential of your own face, in seven chapters. "Nothing destabilizes power more than an individual that knows his or her own worth, and the campaign against selfies is ultimately a crusade against widespread self-esteem. What selfie-haters fear, deep down, is a growing army of faces they cannot monitor, an army who does not need their approval to march ahead."
posted by Phire at 10:41 AM PST - 39 comments

The Doomsday Scam. For decades, aspiring bomb makers — including ISIS — have desperately tried to get their hands on a lethal substance called red mercury. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:35 AM PST - 47 comments

10 cats enjoy an ice ball
posted by The Whelk at 9:34 AM PST - 31 comments

I had the best lawyers, Ivy League backing, and Bill Clinton’s support. But I still don’t have a green card.
posted by crazy with stars at 9:19 AM PST - 64 comments

Questioned by a sadistic interrogator, an American detainee is initially able to resist a brutal line of questioning - but how much can he take? (SLYT)
posted by Smedleyman at 8:46 AM PST - 6 comments

The Kitchn's Beer School: Emma Christensen's thorough but friendly 20-lesson / 5-weekend course in 1-gallon homebrewing. [more inside]
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:35 AM PST - 45 comments

The murderers next door. [The Guardian] In a remote corner of Romania, neighbours kill each other over tiny strips of land. Betrayed by their rulers, these rural communities have resorted to violent assertion of their rights. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:30 AM PST - 14 comments

The Cool Way to Brew Good Coffee (Matt Buchanan, The Awl)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:29 AM PST - 54 comments

The Hard Times brings you all the (somehow occasionally mistaken for real) punk rock news. [more inside]
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:27 AM PST - 27 comments

The Bonds of Catastrophe - D. Graham Burnett

It is perhaps not widely understood (outside the specialized domains of risk modeling and property insurance) that the last twenty years have seen the relatively rapid growth of a new kind of financial instrument: the catastrophe bond. I aim in what follows to offer the reader a brief introduction to these innovative money-things, which sit at the precarious nexus of mathematical modeling, environmental instability, and vast sums of capital.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:21 AM PST - 37 comments

A man who draws pictures for the computer explains the space doctor's big idea about time and space using only simple words. [more inside]
posted by schmod at 8:02 AM PST - 29 comments

Horse Burlesque [SLVimeo, NSFW]. Does what it says on the tin, I guess?
posted by Old Kentucky Shark at 7:48 AM PST - 10 comments

The Delights and Perils of Navigating New York City with a Guidebook from 1899, in which Luke Spencer at Atlas Obscura spends a weekend with the 1899 Baedeker guide to NYC.
posted by Stacey at 7:34 AM PST - 17 comments

Why men don't like funny women:

When they would ask men and women what they looked for in their long-term partners, both genders would say they wanted someone “with a good sense of humor.” It was only when researchers pressed their subjects on what they meant, specifically, by “sense of humor,” that the sex difference became clear. Women want men who will tell jokes; men want women who will laugh at theirs.

posted by cosmic owl at 7:13 AM PST - 123 comments

We’ll never have Paris here in New York. But we could have . . . if not for Aaron Burr.

Alexander Hamilton, the short-tempered protean creator of the Coast Guard, founder of the New York Post, would be proud that 250 years later it is still publishing articles destroying the reputation of Aaron Burr, sir. [more inside]
posted by jeather at 7:09 AM PST - 123 comments

Today, Ken Griffey Jr. is exactly as old as Shakespeare was the day he died, Joe Montana is exactly as old as Nixon was the day of Watergate, and Robert Downey Jr. is exactly as old as Steve McQueen was the day he died (plus, my sister is exactly as old as George Sisler was the day he had 6 hits in a single baseball game). Yesterday, Carrie Underwood was exactly as old as Thomas Edison was the day he invented the lightbulb, Ralph Macchio was exactly as old as Mikhail Gorbachev was the day he became head of the USSR, and Blue Jays 3rd baseman Josh Donaldson was exactly as old as Darryl Strawberry was the day he hit 9 homers for the Springfield Isotopes (and my aunt is exactly as old as Walter Cronkite was the day he retired). You can check dates of your own choosing using the widget, and Chris Jaffe updates his Twitter daily with more and weirder/sillier On This Day facts (i.e "If this was the planet Neptune, this would be the 1st anniversary of the death of Mary Shelley.").
posted by Copronymus at 6:59 AM PST - 35 comments

Gene found in China final breach of humans' last line of antibiotic defence. Last year, WHO warned (see MeFi post) about the serious global threat of bacteria resistent to all known antibiotics. Now, on November 18—in the middle of WHO's World Antibiotic Resistance Week—an article in The Lancet Infectious Disease reports that scientists in China have found bacteria resistent to colistin, the antibiotic of last resort. Resistance is caused by a gene dubbed Mcr-1 which seems to have evolved in the Chinese pork industry and can be transferred between bacteria. [more inside]
posted by mbrock at 6:31 AM PST - 37 comments

God is God, and I am not. A lovely, long form account of a life well-lived.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:29 AM PST - 12 comments

"Here is the Doll" (NSFW) Exclaimed Hans Bellmer when he first met Unica Zürn who became the muse behind LaPoupee
Zurn: From my earliest childhood, the first woman’s eyes I encountered conveyed the same uncontrollable anguish spiders cause me…This is why I very soon divided myself into two halves
Zurn was artistically known as an anagrammatical poet and for her line drawings.
Bellmer indulged in bondage, tying Zurn whom he then photographed.
Her book Trumpets of Jericho has just been republished and reviewed.
posted by adamvasco at 1:44 AM PST - 6 comments

On November 12th, 2015, Adel Termos threw himself at the second suicide bomber approaching a mosque in the Bourj al-Barajneh district in southern Beirut, minutes after the first bomber struck. He saved potentially hundreds of people.
posted by numaner at 5:10 PM PST - 100 comments

"The Boy They Couldn't Kill: How Rae Carruth's son survived and thrives" by Thomas Lake.
posted by goatdog at 2:50 PM PST - 10 comments

"Meet two amazing women who are still working at the age of 102. Yes, 102."
posted by DarlingBri at 2:36 PM PST - 26 comments

Sixteenth century European Catholics with sufficiently heavy purses could upgrade their rosary beads with Prayer Nuts, virtuoso boxwood carvings of astonishing detail. You can get lost in these things, and probably the more so back in the day when, some believe, they were infused with scent, mixing the visual with the olfactory. They've been known to hit the market, latterly in the low six figures. [more inside]
posted by BWA at 1:52 PM PST - 26 comments

How do you get both cooperation and promiscuity, a rare combination in a world dominated by selfish genes? The key, it appears - at least in birds - is long life. "Promiscuous cooperative species are exceptionally long lived."
posted by clawsoon at 1:47 PM PST - 2 comments

A new viral trend reveals a surprising cat behavior, but pet owners should beware. By Brian Clark Howard. SLNatGeo.
posted by valkane at 1:19 PM PST - 210 comments

We've talked about wood identification before (previously), but there's so much more than The Wood Database, starting with Identification Of Common North American Woods. [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 12:51 PM PST - 12 comments

"Young women could now do more than read about feminist issues and discuss them in class; they could find communities of women on Twitter or Tumblr whose experiences they could relate to—or who could open up new vistas for them on what other women’s lives are like. They could participate in the creation of a new feminism—one that would be a far cry from Friedan’s. By 2011, the writer Flavia Dzodan was famously declaring on her blog: “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.” Her words became a rallying cry."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:11 AM PST - 30 comments

With realistic fur, purrs and meows - and sensors that respond to petting and hugs with familiar, cat-like actions - Companion Pets deliver a soothing, joyful experience that inspires smiles, laughter and fond memories for people of all ages. Hasbro is now offering lifelike robotic cats to provide companionship for seniors.
posted by gottabefunky at 11:04 AM PST - 99 comments

Two years ago, I was thrilled that three of the six women on our roundtable were black: Oprah Winfrey, Lupita Nyong’o and Octavia Spencer. I thought, perhaps naively, that this represented a sea-change in the film business, and hoped it was catching up with the tectonic shifts that industries all across America have had to make to reflect this country’s diversity. But I was wrong. Stephen Galloway, in The Hollywood Reporter: Why Every Actress on The Hollywood Reporter Roundtable Cover Is White
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:27 AM PST - 37 comments

From National Geographic YouTube channel: The Shaolin (Wushu) Temple Kung Fu Academy is the largest school of its kind in China. Footage was adapted from filmmaker Inigo Westmeier's 2012 documentary 'Dragon Girls' with music from Gener8tio featuring M.I.A. The Academy has a website.
posted by growabrain at 10:01 AM PST - 9 comments

Stray cats walk across stage at G20 summit in Turkey
posted by Stewriffic at 9:48 AM PST - 47 comments

The Mixtape 24: Soviet Space Disco courtesy of The Calvert Journal: [October]'s mixtape is a collection of cosmic disco music from the archives of Soviet state record label Melodiya. Compiled for the launch of the exhibition Soviet Space Archive: Configuration II (on display at Calvert 22 Gallery between 10 October — 31 October 2015), it showcases the otherworldly highlights of the label’s eclectic Diskoklub series, including the swirling synths and tight brass of groups such as Zodiak from Latvia. For the exhibition opening, curators Rory McCartney and Ella McCartney will host a Soviet Space Disco. This mix captures the futuristic soundtrack to the opening event.
posted by Wolfdog at 9:46 AM PST - 7 comments

In an unexpected but effective mix of unlikely media, Toronto-based artist Talwst has created a series of miniature dioramas inside of antique ring boxes that capture wide array of scenes from various historical periods. http://www.boredpanda.com/antique-ring-box-mini-diorama-talwst/ [more inside]
posted by steinwald at 9:40 AM PST - 6 comments

“You have lost your mind,” telegraphed Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures. “Stop filming and return to Los Angeles at once.” DeMille refused. “I cannot and will not make pictures with a yardstick,” he wired back to the studio. “What do they want me to do?” he was rumored to have said, according to Higashi. “Stop now and release it as The Five Commandments?” Excavating the "City of the Pharoah," the biggest set ever built for a Hollywood film in the 1920s. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:37 AM PST - 10 comments

The AcroCats do (and do not do) pretty much everything you would expect them to do (and not do). [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 9:27 AM PST - 32 comments

This is the sort of story we need to hear in these divisive and troubled times. A touching account of a chance airport encounter written by San Antonio poet Naomi Shihab Nye.
posted by Agave at 9:21 AM PST - 15 comments

In 2011, Everclear frontman Art Alexakis finally gave the people of Portland what they wanted: He moved back to California.
posted by josher71 at 9:15 AM PST - 58 comments

"Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown" is a hypnotic, disturbing, and mostly forgotten 1981 radio documentary about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. [more inside]
posted by ryanshepard at 8:58 AM PST - 7 comments

Over the years, gay rodeos have become a centrally welcoming space for LGBTQ people in rural areas and an important place for people of all genders to compete in events which have been historically divided strongly along gender lines (such as bull riding and barrel racing). They've come a long way from their origins as a means of raising money for charity. But the people who participate in gay rodeos are aging and attendence is declining, raising questions about the future of gay rodeo. A new documentary shines a spotlight on this important piece of LGBTQ history.
posted by sciatrix at 8:23 AM PST - 11 comments

In the aftermath of the attack in Paris, a small boy & his father are interviewed. Together they remind us that even in the darkest hour there is light and hope.
posted by scalefree at 7:16 AM PST - 28 comments

And here’s the thing: This team that you’re making all these sacrifices for — this team for which you are giving up your body, your Friday nights, your hair — this team hasn’t won a game in 16 years. That’s right. Sixteen years. Zero victories. The Tigers have lost so many games in a row that everybody has lost count. Ninety-eight?  But what about forfeits?  That would make it 102, or maybe 103.  Truth is, no one counts consecutive losses as closely as consecutive wins.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:12 AM PST - 21 comments

"In order to recover a bit from a recent feeling of exhaustion, I spent a significant amount of this past weekend diligently sitting on my ass, in front of the television. On Saturday night, I popped in my copy of Woody Allen’s 'Manhattan,' which, among other things, is as stunningly designed a movie as I’ve ever seen. This is largely thanks to the work of Gordon Willis, a master cinematographer who, apart from his incredible work on this film, was also responsible for photographing an alarmingly high share of my favorite movies of all time: 'The Godfather,' 'The Godfather Part II,' 'All the President’s Men,' and 'The Parallax View,' among others." [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:51 AM PST - 23 comments

According to the Urban Institute's Health Reform Monitoring Survey, "Though the Affordable Care Act [ObamaCare] has led to increased health insurance coverage for millions of nonelderly adults, and early signs indicate improvements in broad measures of access to care and affordability, we find that gaps in access to dental care remain even for insured adults and that low- and moderate-income adults in particular face challenges affording dental care." [more inside]
posted by unannihilated at 3:48 AM PST - 82 comments

She had posted and removed the story twice before and no one cared. To garner more interest this time, she made it darkly funny while preserving the gist of what happened. And she has no regrets. "I made people who probably wouldn't want to hear a sex trafficking story want to be a part of it," she says, "because it was entertaining."

Rolling Stone interviews and fact-checks Aziah "Zola" Wells, whose 158-tweet-long story about a trip to Florida (archived here) became an overnight sensation, receiving accolades from Selma director Ava DuVernay and Missy Elliot (quoted in the title), along with many, many others. The Washington Post has released its own report on the story. A movie is reportedly in the works.
posted by rorgy at 3:46 AM PST - 21 comments

Former New Zealand rugby winger Jonah Lomu has died of cardiac arrest aged 40. [more inside]
posted by Pink Frost at 11:38 PM PST - 44 comments

Horse With Hands Riding A Bike. A horse is difficult to draw. Hands are difficult to draw. Bicycles are difficult to draw. So to draw all three is just cussing mind blowing. But these guys have given it a go!
posted by domnit at 10:38 PM PST - 25 comments

The Star Wars galaxy is vast, and it's universe will expand for decades to come. In fact, it is quite likely that you won't live to see the final Star Wars movie - a Wired article on the ever-growing paracosms of the Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes, and accolades for Chris Carter's expansive X-Files universe.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:34 PM PST - 85 comments

The 2015 The Nebula Awards Suggested Reading List, selected collaboratively by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in the run up to the Nebula Award. Categories include novella, novellete and short story, within which most entries have links full stories.
posted by Artw at 6:25 PM PST - 33 comments

Ever since the the Villa dei Papiri and its cache of at least 800 papyrus scrolls was discovered in Herculaneum in 1752, this potential treasure trove of information and insight into the classical world has fascinated scholars with what it could possibly contain. The difficulty has been in how to read them without destroying them. As John Seabrook describes for The New Yorker: "One scroll was peeled apart into many fragments; the other dried up and then, like a disaster in slow motion, split apart into more than three hundred pieces." Now, thanks to new imaging techniques, the contents of the scrolls could—slowly—be revealed.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:14 PM PST - 20 comments

Bill Simmons (formerly of Grantland) interviews President Obama for GQ.
posted by holmesian at 5:27 PM PST - 39 comments

- 2014 gubernatorial candidate for the state of California... [more inside]
posted by triggerfinger at 4:39 PM PST - 20 comments

"[F]or a while now, think pieces have been fretting over the increased fragility of American college students, and blaming it on … well, whatever the writer thinks is wrong with kids and/or society today." What if it's just not true? [more inside]
posted by escabeche at 3:59 PM PST - 42 comments

Counterterrorism "expert" David Kilcullen discusses the rise of ISIS with historian Robert Manne. Kilcullen was a senior adviser to General David Petraeus in 2007 and 2008, when he helped to design and monitor the Iraq War troop "surge".
posted by mattoxic at 3:54 PM PST - 45 comments

According to ancient texts, Athenians and Spartans clashed at the isle of Kane in 406 BC, one of the last battles of the Great Peloponnesian War. Some 100 ships were sent to the bottom of the Aegean Sea as a result of the prolonged, hard-fought naval battle. Archaeologists have long debated the location of Kane, but none of the islands in the Aegean seemed to fit the descriptions. At long last, thanks to artifacts and core samples, the location of Kane has been identified, as has the reason it took so long to find it: It isn't an island anymore.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 3:35 PM PST - 6 comments

From his obituary: "The visionary artist and luminary, Paul Laffoley, has died today after a long battle with congestive heart failure. He had an extraordinary grasp of multiple fields of knowledge compulsively pursing interests that often lead him into uncharted territory. His complex theoretical constructs were uniquely presented in highly detailed mandala-like canvases largely scaled to Fibonacci's golden ratio." Some of his better known works are available on his website. HuffPo offers a surprisingly good survey of his more recent works. Previously. Apologies for the workmanlike quality of this FPP - I am genuinely upset at the news of Mr. Laffoley's passing.
posted by doctor tough love at 3:28 PM PST - 10 comments

"Series of murals painted on a few of the thousands of icebergs freshly broken off from a nearby glacier. In the short time I was there, I witnessed the extreme melting rate first hand as the sound of ice cracking was a constant background noise while painting. Within a few weeks these murals will be forever gone, but for those who find them, I hope they ignite a sense of urgency, as they represent the millions of people in need of our help who are already being affected from the rising sea levels of Climate Change.” [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:14 PM PST - 11 comments

Streaming service Rdio is filing for bankruptcy, and Pandora is set to buy its assets for $75 million. Never heard of Rdio? The service was a lesser-known competitor to the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, and did a lot of things right in a low-key way. Its userbase is savvy and fiercely loyal. The service is set to wind down over the next few weeks. The Atlantic: A Eulogy For Rdio. David Greenwald: What Spotify and the rest could learn from Rdio. The Verge: Streaming music has an economics problem. [more inside]
posted by naju at 12:26 PM PST - 109 comments

13 miles of typography on Broadway from A to Zabar's, New York City's showiest street shows off its signage (and yes, it includes an example of Broadway font)
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:56 AM PST - 6 comments

The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product. Dan Goodin reports for Ars Technica on cross-device tracking software already in use today. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:48 AM PST - 89 comments

Let's Get Crunning: The New, More Humiliating Version Of Running [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:36 AM PST - 89 comments

"the [UCLA Game Lab] fosters research and development in not only computer or video games, but also physical, tabletop, and other game forms. Known for its annual Game Art Festival at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, California, the lab supports the production and exhibition of student work, but it also curates and promotes vanguard game design from around the world. Through its tripartite mission to push the envelope of game aesthetics, game context, and game genres, the lab nurtures game projects that often adapt contentious, controversial subjects not found (overtly, anyway) in many commercial games: issues of politics, gender and identity, industry and commerce, the environment, experiences of alterity, the silly and the surreal…. In short, all that composes lived experience becomes fair game, so to speak, for adaptation.." -- Playfully Subversive: the Many Roles of Adaptation in Making Games at the UCLA Game Lab by David O'Grady [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 10:12 AM PST - 4 comments

Christopher Kimball, the 'kitchen stickler' behind the beloved Cook's Illustrated magazine and PBS' highly-rated America's Test Kitchen show, is leaving the kitchen amidst a leadership shakeup at the company he founded. The last letter from Vermont has not yet been published. Previously
posted by anastasiav at 9:22 AM PST - 150 comments

Over 150 recipes from the early run of TBS' Dinner and a Movie, including "Peter Pancakes with Lost Boys-enberry Syrup" (originally paired with a presentation of Hook), "Two Hot Peppers on the Lamb" (Thelma and Louise), and "Jane S'mores" (Somewhere in Time).
posted by Iridic at 8:57 AM PST - 6 comments

Real or Satire? Copy and paste any article URL. They'll tell you if it's satire. A useful tool for your easily-fooled neighbors. [more inside]
posted by blue_beetle at 8:44 AM PST - 14 comments

The Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel is bigger and meeker than the common grey squirrel, but neither of those attributes saved it from being endangered -- it was on the very first list of species to be protected under the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966. Nearly half a century later, the Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel will be delisted, indicating that its numbers and habitats have recovered enough to no longer need federal protection. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:22 AM PST - 10 comments

Hardy Boys Covers
posted by josher71 at 7:30 AM PST - 35 comments

Fabio Wibmer escapes from the police - SLYT
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 6:53 AM PST - 22 comments

The Asteroid Hunters
posted by zarq at 6:47 AM PST - 23 comments

Surfin' Shetland Otters! That is all.
posted by Flitcraft at 5:05 AM PST - 26 comments

For years, Apple followed user-centered design principles. Then something went wrong. Former Apple designers Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini on how Apple has sacrificed core principles of usability and good interface design on the altar of visual simplicity and prettiness.
posted by starzero at 3:58 AM PST - 270 comments

[Spoilers ahoy!] Toby Fox's Megalovania, possibly inspired by Castlevania and Live a Live, started life as the soundtrack to his Earthbound Halloween Hack. It then gained major prominence as part of Homestuck's sprawling multi-album soundtrack, featuring in a pivotal Flash page and consequently being associated with a certain cerulean crook due to the incorporation of her theme. Recently its popularity soared due to being used as the boss battle song for a sapphire skeleton in Undertale (though there's some speculation that it really represents the player). Its inclusion in Homestuck and especially Undertale has inspired a lot of fanwork: all three versions layered, two orchestral versions, major key, muzak, mashups with Kana Hanazawa, DMX, Panic! At the Disco, and Eminem, with Super Mario Maker and Plants vs Zombies, on hard drives, music boxes, and violins, metal, 8-bit, acapella, and kazoo covers, even a mindboggling DDR-style game which the creator and his girlfriend played through. Let's dance in the sandstorm! [more inside]
posted by divabat at 3:23 AM PST - 11 comments

Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Stories Inspired by Microsoft features work by Elizabeth Bear , Greg Bear, David Brin, Nancy Kress, Ann Leckie, Jack McDevitt, Seanan McGuire and Robert J. Sawyer, "also includes a short graphic novel by Blue Delliquanti and Michele Rosenthal, and original illustrations by Joey Camacho" and is available for free from the usual ebook retailers.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:53 AM PST - 13 comments

"Not everyone is so shy about queefing. Some people are downright enthusiastic about it. How else can we explain things like queef fetish forums, queef championships and queef-themed pornography? In her 2013 song, 'Queef,' Awkwafina incorporates the proud line, 'You need to embrace your queefing. You can’t be scared of it anymore. It’s gonna save the world.'" Queefing: How to Get Down with Sexual Embarrassment (By Carrie Weisman / AlterNet) [previously and relatedly]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:48 PM PST - 28 comments

Humans of Los Angeles.
posted by prefpara at 9:30 PM PST - 40 comments

It is your first day as an Intern at the Night Vale Community Radio Station. You know it may be your last. But the show can’t proceed as normal until you recapture The News. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:53 PM PST - 8 comments

Why is the new name for ISIS so hard to understand? And why it's a really good idea to start exclusively using this new name instead of any of the other ones.
posted by umamiman at 7:17 PM PST - 93 comments

Marcin Wichary writes (among other things) articles about crazy, complicated computer bugs and what they say about the world. Come to read about how a bug in Google's famous Pac-Man doodle led to all manner of chaos, stay to learn how a confluence of history, typography, and OS weirdness broke the Polish S (previously), or how a fluke of CSS unearthed a decades-old font. [more inside]
posted by Itaxpica at 6:49 PM PST - 37 comments

President Obama: “I look forward to presenting these 17 distinguished Americans with our nation’s highest civilian honor. From public servants who helped us meet defining challenges of our time to artists who expanded our imaginations, from leaders who have made our union more perfect to athletes who have inspired millions of fans, these men and women have enriched our lives and helped define our shared experience as Americans.” [more inside]
posted by Beti at 5:21 PM PST - 12 comments

5 things the media does to manufacture outrage.
posted by jacquilynne at 3:21 PM PST - 71 comments

Nintendo still won't make Link a girl, but they'll put him in a dress and call him 'Linkle'. [Kill Screen]

There's is no conceivable lore reason for why Link can't be reincarnated as a girl. As the Zelda Wiki states, Link is, "the name shared by the main protagonists of The Legend of Zelda series." There are many different reincarnations and iterations of the Link character, "each possessing the Spirit of the Hero, with some of them being blood related as well," but, most importantly, all Links are connected by the fact that they were "chosen by the Goddesses to protect the land from evil whenever deemed necessary."

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:19 PM PST - 84 comments

The Guča Tumpet Festival, also known as Драгачевски сабор, is an annual brass band festival held in the town of Guča, in western Serbia. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 2:39 PM PST - 13 comments

This year, the scientific workshop ADAPT shakes the status quo in the scientific process by using reddit as its primary review system. [more inside]
posted by knz at 1:54 PM PST - 42 comments

The Stade de France–A History in Fragments

Or did he, and the other players, make the same decision that many are now saying we should: that in the face of horror the only thing to do is to keep playing, moving, living? Watching it now – knowing all that we do about what happened Friday night in Paris – we can perhaps count it as one of the most surreal things to ever take place in this storied stadium, a place built nearly two decades ago specifically to house history.

posted by infini at 1:12 PM PST - 4 comments

Brentin Mock explores the rise and fall of Soul City, a planned city in rural Warren County, North Carolina founded by civil rights veteran Floyd McKissick and funded by the Nixon administration, and how Soul City's decline propelled the environmental justice movement.
posted by radiomayonnaise at 12:25 PM PST - 8 comments

“I’m 60% excited,” says Adele, directing me to a couch beside a set of speakers, “40% shitting it.” She’s invited me here today to hear her third album, 25.
posted by ellieBOA at 11:24 AM PST - 66 comments

Whichever cameras are used, it’s increasingly clear police will control the footage. In a recent survey of 25 departments with body camera programs, only two made the footage available to individuals filing complaints against the department, and only four had systems to prevent tampering or unauthorized access. - Who controls the cop cam?
posted by Artw at 11:09 AM PST - 40 comments

Vancouver band North Atlantic Explorers with their dreamy beautiful odes to a life lived on the sea. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 10:49 AM PST - 10 comments

Interested in foreign languages and language history? As requested, here's a (highly subjective) selection of podcasts and blogs to keep you busy. [more inside]
posted by benito.strauss at 10:21 AM PST - 23 comments

[Megan] Phelps-Roper spent the summer and the fall in an existential spiral. She would conclude that everything about Westboro’s doctrine was wrong, only to be seized with terror that these thoughts were a test from God, and she was failing. “You literally feel insane,” she said. Eventually, her doubts won out. “I just couldn’t keep up the charade,” she said. “I couldn’t bring myself to do the things we were doing and say the things we were saying.” - How a prized daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church came to question its beliefs. (content warning : extreme homophobic & anti-Semitic language)
posted by nadawi at 9:24 AM PST - 61 comments

Joanna rants: Types of Spanish Accents [more inside]
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 9:22 AM PST - 44 comments

ESPN uses the "30 for 30" series to tackle the most important sporting event of the Cold War. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 8:10 AM PST - 26 comments

On Gawker's Problem with Women. A former staff writer describes how a media company founded on whistleblowing and radical transparency failed its female employees.
posted by emjaybee at 8:08 AM PST - 41 comments

When it comes to human resilience, our culture has grand ideas about the nobility of hardship and suffering. “The world breaks every one, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. And certainly, I became the woman I am today, for better and worse, because of the hardships I have endured. If I had to choose, though, I would prefer to have not lost my sense of safety in the way I did.

--Roxane Gay on Safe Spaces
posted by almostmanda at 7:42 AM PST - 32 comments

"The Memphis Grizzlies will be honoring the old Memphis Sounds for their Hardwood Classic games this NBA season by wearing the Sounds’ red-and-white jerseys. Given that the Sounds were around in the early 1970s and were of the ABA, the jerseys are pretty slick and sweet. ...To understand the Sounds you need to understand the music. And to understand the music you need to understand race and cotton." - Curtis Harris on Stax Records and the context of the Memphis Sounds.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:14 AM PST - 18 comments

In Cities: Skylines ... it can be hard to keep tabs on a single person's life for very long, and difficult to find them again later. I thought I'd fix this problem by creating a city in which only a single home could be built. Then I'd see who moved in and keep track of their lives. Here's what happened.

[more inside]
posted by cthuljew at 2:57 AM PST - 55 comments

Humans 2.0 - "With CRISPR, scientists can change, delete, and replace genes in any animal, including us. Working mostly with mice, researchers have already deployed the tool to correct the genetic errors responsible for sickle-cell anemia, muscular dystrophy, and the fundamental defect associated with cystic fibrosis. One group has replaced a mutation that causes cataracts; another has destroyed receptors that H.I.V. uses to infiltrate our immune system." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 12:21 AM PST - 67 comments

More than perhaps any creature, salmon epitomize modern wildlife management. We are willing to bend over backwards, to the point of comedy, to recover species we cherish: We captive-breed black-footed ferrets; we shoot barred owls to save spotted owls; we patiently teach whooping cranes to migrate behind aircraft. Yet coexistence occurs strictly on our terms — and there is always at least one term left non-negotiable. We spend millions on wildlife crossings over highways, yet would never close the highways themselves; we relocate imperiled trees to help them weather climate change without daring to retool our carbon-based economy. In the Columbia Basin, the dams, and their power, are the inviolable condition, the infrastructure that fish and managers must turn cartwheels to accommodate. We will give salmon everything, except what we don’t want to give.

The great salmon compromise: High Country News' Ben Goldfarb explores the complicated legal and biological tradeoffs in federal and tribal salmon recovery efforts in the Columbia Basin. [more inside]
posted by Dip Flash at 11:43 PM PST - 7 comments

Developments like wikis and Facebook walls and comments sections were supposed to open the Internet to everyone, “using the Web the way it’s meant to be used.” Ten years in, and it sometimes seems those technologies only opened us up: to quantification, to monetization, to tracking, to abuse. Given these rather disappointing developments, it’s little surprise that some look back at Web 1.0 with longing.

The counterintuitive, GIF-tastic plan to redeem the modern Internet (SLWaPo)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:03 PM PST - 45 comments

Pinboard's (and MeFi's own) Maciej Cegłowski live-tweets O'Reilly's Next:Economy conference.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:51 PM PST - 23 comments

Onepunch-man (ワンパンマン) a comedy/superhero webcomic created by ONE in 2009 hosted on his site which quickly became a viral hit over the years. It features the adventures of Saitama (サイタマ), an unlicensed hero, and his disciple Genos (ジェノス) as they protect the citizens in Z-city from a variety of villains and monsters. However, after all his dedication to training to become a serious hero he feels empty as everything is too easily resolved with one punch. [more inside]
posted by chrono_rabbit at 9:04 PM PST - 11 comments

This kitten is pretty excited to see their human. [SLImgur]
posted by Room 641-A at 8:41 PM PST - 23 comments

In 1991, The Supreme Court heard Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. (spoilers!) (Number 90-26), in which two strip clubs contented that laws against nude dancing violated their first amendment rights.
The oral argument (as recorded and transcribed at Oyez) is just as titter-inducing and thoughtful as you would expect a hypothetical-filled conversation between lawyers talking about nudity would be; it was later adapted verbatim into the play Arguendo.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:18 PM PST - 10 comments

The JB-9 Jetpack test flight around The Statue of Liberty: Finally, The Jetpack We Always Wanted [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:38 PM PST - 38 comments

The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto Trans media theorist Sandy Stone's 1987 essay on transsexual women and radical feminism, written in response to TERF works of the time, was a foundational text for transgender studies, located within a particular cultural moment but calling for a new discourse of transsexual and transgender womanhood beyond the gender binary. [more inside]
posted by thetortoise at 5:35 PM PST - 4 comments

In 1993, alt-rock band The Connells released the single "74-75" from their fifth studio album Ring. The accompanying music video was shot at Needham B. Broughton High School in the band's hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, and it featured members of the Class of 1975, juxtaposing yearbook pictures with footage of the same people as they appeared in 1993. The band has now updated the video, with footage of the surviving classmates from the original video.
posted by 4ster at 4:31 PM PST - 45 comments

In early November 1990, George Michael released the VHS documentary GEORGE MICHÆL, the fourth release in support of his floundering second solo album Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:16 PM PST - 39 comments

An Art Without an Artwork By Tom Russell [Guernica Magazine] A summer of chess in Bryant Park.

“Another way to distinguish a great chess player from an average one is to gauge how comfortable he or she is with tension. After the opening flurry of moves it is inevitable that a tension accrue somewhere on the board—a cluster of opposing pieces all vying for control of a vital square. The temptation for most is to resolve that tension by trading off pieces and simplifying the position. Experts let it build and build, and pounce only when they identify a clear way to gain an advantage. Everything you’d want to know about a person psychologically is there to see on the chessboard.”

posted by Fizz at 2:44 PM PST - 11 comments

Drone video footage of the largest ice fishing tournament in the world from Gull Lake, Minnesota. (SLYT) There are over 20,000 holes in the ice and just as many anglers.
[more inside]
posted by growabrain at 2:10 PM PST - 26 comments

Intrepid band of puppies take a swim for the first time.
posted by phunniemee at 1:50 PM PST - 34 comments

Floating point math, exemplified by Erik Wiffin. [more inside]
posted by metaquarry at 10:13 AM PST - 43 comments

English is not normal. "No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language." (Aeon via Longform).
posted by pravit at 9:05 AM PST - 102 comments

Kentucky counties with highest Medicaid rates backed Matt Bevin, who plans to cut Medicaid

Owsley County, one of the nation's poorest places [prev], neatly fit the trend. Nearly 1,000 of its 4,508 residents got health insurance after Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear established Kynect two years ago and expanded Medicaid to include people up to 138 percent of the poverty level, which is $16,105 a year for an individual. Newly insured people started to visit the Owsley County Medical Clinic on the outskirts of Booneville. They desperately needed medical care. Even by Kentucky's lax standards, Owsley has high rates of obesity, smoking and poor nutrition, and as a result, greater than normal incidences of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Some patients wept with relief as longtime ailments finally were treated, clinic officials said. [...] The community's largest-circulation newspaper, the Three Forks Tradition in Beattyville, did not say much about Kynect ahead of the election. Instead, its editorials roasted Obama and Hillary Clinton, gay marriage, Islam, "liberal race peddlers," "liberal media," black criminals and "the radical Black Lives Matter movement."

Owsley County voted for Bevin, a Tea Party businessman who vowed to dismantle Kynect, by a 70-25 margin. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 7:30 AM PST - 90 comments

Anthony Bourdain goes to a Waffle House.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:40 AM PST - 119 comments

"I sold my wife’s clothes to build a Christmas village in my parents’ basement." “Oh, Richard has a Christmas village,” my mother said, and began to explain it in painstaking detail. And while I listened to her confuse my post office and library, gloss over my recreation area, and completely fuck up my all-embracing vision, I became assured that there was only a teeny little chance that Litia and I would ever have sex again.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 5:37 AM PST - 108 comments

"A revolutionary story of guitars, motorcycles, cell phones – and the music of a new generation” is how director Christopher Kirkley describes his West African re-imagining of Purple Rain. Set in the Saharan city of Agadez in Niger, Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai (Akounak for short) is a visually sumptuous and musically thrilling movie that works splendidly with or without the Purple Rain mythos. But riffing on Prince’s tale locates Purple Rain’s universal heartbeat

posted by infini at 2:44 AM PST - 10 comments

Ronda Rousey--arguably the most dominant and recognizable athlete in women's MMA--has been defeated. [more inside]
posted by Anonymous at 11:05 PM PST - 101 comments

Mo'Wax is a British record label that was formed in 1992 by teenage school friends James Lavelle and Tim Goldsworthy. The label quickly gained renown for trip-hop, turntablism and other odd beat hip-hop, from the likes of Japanese DJ Krush, Americans Money Mark, Dr. Octagon and DJ Shadow, British Luke Vibert, and their own UNKLE project. The label lasted a solid decade, then petered out as the 2000s wore on. James Lavelle looked back on 21 years of the label (a year late), and is now restarting the label. This effort is being kicked off with releases by a West London artist, Elliot Power. More waxing below the break. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:43 PM PST - 20 comments

Why Australia has fallen bizarrely in love with a Chinese dating show
posted by bswinburn at 8:25 PM PST - 28 comments

After more than a decade of decline, Baltimore's homicide rate spikes up. Tonight it just broke the 300 mark. [more inside]
posted by CommonSense at 8:24 PM PST - 17 comments

Fencing Senior World Championships Moscow 2015
Star Wars Duel on Fencing Senior World Championships Moscow 2015
FIXED Star Wars Duel on Fencing Senior World Championships Moscow 2015
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:35 PM PST - 15 comments

The nihilism behind Nathan Fielder’s real-world marketing success [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:28 PM PST - 23 comments

The 10 Best Genre-Bending Books - PublishersWeekly
20 Strange and Wonderful Books - cartania.com
10 Ultra-Weird Science Fiction Novels that Became Required Reading - io9
10 Weirdest Science Fiction Novels That You've Never Read - also io9
China Miéville's top 10 weird fiction books - The Guardian
The Weird: An Introduction - Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Weird Fiction Review
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:02 PM PST - 53 comments

Oasis songwriter/guitarist/vocalist Noel Gallagher, interviewed by Alex Bilmes for Esquire: “I have an opinion on everything and if I don’t have an opinion, I’ll fucking make one up on the spot.”
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 5:01 PM PST - 52 comments

Tonight at 9 EST Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O'Malley will come together for a debate in Iowa at Drake University. [more inside]
posted by Drinky Die at 4:50 PM PST - 168 comments

Looking for a new esoteric language to learn? Try rally notes. Learn the symbols or study these sample rally notes. Not esoteric enough? Try the Jemba Inertia Notes System. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:29 PM PST - 10 comments

She wasn’t vain, shallow or in denial. She was just unembarrassed that beauty – along with literature, music and a hundred other things – was part of who she was, and determined that cancer would not erode both her character and her body. In her weekly beauty column for The Guardian today, Sali Hughes writes about her friend, keyboardist for indie band Camera Obscura, and occasional beauty blogger Carey Lander, and the importance of make-up. [more inside]
posted by ambrosen at 4:05 PM PST - 6 comments

As the first semester of the school year reaches the halfway mark, countless college freshmen are becoming aware that their clothes are feeling rather snug. While the so-called freshman 15 may be hyperbole, studies confirm that many students do put on five to 10 pounds during that first year away from home. Now new research suggests that an underlying cause for the weight gain may be the students’ widely vacillating patterns of sleep.
posted by sciatrix at 2:56 PM PST - 37 comments

" Chinese emperors of the Tang Dynasty liked their ice cream a special way: Fermented buffalo or goat milk was heated, then thickened with flour and seasoned with camphor, which made it flake like snow. For good measure fragments of reptile brain were added, along with an eyeball or two." - "It Ought To Be Called Vice Cream" - Austerity Kitchen on the social and technological history of Ice Cream.
posted by The Whelk at 2:30 PM PST - 17 comments

Donna Pinckley photographs interracial couples and writes the negative comments they have been subjected to underneath
posted by growabrain at 12:47 PM PST - 34 comments

The Kesla 28RH is a machine that turns trees into logs. Very quickly. (SLYT)
posted by theodolite at 12:00 PM PST - 75 comments

Emus vs Humans: The Great Emu War of 1932 Also covered on The Uncyclopedia and EmuGigs [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 11:57 AM PST - 14 comments

The Writers Guild of America has released their list of The 101 Funniest Screenplays.
posted by Room 641-A at 9:45 AM PST - 124 comments

RIP actor Warren Mitchell who had significant career on both stage and screen but will always be best remembered for playing the iconic and controversial bigot, Alf Garnett in the British television series Till Death Us Do Part and In Sickness and in Health [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:17 AM PST - 16 comments

A Polish student of mine tells me they all see this documentary about photographer Julien Bryan in high school. He was an American who was in Warsaw at the beginning of the war. The four-part documentary (which includes his film Siege) is available on YouTube, dubbed into English. [more inside]
posted by Rash at 8:05 AM PST - 1 comment

As a young computer scientist at International Business Machines Corporation in the early 1960s, he played a crucial role in the development of the System/360 series, the most successful line of mainframe computers in IBM’s history. Its architecture influenced computer design for years to come. Computer pioneer Gene Amdahl has died.
posted by bukvich at 7:21 AM PST - 33 comments

In 1970, Vince Staten was the humor columnist for the campus newspaper The Daily Beacon. He made a passing joke to David Williams, the news editor, that rumors of Staten's run for homecoming queen were not true. The next day the Beacon featured the headline, "Staten Denies Running for Homecoming Queen." And Staten's un-candidacy took flight from there. [more inside]
posted by workerant at 5:58 AM PST - 2 comments

MOMOIRO CLOVER Z vs KISS, winner of the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards Japan "Best Collaboration" category.
posted by needled at 4:58 AM PST - 15 comments

"The underground bad place is always in the present, whether literally or in memory, and it is always about the past." Bernadette Lynn Bosky on underground and secret spaces in Peter Straub’s fiction.
posted by thetortoise at 2:49 AM PST - 7 comments

Huh, a new show on Netflix. "W/ Bob & David." It's sketch comedy. Wait a second... BOB and DAVID? OMG MR. SHOW IS BACK! Here's a country music video parody from them! [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 1:36 AM PST - 18 comments

Synchronized swimming set to "Stairway of Heaven." That is all.
posted by gingerbeer at 11:00 PM PST - 12 comments

Multiple shootings are happening at popular venues and restaurants in Paris The Guardian seems to be very well informed. But here is a link to Liberation as well [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 2:49 PM PST - 1406 comments

TensorFlow. Google has open-sourced their numerical computation library for machine learning applications. (Especially "deep" learning.) [more inside]
posted by grobstein at 2:46 PM PST - 28 comments

Suffer the Children: A long and heart-rending essay in The Monthly magazine about the Australian Family Law system's ugly response to allegations of child abuse in custody disputes. [more inside]
posted by Coaticass at 1:33 PM PST - 26 comments

Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks. Here is an engaging yet fairly thorough and technical explanation of the signal system(s) used in the NYC Subway (SLAtlantic) [more inside]
posted by millipede at 12:34 PM PST - 60 comments

"What’s cropped up in rural North Carolina is essentially a Venus Flytrap crime ring — with lackies, middle men, and a mysterious end buyer who’s perpetuating the market.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:16 PM PST - 28 comments

Wanna buy a palatial 365-room Castle in the Florentine foothills - CHEAP? The bizarre castle and its 160-acre grounds, which have been left to ruin for the last several decades is being auctioned off at a starting price of just S20 million in an attempt to save the estate from private investors who are angling to turn it into a luxury resort if the price falls low enough. Google images here.
posted by growabrain at 11:50 AM PST - 28 comments

America's Poorest White Town: Abandoned by Coal, Swallowed by Drugs. The first in a series of dispatches from America's poorest towns by the Guardian.
posted by Atreides at 11:42 AM PST - 43 comments

And we still don't know who inspired "You Oughta Know." Plus a few more things you oughta know about Alanis.
posted by Michele in California at 11:30 AM PST - 78 comments

Wanderment is a game that lets you play as a lost kitten looking for your kitten friend. The twist: you, the kitten, are completely blind. Instead of navigating by sight, you must navigate by sound and smell to find your way around your environment and track down your friend.
posted by sciatrix at 11:25 AM PST - 10 comments

The art of the strange writing exercise. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 11:18 AM PST - 10 comments

Pinochet, The Cold War, and the Most Pathetic Match Ever Played
posted by josher71 at 11:06 AM PST - 6 comments

The Radical Sandcastles of Matt Kaliner, aka Sandcastle Matt: How To Build Sandcastles The Sandcastle Matt Way [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:11 AM PST - 8 comments

Guy's Big Gulp - Guy Fieri tackles wine "And if you’re looking for a metaphor of how the food-and-wine establishment views Guy Fieri, it’s hard to top a man who feeds dog shit to slow-moving animals and calls it foie gras." - Drew Magary heads to Flavortown's Sonoma outpost.
posted by GamblingBlues at 9:19 AM PST - 109 comments

Arstechnica contrasts gaming performance between SteamOS on Steam Boxes and Windows 10.
posted by juiceCake at 9:02 AM PST - 62 comments

Twelve years ago, an amateur poker player from Tennessee won the main event at the World Series of Poker, and suddenly, the entire world wanted to play Texas Hold ’em. The craze spawned countless underground poker rooms. Greenville, S.C., was one of the South’s hottest underground poker towns — until the whole thing went sideways in a hail of gunfire. This week, as the 2015 WSOP draws to a close, The Bitter Southerner will tell you a week-long story about that night in Greenville — and the South’s twisted relationship with legal poker. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:29 AM PST - 16 comments

Kriss Kyle riding BMX in a visually stunning setup [more inside]
posted by glaucon at 8:23 AM PST - 10 comments

“I chose the phone call option, no rush, because that seemed like the most respectful way to do it, and also because I wanted to hear how the person from the The Breakup Shop would handle it. Sending an email or text is easy. What do you do when the other person talks back?”—I Paid This Company $30 to Break Up With My Girlfriend (SLVice)
posted by Maecenas at 6:46 AM PST - 87 comments

Okay, you enjoyed the Gif Dance Party (or some of you did), how about an Emoji Party? (warning: auto-sound cannot be turned off) Move your cursor to the upper right corner to pick more emojis to add to the crowd, move the cursor around to change the moving patterns and click and hold to add more music. You're welcome.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:05 AM PST - 15 comments

Patrick Mathis performs a pretty rad arrangement of Smooth Criminal on an orgue de Barbarie. [more inside]
posted by en forme de poire at 10:53 PM PST - 29 comments

In the summer of 2000, carbosilicate amorph Schlock enlisted with third-rate mercenary band Tagon's Toughs. Since then, he's given us over 5000 comics' worth of hurting people, breaking things, and interspeciated offices, in the process garnering author Howard Tayler four Hugo nominations and a cease-and-desist letter. The archives are well-indexed, but given their length, may I suggest Archive Binge? [more inside]
posted by d. z. wang at 7:10 PM PST - 18 comments

After ten years doing mostly production work, Missy finally drops a new track. And lord, it RAWKS. [NSFW, SLYT]
posted by Purposeful Grimace at 6:58 PM PST - 99 comments

Recently, they've been helping us track our facial hair. Now Microsoft's Project Oxford will recognize your emotions from a photo. In the demo, upload (or link to) an image, then roll over the face(s) and get a probability distribution for their emotion(s).
posted by klausman at 6:29 PM PST - 26 comments

Philthy Animal Taylor, drummer for Motorhead's golden age lineup*, has passed away. RIP, you Philthy bastard. *this clip shows that along with being a great drummer, he could really cut a rug
posted by jonmc at 5:23 PM PST - 40 comments

Somebody took out a full page ad in The Hollywood Reporter to pitch a Die Hard sequel
posted by The Whelk at 5:12 PM PST - 60 comments

You were taught in school that the rain forest is like the lungs of our planet.

It’s not that simple.
posted by zarq at 4:09 PM PST - 16 comments

"The one who has not traveled widely thinks her mother is the best cook.” A short article describing the experiences which led the author to write a Ghanaian Cookbook. [more inside]
posted by ramix at 3:52 PM PST - 12 comments

Unpublished Charlotte Brontë story and poem discovered. [The Guardian]

The short story features a public flogging, embezzling from the Wesleyan chapel, and a “vicious” caricature of the Reverend John Winterbottom – a religious opponent of the children’s father. Winterbottom is “in the middle of the night dragged from his bed” and then “by the heels from one end of the village to the other”, writes Charlotte in the story. The poem features Mary Percy, the lovesick wife of the king of Angria Zamorna, and “one of the leading Angria characters”, said Dinsdale.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:50 PM PST - 7 comments

Uterus Transplants May Soon Help Some Infertile Women in the U.S. Become Pregnant (SLNYT)
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 3:13 PM PST - 50 comments

For the first time in more than 60 years, no new network TV series have been cancelled before the November sweeps period. Insiders say the change has a couple of reasons: DVRs and online streaming mean that people have many more chances to find and start to love a show (Quantico's audience nearly doubles when one takes these into account); non-network outlets are increasingly willing to grab "castoffs" (a la Yahoo's acquisition of Community, though that didn't work out as well as they had hoped); and lower ratings across the board means that it's not as easy for networks to throw away the millions they spend developing each new series. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 1:31 PM PST - 48 comments

"The number of people living in poverty in Portland’s suburbs shot up almost 100 percent between 2000 and 2011, according to the Brookings Institute. If the North’s poor black residents are driven to the same poverty in less desirable areas, then the Portland Boheme for middle-class whites has been purchased at a price of cultural disruption and displacement, even violence. And while immigration to cozier, comfortable climes, and gentrification and attendant displacement are not new phenomena, I find that people flocking Portland-ward rarely wish to accept their own culpability or complicity in this story—there is a desire on behalf of most newcomers to think of themselves as socially progressive and so properly enlightened, as if being anti-racist or super-considerate and well-meaning, responsible even, somehow makes this process of ‘urban renewal’ consequence-less and clean. It is not." Michael Copperman, La Boheme Portlandia.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 1:23 PM PST - 73 comments

Illustrations from Walt McDougall’s Good Stories for Children, 1902-05
posted by naju at 1:07 PM PST - 22 comments

"Studies show that if you've served in the military -- any branch, any war, or even if you served in a time of peace -- you have a much higher risk of dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) than if you were not in the military. And no one seems to know why." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:42 AM PST - 39 comments

In an attempt to curb in-game harassment, online gaming communities have tried to develop a variety of workable solutions. One of the most prominent of these communities has been League of Legends (previously, previously), an extremely popular game that uses a virtual judiciary of gamers' peers, among other tactics, to identify problem players and mete out consequences. Two years ago, the tribunal drew public attention when it chose to expel a professional player from the game for a year (potentially ending his gaming career) for harassing other players. But is it working? Preliminary data indicates that the system is helping.
posted by sciatrix at 11:24 AM PST - 46 comments

Even famous female economists get no respect. [SLNYT]
posted by Mchelly at 11:23 AM PST - 19 comments

Holy Cow, Home Alone Is 25! Remember Winnetka’s most famous big-screen family, the McCallisters—especially the resourceful son who got left behind? An oral history of one of the most beloved Christmas comedies ever made.
posted by almostmanda at 10:33 AM PST - 48 comments

Edna Lewis and the Black Roots of American Cooking [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:00 AM PST - 26 comments

In a daring attempt to ease cold war tensions, the 19-year-old amateur pilot had flown a single-engine Cessna nearly 550 miles from Helsinki to the center of Moscow—probably the most heavily defended city on the planet—and parked it at the base of St. Basil’s Cathedral, within spitting distance of Lenin’s tomb. Newspapers dubbed the pilot “the new Red Baron” and the “Don Quixote of the skies.” The stunt became one of the most talked-about aviation feats in history. But it was politics, not fame, that motivated Rust.
posted by veedubya at 8:50 AM PST - 21 comments

Neil Strauss, author of the The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, says he has grown up. He talked with the CBC (and The Guardian, and GQ) about his new book, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships.
posted by clawsoon at 8:24 AM PST - 126 comments

Despite its reputation for being dense, awkward, and repetitive, legal writing can be simple, readable, and concise when done well. Legal writing blogs, such as Bryan A. Garner's Law Prose, are here to help. Non-lawyers may also find these useful when reviewing a lawyer's work, reading legal documents, or in their own formal writing. [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 8:10 AM PST - 33 comments

Videos for Cats To Watch Volume 1 - a playlist of 32 videos filled with birds and squirrels and suchlike. The latest one is 38 minutes long and features birds twittering about on a fence and a bench. Warning: my cat attempted to destroy my laptop keyboard.
posted by desjardins at 7:46 AM PST - 36 comments

I analyzed 10,000 Craigslist missed connections. Here's what I learned. [more inside]
posted by glaucon at 7:42 AM PST - 35 comments

Koala bear Imogen was born at Australia's Symbio Wildlife Park in November. Soon after, another koala in the park had a baby but, sadly, mom died a few days later leaving the new joey orphaned and in danger. Zookeepers Matt and Kylie decided to hand-rear Imogen because she was stronger and older, freeing Imogen's mother to raise the motherless joey. The plan went well and Imogen turns one year old this weekend. She's had an adventurous young life that Matt and Kylie thoughtfully documented along the way. [more inside]
posted by _Mona_ at 7:37 AM PST - 24 comments

Do you know your Viking from your Lundy?
posted by the quidnunc kid at 6:49 AM PST - 40 comments

Of the many concerns unearthed by the protests at two major universities this week, the velocity at which we now move from racial recrimination to self-righteous backlash is possibly the most revealing. The unrest that occurred at the University of Missouri and at Yale University, two outwardly dissimilar institutions, shared themes of racial obtuseness, arthritic institutional responses to it, and the feeling, among students of color, that they are tenants rather than stakeholders in their universities. That these issues have now been subsumed in a debate over political correctness and free speech on campus—important but largely separate subjects—is proof of the self-serving deflection to which we should be accustomed at this point.
posted by Artw at 6:44 AM PST - 142 comments

Malaysian illustrator Charis Loke designs geek culture-inspired traditional South/South East Asian outfits, primarily baju kurung and kebaya. Some of her inspirations include Tolkein, Pacific Rim, Watchmen, and the Hunger Games.
posted by divabat at 6:02 AM PST - 10 comments

Electric Candyland, a gorgeous, fun comic by illustrator Jesse Tise.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 4:53 AM PST - 5 comments

Øyvind Thorsby, creator of multiple strangely charming webcomics (previously), has recently begun his fifth series, Trixie Slaughteraxe for President (link is to the first page). Thorsby's comics bear multiple trademarks: distinctively simplistic art, strange creatures with strange adaptations to their environments, creative applications for magical and technologically advanced objects and phenomena, and, of course, complicated farcical situations often involving desperate wacky schemes. A list of his comics (including the new hosting for his first three comics) is inside. Content warning: violence, swearing and sexual themes. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 3:55 AM PST - 8 comments

"Here’s the point: to all of us readers, Saga gives a promise of freedom to be whoever we want and make our own choices without fear of being judged or punished." -- Nadia Bauman looks at what exactly it is that makes Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan's Saga so popular.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:43 PM PST - 45 comments

Outlaw songs are at least as old as popular music itself. The image of a gallant loner battling a rigid and unyielding legal establishment has proved irresistible for generations of songwriters. In 1959, Texan Sonny Curtis wrote one of the best, "I Fought The Law." Intended as a vehicle for himself and the post-Buddy Holly Crickets, their single went precisely nowhere.

That is, until it was covered -- the first hit cover was by The Bobby Fuller Four in 1965, then another major version came out 14 years later, from The Clash who revived the "oldie" into what is now a "punk anthem." From there, the covers start piling up.... [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:03 PM PST - 29 comments

Extra History: The Seminal Tragedy (2, 3, 4), wherein Extra Credits' history subseries (previously) takes us into the series of coincidences, missed saves, miscommunications and bad decisions that led the world improbably into The Great War. (Bonus: Corrections, Retractions, and Lies!)
posted by Navelgazer at 8:37 PM PST - 4 comments

In Flanders Fields read by Michael Enright.
posted by HuronBob at 7:26 PM PST - 40 comments

Remember back in July, when 1000 musicians all gathered in the Italian city of Cesena in a bid to get the Foo Fighters to come play a concert there? Remember when Dave Grohl responded by saying the Foo Fighters would? He meant it - last week, on November 2nd, the Foo Fighters played for an audience of 3000 in Cesena, and the videos are starting to show up online now. [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:23 PM PST - 22 comments

A challenge coin has been struck to commemorate Det. Ralph Friedman's service in the NYPD. He is the most decorated detective in NYPD history.
posted by Talez at 6:18 PM PST - 25 comments

Are you a James Bond fan? You've seen every movie including unofficial ones like Never Say Never Again and the original 1967 Casino Royale? How about Operation 007 starring Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny, Bernard Lee as "M" and... Neil Connery, Sean Connery's brother, as 007's brother... Neil Connery. The Italian production was also known as O.K. Connery. How good is the movie? So good that it it made into an episode of the much-loved Mystery Science Theater 3000.
posted by GuyZero at 5:23 PM PST - 21 comments

The Burning Man of Birding: Inside Iceland's Puffin Festival by Brian Kevin [Audubon.org] For decades Icelanders have celebrated the Atlantic Puffin even while they've served it up on plates. But some traditions can't last forever.

These days, though, the only place to reliably find smoked puffin at Thjodhatid is in the concession tent, where, alongside cheeseburgers and chicken fingers, it’s sold for 1,500 krona, or about $12, per bird. That’s three times what it cost 20 years ago, making one little puffin an expensive snack; it’d take three birds to make a modest meal. So it isn’t a popular menu item—the concession tent has stocked just 600 birds for a three-day fest that regularly draws 16,000 people. Still, the puffin has its devotees.

posted by Fizz at 3:07 PM PST - 30 comments

You know, a little known fact about the Greeks is that they invented The Sequel. So, in the finest tradition of their ancestors, the Portokalos family will be returning to the big screen in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, this coming March. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 2:44 PM PST - 48 comments

Monster flash flood, August 30, 2015, Southern Utah: A massive thunderstorm stalled up this basin and dumped billions of gallons of water in around and hour and a half.
posted by growabrain at 2:24 PM PST - 45 comments

Watch this video where it appears that the Earth is breathing. [VVS trigger alert]
posted by pjern at 2:23 PM PST - 10 comments

To see how long it would take to attain an arbitrary skill, Mike Boyd chose skateboarding and set the milestone at a kick flip. It took him five hours and forty-seven minutes. With help from his cat. [SLYT]
posted by Stark at 2:04 PM PST - 23 comments

The podcast Gastropod explores alcohol through the lens of the peak booze generation in the UK. The podcast recaps Chrissie Giles' article Peak Booze: How My Generation Became the UK's Heaviest Drinkers before jumping into exploring "Synthalol" as an alternative to booze. [more inside]
posted by CMcG at 2:03 PM PST - 9 comments

Spotlight, the movie: A personal view Lessons learned from survivors of sexual abuse, the strange intoxication of Hollywood & the power of investigative journalism. By Matt Carrol.
posted by artsandsci at 1:24 PM PST - 4 comments

The Life & Times of Strider Wolf Trigger warnings for Violence, Child Abuse.
posted by Chrischris at 1:23 PM PST - 10 comments

People think of Bainbridge Island as a peaceful, affluent, middle-class bedroom community and day trip destination, seven miles on the ferry from downtown Seattle. The island has a population of about 23,000, 5.5 percent unemployment, and the median housing price is below $500,000. Less well known is the island's role as an incubator for young and talented loud rock musicians. The suburban cocktail of teenage angst, plastic prosperity, and free time that makes angry young musicians pop up like mushrooms after a spring rain is hardly unique to Bainbridge, but the island has those ingredients in excess. What's special about Bainbridge hardcore is the scene's longevity. For more than 30 years, a metamorphosing network of house shows helmed by high-school teenagers has produced well-loved bands and musicians, many of whom never make a dent in the mainland musical consciousness—though some, like the radically unalike Murder City Devils and Holy Ghost Revival, have. The island lists Chad Channing (formerly of Nirvana), Andrew Wood (Malfunkshun, Mother Love Bone), and Ben Shepherd (Soundgarden) among its famous alumni. Governor Jay Inslee is also a Bainbridge native, but nobody can confirm ever seeing him at a house show.
posted by josher71 at 1:22 PM PST - 8 comments

Why the Trend of Adoption Crowdfunding Makes Me So Uncomfortable
posted by almostmanda at 10:31 AM PST - 145 comments

"There's a snideness about it that is in keeping with the experience and the inner life of being a certain kind of teenager. It's very anti-earnest. There was a moment after the period where that song came out where everything was humorless and grotesque. But after that, it seems like what happened was that everything got pretty earnest." Why Harvey Danger's '90s alt-rock hit "Flagpole Sitta" endures. [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 9:31 AM PST - 114 comments

What Are the Defining Ingredients of a Culture’s Cuisine? Priceonomics examines a dataset of Epicurious recipes to pull out the most common ingredient and the most distinctive ingredient by cuisine, plus a "Meat-o-Meter" that looks at commonly used meats in various cuisines. [more inside]
posted by taz at 9:23 AM PST - 71 comments

Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:19 AM PST - 54 comments

When Britain entered the war in Europe in 1914, it wasn't a sufficiently existential threat for Parliament to authorize a draft, so enlistment in the armed services was still voluntary. To "encourage" enlistment, Vice-Admiral Charles Penrose-Fitzgerald organized a group of women known as the Order of the White Feather. Their task -- to hand a white feather to any military-aged man they saw out of uniform. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 9:11 AM PST - 46 comments

Shortly after the dust of the Civil War had settled, plantation owners in the Deep South tried to replace the labor of black ex-slaves with Chinese immigrants--most of whom left rather than put up with bad working conditions. Some, however, stayed in the Mississippi Delta through the end of Jim Crow, often carving out a role for themselves in the South's harsh racial climate as grocers serving primarily black communities. In fact, a historic Supreme Court case extending the reach of segregation to all non-white people took place when a Chinese family sued a local white school board. Now these grocers are dying out as their children leave the South, but groups like Southern Foodways are collecting their stories so that their contribution to Southern history can be remembered.
posted by sciatrix at 8:52 AM PST - 12 comments

In the war against campus sexual assault, why are we not talking about drinking? "It bothers me that the conversation about alcohol and consent seems to be debated mostly by women—fought by women, argued about by women, the emotional burden carried by women. I’m ready to see more focus on how drinking changes men: how sex and aggression can get cross-wired, or the frightening way alcohol can smear their good sense away. Not “how much did she drink” but how much did he?" (slTexasMonthly) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:05 AM PST - 58 comments

If you, too, tend to forget to visit MeFi Projects, possibly due to everything existing everywhere, simultaneously, then you ought to check out MagicRealismBot on Twitter. [more inside]
posted by wintersweet at 7:55 AM PST - 20 comments

Visitors are invited to join Shia LaBeouf in person as he watches all his movies consecutively in reverse chronological order over the next three days, 24 hours a day.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 7:03 AM PST - 125 comments

United States Naval Aviation 1910–2010 by Mark L. Evans and Roy A. Grossnick is the Naval History and Heritage Command’s fourth update to the original history which was initiated in 1960. That first issue celebrated the first 50 years of United States naval aviation and this two-volume set commemorates the centenary. [more inside]
posted by Confess, Fletch at 6:03 AM PST - 1 comment

Are you flippping kidding me? Jose Bautista of the Toronto Blue Jays pens an essay that begins "Let me take you inside my head for a second" and brings us through his thoughts in Game5 of the ALDS against Texas and his now (in)famous home run and bat flip. [more inside]
posted by biggreenplant at 4:22 AM PST - 90 comments

Rewrite the rules to benefit everyone, not just the wealthy - "If there's one thing Joseph Stiglitz wants to say about inequality, it's that it has been a choice, not an unexpected, unfortunate economic outcome. That's unnerving, but it also means that citizens and politicians have the opportunity to fix the problem before it gets worse." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 2:34 AM PST - 111 comments

Toronto researchers cross the blood-brain barrier for the first time. Dr. Todd Mainprize used a focused ultrasound technique, developed with collaborator Dr. Kullervo Hynynen and others, to non-invasively cross the blood-brain barrier to selectively and directly deliver a chemotherapeutic drug to a glioma. (Globe & Mail x 2). "Mainprize says the method could be used for all sorts of brain conditions besides cancer. "There are possibilities of delivering new chemicals and therapies for depression, Alzheimer's disease, stem cells," he said." (CTV) [more inside]
posted by cotton dress sock at 11:26 PM PST - 10 comments

Palliative care practitioner BJ Miller on redesigning our relationship with death. BJ Miller and the Zen Hospice Project previously.
posted by lumensimus at 9:58 PM PST - 9 comments

Forget about circus. Forget about glittering costumes, caged animals and clowns with their old hat jokes. Circus can be alternative…

This is the vision of Ukrainian director Taras Pozdnyakov with his Kiev-based circus project Raw Art, "post-circus," a response to the large-scale blockbusters, such as Cirque du Soleil and Franco Dragone. Acts focus on individual and small group performances, such as the award-winning structure-free gymnastic performance by the brothers Iroshnikov, and solo performances by Sergey Timofeev and Alexander Koblikov. There is a trio of jugglers, choreographed jumprope routines, ring work and much more on YouTube and Vimeo.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:33 PM PST - 9 comments

Sony has announced that it will stop its production of Betamax video tapes in March of next year. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:17 PM PST - 84 comments

"Americans fighting over what is printed on a coffee cup designed by a billion-dollar company to promote conformity sounds like cold German satire: While the world rages on and problems like starvation, a massive refugee crisis, and homelessness remain unfixed, people in America — including an American presidential candidate — are arguing over a red beverage container." Starbucks’s red cup controversy, explained (Alex Abad-Santos, Vox)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:16 PM PST - 233 comments

The long battle between the US government and the folks who own the property next door to Area 51.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:50 PM PST - 17 comments

On June 18, 1947 on a Pan Am flight from Calcutta to New York, an engine stopped working. While the pilot attempted to land the plane, the 25-year-old co-pilot unbuckled himself, and went into the main cabin to help the passengers...
posted by schmod at 2:50 PM PST - 61 comments

How Richard Scarry updated his children’s book to be more progressive and inclusive: photos comparing and contrasting two editions of Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever and documenting shifts between 1963 and 1991.
posted by eagle-bear at 2:24 PM PST - 55 comments

When the stones finally made it to the Bronx warehouse, Hearst realized he had yet another administrative catastrophe on his hands—the workers repacked the stones without returning them to their original wooden crates. The crates had departed from Spain with an identifying number and a compass direction on each crate, so that the 10,571 pieces of monastery could be reconstructed. Now that blueprint was completely, irrevocably gone. Hearst was the overwhelmed owner of what Time magazine christened “the biggest jigsaw puzzle in history.” -- In The Early 1900s, Robber Barons Bought Dozens Of Centuries-Old European Buildings. Where Is Medieval America Now?.
posted by steinwald at 2:02 PM PST - 7 comments

Watch this five year old change (with a little help) a wheel bearing on his dad's Toyota.
posted by pjern at 1:14 PM PST - 19 comments

An anthem for a hero for our age. An anthem... for Rowsdower.
Also from the same guy, songs for The Pumaman and Mitchell, and Idiot Control Now. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 12:34 PM PST - 50 comments

Even though I’ve sold out Madison Square Garden as a standup comedian and have appeared in several films and a TV series, when my phone rings, the roles I’m offered are often defined by ethnicity and often require accents. ~ Aziz Ansari on Acting, Race and Hollywood [SLNYT]
posted by melissasaurus at 11:55 AM PST - 177 comments

Allen Toussaint, the legendary songwriter and pianist, has died. [more inside]
posted by cardioid at 11:37 AM PST - 58 comments

The "National Religious Liberties Conference" , sponsored by radical evangelical pastor Kevin Swanson, with featured speaker Phillip Kayser, was primarily focused on how homosexuality was destroying god-fearing people everywhere, and how gays should be executed if they don't repent and stop being so gay. Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal cuddled up with Mr. Swanson in their quest to outcrazy the other candidates, which is a difficult task, let's be honest. Rachel Maddow (skip to minute 6:00) is the first (and so far, only) national media journalist to cover the story and show footage of the event.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 11:33 AM PST - 51 comments

"Spätzle are a kind of soft egg noodle found in the cuisines of southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Alsace and South Tyrol. Traditionally, Spätzle are made by scraping long, thin strips of dough off a wooden (sometimes wet) chopping board (Spätzlebrett) into boiling salted water where they cook until they rise to the surface... Spätzle typically accompany meat dishes prepared with an abundant sauce or gravy, such as Zwiebelrostbraten, Sauerbraten or Rouladen. In Hungary spätzle often are used in soup..." [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 11:10 AM PST - 69 comments

What the numbers say as a neighborhood gentrifies. New research is finding that gentrification, contrary to popular belief, doesn't actually force poorer residents to leave areas at atypical rates—though that doesn't mean the changes don't have negative consequences.Relatively reliable data over a period of 12 years.
posted by rmhsinc at 10:51 AM PST - 37 comments

"Most stores in South Korea are "one size fits all," and that one size is small, as in designer sample size small. Finding clothes larger than a U.S. women’s size 6 is challenging, especially since the starting point for "plus-size," or extra-large, is a Korean size 66, the rough equivalent of a U.S. women’s 8."
posted by Ragini at 10:50 AM PST - 16 comments

Beatrix Kiddo, age 7. The badassedessed junior ninja routine you'll see all year. Stay for the end. [SLFBvid]
posted by gottabefunky at 10:21 AM PST - 25 comments

Sleep With Me is a bedtime story for insomniacs, designed to get more and more boring as you listen. This is the story of Drew Ackerman's strange but popular podcast, whose raison d'être is literally to bore you to sleep with carefully constructed, rambling monologues. (Episodes occasionally mildly NSFW)
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:05 AM PST - 41 comments

Playwright Katori Hall responds to a production of her play, The Mountaintop where the role of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been double-cast the role of King with a black actor and a white one.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:55 AM PST - 18 comments

Known only as The Grindmother, she is a 67 year-old Canadian woman who has taken up grindcore music and her demonic wailing will peel the paint off your walls. Why the Grindmother is the greatest thing to happen to grindcore in 2015. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:27 AM PST - 40 comments

Over these last two years, I've come to suspect that my cat has gotten better, more comprehensive planning around her eventual death than most people do.
posted by dersins at 8:58 AM PST - 40 comments

A longtime legend in the piercing community has it that during the Victorian Era, young women from England were briefly caught up in the fad of having their nipples pierced. It was all the rage, and then it went out of style. It’s one of those stories, like Julius Caesar’s own pierced nipples, or King Tut’s stretched lobes, that seems made up, or at least padded with potential exaggeration. It’s the sort of thing that raises eyebrows, challenges how we think about Victorian Culture (The same people who supposedly covered their table’s legs because they too closely resembled female ankles were getting their nipples done?) and just plain seems impossible. Except it’s all true and then some.
posted by sciatrix at 8:50 AM PST - 58 comments

Industrial production destroyed both the taste and the nutritional value of wheat. One scientist believes he can undo the damage. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:57 AM PST - 111 comments

The World Anti-Doping Agency, which monitors the fight against performance-enhancing drugs in sports, has released its 323-page report detailing the endemic use of PEDs in Russia, enabled and encouraged by the Russian government via the Ministry of Sport and the Federal Security Service. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:55 AM PST - 29 comments

The Novella Is Not The Novel’s Daughter: An Argument in Notes by Lindsey Drager [Michigan Quarterly Review] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:29 AM PST - 37 comments

It's hour six of Mathew Knowles’s day-long seminar "The Entertainment Industry: How do I get in?", and he is yelling across the theater at an usher who just told him new microphones are "on the way." "If this were a Beyoncé show and you said it was ‘on the way,’ your ass would be on the way," he shouts at her from the stage. It’s not the best burn, but we get the gist. The room is silent until another usher appears with two fresh microphones so the audience Q&A can get going. Weirdly, it takes a few minutes before the crowd loosens up.

--Learning to Be Beyoncé From Her Terrible Father: Inside Mathew Knowles's entertainment industry seminar
posted by almostmanda at 4:47 AM PST - 34 comments

We've already discussed part one and part two of Wait But Why's epic interview with Elon Musk, he has finished the series at part four with a bonus audio section. Enjoy!

Part One - Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man
Part Two - How Tesla Will Change The World
Part Three - How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
Bonus Audio - SpaceX Audio Stuff (podcast and audio book)
Part Four - The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 12:57 AM PST - 113 comments

Arika Okrent (previously and previously and previously) is known here as MentalFloss.com's language maven, usually looking at linguistic history, like English language words that only survive as parts of idioms and a group trying to revive the Lakota language. But her latest short piece clearly deals with the Future of Language: Emojis. And how the depiction of emojis for certain emotions vary between different devices/systems, sppecifically Apple/iOS, Google/Android and Samsung's proprietary sub-system for the Galaxy S5. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:23 AM PST - 24 comments

A short film: The winter stories of the Ojibwe are vital narratives that offer a historical and moral guide for understanding the environment and our people’s place within it. One of these stories tells of the first maple sugar gathering. A tree offered its life-force (sap) for use by the people to help keep them alive through a difficult winter when many were starving to death. This tree asked to be cared for in return and to be thanked properly for this gift. Each spring the students at Waadookodaading Ojibwe Language Immersion School open the school sugar bush with a retelling of this story and an opening feast of thanks.
posted by rtha at 8:18 PM PST - 6 comments

UBeam claims to be able to do wireless charging via ultrasound. "UBeam, a high-profile start-up backed by some of Silicon Valley's most prominent investors, has become a tech industry sensation because of the wireless charging technology it says it has developed... But the company, which has never demonstrated a fully-functioning prototype, is now facing an onslaught of questions about whether it can actually deliver the breakthrough it is promising." EEVblog is critical. The demo.
posted by GuyZero at 5:45 PM PST - 94 comments

"So, we all need to remember that except for like 1% of 1% of 1% of everyone in the art world, almost no one in the art world makes money." Jerry Saltz turn his pockets inside out out to reveal that, despite being one of the best known art critics working, he lives paycheck to paycheck. The original facebook post is here. [more inside]
posted by batbat at 5:19 PM PST - 29 comments

Facial recognition software is increasingly being deployed in the retail sector. Stores say this helps them achieve 2 main goals: identify shoplifters, and target high-spending customers. [more inside]
posted by cynical pinnacle at 4:27 PM PST - 87 comments

A generation of evidence affirms cash transfers as among the most powerful means of eliminating extreme poverty in the world. Transfers of money, along with transfers of food vouchers, have seen Brazilian inequality plummet alongside the numbers of the very poor.
posted by blankdawn at 3:46 PM PST - 45 comments

The infrequently updated blog Heavy Latin chronicles and translates the uses, and misuses, of Latin by metal bands.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:01 PM PST - 20 comments

Dr. Leo Spaceman (from the 30 Rock series) and Dr. Ben Carson (from the Republican presidential debate series) are both doctors. They both say outlandish things. A group of MeFites have placed Dr. Spaceman's quotes on Dr. Carson's pictures and vice versa. No verisimilitude has been lost in these exchanges. [via mefi projects]
posted by ignignokt at 1:25 PM PST - 38 comments

The Rumpus is not of the same world as The Huffington Post, and therein lies the problem with this conversation: somewhere along the line, in an important and valuable attempt to be pay writers better, the issue of what any given publication could legitimately afford was thrown out the window. Paying writers = the right side of history, period. If you don’t have the financial backing of venture capital or a man with a lot of money, you shouldn’t even exist. Your continued dedication to existence is in fact offensive to the very writers you claim to nurture. [...] I’m sensitive to this issue as a website that was unable to pay most of its writers from our inception in 2009 until late 2013. We didn’t have the money to pay them, that’s just a fact. The money did not exist, we could not summon it from the sky; we’re lesbians, we inherently lack rich husbands. Maybe that means we should’ve given up, I’m not sure, but that makes me really frightened for the future of independent journalism by and for populations even more disenfranchised than our own. How can we advocate for both disenfranchised writers and disenfranchised publishers? Because the thing is… Not paying your writers SUCKS.

- Autostraddle: The “Who Pays Writers” Conversation Needs a Little Nuance
posted by divabat at 1:24 PM PST - 78 comments

R2-D2, beloved blue and white astromech droid or perhaps, the biggest scumbag in Star Wars? via Geek.com.
posted by Atreides at 12:47 PM PST - 60 comments

This talking horse is a brutally honest and accurate portrayal of all of us, and the struggles and suffering we face in life. The Zen of Bojack Horseman
posted by litleozy at 12:32 PM PST - 23 comments

Seven fossilized brains from the Cambrian. A complex animal skeleton from the pre-Cambrian. Oxygen made by photosynthesis a billion years before the Great Oxygenation Event. Carbon made by life from 4.1 billion years ago. (Okay, maybe not so fast on that last one.)
posted by clawsoon at 12:32 PM PST - 4 comments

Three young women, part of a literacy project called Get Lit, drop a powerful message on Queen Latifah's talk show. (TW: mentions of sexual assault, racism, assault)
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:16 AM PST - 4 comments

40 kid "castaways."
40 days.
No Adults.
Kid Nation [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:10 AM PST - 28 comments

One morning as I scanned the news...I thought of Edward Snowden and wondered how he was holding up in Moscow. I began to imagine a conversation between him and Daniel Ellsberg... And then, interestingly, in my imagination a third person made her way into the room—the writer Arundhati Roy. It occurred to me that trying to get the three of them together would be a fine thing to do.

John Cusack (yes, that John Cusack) asks Arundhati Roy to join him and Daniel Ellsberg on a trip to Moscow to have a conversation with Edward Snowden [more inside]
posted by aerosolkid at 11:10 AM PST - 29 comments

The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World A new study published in Cell shows that "Parents in religious households reported that their children expressed more empathy and sensitivity for justice in everyday life. However, religiousness was inversely predictive of children’s altruism and positively correlated with their punitive tendencies." [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:36 AM PST - 40 comments

Three more years have passed in a blur of deadlines and I still don’t know anybody who isn’t connected to my work. If I nip out to buy wine on Saturday evening, I pass pubs full of people who look like they’re having fun. I see groups of men often catching up one-to-one, and I experience pangs for when my weekends were like that. Everybody except me has a fulfilling social life. Or does it only look like that? The difficulty of forging friendships in your adulthood on MeFi, previously and previouslier.
posted by Kitteh at 10:01 AM PST - 167 comments

How to Run A Successful Conference Panel Discussion [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:52 AM PST - 3 comments

At the recent World Fantasy Awards it was announced that the trophy will no longer be modeled on the head of horror writer HP Lovecraft. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:36 AM PST - 131 comments

Let's learn some Regency-era dances! [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 7:56 AM PST - 5 comments

1929-1964, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (SL Mashable)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:37 AM PST - 21 comments

Slate: Meet Our New Dear Prudence Columnist: After a glorious decade, Emily Yoffe is passing the advice-giving pen to Mallory Ortberg. [more inside]
posted by zombieflanders at 7:35 AM PST - 74 comments

Three years ago, the people living in the Ochiichagwe'Babigo'Ining Ojibway Nation in Ontario would crowd in each other’s homes and outside the band office to access what little internet the community had. There was dial-up, there was expensive cellular data, and there was some service from an internet provider in a neighboring town; when the network went down, it would sometimes take weeks for a technician to come and fix the issue. The community’s kids—itching to get their gaming systems online and scroll through Facebook on their phones—weren’t having it. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 7:13 AM PST - 8 comments

After a successful kickstarter campaign, Muzzled the Musical has released it's promised three episodes (season one): episode 1, episode 2, episode 3. An epic saga of mean girl princesses and bloody musical warfare, starring Ashly Burch (of HAWP) and created by Matthew Mercer.
posted by Theta States at 6:54 AM PST - 4 comments

Phoebe Robinson, author of the the Blaria blog, writes about the meaning of her blog's name and how Daria Shaped a Generation of Women.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:28 AM PST - 12 comments

After several high-profile incidents of overt racism at the University of Missouri, the student organization Concerned Student 1950 (named after the first year that African-American students were allowed to enroll at UM) held protests and demanded the resignation of Tim Wolfe, president of the University of Missouri System. Graduate student Jonathan Butler started a hunger strike, and student members of the football team have boycotted all team activities until Wolfe resigns. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:12 AM PST - 223 comments

'It’s only a matter of time until something terrible happens,' The New York Times’s Ron Lieber wrote in a 2012 piece examining Airbnb’s liability issues. My family’s story — a private matter until now — is that terrible something.

Writer Zak Stone about a tragic family death and the lack of regulations and liability in the sharing economy at the example of Airbnb.
posted by starzero at 3:33 AM PST - 157 comments

In this Buzzfeed video, young cancer survivors talk honestly about their experiences. (SLYT) We all spend our lives wondering what it would be like if the doctor told us we had cancer. How would we react? How would our lives change? In this video young cancer survivors talk with candor and some humor about the day they were diagnosed, and what happened after that. [more inside]
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:27 AM PST - 17 comments

certain football clubs have become symbols of football hipsterdom and many of them seem to have a lot in common: an almost blanket lack of on-field success, a history of anti-establishmentarianism, the status of plucky underdog, a nice away shirt

The Grauniad's regular football column, Joy of Six, presents hipsters' favourite football clubs.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:51 AM PST - 30 comments

The mysterious collapse of Australia's Nugan Hand bank (SLYT) has long been a favorite subject of the espionage mythos, with its chairman's suicide, the disappearance of its former CIA co-founder Michael Hand, the bank's ties to the CIA, apparent drug money laundering... basically, talk of ties to every CIA conspiracy theory of the last 30 years... the stuff of legends. Except, of course, that Michael Hand has been found by Australia's 60 Minutes, living in Idaho Falls, where he runs a business manufacturing combat knives for the special OPs crowd. Here is the full 60 Minutes report.
posted by markkraft at 10:35 PM PST - 20 comments

The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever goes like this:

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for “yes” and “no” are “da” and “ja,” in some order. You do not know which word means which.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:53 PM PST - 59 comments

Sex, Death and Mushrooms
posted by telstar at 9:26 PM PST - 24 comments

Frederick Douglass's Faith in Photography by Matthew Pratt Guterl [The New Republic] How the former slave and abolitionist became the most photographed man in America.

He wrote essays on the photograph and its majesty, posed for hundreds of different portraits, many of them endlessly copied and distributed around the United States. He was a theorist of the technology and a student of its social impact, one of the first to consider the fixed image as a public relations instrument. Indeed, the determined abolitionist believed fervently that he could represent the dignity of his race, inspiring others, and expanding the visual vocabulary of mass culture.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:56 PM PST - 4 comments

Writing for Agence France-Presse, Rob Lever details the struggles of major news organizations and online content aggregators to keep comment sections from devolving into ‘pie fights’ at best to hateful and abusive at worst. Some sites have simply eliminated comments rather than deal with the negativity. In 2014, The New York Times and The Washington Post announced that they would form a partnership, the Coral Project, aimed at creating a commenting system that, “might diminish the ‘incentive to be the loudest voice’ and would foster communities of commenters[.]” [more inside]
posted by ob1quixote at 7:41 PM PST - 45 comments

56-year-old (Peter) Stoney Emshwiller is interviewed by his own 18-year-old self from the year 1977. In the late 70s teenaged Stoney Emshwiller filmed several hours of himself pretending to interview his future self. Emshwiller went on to be an actor, novelist, editor, filmmaker and artist. Recently he released a sizzle reel - still on its way to being a longer film - of his older self answering some of those questions. Poignant and funny, this concept reminds us that the closest any of us can get to time traveling is still through the magic of recorded media.
posted by NorthernLite at 5:45 PM PST - 16 comments

'Marty Was Always My Best Friend': Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Love Story, an excerpt in Jezebel from the new book Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik. [Don't read this unless you're ready to sob like a baby.]
posted by Ragini at 2:57 PM PST - 16 comments

Abortion in Ireland is illegal with the sole exception of when the mother’s life is in immediate danger. Comedian Gráinne Maguire is using Twitter to focus more attention to the issue by live-tweeting the details of her period to Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny. [more inside]
posted by cynical pinnacle at 2:32 PM PST - 22 comments

"San Bernardino is the poorest city of its size in California, mired in its fourth year of bankruptcy. Industries left, the middle class shrank, the working poor struggle to rise and the destitute fall. Yet there are people in San Bernardino who work tirelessly to resurrect the city for the next generations. Although their paths are different, their trajectories meet at the same question — can San Bernardino be saved?"
A slow, powerful documentary by photojournalist Liz O. Baylen about a sad, desperate city not far from here.
posted by growabrain at 1:34 PM PST - 20 comments

About a year ago, the U.S. Justice department issued a memorandum allowing tribal nations to grow and sell marijuana. In June of this year, The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe, located in South Dakota, announced plans to open a marijuana resort (See also). The tribe signed a contract with Colorado-based Monarch America to help them with the venture. A member of the tribe is creating a documentary of the process. The resort was slated to open on December 31, 2015. An extensive grow operation was underway to provide more than thirty strains of marijuana in a tightly-controlled environment. As of yesterday, all growth operations have ceased, the plants may have been destroyed, and the future of the Tribe's plans is uncertain.
posted by yesster at 1:27 PM PST - 22 comments

Dakotaraptor ruled Hell Creek Formation as lethal predator The bumps serve as reinforcement points for long wing feathers, marking the first concrete evidence that large raptors had wings. "It really would have made this like a turkey from hell," he said.
posted by Michele in California at 1:16 PM PST - 15 comments

It’s a Thursday morning, and you’re sitting around with nothing to do. You had a job, but it exploded, so now you’re stuck here in your boring house. Suddenly, your phone rings. Murder, Cheat, and Fuck Your Way Through Boston
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:32 AM PST - 45 comments

What do you do when the Japanese bomb your airfield and smash the right wing of your only airplane? The strange tale of the DC-2 ½
posted by pjern at 10:11 AM PST - 18 comments

RIP Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface in the classic horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:23 AM PST - 29 comments

In Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice (Orbit Books: 2013), the imperial Radch rules over much of human-inhabited space. Its culture – and its language – does not identify people on the basis of their gender: it is irrelevant to them. In the novel, written in English, Leckie represents this linguistic reality by using the female pronoun ‘she’ throughout, regardless of any information supplied about a Radchaai (and, often, a non-Radchaai) person’s perceived gender. This pronoun choice has two effects. Firstly, it successfully erases grammatical difference in the novel and makes moot the question of the characters’ genders. But secondly, it exists in a context of continuing discussions around the gendering of science fiction, the place of men and women and people of other genders within the genre, as characters in fiction and as professional/fans, and beyond the pages of the book it is profoundly political. It is a female pronoun. When translating Ancillary Justice into other languages, the relationship between those two effects is vital to the work.
posted by sciatrix at 7:09 AM PST - 95 comments

The world's slowest Rube Goldberg machine. [SLYT]
posted by spitefulcrow at 7:02 AM PST - 25 comments

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari - "The book delivers on its madly ambitious subtitle by in fact managing to cover key moments in the developmental history of humankind from the emergence of Homo Sapiens to today's developments in genetic engineering." Also btw, check out Harari on the myths we need to survive, re: fact/value distinctions and their interrelationships.
posted by kliuless at 6:55 AM PST - 7 comments

"The UCSB Library, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Grammy Foundation, and donors, has created a digital collection of more than 10,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. To bring these recordings to a wider audience, the Library makes them available to download or stream online for free." You can browse the collection here. More information about the collection can be found on their "about" page. (It's been nearly 10 years since this was posted previously, they've nearly doubled the size of the collection since then, I felt it was worth mentioning one more time. The collection, along with other resources was also mentioned in an FPP in 2006.)
posted by HuronBob at 5:35 AM PST - 16 comments

A white pseudo-aristocracy maintains genteel airs and graces amid crumbling towns and black rural poverty reminiscent of Haiti. It’s all stirred up with whiskey, denial and fire-breathing religion.

The Delta is arguably the most racist, or racially obsessed, place in America, and yet you see more ease and conviviality between blacks and whites than in the rest of America.
After nearly three years here, it still feels like we’re scratching the surface.
posted by four panels at 10:13 PM PST - 75 comments

Will Sloan interviews Gregg Turkington [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:17 PM PST - 7 comments

Onto the Land (yt) - the latest in a series of Grand Theft Auto V nature documentaries in the style of David Attenborough.
posted by Artw at 8:11 PM PST - 13 comments

Life in a Studio Apartment with my Wife and Two Sons - Between July 2011 and August 2015 I lived in a ~400sqft studio apartment in San Francisco. I moved in a bachelor but by the time I moved out, I was one member of a four person family. Here are some things I learned along the way. (via)
posted by nevercalm at 7:51 PM PST - 119 comments

Confessions of a Paywall Journalist :

Policy journalism in Washington is thriving. It’s just not being written for you, and you’re probably never going to read it.

[more inside]
posted by retrograde at 5:58 PM PST - 13 comments

Bernie Sanders (comedian James Adomian) joins Dr. Ben Carson (Jerry Minor), Lincoln Chafee (Seth Morris, previously), Hillary Clinton (Heather Campbell), and others for Decision Election 2016 All-Star Clusterfuck, a bi-partisan debate, live at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles. [SLYT, NSFW]
posted by Room 641-A at 4:49 PM PST - 13 comments

How a Guatemalan chef became the owner of an okonomiyaki restaurant in Hiroshima. [more inside]
posted by bigZLiLk at 4:11 PM PST - 27 comments

In honor of Albert Camus' birthday, Flavorwire has collected 30 quotes from absurdist fiction.
posted by holmesian at 3:12 PM PST - 13 comments

Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months by Jonathan Franklin. Salvador Alvarenga is a fisherman who fishes off the Pacific coast of Mexico. In November 2012 his boat was carried out into the Pacific by a storm. He survived until he drifted ashore in the Marshall Islands, over ten thousand kilometers from where he'd left shore.
posted by Kattullus at 2:21 PM PST - 14 comments

One of the most distinctive masks worn during the Carnival of Venice is “Il Medico della Peste,” or “The Plague Doctor.” But the distinctive bone-white mask and black clothing was actually the 17th century equivalent of a biocontainment suit. Albeit one based on very shaky science.

posted by filthy light thief at 2:01 PM PST - 15 comments

On January 27, 1913 Mr. & Mrs. J.W. Savis of Pine Hollow, PA entrusted their daughter to rural carrier James Byerly out of Sharpsville, PA. He delivered her safely that afternoon to relatives in Clay Hollow. It cost 45 cents to send their daughter. For the first few years of the U.S. Parcel Post it was legal to mail children, as long as they were under 50 pounds. [SLPDF]
posted by gottabefunky at 1:29 PM PST - 30 comments

New York City's mail chutes are lovely, ingenious and almost entirely ignored. But what happens if mail gets stuck?
posted by Ragini at 11:28 AM PST - 36 comments

Adnan Syed’s case is being reopened. NPR's Serial Podcast, formerly discussed abouts these parts, seems to have finally precipitated the state of Maryland to allow a new examination of the case, considering new evidence stemming from the podcast series and following events. The Guardian's post-podcast rundown.
posted by allkindsoftime at 11:19 AM PST - 98 comments

Over 30 years of Over The Edge radio episodes have been made available on archive.org. Starting in 1981, Over the Edge ran weekly on KPFA until the death of host (and Negativland contributor) Don Joyce. Stream-of-consciousness audio collages punctuated topical themes that would extend over many episodes. [more inside]
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 10:55 AM PST - 22 comments

Chile admits Pablo Neruda might have been murdered by Pinochet regime. [The Guardian]

The interior ministry released a statement on Thursday amid press reports that Neruda might not have died of cancer as previously believed. The statement acknowledged a ministry document dated March of this year, which was published by the newspaper El Pais in Spain. “It’s clearly possible and highly probable that a third party” was responsible for Neruda’s death, the document said.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:55 AM PST - 22 comments

If the Venus de Milo had arms, if David had his groove on, if the Thinker took some action - Figma's Table Museum series addresses in plastic the possibilities.
posted by BWA at 9:46 AM PST - 9 comments

You send us your most ephemeral and worthless communications, and we'll carefully transcribe them into the most long-lasting medium known to man - a clay tablet. It's Dumb Cuneiform.
posted by davidjmcgee at 9:07 AM PST - 35 comments

The word algebra stems from the Arabic word al-jabr, which has its roots in the title of a 9th century manuscript written by the mathematician Al-Khwarizmi. The Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wal-muqabala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing) was a pioneering piece of work - offering practical answers for land distribution, rules on inheritance and distributing salaries. This treatise also underpins the science of flight and the engineering behind the fastest car in the world. via
posted by infini at 4:28 AM PST - 15 comments

Cyanide and Happiness is one of the most successful webcomics, combining very simple 'semi stickperson' characters with very simple gags, sometimes silly, more often gleefully offensive. Of the more than 3000 strips in its history, hundreds are three-panel interactions between 'Mr. Blue' and 'Mr. Green'. From those, they have now made a Random Comic Generator, which creates comics that sometimes make more sense than the originals. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:09 AM PST - 44 comments

The gloves are coming off in the race for the Louisiana governorship, as a new attack ad from Democrat John Bel Edwards states that Republican rival David Vitter 'chose prostitutes over patriots'. [more inside]
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:10 AM PST - 46 comments

Peacock Spiders with light sabers! [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:35 PM PST - 13 comments

One family fights to win their house back in the Wayne County foreclosure auction after being scammed by a sub-subprime entrepreneur
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:12 PM PST - 15 comments

Possibly spurred on by TransCanada's request for a delayed decision, Obama has rejected construction of the long-contested Keystone XL pipeline. [more inside]
posted by crazylegs at 3:32 PM PST - 80 comments

The mysterious Faraday Future (yes, that's the real name), has already hired 400 top automotive engineers (such as the former director of manufacturing for Tesla) and is building a $1B facility to create a new type of electric car as soon as 2017. But what is Faraday Future? Some think its part of Apple's secret "Titan" car project (which will have electric license plates!), while others think it is "China's response to Tesla." The auto industry is changing fast, as, also within the last 24 hours, Toyota started investing $1B in AI and Local Motors rolled out their latest 3D-printed car design.
posted by blahblahblah at 2:05 PM PST - 51 comments

The Extreme Minuet is "the world's fastest coin-toss orchestra of 43 people" performing one of Mozart's minuets in about 3 seconds, then played back at a much slower speed to hear the performance stretched to its usual length and speed. [SLYT, Suntory commercial shot with Phantom 4K camera] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:18 PM PST - 27 comments

"In a closed-door meeting Thursday night, Yale University’s apologized to a large group of minority students for the school’s failure to make them feel safe on campus." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:25 PM PST - 121 comments

This experiment explores how to generate little romantic stories about images, using neural-storyteller, a recently published experiment by Ryan Kiros.
posted by signal at 12:21 PM PST - 10 comments

17 surprisingly useful diagrams for narrowing down your wedding dress shopping Buzzfeed - where else?
posted by St. Peepsburg at 11:01 AM PST - 20 comments

See drops of water 'trampoline' higher and higher At first, the drop rested motionless on the surface, but at around a twentieth of normal atmospheric pressure it suddenly jumped up. After a short leap the droplet eventually landed on the surface again, only to jump up again—even higher than the first time.
posted by Michele in California at 10:53 AM PST - 5 comments

Watch Ozzy Osbourne Tour the Alamo 33 Years After Urination Arrest. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:45 AM PST - 14 comments

Do you like uplifting monologues over drum beats and synths, intercut with shots of urban environments from different angles that follow a pedestrian? Then you might enjoy the video for Hieroglyphic Being and J.I.T.U Ahn-Sahm-Buhl’s “Fuck The Ghetto / Think About Outer Space”.
Hieroglyphic Being’s own story of overcoming homelessness in Chicago to become a successful experimental DJ was covered in a short documentary for Resident Advisor’s ORIGINS film series.
Previously, previouslier
posted by Going To Maine at 10:23 AM PST - 3 comments

With decreasing emphasis on creative arts in schools, The Monster Project is a collaborative project between elementary school kids and skilled artists from around the world, where kids draw monsters from their own imagination, and the professional artists take their own spin on it. The goal, according to the projects founders, is "to help children recognize the power of their own imaginations and to encourage them to pursue their creative potential."
posted by Karaage at 10:20 AM PST - 31 comments

Attempting to be the oldest person to paddle the Mississippi River from source to sea (and in World Record time) Dale Sanders is not your average 80-year-old. Meet Dale Sanders. The intro to the story (in an audio nutshell). The 170 videos uploaded to his YouTube channel to document his trip (in oldest to newest order). He also did it to raise awareness for juvenile diabetes. His "Source to Sea" Facebook page and a link to his blog.
posted by spock at 10:02 AM PST - 5 comments

For six and three-quarters seasons, no contestant had ever made it to Mount Midoriyama, the insanely difficult Stage Four of American Ninja Warrior, the grueling ultimate-obstacle-course reality show, despite the incentive of a $1 million prize for doing so. Then, in season seven, not one but two people completed the entire course, with TV cameraman Geoff Britten completing the course first, then Isaac Caldiero, a "professional nomad," beating Britten's time. Since the rules of the show state that only the fastest competitor to beat Mount Midoriyama gets the prize money, Caldiero got the million dollars and Britten got nothing - but he seems to be okay with it.
posted by mightygodking at 9:23 AM PST - 66 comments

NASA Mission Reveals Speed of Solar Wind Stripping Martian Atmosphere [mars.nasa.gov] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:54 AM PST - 41 comments

Mormon Church makes same-sex couples apostates, excludes children from blessings and baptism
More details in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Mormon Church Bleeding Members Over Gay Marriage
posted by andoatnp at 8:33 AM PST - 220 comments

How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained.
posted by bondcliff at 6:40 AM PST - 105 comments

"Child sex abuse victims face a dilemma. To be recognized as victims, they cannot remain silent, but they must be silent enough to seem authentically hurt." -- US Federal prosecutor Sarah Chang talks about how expectations about how child abuse victims should act hinders prosecution of their abusers. Note: there are no explicit descriptions of abuse mentioned in this story, but this is still about child abuse, so take care.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:35 AM PST - 13 comments

Here's the Deal: The Text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership by Barack Obama - "In other words, the TPP means that America will write the rules of the road in the 21st century." (PDFs; previously) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 3:21 AM PST - 109 comments

Jetman (previously, previously, previously) and wingman over Dubai in formation flight with A380 (YouTube). Behind the scenes video. Discussion by Emirates of the flight planning involved in ensuring, among other things, that they didn't reenact the sad fate of Stratogale as seen in The Incredibles.
posted by Major Clanger at 2:55 AM PST - 16 comments

Native American artist George Redhawk creates eerily beautiful gifs even though he's legally blind. With help from computer software, the designer utilizes the art of gif-making to show others how he sees the world as a man who suddenly lost his sight.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:36 AM PST - 11 comments

This animated short tells the story of a dapper young remittance man, sent from England to Alberta to attempt ranching in 1909. However, his affection for [polo and] badminton, bird watching and liquor leaves him little time for wrangling cattle. It soon becomes clear that nothing in his refined upbringing has prepared him for the harsh conditions of the New World. A film about the beauty of the prairie, the pangs of homesickness and the folly of living dangerously out of context. [SLYT Canada NFB] [more inside]
posted by davidpriest.ca at 9:48 PM PST - 11 comments

Alyssa Pelish - On viewing my wrinkles through Proust, Rembrandt, and plastic surgery textbooks
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:09 PM PST - 7 comments

The Car, Thunder Charger, Plymouth Barracuda SSXR, Supervan, Batmobile, AMX-400 all rolled out of Barris Kustoms, home of car customiser and fabricator George Barris who passed away today at age 89. [more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 7:00 PM PST - 22 comments

Ben Carson just dropped his rap radio ad for president. [more inside]
posted by Muddler at 6:05 PM PST - 313 comments

In late October 1716 Jacob Arend, a journeyman cabinetmaker, was 28 years old and at a crossroads. He and his fellow journeyman, Johannes Witthalm, had recently finished work on a writing cabinet.... The writing cabinet was a masterpiece but Jacob felt the need to write a letter and conceal it in the cabinet. He made sure it would not be easily found and he was very successful in this endeavor. The letter was not found until December 1967 and it wasn’t until 2014 that the letter was translated and studied.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:03 PM PST - 45 comments

Lamar Smith continues waging his three-year war on the National Science Foundation. If Congress has its way, the next round of grants by the National Science Foundation, a hallmark of government funding for graduate students and scientists, will no longer be based on scientific merit. Proposals would not be reviewed by panels of preeminent scholars across the United States as they have been for more than a half-century; instead, they would all be “in the national interest,” with strict new rules adopted earlier this month by a Republican House committee. Previously. This is not the first time Smith has tried to impose Congressional control on the NSF's budget.
posted by sciatrix at 2:57 PM PST - 37 comments

Norman Lloyd (Dr. Auschlander on St. Elsewhere and the professor who discovered the common root of life in the Star Trek universe) is still alive. In fact, he turns 101 on Sunday. And he's still working, so the AV Club sat down with Lloyd for its Random Roles feature, covering a career that's spanned from Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin to Don Adams to Judd Apatow.
posted by Etrigan at 1:25 PM PST - 25 comments

In the late 1970s, a bicycle mechanic named Lee Post moved to Homer, Alaska to run a small bookstore with his mother. He also volunteered at the town's natural history museum, where he took on the task of assembling a beaked whale skeleton.

Post thought, well, I've repaired bikes — surely I can repair a whale skeleton if I have a book to follow, and conveniently, I run a bookstore. He searched for any books about reconstructing whale skeletons. “There was no such thing,” he says.

This is the story of how a bookseller from Homer, Alaska became the an international animal skeleton re-assembly expert (Bay Nature). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:47 PM PST - 10 comments

When A 14-Year-Old Chooses To Die Because Of Religion, Can Anyone Stop Him? Dennis Lindberg was 14 when he was diagnosed with leukemia. As a Jehovah's Witness, he declined the blood transfusions that could have saved his life.
posted by Charity Garfein at 12:35 PM PST - 91 comments

Today, the Union of Reform Judaism, the body that represents synagogues in the Reform movement —Judaism's largest U.S. branch — unanimously passed the most far-reaching resolution on transgender rights of any major religious organization. The resolution affirms the equality of transgender people and welcomes them into congregations, camps and other Reform Jewish institutions. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 11:31 AM PST - 30 comments

Scholars are beginning to examine an unprecedented collection of European correspondence from the late 17th and early 18th centuries--a chest belonging to a Dutch postmaster which contains some 2600 undelivered letters, 600 of which have never been opened.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:21 AM PST - 20 comments

Franco-Arabic rappers of an Islamic persuasion are the talk of Paris right now, and for all the right reasons.
posted by josher71 at 11:09 AM PST - 7 comments

In 1984, the comic book Evangeline's first issue was released, featuring the eponymous killer sexy secret-agent nun... in spaaace! #1: Guns of Mars. #2: Hate Boat. #3 Dinosaur Farm. Bonus Theme Song! Evangeline by Matthew Sweet.
posted by ennui.bz at 11:09 AM PST - 11 comments

Empire tells of the legacy of the Dutch East India Company, and its cultural legacy, through online experience blending image, text, video, and audio.
posted by Miko at 10:57 AM PST - 6 comments

Remember that Antares rocket that blew up shorty after launch in October of 2014? NASA just released several startling gorgeous photos of it exploding. [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:41 AM PST - 20 comments

Disney To Retire All Slave Leia Merchandise Word has it from "informed sources" at Disney that they company will stop releasing or authorizing any merchandise featuring the famed Slave Leia version of the original trilogy heroine sometime in 2016. Even a fan movement to re-christen the look as "Slayer Leia" (because she kills Jabba with the chain in the pleasure barge fight scene) is not really in the cards for official use.
posted by briank at 10:29 AM PST - 145 comments

In 1987, guitarist Paul Speer and pianist David Lanz teamed up with videographer Jan Nickman to create a video album inspired by the Southwest of the United States. Desert Vision is instrumental music that feels influenced by Vangelis, Trevor Jones, and Pat Metheney coupled with video that soars dramatically across the landscape or introspectively ponders nature from the ground. Eagle's Path Seguaro Desert Rain Sculptures Canyon Lands Carlsbad White Sands Stormlight Tawtoma [audio only]
posted by hippybear at 9:41 AM PST - 3 comments

People camp overnight for chance to buy "affordable" London "flat" (slTheGuardian) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 9:33 AM PST - 50 comments

For Inktober, an A-Z of D&D monsters.
posted by frimble at 9:14 AM PST - 26 comments

Phylogenetic analysis (using DNA to figure out the family tree of life) of Hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps) has shown that eusociality (societies in which the many give up their own reproduction to support the reproduction of the few) first evolved, in every case studied so far, in monogamous species, in which all offspring have the same mother and father. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 8:46 AM PST - 8 comments

Karl Ove Knausgaard reads Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission. [The New York Times] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:37 AM PST - 27 comments

“Should we smoke before we pray?” Cynthia Joye asked, tapping the Bible resting on her lap New York Magazine profile on Centennial Colorado where weed is referred to as cannabis, and you don't get high, you get "lifted"
posted by Pablo MacWilliams at 8:20 AM PST - 74 comments

René Girard, literary theorist and religious historian, has died at the age of 91. The French-born academic and Immortel of the Académie Française first became famous for developing the idea of mimetic rivalry as a predominant theme in modern literature. Later, and more controversially, he argued for the centrality of violence and scapegoating in ancient religions, by which the sacrifice of a chosen victim restores peace in society. Most controversially of all, he argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition is unique in exposing and refuting this scapegoating mechanism. (Previously, previously)
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:13 AM PST - 8 comments

By definition, any computing platform invented in the first half of the 1980s that has survived until 2015—and is an enormous business—has accomplished something remarkable. There's the Windows PC, which traces its heritage back to the original IBM PC announced in August 1981. There's the Mac, which famously debuted in January 1984.
And then there's the Bloomberg Terminal, which hit the market in December 1982. [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:37 AM PST - 46 comments

For a few hundred bucks cash, he told The Washington Post, he’ll make an appearance at your party or gathering, prank your friend or even scare your misbehaving kid straight, as he was recently hired to do by one mother looking for a way to reform her trouble-making 12-year-old.
posted by veedubya at 7:33 AM PST - 34 comments

Study Reveals That Your Cat Is Basically A Tiny Lion
posted by almostmanda at 6:48 AM PST - 94 comments

Tuesday night, after Amy Poehler had wrapped up her interview with Carrie Brownstein at a Pasadena, California event to promote Brownstein's new memoir, Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl, they turned to the audience to ask if anyone had any questions for Carrie. Two young women, Kendall and Genevieve, raised their hands and asked if Brownstein, who recently became a licensed wedding officiant in California, would marry them. She said yes.
posted by Toekneesan at 6:45 AM PST - 19 comments

At the A.V. Club, Caroline Siede examines how Hamilton and Allegiance might represent a new approach to historical drama.
posted by Ipsifendus at 6:23 AM PST - 58 comments

When Daydreaming Replaces Real Life [more inside]
posted by holmesian at 5:51 AM PST - 60 comments

"Facing criminal charges, relieved of her law license and threatened with removal by the Legislature, Pennsylvania's attorney general Kathleen Kane seems to have decided that if she has to go, she's going to take others down with her. As authorities began building the leak case against her, Kane started releasing chains of emails, saying the misconduct allegations against her were concocted by a corrupt old-boy network inside law enforcement to stop her from exposing their raunchy email ring." [more inside]
posted by valkane at 5:47 AM PST - 21 comments

“Cut Microbe” is a sculpture entirely hand cut out of paper. Measuring 44 inches/112cms in length, it is half a million times bigger than the ecoli bacteria upon which it is based. I wanted to create a sculpture that reflected in the process of being made the incredible scale and complexity of this microbiological world. I am amazed at the strange beauty of the natural world and wanted to open people’s eyes to aspects of it that they rarely see. -Rogan Brown
posted by jammy at 5:35 AM PST - 18 comments

In an essay originally published back in 2000, Ursula K. LeGuin takes a punt at the question any writer dreads to get asked: "so, where do you get your ideas from" and uses it as a springboard to examine the art of reading and writing and why Americans are afraid of dragons.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:58 PM PST - 14 comments

How can I become a Data Scientist.... ...the first answer in this Quora thread is a pretty concise profile of this hot (and hyped) new career choice written by William Chen, whose data science blog Storytelling with Statistics has got some cool stuff in it. Like the Probability Cheat Sheet. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 10:04 PM PST - 16 comments

Melissa Mathison dies at 65 - L.A. Times (Steve Chawkins)" "Mathison, 65, who portrayed children as sensitively heroic, died Wednesday at UCLA Medical Center. The cause was neuroendocrine cancer, her brother Dirk Mathison said. Mathison’s film credits also include “The Black Stallion” (1979), “The Escape Artist” (1982) and “The Indian in the Cupboard” (1995)."
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:57 PM PST - 20 comments

"'I just thought I’d ask in case you had it in the back somewhere' the customer explained. They did not have it in the back somewhere." Former bookseller Dustin Kurtz visits Amazon's new bricks-and-mortar bookstore.
posted by goatdog at 8:29 PM PST - 85 comments

Walter Benjamin’s legacy, 75 years on : The First Pop Philosopher [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:06 PM PST - 10 comments

Feeding America is a network of food banks that feeds more than 46 million people. In 2005, four professors at the University of Chicago helped replace their centralized distribution system with an auction-based one, allocating "shares" to each bank to bid on donated food. The Week reports on a more detailed paper describing the transition to the new system and its overall success. [via] [more inside]
posted by Rangi at 6:50 PM PST - 21 comments

First...Epic would have to link each system that a hospital wanted to access—a labor-intensive process for which it charged an hourly fee. Once linked, hospitals could trade information, but only by paying an additional fee: "We charge on a per-patient, per-year basis—so it's not per transaction—and it's the same whether that patient is sent to 100 different places or one other place."
posted by Lycaste at 6:10 PM PST - 40 comments

"Do you know the young lady?" I asked.
"My Mary? Impossible!"
"Witness: I should prefer not to answer.
"Let us
"I have heard of you, Mr. Holmes."
"I trust that I am not intruding." I am well acquainted with the accused.
Well, she was just a-biling.
"Was you in my Room?"
"I always give too much to ladies." I am!
'Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.
--I asked a computer to write a novel that it thought was similar to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:40 PM PST - 25 comments

Philip Glass revisits his parallel lives in 1970s New York - driving a taxicab through threatening twilight streets while emerging as a composer in Manhattan's downtown arts scene.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:37 PM PST - 13 comments

If you happen to be lucky enough to find yourself in a room with four owls, here is how to blow. their. minds.
posted by mudpuppie at 2:54 PM PST - 45 comments

What I've got: A spreadsheet containing every single play run in the NFL from 2000-2014 (500,000 in all)

What I'm going to do with it: Show that the referees subconsciously change the outcome of a play based on where the painted lines are on a field, and subsequently show that it doesn't matter.
posted by swift at 2:53 PM PST - 12 comments

In a 4-to-1 decision, the Mexican Supreme Court has ruled that recreational marijuana use is legal, an enormous change in policy that will impact the drug war, our relations to the US, and pretty much everything about the path our country has been on for decades.
posted by Cobalt at 2:47 PM PST - 26 comments

On Sunday, Jenny Lawson (AKA The Bloggess) shared this embarrassing exchange on Twitter: Airport cashier: "Have a safe flight." Me: "You too!" I CAN NEVER COME HERE AGAIN. Very quickly, Lawson’s followers were tweeting their own embarrassing exchanges at her, and she began to retweet them en masse. The result was a stream of cringingly awkward hilarity.
posted by Four-Eyed Girl at 2:17 PM PST - 408 comments

Oil may be king of the commodities, but its physical form is tough to come by for a retail investor. Mom and pop can buy gold and silver. They can gather aluminum cans, grow soybeans, and strip copper wiring, if they choose, but oil remains elusive—and for very good reason. Oil, as I would soon discover, is practically useless in its unrefined form. It is also highly toxic, very difficult to store, and smells bad.
posted by Chrysostom at 2:16 PM PST - 22 comments

Neodymium magnet falling through the interior of a copper pipe.
Another example.
Explanation. [more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:07 PM PST - 23 comments

How To Apologize: "Remember, the goal of apologizing is to keep someone from being angry, because you're responsible for how other people feel about you." [SLToast]
posted by divined by radio at 11:47 AM PST - 81 comments

Daniel Craig's public statements that he is done playing James Bond have re-ignited the debate about whether we need yet another white guy playing the character (*cough*). The AV Club asks not only whether we need another white guy, but whether we need Bond to be straight, young, British, or even remotely sane.
posted by Etrigan at 11:45 AM PST - 145 comments

You are not a crazy genius or an irredeemable asshole or a misfit who's damned for all time. You are just a person. We are all damned in our own little ways. We are all uniquely blessed and uniquely fucked. Welcome to the world. [more inside]
posted by Braeburn at 11:32 AM PST - 46 comments

The Jagged Little Chicks covers Alanis Morisette's "Ironic" (SLYT)
posted by numaner at 11:25 AM PST - 14 comments

On September 1, popular police lieutenant Charles Gliniewicz of the Chicago suburb of Fox Lake, Illinois, called in the pursuit of three armed suspects (two white, one black) near the Wisconsin border. As backup arrived 14 minutes later, Gliniewicz was dying from a fatal gunshot to the chest from his own gun, after what appeared to be a scuffle with the suspects. A massive manhunt shut down Lake and northern Cook Counties, putting public buildings on lockdown and even halting the Fox Lake Metra line; hundreds of cops hunted for the suspects for more than three days. Gliniewicz was given a hero's funeral.

Today, the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force announced Gliniewicz's death was a carefully staged suicide intended to cover up Gliniewicz's embezzlement of police department funds over the past seven years, as well as threats to falsely pursue DUI charges against village officials auditing the police department. [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:18 AM PST - 65 comments

It's been just over a year since the CDC came out with guidelines for using HIV-drug Truvada as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in preventing HIV. Where are we now? VICE created a thoughtful documentary on the topic that interviews Truvada advocates, critics, and HIV researchers. Stopping HIV with the Truvada Revolution : Part 1; Part 2; Part 3 [more inside]
posted by biggreenplant at 11:08 AM PST - 6 comments

The question about why speedometers go so high has a number of good answers as to "why the top speeds exceed reality", but let's take a moment to enjoy the radial gauge's data visualization that breaks some standard data vis rules, and ponder the possibilities in its design. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:40 AM PST - 51 comments

Avoid Humans is a service that scours Foursquare and Instagram checkins to find nearby coffee shops, restaurants, and bars that are the least likely to be crowded.
posted by schmod at 10:23 AM PST - 42 comments

The rating game: How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses. Josh Dzieza writes about how customer rating systems for "sharing economy" on-demand services like Uber, Airbnb and Taskrabbit has made already tenuous employment even more precarious. "We’re not just working for money," an Uber driver told me. "We’re working for ratings, but ratings have no value. Ratings serve only to prevent you from getting fired. Only bad things can happen to you. We’re scurrying like rats after these things with no value." [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:20 AM PST - 123 comments

Dutch artist/musician Kamiel Rongen creates liquid landscapes, WaterBallet if you will. Here are all of them. Here is his website.
posted by growabrain at 9:39 AM PST - 4 comments

The Sad and Beautiful World of Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous (slPitchfork)
posted by Kitteh at 9:15 AM PST - 14 comments

In late December of 1895, the writer Stephen Crane—nervous, shabby, and all of twenty-three—attended the first annual dinner of the Society of the Philistines as its guest of honor. He little dreamed he was walking into one of history's first celebrity roasts.
posted by Iridic at 8:41 AM PST - 8 comments

"All too often, cooking is explained in terms of social norms about femininity, or immigrants, or, in one recent New York Times column, the Cold War. This is all very well for sophomore sociology classes, but why does no one ever offer simple theories such as 'they liked it'; 'they thought it looked pretty like that'; or 'that was what they could afford'? Having read quite a lot of the era's cookbooks and food writing, I find these the most likely reasons for the endless parade of things molded, jellied, bemayonnaised and enbechameled."
posted by clawsoon at 8:23 AM PST - 63 comments

The journalists were assassinated on American soil, one after another. [more inside]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:56 AM PST - 5 comments

Houston Voters Reject Broad Anti-Discrimination Ordinance [The New York Times]

A yearlong battle over gay and transgender rights that turned into a costly, ugly war of words between this city’s lesbian mayor and social conservatives ended Tuesday as voters repealed an anti-discrimination ordinance that had attracted attention from the White House, sports figures and Hollywood celebrities. The City Council passed the measure in May, but it was in limbo after opponents succeeded, following a lengthy court fight, in putting the matter to a referendum.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:30 AM PST - 186 comments

As debate rages about whether to introduce a sugar tax, this is the story of how Mexico defied its own powerful fizzy drinks industry to impose a tax on soda. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 5:19 AM PST - 12 comments

"In those terrible moments we did not know if the ship was below the water or still floating! But like a miracle the windows cleared again, and 'Stolt Surf' continued its brave battle against the waves." Amazing photographs and first-person description by Karsten Petersen of the chemical tanker "Stolt Surf" running afoul of a strong hurricane and rogue waves in the North Pacific, 1977. [more inside]
posted by taz at 4:57 AM PST - 19 comments

The Future of (Post)Capitalism - "Paul Mason shows how, from the ashes of the recent financial crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy." (previously; via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 4:20 AM PST - 22 comments

Invitational Battle between Vintage and Modern Street Dancers at Montreal Swing Riot. Modern and Vintage Street Dancers battle it out to their own and each others' music, creating an amazing mix of styles. Modern Street Dancers represented waacking, locking, popping, breaking, hip hop and krump; Vintage Street Dancers represented vernacular jazz dances like the Charleston and the Lindy Hop.
posted by metaBugs at 2:13 AM PST - 25 comments

Terry Gilliam's deleted animations from "Monty Python & The Holy Grail" (SLYT - from the 40th Anniversary video gift set via the Official Monty Python Channel)
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:46 AM PST - 5 comments

The Arab Spring was two centuries in the making. But is the Egyptian revolution any closer to ending the state’s tyranny? [more inside]
posted by maskd at 11:21 PM PST - 7 comments

Taiwan's president Ma Ying-jeou and China's president Xi Jinping will meet in Singapore on Saturday---the first meeting between leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait since 1949, when Mao forced the Nationalist regime off mainland China and into retreat into Taiwan. The Singapore meeting set for Saturday has been planned behind the scene for a year. Already, opposition parties in Taiwan are crying foul, calling for the impeachment of Ma and accusing him of going against mainstream public opinion to meet with Xi.
posted by wallawallasweet at 8:08 PM PST - 15 comments

Women in Crime: An Interview with Sarah Weinman
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:54 PM PST - 4 comments

Gif Dance Party
posted by Confess, Fletch at 6:21 PM PST - 58 comments

On 3 November 2015 Michelle Payne became the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup, riding Prince of Penzance to victory on 100-1 odds. [more inside]
posted by fever-trees at 6:16 PM PST - 16 comments

Musician and composer Ólafur Arnalds (previously) and classical pianist Alice Sara Ott collaborated together on an album of original compositions inspired by the works of Frederic Chopin, recompositions, and renditions of Chopin's sonatas called The Chopin Project, to truly beautiful effect. [more inside]
posted by yasaman at 5:31 PM PST - 5 comments

Essena O'Neill was a social media celebrity, with over half a million followers on instagram and deals with brands to advertise their products. She was 16. Then she decided to stop. [more inside]
posted by lunasol at 4:06 PM PST - 47 comments

C. Spike Trotman (previously, previouslier) went from teen comics geek to porn anthologist and crowdfunded comics publishing guru. But that’s only part of the story - as told awesomely at this year’s XOXO. [more inside]
posted by progosk at 2:21 PM PST - 6 comments

Last year, Laverne Cox read a letter written by a trans woman in involuntary protective custody for a video released by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Cox would later ask the SRLP to take the video down, citing concerns about the inmate's convictions. This is an interview with the woman who wrote the letter, Synthia China Blast.
posted by The Devil Tesla at 1:01 PM PST - 16 comments

Alan Moore talks to John Higgs about the 20th Century touching on, among other subjects, Lovecraft, science fiction and piggate (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:00 PM PST - 10 comments

"Imagine creating the best work of your life, some of the best music of its day, and no one cares. Now imagine playing those songs 47 years later to a screaming and loving bunch of fans and getting what seems like a hero's welcome. That's part of the story of The Zombies, who played the classic 1968 album Odessey and Oracle, along with a set of other hits and brand new songs, live in Washington, D.C. last month." Listen to the full concert here.
posted by plasticpalacealice at 12:07 PM PST - 31 comments

"When the monsters of your childhood become faded old people with the fight gone out of them, what do you do? How do you find a way to relate? Do you forgive and try to find a way to interact with who they are now or do you hold onto the tight little ball of yourself you've been protecting all this time?" How do I tell my dysfunctional folks I'm not spending the holidays with them this year? [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 11:43 AM PST - 92 comments

The U.S. Department of Education announced yesterday that an Illinois school district is violating the rights of a transgender student by refusing to allow her the unrestricted use of a girls' locker room. This statement comes one week after the Department of Justice filed a brief supporting Gavin Grimm, a high school student in Virginia who has been denied access to the boy's bathrooms. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:04 AM PST - 50 comments

MeFi's own Greg Nog makes a Dagwood Sandwich. But this is not the comical Dagwood you prefer to remember. This is an ancient, primordial Dagwood, and it is no joke. [more inside]
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:20 AM PST - 92 comments

The Hunger Games Theme Park and the Death of the Disney Dream [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:05 AM PST - 104 comments

The future is shorter now, and I’m little more than a stranger in a strange land. It may always be that way, even when I go home again. So while missing out on much, perhaps I’ve also given myself a lot to remember. (slMedium)
posted by Kitteh at 9:12 AM PST - 30 comments

Interesting infographic/flow chart shows how new Canadian prime ministers are sworn in. [more inside]
posted by Nevin at 9:07 AM PST - 181 comments

"The lenses measure less than a centimeter in length; the [often pornographic] photographs glued to them are the size of the head of a pin." The Kinsey Institute talks about Stanhopes, the Snapchat of the 1850s, made of everyday objects such as rings, thimbles and rosaries. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 6:51 AM PST - 27 comments

Ahmed Chalabi, one of the key architects of the Iraq War, has died. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:36 AM PST - 58 comments

The Decay of Twitter. At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.” [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 5:39 AM PST - 201 comments

"It isn’t easy to discover new podcasts. There are just SO many out there. Sometimes the best approach is to simply turn to a friend and say, 'Hey, what are you listening to these days?'" So, NPR has created earbud.fm, a "friendly guide to great podcasts."
posted by zarq at 4:13 AM PST - 82 comments

Robert Sikoryak is turning the iTunes terms and conditions text into a beautiful graphic novel, a document full of mind-bending legalese that everyone agrees to without comprehension. A new page appears each day, in which our intrepid hero Steve Jobs dramatically imparts the otherwise soul-destroying passages in various scenes, rendered in the style of different cartoonists. [more inside]
posted by NordyneDefenceDynamics at 3:04 AM PST - 25 comments

“The uprising,” we told each other immediately, like everyone else in Warsaw. [more inside]
posted by hat_eater at 12:12 AM PST - 3 comments

Nate is a 16 yr. old with calm demeanor and tolerance for ingesting peppers with very high Scoville scale. He started his Youtube review channel "snacksandsuch" 5 years ago with a spoon of Blair's Pure Death (Scoville Heat Units 35,000).
The videos are all similar in style: Here he is eating a Yellow 7 Pod cultivar (1M+SR). Here is his Chocolate Bhut Jolokia test, etc. He gets to taste the Naga Viper, the Trinidad moruga scorpion, Carolina Reaper, and many others. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 9:46 PM PST - 74 comments

New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz has another hobby.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:27 PM PST - 8 comments

100 years ago, Richard Strauss premiered An Alpine Symphony, "a majestic, musical depiction of a dawn-to-dusk hike up the Alps," his final symphonic poem. For this recent anniversary, NPR brought together Semyon Bychkov, who conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in their performance of the tone poem, and David Hurwitz, the author of Richard Strauss: An Owner's Manual (Google books preview), to provide guidance and reviews of the symphony. You can take your own musical journey with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Bernard Haitink, for the BBC Proms in 2012.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:05 PM PST - 6 comments

On November 10, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank off Whitefish Bay on Lake Superior. In the intervening years, weather researchers have compiled and simulated the data of the weather that led to the sinking. In 2010, Gordon Lightfoot revised the lyrics to his famous song about the sinking, based on claims that a "rogue wave" was enough to cause the Fitzgerald to sink. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:56 PM PST - 43 comments

Rising deaths among white middle-aged Americans could exceed AIDS toll in US A sharp rise in death rates among white middle-aged Americans has claimed nearly as many lives in the past 15 years as the spread of Aids in the US, researchers have said. The alarming trend, overlooked until now, has hit less-educated 45- to 54-year-olds the hardest, with no other groups in the US as affected and no similar declines seen in other rich countries. [more inside]
posted by modernnomad at 8:19 PM PST - 127 comments

Within each of us is a developer. You too can make a game.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:10 PM PST - 13 comments

The Art of Witness by James Wood [The New Yorker] How Primo Levi survived.

“Primo Levi [wiki] did not consider it heroic to have survived eleven months in Auschwitz. Like other witnesses of the concentration camps, he lamented that the best had perished and the worst had survived. But we who have survived relatively little find it hard to believe him. How could it be anything but heroic to have entered Hell and not been swallowed up? To have witnessed it with such delicate lucidity, such reserves of irony and even equanimity? Our incomprehension and our admiration combine to simplify the writer into a needily sincere amalgam: hero, saint, witness, redeemer.”

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:54 PM PST - 8 comments

People sometimes say the story of Ferguson began with a body in the road. But Ferguson attracted attention not because of a body but a person, Michael Brown, and those who loved him—a community who took to the streets in anguish and grief. On a hot August day, Brown’s family, friends and neighbors surrounded the scene of what they deemed murder by cop. They refused to remain silent about Brown’s death, but at the same time were hesitant to speak out. Before Ferguson became a buzzword dropped by pundits and politicians, it was a tale told with reluctance.

posted by ChuraChura at 7:22 PM PST - 5 comments

"Black nerds on Twitter are an eclectic group, into sci-fi/horror/nerdy shows like Doctor Who, The Walking Dead, American Horror Story and Game of Thrones, and they often view the show through a different lens, compared to a non-POC viewer. Blerd Twitter’s consistent viewership and use of blerd hashtags along with network hashtags have made them a prominent source for constructive critiques about television. Hashtags aside, Blerds will give shows a fair shot, but this community won’t hesitate to call series writers and producers out on important issues, like a lack of diversity and/or lax character development for Black characters on the show." How Twitter Blerds are Impacting the Future of TV (by Tai Gooden)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:19 PM PST - 4 comments

The slowed-down Chipmunks are brilliant and terrifying... The "original" Chipmunks cover of Call Me vs the slowed-down version
posted by GuyZero at 5:18 PM PST - 85 comments

The full edition of the Chicago Tribune from November 1st, 1963. (68 pages) Learn more about the terrible Ice Show tragedy that eventually claimed 74 lives. In other front page news, Harvard sex orgies are exposed by a dean (girls stayed in boys rooms in violation of dorm rules, booze may have been a factor, this six months after Timothy Leary was fired) . [more inside]
posted by readery at 4:04 PM PST - 41 comments

Mallory Ortberg speaks about starting The Toast at the XOXO Festival [SLYT]
posted by Harpocrates at 1:50 PM PST - 25 comments

Comment trolls got you down? Feel like you can't make headway in a good old fashioned debate anymore because no one is following the rules? Logical Fallacy Ref is here to help.
posted by hindmost at 1:49 PM PST - 47 comments

Trailer for the new television series Preacher based on the 'cult comic book' by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillion
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:52 PM PST - 113 comments