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Isobel Yeung goes undercover in a special VICE News report that reveals how China is oppressing the Muslim minority Uighur people in horrific conditions.
posted by querty at 10:34 PM PST - 15 comments

Google Earth is now available, in beta form, on the web! [Edit: Chrome only]
posted by slater at 9:38 PM PST - 27 comments

King Charles comes to a certain land with an army, while King Redbad comes down from Denmark, also with an army; both claim the land belongs to him. A bloody battle is inevitable, unless they find a less violent way to solve the problem. So, they have decided upon a standing contest, ‘an ordeal in which the participants had to stand motionless, with their arms stretched sideways’.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:37 PM PST - 7 comments

The top ten singles in Canada† on June 30, 1989 were [1] Forever Your Girl, Paula Abdul [2] Rock On, Michael Damian [3] Wind Beneath My Wings, Bette Midler [4] Buffalo Stance, Neneh Cherry [5] Soldier of Love, Donny Osmond [6] The Look, Roxette [7] Like a Prayer, Madonna [8] Pop Singer, John Cougar Mellencamp [9] Good Thing, Fine Young Cannibals [10] Funky Cold Medina, Tone Loc [more inside]
posted by sylvanshine at 6:35 PM PST - 46 comments

"Just then, our secretary came into the office and said an inventor was here to see us. Normally, Myung was the one who worked with inventors. I handled sales. But Myung wasn’t there. My secretary said, 'Well, the guy’s here. Why don’t you meet him?' I turned around, and in the doorway was a small, thin, spectacle-wearing black man who looked like he was the saddest guy in the world." An oral history of the Super Soaker. [more inside]
posted by How the runs scored at 4:42 PM PST - 30 comments

Guillermo Mordillo, known simply as Mordillo, was an Argentine creator of cartoons and animations and was one of the most widely published cartoonists of the 1970s. He is most famous for his humorous, colorful, and wordless depictions of love, sports (in particular soccer and golf), and long-necked animals. Mordillo died Sunday, age 86, in Majorca, Spain [in Catalan].
posted by chavenet at 3:46 PM PST - 14 comments

The mindfulness conspiracy. "It is sold as a force that can help us cope with the ravages of capitalism, but with its inward focus, mindful meditation may be the enemy of activism." This is an excellent piece by Ronald Purser (@McMindfulness, previously) on the co-option and commodification of mindfulness meditation. It's adapted from his book, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. [Via @RubaAlHassani] [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 12:55 PM PST - 59 comments

Interview: The World According to Frank Ocean [Dazed Digital] John Waters, Janet Mock, Billy Porter and many more pose questions to the most enigmatic pop star of our generation.

PALOMA ELSESSER: Frank, what does heaven look like? What’s the scene, what’s the scent, what’s the feeling? FRANK OCEAN: OK, so the scene is a city half overgrown by jungle and it feels like you and your lover laid out like two letter Xs in the shade on a beach, and the faint scent of tigerlilies, BBQ and sweat.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:01 AM PST - 10 comments

Back in 1994, NPR and Smithsonian Institution unveiled Wade In The Water, an unprecedented 26 episode, 26-hour-long exploration of African American sacred music traditions that had taken 5 years to assemble. NPR has re-released the project and all the episodes can be found here, and here's a link to use with the NPR One app. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:22 AM PST - 11 comments

Cretaceous Chainsaw Massacre! Four years ago, National Geographic aired a special called T. Rex Autopsy (YT, full "documentary"), and it was awesome. And bloody. (Washington Post) Bonus clips: T. rex: Behind the Build -- Check out the workshop, Crawley Creatures, with some of the designers and sculptors who created the massive T. rex; and The Gross Stuff | T.rex Autopsy: Behind the Scenes. And in case you missed it: Taking Dinosaur Temperatures with Eggshells (CalTech press release, October 13, 2015; full paper in Nature Communications).
posted by filthy light thief at 7:57 AM PST - 4 comments

Who do you trust to keep our country safe from bugs?
☐ Some wimpy Democrat who thinks bugs are an essential part of the ecosystem.
☐ Donald Trump, who is a giant swarm of bugs in a people suit.
☐ Monks, who is a mighty hunter and has killed several bugs in his lifetime.
Vote Monks 2020. He's a candidate we can believe in pet. [more inside]
posted by jocelmeow at 7:32 AM PST - 29 comments

The Simple Idea Behind Einstein's Greatest Discoveries - "Lurking behind Einstein's theory of gravity and our modern understanding of particle physics is the deceptively simple idea of symmetry. But physicists are beginning to question whether focusing on symmetry is still as productive as it once was." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:49 AM PST - 30 comments

"I don't think he likes that shit." Other gems include the sheriff's quote, "Narcotics investigators arrested one man and are looking for another after they executed a search warrant Monday that yielded meth, drug paraphernalia, body armor, and a squirrel." Oh, also its name is "Deeznutz." How do you give a squirrel meth? What is the LDL50 of meth for a squirrel? "Authorities say there is no safe way to test methamphetamine."
posted by phlyingpenguin at 8:19 PM PST - 24 comments

"This page goes into detail on how I used Machine Learning to find hundreds of Krazy Kat comics that are now in the public domain."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:12 PM PST - 20 comments

Read a new short story about what food means in space. Each month, Future Tense Fiction—a series of short stories from Future Tense and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives—publishes a story on a theme. The theme for April–June 2019: space settlement. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 4:56 PM PST - 4 comments

At the end of June 1979, Tubeway Army's Are "Friends" Electric? started its four-week residency at the top of the UK pop charts. Painting a dystopian SF world of broken humans emotionally dependent on androids, it wasn't the first synth-heavy song to get to the top, nor did composer/front man Gary Numan come from the northern cities which had hitherto been the breeding grounds of British machine music. But it was the breakthrough hit that made synth-pop a powerhouse genre, foreshadowing much that was to come. For the twenty-one year old Numan, though, that future would turn out less science fiction, more soap opera. [more inside]
posted by Devonian at 2:49 PM PST - 34 comments

A Thong Day’s Journey Into Night: What Wearing a G-String Taught Me About Feminism
posted by Chrysostom at 2:04 PM PST - 83 comments

Princess Chelsea (previously) is from New Zealand and swings twee like a sledgehammer, making tightly constructed big mood dreamy pop music and wonderfully, variously weird music videos. Wasting Time is high kitcsh pink hair singing into a flower with cows; Growing Older is a creepingly psychedelic home video collage.

Both are off her 2018 album, The Loneliest Girl, but boy howdy is there a lot more goodness from the last decade. [more inside]
posted by cortex at 12:31 PM PST - 6 comments

Twitter Officially Has Separate Rules for Politicians [Vice]

“In the past, we’ve allowed certain Tweets that violated our rules to remain on Twitter because they were in the public’s interest, but it wasn’t clear when and how we made those determinations. To fix that, we’re introducing a new notice that will provide additional clarity in these situations, and sharing more on when and why we’ll use it.” the company said in a blog post.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:15 AM PST - 54 comments

Nuntii Latini, the weekly news bulletin in Latin broadcasted by Finnish public radio (YLE), is cancelled – after 30 years.
You can still learn some of the vocabulary used in the program to describe the modern world, with English, German and Finnish translations.
posted by Vesihiisi at 8:06 AM PST - 16 comments

The $50 DeepNude app dispenses with the idea that deepfakes were about anything besides claiming ownership over women’s bodies. [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 6:53 AM PST - 78 comments

Sharing some screenplay-worthy highlights from her 3 years with a very "extra" student, author and educator Erica Buddington stans a Stan.
posted by drlith at 6:29 AM PST - 14 comments

"Wilson was well-known as a perambulator, a peregrinator, and a master of 'leg-ology.'" The engrossing tale of the man who captured a nation's heart by walking.
posted by smoke at 3:13 AM PST - 6 comments

Previously, Bon Appetit editor Amiel Stanek took us through every way to cook a chicken breast¹ and every way to cook an egg.² Previously
At last, the next installment of the saga is here: Every Way To Cook A Potato.³
___ ___
1. 32 ways
2. 59 ways
3. 63 ways [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 10:18 PM PST - 34 comments

A 30 minute video by Reclaim Pride NYC about why they're having a non-corporate, people's march reclaiming Pride for the people and replicating the route of the original Pride march a year after the Stonewall Uprising. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:03 PM PST - 21 comments

Iconic political cartoon site The Nib seems to be facing its biggest challenge yet: defunded and laid off by their parent company and struggling to find wherewithal to continue. The Nib is famous for its important and heavy hitting work featuring cartoonists Matt Bors, KC Green (who was mentioned here very recently), Tom Tomorrow, Pia Guerra, and many others.
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:35 PM PST - 16 comments

"Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why. Inside the most irrational environmental crime of the century." (PSMag) [more inside]
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 7:47 PM PST - 9 comments

The Six-Year Struggle to Regain Ownership of the ‘This Is Fine’ Dog
posted by Etrigan at 7:29 PM PST - 15 comments

Sina Grace, former writer for Iceman (twice) talks candidly about what it's like to write for an out gay superhero at marvel comics.
posted by dinty_moore at 4:40 PM PST - 6 comments

Hooked: A raging heroin addiction fueled a former Boeing engineer’s yearlong, 30-bank robbery spree.
posted by allkindsoftime at 4:07 PM PST - 40 comments

I met a monk on the road here, trying to get away. Terrified of whatever it was he saw out here. He couldn't explain it. He told me he'd left something behind. Something I could use. A gift, to anyone who seeks clarity. Go to the edge of the world, and see the truth. [more inside]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:47 PM PST - 10 comments

Town versus gown. An Ohio judge ordered Oberlin College to pay a local bakery $25 million in damages. The amount was trimmed down from $44 million initially awarded by a local jury, and represents relief for reputational and financial harm allegedly caused to Gibson's by Oberlin students and administrators during protests and related events in 2016 and 2017. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 2:23 PM PST - 50 comments

After Mary Latham’s mother died in 2013, the New York wedding photographer spent several years feeling adrift, wondering how long her emotions would be so raw. Her mind would routinely go back to something her mom, Patricia Latham, had told her after the Sandy Hook mass school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. “I’d been feeling terribly sad about it, and she said, ‘Mary, there are always going to be tragedies in the world, but there will always be more good — you just have to look for it,' " Latham, 32, recalled. (MSN | WaPo) [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:26 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Nicole Cliffe profiles Alanis: Alanis Morissette on Pregnancy at 45, Childbirth, Postpartum Depression, and #MeToo
posted by Chrysostom at 1:21 PM PST - 9 comments

Staging that scene from Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s divisive final film.
posted by sapagan at 12:27 PM PST - 47 comments

twitter: @ryansimmons

got another capitalism greatest hit. i will give you one hundred thousand dollars if you can guess the brand by the end

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:24 PM PST - 52 comments

A history of Champagne in hip-hop. A longish article going from the 1980s to the 10s, with plenty of quotes and data on the cultural and commercial symbiosis between hip-hop and Champagne.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 11:59 AM PST - 2 comments

“The feminization is the spread of unpaid labor. Now the spread of unpaid labor means that, more and more, you work for a year without money, hoping they will give you the job. And so you do a year. The left, unfortunately, is always worried about technology replacing workers; they are not worried about how, actually, unpaid labor is spreading. What is shrinking is the waged working class, not work.” A long ranging interview between author and activist Silvia Federici and filmmaker Astra Taylor covering globalization, local support networks, feminism, welfare, automation, social reproduction, and how capitalists concede demands. (The Believer)
posted by The Whelk at 11:48 AM PST - 2 comments

Jacques Greene teamed up with Cadence Weapon and dropped a "club spiritual" deep house poetry single titled Night Service (Bandcamp), finally releasing the song that he and Cadence performed back in December 2018 (YouTube, Q on CBC). This is a continuation of his intellectual engagement with the idea of the club (interview with The Fader) that was the focus of his debut album, Feel Infinite (Bandcamp).
posted by filthy light thief at 9:08 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Super Mario Maker 2: much more than a game design toolkit [Polygon] “Don’t let the title confuse you. Nintendo hasn’t merely made a game for makers; it has made a nearly full (and fittingly experimental) Super Mario title that just so happens to be paired with an exceptional creator’s suite. [...] That’s the magic of Super Mario Maker 2. Maybe you’re after Miyamoto’s title, an aspiring level-making genius. Or maybe you just want to kick back and experience the wide array of stages the game throws at you. Or maybe you want to make something that really pisses off your friends. In Super Mario Maker 2, these are all totally viable and accessible options.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:36 AM PST - 37 comments

Europe is sweltering under a historic heat wave -- France has set a new all-time record high temperature with 44.3C (111.7F) recorded in Carpentras in the Vaucluse; Spain is battling a wildfire in Catalonia that has consumed over 6,000 hectares (15,000 acres) suspected to been started by a pile of manure that self-ignited; several deaths have already been attributed to the heat wave in Spain, Italy and France; Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland have broken high temperature records for the month of June with temperatures of 38.6C (101.5F), 38.5C (101.3F) and 38.2C (100.8F), respectively; London could see temperatures of 34C (93F) on Saturday. [more inside]
posted by andrewesque at 7:22 AM PST - 100 comments

The 1987 Aston Martin Lagonda - Doug DeMuro reviews any car he can get his hands on, and he says it straight. In this video, he reviews the 1987 Lagonda, from Aston Martin, famed maker of ultra-lux hyper-cars trying to muscle in on the performance luxury Brit sedan market dominated by Jaguar, Bently and Rolls Royce models in the '80s. It does not go well. [more inside]
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:35 AM PST - 39 comments

Imogen performs several songs including a hauntingly beautiful version of Hide and Seek using her Mi.Mu Gloves.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:20 AM PST - 12 comments

Trump Keeps Talking About the Last Military Standoff With Iran — Here’s What Really Happened
posted by axiom at 12:13 AM PST - 22 comments

When is the last time you saw a flat bench? No armrest breaking up the middle? That's by design and the design is to prevent homeless people from using the bench to sleep. Welcome to the world of hostile architecture. From window spikes to "modern art" sculptures over exhaust grates, hostile architecture is everywhere, if you know where to look. Of course, once you start seeing it, it's impossible to miss just how wide spread it is.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:37 PM PST - 106 comments

This Saturday is International Mud Day from the World Forum Foundation. The World Forum Foundation is an international organization focused on connecting early childhood educators to improve the lives of children everywhere. International Mud Day began as an event between two sister schools, one in Australia and one in Nepal, and has since spread throughout the world. You can see Instagram posts of the celebrations from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. [more inside]
posted by CMcG at 5:03 PM PST - 6 comments

Without the confines of linear time, the rain does not bother me. Out of habit I wear a raincoat, but when I’m soaked it’s not unpleasant — it just is, like everything now. It’s never cold or warm. It’s the perfect neutral temperature that so many years of climate control sought to obtain. I ride my bike under the laden clouds, along routes I’ve deemed to be safe: past the marina, where the moorings of boats both real and remembered moan and creak in the river’s sway; along one stretch of empty highway, where shimmering ghost houses teeter on knotweed hills, ghost children in their windows, ghost wives hanging laundry, ghost steelworkers forever climbing down rickety stairs to the mills. A short story by Tess Allard.
posted by ChuraChura at 1:53 PM PST - 12 comments

Marshae Jones of Birmingham was five months pregnant when she was shot, by another woman, in a dispute about the baby's father. Ebony Jemison shot Jones in the abdomen. The mother survived the shooting, but it resulted in a miscarriage. A grand jury didn't return an indictment, and Jemison was not charged. Police then determined that Ms. Jones started the fight, and was therefore responsible for the death of her unborn child. [more inside]
posted by dejah420 at 1:13 PM PST - 67 comments

Let's Fix All The Bird Logos In Pro Sports
posted by Chrysostom at 1:13 PM PST - 30 comments

Zack McLeod Pinsent is making the rounds with a short and sweet BBC video featuring himself, a posh gentleman who has been making his own clothing in Victorian style since he was 14. [more inside]
posted by amanda at 1:08 PM PST - 13 comments

“Man,” Alice said, “brown-headed man and brown-eyed, what are you to us?” The dark heart of Sweet Valley High: "Their Handsome Father, Ned Wakefield" [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:59 PM PST - 14 comments

Given an unlimited budget, a keen cook could drop tens of thousands of pounds on the kitchen of their dreams. Yet often, even in the most smoothly finished set-up, it is tried-and-trusted, bashed-up equipment that we rely on the most. We asked some of our leading chefs and cookery writers to share which old gizmos and gadgets they cherish. (Tony Naylor, Guardian)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:22 PM PST - 48 comments

Women's World Cup Quarterfinals:
Today:
Norway vs England
Tomorrow:
France vs USA
Saturday:
Italy vs Netherlands
Germany vs Sweden
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:57 AM PST - 9 comments

“What will happen,” Morris asked, “with all this country beauty?” What an appalling waste, he thought, of land exploited by absentee profiteers “for the sake of villa-dwellers’ purses.” But the greater outrage was the injustice and indignity inflicted on godlike beings.” The Romantic Socialism of William Morris. (Commonweal)
posted by The Whelk at 9:25 AM PST - 9 comments

Mouse Guard is a New York Times Bestselling, Eisner & Harvey Award winning comic book series written and illustrated by David Petersen. It was being developed into a movie by Fox, but with the company being bought out by Disney, the project was cancelled in April of 2019, two weeks before production was to begin, with a vague hope of finding a home elsewhere. Unfortunately on 6/26 director Wes Ball confirmed the project is dead, but released a 10 minute demo reel/pre-visualization of what the movie would have "felt" like. With that, screenwriter Gary Whitta has posted his screenplay for the movie, while composer John Paesano has uploaded one of his early drafts of a soundtrack theme. A few artists have been posting concept art at the Twitter hashtag mouseguard.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:38 AM PST - 28 comments

Earlier this month, the FBI Records Vault finally released its records on one of the Pacific Northwest's biggest mystery, and posted a tweet with link and a single word: Bigfoot. 40 years ago, Cue Byrne, who at the time was director of the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition in The Dalles, Oregon, asked the FBI to analyze ‘Bigfoot’ hair, and never heard back. Until now. (Washington Post) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:00 AM PST - 17 comments

Epcot World Showcase is a story by Kristen Arnett
posted by chavenet at 8:00 AM PST - 5 comments

EA Says Loot Boxes Are 'Quite Ethical and Quite Fun' [Vice Gaming] “The United Kingdom’s House of Commons grilled representatives from Electronic Arts and Fortnite developer Epic Games for two and a half hours on June 19. It didn’t go well for Epic and EA. When MP Brendan O'Hara asked if loot boxes were ethical, EA took issue with the term itself. [...] Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media, and Sports Committee grilled EA and Epic on a wide range of topics—from crunch, to game addiction, to loot boxes, to hate speech—and EA and Epic spent the inquiry dodging questions, avoiding responsibility, and admitting to not always following the law. Along with Hopkins, EA’s UK County Manager Shaun Campbell, Epic’s Director of Marketing Matthew Weissinger, and General Counsel Canon Pence sat for questioning.” [YouTube][Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee][2:19:08] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:45 AM PST - 49 comments

The invention of Essex is an article by Tim Burrows discussing the place that Essex plays in British society and self-perception, its link to class prejudice and the sometimes tenuous relationship between imaginary Essex and the actual bloody place.
posted by Dim Siawns at 6:32 AM PST - 2 comments

The Ultimate Fantasy of Dragon Age is Being Listened to by a Man [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 5:07 AM PST - 36 comments

Writer Erik Davis has a new book out. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies. It is a slightly watered-down version of his 2015 PhD thesis for Department Religious Studies, Rice University, which is now available online. The main topics are the altered consciousness experiences and related documents of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. [more inside]
posted by bukvich at 10:46 PM PST - 18 comments

It's a feeling we at ANIMA know only too well. You're deep in a surreal world where you can be anybody you like, where you can do anything. And then you wake up, and the dream fades. It's gone, like smoke on the breeze. Or is it? Here at ANIMA we've built something we call a dream camera.

ANIMA, the new solo album from Thom Yorke, is available to stream or download now. Visit Netflix to watch the ANIMA "one-reeler", directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. [more inside]
posted by JimBennett at 9:44 PM PST - 12 comments

‘These are the culture wars, white society bickers over the bodies of PoC. Shelton makes a martyr out of Folau knowing he will never suffer the same repercussions despite holding the same views & being in a far more powerful position to influence policy & society.’ - Ruby Hamad, "Folau’s Fall Is A Story Of Whiteness" for Meanjin [more inside]
posted by AnhydrousLove at 9:40 PM PST - 36 comments

An Angolan family of five has been living in an airport in South Korea for over six months now, awaiting the outcome of their asylum request. The father says was tortured in prison and will be killed if he returns. South Korean officials repeatedly tried to deport the family, who are trying to follow UNHCR procedure, but a Korean man has hired them a lawyer and is fighting to have them assessed for refugee status. In the meantime they are sleeping on airport furniture and dependent on the kindness of strangers for food and other necessities.
posted by serathen at 7:54 PM PST - 6 comments

When Bill Hong said yes to the promoters, he was trying to be practical. He knew the restaurant needed more customers; maybe letting a few young bands play could help bring them in. He never could’ve foreseen that his family’s establishment, the Hong Kong Low—located on a small street called Gin Ling Way—would become a focal point for a seminal music scene: West Coast punk.
posted by zamboni at 7:36 PM PST - 4 comments

Three senators, four current or former representatives, a mayor, a governor and a former Cabinet secretary all walk onto a stage ... followed the next night by a former vice president, four senators, a congressman, a former governor, a mayor and a pair of entrepreneurs. It's not a joke set-up, it's the first Democratic primary debate, split into two nights, starting tonight, Wednesday, June 26, 2019. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 6:00 PM PST - 649 comments

A few days ago, a medical school student at the University of Calgary was writing an exam, when her phone rang. Of course, she couldn't answer. Hayley Wickenheiser had to wait until her exam was over to find out that -- as every pundit and observer had expected -- she had been elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame on her first year of eligibility, as the greatest woman who has ever played the sport. [more inside]
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 2:47 PM PST - 10 comments

Laughing Squid on the restoration of the two-wheeled prototype car, the Gyro-X, which looks like a sports car put through a photoshop wringer. A bit more from the Lane Motor Museum. Some individual video links: inside the restoration process in 2013; some post-restoration garage and show footage; more tidbits on the restoration process and recreating the gyroscope; vintage, silent footage of the original prototype in the late 60s.
posted by cortex at 2:02 PM PST - 6 comments

Reverend Dollars (Soundcloud link) is an amazing musician and DJ in Seattle, Left At London is another trans woman making really great music in Seattle as well. [more inside]
posted by nikaspark at 1:48 PM PST - 8 comments

The Strange World of Sorority Rush Consultants -- Would you pay an expert to get your daughter into the sorority of her dreams?
posted by Chrysostom at 1:12 PM PST - 56 comments

Neoliberalism has tricked us into believing a fairytale about where money comes from (Mary Mellor, The Conversation).
posted by sapagan at 1:02 PM PST - 41 comments

Ed Sheeran's new music video features motion capture.
posted by Stark at 12:48 PM PST - 8 comments

Richard Montañez went from cleaning toilets to being one of the most respected execs in the food industry.
posted by Etrigan at 11:54 AM PST - 23 comments

Gangsta's Paradise but every other beat is Amish Paradise [more inside]
posted by bondcliff at 11:29 AM PST - 41 comments

Fall, 1982. A new freshman class arrives at arty, louche, and expensive Bennington College. Among the druggies, rebels, heirs, and posers: future Gen X literary stars Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem.
posted by vunder at 11:05 AM PST - 44 comments

Judge Judy’s Lifetime Achievement Is Teaching Us to Laugh at the Less Fortunate The 1993 Los Angeles Times article that first brought Judith Sheindlin national attention begins with the case of a crack-addicted mother who gave birth in a bathroom, unattended. The mother pushed, and her infant fell to the floor and broke his skull. Sheindlin, then a Manhattan Family Court judge, wondered aloud if there was anything to be done about the woman. A moment later, she clarified: “Can we stop her from populating half the planet?” Stories like this are noticeably absent from Jazmine Hughes’ glowing New York Times Magazine story about Sheindlin, which devoted several paragraphs to her new hairstyle (a clip-on ponytail) but none to the allegations that dogged her throughout her career: that she is both racist and profoundly contemptuous of the poor. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:51 AM PST - 45 comments

“Workers even lack the power to hold their bosses to account for a wide range of abuses at work — even when those abuses are illegal, such as sexual harassment and wage theft. The scale of wage theft — effected by forcing workers to work off the clock, work overtime without extra pay and numerous other scams — is vast. It exceeds the sum total of all other thefts in the U.S.” Capitalist Workplaces Set Bosses Up to Be Authoritarian Tyrants (Truth Out) “Employees won a few of their smaller, concrete goals, such as getting laid-off people rehired, but the international caved in to management when it came to the demands among Lords-town wildcatters for greater control over their own working conditions. “They were unable to win freedom from work,” Loomis said, “or freedom from that kind of work, because they were just starting a conversation and it never had the time to really come to fruition.” The Road Not Taken (New Republic)
posted by The Whelk at 9:01 AM PST - 11 comments

Rain seldom falls on the desert lowlands of coastal Peru, so people in the area have always depended on the water that flows down from the Andes during the rainy season. But streams in this part of the world come and go quickly, so indigenous people built a system of canals and ponds to channel excess rainwater and create groundwater. Now a group of researchers says that a scaled-up version could help improve Peru’s water management. And at a fraction of the cost of developing modern reservoirs. Ancient Peruvian engineering could help solve modern water shortages (Ars Technica; research abstract). Related presentation PDF: Learning from our ancestors: Using modern hydrological techniques to understand ancient water harvesting practices [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:28 AM PST - 10 comments

What is an autobattler game? Get to know this new game genre. [Dot Esports] “What are these “auto-thing” games and why is everyone talking about them? Autobattlers came out of nowhere and skyrocketed in popularity as the rising video game genre of 2019. A few months after a Dota 2 fan-made mod called Dota Auto Chess found success in the genre, it died to give birth to two other titles, Auto Chess and Dota Underlords. Riot Games’ League of Legends mode Teamfight Tactics then appeared to fight them for players. Autobattlers are tactical strategy games with drafting elements from card games. Matches feature eight players and take place across several rounds. Players fight each other in one-vs-one matches defined at random. Players fight each other by placing a set number of units on a board as they wish. These units, or pieces, fight each other automatically when a round starts.” [YouTube][Dota Underlords Trailer][Teamfight Tactics Trailer][Auto Chess Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:43 AM PST - 32 comments

600,000 recycled PET water bottles went into the making of this house in Nova Scotia, which borrowed techniques from the boat-building industry.
posted by clawsoon at 5:15 AM PST - 23 comments

Can science explain why Jeremy Hunt, possible contender for the UK Prime Minister job, is constantly being called the rudest possible word by respectable broadcasters? It started on Radio 4 back in 2010, when James Naughtie did it live on air, before quickly apologizing. Since then it has happened again and again but even this compilation video doesn't have every instance. [more inside]
posted by w0mbat at 6:16 PM PST - 60 comments

A collaborative short story based on this prompt:

Temples are built for gods. Knowing this a farmer builds a small temple to see what kind of god turns up.

posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:42 PM PST - 18 comments

Chinese Jamaican music producers helped turn reggae into a global sensation—one that would eventually reach all the way to the country their ancestors had left behind. A longform comic on the fascinating, intertwined story of China and reggae [via mefi projects]. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 3:14 PM PST - 20 comments

Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, Hank Jones, Sam Jones and Art Blakey play Autumn Leaves, Blue Note 1958. (Via)
posted by growabrain at 2:13 PM PST - 13 comments

At a time when malice and rudeness were highly prized by some rightwing Cambridge dons, Stone outdid them all in the abuse he hurled at anyone he disapproved of, including feminists (“rancid”), Oxford dons (“a dreadful collection of deadbeats, dead wood and has-beens”), students (“smelly and inattentive”), David Cameron and John Major (“transitional nobodies”), Edward Heath (“a flabby-faced coward”) and many more.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:10 PM PST - 33 comments

Thirty years after the hit, Kim Basinger, producer Michael Uslan and actor Robert Wuhl recall tense table reads, alternate castings (Michelle Pfeiffer as Vicki Vale?) and convincing Hollywood the Dark Knight had potential: "Not only did they turn us down, they basically said, 'This is the worst idea we've ever heard.'"
posted by Etrigan at 11:15 AM PST - 145 comments

Researchers Say It’s Time To Stop And Smell The Wildflowers [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:58 AM PST - 8 comments

How a 6-Year-Old Survived Being Lost in the Woods [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:14 AM PST - 30 comments

"Will it hurt?" You might get a little motion sickness. [Note, dystopian short film, see comments for details/spoilers]
posted by CheapB at 9:08 AM PST - 19 comments

“Inslee’s “Freedom From Fossil Fuels” plan looks to take on the leadership of fossil fuel companies directly and account for their role in climate and environmental crises, in part by establishing an Office of Environmental Justice within the Department of Justice. These Are The Polluters (The Intercept) “Our study shows that action on climate change demands shuttering vast sections of the military machine. There are few activities on Earth as environmentally catastrophic as waging war. Significant reductions to the Pentagon’s budget and shrinking its capacity to wage war would cause a huge drop in demand from the biggest consumer of liquid fuels in the world.” (The Conversation) Today, People’s Policy Project has released a plan for a truly Global Green New Deal (GGND). We begin with a modest proposal: that lawmakers should take seriously the standard cost estimates developed by climate science and policy research, which calls for $2 trillion in annual transfers from wealthy nations to the poorer ones. (Intervuew with one of the paper’s writers on The Discourse).
posted by The Whelk at 8:33 AM PST - 17 comments

The Stonewall Riots happened within Living History, yet many of the known 'facts' may just be myths.. Who threw the first Brick? Is that a loaded question? Does it matter? [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 6:34 AM PST - 29 comments

The new feminist armpit hair revolution: half-statement, half-ornament - "Female body hair is becoming more visible in popular culture and, while the issue has been around for decades, the new enthusiasm for hirsuteness has a 21st-century twist." (previously)
posted by kliuless at 6:23 AM PST - 72 comments

Dagoth Ur would like to speak to you about that copy of Sunder you're holding. [SLYT]
posted by tocts at 5:04 AM PST - 13 comments

The Comic Strip That Has A Finale Every Day for June 25, 2019, by John "Scully" Scully, and hosted on GoComics.com.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:11 AM PST - 17 comments

Toy Story 4’s Forky Has Haunting Metaphysical Implications for the Toy Story Universe (Slate) "A new Toy Story movie is in theaters this weekend, and as audiences all over the world emerge from another thrilling Pixar adventure with Buzz, Woody, and a newly-independent Bo Peep, one question is on everyone’s lips: “What does the introduction of ‘Forky,’ a homemade toy fashioned from pipe cleaners, googly eyes, and a spork, imply about the nature of consciousness in the sentient toys of the Toy Story universe?” Fortunately, the films offer enough evidence to reach a definitive conclusion. Unfortunately, that conclusion is too awful to contemplate. So let’s contemplate it!" (Spoilers for Toy Story 4) [more inside]
posted by lesser weasel at 11:37 PM PST - 57 comments

Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order (PDF) Tuesday (June 18, 2019) apologizing on behalf of the citizens of California for a history of “violence, maltreatment and neglect” against Native Americans in a rare move that some tribal leaders said could begin a healing process for their communities. (Los Angeles Times) Now it’s Los Angeles’ turn to offer an apology. No other city in the state went further in the 1850s to strip away the rights of Indians, make their labor available to whites, and hasten the devastation of the Native American community in the city. (L.A. Times op-ed) But the enslavement of indigenous people was not a practice only in California, but throughout the Americas (Wikipedia), for hundreds of years, under various names and methods. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:02 PM PST - 8 comments

Happening right now, live: The Investigation: A Search for the Truth in 10 Acts. A cast that includes Annette Bening, Kevin Kline, John Lithgow, Michael Shannon, Jason Alexander and many more as they perform The Mueller Report.
posted by dobbs at 6:36 PM PST - 13 comments

Frida, a rescue dog in the Mexican Navy (SEMAR), hung up her goggles today after nine years of service. She is celebrated and beloved for her contributions to rescue operations in Mexico, Haiti, Ecuador and Guatemala, and will help train future rescue dogs. Here is a clip from her retirement ceremony. Gracias Frida, you are truly a 15/10.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 5:54 PM PST - 5 comments

This summer marks the 10-year anniversary of Kesha's insanely earwormy Tik Tok! Celebrate it with Kesha by overthrowing the classist patriarchy, why don't you?
posted by rorgy at 4:12 PM PST - 57 comments

The making of Samurai Shodown [Polygon] “Known as Samurai Spirits in its native Japan, as it always has been, SNK’s latest is the first mainline Shodown game in more than a decade. Part prequel, part reboot, it’s an attempt to revitalize a series born nearly 26 years ago in the smoky arcades of the early ’90s. Fighting games have a sentimental relationship to the past; any significant degree of change, however innovative, is met with a certain mistrust. They work well in two dimensions, for the most part, and have since the heydey of two-player cabinets like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. So maybe it’s not too surprising to see the new Shodown hewing to the traditions of its predecessors: 2D combat, manga-inspired art, a special emphasis on melee weapons, the 18th-century Japanese setting.” [YouTube][PAX East Panel][Gameplay Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:33 PM PST - 30 comments

Over 100 Years Ago, the US Government Commissioned 7,500 Watercolor Paintings of Every Kind of Fruit in the Country "The Pomological Watercolor Collection comprises over 7,500 paintings, drawings, and wax models commissioned by the USDA between 1886 and 1942....About 65 American artists contributed to the collection, tasked by the USDA to document the thousands and thousands of varieties of heirloom and experimental fruit cultivars sprouting up nationwide."
posted by apricot at 12:06 PM PST - 27 comments

A set of identical brothers ambivalently attends the world’s largest gathering for twins. (slTheNib)
posted by Etrigan at 10:59 AM PST - 37 comments

So if type I fun is things that are fun while they are occurring, and type II fun is things that feel bad in the moment, but are looked back on fondly, and type III fun is things that are no fun at all, why would anyone deliberately seek out type II (or 'latent') fun?
Project Y tries to find out [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:04 AM PST - 80 comments

Against the backdrop of cultural differences as a current axiom of academic (and other) discourse around the world, and against the very real, very-not-academic protests in Hong Kong as Hong Kong people advocate loudly for their independence from the Chinese legal system, Qu Weiguo addresses the 2019 graduating class of Fudan University with a speech about individual freedom, the problematic nature of 'cultural differences', and who gets to (or doesn't get to) claim freedom as an ideal.
posted by cirgue at 8:43 AM PST - 8 comments

Writer Ocean Vuong publishes his first novel : as noted by the American Booksellers Association, "On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a portrait of a family, first love, and the power of storytelling and an exploration of the American stories of race, class, masculinity, immigration, as well as of addiction, violence, and trauma." As Lucille Clifton said, poetry should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; Ocean Vuong's writing certainly does that. [more inside]
posted by wicked_sassy at 7:31 AM PST - 6 comments

Rescue & Restore is a YouTuber who takes vintage to antique toys and makes them look and work like new. No commentary, no soundtrack, just showing you what it takes to restore old, rusty toys with modern tools and techniques. There are eight videos up to date: Vintage Toy Electric Oven Restoration - Little Lady Range By Kingston | Barn Find Toy Piano Restoration | 1960s Tonka Jeep Restoration - Military Jeep GR2-2431 | 1930s Wyandotte Toy Airplane Restoration | 1920s Dayton Toy Train Restoration - Antique Locomotive | 5 Cent Candy Vending Machine Restoration - Northwestern Model 60 | 1960s Stepside Tonka Pickup Truck Restoration | Vintage Toy Cash Register Restoration - Tom Thumb || Also on Instagram and Facebook.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:19 PM PST - 29 comments

“I can’t go up here and say I promise you UCB will be open forever.” "Is UCB done for? Does bankruptcy loom? Or can the theater survive? There are no easy answers; the hard answers aren’t all that pleasant. If the UCB4 cannot steer the ship out of this crisis, whether by implementing more sustainable practices or selling the business to someone who will, the theater will close." [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:44 PM PST - 27 comments

Ravelry, the eight-million-strong social network for knitters previously, has announced that it will ban its users from voicing support for the Trump administration on the grounds that doing so “is undeniably support for white supremacy”.
The language of the new policy has been adapted from a similar announcement by RPG.net last November.
Further coverage from: USA Today, The Guardian, Business Insider, The Hill, BuzzFeed, Inquisitr, The A.V. Club, and The Mary Sue.
(For a sense of scale: as of February, Twitter has 126 million daily users, Snap has 186 million, and Facebook has 1.56 billion.)
posted by Going To Maine at 8:20 PM PST - 153 comments

In the small, insular world of the British establishment, every so often a clique of people can exert an extraordinary influence. There is a curious parallel between the 1980s Oxford Tories and the 1930s Cambridge spies. [...] Admittedly, the comparison between the Cambridge and Oxford sets isn’t entirely fair: though both betrayed Britain’s interests to the benefit of Moscow, the Brexiters didn’t mean to.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 6:36 PM PST - 16 comments

Judith Krantz, bestselling author and pioneer of the sex-and-shopping novel, has died of natural causes at 91. Krantz, who wrote prolifically for women's magazines, did not attempt fiction until later life. She published her first novel, Scruples ("about the staggeringly luxurious life of a Beverly Hills boutique and the people who work in it"), when she was 50. [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 6:01 PM PST - 14 comments

To find real solitude, you have to go out of range. But every year that’s harder to do, as America’s off-the-grid places disappear. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 5:41 PM PST - 21 comments

The Anita Sarkeesian Story: A Look Back at 10 Years of Feminist Frequency [Polygon] “For our interview, Sarkeesian and I are sitting in an apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District. I want to talk to her about her life and her work. I want to find out more about her background and her formative years as a political activist and cultural critic. I want to find out why her non-profit orgaization, Feminist Frequency, is dramatically scaling back its operations, exactly 10 years after its formation. But first, I want to talk about her achievements.” [Previously.] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 1:18 PM PST - 18 comments

It’s your first day on the job and Beyoncé is getting ready for a red carpet. What are you getting her for breakfast? (scroll down to see choose-your-own-adventure-style threading)
posted by Etrigan at 10:54 AM PST - 29 comments

In Russia’s arctic wilderness the remnants of one of the Soviet Union’s most tragic gulag projects now lies largely forgotten. Photojournalist Amos Chapple went to see it.
(Gulag previously.)
posted by adamvasco at 6:24 AM PST - 46 comments

“Pointing out hypocrisy or craven motivations seems almost beside the point. Yes, Equinox is showcasing an artform pioneered by poor transwomen of color while gentrifying the very neighborhoods they used to live in by building luxury gyms that charge up to $250 in monthly rates. Yes, Essie is simply trying to maximize its profits by expanding its clientele to people who are not women. Yes, Fossil’s website still divides their products into “men’s” and “women’s” despite allegedly helping a nonbinary customer come to terms with their identity. Who cares? There is an unspoken agreement that even savvy consumers who see through the bullshit will at least appreciate the effort required to produce it.” Raytheon said Gay Rights! ( Outline) “Recent years have also seen a blossoming in the smaller worlds of queer communist and socialist politics. Though the scale of US gay rights organizing has atrophied since the victory of the gay marriage campaign, efforts to organize trans and queer people explicitly against capitalism, to think queer freedom alongside communism, are at their most vibrant since the gay liberation era of the early 1970s.” Fifty Years Of Queer Insurgency (Commune) Barbara Smith: Why I left the mainstream Queer rights movement. (NYT) Keep your politics out of my gay rights! (Liquid Flannel Podcast)
posted by The Whelk at 11:23 PM PST - 53 comments

NPR's Code Switch team has a list of 14 non-fiction and 14 fiction books for summer reading, ranging from The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers by Bridgett M. Davis and White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo (forward by Michael Eric Dyson) to No-No Boy by John Okada and Training School for Negro Girls by Camille Acker (all book links go to Goodreads).
posted by filthy light thief at 9:14 PM PST - 8 comments

"Supposedly you can sweet-talk your plant to greater health — so I screamed at and insulted a plant every day for three weeks, all in the name of science" This....does not quite go as one expected. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:47 PM PST - 23 comments

August 3rd, 1965 saw the brief collision of a handful of people. A local photographer, a hopeful actress, a budding filmmaker, and a failing businessman. They came together, made a sex film, got arrested, and never saw each other again. If life is the sum of one’s choices, their lives were shaped by what happened that summer’s day. The Sexploitation Film Made on a Desert Island in New York City [NSFW]
posted by chavenet at 12:37 PM PST - 14 comments

So what are the difficulties of building a giant shed around an exploded nuclear reactor? How did a small Scottish consultant land work on a critically important international project? And what is it like to work at the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident? [more inside]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 12:28 PM PST - 14 comments

Desus and Mero Aren’t Your Parents’ Late-Night Hosts. They've gone from radio bodega boys to webseries stars to Viceland darlings to their current and most prestigious gig to date - but can the stars of the hit podcast Bodega Boys win over a broader—and whiter—audience on Showtime? [more inside]
posted by nightrecordings at 11:36 AM PST - 6 comments

Strangers: the Syrian diaspora in 19th century New York. While they were predominantly Christian, like the majority of immigrants flooding into the country from other parts of the world, they were Arabs. They spoke Arabic. Their shop signs were in Arabic. They had over 40 local newspapers which were printed in Arabic. Some lasted only a couple issues. Others, like Kawkab America and Al-Hoda, lasted decades, and became debating forums for issues all immigrants faced when they came to the U.S. “They were trying to figure out who they wanted to be in the U.S.,” says Jacobs. “There was a debate in the community about how much of their identity they should give up, how much they should sacrifice to become Americans.” The language they spoke however, often misidentified them as Turks, having come from Ottoman provinces in Syria and Palestine.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 9:33 AM PST - 9 comments

The health care system is rife with transphobia. While there has been an expansion in trans training programs for medical providers in recent years, trans people still struggle to find competent basic care, much less trans-specific care. “Trans broken arm syndrome” — a phenomenon where every little ailment, from an infection to a broken arm, is blamed on the hormones many trans people take as a routine part of their transition — is a common occurrence within the medical community....Trump’s proposed ACA rule, and an earlier proposed rule that would allow doctors to make religious objections to providing certain medical treatments, will only exacerbate the medical knowledge gap when it comes to treating trans bodies. Instead of doctors attending training on how to treat trans people with competence, Trump’s rule will allow them to just deny service altogether. Doctors could also condition care on a trans person detransitioning in any state that doesn’t already have trans nondiscrimination protections on the books.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:21 AM PST - 19 comments

Turn any homophobic corner in Africa and you're guaranteed to run into a delirious celebration of "African culture," but there's nothing African about homophobia. Kamau Muiga writes.
posted by hugbucket at 8:04 AM PST - 12 comments

Oscar winner Paul Williams on writing Kermit the Frog’s signature song: “The thing that is so human about the song, and spiritual at the same time, is that it honors the questions, not the answers.” slVanityFair
posted by Etrigan at 4:56 AM PST - 37 comments

You've probably seen the video of comedian DJ Pryor discussing the season finale of Empire with his earnestly babbling son Kingston. Denny's used the two of them in a Father's Day ad, and Chris Cuomo interviewed them for CNN. Here's more Kingston, and here's the family's Facebook page.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:32 PM PST - 5 comments

These TV shows were ruined by stray shoes: A rogue sneaker is all it takes to smash through the suspension of disbelief. [more inside]
posted by freethefeet at 10:33 PM PST - 69 comments

Jules Montenier was a cosmetic chemist who improved antiperspirant, making them less irritating to the skin, and developed a new squeeze-bottle applicator with the product name of Stopette (Cosmetics and Skin). He became sponsor of What's My Line? (Old Time [Radio]), as seen in this collection of ads. But wait, one of them is not like the rest. That would be Dorothy Jarnac's Stopette pantomime. She's more than the Deodorant Dancer -- Miss Jarnac started out as an exponent of the classical ballet, but her sense of humor got the upper hand and she gained some small renown for interpretive dance (Periodically Vintage). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:59 PM PST - 6 comments

Stonehenge Skyscape. "For thousands of years people have made the pilgrimage to Stonehenge to gaze in wonder at the interplay with the monument of the sun, moon and stars, but from Friday a virtual version of the looming sky above the circle will be available to people from around the world. A live feed from a camera close to the stones has been set up – appropriately enough on the summer solstice – to allow people to tune in to the monument whenever they want. After dark, the live feed is replaced by a computer-generated image of the night sky as it would be at the moment a viewer clicks on the link to the website." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 8:58 PM PST - 4 comments

America’s New Concentration Camp System
posted by latkes at 6:32 PM PST - 64 comments

What It’s Actually Like to Be on House Hunters Twice "For starters, we already had a house. It just got weirder from there." [Slate.com]
posted by readinghippo at 3:42 PM PST - 46 comments

The second in what will be a trilogy, coming after the Pulitzer Prize winning and all around incredible Become Ocean (Bandcamp link), is John Luther Adams' newest and equally incredible work Become Desert (NPR link with Spotify stream).
posted by Lutoslawski at 3:16 PM PST - 5 comments

E. Jean Carroll, advice columnist extraordinaire and former Miss Cheerleader USA, reckons with a life full of hideous men, from being attacked by her Girl Scout camp counselor to being raped at Bergdorf’s by the current President of the United States. (tw: rape and sexual assault)
posted by sallybrown at 11:44 AM PST - 52 comments

The first time I noticed that quite a lot of people on the Internet seemed to be begging celebrities to kill them was a couple of years ago. “Can lana del rey step on my throat already,” one person tweeted. “Snap my neck and hide my body,” another announced, when Lady Gaga posted a new profile photo. [...] One takeaway from all this is that young people really love celebrities. Another is that we’re craving unmediated connection so desperately that we would accept it in the form of murder. It’s also possible that we simply want to die.

Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You
posted by griphus at 10:51 AM PST - 83 comments

A week out from the launch of the game's third expansion, Shadowbringers, the folks at Square Enix have dropped an ad for Final Fantasy XIV where Hannibal Buress works on training Tom Holland to be the Warrior of Darkness.

Japan, on the other hand, gets an anime catgirl having fun with friends. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:05 AM PST - 16 comments

The Group Stage of the 2019 Women's World Cup is over, and the bracket for the elimination Round of 16 is set: [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:51 AM PST - 20 comments

“They just said me and [my colleague] were very meticulous and had a lot of promise to move up to the SME position,” Speagle said, referring to the subject matter experts who make $1 more per hour in exchange for answering moderators’ questions about Facebook policy. “They said Facebook is basically shoving all of their graphic violence content to us, that they didn’t want it anymore. So they had to move more people to cover it. And that’s all that we saw, every single day.” For the first time, three former Facebook moderators in North America are breaking their nondisclosure agreements and going on the record to discuss working conditions that include squalid, bed bug infested offices, theft and abuse by managers, and developing PTSD from watching graphic violence : BODIES IN SEATS (Content warning: This story contains descriptions of violent acts against people and animals, accounts of sexual harassment and post-traumatic stress disorder, and other potentially disturbing content.)
posted by The Whelk at 7:51 AM PST - 74 comments

The newest game from Niantic hit phones yesterday: Harry Potter Wizards Unite. Like Pokemon Go, you walk around and interact with icons on your phone, but Wizards Unite improves on what makes Pokemon Go great. Have questions? There's a lot of options, but there's also an FAQ.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:42 AM PST - 48 comments

Much more than Mario Kart: The history of kart racers [Ars Technica] “No video game genre divides and unifies us like the kart racer. For every Mario Kart there are a dozen by-the-numbers cash-ins, and even that hallowed series receives regular criticism as too derivative. But while we all breathe a collective sigh of disappointment with each kid-friendly license that predictably goes the generic kart-racing route, it's hard not to get excited by that rare entry that feels fresh and new. A great kart racer is a joyous thing. It's accessible yet deep, fun yet primed for oh-so-serious competition between friends, and full of colorful, wacky charm. It is a game for everyone. So in keeping with the spirit of the genre—and as the latest edition in our gaming genre history series that includes city builders, graphic adventures, and simulation games—it's time to ride through the ups and downs of kart racing.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:25 AM PST - 15 comments

The Kitty Federation sent a crew, led by Captain Laika, to a distant planet. When they failed to return, the Federation got worried. Dozens of puzzles stand in your way. And you only have 5 steps to solve them.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 6:43 AM PST - 7 comments

Everything I Learned While Getting Kicked out of America's Biggest Anti-Vaccine Conference Jezebel's Anna Merlan visits, and is ejected from, the AutismOneconference. [more inside]
posted by Hold your seahorses at 3:54 AM PST - 40 comments

Cool video with no CGI or green screen. Video side-by side with making of [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 3:15 AM PST - 9 comments

He went from bro-asshole correspondent on The Daily Show to AlexJonesMeetsColbertReport for Comedy Central, but Jordan Klepper's new series Klepper is unlike anything ever seen before. A docuseries which explores issues from the inside, and maybe gets a white guy to weaponize his privilege on behalf of his subjects. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:20 PM PST - 5 comments

My neighbor was out picking walnuts yesterday to make pickled walnuts. We share our urban habitat with SQUIRRELS and they EAT ALL THE WALNUTS so I was excited to learn how to intercept some of the nuts. So if you ALSO want to know how to intercept some of the walnuts in YOUR neighborhood from YOUR local squirrels, you'll be wanting these recipes. Turns out squirrels live EVERYWHERE. Green walnuts are the answer. Long live the green walnut! [more inside]
posted by aniola at 9:32 PM PST - 18 comments

Get hyped for days of warped music! Warp Records turns 30 soon, and is celebrating with a multi-day take-over of NTS Radio (Wikipedia), starting on 21 June 2019 at 12 PM BST (TimeBie converter). The 60-hour line-up is on Warp.net (direct image link; Imgur link for posterity), and I've pulled together a random live set from each of the musicians* on the line-up, in case you can't tune in (or can't wait), plus some more links to read along while you listen. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:25 PM PST - 40 comments

2-D Trick Shots — a few marbles (one orange), a few woodblock magnets, some K'nex pieces, and a "net" made of buckyball magnets, all set in motion on top of a tilted magnetic whiteboard. [SLYT, 2:16]
posted by not_on_display at 5:51 PM PST - 15 comments

First step towards a better prosthetic leg? Trip people over and over. The aim of "stumble recovery" research being carried out at Vanderbilt University is to "construct a model of which factors determine the nature of the stumble response, so when a stumble occurs, we can use the various sensors on a robotic prosthetic leg to artificially reconstruct the reflex." From the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation: A novel system for introducing precisely-controlled, unanticipated gait perturbations for the study of stumble recovery.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:02 PM PST - 10 comments

Opinion analysis: Court holds that First Amendment does not apply to private operator of public-access channels From the majority's opinion: “MNN, as a private actor, is not subject to First Amendment constraints on how it exercises editorial discretion over the speech and speakers on its public access channels.” From the minority's dissent: “Just as the City would have been subject to the First Amendment had it chosen to run the” channels itself, MNN “assumed the same responsibility when it accepted the delegation” to run the channels and must comply with the First Amendment.” [more inside]
posted by daq at 2:17 PM PST - 29 comments

Young Swedish guitarist Lucas Brar shows how to play Summertime by Gershwin in 10 different ways. Starts at 0:28. Full Channel here. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 1:56 PM PST - 9 comments

Ground zero demolition archive c/w 9/11 Archivists who bought a stash of CDs at a house clearance sale found 2,400 photos of Ground Zero in New York taken following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. c/w 9/11 [more inside]
posted by RandomInconsistencies at 1:34 PM PST - 17 comments

"Drag brunch, until recently, was almost an oxymoron. For most of the 20th century, drag happened in queer spaces, in the dark, and was created by people who scraped together beauty from whatever they could find. Brunch, until about the 1980s, was conspicuously for the rich, or at least the genteel, an occasion for after church or on Mother’s Day — not one eating too much or getting too drunk. It was an opportunity to be seen looking sharp, at least in the church sense. There was little chance the worlds should ever meet. But starting around the 1990s, brunch got raucous and, concurrently, drag got mainstream." Jaya Saxena at Eater asks When Did Drag Brunch Get So Normie?
posted by everybody had matching towels at 1:12 PM PST - 11 comments

For all the Bois bois (and everyone else, too) on Metafilter - unabashed praise for a transcendent sportswriter. Kate Wagner does a great job diving into what makes Bois something special. "his work brings together sports and art, sports and media culture, sports and history, sports and creative nonfiction, sports and fiction-fiction. Armed only with a high school diploma and a computer, Jon Bois renovated the genre of sports writing for the internet age. " " As a cultural critic, most people only get to hear about what I hate, and few ask me what I like. Well, I like the work of Jon Bois."
posted by jayz at 12:36 PM PST - 24 comments

Hack the Moon tells the remarkable story of the engineers behind the revolutionary technologies developed for the Apollo missions. Explore newly released photos, videos and stories about the unsung heroes behind the moon landing. In the face of epic challenges, and with a fraction of today’s technology these are the people who hacked the moon. Part of NASA's 50th Anniversary of Apollo celebration.
posted by scalefree at 12:20 PM PST - 6 comments

Joe Biden Keeps Shooting Past Centrism and Into Conservatism. While some of Biden's proposed policies are in line with the left-wards turn the Dem candidates have been taking, (15$ minimum wage, he now supports the repeal of Hyde), he continues to cozy up to wall street and he wont stop waxing nostalgic about two notorious segregationist senators. This has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, including fellow Dem candidate Cory Booker who heavily criticized Biden for painting noted racists James Eastland and Herman Talmadge in a positive light. Biden's response? To demand an apology from Booker.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:46 AM PST - 179 comments

Each June 21, The Garden of Memory celebrates new music and the summer solstice at The Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, California, a historic columbarium largely designed by Julia Morgan. Visitors walk from room to room hearing dozens of performers creating music which pushes boundaries - avant garde, new approaches to World Music, experimental, electroacoustic, new classical, unusual jazz. [more inside]
posted by kristi at 8:49 AM PST - 7 comments

On Sunday at 10:30pm, the Quebec government passed a secularism law which makes it illegal to wear religious symbols at work if you're a public school teacher, a police officer, a judge, a prison guard, a wildlife officer, a Crown prosecutor or if you work as a lawyer for the government. Schoolteachers already on the job will be exempt from the religious symbols ban under a grandfather clause, but they will lose the exemption if they move to another school or take up another position. The government has invoked the notwithstanding clause to protect the law from legal challenges based on freedom of religion, so opponents are challenging the law on every other grounds they can think of. Some school boards have vowed not to implement the law, and it has been condemned from outside the province as a separation from the very idea of what Canada represents. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 7:31 AM PST - 99 comments

Daniel Kay Hertz asks twitter 'What is the most Chicago-like city of every country'? Includes a link to this 2012 Chicago Tribune article.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:20 AM PST - 94 comments

Cyberpunk 2077's in-game context doesn't matter if its marketing contributes to transphobia right now [Rock Paper Shotgun] “During this week’s E3, Cyberpunk 2077 developers CD Projekt Red released a new CG trailer starring Keanu Reeves, showed the game to press behind closed doors, and handed out some new screenshots. Two screens in particular were released via Nvidia to show off ray tracing effects, and both seem innocuous enough. One depicts what looks like a science lab, the other a neon-lit stairwell, but a second glance at the latter will reveal something else. There are three adverts on the wall, the middle of which depicts a sexualised trans woman, her body objectified and fetishised to sell an energy drink [*NSFW*] for a fictitious in-world corporation. [...] The idea in isolation could work: there’s no reason you can’t depict trans women in a sexual manner. It’s just, as with any kind of sexualization, there’s a fine line between empowerment and objectification. It’s not at all apparent from the image itself that we are supposed to be disgusted by the exploitation. Instead, it looks like an image you’re supposed to laugh at, with trans people the victim of the joke.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:52 AM PST - 47 comments

A simple how-to video for performing a factory reset on C by GE light bulbs (slYT). I mean, it really can't get simpler than this.
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:13 AM PST - 81 comments

Proposed dams threaten indigenous people and wildlife in Central America. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 4:59 AM PST - 2 comments

Missionary Renee Bach who founded the non-profit Serving His Children (SHC) in Eastern Uganda with the mission to address malnutrition in children is being sued by local mothers in connection to her involvement in the deaths of over a hundred children. Excellent reporting by the local organization No White Saviors, the Ugandan newspaper the Independent, and The Spy Uganda, has uncovered that Bach, who founded SHC soon after her arrival in Uganda as a sheltered teenager with barely a high school diploma, routinely performed complex medical procedures (such as blood transfusions using apparently the wrong blood type) on vulnerable children leading to debilitating and fatal results. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 3:52 AM PST - 26 comments

“From the very beginning, he was always concerned about policy. Always concerned about making a meaningful difference. He didn’t have time for the niceties,” Jane Sanders, the Senator’s wife and closest adviser, told me. “He has, over time, really become more—he’s still very issue oriented, but he’s placing focus on the people and the impact that those policies have.” Bernie Sanders Wants to Change America. But He May Have to Change Himself First. (TIME) “A cashier who steals a handful of twenties is held accountable, but Wall Street executives almost never hold themselves accountable,” Warren said. “Not now, and not in 2008, when they crushed the worldwide economy. The only way that Wall Street will change is if executives face jail time when they preside over massive frauds.” Can Elizabeth Warren Win It All? Sanders likes to frame himself as a New Dealer — an heir to the party of Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt, Sanders said last week, “led a transformation of the American government and the American economy” and was “reviled by the oligarchs of his time,” who attacked his New Deal programs as “socialism.” Why Bernie Sanders Isn’t Afraid of ‘Socialism’ (NYT) “Ask me who my favorite president is,” Warren said. When I paused, she said, “Teddy Roosevelt.” Warren admires Roosevelt for his efforts to break up the giant corporations of his day — Standard Oil and railroad holding companies — in the name of increasing competition. She thinks that today that model would increase hiring and productivity.(NYT Magzine)
posted by The Whelk at 1:03 AM PST - 42 comments

Amy Grant's astonishing 1988 album Lead Me On was not what anyone was expecting. After the pop of Unguarded, she retreated into a more acoustic Nashville-flavored rock style. And revealed some of the most mature, questioning, striving-toward-perfection-while-failing lyrics ever recorded by a CCM artist. It's truly an album worth giving a full listen. CD track listing: 1974 (We Were Young), Lead Me On [video], Shadows, Saved By Love, Faithless Heart, What About The Love, If These Walls Could Speak, All Right, Wait For The Healing, Sure Enough, If You Have To Go Away, Say Once More
posted by hippybear at 10:41 PM PST - 5 comments

As soon as we sat down, Liu called a waiter over and asked for two beers. I said I wouldn’t be drinking, but Liu clarified that he was happy to lay claim to both bottles.

Jiayang Fan profiles science fiction writer Liu Cixin, primarily known internationally for his trilogy The Three-Body Problem and the film adaptation of The Wandering Earth, in The New Yorker.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 9:12 PM PST - 14 comments

At the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, American Walter Winans took the podium and waved proudly to the crowd. He had already won two Olympic medals—a gold for sharpshooting at the 1908 London Games, as well as a silver for the same event in 1912—but the gold he won at Stockholm wasn’t for shooting, or running, or anything particularly athletic at all. It was instead awarded for a small piece of bronze he had cast earlier that year: a 20-inch-tall horse pulling a small chariot. For his work, An American Trotter, Winans won the first ever Olympic gold medal for sculpture.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:59 PM PST - 5 comments

"In total, Trump faces at least 15 criminal or civil inquiries by nine federal, state and local agencies into his business, his charity, his campaign, his inaugural committee and his personal finances. […] Trump plans to characterize the investigations in these blue states — just like those by special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional investigations — as attacks by the same people: Democrats, the media and his critics. To his backers, it’s already been a winning strategy." "In a sign of that fervour, Trump’s campaign raised a staggering $24.8m in the less-than 24 hours after kicking off his re-election bid, according to Republican party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel," overshadowing the amount raised by the top Democratic 2020 contenders during the first three months of 2019. [more inside]
posted by Little Dawn at 7:29 PM PST - 1821 comments

"The banana used to be a luxury good. Now it’s the most popular fruit in the U.S. and elsewhere. But the production efficiencies that made it so cheap have also made it vulnerable to a deadly fungus that may wipe out the one variety most of us eat. Scientists do have a way to save it — but will Big Banana let them?" Maybe, if Western public opinion keeps coming around to the idea. But is continuing to farm vast monoculture crops worth endangering global banana production? [more inside]
posted by Drosera at 6:38 PM PST - 42 comments

Aretha: Her story was in her songs

Six songs tell you as much about Aretha Franklin as any memoir ever could. The Queen of Soul was not much for talking about her life, so with the help of Oprah Winfrey, Paul Simon, Questlove and others, we peel back the layers of emotion, technique and lived experience she packed into these key performances.

posted by kirkaracha at 4:16 PM PST - 4 comments

When model, cookbook author and unofficial mayor of Twitter Chrissy Teigen wondered aloud on the social media platform whether there is a reason she cries more at movies while on a plane, she tapped into a shared — and apparently emotional — travel experience. The answer from her followers was an overwhelming “yes” […]

Although there are far more anecdotes than pieces of solid research, psychologists can point to explanations behind what’s been dubbed the “Mile Cry Club.” (Hannah Simpson, WaPo; non-WaPo link) [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:05 PM PST - 34 comments

Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason presents A History of Music in Technology, a nine-part Open University/BBC series "charting the history of music and technology and exploring the world of legendary artists, producers, engineers and inventors. The series shines a light on game-changing innovations including the synthesiser, electric guitar, samplers, drum machines and the recording studio itself," and airs until June 22. Episodes available to date: Sound Recording, The Studio Part 1, The Studio Part 2, Samplers and Drum Machines, The Synthesizer, The Hammond Organ, Electronic Music Pioneers, and The Electric Guitar.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:53 PM PST - 14 comments

"Spiritfarer looks like utterly magical heartbreak" (short sl Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
posted by Caduceus at 12:57 PM PST - 13 comments

For those with hearing impairments, restaurant noise isn’t just an irritation. It’s discrimination. Under Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act, restaurants — as places of public accommodation — must accommodate disabilities. But what if the disability is a hearing impairment, and the request is for a lower volume?
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 11:51 AM PST - 77 comments

Today is Juneteenth: The Black American Holiday Everyone Should Celebrate but Doesn’t, Jamelle Bouie
What Is Juneteenth, How Is It Celebrated, and Why Does It Matter?, Jameelah Nasheed - " In Texas, approximately 250,000 people were still being held in slavery when, on June 19, 1865, Union troops, led by Major General Gordon Granger, arrived in Galveston to announce that the war had ended and that all slaves were now free." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:55 AM PST - 23 comments

Poet, musician, and playwright Joy Harjo has been named US Poet Laureate. Harjo is the first Native American to hold the title.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:17 AM PST - 10 comments

London-born, NYC-based visual artist Shantell Martin in conversation with Ilana Glazer. The artist discusses growing up "brown with an afro" in white-working-class southeast London, connecting with her grandma as an adult, Tokyo vs. NYC club culture, never giving up, and art vs. shame. [more inside]
posted by The Minotaur at 10:03 AM PST - 1 comment

Political Confessional: an ongoing series of anonymous interviews conducted by FiveThirtyEight's Clare Malone (previously) with people who hold political views they are afraid to admit to, like being a 75-year-old woman who prefers to vote for (Democratic) men, wanting to ban private schools, or for Democrats to compromise on abortion to win votes, about why they hold these views, and why they feel they can't speak about them with friends or family. [more inside]
posted by skewed at 9:18 AM PST - 80 comments

Kate Tempest’s latest record finds beauty amidst breakdown. The spoken word poet – whose last album, 2016’s Let Them Eat Chaos (YouTube playlist), was nominated for the Mercury prize – is known for her chest-thumping, rousing statements. But on The Book of Traps and Lessons (YT pl), she takes a macro view of people (in one breath-catching moment she counts (YT): “7.2 billion humans … 7.3 billion humans …”, and on), before zooming right in to the smallest of intimacies. On Three Sided Coin (YT), she captures the current turbulence of the UK, a nation living “in the mouth of a breaking storm”; and then, quickly, the track unspools into the softer-edged I Trap You (YT), a meditation on a broken-down relationship. (The Guardian) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:27 AM PST - 6 comments

What Lyra did next. "An exclusive extract from Philip Pullman’s new novel The Secret Commonwealth: Twenty-year-old Lyra has to flee Oxford by boat for the third time in her life, this time in the company of the old gyptian Giorgio Brabandt. As they sail towards the safety of the Fens, they hear a zeppelin approaching …" The Secret Commonwealth: The Book of Dust Volume Two will be published on 3 October 2019. [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 6:48 AM PST - 17 comments

In advance of a new film set in a parallel universe in which the Beatles never existed except in the memory of one man, several music writers consider the question of how popular culture and society in general would have differed had the band never existed. Would rock'n'roll have died out in the early 60s, with folk or jazz providing the basis of pop music? Would pop music have been more ephemeral and insignificant, with something else (possibly surfing or chess) serving as the core for generational rebellion? And what would have happened in the lives of everyone from the four erstwhile Beatles themselves to Brian Epstein, Mick Jagger and antecedents including Elton John, Noel and Liam Gallagher and Ed Sheeran. (SLGuardian)
posted by acb at 6:25 AM PST - 151 comments

Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night whips it good [Rock Paper Shotgun] “Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night, the crowdfunded return of Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night, is out now. Produced by [director Koji Igarashi] new studio, ArtPlay, it’s a series successor in all but name. There might be a shortage of Belmonts or Draculas, but there’s a big gothic castle to explore, bosses to clobber, and a bundle of RPG elements to pad out the platform exploration and brawling. Below, a very tongue-in-cheek launch trailer, featuring Igarashi hamming it up in front of the camera again, daft character customisation, and free DLC plans. [...] The similarities run all the way down to the primary protagonist having magic tattoos which let her steal abilities from monsters and re-purpose them. Igarashi was just a producer, rather than director on that game, but I’m hoping it manages to recapture that fine balance between RPG flexibility and tricky platform combat.” [YouTube][Launch Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:51 AM PST - 9 comments

How a Swedish town became the world capital of recycling [slGuardian]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:48 AM PST - 1 comment

CAPITAL CITY: “Planners provide a window into the practical dynamics of urban change: the way the state both uses and is used by organized capital, and the power of landlords and developers at every level of government." Antifada Podcast: The Housing Monster w/ Samuel Stein of Capital City on the Real Estate State (89:00) 'Places where real estate is cheap don’t have many good jobs. Places with lots of jobs, primarily coastal cities, have seen their real-estate markets go absolutely haywire. " Why Housing Policy Feels Like Generational Warfare (The Atlantic) Grim New Report Shows Rent Is Unaffordable In Every State (Huffpost) Tenants Won This Round: Last week, New York tenants overcame the state's powerful real-estate lobby to win a historic package of renter protections. Next stop: universal rent control. (Jacobin) Berlin backs five-year rent freeze amid housing pressure (BBC) Lessons from Berlin (RTE)
posted by The Whelk at 12:49 AM PST - 28 comments

Facebook Will Make the Money Now - "Money is a technology. This is true, first of all, in a grand abstract sense: The human capacity to generate collective fictions is our most powerful and general technology, the thing that distinguishes us from other animals and enables long-term cooperation and complex societies, and money is one of the most important collective fictions."[1] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 12:12 AM PST - 56 comments

“There are so many unanswered questions that will probably never be answered, but the one I would love to get answered is, Who was Peter Bergmann?” Ten years ago this week a man calling himself Peter Bergmann checked in to a hotel in Sligo town. Five days later his body was found on Rosses Point beach. Who was he?
posted by Grinder at 12:10 AM PST - 26 comments

I didn’t expect to have a profound reckoning with my relationship to my own lesbianism and womanhood. I didn’t expect to make friends I hope to keep for a long, long time. I didn’t expect that spending a few days with a couple thousand lesbians on a floating hotel/casino/mall/amusement park would push me to radically reconsider the future I’d been carefully and painstakingly planning for myself.

Shannon Keating went on an Olivia cruise, run since 1990 by the legendary lesbian record company and didn't expect much beyond having a good time. It ended up overturning her entire life.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:09 PM PST - 39 comments

This is a song about potatoes.
posted by MoonOrb at 9:36 PM PST - 12 comments

A Garfield-licensed restaurant has opened in Toronto. My first question was direct, “Why Garfield?” [more inside]
posted by knile at 9:13 PM PST - 41 comments

Author Ada Palmer on writing, pain, and teamwork.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:44 PM PST - 15 comments

Nintendo Life: Tetris Creator Alexey Pajitnov On Tetris 99, Tetris Comics And His Favourite Tetris Piece
posted by duffell at 7:29 PM PST - 8 comments

As human teardrops dry, salt and other substances in the teardrop bunch together and crystalize in intricate, snowflake-like shapes (Discover Magazine). Do the tears caused by onions look the same as those provoked by sadness? Photographers Rose-Lynn Fisher (Smithsonian) and Maurice Mikkers (Medium) have both explored the composition of the three types of tears: basal (ever-present fluid that protects the eye), reflex (triggered by an irritant), and psychic (triggered by emotions). The verdict: they all look different but not because of the type of tears. “There are many factors that determine the look of each tear image," says Fisher (New Yorker), "including the viscosity of the tear, the chemistry of the weeper, the settings of the microscope, and the way I process the images afterwards,”
posted by not_the_water at 3:47 PM PST - 8 comments

The Skatune Network Presents: The Impression That I Get, Except It Changes Genre Every 15 Seconds
posted by everybody had matching towels at 3:16 PM PST - 37 comments

Want some classic Bowie recordings remixed into a reggae structure? Well, here's David Bowie - The Next Dub, one of over a dozen dub remix projects by musical entity Black Market. [more inside]
posted by cortex at 12:56 PM PST - 13 comments

Truckla , the new Tesla Pickup. "Available nowhere." (Except in Simone Giertz's driveway.)
posted by dobbs at 11:28 AM PST - 49 comments

The actual story of famed and disgraced auto designer John DeLorean would probably make a pretty good movie. Probably wouldn't have any time machines in it though. It would be more like The Wolf of Wall Street, but with cars.
posted by COD at 10:03 AM PST - 41 comments

Youtuber Tom Scott and friends has a go in the Royal Navy's Damage Repair Instructional Unit, also known as the HMS Excellent. While water is pouring in and the unit is listing, they are trying to apply damage control procedures that the Royal Navy would use in a real situation (SLYT).
posted by Harald74 at 8:58 AM PST - 25 comments

Author Michael Lewis has a new{NYT] podcast called[FT] "Against The Rules" [spotify, apple, stitcher] that's all about referees and refereeing [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:29 AM PST - 17 comments

As early humans spread across the earth, they persistently hunted down the largest beasts around. Along with climate changes and human-caused ecosystem change, many researchers implicate hunting as a death knell for creatures from the giant ground sloth (Inverse; full paper) to the wooly mammoth and other megafauna (Geology Page; full paper in PDF). From this perspective, humanity’s late arrival to New Zealand simply delayed the moa’s execution date. When the Māori First Settled New Zealand, They Hunted Flightless, 500-Pound Birds (Atlas Obscura) -- but how did Māori best these beasts? [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:25 AM PST - 5 comments

Looking back at the show’s history, queer content has come in a few distinct forms. Tracking the evolution of these forms across the years can give us an appreciation for just how far Saturday Night Live and we, its fitfully patient (and just as often impatient) queer audience, have come.
posted by Etrigan at 6:32 AM PST - 23 comments

Can the small Hawaiian island of Moloka‘i and its utility get along well enough to teach the rest of the world how to get off fossil-fueled electricity? [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 6:01 AM PST - 14 comments

A brief history of cheating at video games [Engadget] “For as long as we've played games, there have been players willing to break the rules in order to win. Whether it's rolling weighted dice, counting cards, or hip checking pinball machines, you can bet your bottom dollar that if there's a game of chance, someone's working to work the odds in their favor. [...] Whether you exploit them or not, cheats are an intractable facet of modern gaming. They help developers test and debug their programs faster, with less effort, while providing a leg up for players otherwise overwhelmed by a game's difficulty.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:30 AM PST - 24 comments

A paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that dogs’ faces are structured for complex expression in a way that wolves’ aren’t, thanks to a special pair of muscles framing their eyes. These muscles are responsible for that “adopt me” look that dogs can pull by raising their inner eyebrows. It’s the first biological evidence scientists have found that domesticated dogs might have evolved a specialized ability used expressly to communicate better with humans. [The Atlantic]
posted by jim in austin at 4:12 AM PST - 32 comments

Pygmy possums usually aren’t on the menu for huntsman spiders. But an Australian man from Tasmania has captured the rare moment a huntsman attempted to devour a tiny possum at a lodge in the Mount Field national park, 64 km north-west of Hobart. CW: PICS OF A SPIDER EATING A MAMMAL (Possum-eating spider previously)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:26 PM PST - 37 comments

Babylon 5 Is the Greatest, Most Terrible SF Series. Jennifer Giesbrecht takes an extended look at the best and worst aspects of this pathbreaking TV program 26 years after it first aired. Spoilerrific, of course.
posted by grouse at 3:45 PM PST - 110 comments

Actual clips from Amazon's union-busting training video that was sent to Whole Foods management in 2018. It was then leaked by Whole Worker to the media.
posted by adept256 at 2:27 PM PST - 44 comments

Mr Olds' Remarkable Elevator - Tom Scott explores a (recently discovered) counterintuitive engineering solution that had been hiding in plain sight
posted by Christ, what an asshole at 12:50 PM PST - 35 comments

Yardsley. Or she may possibly have punctured her tire—that would delay her fifteen or twenty minutes. Don’t worry, my dear boy. I showed her how to fix a punctured tire all right. It’s simple enough—you take the rubber thing they give you and fasten it in that metal thingumbob, glue it up, poke it in, pull it out, pump her up, and there you are.

Bradley (with a mock sigh of relief). You don’t know what a load you’ve taken off my mind.

For its 40th episode, The Wheel Friends (FB, Patreon)recreates The Bicyclers, the epitome of bicycle based comedy in 1896
posted by rebent at 12:30 PM PST - 1 comment

from the atlantic, more about where mh370 may have gone, and an american lawyer looking for the debris, over five years later.
posted by koroshiya at 12:26 PM PST - 35 comments

At the first annual Ugly Conference, attendees aren't trying to "reclaim" anything. They're just trying to be seen as they are. A Vice reporter recounts their experience at Oakland's first annual Ugly Conference, which was organized by Vanessa Rochelle Lewis after her picture made the rounds on the internet when a party promoter used it in a meme. Lewis hopes the conference is the "first in a series of gatherings designed to combat image-based prejudice and abuse." [more inside]
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 12:18 PM PST - 11 comments

The proposed strategy relies on manipulating with high precision an unimaginably huge number of variables
posted by hugbucket at 11:22 AM PST - 28 comments

Low-tech Magazine does small wooden wind turbines.
posted by clawsoon at 9:44 AM PST - 31 comments

The LA Review of Books revisits the life and writing of Ronald M. Schernikau

i am afraid. am female, am male, double. feel my body departing from my body, see my white hands, my eyes in the mirror, i don’t want to be double who am I? want to be me, male, female, see only white. i am facing myself, want to reach myself, stretch my arms out towards myself where am i? i see, kiss, hug and intermingle. at some point lea appears, then reappears, and at last he is aware of her. b. senses: he’s lying in bed, it’s morning, his room is blurry, he tries to take it in, feels the movement of his head, doesn’t try to steer it. no hope for a good day today, fuckingettingup, fuckingschool, fuckinglife.

posted by frimble at 8:45 AM PST - 1 comment

Mail-in diagnostic testing lacks the rigor and accuracy of actual medical testing. The results can be inaccurate and misleading even when true, as they lack context. Science and astrology are often seen as opposite poles... The implication is that anything making a scientific claim, like a medical test, should not be as squishy as astrology. Yet the same thing that drives some people toward astrology drives others toward mail-in test kits: People want to learn more about themselves and make sense of why they are the way they are. Your life might be fine, but perhaps it could be better if you understand yourself on a deeper level. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:46 AM PST - 30 comments

Will Native Americans be counted? [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 5:50 AM PST - 3 comments

English sumptuary laws (Wikipedia) started off with regulations on work attire, then a proclamation against 'outrageous consumption of meats and fine dishes' by nobles, in 1281 and 1309, respectively (Lords and Ladies.org). Next came the regulation of pointy shoes. Why Were Medieval Europeans So Obsessed With Long, Pointy Shoes? (Atlas Obscura) Want more? Check out The history of sumptuary law and shoes, a blog in which "the author attempts to describe a brief history of sumptuary laws and relate this to how legislation of the Middle Ages may have influenced the design and style of today’s shoes," though the latest post looks at early Christian times, and other cultures around the world.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:21 PM PST - 20 comments

Television Heaven tweeted 20 Things You Know Because of Television. Writer John Donoghue asked his followers "what else can we add?"
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:54 PM PST - 143 comments

Two motorcycle enthusiasts KiwiGrom are making videos and documenting their trip riding a pair of 8hp Honda Groms across the US, mostly off-road, via the Mid Atlantic Backroad Discovery Route and TransAmerica Trail. [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 4:21 PM PST - 13 comments

A friend who used to play at Augusta every year during non-tournament weeks (his father was a member) told me that, at dinner in the clubhouse, you could see the power of the green jacket in the body language of the guests, as they fawned over their host. Yet there was also a certain gelding effect: “Dad was not a humble man, but he was always nervous at Augusta. He didn’t want to break a rule. The club turned these high-powered men into boys.”
Writing for The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten takes us on a 10,000-word tour of Augusta National Golf Club during the 2019 Masters Tournament: its founding, its opulence, and its handling of media: “Inside the Cultish Dreamworld of Augusta National”. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 2:13 PM PST - 38 comments

The new exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage gets everything right—and fixes nothing. Dara Horn reviews “Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away" for The Atlantic. [more inside]
posted by colorblock sock at 12:43 PM PST - 34 comments

WNYC did a podcaster survey as part of their Werk It campaign and festival. "We received 612 responses in total from a self-selecting group of anonymous US-based participants who reported earnings in US dollars. These are a few of the headlines that emerged."
posted by hippybear at 11:14 AM PST - 16 comments

For the time, it would certainly have been subversive and risky to base the country’s most prominent symbol of haughty masculinity on Leyendecker’s own gay lover. Their forbidden love was in everyone’s faces in the ads of one of the country’s most prominent clothing manufacturers and on the covers of America’s favorite conservative magazine, though it remained hidden in plain sight—so much so that few sources even mentioned Leyendecker’s homosexuality until fairly recently. The Arrow Collar Man specifically, and the Leyendecker Man more generally, became the model of style, sophistication, and masculinity. What Maketh a Man: How queer artist J.C. Leyendecker invented an iconography of twentieth-century American masculinity by Tyler Malone
posted by chavenet at 10:59 AM PST - 5 comments

“Today in nightmare fuel: the “AXAYINC Dog Masks, Pet Entertainment Spoofs, Super Cute Masks Designed for Pets to Prevent Bites and Eat Unclean Food.” As the name very clearly implies, these masks, available on Amazon, serve as a fun way to keep your dog from biting things and eating food that is not clean (?) while also making your dog look like a serial killer.” [via: A.V. Club]
posted by Fizz at 10:54 AM PST - 18 comments

is Bloomsday! Bloomsday is a celebration that takes place both in Dublin and around the world. It celebrates Thursday 16 June 1904, which is the day depicted in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The day is named after Leopold Bloom, the central character in Ulysses. The novel follows the life and thoughts of Leopold Bloom and a host of other characters – real and fictional – from 8am on 16 June 1904 through to the early hours of the following morning. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 9:19 AM PST - 43 comments

Photos of Yugoslav monuments known as spomeniks are often shared online, exoticised and wrenched from context. But now, argues Owen Hatherley, it is vital that we make the effort to understand what they truly represent.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 6:58 AM PST - 23 comments

Since the 60s, *every* field has become beset by specialization, fueled by increasing competition for jobs and spiraling productivity, which forces researchers to take a narrow, goal-oriented, approach to science. Those who don't do this to some degree vanish. (twitter thread) [more inside]
posted by sammyo at 5:48 AM PST - 10 comments

Coldwar_Steve “I don’t know what I would do if couldn’t satirise these repellent, grotesque imbeciles. From the point of view of creating art, it’s a fantastic time, there’s so much material. But thinking of my daughters growing up in this world is frightening – a small, shrinking island, bitter little England. I just hope good will prevail in the end.” From The Guardian: 'His work features public figures in typically English settings – seaside towns, low-cost supermarkets, working men’s clubs, car boot sales, a nostalgic place of “Fray Bentos pies and insipid high streets”. Among the Brexit cast list are Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Theresa May, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Jeremy Corbyn and the Queen. An international presence is supplied by Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un.' Picture gallery, The Guardian. The Time Magazine cover, link from The Poke. [more inside]
posted by glasseyes at 3:06 AM PST - 21 comments

"If Sunkara asks “Freedom for whom?” Aaron Bastani wants to know “who will benefit?” The rise of Millennial Socialism (The New Statesman America) A specter is haunting the straight white liberal sixty-something American dad—the specter of his damn socialist kids. (Bookforum) "More than a century and a half after Marx first talked about the struggle between the ruling class and labour, the promise of capitalism — that progress was inevitable and would ultimately lead to good things for everyone — has proven empty for many people." Reclaiming Marxism in an age of meaningless work (CBC) "On further examination, I found a sign on printer paper attached to one of the side doors: LOOKING FOR SOCIALISTS? → THIS WAY!" Millennial Socialism from the point of view of the dictatorship of present. Say it loud, Say it proud, Democratic Socialism is the future (Medium) ‘We Have to Talk About Democratic Socialism as an Alternative to Unfettered Capitalism’ (The Nation)
posted by The Whelk at 10:55 PM PST - 109 comments

A brief history of the movie-summarizing end-credits rap from “Addams Family (Whoomp!)” to “Deepest Bluest” to far too many songs from Will Smith.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:21 PM PST - 30 comments

Can we just say some pizzas are demonstrably better than others? The quality gap between the best and worst regional styles is a wide chasm. This doesn’t apply to any other food in America with the exception of maybe barbecue (but even with barbecue, we’re talking about a genre, not a specific dish). And frankly, some city’s pizza styles are half-assed ideas that get disproportionate championing in the name of civic duty. Every city thinks it’s the best in America, and we know that’s just not possible. The same goes with pizza. (Kevin Pang, The Takeout)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:38 PM PST - 167 comments

"This almanac of 1659, now lost, featured the first appearance of a character named Lustucru, a blacksmith turned brain surgeon or 'operateur cephalique' ... In today’s terms, he went viral."
posted by todd at 1:44 PM PST - 8 comments

I’m sorry, have guys heard of the “Joe Pera Reads You The Church Announcements” episode of Joe Pera Talks With You? It rocks! It’s unbelievable! Music writer / politics reporter @DaveWeigel tweeted about it this morning and I haven’t slept since.
ed. note: this is a link to a website with a 10-minute long video. Here is a brief interview with Pera about this episode and others
posted by Going To Maine at 11:02 AM PST - 20 comments

Apollo 11 in real-time.
"This website replays the Apollo 11 mission as it happened, 50 years ago. It consists entirely of historical material.
Select whether to begin one minute before launch, or click "Now" to drop in exactly 50 years ago, to-the-second during the anniversary."
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:40 AM PST - 18 comments

The Side View is about "the knowledge and intuition we use to navigate the world. It’s about how our minds meet the world, but it’s also about how our minds, when trained in the right way, change how we perceive what’s around us and within us. In other words, The Side View is about how we become skillful perceivers and doers, people who know, in the moment, the right details to attend to and the right actions to take. But The Side View isn’t just about expertise or getting more efficient at things; it’s about learning how to deepen our engagement with a complex world..." [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 9:12 AM PST - 24 comments

Wiki Titles Singable to TMNT Themesong is a twitter bot that generates Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-style title art images based on wikipedia article titles singable to the TMNT theme song. [hat tip to waxpancake]
posted by cortex at 8:54 AM PST - 21 comments

The lab of famous battery scientist John Goodenough is working on Lithium batteries that use powdered glass as an electrolyte . One of the great advantages to this construction is reducing the well known risk of lithium battery explosions, which is leading to increasing fires in the scrap industry, and increasing the challenge of recycling. [more inside]
posted by unknown knowns at 11:14 PM PST - 17 comments

Actually, Air Bud sucks at basketball
posted by Chrysostom at 8:02 PM PST - 33 comments

Justin Kirkland interviews Billy Porter for Esquire: Three decades after Billy Porter’s career began, the people who once brushed him off for auditions are doing double takes. He’s caught the attention of fashion gurus with bold and stylish moments on the red carpet. And now that people are listening, he has a few things he’d like to share: memories of breaking free from abuse and his own doubt. Words about respect and acceptance. But most of all, what he's sharing makes one thing clear—Billy Porter didn’t evolve into this phenomenon. It took thirty years for the world to catch up.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:15 AM PST - 8 comments

Jessica Cantarelli's husband's family owns an independent pizzeria in Chicago. She explains the costs that go into a basic 15-inch cheese pizza, including the $0.30 for the box.
posted by Etrigan at 9:44 AM PST - 102 comments

“Millions of other people watch all this as well. It’s true that the broader Fox project was always to make those viewers—Trump, your septuagenarian relatives, and everyone else feeling as though the elite liberal cultural complex has quietly been robbing them blind through much of their adult lives—receptive to conservative politics. But the actual election to the presidency of a Fox News addict whose understanding of politics is shaped wholly by the television he watches and his own legacy grievances and biases presents a different suite of challenges. Trump’s towering incuriosity and impatience with other people have ensured that, despite having a massive intelligence-and-policy apparatus at his command, he continues to get most of his information from his television.” The Man Who Was Upset (New Republic)
posted by The Whelk at 9:42 AM PST - 20 comments

Megavalanche 2018 SLYT that is all
posted by allkindsoftime at 9:39 AM PST - 25 comments

Boston Dynamics: New Robots Now Fight Back [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:37 AM PST - 31 comments

GQ and How Not to Talk About Men’s Bodies "It’s no secret that the media reinforces our beliefs about our own bodies and other people’s bodies, and that it’s much worse for women and nonbinary people than men; our sister site Jezebel has been grappling with this for at least a decade, and is still grappling with it. As Atlantic writer Amanda Mull pointed out yesterday, however, men’s media is so far behind (with a few exceptions) that it doesn’t even know it has a problem." Paul Blest [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 9:14 AM PST - 31 comments

"There's a modern (or at least louder in modern era) tendency in both fiction and the interpretation of fiction that every narrative be some sort of very specific kind of hyper-literal puzzle box that can be 'solved' by wikis and lore and clues" is near the start of a 2017 Twitter thread by Scott Benson. "After we released our game I was really blown away by how large the hunger for really concrete literal explanations were for things that were by design shadowy and vague and open to interpretation. But like, not in the sense of 'hey I'm curious', but 'hey, you left this out, when are you going to finish it or write the backstory lore etc'" [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 7:59 AM PST - 88 comments

When you’re in the mood for Kool-Aid, you can walk into a grocery store and chose from about 20 different flavor packets all priced at about a quarter a piece. However, if you’re in the market for some quintessentially classic, high-grade, “Oh Yeah!”-era Kool-Aid (YouTube), you’ll have to enter the fruit-flavored underbelly of one the most intriguing subsets in the world of pop culture food enthusiasts: the black market of vintage Kool-Aid packet collectors. Will Hodge writes for The Takeout, interviewing Matt of Dinosaur Dracula (previously), who is a fan of old and rare Kool-Aid flavors, going so far as to mix and drink really old Kool-Aid.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:55 AM PST - 29 comments

You got stuck trying to get the chest. Find the way out. [more inside]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 7:53 AM PST - 8 comments

Deepfakes are troubling. But disinformation doesn’t have to be high tech to be damaging. The deepfake is becoming more common. But the recent fake video of a "drunken" Pelosi was more of a cheapfake- and it was just as damaging. Numerous news organizations quickly debunked the video, but the damage to public trust was already done. Many will never know the video was a fake, but the advantages it gave to pundits will echo into the future. It’s a recent example of what legal theorists Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron call the liar’s dividend. Those wishing to deny the truth can create disinformation to support their lie, while those caught behaving badly can write off the evidence of bad behavior as disinformation. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:27 AM PST - 20 comments

Every person on earth needs food every day. Every day, food is tended, harvested, transported, stored, and served up on our tables. In a very real sense, food cannot be separated from life itself. And so it has been said that changing the way we grow and eat food is one of the most powerful tools we have for changing our economies and society as a whole. So when we ask: what will the farms of the future look like? We should really be asking — what do we want the future to look like? And then answers may begin to emerge. [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 6:40 AM PST - 22 comments

No Man's Sky fans (previously) are buying a billboard to say thank you to Hello Games.
posted by tomcooke at 5:50 AM PST - 17 comments

P!nk the border collie wins back-to-back titles at the 2019 WKC Masters (SLYT)
posted by Harald74 at 4:18 AM PST - 31 comments

In 1991, there were no women in Swiss government, there was no statutory maternity leave, and some Swiss women had been granted the vote only the previous year. Fed up with such inequality and lack of respect, hundreds of thousands of Swiss women staged the biggest strike in Swiss history. Now, 28 years later, Swiss women are going on strike again to protest the lack of equality that plagues the country, which has an average 20% pay gap and 37% pension gap between men and women. You can follow the strike and its stories using the Twitter hashtag #frauenstreik2019. Also on Twitter, Anna Wiederkehr of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper shows what the news would look like without women: "No women, no media."
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:10 PM PST - 11 comments

Andrew Huang has written a song with a horse. [more inside]
posted by capricorn at 7:30 PM PST - 12 comments

Maciej Cegłowski on Facebook, Google, and the absence of "ambient privacy": "This requires us to talk about a different kind of privacy, one that we haven’t needed to give a name to before. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition."
posted by gwint at 5:47 PM PST - 51 comments

Michael Apted's 56-year-long documentary is back once again [previously] and [even more previously] and [hints of more previously before that]. 63-Up is the latest update on a group of 14 individuals filmed every seven years since their first appearance, aged seven in 1964.
posted by dogsbody at 2:44 PM PST - 46 comments

New video out today from King Princess. (N.B. the actual song doesn't begin until 0.55.) King Princess previously.
posted by Bee'sWing at 2:13 PM PST - 5 comments

IDC School of Design in Mumbai holds an annual Typography Day with a poster design contest. Here are winners from 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011. [more inside]
posted by rikschell at 2:08 PM PST - 4 comments

A single line tattoo. Across the chest, down the arm and around the fingers. Up forearms and down forearms. Back up the arm and over the shoulder. Across the chest and crawling down the back. Along the thighs. Up and down the spine once more. Neck flows into ear. Ears and ears and ears. Chin. Lip. (All links to artist Instagram posts.)
posted by not_the_water at 11:35 AM PST - 21 comments

James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed the Gaia Hypothesis of life on Earth in a vast interrelated self-stable complex system , named after a Greek primordial goddess. But what if our idea of feedback is incorrect? What if Life On Earth Is Ultimately Self-Destructive, as laid out in Peter Ward's Medea Hypothesis? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:27 AM PST - 16 comments

Medieval Christian theologians were OBSESSED with the cannibal baby question: if our bodies are resurrected in the Last Judgment, what happens if we were eaten? (CW: cannibalism, including medieval images of same.) [more inside]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 11:02 AM PST - 38 comments

Doctor Sleep [YouTube][Trailer]
posted by Fizz at 11:01 AM PST - 48 comments

There’s a subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where people pretend to be badly-disguised robots... There’s another subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2, that trains GPT-2 on various subreddits to create imitations of their output. Now r/SubSimulatorGPT2 has gotten to r/totallynotrobots, which means we get to see a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human. (source)
posted by Cozybee at 11:00 AM PST - 14 comments

Fascinating animation of the rise and fall in number of users of the most popular social media networks. Starts with Friendster in 2003, with so many others, coming and going, through 2018. (warning - annoying music). [more inside]
posted by j810c at 10:31 AM PST - 17 comments

"Now I want to hear 'All Star but it's a Madrigal' or 'All Star but it's a 40-part motet composed in the style of Thomas Tallis.'" TheWhiteSkull, Feb. '18. Ask, and it shall be given you.
posted by merriment at 9:54 AM PST - 23 comments

“From even a quick scan of the 20-plus page draft bill, it’s clear that decriminalizing sex work means dealing with more than just laws against prostitution per se. “This actually speaks to exactly how pervasive the criminalization of the sex industry is,” said State Senator Julia Salazar, “that it touches so many parts of the law the average person doesn’t think about when they think about prostitution being illegal.” A Historic Breakthrough for Sex Workers’ Rights: New York could become the first state to decriminalize prostitution. (The New Republic) Sex Work Is a Hot and Messy 2020 Political Issue (City Lab) Philosophy Tube: Sex work, criminalization, legalization, and decriminalization (43:00)
posted by The Whelk at 9:34 AM PST - 30 comments

Picture a Russian male stereotype. What image comes to mind? Is it a guy squatting in an Adidas tracksuit? A People's History of the "Slav Squat"
posted by dephlogisticated at 8:57 AM PST - 32 comments

The New York Times announced on Monday that it will cease publishing political cartoons, weeks after the newspaper came under fire for publishing a cartoon that was slammed because it had been deemed blatantly anti-Semitic. "I’m afraid this is not just about cartoons, but about journalism and opinion in general," Chappatte wrote. "Over the last years, some of the very best cartoonists… lost their positions because their publishers found their work too critical of Trump. Maybe we should start worrying. And pushing back. Political cartoons were born with democracy. And they are challenged when freedom is."
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:20 AM PST - 48 comments

Jeanna Kadlec writes for Nylon on how Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman, "this queer, feminist book, defined [some] millennial women. For a particular age bracket of millennial women, this book was our first feminist guidebook. It was the first fiction that insisted: God wouldn't have given me this if he didn't want me to use it. It said: Your parents don't necessarily know what is best for you. It taught us about consent, showed us that we alone owned our bodies and minds and futures."
posted by ChuraChura at 7:40 AM PST - 52 comments

A Guardian long-read about food and identity Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon has written a book: My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong, from which this is an excerpt. Quote beneath the fold [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 7:13 AM PST - 5 comments

Earth's clingy best friend is also the site of one of the largest-known impact craters in our entire solar system. Essentially, something caused a giant hole on the moon billions of years ago, and astronomers have just discovered that there's something big -- really big -- buried underneath the surface. [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 6:36 AM PST - 62 comments

An Oral History of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Perfect Men in Black ‘Sugar Water’ Scene On the eve of the release of the latest Men In Black movie, Rachel Handler at Vulture looks back at one of most memorable scenes from the original film. [more inside]
posted by Servo5678 at 6:00 AM PST - 27 comments

From the essay Hong Kong Food Runes: Nobody knows I’m a fraud. No one here knows where I live, but they assume I live nearby—every evening with my punters’ guide, a black notebook, and a dozen bottles of beer. Like an unassuming creeper, I leisurely slot myself into taking food orders for customers when the noodle-stall keeper does not have enough hands, until eventually I’m asked to simply open the till for change. [more inside]
posted by taz at 4:45 AM PST - 24 comments

reply to this with the weirdest image in your phone gallery ill start (NSFW, SLTwitter) [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:59 PM PST - 17 comments

In mammals, there's a relatively simple relationship among metabolism, body mass, and lifespan. For the most part, as the size of the mammal goes up, its metabolism slows down and its longevity increases. But a new paper (Nature, abstract only, paywalled article) about longevity includes a remarkable statistic: "Nineteen species of mammals live longer than humans, given their body size, of which 18 are bats." Why do bats have such bizarrely long lifespans? (Ars Technica) Meanwhile, in herpetology -- rattlesnakes held in captivity live an average of 15 years. Herpetologist William Brown has spent decades studying a population of timber rattlers in upstate New York, and he's identified two snakes that may about 40 to 50 years old. The Town that Lives with Rattlesnakes (Outside Online)
posted by filthy light thief at 9:41 PM PST - 23 comments

How modern life is transforming the human skeleton: ... our skeletons are surprisingly malleable. The pure white remains displayed in museums may seem solid and inert, but the bones beneath our flesh are very much alive ... and they’re constantly being broken down and rebuilt. So although each person’s skeleton develops according to a rough template set out in their DNA, it is then tailored to accommodate the unique stresses of their life. [more inside]
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:31 PM PST - 18 comments

NPR's Fresh Air recently featured a full episode interview with Lizzo! [45m] Transcript
posted by hippybear at 8:02 PM PST - 6 comments

"But a growing awareness among women hasn’t been enough to fix the problem. The thing many people don’t want to acknowledge, and the thing stopping us from making more progress toward housework equality, is the resistance of men. Men remain unwilling to do their fair share of housework and childcare: they are oblivious, willfully ignorant, or pathologically indifferent to the stress and suffering of the women around them."
posted by Lycaste at 6:43 PM PST - 129 comments

These features are part of the Gorda Ridge, a tectonic spreading center located off the border of California and Oregon. The Newly Discovered Apollo Vent Field. Via the SUBSEA (Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog) Research Program. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:37 PM PST - 5 comments

For Pride month, five queer-focused fictions — by queer authors and/or about queer characters — translated from Arabic that you can read online. Authors include Muhammad Abdelnabi, Mortada Gzar, Sahar Mandour, Alexandra Chreiteh, Amahl Khouri and Raji Bathish.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 3:52 PM PST - 7 comments

What did (English-language) alphabet books do before we invented xylophones and X-ray machines?
posted by Chrysostom at 2:03 PM PST - 53 comments

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was an instant classic upon its release in March of 2017, propelling monster sales of itself and the Nintendo Switch console (much-needed after the disappointing performance of the WiiU and the disastrous "Year of Luigi") and gaining the most perfect reviews of any video game in history. Which is probably why the internet went a little bit wild yesterday when Nintendo finished their E3 Direct with a trailer announcing the venerated title's sequel. With only those ninety seconds to go on, speculation has been rampant, with the most compelling theory being that this will finally be the game in which Zelda is a playable character...
posted by Navelgazer at 1:17 PM PST - 50 comments

Where we are in 2019 - a view of the current set of spacecraft in our solar system and beyond, courtesy of The Planetary Report.
posted by Stark at 12:35 PM PST - 9 comments

Kneel Before Zack [The Ringer] “This is the story of #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, the most bizarre sustained fan campaign in modern superhero-movie history, arbitrary and fearsomely dedicated, fascinating and bewildering, possibly hopeless and legitimately inspiring. It is led by people who wish Justice League were more than three and a half hours long, but also, in their defense, an entirely different movie. ”
posted by Fizz at 10:49 AM PST - 52 comments

The Myth Of The Impartial Machine, Alice Feng and Shuyan Wu
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:28 AM PST - 4 comments

Alphabet-Owned Jigsaw Bought a Russian Troll Campaign as an Experiment.
posted by adept256 at 10:17 AM PST - 35 comments

A review of the Facebook accounts of thousands of police officers across the US found one in five current officers made public posts or comments that were racist, or endorsed violence against black people, Muslims, women, and criminal defendants. Among retired officers, the figure was two in five. The database is the largest of its kind. (Buzzfeed News) (CW hate speech)
posted by The Whelk at 9:24 AM PST - 55 comments

"Friends and heartthrobs of the past, future, and present: where I am now, the temperature has begun its slow climb, and summer is preparing its eviction notice for all the gentle breezes and drives with windows down and the incessant joyful choir of birds. We will soon have to settle for less pleasing aesthetics of romance. Sweat becomes romantic because it will happen whether or not I want it to, and I’ve got to make the best of it." Hanif Abdurraqib's Notes on Pop in The Paris Review: On Whitney Houston, On Summer Crushing
posted by everybody had matching towels at 8:47 AM PST - 5 comments

Dancing Bacons is a youtuber actively documenting the street foods of Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. One of their obsessions is the world of vending machines. So enjoy their footage of a salmon vending machine, cotton candy vending machine, Probably World 1st Ice Cream Fun-Vending Machine, pizza, cake, popiah, coconut, hot cheese snacks, water, gelato, and magic Coke vending machines. [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 8:11 AM PST - 16 comments

Is There Artistic Merit In This Painting Of A-Rod Sitting On His Toilet? An Investigation
posted by Literaryhero at 8:05 AM PST - 7 comments

The Doomsday Clock is set to two minutes to midnight—the same position it held in 1953, when the United States and USSR detonated their first hydrogen bombs. So why don't we make movies about nuclear war anymore?
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 5:56 AM PST - 77 comments

People worldwide could be ingesting five grammes of microscopic plastic particles every week. Coming mostly from tap and especially bottled water, nearly invisible bits of polymer were also found in shellfish, beer and salt. "If we don't want it in our bodies, we need to stop the millions of tons of plastic that continue leaking into Nature every year." [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 4:24 AM PST - 31 comments

The vernacular architecture of Africa (architecture built out of local materials and using traditional construction techniques) is very diverse. People build with what materials are locally available, and this varies due to what area of Africa it is. Click on a country icon to view the diversity and beauty of African vernacular architecture.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 12:26 AM PST - 13 comments

For sixty years, conventional wisdom has told us that women generally did not perform rock and roll during the 1950s. The reality is, however, that hundreds—or maybe thousands—of women and girls performed and recorded rock and roll in its early years. And many more participated in other ways: writing songs, owning or working for record labels, working as session or touring musicians, designing stage wear, dancing, or managing talent—to give just a few examples. The Women in Rock Project is working to document these musicians, artists, and other women in the first wave of rock'n'roll, from Faye Adams to “The Duchess,” Norma-Jean Wofford, with biographies and partial discographies, and some interviews. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:20 PM PST - 8 comments

Jon Stewart testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, speaking out demanding the continued funding for the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund.
posted by hippybear at 7:59 PM PST - 52 comments

Françoise Gilot, 97, Does Not Regret Her Pablo Picasso Memoir Gilot, an artist in her own right, does not regret the (at the time) controversial book she wrote about her 10 years with Picasso. To be republished this year, she had a few words to share with the NYTimes - all of them on point. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 7:47 PM PST - 7 comments

Cats 'Farm' Bacteria in Their Butts (Live Science). Why do they do this? Cats use their anal glands to produce a stinky pheromone spray made up of many volatile chemicals (which they use to mark their territory with messages that tell others who they are and whether they're ready to mate). And it turns out they probably don't make most of those smelly chemicals themselves; they outsource a lot of the production to microbes that live in those glands, new research reveals. (bioRxiv) (PDF) [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 7:26 PM PST - 14 comments

Jonathan Frakes Asks You Things
posted by griphus at 5:03 PM PST - 42 comments

"I made a human flesh coin purse" Twitter | Threadreader
"I want to carry in this" Twitter | Threadreader
"Please look for a guy who is not scared" Twitter | Threadreader
"Search search 'Metabo bag'!
"By the way, type w which may be attached to the butt side is also w" Twitter | Threadreader
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:53 PM PST - 28 comments

Mavis Staples turns 80 on July 10, 2019. She's on a birthday tour, and in May she released her 12th studio album entitled We Get By (Bandcamp, and full album stream from ANTI- records on Youtube). WTF with Marc Maron interview (June 10, 2019 - interview starts at 14:55). [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:20 PM PST - 22 comments

"Music is emotional, and so our listening often signals something deeply personal and private. Today, this means music streaming platforms ... have troves of data related to our emotional states, moods, and feelings. As it turns out, in a move that should not surprise anyone at this point, Spotify has been selling access to that listening data to multinational corporations." Big Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly for the Baffler.
posted by RedOrGreen at 2:16 PM PST - 35 comments

At least when it comes to inventing an effective tagging system better than anything big tech can deliver so they can enjoy their Steve/Tony slash, as Wired's Gretchen McCulloch explains.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:41 AM PST - 32 comments

Battered by poverty, discrimination and climate change, Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Reservation are raising homes – and hope – for the next generation. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:49 AM PST - 8 comments

How Mobile, Alabama fought urban blight to restore abandoned houses. Why a small group of Government employees, including "a landscape architect, a dreadlocked anthropologist, and an industrial designer with a man bun", fought to change the state constitution to make it easier for the state to seize property - and how they did it. Also featuring the strategic deployment of bright pink stickers, a $22 plate of red beans and rice, and one determined "house-hugger".
posted by Gin and Broadband at 10:32 AM PST - 14 comments

Back in 2000, economist Robin Hanson proposed futarchy, a governance model in which people would Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs.
"Under this system, individuals would vote not on whether or not to implement particular policies, but rather on a metric to determine how well their country (or charity or company) is doing, and then prediction markets would be used to pick the policies that best optimize the metric. " [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:25 AM PST - 28 comments

The next true installment in the Nintendo franchise is (now) slated for a March 2020 release (previously: 2019). Video on twitter (alternative). As usual, you attempt to build an idyllic life from within a capitalist economic system controlled by Tom Nook, with crafting being a significant activity. Features a flimsy axe, sunsets, camp sites, fireflies, and crippling debt.
posted by Wordshore at 10:21 AM PST - 27 comments

Can video games have an ideology? (Previously on Sim City) Yaz Minsky thinks so: Sid Meier at the End of History: the Philosophy and Politics of Alpha Centauri (58:00) can working on video games have an ideology? On March 4, 2019, three creators—two of the creators of independent video game Night in the Woods, Scott Benson and Bethany Hockenberry, along with prolific artist/musician Wren Farren—announced rather suddenly that they’d established The Glory Society, a new worker cooperative video game studio.
posted by The Whelk at 9:05 AM PST - 20 comments

Fowl Play: Chickens in Video Games [Forces of Geek] “In video games however, chickens have a long and varied history, they’ve become something of a joke and have also been treated pretty badly so it’s no surprise that in some games they are straight up evil. [...] Chicken abuse has been a constant and re-occurring theme in gaming. For some reason, we enjoy attacking them, mocking them and using their limited ability of short range flight for our own means. [...] Then again, some of the chickens in games are so formidable I wonder if it’s a commentary on their treatment in the real world, what would chickens like to do to us humans as recompense for our treatment of them?” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:15 AM PST - 54 comments

507 Mechanical Movements
posted by storybored at 8:02 AM PST - 17 comments

In 2018 Seinabo Say sat down with Billboard to talk about her upcoming second album, "I'm a Dream." From Billboard: On her critically acclaimed debut album, 2015’s Pretend, the Swedish-Gambian singer battled self-doubt and self-sabotage on soul-pop tracks like “Younger,” which chastised herself for not working harder, and “Who,” a brutal self-interrogation that asked questions like: Who do you think you are? What have you done to deserve that? But on her upcoming second album, I’m a Dream, she’s noticeably changed her tune. The video for the first single, the ominous banger “I Owe You Nothing,” sees Sey posing like royalty as she declares, “I don’t have to smile for you/ I don’t have to move for you/ I don’t have to ‘dance, monkey dance’ for you." [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 7:56 AM PST - 5 comments

Despite initial statements minimizing the extent of the loss, court documents reveal that a 2008 fire at Universal Studios wiped out an immense collection of irreplacable master tapes of some of the 20th century's greatest recording artists: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, Etta James, Buddy Holly, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra. The list goes on. (SLNYT)
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:49 AM PST - 56 comments

Juzzie Smith busking blues with a unique technique. An infectiously happy and stunning to watch one man band. [more inside]
posted by asok at 6:38 AM PST - 5 comments

The Secret Rebellion of Amelia Bedelia, the Bartleby of Domestic Work
posted by Chrysostom at 9:48 PM PST - 36 comments

The New England Patriots coach, who has took the Patriots to 9 Super Bowls has a degree in economics and has NO time to waste. The New England Patriots have ruled the NFL since 2001 and it seems that they are not going anywhere. They are here to stay.
posted by YankeeKing6700 at 9:00 PM PST - 55 comments

88 year old dad and 53 year old son At the airport (SLYT)
posted by growabrain at 7:32 PM PST - 7 comments

Australia's ABC Classic FM asked its listeners to vote for their top 10 favourite composers, and over the weekend of 8-9 June counted down the top 100 results. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of long-dead white men, but also some unexpected results - who would have thought 12th-century nun Hildegard von Bingen would make it as high as 33? And although Aboriginal Australian composer William Barton clocked in at 87, at least he is still alive so has time to climb the ranks. [more inside]
posted by Athanassiel at 7:23 PM PST - 27 comments

The 45th Annual Origins Game Fair kicks off in Columbus, Ohio this Wednesday. Inaugurated in 1975 as the Origins International Game Expo in Baltimore, and initially focusing on large scale wargaming, the Convention has taken place in Columbus, Ohio since 1996 and was renamed Origins Game Fair in 2007. Origins is second only to Gen Con in size with almost 20,000 attendees in 2018. While Gen Con might be considered the darling of the industry, with more premiere issues and far more attendees overall, Origins still enjoys the participation of a large number of game publishers. [more inside]
posted by hearthpig at 7:04 PM PST - 15 comments

"I've heard of Fantasy Football but Fantasy Shipping Forecast?" Using the daily 0048 Shipping Forecast from the Met Office, we take the average of each gale force mentioned for an area to determine that area's score. Pick a dream team of five sea areas, and your team's score will be the average of the scores of those regions, both daily and weekly. [more inside]
posted by Hal Mumkin at 5:49 PM PST - 10 comments

Patricia Battin, Lightning Rod in a Library War, Dies at 89 (New York Times): In the 1980s, she led a national campaign to save millions of disintegrating books that were published between 1850 and 1950, persuading Congress to increase its funding for microfilming these so-called brittle books.To many librarians, Ms. Battin, who died on April 22 at 89, was a pioneer and a visionary. Horrified that the printed word seemed to be crumbling to dust before her eyes, she helped lead the profession out of the dark ages and embraced the digital revolution. To others, however, this revolution was misguided. It was, they said, stoked by hyperbole and had devastating consequences: the destruction of irreplaceable original documents. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 5:19 PM PST - 10 comments

At University of California at Santa Barbara's ScienceLine, UCSB research scientists answer questions from teachers and students in K-12 schools. Are you "confused about the hearts of insects?" Maybe you want to know "Where does salt come from?" Or perhaps you have "been researching, and Venus seems AWFUL. Is there anything good about Venus?" [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 4:47 PM PST - 10 comments

Tyson had a story to tell. Tyson had become a dedicated marijuana user. After he'd endured years of more serious substance abuse, weed had helped him come out of the shadows. He was a chilled-out 50-something tennis dad who'd seemingly put active self-destruction behind him. Hickman says that by that point he had “a lot of major A+ stars coming at me, trying to coordinate some branding in the [cannabis] space.” He says he met with Snoop and with representatives from Playboy. But no one made more sense than Mike Tyson. “It's changed his life,” Hickman says. “He's the perfect person.” Mike Tyson Smokes the Toad [SLGQ] [Content Warning: Tyson]
posted by chavenet at 1:12 PM PST - 9 comments

Daniel Danger has a plan. sltwitter, h/t to jpoulos
posted by yhbc at 10:54 AM PST - 142 comments

“Many right-wing creators already made long video essays, or posted video versions of their podcasts. Their inflammatory messages were more engaging than milder fare. And now that they could earn money from their videos, they had a financial incentive to churn out as much material as possible. A few progressive YouTube channels flourished from 2012 to 2016. But they were dwarfed by creators on the right, who had developed an intuitive feel for the way YouTube’s platform worked and were better able to tap into an emerging wave of right-wing populism.“I’m not sure the left understands the monumental ass-whupping being dished out to them on YouTube,” Mr. Watson, the conspiracy theorist, tweeted in 2017.” The Making Of A Youtube Radical (New York Times Feature Story)
posted by The Whelk at 8:59 AM PST - 135 comments

It may remain a little-known fact, but Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed. Some remarkable new books make this case in scholarly but accessible terms, and they admirably complicate our understanding of Africa’s past and present. ~ Howard French long read
posted by hugbucket at 8:43 AM PST - 21 comments

You Can't Beat An Unwinnable Game. But You Can Break It

In 2010, some random guy on the internet beat SimCity 3000. At least, that’s how articles on the internet described it at the time. What happened was a 22-year-old architecture student in the Philippines named Vincent Ocasla achieved gaming perfection. He painstakingly designed, without the aid of cheats, a city so complex and densely populated that it rendered all future attempts at SimCity pointless. It was beautiful and horrifying.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:11 AM PST - 29 comments

"One of the highest callings of science fiction is imagining utopia as a possible human future. I don't mean creating a fantasyland. I mean honest, earnest engagement with the question of what a better world looks like. " Writer Monica Byrne speaks on imagination, science fiction, and climate change in her Albright Institute talk, Our Age of Emergency: 2019-2100 (text of the talk as well as video).
posted by mixedmetaphors at 7:01 AM PST - 12 comments

Striving to be seen: Black Girl Gamers on Twitch [BGG] “BGG has nearly 6,000 followers on Twitter and more than 4,000 followers on Twitch, and it's been featured in publications including Blavity, BBC Radio 4 and Vice's Broadly. BGG partners with other organizations, such as Intel's AnyKey, to support inclusivity efforts on all sides of video game development and consumption. "We really want to work with game developers to be able to represent the community more accurately," Lopez said. "To be able to represent the community not just as a token, as well, but also get people -- young, black girls -- into coding."” [via: Engadget] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:19 AM PST - 8 comments

Ethereum for humans - "A bit pathetically, much of what I have been doing for the past two years is working on a software project called sbt-ethereum."[1] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 5:49 AM PST - 16 comments

The process that imprisoned Lula & rendered him ineligible to run – paving the way for Bolsonaro's ascension to power – was fueled by wrongdoing, politicized abuse of power & deceit: all of which will now be revealed due to this massive leaked archive of their secrets. 1/3 How and why The Intercept is reporting on a vast trove of materials about Brazil’s operation Car Wash and justice minister Sergio Moro [more inside]
posted by Tom-B at 4:15 AM PST - 12 comments

After laying off a quarter of its staff this May, Maker Media -- founder of the San Mateo Maker Faire and Make Magazine -- has ceased operations and laid off remaining staff. [more inside]
posted by Ogre Lawless at 10:47 PM PST - 24 comments

"His DNA solved a century-old jailhouse rape. The victim: his grandmother." (SLBNP)
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:28 PM PST - 9 comments

The doughnut culture of Southern California.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:40 PM PST - 73 comments

James Corden and basically all of Broadway opens this year's Tony awards with 10 minutes that illustrate and remind you of why live theater is so thrilling.
posted by hippybear at 8:20 PM PST - 29 comments

National Weather Service meteorologists noticed something puzzling on their radar screens in Southern California last Tuesday evening — a big green blob, spanning 80 miles by 80 miles (130 km by 130 km) (Reuters), with the most concentrated mass about 10 miles (16 km) wide (Sacramento Bee). It was a clear day with no expectations of rain or thunderstorms, so the meteorologists called a weather spotter in Wrightwood, Calif., near the blob's location in San Bernardino County. The spotter told them the mysterious cloud was actually a giant swarm of ladybugs (NPR), also known as a ladybug bloom (NWS San Diego tweet).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:12 PM PST - 15 comments

A million people in the streets: Organisers say that one million people took to the streets to protest the controversial Hong Kong proposed extradition law. If those figures are correct, it represents 1 in 7 Hong Kong residents. [more inside]
posted by frumiousb at 7:54 PM PST - 63 comments

ONE

My dad died. Classic start to a funny story. He was buried in a small village in Sussex. I was really close to my dad so I visited his grave a lot. I still do. [DON’T WORRY, IT GETS FUNNIER.] (Twitter | Threadreader)

[more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:22 PM PST - 58 comments

Long Read: Digging to the Mining Arc.
In this journey, we talked to miners, companies, academics, indigenous, politicians and activists and gathered exclusive material on Latin America’s most underreported natural resources conflict.
Venezuela’s gold fever fuels gangs and insecurity: 'There will be anarchy'.
posted by adamvasco at 3:09 PM PST - 2 comments

Studio 188 makes trailers. Low-budget trailers. They often involve creative uses of food. Terminator 2. The Fifth Element. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Pirates of the Caribbean. The Matrix. Avengers: Endgame. And there's more! [more inside]
posted by Anonymous at 12:23 PM PST - 12 comments

“Working- and middle-class people have a vested interest in infrastructure investment. They depend on good public roads, schools, and parks. Wealthy people don’t. If public services frazzle, they can opt out to private alternatives. And the more wealth concentrates, the more our political leaders tilt the wealthy’s way. The wealthy do not like paying for public services they don’t use. Political leaders don’t make them. They cut taxes and deny public services the funds they need to thrive.” The World Would Be a Better Place Without the Rich (Jacobin) [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 5:45 AM PST - 104 comments

“We’ve got ten months to deliver two games to Sony, and they are cheering over a black triangle? THAT took them nearly a month to develop?” If it may not look like much to the casual observer, but you know how important it is - it might be a black triangle. Games developer Jay Barnson on the project breakthroughs that don't give you much to show off. [more inside]
posted by Gin and Broadband at 5:19 AM PST - 31 comments

How China Is Planning to Rank 1.3 Billion People - "Yet educated, urban Chinese take a positive view, seeing social credit systems as a means to promote honesty in society and the economy rather than a privacy violation, according to a poll by Mercator Institute for China Studies."[1] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 2:34 AM PST - 37 comments

The diet industry is a virus. "I’m still trying to separate my worth from my appearance. They are two necklaces that have gotten tangled over the course of my 35 years, their thin metal chains tied up in thin metal knots. Eventually, I will pry them apart." Jessica Knoll for the NYT Sunday Review
posted by bq at 7:48 PM PST - 68 comments

The mighty New York Yankees have won one World Series since 2001, in 2009. The 21st century belongs to the Boston Red Sox The mighty New York Yankees have won 27 World Series championships. They have failed to add No. 28 since 2010, and those were the last years of the Jeter-Rivera-Pettitte-Posada-A-Rod days. Since then, the Yankees have rebuilt, and rebuilt under a Yankee farm system that produced Judge, Severino, etc., but they still have not reached No. 28. Yankee fans are waiting and are restless. Yankees expect to win the World Series every year. It's fact. Call To the Pen link
posted by YankeeKing6700 at 6:28 PM PST - 58 comments

History’s Greatest Horse Racing Cheat and His Incredible Painting Trick [Hidden History] In the sport’s post-Depression heyday, one audacious grifter beat the odds with an elaborate scam: disguising fast horses to look like slow ones.

“He was a master, at 38, of the various measures a man could take to bend the odds at the track. He knew, for example, just how much heroin to shoot into a horse’s neck to make him “think he was Pegasus,” as the Daily News put it in 1932 (about 30 milligrams by hypodermic needle, or 160 milligrams down the throat). But it was Barrie’s fingernails that told the story of his particular genius: They were nearly gone, eaten away by the bleach and ammonia he rubbed into the hides of thoroughbred horses so that racetrack stewards, detectives, jockeys, and even the horse’s own trainers mistook them for entirely different creatures.”

posted by Fizz at 5:36 PM PST - 9 comments

Dagwood was living a perfect life of adventure with his sister, Bucket, and his parents, Brianna and Keith, but then the unimaginable happened when he was hit by a car. Doctors said he only had a 10% chance of surviving. Watch him prove everyone wrong as his dedicated family helps him through it. Keep up with them on Instagram.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:19 PM PST - 16 comments

The world's best bounty hunter Is 4'11", and sees her childhood of building computers and soldering motherboards as helping her current career -- “Profiling a subject is a lot like constructing a motherboard,” Michelle Gomez says. “You have to see connections that are invisible to other people by filling the spaces between with information.” (Wired) Despite its macho image, Gomez said women naturally have qualities that make them well-suited for bounty hunting. “We have intuition that a man doesn't have. You won’t find your subject with muscles and an ego,” she said. (Make Change)
posted by filthy light thief at 1:59 PM PST - 15 comments

(Don't) Be The Gray Man - Patrick Steedman : "It would’ve been much worse if my friend had bought the gun, learned how to use it, and told no one, blending in with his creative professional peers among whom gun ownership is uncommon. That would have made him a gray man, which is like normcore for preppers, except in the ways that it isn’t." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:41 AM PST - 110 comments

The first steps towards creating the internet were taken in the 1960s. Originally, the internet was established to serve a common good. The idea of the pioneers of the internet was to connect people all around the world, regardless of their location. Within these years, it has taken on new dimensions. Therefore, the internet has to be analysed from different perspectives, taking into consideration the long-term futuristic view but also recognising the risks.
posted by hugbucket at 7:32 AM PST - 10 comments

35 stupid crafts one can make with cement, set to horrible upbeat music. (The last several use polymer clay.) [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 10:33 PM PST - 90 comments

America's Test Kitchen teaches you how to make the best grilled pizza [video link, segment starts at 0m50s, ends at 9m45s]. Like, seriously, we've had this a lot and it's amazing.
posted by hippybear at 10:25 PM PST - 22 comments

"I’m sure this is the kind of essay where you expect to find a picture of me casually standing in my sun-dappled kitchen, a woven basket full of my farmer’s market bounty propped against my hip as I lean seductively on my impeccable farmhouse sink, fully hydrated and ready to pass a firm, fiber-enriched stool." Except, of course, there are no farm-fresh tomatoes, and this is not that kind of essay. You know what Samantha Irby does eat? Poppin’ Jalapeño Doritos. A single-link Medium essay on using up what's in the refrigerator, delivery as a food group, and what we eat, standing over the sink, when there's no one else around.
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:59 PM PST - 21 comments

Simone Giertz, Queen of Shitty Robots, celebrates the completion of x-ray therapy for her brain tumor by turning her radiation mask into a Westworld-style LED lamp. (previously and previouslier)
posted by Doktor Zed at 4:59 PM PST - 10 comments

The story wouldn’t show her as a picture-perfect parent, but it would show her as the person I saw her to be: a woman working to assert her presence in a world that had, for a long time, refused to see her.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:02 PM PST - 8 comments

According to the plan outlined today, NASA will be rolling back its restrictions on for-profit and marketing activities on the space station. Companies will now be able to pay for astronauts to help advertise their products and use the space station facilities for manufacturing and other money-making ventures. NASA also says it will open the space station to short-duration stays by commercial astronauts traveling on private spacecraft, which it says could begin as early as next year. Additionally, NASA says it will lease the last open port on the ISS, where a new module can attach, to a private company and expects to award that contract by the end of the fiscal year. [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 12:46 PM PST - 64 comments

What to expect from E3 2019 [The Verge] “For fans looking to hear about the future of games, E3 has always been an exciting week. This year, though, there’s a big cloud hanging over the show. Two of the biggest names in the industry aren’t holding their usual press conferences; mega publisher Electronic Arts will instead be live streaming news and announcements over the course of a weekend; and Sony isn’t just forgoing a keynote, it’s skipping E3 altogether. [...] It has left some to ponder — and not for the first time — whether E3 is even relevant any more. Should you still be excited?” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:37 AM PST - 88 comments

From the darkness, it reared its head. An aquiline nose, about a foot in length, jutted forth from the androgynous sculpture like only a Picasso can – yet, a Picasso it was not. The startling work was made by Anton Prinner, yet another of the art world’s more overlooked sensations. To the public, he was a mystery. To Picasso, he was “Monsieur Madame,” because Prinner — née Anna Prinner – only adopted a male identity when he moved from his native Budapest to Paris in the 1920s. It was there, in the heat of the Left Bank in the roaring ’20s, that he used art to bring his journey with gender identity into a more public sphere. Then, just as swiftly as he burst on the scene, he disappeared. Anton Prinner is the Genderqueer Picasso We Need in the 21st Century (Messy Nessy Chic) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:39 AM PST - 7 comments

“Uber is the breakthrough case where the public perception of a large new company was entirely created using the types of manufactured narratives typically employed in partisan political campaigns. Narrative construction is perhaps Uber’s greatest competitive strength. The company used these techniques to completely divert attention away from the massive subsidies that were the actual drivers of its popularity and growth.” Uber’s Path of Destruction (American Affairs)
posted by The Whelk at 9:14 AM PST - 65 comments

Indie rock spent the past 20 years learning to love the Grateful Dead. Now what? (SL WAPO)
posted by josher71 at 8:57 AM PST - 52 comments

"The eighth Women’s World Cup, which begins Friday in France, comes at a pivotal time for the women’s game. For years, players around the world have demanded better pay and more support from their federations. In some countries, serious progress has been made; in many others, the fight continues. We wanted to know what it’s like to be an elite women’s soccer player in this moment." 108 Women’s World Cup Players on Their Jobs, Money and Sacrificing Everything [more inside]
posted by everybody had matching towels at 8:53 AM PST - 5 comments

How to Draw a Stick Figure. Ok, that kinda got complicated at the end. No worries, let's draw some stick figure comics.
posted by storybored at 8:48 AM PST - 7 comments

Vocal is a type foundry that makes typefaces that highlight the history of underrepresented people “from the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Argentina to the Civil Rights Movement in America”. For example, the Martin typeface is based on signs carried by marchers in the streets of Memphis after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. [via] [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong at 8:39 AM PST - 7 comments

How to parent like a BOSS (via)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:22 AM PST - 20 comments

Twitter thread: This is a work lunchtime game changer. The Mico is a toasted sandwich maker that you put in the microwave (it uses sealed silicon-coated metal plates). It's not new - something a bit burnt from December 2017 (this looks better), and a QVC promotional video shows a bacon and cheese toastie. YouTube (caution for 'cheese leakage'): the WHICH ultimate cheese toastie challenge (Morphy Richards Mico toastie vs Breville Deep Fill). Other sandwich toasters are available. (Disclosure: we're mutuals on cake-twitter)
posted by Wordshore at 3:18 AM PST - 55 comments

Mama Alto is a Melbourne, Australia-based queer trans non-binary femme of colour who is also an accomplished jazz cabaret artiste, creative producer, and community activist. Her work intertwines and uplifts the stories and experiences of people of colour, queer and trans people, and other marginalised identities, whether through reimagining jazz classics or through direct advocacy. [more inside]
posted by divabat at 2:42 AM PST - 5 comments

[...]A year later, though, Securly also began offering "sentiment analysis" of students' social media posts, looking for signs they might be victims of cyberbullying or self-harm. In 2016, the company expanded that analysis to students' school email accounts, monitoring all messages sent over district networks. It also created an "emotionally intelligent" app that sends parents weekly reports and automated push notifications detailing their children’s internet searches and browsing histories[...]

via Zeynep Tufekci on twitter
posted by postcommunism at 10:02 PM PST - 33 comments

The longest train ride in the world.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:06 PM PST - 14 comments

"We made this absurd comedy that has full frontal male nudity and all these drug jokes, that people are still moved by—that to me is a perfect movie." Dewey Cox Ain’t Dead: An Oral History of ‘Walk Hard’ [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:00 PM PST - 17 comments

A Four Day Workweek Could Be Coming to the U.K. (a podcast for work! or leisure ;) - "If you live in the U.K., your workweek could soon be a day shorter if the political winds tilt more heavily toward the left. Jess Shankleman reports on how the proposal is gaining momentum and how it might affect Britain, then Bloomberg Opinion columnist Noah Smith joins host Stephanie Flanders for a deeper look at the economic questions raised by the four-day week."[1,2] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 7:21 PM PST - 28 comments

Dr. John, The Night Tripper, has gone into the night. Mack Rebennack has been not only a godfather of New Orleans sound, but also a messenger from more mysterious parts of the bayou. At 77 on 6/6, RIP.
posted by moonbird at 5:06 PM PST - 72 comments

The ultimate limit of human endurance has been worked out by scientists analysing a 3,000 mile run, the Tour de France and other elite events. They showed the cap was 2.5 times the body's resting metabolic rate, or 4,000 calories a day for an average person. Anything higher than that was not sustainable in the long term. The research, by Duke University, also showed pregnant women were endurance specialists, living at nearly the limit of what the human body can cope with.
posted by bq at 3:33 PM PST - 20 comments

Billion Dollar Bully Highlights Why Yelp Feels Unfair The overall argument of Billion Dollar Bully, the new documentary about Yelp released on Amazon and iTunes in May, is that Yelp extorts small business owners for advertising fees in return for helping to manage and improve reviews on their platform. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 2:23 PM PST - 57 comments

US conservatives appear to be having an internecine philosophical debate started by this creepily named manifesto, summarized well in the NY Times here. In a nutshell, the pro-Trump pundits behind the manifesto reject the old Republican political alliance which was run by libertarian/pro-business/plutocratic types, and which relegated religious conservatives to back-bencher status. Instead, they favor a more explicitly reactionary conservative movement that denounces liberal values and emphasizes more communitarian social welfare (presumably for favored groups only) and the imposition of their moral vision on the nation, including via strong government action.
posted by wibari at 1:58 PM PST - 119 comments

Jassy J, MelSickScreamoAnnie, Zukky, Juliana Wilson, Nishat Anjum, Jade Justine, Juliette Valduriez, Paige Marina, Phatta, Noémie B. Not in a bedroom BabySaster, Tina S. Acoustic Biljana Sovilj. Piano Vika. Bass Anna Sentina. Drums Brooke C, Meytal Cohen. Guitar lesson Mel teaches the main riffs. Not Master of Puppets Ada Kaczanowska. Not Metallica Sakura Yoshida. [more inside]
posted by adept256 at 12:41 PM PST - 10 comments

Lovot is a robot that's built for loving. "With a luminoxity sensor, a 360-degree half-sphere camera, a half-sphere microphone that can detect the direction of sounds and voices, and a thermal camera (thermography) that can distinguish human beings from objects. LOVOT can make an accurate scan of an entire room and find its owner immediately." So when it looks up for you and asks for a hug, you'd better hug it. [more inside]
posted by Mchelly at 11:22 AM PST - 35 comments

The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices (formerly Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, formerly the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir) is a Grammy-winning musical group that sings arrangements of traditional Bulgarian folk music. Founded in the 1950s, the group became known to Western audiences in the 1980s through the work of ethnomusicologist Marcel Cellier and the record label 4AD, and even appeared on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show (including a rendition of "O Susanna"!). Here's a more recent performance for KEXP. The current iteration of the group is touring with Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance, and are profiled in the Guardian. Want to learn how to sound like a Bulgarian folk singer? Dessislava Stefanova of the London Bulgarian Choir shows you how (via).
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:23 AM PST - 25 comments

EverQuest: A game born in an era of dial-up Internet is still doing well after all this time—how?! [Ars Technica] “Twenty years ago, a company in Southern California launched an online game that would go on to serve as the model for many more titles to come in the massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) space. And unlike many games that sought to replace it over the years, this one is still going today. No, this isn’t about World of Warcraft—that game only turns 15 in 2019. Before there was WoW, there was the MMO pioneer EverQuest. This sword-and-sorcery-based game was developed by a small company, 989 Studios, but it eventually reached its pinnacle under Sony Online Entertainment after SOE acquired that studio roughly a year after the game's launch. Today, EQ marches on with a dedicated player base and another developer, Daybreak Games, at the helm.” [YouTube][20th Anniversary Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:19 AM PST - 36 comments

Peruse Les Animaux Tels Qu’ils Sont, a book from the 1930s that shows how to draw animals starting from basic shapes (though the jump from second-to-last to the finished animal can be sizable). (via kottke.org)
posted by Etrigan at 10:11 AM PST - 13 comments

Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt [Berlin: Symphony of a Great City [video], or Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, 1927] is a silent film by Walther [Walter] Ruttmann " is perhaps the quintessential early iteration of that celebrated genre that dwells within the interstices of the documentary and the experimental film" [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:04 AM PST - 1 comment

D-Day 75th Anniversary. On this day 75 years ago, Allied forces were storming the beaches in Normandy. The Associated Press is documenting stories of the surviving D-Day soldiers, their fallen comrades and those working to keep the memories alive today. You can follow all of the AP’s coverage at the link. [more inside]
posted by gudrun at 9:37 AM PST - 41 comments

Living in Addis Ababa for the past nine years has been a lesson; a lesson in humility, and a lesson in what it means to return to a land that was foreign to me. Over the past nine years, an expression of my grandmother has stuck in my mind – she would say, “The world is 9, it is never complete and it’s never perfect.” I thought it was interesting, but it wasn’t until much later as an adult that her voice echoed in my thoughts of whether we can live in this world with full contentment. [...] I have chosen to continue working on body painting, which is inspired by traditional body art from across Africa. Each work is a reflection of conscious and sub-conscious manifestations of time and space. -- Aïda Muluneh, The World is 9 [via Everlasting Blort] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:21 AM PST - 3 comments

“ILWU International President Harry Bridges pushed to have a few Japanese Americans, interned for most of the war, admitted to the Stockton division of Local 6 (Bay Area warehouse) in conjunction with the government’s War Relocation Authority.” Dockworkers Show Us How Unions Can Be a Powerful Force Against Racism (In These Times) “The dockworkers were very involved in Latin America in general but in Chile after the coup, the dockworkers were the first to refuse to handle cargo from the dictatorship. They let fruit rot on the quays, and they refused to discharge other cargo.” Worker Power on the Swedish Docks (Jacobin) “If longshoremen in San Francisco could find a way to support Black workers in South Africa, it would help the liberation movement there survive and win. ” RIP Leo Robinson, self described ‘Red’ and Soul of the Longshore. Professor Peter Cole on the power of dockworkers (Who Makes Cents? 46:42) In the logistics industry, from port workers to truckers to delivery drivers, time is of the essence. Their potential control over that time gives workers enormous leverage in the global economy.
posted by The Whelk at 9:08 AM PST - 2 comments

The Audubon Mural Project spotlights 314 bird species threatened by climate change. [more inside]
posted by hapaxes.legomenon at 9:08 AM PST - 3 comments

Love letters from Leonard Cohen to Marianne Ihlen as featured in an upcoming auction.
posted by Capt. Renault at 7:14 AM PST - 3 comments

The University of Pittsburgh Acquires Romero Collection, To Found Horror Studies Center. The University of Pittsburgh’s University Library System has acquired the archives of pioneering horror filmmaker George A. Romero (1940–2017), including correspondence, scripts, footage, promotional material, and props from his legendary films. These include Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, both shot near Pittsburgh. The new archive will form the foundation for a future horror studies center, building on collections already housed in ULS archives and special collections and funded in part by the George A. Romero Foundation. [more inside]
posted by schoolgirl report at 6:59 AM PST - 7 comments

The Oral History of Santana and Rob Thomas’ ‘Smooth’ [sl Rolling Stone]
posted by ellieBOA at 1:53 AM PST - 73 comments

Remake My Day is a nice data visualization that compares the critical reception, gap between critical and audience response, and relative profitability of a host of Hollywood remakes and their predecessors.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:41 PM PST - 33 comments

The Peruvian government has broken ground on a new airport to serve Cuzco and Machu Picchu.
posted by Surely This at 6:25 PM PST - 23 comments

“For people who are using the Archive to simply play with and enjoy its many different materials, be they website histories, movies, music, and books – this tool is probably not what you need. “But for the scripting-comfortable folks.. for people who want to become scripting comfortable folks… for people who are maintaining collections or working hard with multiple uploads and doing a lot of manual work to enter metadata.. this multi-tool of Internet Archive access is exactly what you need.” [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 3:28 PM PST - 4 comments

"You can get to anybody's heart over a bowl of gumbo. Over some good food, you can do that." Leah Chase, restaurateur, civil rights activist, art collector, and the queen of Creole cuisine, died last Saturday at the age of 96. Even into her 90s, she was a force in the kitchen at Dooky Chase's, a New Orleans landmark. And she was so much more. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 1:26 PM PST - 22 comments

Neural networks and other machine learning approaches can often guess who wrote a given piece of text by analyzing patterns in the way they use words. But what about identifying an author by the punctuation they use instead? University of Oxford researcher Alex Darmon (and coauthors) has a web app that will compare the punctuation style of any writing sample to the authors in its database. Who do you punctuate like? (details on arxiv here)
posted by dbx at 1:20 PM PST - 56 comments

A group with links to the Kochs attacks the decades-old Indian Child Welfare Act, which provides priority in adoption for Native American children to Native American families. Naturally, wealthy white evangelicals have stepped in to be "better parents" than the extended family of two such children and provided them with their test case. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 1:08 PM PST - 35 comments

Dragonfish have 'invisible' teeth to help them sneak up on their prey owing to the nanostructures that comprise them, say the authors of On the Nature of the Transparent Teeth of the Deep-Sea Dragonfish, Aristostomias scintillans. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:33 PM PST - 6 comments

In the rapidly changing world, another thing to track and preserve is food. From the nearly lost art of making su filindeu, or threads of god, pasta in Italy (Saveur; previously from BBC Travel), to the local breakfast favorite, Api (morado), a warm Bolivian drink made of purple corn flour (Bolivia Belle with a recipe, without fermentation), and rare foods like Omajovi mushrooms in Namibia (Gondwana Travel blog) and Bhutanese red rice (Gastro Obscura), the Slow Food Foundation for biodiversity has a map and more information on local ingredients and cuisine that are in danger of disappearing around the world, while Slow Food USA has an "Ark of Taste" focused on the U.S.. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:10 AM PST - 22 comments

A cat is chasing a mouse which is trapped in a circular pond. The cat can run around the outside of the pond four times faster than the mouse can swim. Can the mouse escape? [more inside]
posted by Stark at 5:19 AM PST - 50 comments

Radiohead is no stranger to leaks -- frontman Thom Yorke praised Napster for "encourag[ing] enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do" when their hotly anticipated album Kid A was uploaded to the service in its entirety (though the band was decidedly less thrilled when the same happened to an unfinished version of 2003's Hail to the Thief). Even pranksters have gotten in on the action. But now, after an abortive attempt at selling the stash, one leaker has given longtime fans the biggest prize yet: over 17 hours of early and unreleased material from the OK Computer era, including new full-band versions of "Lift" and "True Love Waits", an extended "Paranoid Android", alternative lyrics, rehearsals, jam sessions, found sound, and so much more. While legal eagles play whack-a-mole with download links, follow discussion of this landmark release on /r/radiohead and Discord, or get a taste of the material by browsing the scraps of it that were included in 2017 reissue OKNOTOK (including this utterly gorgeous rendition of "Motion Picture Soundtrack").
posted by Rhaomi at 4:42 AM PST - 80 comments

Bernie Sanders' plan to empower workers could revolutionise Britain's economy (among others') - "Giving employees a stake in firms would reshape power: this could be the start of a transatlantic challenge to neoliberalism." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 4:32 AM PST - 7 comments

A traditional practise of the Inuit is to never waste the food or materials provided by the animals they bring home. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 3:44 AM PST - 7 comments

Why is "LeftTube" So White? According to Kat Blaque, it largely seems to be because White people are only willing to listen to the dangers of things like white nationalism when it's coming from another White person. [more inside]
posted by divabat at 12:32 AM PST - 10 comments

Carlos Maza, a Hispanic writer and video host for Vox, has been the target of a racist and homophobic harassment campaign led by right wing commentator Steven Crowder, with Crowder not only posting videos targeting Maza and calling him all sorts of slurs, but also having his followers harass Maza with calls and texts. Finally, Maza released a Twitter thread detailing the abuse he was receiving at the hands of Crowder, which got the attention of YouTube's staff.

But, after a few days, YouTube responded with a decision that in YouTube's eyes, Crowder's videos were not harassment, and would stay on the site, in seeming contradiction to YouTube's posted harassment policies. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:37 PM PST - 158 comments

5 June 2019 marks a hundred years since the birth of American artist and author Richard Scarry (1919-1994), best known for his series of books about Busytown, which was adapted into 1990’s animated series The Busy World of Richard Scarry and the 2007-2010 Busytown Mysteries. A [more inside]
posted by jjderooy at 5:45 PM PST - 39 comments

Most people got the joke. They found it funny. And some people … well, they did not. I tweeted about the Joker being a woman who was tired of this shit and it now feels auto-biographical.
posted by adamcarson at 5:30 PM PST - 44 comments

In 2008, rogue automation caused an Airbus A330 to fall out of the sky, a harbinger of the 737MAX debacle a decade later. An uncommanded nose dive on an Airbus A330 caused a mass casualty incident, injuring 9 out of 12 crew and over 100 passengers, 14 seriously enough that they required life flights to Perth. Attempting to reboot the malfunctioning flight control computer sends the plane into a second nose dive, forcing the pilot to fly the crippled plane by hand to the nearest airport with multiple systems disabled. Initial reporting blamed clear air turbulence and reminded passengers to keep their seat belts on for safety, but it soon became clear something terrible had gone wrong with the automation on the plane. [more inside]
posted by xdvesper at 4:21 PM PST - 18 comments

“People will say to me, ‘Why are MTA construction costs so high?’ And the answer is ‘Everything,’ ” says Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the RPA and co-author of its 2018 report comparing New York’s construction costs to those in peer cities. “Every factor you look at is flawed the way the MTA does business, from the first step to the end.” - It costs three times more to build a subway station here than in London or Paris. What if we could change that? (Josh Barro in New York Magazine)
posted by beisny at 3:58 PM PST - 19 comments

Supernumerary fingers (polydactyly) are often considered to be a useless malformation and are usually removed at a young age. In this Nature Communications article (Open Access), two people with polydactyly are shown to coordinate the extra finger with their other fingers for more complex movements than five fingered subjects, and to carry out with only one hand tasks normally requiring two hands. And they were also able to play a video game designed for 6-fingered people. [more inside]
posted by elgilito at 3:34 PM PST - 23 comments

To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands.
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:32 PM PST - 34 comments

THE PROCESS OF ADAPTING A NOVEL for film or television necessarily includes acts of character assassination as familiar names are ruthlessly cut for the sake of time or clarity. Yet one Jane Austen character survives in multiple adaptations in movies and on television. I am referring, of course, to the inimitable Mr. Collins, whose very flatness of character renders him an attractive canvas on which screenwriters, directors, and actors can distinguish themselves. For what is most striking about the Mr. Collinses in Pride and Prejudice screen adaptations is how divergent they are, with each taking up different facets of his character as presented in the novel. Each Collins character is a figure of ridicule in the adaptations, much as he is in the novel, but each Mr. Collins is also ridiculous in his own way. PhD candidate Mary M. Chan writes about adapting Mr. Collins for the Jane Austen Society of North America
posted by ChuraChura at 12:53 PM PST - 28 comments

“Our National Parks belong to the people, so this typeface should too.” [more inside]
posted by ob1quixote at 10:15 AM PST - 40 comments

On our current trajectory, the report warns, “planetary and human systems [are] reaching a ‘point of no return’ by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order.” (Report)
posted by Memo at 10:03 AM PST - 135 comments

Artifact was supposed to be a slam dunk. [win.gg] Instead, Artifact has thus far shaken out to be a shocking commercial flop.

“To me there are two important parts of pay-to-win. The first is whether buying something will make you a champion. This is not true for Hearthstone, Magic, or for that matter, golf. It also isn’t true for Artifact. The second part of pay-to-win is what the bottom line expenditure is. Top level decks in Magic or Hearthstone generally cost more than top level decks in Artifact. And since there is a market, you can shift around your collection with relative ease. It is easy to construct games where buying the components is a better deal than all players being forced to buy everything - though some measure of faith has to be put in the publisher.” ~ Ex-Artifact dev Richard Garfield on what went wrong.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:46 AM PST - 43 comments

When she arrived in the US as a 10-year-old refugee, Dina Nayeri found it hard to fit in. But that all changed when she hatched a plan to get into Harvard – by becoming a taekwondo champion. A long read from The Guardian. [Note, talks about restrictive eating] [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 9:38 AM PST - 4 comments

“More broadly, our task is now to make a single, simple point. There is no humane border regime, just as there is no humane abortion ban. The border will always tear parents from children, caregivers from charges, longtime residents from the only communities they’ve ever known. It may do it faster or slower, with ostentatious brutality or bureaucratic drag, but it will always do it.“ Society as Checkpoint “And whatever downward pressure an influx of immigrants has on wages, it is dwarfed by the economic consequences of a weak and divided working class. The working class cannot reverse its economic decline without bringing immigrant workers into the fold, as a thirty-year strategy of soft-restrictionism has amply demonstrated.” The Case For Open Borders.
posted by The Whelk at 9:15 AM PST - 23 comments

Can Nashville's Music Row Be Saved from Demolition? The National Trust for Historic Preservation has named Nashville, Tennessee's Music Row (heart of the country music industry for decades) one of its 11 most endangered historic places for 2019. [more inside]
posted by soundguy99 at 9:10 AM PST - 15 comments

"A month ago, when I started walking, I decided to conduct an experiment. ... The idea was not to totally disconnect, but to test rational, metered uses of technology. I wanted to experience the walk as the walk, in all of its inevitably boring walkiness. ... My phone ceased to be a teleportation machine and became, instead, a context machine." Craig Mod, The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan. [more inside]
posted by oulipian at 8:11 AM PST - 43 comments

Various Authors, Dr Leg, and PLEASE: A Neural Network names Kittens for Morris Animal Refuge. Better names than last time (previously). And it names guinea pigs, too. From neural net whiz Janelle Shane, even more previously.
posted by Gordafarin at 8:04 AM PST - 50 comments

There are millions of mobile applications available to smartphone users today, and that number will only keep growing as it becomes easier to build and deploy apps. Some apps are for amusement, but others are specifically designed to improve the lives of their users or the world at large.

We asked a panel of Young Entrepreneur Council members the following question about some of the most innovative apps they’ve encountered that were created to help people: What’s one innovative app you‘ve seen that’s designed to help people, and what can leaders learn from apps like it? (via) [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:49 AM PST - 5 comments

In these dark times, you have to take joy wherever you can find it. ... This weekend, I found a new image that I will return to over and over again in times of crisis, whenever that picture of Nigel Farage covered in salted caramel milkshake just doesn’t hit the spot. It is my Mona Lisa. ... It’s this, a photo of Anthony Joshua, that impossible Herculean demigod, being laid on his arse by Andy Ruiz Jr, a man whose physique can only be described as “Peter Kay in those John Smith’s ads from the noughties”. [boxing] [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 7:14 AM PST - 24 comments

Last night (or yesterday morning, if you live in Alabama), a king was toppled: James Holzhauer lost a Jeopardy! match for the first time, ending a 32-game winning streak that brought the venerable game show huge ratings and nearly broke Ken Jennings' record for total earnings (the two have expressed mutual respect on Twitter). [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 5:45 AM PST - 64 comments

Incredible footage shot from cruise ship MSC Opera as it slams into dock in Venice, Italy yesterday. According to France24,

A cruise ship lost control as it was coming in to dock in Venice Sunday, crashing into the wharf and hitting a tourist boat, Italian media reported.

[more inside]
posted by scalefree at 9:06 PM PST - 58 comments

June 1999, and the music industry is rolling in cash. Bloated by the vast profits of the CD business, which reached a high of £30.6bn that year, the future looks bright for the suits at the top. Sadly for them, in a dorm at Boston’s Northeastern university, a precocious coder is about to blow it all apart. Oversharing: how Napster nearly killed the music industry -- Twenty years ago, the idea of free music was so compelling that up to 80m users downloaded Napster and broke the law. The aftershocks are still being felt today. (The Guardian) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:49 PM PST - 63 comments

The state Assembly just passed a bill that could give Uber and Lyft drivers basic labor protections for the first time. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 8:03 PM PST - 14 comments

NASA Live: Earth Views from the Space Station — "...views will typically sequence through the different cameras. If you are seeing a black image, the Space Station is on the night side of the Earth. If you are seeing an image with text displayed, the communications are switching between satellites and camera feeds are temporarily unavailable. Between camera switches, a black & gray slate will also briefly appear." Here, you can find the current location of the ISS on a map of the earth.
posted by not_on_display at 6:18 PM PST - 16 comments

Is Meritocracy A Myth? and Other Awkward Conversations CBC Radio talks about how much privilege plays a role in what we think of as Self Made Success Stories. Is the concept of the American (or Canadian) Dream not only not possible anymore, but was it ever a real thing? [more inside]
posted by helmutdog at 3:31 PM PST - 77 comments

In a drawer. The chessmen, one of the treasures of the British Museum, were carved from walrus ivory in Trondheim, Norway, in the 12th century. They were found on the beach in the Outer Hebrides in 1831.
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:04 PM PST - 20 comments

Emily Todd VanDerWerff writes for Vox about The Handmaid's Tale and coming out as trans: "The Catastrophist"
VanDerWerff was inspired to "think about thinking about transitioning" after reading a March 2018 interview of Daniel Ortberg by Heather Havrilesky in The Cut: "'Mallory Is Not Gone': Daniel Mallory Ortberg on Coming Out As Trans"
posted by Going To Maine at 1:49 PM PST - 22 comments

"To get there, you need a down payment. And if you’re putting your extra money toward child care, or loans, or medical bills — how do you come up with that down payment? And how do you find a home you can actually afford? Homeownership, like other forms of participation in the American dream, increasingly resembles an exclusive country club, with membership predicated on who your parents are and your race." Anne Helen Petersen: 14 Millennials Got Honest About How They Afforded Homeownership
posted by everybody had matching towels at 11:34 AM PST - 104 comments

Jai Paul is back with a new website, and he has released the unfinished album originally leaked in 2013. [more inside]
posted by sleeping bear at 11:09 AM PST - 8 comments

A. W. Merrick really was a newsman, although maybe not an intrepid one. And the Black Hills Pioneer was a real newspaper. Digging through the papers archives, Matthew Dessem takes a look at the actual recorded exploits of Al Swearengen, E.B. Farnum, Seth Bullock, Sol Star, and others. Among the many fascinating revelations is that Deadwood (mercifully) leaves out a lot of historical blackface at the Gem Saloon.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 10:41 AM PST - 13 comments

Why US troops ‘flattened’ Raqqa and Mosul, and why it may herald an era of ‘feral city’ warfare. In 2004, Richard J. Norton wrote an influential paper, Feral Cities [US Naval War College Review], in which he defined a "feral city" as a city of more than a million, which no longer was under the rule of law of a larger state, and yet maintained an international level of influence. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:37 AM PST - 10 comments

A thriving postwar LGBTQ scene in Washington D.C was decimated by paranoia and prosecution over supposed links to queerness and communist subversion : The Lavender Scare (The Nib) “The purge followed an era in which gay people were increasingly finding each other and forming communities in urban America. During World War II, many men and women left behind the restrictions of rural or small-town life for the first time. After the war, young people poured into cities, where density and anonymity made pursuit of same-sex relationships more possible than ever.” Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare (Archives.gov) “Frank Kameny was fired from his federal government job in 1957 because he was gay. He didn’t just go home and pull the covers over his head. He fought a successful eighteen-year-battle with the government to change the law so the same thing didn’t happen to other gay people.” (Making Gay History)
posted by The Whelk at 8:59 AM PST - 5 comments

Elbertie Foudray and the Adventure of Life: I never set out to write a book about the dream in 1940 of devising the most scientific census ever. Instead, I went looking for an obscure census mathematician named Elbertie Foudray and, to my surprise, discovered the census. This is a census story all about chance and gender (as well as power) and it began with an effort to recreate a very odd paper machine. Dan Bouk, a historian at Colgate University, shares a story of a woman who played a critical role in the development of the U.S. Census in the early 20th century, but was never properly recognized for it in her lifetime.
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:40 AM PST - 1 comment

The perpetual diamond is an optical illusion that produces motion continuously and unambiguously in one direction despite the diamond itself never physically changing location. Link is to online paper; scroll down for brainbending video demos [flashing lights, only if you click play].
posted by carter at 7:40 AM PST - 49 comments

"I was like, “Why don’t we know these basic things about female health?” She goes, “Welcome to my world.”". An interview with Dr. Lisa Mosconi about links between Menopause and Alzheimer's . It turns out that menopause affects far more than our childbearing potential. [NYT]
posted by Mchelly at 7:32 AM PST - 18 comments

Since 2015, 21 young people from across the country have been suing the federal government for violating their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property by knowingly contributing to climate change for over five decades. Like Brown v. Board of Education did for civil rights, Juliana v. United States has the potential to become the landmark climate change case of our country’s history. [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 6:15 AM PST - 14 comments

Apple expected to close iTunes after 18 years [The Guardian] “It was once heralded as a possible saviour of the music industry in the digital age, famously annoyed fans by forcing a U2 album on them, and its 20,699-word terms and conditions have even inspired a graphic novel, but now Apple is to replace its iTunes download service. According to a report by Bloomberg, the tech company will announce that three separate apps for music, TV and podcasts will supersede iTunes, as Apple seeks to reposition itself as an entertainment service rather than a hardware company powered by products such as the iPhone.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:47 AM PST - 118 comments

Check out the most beloved warm-weather dishes across the country! Food Network lists (with recipe links!) the top summer recipe in every state. Well, the top searched recipe in every state, anyway.
posted by Weeping_angel at 12:26 AM PST - 29 comments

Mount Everest's 2018-2019 season ended on a number of highs (USA Today): more than 825 climbers and Sherpas reached the summit this year, a record-breaking number; number of permits from the Nepalese government also broke records this year, with 381 issued; and deaths were at a four-year high, with 11 fatalities, most blamed on a combination of overcrowding, inexperience and poor weather limiting the number of days climbers were able to attempt to summit. Alan Arnette recapped the season's headlines. You can skip the crowds, save tens of thousands of dollars (Cost Freak, 2017 expenses), and enjoy Paul Oakenfold's Mount Everest Base Camp Mix (CD 1 and CD 2 on MixCloud; Discogs). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:56 PM PST - 32 comments

From chrysalis to flight: The blogger behind TYWKIWDBI* lovingly documents the emergence of a female Black Swallowtail. (Single-link nice thing; * "Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently.")
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:46 PM PST - 8 comments

Researchers strapped video cameras on 16 cats and let them do their thing. Here’s what they found.
posted by not_on_display at 4:58 PM PST - 53 comments

40 minutes of a dot matrix printer printing, a banner of a hot dog. Review of the dot matrix printer. [more inside]
posted by zabuni at 4:54 PM PST - 33 comments

The Lost Boys of Galveston - From the New Yorker, the story of one American helping as many migrants as he can. Terry Keel is the president of the Children’s Center, a nonprofit in Galveston that supports and houses migrant children who have been separated from their parents because of incarceration, deportation, illness, or violence. [more inside]
posted by 6thsense at 9:34 AM PST - 3 comments

I Built a Guitar Out of Epoxy Resin. Also: 8 Mega Jawbreaker Candies, some styrofoam, and pencil crayons.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:51 AM PST - 22 comments

Want a Visa for the U.S.? You’ll Have to Hand Over Your Social Media Handles The vast majority of applicants for U.S. visas will now have to hand over their social media usernames along with previous email addresses and phone numbers, according to a newly imposed rule. Applicants for pretty much all visas, except for certain diplomatic and official ones, will have to give five years’ worth of phone numbers, email addresses, and social media handles as part of the application process.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:53 AM PST - 80 comments

Three talks from ParallaxNick on a lesser-known area of the solar system, and the people and history associated with it: Uranus and Neptune: Worlds of Water [30:13] – Worlds of Shadow and Light: The Moons of Uranus and Neptune [34:03] – Solar Ghosts: The Rings of Uranus and Neptune [21:37]. [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 5:17 AM PST - 3 comments

On May 23, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), joined by Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), introduced the Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act, which would ban lootboxes and microtransactions from videogames marketed to minors. (Bill text on scribd; Google Doc version.) [more inside]
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:42 PM PST - 66 comments

The Generalist Academy is MeFite Paragon's blog where they share one interesting thing every day, like Thailand's culinary diplomacy (also known as gastrodiplomacy), 16th century German artillery master Franz Helm's proposed "rocket cat" ("This sounds like a terrible idea."), Samoan independence, and Poggio Bracciolini's Renaissance-era fart jokes. [via mefi projects]
posted by filthy light thief at 6:46 PM PST - 19 comments

Martin Bramah’s Blue Orchids have been the most consistently enjoyable spin-off of The Fall since 1980 (first lineup included both Martin and Fall founder/keyboardist Una Baines - previously) and they’re back with a new single co-written by Mark E Smith back in the late 70s, “Addicted to the Day”
posted by porn in the woods at 4:04 PM PST - 4 comments

Buried in the source code from a 1999 Rock Paper Scissors tournament is a comment section starting with, "They were both poisoned," that goes on to describe one of the cleverest strategies ever designed for a computer game. As with its inspiration from The Princess Bride, the strategy considers that its opponent might know its strategy, and that its opponent might know that it knows that the opponent knows its strategy, and... you get the idea. Tweaks on the original idea remain the core of the best Rock, Paper, Scissors algorithms.
posted by clawsoon at 3:53 PM PST - 42 comments

We know that dog owners and cat owners have different personalities, but now it appears that love for dogs may be coded in our DNA.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:20 PM PST - 23 comments

You cannot swing a cat (pose) on Instagram without hitting photographs of yoga instructors with perfect figures twisted into perfect shapes, selling essential oils and greeting-card spirituality. Alex Auder is not one of them. [more inside]
posted by waving at 2:16 PM PST - 19 comments

DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too [The New York Times] Chess and Go were child’s play. Now A.I. is winning at capture the flag. Will such skills translate to the real world?

“In a paper published on Thursday in Science (and previously available on the website arXiv before peer review), the researchers reported that they had designed automated “agents” that exhibited humanlike behavior when playing the capture the flag “game mode” inside Quake III. These agents were able to team up against human players or play alongside them, tailoring their behavior accordingly.”

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:26 PM PST - 36 comments

Argumentum ad Ignorantiam: The Real Issue With Mary Beard's Latin - "What irritates me is that —again like most classicists — she treats this as a self-evident fact to be just accepted rather than a problem to be dealt with, as if nobody could hope to actually read Cicero with ease. It always strikes me as bizarre and a bit embarrassing to see classicists insisting that it is impossible to acquire fluid or fluent command of Latin or Greek, that "we" can never do this. It's not just that this assumption would be news to people like Galileo, Kepler or Descartes. It's that people do actually acquire this kind of competence. Today. Anyone who pokes around at, say, the Paideia Institute, will find proficient Latin-speakers as readily as Zeus finds incestuous booty-calls." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:11 PM PST - 54 comments

Heidi Fleiss is not trying for a redemption narrative. Her story is much stranger than that. Once a 90s tabloid cause célèbre, the former "Hollywood Madam" always refused to reveal her client's names. Then twenty years after the height of her infamy a reporter gets a call from Pahrump, Nevada. [more inside]
posted by Gin and Broadband at 12:04 PM PST - 15 comments

Over the last 51 years I have played and owned many flutes ... Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull tells about his flutes, and why you might find one for sale secondhand at regular market prices.
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:40 AM PST - 19 comments

Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. [more inside]
posted by stonepharisee at 10:44 AM PST - 16 comments

“To limit the worst effects of the climate crisis, we have under eleven years to decarbonize our economy, mobilizing, as Bill McKibben and others have urged, on the speed and scale of WWII. One might expect to see that mobilization effort in the US media more often; climate change, after all, frames every beat. A threat of such breadth, teen climate activist Greta Thunberg once said, should preclude us from talking, writing, or reporting about anything else. Yet my news feed tells a different story.“ War all the time? Climate reporters weigh coverage quantity against quality (CJR)
posted by The Whelk at 10:39 AM PST - 27 comments

Roky Erickson, Lead singer and guitarist for legendary psych band The 13th Floor Elevator has died. Roky Erickson was a difficult personality in that he had a peerless talent for the music he created, and was known for excesses in chemical intake. This second however, may have more to do with mental illness, than actual excess. Much like contemporary Syd Barrett, Roky lead a tumultuous life. I'm going to leave the links below the fold. Please enjoy the music and videos. [more inside]
posted by evilDoug at 10:12 AM PST - 38 comments