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The Second City alum won an Oscar late in the game for “Little Miss Sunshine” and was memorable in “The Russians Are Coming,” “The In-Laws” and “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.”
posted by kitten kaboodle at 10:07 PM PST - 79 comments

Deadly marine creature could hold the secret to development of new medications. Deadly cone snails reared from eggs in a laboratory aquarium uncover a potential treasure trove of new venoms for medication development. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:31 PM PST - 14 comments

Beloved Canadian sex educator, legendary host of the "The Sunday Night Sex Show" and "Talk Sex With Sue Johanson", Sue Johanson has died aged 93. [more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 7:34 PM PST - 42 comments

He’s The Trans Son Of An Anti-Trans Influencer. It’s His Turn To Speak. A long article by Christopher Mathias about Renton Sinclair. [CW: attempted suicide, conversion therapy]
posted by Kattullus at 5:17 PM PST - 30 comments

Static electricity attracts ticks to hosts "Thought ticks were terrifying? They just got worse. Turns out they can use static electricity to launch through the air onto hosts, including you! " [paper]
posted by dhruva at 4:10 PM PST - 32 comments

While entering associate classes have been comprised of approximately 45% women for several decades, in the typical large firm, women constitute only 30% of non-equity partners and 20% of equity partners ... [and] the number of lawyers named as new equity partners at big firms has declined by nearly 30% over the past several years ... The critical question, of course, is why? What is it about the experiences of women in BigLaw that result in such different outcomes for women than men, and why do even senior women lawyers have so many more obstacles to overcome? These core questions drove this first-of-its-kind study ... through the perspective of more than 1,200 big firm lawyers who have been in practice for at least 15 years.

(direct link to the report [pdf]) [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 2:18 PM PST - 15 comments

KOTSUMET is a YouTube channel that posts videos about two domesticated otters named Kotaro and Hana who live in Japan. :-)
posted by Fizz at 1:24 PM PST - 11 comments

The Curious Case of William T. Vollmann [Sactown, from 2018] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:38 PM PST - 11 comments

Mike's Videos of Beavers is a Youtube channel from Mike Digout in Saskatoon, who posts videos of beavers.
posted by RobotHero at 12:27 PM PST - 6 comments

BREAKING: Twitter now BLOCKS ALL ACCESS FROM SIGNED OUT USERS (Nitter.net link) [more inside]
posted by buffy12 at 11:28 AM PST - 444 comments

The Sith Academy ran from June 1999 to June 2001 and was a series of parodic stories by many different authors creating a shared continuity, not unlike the Star Wars "extended universe" books, except that these stories starred Darth Maul, the villain from 1999's The Phantom Menace with less than six minutes of screentime. Here Maul is given a rundown apartment, a series of rage-inducing jobs, a pet cat, and a growing supporting cast with characters like "Darth Mary Sue" and padawan "Ben-Wa". Also, Maul has sex with Obi-Wan Kenobi. A lot. [more inside]
posted by one for the books at 11:24 AM PST - 8 comments

LASS: Latinos against spooky shit! Jonathan Perez Galvan, the TikTok creator whose videos often go viral, explains why "A scary movie with Latinos in it wouldn’t last an hour and a half. It would be more like five minutes." [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:52 AM PST - 19 comments

Supreme Court rejects Biden student loan forgiveness plan (WaPo, Reuters), protects website designer who won't do gay weddings (WaPo, ABC, side note) [more inside]
posted by box at 8:23 AM PST - 301 comments

In New Jersey, cheating at boardwalk games is considered especially heinous. On the Jersey Shore, the dedicated detectives who investigate this malicious mischief are members of an elite squad known as the Legalized Games of Chance Control Commission. These are their stories. (archive.today link) [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:37 AM PST - 18 comments

Offer, Emoji, Consideration A Saskatchewan court has ruled that (in certain circumstances) an emoji can constitute a digital signature accepting the terms of contract.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:19 AM PST - 24 comments

Happy Pride Month! At the end of this long month of Queer Women In Music, I'm bringing us back around to where we began. Ginny Berson, co-founder of Olivia Records, put out a book in late 2020 [Olivia On The Record, publisher link]. Being in the midst of the pandemic, the book release event was an online event [1h30m, Berson begins speaking in earnest at 24m30s]. It's a quiet and poignant look back across at a time and movement that fostered so much beyond its imagining. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:57 AM PST - 3 comments

Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 5:43 AM PST - 51 comments

Driven by Love or Ambition, Slipping Across the Color Line Through the Ages by Rachel Swarns in the New York Times, a short account of the life of “Clarence King, a Yale-educated white man who worked as a geologist in the 1800s and dined at the White House, lived a secret life as James Todd, a black train porter with a wife and five children in Brooklyn.” Link via the substack of naturalist David B. Williams, who describes King’s discovery of glaciers in the Pacific West.
posted by bq at 2:23 AM PST - 7 comments

Dustin Ballard has reimagined Elvis Presley singing the lyrics from 1991's Sir Mix-A-Lot single “Baby Got Back,” in the style of his hit 1956 song “Don’t Be Cruel”. [more inside]
posted by Marky at 12:05 AM PST - 21 comments

Finding a visual way to represent an inner identity can be complicated. (WaPo Gift) For much of American Sign Language's history, those who have had the most power to disseminate signs have been straight, White, cisgender people. The rise of video-based social media is allowing ASL to spread more rapidly and is empowering the Deaf queer community to exert more influence over American Sign Language. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 10:19 PM PST - 1 comment

The Ambitious Plan to Open Up a Treasure Trove of Black History "The archive contains around 5,000 magazines, 200 boxes of business records, 10,000 audio and visual recordings, and 4.5 million prints and negatives that chronicle Black life from the 1940s until the present day."
posted by johnxlibris at 7:17 PM PST - 4 comments

Phil Agre warned us about ubiquitous surveillance--in 2001. “I've been in the military and the police, and if you had seen some of the things that I've seen then you would change your mind. You don't know what I've seen. Besides, everyone knows, having been reminded daily by the news, that evil crimes are committed every day. The real problem with your argument is that, like the argument I just addressed, it could be applied to support giving absolute power to the military and police. But then, by definition, we would no longer be a free society. We need principled arguments about the place of government force in a free society, and my purpose here is to suggest what some of those arguments might be."
posted by mecran01 at 5:37 PM PST - 21 comments

A Blind Taste Test of Thomas’, Trader Joe’s, and More But the bagels you can find in bread aisles across the country have their own distinct charm, and there’s something about their springy textures and delicate wheaty flavor that make them, well, loveable. Perhaps supermarket bagels were your family’s Sunday morning staple—a pile of sliced, toasted bagels in the center of the table, as everyone reached for peanut butter or jelly or Nutella. Or maybe they remind you of rushing out the door to catch the schoolbus, cream-cheesed bagel in hand. However you enjoyed them, supermarket bagels are delicious in their own nostalgic right.
posted by SituationNormal at 4:36 PM PST - 64 comments

How they fool ya (Math parody of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah by 3Blue1Brown)
posted by dhruva at 1:14 PM PST - 13 comments

To those who know what Oakland A’s baseball used to be, what Fisher had turned the team into was nothing short of tragic. A’s teams in the past had brought to Oakland pride and repute, as they had seemed to represent, in their character and color, their misfit swagger and underdog grit, something both essential and specific about the East Bay’s sense of self. In this way, certain of those teams had evinced something distinct about the constructive potential of pro sports writ large: how beloved local teams can bring a people together and lift a city up. Fisher’s A’s evince something very different: pro sports’ concurrent capacity for diminishment and plunder, disillusionment and grift. from The Long, Sad Story of the Stealing of the Oakland A’s [The Ringer; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:19 PM PST - 39 comments

New Testament scholar Laura Robinson on why Beautiful Union is unworkable as a theological book about sex.
1. The thesis of sex as an icon via which humans can look to for larger truths about God isn't reliably defined, defended or applied.
2. The argument depends on free association, terrible biblical interpretation and mistreatment of Greek and Hebrew.
3. The book redefines “generosity” and “giving” in sex to include only male self-gratification.
4. The book displays no awareness of the clitoris or the ways in which women actually do have orgasms during sex.
5. The book diminishes the role of women in reproduction while elevating men’s.
Conclusion. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:46 AM PST - 51 comments

"Writing for the Bad Faith Reader" by Susie Dumond (Mar 30, 2023) discusses how easy is is for writers today to get discouraged or preoccupied by the potential reactions of "the person who is looking to invalidate the art that you’re making" (quoting Melissa Febos). Dumond shares "some of the ways I avoid writing for the bad faith reader these days." Her advice to write the first draft for yourself as a way to channel the "best faith" reader, and to accept that your work is not for every reader, reminds me of two of the five laws of library science: "to every book their reader" and "to every reader their book".
posted by brainwane at 9:51 AM PST - 14 comments

Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and UNC (NYT, WaPo, NBC News) [more inside]
posted by box at 7:58 AM PST - 138 comments

CBC Ideas offers a rare balanced look at the impact of human population on climate change. Includes discussions of income disparity, fossil fuels, renewables, the racist history of population control, and many other critical issues that are seen too little in the media. Worth both a read and a listen.
posted by Joan Rivers of Babylon at 6:25 AM PST - 36 comments

For more than two decades, the biggest retro computing story in recent memory sat like a sleeper cell in a Massachusetts barn. The barn was in danger of collapse. It could no longer protect the fleet of identical devices hiding inside. A story like this doesn’t need the flash of a keynote or a high-profile marketing campaign. It really just needs someone to notice. And the reason anyone did notice was because this barn could no longer support the roughly 2,200 machines that hid on its second floor.
posted by Etrigan at 6:24 AM PST - 24 comments

Happy Pride Month! Grace Jones [Wikipedia] is still going strong. A queer icon since her first appearance in at Studio 54 in the Seventies [Pitchfork], she recently played NYC Hammerstein Ballroom [1h30m, decent audience recording] just after her 75th birthday. Grace Jones Electrifies New York With Eye-Popping — and Hilarious — Show [Variety] She sat with Jimmy Fallon in 2021 [7m20s] for a brief conversation.
posted by hippybear at 5:56 AM PST - 8 comments

The Canadian graphic artist Gerhard (previously) has just completed a major new commission inspired by the works of Memling and Breugel. You can admire it in both pencils and inks. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 4:52 AM PST - 6 comments

Precarious Manhood Beliefs Are Positively Associated with Erectile Dysfunction in Cisgender Men. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:33 AM PST - 38 comments

The first price is the cost of acquisition and then "in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits."
posted by blue shadows at 9:20 PM PST - 41 comments

I hadn't heard of NANOGrav before today, but they've announced exciting findings. NPR puts it like this:

What they found is a pattern of deviations from the expected pulsar beam arrival timings that suggests gravitational waves are jiggling space-time as though it's a vast serving of Jell-O.

While the LIGO observaory on earth can measure gravitational waves with a wavelength comparable to its size (4km), NANOGrav's neutron star observations work on a scale of light years, so they see an entirely different "slice" of gravitational waves, much like the difference between visible light and radio waves.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 5:32 PM PST - 21 comments

Anthony Vincent recently wrote a lovely song about his cat. (SLYT)
posted by zaixfeep at 2:36 PM PST - 9 comments

The latest salvo in the internecine let-them-fight war between millennials and boomers comes from Fall Out Boy, who just covered Billy Joel’s headache-inducing earworm “We Didn’t Start the Fire” with an update of events that have transpired in the decades since the song’s release in 1989. Where Joel’s day-zero cringegasm (take it from me, folks — I was in high school at the time) at least makes its references chronologically, Fall Out Boy’s update is all over the map. John Wayne Bobbitt (1993) gets coupled with the Boston Marathon bombing that happened 20 years later. I can’t tell if “Keaton Batman/Bush v. Gore” means the 1989 Tim Burton movie or The Flash, but either way, they’re at least a decade apart. Even worse is the tastelessness in lyrics like “Shinzo Abe blown away,” then rhyming George Floyd with Metroid. Listening to this made me feel as unhappy as Hank Hill in the King of the Hill episode about religious rock: “You’re not making Christianity any better, you’re just making rock ’n’ roll worse!” Anyway, the single is available now. Listen if you dare; we really don’t recommend it. [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 1:19 PM PST - 141 comments

The Scandalous History of Lady Jeans [Note: Twitter thread]
posted by chavenet at 12:18 PM PST - 24 comments

The palm that flowers underground "Some inches into the dirt however, structures start to emerge – an entire cluster of fruit, a stem and a crownshaft (the base of the leaves on palm plants), all buried in the soil. The entire reproductive structure existing below the surface means that the flowers are underground too. Highly unusual, even here in this place of great natural diversity."
posted by dhruva at 12:07 PM PST - 12 comments

Annette Dauphin Simon's book spine poetry is now a book with its own spine. Definition and examples from Marquette Law School staff.

Second place winner (ages 5-8 bracket) of the Saskatchewan Library Association's 2018 book spine poetry contest.
Fortunately the milk
Speechless
Cold as ice
Mmm, cookies!

And previously on MeFi. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:23 AM PST - 6 comments

White people food is the latest social media trend in China, with posters presenting minimalist lunches of raw veggies, crackers, slices to cheese, cold cuts and other staples, as Chinese young people discover the "lunch of suffering."
posted by chrchr at 10:18 AM PST - 94 comments

75 years ago, the New Yorker published a new story by Shirley Jackson. Stephen King, David Sedaris, Carmen Maria Machado and others on how “The Lottery” first got under their skin. [NYT gift link]. Haven’t read it yet? Here you go.
posted by Mchelly at 9:48 AM PST - 56 comments

This magazine started as a joke. Whenever a celebrity dies, especially a very old one, people online express surprise that he was still alive. Years ago, I posted on Twitter about a notional magazine where each issue would focus on "a person who it would surprise you to learn is still alive." Read about the remarkable lives of people like John Dean, Tippi Hedren, and Jonathan the tortoise, the oldest land animal on earth in Issue #1.
posted by jessamyn at 8:16 AM PST - 22 comments

Once, in 1987, a female orca wore a dead salmon on her head; weeks later, two other pods of orcas were all wearing salmon as hats! But it doesn’t matter. Not really. Because these orcas have captured the American cultural imagination. This is the summer of the whale. And popular sentiment favors the whales. In Slate, environmental historian Anna Guasco speculated about why this moment in whale violence feels different. “Part of what makes these boat-sinking whales into anti-capitalist allies is their choice of targets,” Guasco wrote. “Much of the coverage and response focuses on the whales’ attacking yachts in a popular European vacationing location. These yachts symbolize excesses of wealth under capitalism. This story simply wouldn’t have the same appeal or political resonance if the whales weren’t targeting symbols of wealth, waste, and opulence.” The Summer of the Whale from Lyz Lenz in Men Yell at Me. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 7:43 AM PST - 34 comments

Eid al-Adha (NYTimes gift link) Writer, Romaissaa Benzizoune, describes celebrating the Muslim holiday, Eid al-Adha, which has begun. [more inside]
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 7:19 AM PST - 10 comments

Twenty-five years ago today, The Undertaker damn near killed Mankind. Twice. It was one of the most memorable matches in the history of professional wrestling, and now Mark Calaway and Mick Foley are far enough removed to laugh at it as they rewatch the infamous Hell In A Cell match that redefined each of their careers in an instant. (CW: premeditated violence that resulted in real injury to both participants, blood, teeth, thumbtacks)
posted by Etrigan at 6:09 AM PST - 22 comments

Happy Pride Month! The 2019 film Stonewall Outloud [32m] is a documentary taken from the recordings of StoryCorps. Firsthand accounts are lip-synched and performed by current actors, interspersed with interviews and source material, bringing to life voices who witnessed the Stonewall Revolution and bridging the generations. I found it moving and affecting and I'm really happy to share it on this anniversary of the Revolution starting, 54 years ago. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:55 AM PST - 2 comments

Renewed push to save southern cassowary, called "Australia's own living dinosaur." (Not an actual dinosaur, except insomuch as all birds are dinosaurs.) The endangered southern cassowary looks akin to its prehistoric ancestors and there's a national push to save this beautiful giant bird from disappearing.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:23 AM PST - 20 comments

The Password Game
posted by fleacircus at 9:43 PM PST - 39 comments

Survey shows how companies are adapting their property portfolios to changed working patterns
posted by folklore724 at 7:55 PM PST - 57 comments

"Pompei never ceases to dazzle," Italian culture minister says. [Italian] Looking back 2000 years through discoveries such as these, it's possible to see traces of a life we might recognize today. BBC link [English] [more inside]
posted by fruitslinger at 2:36 PM PST - 27 comments

A digital archive of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives This collection is compiled and curated by Valery Marier. It is a labour of love ran in her free time.
posted by chavenet at 12:17 PM PST - 13 comments

Supreme Court rejects independent state legislature theory (NYT, WaPo, CNN, Vanity Fair) [more inside]
posted by box at 8:52 AM PST - 75 comments

Only Up! [Game Trailer] If you’re a gamer in any capacity, your cup likely runneth over with great games to play right now. There are hits like Diablo 4, Final Fantasy 16, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, to name a few. But many people, from big influencers to humble players, are choosing to spend their time on an unlikely candidate: Only Up! Only Up! is similar to Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, a surreal platformer that put the player in the role of a shirtless man crouched in a cauldron, using his mighty sledgehammer to climb a magnificent and surreal peak. Only Up!, which was developed by SC-KR games, is a 3D platformer with a similar premise. The player has to climb past giant disembodied feet, Shiba Inu balloons, and massive networks of oil tankers and scaffolding. The game took off in China and was eventually streamed by Ludwig Ahgren, which led to it exploding in popularity on Twitch and TikTok. [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 8:32 AM PST - 43 comments

Queerness makes room within it for these relationships, or rather: queerness spirals outward. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:00 AM PST - 20 comments

whats your family secret? America's Family Secret More than 100 U.S. leaders – lawmakers, presidents, governors and justices – have slaveholding ancestors, a Reuters examination found. Few are willing to talk about their ties to America's “original sin”
posted by robbyrobs at 7:03 AM PST - 52 comments

After two (and a fraction) terms of the inane, waffling, conservative bootlicking John Tory (who resigned after it was discovered he was schtupping a staffer), preceeded by a term of the odious and idiotic Rob Ford resulting in over 13 years of ponderously ineffective governance, Toronto has finally elected a progressive, visionary mayor: Olivia Chow -- immigrant, Chinese, a master of grass-roots organizing, and the widow of much lamented Jack Layton. I'mma editorialize further: we're giddy up here. [more inside]
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:00 AM PST - 57 comments

"Together, they might be the two worst college golfers in America, but that’s only if you can’t look beyond the score." With the viability of their D-III college golf team and their conference's automatic qualifying bid to nationals on the line, two women--neither who ever played a full round of golf before--chose to help. They shot a combined 434 in a single round, and that was only the start of their journey.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 6:30 AM PST - 33 comments

Happy Pride Month! The 1984 documentary Before Stonewall [1h26m] came out 15 years after the Stonewall Rebellion, and documents the social/cultural life of queer life in the US before the landmark event in 1969. The struggle for equality is shown across the decades of the 20th Century as history evolves. The documentary received a modern restoration in 2019 and the same year was named to the Library Of Congress National Film Registry. Wikipedia [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:54 AM PST - 2 comments

Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) is an under-diagnosed health condition that can lead to odd symptoms. "Mast cells are a part of your immune system that are present in connective tissue (which is why the disorder is very often comorbid with Ehlers-Danlos...). They store histamine and heparin, and release them when encountering certain environmental conditions and allergens... MCAS happens when your mast cells are very bad at identifying environmental conditions and allergens they should freak out at, and instead they freak out ('degranulate') at literally [effing] everything..." Writer synecdochic discusses do-it-yourself ways to diagnose and treat MCAS, and recommends Mast Attack for more details.
posted by brainwane at 4:50 AM PST - 4 comments

Australian earless dragon last seen in 1969 rediscovered in secret location. Victorian grassland earless dragon was once common west of Melbourne but numbers declined due to habitat loss and predators such as feral cats.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:49 PM PST - 8 comments

Dinosaurs have had a rich history within the film industry, brought to life on the big screen with the use of an array of methods and featuring in many different genres. [SLYT]
posted by rebent at 5:40 PM PST - 11 comments

Veteran gamblers know you can’t beat the horses. There are too many variables and too many possible outcomes. Front-runners break a leg. Jockeys fall. Champion thoroughbreds decide, for no apparent reason, that they’re simply not in the mood ... Play for long enough, and failure isn’t just likely but inevitable—so the wisdom goes. “If you bet on horses, you will lose,” says Warwick Bartlett, who runs Global Betting & Gaming Consultants and has spent years studying the industry ... What if that wasn’t true? from The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code [Bloomberg; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:12 PM PST - 38 comments

Do you know your town like the back of your hand? Then prove it, with, uh, Back Of Your Hand, a web game that asks you to identify randomly selected streets on a map and scores you on how close you got. [more inside]
posted by cortex at 10:50 AM PST - 46 comments

"Egregore," by merritt k, is a short story about what happens when you make up a guy to get mad at and the guy gets mad at you back. [more inside]
posted by babelfish at 7:51 AM PST - 52 comments

Happy Pride Month! It was the song Same Love that launched Mary Lambert [Wikipedia] into the stratosphere. The spoken word poet pivoted her career toward music, landing Secrets on top of the US Dance charts. Her most recent album, 2021's Grief Creature [Bandcamp] took five years, as she explains to Front Row Live in an interview about the album [19m]. The Advocate talked to her shortly before the album's release. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:53 AM PST - 2 comments

Come, fellow MeFites, and obnixely enter texts into this fiendish and ancient device. Of anecdotes and tales, baboonery lived, stories told and untold. Of travels to the underworld, of delicacies enjoyed, of a Yule of past or a Yule to come. Be not an agelast on reading, but be wakerife and stub not thy hallux on reaching for keyboard or quill, for this threade be free...
posted by Wordshore at 3:41 AM PST - 142 comments

Programme 4 Community Television has begun its broadcast day!
posted by infinitewindow at 9:06 PM PST - 18 comments

If you hate how Youtube's home page is lately full of clickbait thumbnails and titles desperate for you to load them, you might want to take a look at DeArrow, written by Ajay Ramachandran (Chrome, Firefox), an extension that can replace them with crowdsourced alternatives, or in their absence provide de-emphasized titles and random thumbnails. Ramachandran also produces SponsorBlock (Chrome, Firefox), a crowdsourced system for skipping past the sponsorship ads in videos, as well as the non-music portions of music videos. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 1:19 PM PST - 96 comments

Four Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse crew members say unsustainable working conditions are behind the success of the animated film.

Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion. Four of these crew members agreed to speak pseudonymously about the sprint to finish the movie three years into the sequel’s development and production, a period whose franticness they attribute to Lord’s management style — in particular, his seeming inability to conceptualize 3-D animation during the early planning stages and his preference to edit fully rendered work instead.

While frequent major overhauls are standard operating procedure in animation (Pixar films can take between four and seven years to plot, animate, and render), those changes typically occur early on during development and storyboarding stages. But these Spider-Verse 2 crew members say they were asked to make alterations to already-approved animated sequences that created a backlog of work across multiple late-stage departments.

[more inside]
posted by Pachylad at 12:16 PM PST - 48 comments

For eight years, between 1955 and 1963, federal agents ran a hidden brothel in one of San Francisco’s poshest neighborhoods and tested LSD on unsuspecting Bay Area residents ... At the center of this wildly unethical program was George Hunter White, a former San Francisco journalist-turned-cop who became one of the biggest crusaders of America’s early war on drugs. In public, he railed against drug use and ruthlessly investigated jazz legends like Billie Holiday. Privately, however, he drank martinis by the pitcher and even used drugs like LSD and marijuana. from 'Operation Midnight Climax': The CIA mixed LSD and sex at this SF brothel [SF Gate; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:09 PM PST - 29 comments

Toward a Leisure Ethic A return to the leisure ethic might show us what we are missing. By developing such an ethos, we might find new vistas of human potential and value while fostering a more harmonious relationship with nature and each other along the way. The structure of the average day precludes what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” those rare experiences of authentic self-affirmation that stick with us, crystallized in memory. Although, as Woolf observed, “every day includes much more non-being than being,” that is all the more reason to attend seriously to the limited time one has. The more harried one’s day—the more filled it is with banal busyness and fleeting frivolities—the scarcer the potential for authentic experiences becomes. The shorter one’s life becomes. [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 5:52 AM PST - 40 comments

Happy Pride Month! Adult Mom [Wikipedia] is an indie band that started in Stevie Knipe's bedroom. They created a lo-fi documentary about recording their 2021 album Driver [YT playlist], East For Winter: The Making Of Driver [1h10m] that is full of anecdotes and recording performances. Their most recent release is the non-album track "91". Thank you fabius for this suggestion.
posted by hippybear at 5:52 AM PST - 3 comments

In 2016 Steve Dennette decided to fell and mill some trees in Granby, Massachusetts to build a boat in his back yard and 80 miles from the ocean. Plan is sailing that boat round the world. Last Saturday 17 June 2023 Arabella was launched (38m YT) and took her first spin round Mattapoisett harbor [CBS 6 min exec summary] with Dennette at the tiller [for the first time!]. The trees were planted and pruned by Steve's GtGrandfather. [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:03 AM PST - 10 comments

Very rarely seen marsupial with silky golden fur spotted near Uluru. The marsupial mole is completely blind, swims through the desert sand and rarely ventures above ground. But one eagle-eyed traveller is in disbelief after spotting one attempting to cross the road.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:27 AM PST - 11 comments

When our plates are cleared, Lit orders an espresso martini. My brain feels hollow but I order a dessert wine, and leave the selection up to the sommelier. For dessert, I choose the pistachio praline with Grand Marnier bavarois, while Lit orders the honey-roasted fig with a whipped yoghurt pavlova. We can hear his cocktail being shaken over the murmurs of the emptying dining room. from Financial ‘meme-lord’ Litquidity: ‘The market is beyond satire. You can’t make it up’ [FT; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:00 PM PST - 16 comments

German free jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann has died at age 82. Known for albums like Machine Gun, Songlines, Born Broke, and the 2022 Oxbow collaboration An Eternal Reminder of Not Today (and many more), and live shows with Last Exit, William Parker, Hamid Drake, and countless others, he was a towering figure in the small world of free jazz. WKCR has a memorial broadcast scheduled from 4 pm to midnight (EST) today.
posted by box at 9:44 AM PST - 19 comments

Happy Pride Month! The Ghanaian-American musician Amaarae [Wikipedia] just released her sophomore album Fountain Baby [YT playlist, NPR review] earlier this month. Working loosely within "pop music" in the west, she often finds herself on the outside in her native Accra. Here she talks with KEXP in 2021 with some pandemic acoustic performances. [41m] For a fuller context, here's a talk/discussion about Nigerian and Ghanaian music [Vimeo, 1h10m, rather scholarly but good] and how the alté/alternate music scene fits into the complex world of African music culture featuring Amaarae as a primary example. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:47 AM PST - 3 comments

"Edie tilted her head to listen. It was catchy, full of bouncy rhythms. It made Edie think of sparkly outfits and dancing.....The name of the singer had been said so quickly, and besides that, all musicians gave themselves funny names. They’d done that even when Edie was young." In the short science fiction story "Always and Forever, Only You" by Iona Datt Sharma (previously on MetaFilter), a woman in "what the Sunshine Care Home called Independent Sheltered Living" experiences joy, heartbreak, and togetherness.
posted by brainwane at 5:47 PM PST - 4 comments

It has begun! PWC WAGNER'S owner Prigozhin has called Russians to unite behind him and bring justice and fairness to Russia! (SLYT to Inside Russia live stream) The situation is developing rapidly.
posted by Meatbomb at 4:04 PM PST - 1173 comments

Bobby Broccoli presents a story about the greatest failure in American physics: The Superconducting Super Collider. (warning: 3 hour Youtube video)
posted by Pendragon at 3:38 PM PST - 26 comments

In 1997, two composers made "The Most Unwanted Song" by sending out a survey and putting together all the annoying lyrics and music that most people said they didn't like. The song has a harp with an accordion, out-of-tune children singing about Christmas and Walmart, lots of high-pitched flutes with tubas and keyboard demos, someone yelling random political terms through a megaphone, and an operatic soprano rapping over cowboy music, bagpipes, and screaming. It's 22 minutes long. (Apologies in advance)
posted by Roverlaw at 12:54 PM PST - 44 comments

Hold Space to Fly Straight An addictive, one-button game. [more inside]
posted by swift at 12:51 PM PST - 15 comments

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, with assistance of Biden administration, obtains long sought after sick days for members at four American class 1 railroads (BNSF, Norfolk Southern, CSX, and Union Pacific) in deal seperate from last year's legislative anti strike action.
posted by Mitheral at 12:23 PM PST - 9 comments

Largely, however, I think these theories are promoted by political journalists as a means of protecting their own hoary narratives of presidential politics. Here’s mine: It’s chaotic. It’s weird. Nobody knows anything. Thus, evaluating the candidates through the design & typography of their campaign websites is as valid a method as any. If you think otherwise, you’re a typographic spoiler. from TYPOGRAPHY 2024: FOR AMERICA! FOR AMERICA’S BEST [CW: U.S. politics]
posted by chavenet at 11:31 AM PST - 12 comments

In Central Park, there are four main types of benches: the Central Park settee, the World’s Fair, wood-and-concrete, and rustic benches. When [noted racist] Robert Moses became the Parks Commissioner in 1934, he wanted to put his stamp on the park and called for a new bench. This one was made of cast iron, with an Art Deco flair, but its basic shape harked back to the hoop arms of the turn of the century. About 8,000 were made for the 1939 New York World's Fair—and many are still in the park today.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:56 AM PST - 6 comments

Somewhere beneath southern Minnesota lie the remnants of about 40,000 board games once created and sold as an antiestablishment alternative to mega-selling Monopoly. Manufactured in Mankato, the game Anti-Monopoly found success in the mid-1970s amid America's rampant inflation and institutional distrust. Then, much like in Monopoly, the ownership class quashed the competition.
posted by Etrigan at 9:35 AM PST - 16 comments

Mark Zuckerberg is ready to fight Elon Musk in a cage match [The Verge] Here we go. After Elon Musk recently tweeted that he would be “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO shot back by posting a screenshot of Musk’s tweet with the caption “send me location.” I’ve confirmed that Zuckerberg’s post on his Instagram account is, in fact, not a joke, which means the ball is now in Musk’s court. “The story speaks for itself,” Meta spokesperson Iska Saric told me. After this story was published, Musk responded with two words: “Vegas Octagon.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:28 AM PST - 215 comments

Here we fondly remember Stanley Michael Harris, 3.3.23 - 22.2.93 Found on OpenBenches, a collaborative website collecting geolocations and metadata of memorial benches. [more inside]
posted by avapoet at 7:00 AM PST - 12 comments

Happy Pride Month! Troubled, incarcerated, discovered, acclaimed, forgotten, beloved, rediscovered. The life of early 70s musician Judee Sill [Wikipedia] is a complicated rollercoaster, expertly summarized by the BBC in The Lost Genius of Judee Sill [28m, audio, 2014, recommended]. The Guardian's 2022 profile coincided with the premiere of a new documentary [trailer], and the filmmakers did a great interview afterward [19m, w/ Shawn Colvin]. It's rare to have footage like this, but here is Judee at USC in 1973 [12m] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:43 AM PST - 7 comments

I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers. To actually look closely at the stunning elegance of flowers is to see one of the most beautiful aspects of nature. The architecture of these botanical wonders is a testament to nature’s boundless creativity and ingenuity
posted by _benj at 5:08 AM PST - 5 comments

The Daily Sea Surface Temperature - click on 'World (60S-60N)' to toggle with North Atlantic data - compiled by the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. BBC: Sudden heat increase in seas around UK and Ireland. Science News: Why is the North Atlantic breaking heat records? New Scientist: UK and Ireland suffer one of the most severe marine heatwaves on Earth. Vox: The world’s oceans are extremely hot. We’re about to find out what happens next. The Conversation: here's what that (ocean heat) means for humans and ecosystems around the world.
posted by Wordshore at 12:46 PM PST - 47 comments

How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S. Lauren Davila made a stunning discovery as a graduate student at the College of Charleston: an ad for a slave auction larger than any historian had yet identified. The find yields a new understanding of the enormous harm of such a transaction.
posted by dfm500 at 11:23 AM PST - 14 comments

Pain is like a memory, a path reinforced every time we walk down it. As such, it’s quite possible that writing this is an act of self-harm. It’s not just that it hurts to write, although it does; it’s that when I started thinking about this piece, reading around it, even jotting down notes, I felt the pain in my forearms flare up again, and for a month or two I considered calling it off. My physiotherapist would call that “avoidance”. I would call it “learning from experience”, given that it was writing that got me here in the first place. A June 2023 Guardian long read by Oliver Franklin-Wallis on his struggle to find relief from chronic pain. Content warning: moderate self-harm and suicidal ideation. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 11:19 AM PST - 23 comments

Critically, the bench is classless. Particularly a park bench. From well-dressed ladies to homeless men, from horny teens to elderly people-watchers and pigeon-feeders, they come out to just be in the world a little. It exemplifies a certain kind of publicness, a truly democratic intervention and a place to be private in public, a small space in the melee of the metropolis where it is acceptable to do nothing, to consume nothing, to just be. Truly, a free bench is a wonderful thing. from A Place of Both Solitude and Belonging: In Praise of the Park Bench
posted by chavenet at 10:50 AM PST - 22 comments

That gold theft, like the recent gold theft, involved a Brink’s truck, an airplane, cargo handlers, and smooth crooks who could vanish unseen. Both jobs would need inside help. [more inside]
posted by sardonyx at 10:11 AM PST - 13 comments

Supreme Court Rules Against Navajo Nation in water supply case CNN The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against the Navajo Nation, dismissing a lawsuit arguing that the federal government has the legal duty under treaties signed in the 1800s to develop a plan to provide the tribe with an adequate water supply. The ruling was 5-4 against the Navajos with Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivering the opinion of the court. Justice Neil Gorsuch, filed a dissenting opinion joined by the court’s liberal justices. [more inside]
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 9:53 AM PST - 19 comments

The Justice Department’s report [on Minneapolis PD] was almost uniformly critical, painting a disturbing portrait of a dysfunctional law enforcement agency where illegal conduct was common, racism was pervasive and misconduct was tolerated. Minneapolis Police Used Illegal, Abusive Practices for Years, Justice Dept. Finds [more inside]
posted by paimapi at 9:45 AM PST - 23 comments

Sophie Houlden announces they've made an epicycle clock web app. [more inside]
posted by AlSweigart at 9:37 AM PST - 20 comments

A decade after the cancelation of Brendan Small's affectionate skewering of metal culture, Metalocalypse is getting a proper conclusion with Army of the Doomstar. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:50 AM PST - 17 comments

The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature (NYT gift) Writers Roxane Gay, James Ijames, Lisa Kron, Thomas Page McBee, Neel Mukherjee, and Edmund White created the list.
posted by box at 8:14 AM PST - 26 comments

Protecting ideas lies along a thin line of safeguarding creators’ work without stifling creativity and innovation. Ravensburger is still targeting an August 18 release date for Disney Lorcana despite receiving a lawsuit alleging it's a "stolen game".
posted by Etrigan at 6:37 AM PST - 21 comments

Wednesday’s Nintendo Direct was jam-packed with pleasant surprises, from a Super Mario RPG remake to the return of Detective Pikachu. Another standout announcement was a new Mario game, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which looks like a fun and trippy take on the usual 2D platformer formula. The trailer showed Mario and the gang going on adventures, and at the end of the trailer, Nintendo gave us a sneak peek at a new, goofy-looking fruit that turns Mario into an elephant. Elephant Mario is still recognizably Mario. He’s bipedal, bright-eyed, and keeps his usual mustache, cap, and overalls. (His shoes, however, are gone; presumably, they don’t fit his new elephant feet.) [...] Nintendo didn’t reveal any details about Hollow Knight: Silksong, Metroid Prime 4, or post-release content for Tears of the Kingdom. [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 6:29 AM PST - 32 comments

Happy Pride Month! I was surprised to learn that Kara Jackson is not only a raw, inventive young musician [Kara Jackson Uses Rage, Channels Brandy, Ponders The Human Predicament On Astonishing New LP, Country Queer], but she was a 2019 National Youth Poet Laureate. The Poetry Vlog interviewed her in 2019 about where she was then. [31m] She talked to Kyle Meredith recently about where she is now. [23m] Her recently released album, Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? [YT playlist] is an emotional dreamscape full of searching.
posted by hippybear at 5:42 AM PST - 1 comment

Because it turns out transition isn’t the answer for everyone — to suggest otherwise is narrow-minded and proscriptive. I am nine years old. I am learning the rules, and I am learning that boys liking girl things is a very high stakes issue. I am learning that adults react the same way to my interest in makeup as they do to my interest in matches and lighters. As if maybe, by being what I am, I might burn down something very important to them. Something that makes their life more comfortable and easy. [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 2:09 AM PST - 49 comments

Between 1948 and 1996, about 16,500 people were operated on without their consent under a eugenics law, triggering long campaign for redress
posted by brundlefly at 1:04 AM PST - 2 comments

Why rabbits? Noah Smith on keeping rabbits as pets.

People often ask me: “Why rabbits?” Usually my answer is just “They’re floofy.” And that is a perfectly fine and good answer. Rabbits are indeed floofy, and they’re also playful and affectionate and funny.

posted by russilwvong at 8:56 PM PST - 17 comments

US doctors are rationing lifesaving cancer drugs amid dire shortage The drug shortage could lead to preventable deaths, and it's unclear when it will end.
posted by UhOhChongo! at 7:57 PM PST - 30 comments

I want to tell you how this unfolded without judgment, but every sentence is an arrow pointing somewhere. Already, this, as if there were one thing; unfolded, past tense, as if it has ended. The subject of the November 2017 email: your father raped me #me too.
posted by latkes at 7:54 PM PST - 16 comments

The U.S. Agriculture Department has approved the sale for human consumption of cultured meat . Upside Foods and Good Meat will supply vat poultry to high-end restaurants Bar Crenn and The Bazaar by José Andrés, respectively, until economies of scale kick in and bring lab-grown meat products to your(?) kitchen.
posted by logicpunk at 7:44 PM PST - 30 comments

Davie Bowie's ”Life on Mars?” was released as a single 50 years ago. Did you know it was written as revenge on Frank Sinatra? [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:44 PM PST - 12 comments

This past Saturday, Dr. Robert Moore, a retired dean from San Jose University, turned 100. Dr. Moore is an avid dog lover, and so his daughter Allison had a unique idea - she posted a message on NextDoor asking people to bring their dogs over that afternoon to say hello. She expected maybe only 20 or 30 people - but over 200 people showed up. [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:18 PM PST - 16 comments

Do you enjoy reading the fiction of that in/famous author of weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft? Have you ever said "but what if we had endless Lovecraft fiction?" Researchers attempted to simulate Lovecraftian fiction with GPT-4 [link to ArXiv preprint].
posted by cupcakeninja at 10:45 AM PST - 26 comments

Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping. from AI Is a Lot of Work [Intelligencer; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 10:45 AM PST - 21 comments

It’s been a long time since most Americans shared a values system. Maybe it’s time to accept that.
posted by wittgenstein at 10:38 AM PST - 60 comments

The real history is much messier—and more inspiring.

While Texans celebrated Juneteenth with a particular zeal, many Americans still did not have the faintest clue about its origins, historical import, or contemporary resonance. That was, until an improbable series of events transformed Juneteenth into a national symbol.

[more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 10:34 AM PST - 3 comments

Ontario mom's brutally honest kid birthday invitation goes viral. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 10:07 AM PST - 22 comments

Moon Dog is a fun little short from young Australian filmmaker Nat Kelly. If it's a gloomy day where you are, try this charming distraction. That is all.
posted by Naberius at 9:39 AM PST - 4 comments

"So what is gender-affirming care, exactly? And why is it important? The 19th spoke with health care professionals who provide gender-affirming care to adults and adolescents — as well as trans young adults who were comfortable sharing their experiences — to answer those questions."
posted by bwerdmuller at 6:39 AM PST - 17 comments

Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court (archive.today link) [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:27 AM PST - 114 comments

Happy Pride Month! Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix [Wikipedia] and her band Liturgy make music typically classified as Black Metal, but there is so much more going on in their newest album 93696 [YT playlist]. Hellgate NYC reviews and interviews and writes from earlier this year. She sat with Veil Of Sound last month to talk about the album, her life and philosophy, and her music. [46m] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:41 AM PST - 1 comment

Mental floss - 10 Facts About the History of LGBTQ Pride Month "This year marks the 52nd anniversary of the first gay Pride march, which was held on the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Read on for the history of Pride Month and LGBTQ activism in the United States." - Mental floss [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 3:55 AM PST - 4 comments

Letters exchanged with Mary Renault are the start of an essay looking back on Renault's writing and her 'American boy', Daniel Mendelsohn who traces thoughtfully and tenderly what the gay relationships in her books meant to him as a reader, writer and friend by correspondence.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:19 PM PST - 13 comments

Ellen Alaverdyan is a 10 years old bass player from Las Vegas, Nevada. Started playing the bass in April 2020.

Ellen playing Tom Sawyer

Ellen's Ten Favorite Bass Lines
(She really shines at about 9:02, "Give Up the Funk")
posted by dfm500 at 10:17 PM PST - 10 comments

The first constitutional climate trial in US history came to a close today. A ruling in Held v. Montana is not expected for several weeks as the judge considers the arguments. Montana's case was brought in part because the state constitution guarantees "the right to a clean and healthful environment." [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:51 PM PST - 9 comments

The Etsy sellers paying rent with Taylor Swift merch (The Hustle) [more inside]
posted by box at 4:51 PM PST - 5 comments

From Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul's latest album, Carry Them With Us, the video for the single Tha Fonn Gun Bhi Trom | I Am Disposed of Mirth features some entrancing music, a collaboration with saxophonist and composer Colin Stetson (who also co-produces the album), and the truly stunning landscapes of the Isle of Skye's Cuillin Hills. [more inside]
posted by yasaman at 4:49 PM PST - 11 comments

The unhappy news that Amazon would be shutting down the digital-photography website DPReview can be replaced with the happy news that Gear Patrol has acquired it. It looks like DPReview will continue intact.
posted by adamrice at 3:06 PM PST - 19 comments

‘You can’t listen to CDs on your digital devices unless you rip them first. In ancient times—back in 2001—people knew how to do this, but much that should have been remembered has been forgotten.’
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:03 PM PST - 88 comments

Overly dramatic Indian soap-opera compilation. [YouTube]
posted by Fizz at 11:35 AM PST - 58 comments

Simone Giertz visits Mohammad Waheed, a syrian toymaker, for the UNHCR series "We Were Here". [more inside]
posted by Pendragon at 11:18 AM PST - 8 comments

The Mystery of the Largest Light in the Sea "A quarter-mile below the ocean’s surface, in the borderless realm of the midwater, two blue-green orbs illuminate the inky black. They glow for a few seconds then disappear. When they return, it’s for the same duration. The same disappearance. It’s a signal, a message, the morse code of an ancient language of light. Friend or foe? Rival or mate? I am here, I am this."
posted by dhruva at 10:45 AM PST - 10 comments

Each stripe represents the average temperature for a single year, relative to the average temperature over the period as a whole. Shades of blue indicate cooler-than-average years, while red shows years that were hotter than average. The stark band of deep red stripes on the right-hand side of the graphic show the rapid heating of our planet in recent decades. Also: Biodiversity Stripes
posted by chavenet at 10:34 AM PST - 33 comments

The 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup kicks off in 30 days. Predict the winner at The Telegraph. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 8:21 AM PST - 32 comments

Unbound is a 200-mile race on the dirt and gravel roads around the Flint Hills of Kansas, and is notorious for its extremely challenging course and weather conditions. Unbound is now the most prestigious bike race in America. It's the crown jewel of gravel racing, a sub-discipline of cycling that prides itself on being far more independent and inclusive than Euro-style road racing. If the modern pro peloton is so high-tech and ready for the limelight that it's got its own Drive to Survive-style docuseries on the way, gravel racing like Unbound is closer to the Tour's early days: Here's the course, you figure it out, see you at the finish line. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 6:19 AM PST - 29 comments

Happy Pride Month! Joy Oladokun [Wikipedia] makes "positively powerful" country pop [Gay Times UK]. Her new album Proof Of Life [YT playlist] is also being recognized in folk music circles [Joy Oladokun Emerges With a Defiant Hopefulness, Folk Alley]. CBS Mornings has an interview with and primer about Joy and her music. [8m40s, Facebook] Joy sat with Adia Victoria to discuss influential black woman musicians and to perform a song. [7m45s, Newport Festivals] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:40 AM PST - 8 comments

An article on older autistic people: "Seniors across the country deal with numerous physical and mental health conditions every day that have been heavily studied, but there is not nearly as much research on the experience of those who are on the spectrum. Better understanding what autism looks like in seniors and how it may impact their lives can help make a difference for both them and their families." [more inside]
posted by Zumbador at 5:01 AM PST - 5 comments

But very short fictions need not be concessions to workshop practicalities, the Internet, or shallow attention spans. They can also be—as my extracts show us—serious explorations of the formal possibilities of extreme compression. from The Art of Compression by Richard Hughes Gibson
posted by chavenet at 10:29 AM PST - 23 comments

Introducing Gastro Obscura’s Juneteenth Series by guest editor Michael Twitty [Atlas Obscura] Beyond red cake and soda, food holds a special place on Juneteenth. Like Emancipation itself, the withheld promise of true freedom and equality continues to be fought for, and food remains a key weapon in that battle. [...] The African American food experience is intimately tied to all of the elements discussed here—the celebration of the push and the movement towards equality; the expressive eloquence and power of Black music, dance, and oratory; and the communication of soul energy through food as well as the migrations and movements that have pushed Black people across history’s landscape. : The Legacy of a Civil Rights Icon’s Vegetarian Cookbook | 6 Restaurants That Celebrate Black History | The Chef Fighting Mass Incarceration With Food | The Civil Rights Icon Who Saw Freedom in Farming | A Rare Recipe From a Talented Chef Enslaved by a Founding Father | How a West African Woman Became the ‘Pastry Queen’ of Colonial Rhode Island | The Underground Kitchen That Funded the Civil Rights Movement | The Story Behind Red-Hued Juneteenth Food and Drink [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:37 AM PST - 6 comments

Live reporting at the BBC. It is unclear how many people were on board. The submersible belonged to OceanGate, a company that has been offering tours to the Titanic, two miles deep in the North Atlantic. Tickets: $250,000 per person. A search-and-rescue mission is underway, led by the U. S. Coast Guard.
posted by beagle at 9:29 AM PST - 1159 comments

Happy Pride Month! Being an old, I'd never heard of JoJo Siwa [Wikipedia] before RobinofFrocksley mentioned her. At the age of 20, she's a pop star, an online influencer, and even is a video game [Nintendo]. Here, JoJo sits with Demi Lovato in 2021 for a 40 minute conversation about her life as a young queer icon. She's been talking this month about how she felt safe coming out on social media. [EOnline] She springboarded into pop stardom at the age of 13, outside of her earlier childhood reality show career, with her anti-bullying anthem BOOMERANG [3m30s], which currently has well over 976 million views.
posted by hippybear at 5:38 AM PST - 5 comments

FBI resisted opening probe into Trump’s role in Jan. 6 for more than a year In the DOJ’s investigation of Jan. 6, key Justice officials also quashed an early plan for a task force focused on people in Trump’s orbit
posted by NotLost at 5:35 AM PST - 47 comments

The diary of a woman forced to flee Texas for an abortion Lauren Miller is one of 14 women suing Texas with the Center for Reproductive Rights.
posted by goo at 5:32 AM PST - 5 comments

We Rate Dogs has a new series on their YouTube channel, We Walk Dogs. Their latest episode goes for a walk with Dave Bautista and his 4 rescue pitbulls. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 5:13 AM PST - 17 comments

Da da da (alternative), by Trio, was a top five hit single in 15 countries in 1982. (Joyful Top of the Pops version) (One hour version). In live performance, lead singer (and only surviving band member) Stephan Remmler played the Casio VL-1 keyboard using the Rock-1 rhythm preset and the Piano voice. (Previously: the demo melody on the Casio VL-1)
posted by Wordshore at 2:48 AM PST - 38 comments

This is a little free of english language, and lesser days than monday. [more inside]
posted by flamewise at 11:13 PM PST - 41 comments

He’s Deeply Religious and a Democrat. He Might Be the Next Big Thing in Texas Politics. - James Talarico confounds Fox News hosts, fights the culture wars by quoting scripture, and has fellow Democrats talking about his statewide future. [more inside]
posted by Pachylad at 10:11 PM PST - 64 comments

The first match of the 2023 Men's Ashes series is underway, at Edgebaston in England. So far Australia's Usman Khawaja has made 141, dismissed by England's Ollie Robinson. Previously, previously, previously, previously. [more inside]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:11 PM PST - 23 comments

Qiu Jin was a Chinese feminist revolutionary [archive link] beheaded by agents of the Qing empire in 1907, becoming a martyred hero to her cause. She was also a poet, and Canadian translator (and SF writer) Yilin Wang has been publishing new translations of her poetry in various venues. For more about her approach, you can read her essay about translating. These new translations have been widely appreciated, including by the British Museum, who stole them and published without attribution or compensation.
posted by Kattullus at 3:11 PM PST - 23 comments

Guinness World Records, Britannica and the U.S. government agree: The longest river in the world is the mighty Nile — the “father of African rivers,” Britannica says. But in Brazil, home to the powerful Amazon River, which cleaves South America more than slithers across it, the Nile’s standing is slightly lower. “Second biggest river in the world,” scoffs Portuguese-speaking Wikipedia. “The Amazon is the most extensive in the world,” declares the educational website Brazil School. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 12:26 PM PST - 41 comments

Linguists have identified a new English dialect that’s emerging in South Florida "“We got down from the car and went inside.” “I made the line to pay for groceries.”“He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.” These phrases might sound off to the ears of most English-speaking Americans. In Miami, however, they’ve become part of the local parlance."[via]
posted by dhruva at 12:10 PM PST - 42 comments

Coercive diplomacy [PDF], "where international politics often takes place in a gray region involving no-peace and no-war, wherein the threat of violence – more than its mere application – is the critical variable," is everywhere. China recently published a laundry list of the US' efforts, while China's are also well-known, if less-than-effective. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 10:25 AM PST - 20 comments

Twitter is being evicted from its Boulder, Colorado office due to lack of rent payments over the past 12 months. This isn't a surprise, as we have seen Musk decline to pay for rent in San Francisco or even for Google Cloud services. But what is not mentioned is that this eviction is over a completely new and unused Boulder Colorado office. This is a comedy of errors - an office space that was planned before the pandemic and then, somehow, built anyway while everyone was working from home. Rod Hilton provides the background, with pictures, in a Mastodon thread.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:56 AM PST - 77 comments

Some Sunday Silliness™: Infinite, interactive Trump vs. Biden "debate" on Twitch, powered by ✨A.I.✨ (tw: bad language. also: Trump)
posted by slater at 6:32 AM PST - 12 comments

Happy Pride Month! Ferron [Wikipedia] is one of the godmothers of queer woman's music. She talks to Rainbow Table along with filmmaker Gerry Rogers about her career and songwriting. [~50m] Trailer for documentary Girl On A Road. [4m25s] But because this is Ferron, there is a second documentary! Thunder sneak peak 1 [9m30s], sneak peak 2 [7m12s], trailer [4m50s] And from 2022, Ferrron's full set at Vancouver Island Musicfest [58m]
posted by hippybear at 5:38 AM PST - 9 comments

"Meet the Swedish Artist Who Hooked British Rock Royalty on Her Revolutionary Crochet". At the start of her career, Birgitta Bjerke crocheted garments for Eric Clapton, Roger Daltrey and other VIPs of the 1960s and 1970s. "Today, at 80, Bjerke continues to divide her time between Pecos, New Mexico, and Gotland, Sweden, and is making some of the best crochet of her career". She makes paintings with crochet too, and works for films and television.
posted by paduasoy at 3:58 AM PST - 14 comments

how TV screens made watching movies worse (or alternate VR version) is a 20-minute discussion rant from Youtuber noodle about the issues with home movie formats, TVs, and especially aspect ratios. [more inside]
posted by Dysk at 12:39 AM PST - 62 comments

r/pics users voted 37,331 to 2,329 in favor of sexy John Oliver. [more inside]
posted by signal at 8:00 PM PST - 49 comments

Netflix's first teaser trailer for their live-action One Piece series now out
posted by Pachylad at 8:00 PM PST - 18 comments

At the bottom of an ancient crater, in a city with buildings made of diamond, German archæologists have discovered a 3000 year old sword so perfectly preserved it 'almost shines.'
posted by logicpunk at 7:02 PM PST - 16 comments

H.D.(Hilda Doolittle) epic poem, 'The Walls Do No Fall'. H.D. Reads "Helen in Egypt" (slyt). "HERmione is a lyrical act of sense-making, the reverse of a time capsule—gazing backwards, at a younger self now rendered a stranger in the wistful eye of hindsight." from: 'Dream of a Past. 'Going Through Hell With H.D.’s ‘Eurydice’
posted by clavdivs at 6:12 PM PST - 2 comments

Fox News Producer Behind 'Wannabe Dictator' Chyron Exits the Network
posted by buffy12 at 4:50 PM PST - 20 comments

Going through a parent's hoard after their illness or death or can be daunting. For five exhausting years, Thalia and Tara blogged at Tetanus Burger about whittling away at the 78 junk cars and mysterious piles left by their father at their family's residential lot. Reader beware, there are truly horrific stories about their childhood. But there are also cute kittens (scroll to the bottom of the linked post)! [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:05 PM PST - 48 comments

Harvey Golden, when he isn't running The Lincoln Street Kayak & Canoe Museum, builds functional representative^* replicas of historical indigenous kayaks (87 so far) and paddles. With well curated information to the originals being replicated. [more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 1:26 PM PST - 6 comments

What is cozy horror? At the Mary Sue Julia Glassman explains the subgenre and offers examples, notably Over the Garden Wall. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 1:24 PM PST - 22 comments

Donald Gray Triplett, the first person diagnosed with autism symptoms, died Thursday, according to his longtime employer. Triplett was 89.
posted by Etrigan at 10:21 AM PST - 29 comments

Villarejo hewed to a simple defense: that, while not completely innocent of the accusations against him, he was operating in a system where his kind of espionage was long accepted. He was a patriot, he declared, following the orders that he was given to protect the state. If there was a problem, the problem wasn’t with him, he argued; it was with Spain itself, for letting Villarejo be Villarejo. from The Spy Who Called Me [NY Times Magazine; ungated] by Nicholas Casey [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 10:06 AM PST - 2 comments

Happy Pride Month! A Mexican friend of mine suggested Mon Laferte [Wikipedia], and I'm so glad he did! While she's been long known for her justice and feminist activism [BBC], she defiantly claimed queer identity in mid-concert in 2018 [Spanish article, Google Translate is careless with Spanish pronouns]. Her 2021 album SEIS [YT playlist, has several lyric videos in English translation, that opening track is wow, lyric video for opening track (no subtitles)] won a Latin Grammy and was nominated for a Grammy. Papermag 2021 profile, Sounds And Colors review. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:36 AM PST - 5 comments

Dust to Digital's Instagram account posts community submitted videos of people from all over the world, enjoying music. Street music, traditional music, contemporary music, weddings, parties, high-school bands, funerals, protests, celebrations, anything you can imagine, and a lot you could not. This is a lovely, life affirming, hopeful collection. [more inside]
posted by Zumbador at 5:05 AM PST - 8 comments

The trailer for the next installment of the Babylon 5 saga has arrived: The Road Home. Much of the surviving cast returns, with Bruce Boxleitner, Claudia Christian, Peter Jurasik, Bill Mumy, Tracy Scoggins, and Patricia Tallman all reprising their iconic characters.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 1:13 AM PST - 46 comments

Surrender to Steely Dan - How the insufferably perfectionist duo captured the hearts of a new generation of listeners

Pappademas tries out several theories to explain the Danaissance’s timing. The most compelling of them is the idea that their songs, full of gallows humor and wry disillusionment, resonate with a generation raised on crashing economies and a climate crisis. “Donald and Walter’s songs of monied decadence, druggy disconnection, slow-motion apocalypse, and self-destructive escapism seemed satirically extreme way back when; now they seem prophetic,” he writes. “We are all Steely Dan characters now.”

Steely Dan’s music posed a question: Was it possible to be an ironist and a perfectionist simultaneously? Was taking rock and roll this seriously a high-concept joke, or the only way to unlock the music’s full creative potential? Or had Steely Dan somehow come up with a blend of both, a virtuosic balancing act of scathing satire and fervent earnestness? At one point, Pappademas describes Fagen and Becker as “cynical about their own cynicism,” a phrase that hints at the fierce idealism that runs beneath the surface of even their iciest music.

[more inside]
posted by Pachylad at 7:21 PM PST - 191 comments

Daniel Ellsberg, former military analyst and leaker of the Pentagon Papers, has passed away at the age of 92
posted by brundlefly at 12:23 PM PST - 69 comments

Statistics Canada has a page where they extrapolate from census data, births, deaths, immigration, etc. and smooth it out to estimate the exact population of the country at any moment. The country will, by this metric, hit 40 million in the next half hour or so.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:46 AM PST - 30 comments

Mal Leary reported on politics in Maine. His 10 Rules are worth reading.
posted by theora55 at 10:34 AM PST - 12 comments

Queen Bey’s concert in Sweden’s capital apparently put its economy in a tizzy.... [Michael Grahn, chief economist for Sweden at Danske Bank] assessed that the concert days probably accounted for 0.2 of the 0.3 percentage points added to inflation by hotels and restaurant prices.
posted by Etrigan at 10:12 AM PST - 10 comments

Happy Bloomsday! Celebrate with this short international film:“Yes I Will Yes” [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 9:59 AM PST - 9 comments

Tears of the Kingdom site will help you make those wild builds you're seeing Meet the inventors making Hyrule’s most complicated contraptions. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:28 AM PST - 116 comments

After my mother died, my father had a choice: Give up or reinvent himself. (NYT gift link)
posted by praemunire at 8:16 AM PST - 20 comments

Concurrent with the rise of message boards in the early aughts, there was a group of young, ambitious hip hop artists in North Carolina who were schooled in the trade of that ol’ boom-bap. In 2001, they launched a message board of their own that created a unique online community that spawned unexpected collaborations and relationships that led to the creation of albums and families alike.
posted by gestalt saloon at 8:10 AM PST - 3 comments

Have You Been to the Library Lately?
posted by stp123 at 7:45 AM PST - 37 comments

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) is a podcast ( Spotify ; Apple ) run by Tim Scarfe, and also a Youtube channel, featuring interviews with prominent researchers in machine learning and related fields. [more inside]
posted by bleston hamilton station at 7:14 AM PST - 1 comment

A sludge clapper never chubs a bubble, or at least that's what I'd murm if these keeblies scruffed a skimple a sun in their ivies. Zee Bashew is back, with a cartoon depicting every crunchy dystopian RPG.
posted by JHarris at 6:14 AM PST - 20 comments

Happy Pride Month! We're halfway through the month, and here is an amazing video I found. Three decades of queer women in music, Hayley Kiyoko [32, previously], Brandi Carlile [42, previously], and Meshell Ndegeocello [54, previously] sit down for a Pandemic Pride Month chat in June of 2020 [58m]. They talk about being queer and out in music, about Pride and what it means, and the importance of role models, and music in queer life, and about so much more. It's a joyful and introspective conversation that I'm really happy to share.
posted by hippybear at 5:35 AM PST - 2 comments

In The Nation, Karen Krajcer writes about trying to keep her transgender daughter safe in Texas. Be prepared to cry.
posted by kserra at 5:19 AM PST - 24 comments

Hosts Junia Joplin and Anne Thériault recently finished their 5 episode podcast And Also Some Women, which examines the stories of biblical women with a lively assortment of guests and scholars of feminist theology. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 5:14 AM PST - 6 comments

Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023 [Colorized]
posted by loquacious at 10:24 PM PST - 66 comments

Brendan was once a leader in the US white nationalist movement. But when he took the drug MDMA in a scientific study, it would radically change his extremist beliefs – to the surprise of everyone involved.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:24 PM PST - 47 comments

The Instant Pot Failed Because It Was a Good Product

The Instant Pot is, by all indications, a perfectly good machine—maybe even a great one. The IP, as the device is known to its many devotees, is a kitchen gadget in the most straightforward sense of the term: It’s a classic labor-saver, promising to turn ingredients into family meals while you clean up, tend to your kids, and do all of the other things you could be doing instead of keeping an eye on the stove. Once you get the hang of the electric pressure cooker, it seems to basically deliver on that promise, chugging along gamely through years’ worth of weeknight dinners of pork green chili or chicken tikka masala. Since its debut in 2010, the Instant Pot has sold millions of machines and spent years as a must-have kitchen sensation.

Sure enough, in 2019, when the private-equity firm Cornell Capital bought the gadget’s maker, Instant Brands, and merged it with another kitchenware maker, the combined company was reportedly valued at more than $2 billion. A few years and one pandemic later, the company filed for bankruptcy on Monday, weighed down by more than $500 million in debt after years of supply-chain chaos and limited success expanding the Instant brand into other categories of household gadgetry. Perhaps counterintuitively, that the Instant Pot remains a useful, widely appreciated gadget is not unrelated to the faltering of its parent company. In fact, it’s central to understanding exactly what went wrong.

[more inside]
posted by Pachylad at 5:17 PM PST - 97 comments

The Slow Birding project, on the pleasures of and lessons learned from carefully observing common birds, was launched 13 years ago by animal behavior biologist Joan E. Strassmann. Now it's a book. An author interview: "the reason I wrote a whole book is that I wanted to tell the stories of the commonest birds, because the commonest birds are also the most-studied, and ornithologists have figured out some pretty amazing stories about them. So I also wanted to tell the stories of both the scientists and the common birds." On blue jays: "It may well be that these brilliant colored birds are the only ones I recognize in my early morning daze." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:40 PM PST - 10 comments

Musician Gurf Morlix tells an amazing story about the time he had a heart attack right before a gig in Florida. (SLYT)
posted by swift at 1:34 PM PST - 25 comments

Euler's Number is Irrational (SLYT). A musical proof. "Euler's number is irrational. Euler proved it so there is no debate! Euler's number is irrational And it's about two point seven one eight."
posted by storybored at 12:23 PM PST - 13 comments

Military psychiatrists label "moral injury" the soldiers' emotional wounds, when they commit acts- such as raiding a home or killing non-combatants, that transgress their core values. Doctors on the front lines of America’s profit-driven health care system were also susceptible to such wounds, as the demands of administrators, hospital executives and insurers forced them to stray from the ethical principles that were supposed to govern their profession.
posted by bodywithoutorgans at 10:15 AM PST - 59 comments

Ann Rule had spent most of her career warning other women about the “monstrous self behind the pleasant face.” But even she could not escape this final betrayal. As naïve—about the police, about psychology, about the larger forces that shape crime and criminal justice—as Rule’s books can seem now, after decades of social change, she got that one thing right: We’re the most vulnerable where we most trust. from How the Queen of True Crime Transformed Murder Stories Forever
posted by chavenet at 9:36 AM PST - 4 comments

200+ things that Fox News has labeled “woke.” “Fox personalities struggle to define ‘woke’ because they have attributed the term to nearly everything under the sun, stripping it of any meaningful definition and surrendering it to right-wing dog whistles...Here is a list of over 200 things Fox News personalities, guests, and writers have called ‘woke.’” [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 9:30 AM PST - 74 comments

Supreme Court delivers win for Native American tribes in adoption case (NBC News, CNN, NPR, WaPo). [more inside]
posted by box at 8:26 AM PST - 30 comments

The Black action star pantheon [Polygon] Action movies have a long and storied history with Black stars and Black audiences, and the genre wouldn’t be what it is today without that history. To build the pantheon of Black action stars, Polygon gathered a group of film critics, academics, authors, and experts to weigh in. Our esteemed panel includes Frankie “Balboa” Diaz, action film critic; Matthew Essary, freelance film critic; Christian Valentin, film reviewer; Lee B. Golden III, Film Combat Syndicate founder and editor; and Josiah Howard, author of Blaxploitation Cinema: The Essential Reference Guide. Each of them submitted a list of their 10 favorite Black action stars of all time, with thoughts on their favorites. What follows is the culminating list, with actors in descending order of how often they showed up on those individual lists, a few recommendations on the movies to show off their action bona fides, and the runners-up of Black action stars who were nominated and recognized by our committee.
posted by Fizz at 7:39 AM PST - 11 comments

Happy Pride Month! It's been a while since Brandi Carlile released her album In These Silent Days [YT playlist], but that doesn't mean she hasn't been busy. Just recently, Brandi help usher Joni Mitchell back before a paying audience for the first time in over 20 years [Seattle Times]. Spin has an article with video links. She also brought Tanya Tucker out of retirement, and made a documentary about it [1m30s trailer]. Here's Tanya and Brandi on Today talking about the film. [12m43s] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:34 AM PST - 19 comments

...I did not lie to the House." [more inside]
posted by protorp at 2:41 AM PST - 59 comments

There’s an idealized version of a Pride Night in my head: one night a year where a ballpark truly becomes a place where straightness is the exception and not the norm. - No Straights at Pride Night Lauren Theisen, writing about Pride Night at baseball games, the nice things that we're painfully aware we can't have, for Defector. [more inside]
posted by Ghidorah at 6:55 PM PST - 23 comments

Why Do I Look Like...This? The SexyCyborg Origin Story (YouTube) Naomi Wu (aka Sexy Cyborg) is "a Chinese DIY maker and internet personality [who] challenge[s] gender and tech stereotypes with a flamboyant public persona, using objectification of her appearance to inspire women" (Wikipedia). This video is her origin story, and it is deeply personal and funny and poignant and so, so eye-opening. It's 38 min. long but worth it. [more inside]
posted by mpark at 4:54 PM PST - 21 comments

Grandad Squarepants talks about his life under the sea.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:57 AM PST - 9 comments

Welcome to Slowjamastan, a 'micronation' hidden in California
posted by chavenet at 9:31 AM PST - 46 comments

I'm A Virgo [Official Trailer] “Through its depiction of Cootie — an awkward but endlessly curious and kindhearted young man Jerome inhabits with a boyish charm — and his parents, whose strict rules are a reflection of their love for him, I’m a Virgo is very explicitly telling a tale about what it means to be (or to raise) children whose Blackness and brilliance makes them too “big” for the world. Cootie’s gigantism is the way that Black children are robbed of their childhoods because of how other people perceive them to be older than they actually are and more deserving of punishment. Cootie’s gigantism is the boundless potential for greatness parents see in their Black children knowing full well that the society they’re living in isn’t designed to help them maximize it but, rather, to stifle it. It’s also a rather direct way of unpacking how, even when Black people manage to play the game successfully and reach the upper echelons of fame and fortune, the specter of racism by way of dehumanization is never all that far away.” [via: The Verge]
posted by Fizz at 7:04 AM PST - 7 comments

"Stable Diffusion generates images using artificial intelligence, in response to written prompts. Like many AI models, what it creates may seem plausible on its face but is actually a distortion of reality. An analysis of more than 5,000 images created with Stable Diffusion found that it takes racial and gender disparities to extremes — worse than those found in the real world." An analysis by Leonardo Nicoletti and Dina Bass for Bloomberg Technology + Equality, with striking visualizations. [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 6:00 AM PST - 44 comments

Happy Pride Day! After trailing out singles such as Contact and On The Run for months, Kelela [Wikipedia] finally released her second album Raven [YT playlist] earlier this year after a long hiatus. During this break, she went on a bit of a journey [Grounded: the revival of Kelela, Dazed, Sept 2022] that is a bit breathtaking in its scope and courage. NPR's It's Been A Minute profiled/interviewed Kelela [22m] earlier this year, for a different take on the same story, with background and music samples and a really involved interviewer. The Dazed article has more details on the curriculum she sent to her people. Thanks to eyeball for suggesting this artist. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:29 AM PST - 3 comments

Puzzle maven and speedsolver Max Park beat a super-fast solve time that was set in 2018
posted by Etrigan at 5:14 AM PST - 45 comments

[MLYT] Drue Langlgois' courageous cartoon clean-up crew, The Dudes of Hazmat, have completed their latest weird adventure, Doorway of the Devourer. You can watch all four adventures (and three music videos) to date here. It's reminiscent of Sam and Max in that there's bizarre situations, a nonetheless strong character focus, and a Weirdly Specific Vibe (different to Sam and Max's). [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 5:58 PM PST - 9 comments

For about the next decade, the combined DMX/AEI Music would compete with Muzak. In 2011-2012, Canadian background music (now usually called "multisensory marketing") firm Mood Media bought both Muzak and DMX/AEI, combining them all into the Mood Media brand. This behemoth would enjoy nearly complete control of the background music industry, were it not for the cycle of technology bringing in IP-based competitors like Pandora for Business. Haha, no, I am kidding, Pandora for Business is also a Mood Media product. 3600 words from J. B. Crawford at Computers Are Bad.
posted by cgc373 at 4:46 PM PST - 19 comments

Cormac McCarthy, a critically acclaimed author with a singular voice, has died. McCarthy was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for The Road. [more inside]
posted by theora55 at 1:33 PM PST - 117 comments

From Ars Technica via the BBC, a new Beatles record will be released later this year—widely speculated to be the John Lennon-penned song "Now and Then". [more inside]
posted by vitout at 10:26 AM PST - 99 comments

killedbygoogle.com lists 285 projects, services and pieces of software that Google has terminated during its history. Let's look back at some of them. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 9:54 AM PST - 96 comments

‘Mrs. Davis’ Versus AI: Here’s What Happened When ChatGPT Interviewed Damon Lindelof, Tara Hernandez and Betty Gilpin [more inside]
posted by sardonyx at 9:44 AM PST - 18 comments

For those under electronic surveillance, the walls of a detention center reproduce themselves through technology that is heavily intertwined with migrants’ physical bodies. Immigration authorities are ever-present in the form of a bulky monitoring device strapped to one’s ankle or a smartphone app that demands you take a selfie and upload it at a certain time of day. People enrolled in Alternatives to Detention must keep these technologies charged and fully functioning in order to check in with their supervisors. For some, this dynamic transfers the role of an immigration officer onto migrants themselves. Migrants become a subject of state-sanctioned surveillance — as well as their own enforcers of it. from When your body becomes the border by Erica Hellerstein
posted by chavenet at 8:17 AM PST - 6 comments

Atari announces the first official cartridge, since 1990, for the venerable Atari Video Computer System2600. [more inside]
posted by hanov3r at 8:09 AM PST - 28 comments

Capcom's 40th Anniversary Site Is An Incredible Digital Museum With Playable Retro Games [Capcom Town] “Capcom has launched a beautiful 40th-anniversary website which celebrates the company's history, as well as shares artwork and design docs, and acts as a hub for some of the developer's biggest titles. [...] The town is segmented into areas for certain franchises — Street Fighter has a dojo in the top right corner, for instance, while Monster Hunter occupies the space in front of the giant arcade machine. If you're an eagle-eyed fan, then you'll spot some other small references to Capcom characters throughout. [...] You can pop into the C.M.D Museum to look at artwork from many of Capcom's best titles — there is some never-before-seen concept art for some games, high-resolution artwork of characters we've never had access to, and design docs for the original Mega Man, Ace Attorney, and Street Fighter II. An archivist's dream, basically. Also, remember the arcade we mentioned above? Well, there are a handful of playable retro games over there — these include Mega Man, Mega Man 2, Mega Man X, Street Fighter II, and Final Fight, and you can play them in English or Japanese. You can also read through the game's instruction manuals and have a look at the cartridges for those titles.” [via: Nintendo Life]
posted by Fizz at 6:34 AM PST - 20 comments

Treat Williams, star of stage and screen, was killed in a motorcycle accident yesterday. He was 71 years old.
posted by Silvery Fish at 6:04 AM PST - 59 comments

Happy Pride Month! It probably feels like a lifetime ago when you last heard from Sophie B. Hawkins [Wikipedia]. Well, surprise! Sophie has a new album out, Free Myself [YT playlist], her first in over a decade. Here she speaks with Eric Dahl earlier this year about her new album and her career. [21m] Sophie B. Hawkins emerges from a 'personal tsunami' with new album 'Free Myself' [STL Today] Daily Beast interview with Sophie about the past 30 years. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:27 AM PST - 4 comments

Why Is Everyone Watching TV With the Subtitles On? (SLAtlantic - archive) [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 10:57 PM PST - 155 comments

What it’s like to be 14 in a new school, a new city away from home—and the wrong ethnicity in a divided country. Just a few months earlier, Aida—a bright, energetic 14-year-old girl with olive skin and long black hair bouncing behind her back—had managed a perfect score on Turkey’s national high school entrance exam, and this earned her the right to attend the most prestigious private high school in all of Turkey, a country of nearly 80 million people. Her first day, therefore, should’ve been a celebration. She’d made it; she was where she belonged. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 10:42 PM PST - 5 comments

Well, the time has come. I’ve decided that our 41st season, which begins in September, will be my last. It’s been a wonderful ride, and I’ll have more to say in the coming months. Many thanks to you all. (If nothing else, it’ll keep the clickbait sites busy!)
posted by reductiondesign at 5:27 PM PST - 60 comments

Anger over an astronomical increase in Reddit's API prices [prev.] boiled over this week as multiple third-party app developers were forced to close down, with one -- Apollo dev Christian Selig -- posting a scathing exposé detailing the company's shady dealings... including a recorded phone call disproving CEO Steve "spez" Huffman's claim that Selig blackmailed them. Huffman took to the site's vaunted AMA format to do damage control, only to double down, ignore tough questions, and reap thousands of downvotes. In response, the community has organized a massive subreddit "blackout" to protest the rate hike that will bankrupt popular apps, hamper critical moderation tools, and exclude blind users. While such protests are not new, this one is unprecedented in scope: 20,000+ mods from over 7,000 subreddits with more than 2 billion collective readers, from familiar mainstays like /r/aww, /r/videos, and /r/todayilearned to niche subs like /r/Eragon and /r/Panda. Facing layoffs, a major pre-IPO valuation cut, and a runaway user revolt reminiscent of Digg [prev.], could this be the end of the "front page of the internet"? Watch the site wink out in real time [livestream], join the fight on /r/Save3rdPartyApps and /r/ModCoord, backup your data, or check out some up-and-coming /r/RedditAlternatives. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 8:36 AM PST - 704 comments

Silvio Berlusconi è morto, aveva 86 anni: domani la camera ardente a Mediaset [Corriere della Sera] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 8:16 AM PST - 37 comments

Newsradio station 1010 WINS is reporting that two days after projectionists at a NYC-area Alamo Drafthouse (it isn't clear which, there are three (four if you count Yonkers)) filed a petition to unionize with the National Labor Review Board, Alamo sent an internal email notifying staff of the company's intention to do away with the projectionist position and replace it with a more expansive “technical engineer” role. [more inside]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 7:29 AM PST - 36 comments

School's out for summer. A friend graduated from high school this weekend, and I asked her what she was going to do with all her free time, and she said "sleep in!". And then proceeded to list all the things she had to do this week. Here's our Monday free thread!
posted by Gorgik at 6:35 AM PST - 109 comments

Starfield Gets The Gameplay And Story Reveal You've Been Waiting For [Kotaku] [Starfield Direct] [Starfield Story Trailer] “While we’ll have to wait until September 6th to take to the stars, explore its 1,000 worlds, and listen to its 250,000 lines of dialogue, we now have a much better sense of what you’ll actually do in the game. And during today’s Xbox showcase, Bethesda pulled the curtain back even further, giving us our best glimpse yet of what’s likely going to be one of the biggest games of 2023.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:24 AM PST - 63 comments

Happy Pride Month! Louisa Jo Killen [Wikipedia] was a folk singer in the UK tradition. She spent most of her career performing under her birth gender and name Lou Killen [5m, 2008 performance]. Here is a 2010 performance in her preferred gender. [6m, very low audio] Her transition shortly before her death led a very conservative community into enlightenment. On this day: The Clancy Brothers' Louisa Jo Killen dies in 2013 [Irish Times belated obituary] Before Caitlyn Jenner, Louisa Jo Killen, Folk Song and Shanty Singer [Old Salt Blog] Thank you nebulawindphone for mentioning her. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:26 AM PST - 9 comments

Reddit users are on strike.
posted by sammyo at 4:57 AM PST - 128 comments

Joni Mitchell Returns to the Stage, Golden, Glorious and in Control | A crowd of more than 20,000 on Saturday night at the scenic Washington venue the Gorge Amphitheater got to experience Joni Mitchell's first ticketed live performance in more than 20 years. And it was indeed glorious. [more inside]
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:39 AM PST - 9 comments

"I’ve heard a lot about classic Doom’s data format and decided to write some Rust code to extract its maps and convert that to vector graphics I could laser cut."
posted by brundlefly at 3:28 PM PST - 9 comments

At the intersection of Dr. Who Fandom, historical costuming expertise, and beanplating, lies this. "In terms of the costume design for the show, though, I've broken this down into three essential categories: Earth's timeline in our reality; fictional species and extraterrestrial cultures; finally, we have the Time Travelers, for whom the rules of dress defined in the previous two categories may be in flux." [more inside]
posted by amtho at 12:36 PM PST - 9 comments

We swung Mack the Knife in Berlin town. The magnificent Ella Fitzgerald live in West Germany in 1960, singing the obligatory Mack the Knife (very well-known at the time from releases by Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong). She forgot the lyrics? No problem!!
posted by JanetLand at 9:27 AM PST - 15 comments

One of the most dangerous hours in America is now 11 o’clock on Sunday morning. [CW: guns, violence, killing, religion, wishful thinking]
posted by chavenet at 8:13 AM PST - 33 comments

The meaty, the starchy, the battered - late night foods for the cold, the tired and the drunk There are national cuisines, there are regional dishes, and some foods really belong to one city. And then there are the hyperlocal chippy traditions of the UK - and doubtless equivalents around the world. Each is, as the article says, "local history on a polystyrene tray." [more inside]
posted by YoungStencil at 7:44 AM PST - 67 comments

Happy Pride Month! It takes over a minute before the funk begins to take hold in Meshell Ndegeocello's [Wikipedia] new single Clear Water [5m], but its claws sink in quickly and the Funk will not be denied. Her new album The Omnichord Real Book comes out next week [Albumism article with links to more songs]. Meshell is joined by Staceyann Chin for an evening of music and spoken word at MCA Chicago in 2020. [1h13m] Meshell talks to Adrian Younge in 2021 about her career and philosophy. [51m] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:23 AM PST - 6 comments

Theodore John Kaczynski, 1942-2023. A/k/a the Unabomber, Kaczynski died in prison, within North Carolina's Federal Medical Center. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 2:20 PM PST - 107 comments

The hope of democracy is that we will, knowing all this, find a way to trust each other again, or at least, in the absence of trust, to halfheartedly will each other’s good. Perhaps we will stumble one day on some key, some insight, that will help us to do this again. But for now, real blood has been shed, and more blood is threatened, and each of us really does have enemies, and every day, another you unwittingly begins talking himself into being one of them. And so we all stand jabbering at each other, accusing like Satan, united only by the self-righteousness that crosses every face, which we don’t see because we are no longer looking at each other, or at anything. There is only the wrongness. from The Monster Discloses Himself by Phil Christman
posted by chavenet at 8:04 AM PST - 28 comments

Happy Pride Month! Indigo Girls. [Wikipedia] Emily and Amy sit with Winona LaDuke and Filmmaker Alexandria Bombach to discuss their new documentary It's Only Life After All with Wajahat Ali. [20m, documentary still at festivals without distribution] We Can Do Hard Things With Glennon Doyle: Indigo Girls: Sexuality, Sobriety, Faith & Freedom [1h7m, audio only, summary article from Yahoo!]. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:21 AM PST - 11 comments

Octopuses Can Rewire Their 'Brains' by Editing Their Own RNA on The Fly. "Temperature-sensitive editing occurred at about one third of our sites – over 20,000 individual places... [P]roteins that are edited tend to be neural proteins, and almost all sites that are temperature sensitive are more highly edited in the cold." Study. "RNA editing is rarely used for protein recoding in most organisms."
posted by clawsoon at 5:08 AM PST - 17 comments

Who needs Illumination? Let a completely different Mario movie play out in your brain as you listen to the completely improvised audioplay The Real Mario Movie (starring, among others, Ellie Spectacular, the woman behind, among other things, the uncommonly clean Youtube Poop account DaThings). By its creators' own admission: 'no script, no reheaseals and zero brain cells'.
posted by BiggerJ at 8:01 PM PST - 11 comments

Kid Leaves Stoop breaks down what we know about The Simpsons style guide, a long internal document that defines the surprisingly rigid way the characters are depicted in the modern show, and have been for decades, but weren't in the Tracy Ullman shorts or first season: The Simpsons No-No Sheets. (Youtube, 23 minutes) [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 4:03 PM PST - 24 comments

Many other top executives who gained wealth and status by marketing crypto to the masses have avoided serious repercussions. They had cashed out early, invested in real estate or holed up in When their hedge fund failed, a large swath of the industry was dragged down with it. The ensuing crisis drained the savings of millions of amateur investors and plunged other companies into bankruptcy. But by their own account, Mr. Davies and Mr. Zhu have been thriving. They left Singapore, where Three Arrows was based, and traveled around Asia, effectively taking the summer off. Mr. Davies started meditating. Mr. Zhu played video games and found a surf instructor. His old crypto associates were bad-mouthing him in the press, but he made new friends, a mix of surfer types and UFC fighters.
posted by SituationNormal at 12:07 PM PST - 43 comments

Summer Game Fest 2023 [YouTube] Summer Game Fest is here to kick off a weekend full of announcements and trailers for all the biggest games arriving in the next few months and years. The show, once again hosted by organizer Geoff Keighley, included trailers for all kind of titles including Mortal Kombat 1, Alan Wake 2, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Path of Exile 2, Sonic Superstars, Baldur's Gate 3, Lies of P, Sand Land, John Carpenter's Toxic Commando, Prince of Persia The Lost Crown. But sadly, Summer Game Fest featured no women onstage. Bonus: Devolver Digital’s showcase featured just four games, but they look like good ones, especially wacky walking simulator Baby Steps (from QWOP and Ape Out creators). [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 10:52 AM PST - 26 comments

The Vindication of Ariana Madix It’s familiar territory for any woman who has been cheated on: You weren’t giving your man enough time, you always talked down to him, you never wanted to have sex, you weren’t supportive enough. [more inside]
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 8:31 AM PST - 53 comments

Fire escapes are a hacky bit of afterthought tacked on to the outside of a building after the building is finished. If you're using fire escapes, it's worth making them as good as possible, but you’ll prevent more fires if you build better buildings. Similarly, incident response is often a hacky bit of afterthought tacked on long after software is released. Again, great incident response can help you recover faster than if you don’t have it but… you’ll prevent more outages if you build better software. Finally, buildings have an extremely detailed fire code, but we don't really have an extremely detailed systems engineering code for software, and I think we should have. from The History of Fire Escapes
posted by chavenet at 8:00 AM PST - 15 comments

Happy Pride Month! The lesbian daughter of Lithuanian and Syrian immigrants, Silvana Imam [Wikipedia] is one of Sweden's biggest rappers [2019 NYT profile, archive]. Her short music film Naturkraft [16m] is about the Swedish immigrant experience. Imam talks rap and politics with Sway in 2015. [15m] Bergen rapper Aron Eskeland helps Silvana shop for clothes. [15m] Thanks mersen for mentioning her!
posted by hippybear at 5:15 AM PST - 1 comment

The Simpsons Is Good Again - after 34 seasons, 750 episodesm and a decades-long funk, the show innovated its way back to popularity and relevance

Every person I spoke to for the story - from Broti Gupta, one of the first writers on The Simpsons to have been born after the show's premiere, to James L. Brooks, one of the series' founders, to the former members of the No Homers Club fan community, infamous for compaining about the decline of the show - agrees that The Simpsons, in 2023, is undergoing a renaissance. The staff, working in the shadow of a looming writers strike when I visited, are putting out some of the most ambitious, poignant, and funny episodes in the show's history - episodes that, after all these years, have managed to broaden our understanding of these familiar characters and why they remain so important to so many people. And thanks to the streaming era, a whole new generation is growing up bingeing The Simpsons, bolstering the sense that the show, once left for dead by critics, may really go on forever.

posted by Pachylad at 11:13 PM PST - 56 comments

After a traumatic experience in college, April Burrell was catatonic for twenty years. She was diagnosed with a severe form of schizophrenia which did not respond to treatment. “She was the first person I ever saw as a patient,” said Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, who was still a medical student in 2000 when he first encountered April. “She is, to this day, the sickest patient I’ve ever seen.” [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 5:17 PM PST - 31 comments

Trump indicted in classified docs probe.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 5:15 PM PST - 490 comments

OK Blue J-----OH SWEET LORD WHAT IS GOING ON [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 4:56 PM PST - 48 comments

What it’s like to wear the Dyson Zone around an NYC covered in wildfire smoke "A quick note: I don’t recommend anyone strap on a futuristic pair of headphones that double as a wearable air purifier and stride out into hazardous conditions."
posted by KelsonV at 3:19 PM PST - 29 comments

“If you had no head, no heart, no center of operations,” he began. “If you could taste with your whole body. If you could take a fragment of your toe or your hair and it would grow into a new you — and hundreds of these new yous could fuse together into some impossibly large togetherness. And when you wanted to get around, you would produce spores, this little condensed part of you that could travel in the air.”

Merlin Sheldrake, The Man Who Turned the World on to the Genius of Fungi. (NYT Guest Link, Archive Link)
posted by Rumple at 11:33 AM PST - 21 comments

Why don’t websites hire service people to write about food? How do ‘restaurant journalists’ exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.
posted by HeroZero at 11:26 AM PST - 23 comments

Evangelist preacher, architect of the Religious Right, political gadfly, broadcaster, and bigot Pat Robertson has died at 93. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:19 AM PST - 119 comments

How do I feel about Apple’s brand spanking new Vision Pro starting at $3499? I’m conflicted. Part of me hates it, while another, perhaps younger, more tender part thinks its really stupid Apple released a nine minute ‘wow lookie’ video touting their high-end welding masks. And yes it's insane and amazing and great. It’s got gadgets and gizmos galore, sure, and yes its, as Today in Tabs’ Rusty Foster put perfectly, “the most technologically advanced product ever created for viewing and annotating PDF documents.”
posted by SituationNormal at 10:58 AM PST - 134 comments

Supreme Court rejects voting map that diluted Black voters' power (NYT gift) [more inside]
posted by box at 10:39 AM PST - 32 comments

According to the annual Slice of the Union report from independent pizzeria delivery app Slice, a new pizza topping is set to conquer pies in 2023: pickles. 🥒 This year's pizza trends: Fewer pineapples, more pickles. Why you should seriously consider making pickles your go-to pizza topping. Pizza Hut is launching a pickle pizza and I’m furious. How to make Ranch and Dill Pickle Pizza. Pickle pizza started as a novelty, but now it’s a big dill.
posted by Fizz at 9:26 AM PST - 83 comments

[SLYT, Repost] One Day Like This, by Elbow, eventually reached #4 in the UK singles chart in 2012. Their 2011 Glastonbury performance of this song, and at the same festival six years later. [title from comment in original post]
posted by Wordshore at 9:22 AM PST - 4 comments

The encounter, and much of the text of Working Girl, suggests the appeal or even the revolutionary potential of relating in such an upfront, contractual manner: that there might even be a cleansing element to addressing things in such blatant terms, equity in considering one’s time worth good money, and asking for it, especially in the contexts of the art world and sex industry, when participants often harbor vast wealth. from Working It by Kate Wolf [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:57 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Agriculture slurps 80% of the Colorado River in the U.S. each year, and a single forage crop, alfalfa hay, is responsible for over a third of that drain. You've probably read about the drought in the southwestern US and how Lake Powell hit historic lows (though this winter has improved things somewhat). But the real problem is not the drought, but overuse. The classic analysis, Cadillac Desert, first published in 1986, is no less true now than it was 40 years ago. [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:49 AM PST - 24 comments

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” "In the past, moments of national trauma had provided an opportunity for unity and cohesion. But Ms. Didion found herself confronted with a fractured version of America that’s not too different from the one we’ve come to recognize today. " Fascinating thought piece (NYT) about Joan Didion and Gregory Dunne's reaction to RFK's assasination while in Hawaii.
posted by j810c at 7:38 AM PST - 16 comments

Some languages start arrays at 0, which can be unintuitive for beginners. Some languages start arrays at 1, which isn't representative of how the code actually works. DreamBerd does the best of both worlds: Arrays start at -1.
posted by MetaFilter World Peace at 5:25 AM PST - 29 comments

Happy Pride Month! Liniker [Wikipedia] is changing the way trans people are seen in Brazil [Paper, 2018]. Agnes Nunes visited with her for conversation and a duet. [Portuguese with optional English captions] For the 2022 Rock In Rio festival, Liniker was joined by Luedji Luna for an hour-long set. Thank you to umbú for suggesting her! [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:14 AM PST - 1 comment

Arnold Schwarzenegger sits down with Danny DeVito for a conversation about life and death. [more inside]
posted by uncleozzy at 4:46 AM PST - 18 comments

The Girl From Ipanema. Astrud Giberto, best known as the voice of Bossa Nova, died June 5th at her home in Philadelphia, PA. [more inside]
posted by From Bklyn at 2:24 AM PST - 37 comments

Female crocodile that lived alone for 16 years had a virgin birth. An American crocodile managed to reproduce by herself, in a process scientists call parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, DNA reveals. Scientists say the discovery suggests the phenomenon may have also occurred in extinct reptiles like dinosaurs.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:14 PM PST - 26 comments

Revenge served ice cold. Top L.A. law firm outs former partners’ racist, sexist emails. Last month, Lewis, Brisbois, Bisgaard and Smith, one of the nation’s largest law firms, was rocked by the announcement that two top partners who ran their labor and employment practice, defending corporations against harassment and discrimination lawsuits, were starting their own boutique practice and taking as many as 140 colleagues with them. The shock inside the’ downtown Los Angeles headquarters soon gave way to anger as the recently departed partners embarked on a press campaign that portrayed their former employer as a profit-focused legal mill that ground down the aspirations of its lawyers. In an extraordinary move, the law firm's management team directed the release of scores of emails in which Barber and Ranen used vile terms for women, Black people, Armenians, Persians, and gay men and traded in offensive stereotypes of Jews and Asians. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 8:09 PM PST - 40 comments

Kingly is a webcomic abougt a very sweet king. if Prince Valient met Hagar the Horrible but was actually funny and with more genitals.
posted by Grandysaur at 6:26 PM PST - 15 comments

Okazu is the internet's longest-running blog devoted to the study and review of yuri, a genre of manga and anime featuring romances between women and girls. Run by noted yuri expert and historian Erica Friedman, Okazu features loads of reviews ranging from recent series to untranslated classics. There are also essays galore. And if you're new to yuri, you can also find recommendations on where to start.
posted by May Kasahara at 3:36 PM PST - 9 comments

Today is the tenth anniversary of Check, Please!, a completed webcomic by Ngozi Ukazu about Canadian university ice hockey, friendship, anxiety, love and pie. Available in print thanks to a series of wildly successful kickstarter campaigns, it nevertheless remains fully readable online for readers who like joy. [more inside]
posted by Lorc at 1:42 PM PST - 4 comments

The 1970s Librarians Who Revolutionized the Challenge of Search
posted by box at 10:28 AM PST - 7 comments

Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, a.k.a. The Iron Sheik, one of the most hated villains in professional wrestling history, has died at the age of 81 according to his official Twitter account, where he had enjoyed a second career of rants and insults. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 9:40 AM PST - 45 comments

What to know about the Canadian wildfires affecting parts of the U.S. [The Washington Post] [Gift article] “Uncontrollable flames are ravaging swaths of Canadian forest in what authorities described as a “devastating” wildfire season that could become the worst the country has ever seen. The United States’ northern neighbor is home to some of the world’s densest forests, and it experiences wildfires every year. But this year, the fires have been particularly widespread, numerous and intense, burning through more than 3.7 million acres in Canada. Canada’s government expects “higher-than-normal fire activity” to continue throughout the wildfire season — which typically lasts between April and September — due to a combination of ongoing drought conditions and hot temperature forecasts. Smoke and haze from the Canadian wildfires has also affected the United States, leading authorities from New York to Minnesota to issue public health alerts and urge people to stay indoors and wear masks to protect themselves from potentially toxic fine particles in the air.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:37 AM PST - 176 comments

By the 1820s, the cubes that clinked in glasses of iced tea in Charleston, the ice that cooled hospitalized patients in Savannah; the ice that formed ice cream in the White House during the hottest months of summer—all of it from New England. Ice was so unusual (and expensive) in the South that locals called it “white gold" ... Ice continued to obsess America. from Is Ice America’s Most Literary Element? by Amy Brady [LitHub] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:51 AM PST - 8 comments

Noted "New Age" pianist George Winston passed away this week after fighting cancer for many years. Winston came to prominence in the 1980s as one of the artists recording for the "New Age" Windham Hill label along with performers such as Liz Story, Will Ackerman, and Shadowfax. His albums "Autumn" and "December" were his most popular, and he won Grammys in 1996 and 2004. [more inside]
posted by briank at 5:45 AM PST - 52 comments

Happy Pride Month! I can't say I was familiar with Hayley Kiyoko before the primroses were over mentioned her name, but apparently everyone else knows about her. If, like me, you need a primer, Hayley summarizes her career [15m] for them, with an accompanying article. If you want to get a bit deeper and less formal, Quitters Podcast spent over an hour talking to her about her career and her life and outlook. But the real news is, she just published her first book [Publishers Weekly]! [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:13 AM PST - 5 comments

Oh what a world it is, that has such musicians in it! There was a piano in a London tube station, so Aurélien Froissart decided to kill time by playing classical music. As one does. But then something amazing - another musician who was passing through asked if she could jump in. What followed was an incredible and virtually flawless impromptu duet - between strangers, with no planning, no rehearsal, no sheet music. Astonishing.
posted by Mogur at 4:34 AM PST - 39 comments

We mentioned the Winamp Skin Museum at skins.webamp.org three years ago.
But we didn’t mention the interactive, browser-based version of Winamp.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:52 PM PST - 10 comments

A ProPublica piece that looks at an article from Nature Sustainability Quantifying the human cost of global warming that dares to ask what if the human cost was the lens that we used to evaluate climate change impacts?
posted by Ignorantsavage at 7:07 PM PST - 4 comments

The PGA has announced a merger (PGA site, NYT) with Saudi-backed LIV Golf. [more inside]
posted by box at 10:20 AM PST - 80 comments

Stanley Kubrick scholar Filippo Ulivieri shares a hidden, almost subliminal aspect of Jack Nicholson's performance in The Shining: quick, unsettling glances that break the fourth wall. (SLYT)
posted by swift at 10:07 AM PST - 66 comments

Once again, Ask A Manager's Alison Green has asked her readers for their crazy work stories - this time regarding free food at work, and what it does to people's minds. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:33 AM PST - 109 comments

Happy birthday, Sweden, which is celebrating 500 years as a nation today on June 6, which became National Day in 1983 and an official public holiday in 2004. One reason the date of 6 June was chosen because it is the day in 1523 when Sweden became independent of the Union of Kalmar, which had formerly united Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It was a genuine new start for Sweden, and it was the occasion of their electing Gustav Vasa as their king and adopting their own flag. The second reason for choosing 6 June is that, in 1809, Sweden adopted a new constitution on that date. The tradition of celebrating 6 June as Flag Day began in the 1890s, when Artur Hazelius held such celebrations at his Stockholm-based open-air museum named “Skansen.” [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 8:42 AM PST - 23 comments

Inside the fundamentalist Christian movement that wants to remake Canadian politics. TW: anti-trans comments, suicide [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:27 AM PST - 38 comments

The Many Feet of The Lands Between: A collection of the many feet you'll encounter on your journey through the Lands Between. [Steam Community][SFW] “Elden Ring is full of hard bosses, esoteric secrets, and weird exploits, but the current top guide on the game’s Steam page isn’t about any of that. It’s about feet. The fleshy pads come in all different shapes and sizes, and Elden Ring, like the Souls games before it, is full of them. So of course someone decided to document each pair, and now Steam users can’t get enough of them. “The Many Feet of The Lands Between,” reads the title of the current most popular guide. The collection, curated by Steam user Mister B, has over 70 entries, from Fia’s long narrow tootsies to the Mad Pumpkin Head’s gnarly arches. There are zero descriptions; it’s all just names and images, and it keeps getting updated with new content. The guide has a perfect five out of five stars and over 500 ratings.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 8:26 AM PST - 10 comments

"Listen, if you’ve never had any scandals, my advice would be to continue to have none. But if you’ve had one, have as many more as you can. It’s the Kardashian, Trumpian information overload fatigue. There’s a point where people can’t retain enough information to remember every little scandal. Whereas if you have one scandal, people remember, and it defines you.” from Caroline Calloway Survived Cancellation. Now She’s Doubling Down by Lili Anolik [Vanity Fair; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:35 AM PST - 39 comments

Happy Pride Month! So, another artist suggested by wowenthusiast is anonymous Brooklyn rapper Leikeli47 [Wikipedia]. She recently completed her Beauty trilogy with the album Shape Up [YT playlist, Pitchfork review]. Leikeli spoke with NPR's Sidney Madden [44m] about the new album, her outlook and philosophy, and her struggles for authenticity. She did a set for NPR Music's 15h Anniversary [23m] that was so fire that Uproxx had to write about it. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:10 AM PST - 5 comments

Blaseball is shutting down after The Game Band concluded that it wasn't sustainable. They had been tooling up for its third age, titled the "Coronation Era," and had planned mobile apps as part of the experience. They even came out of siesta for a brief time, only to go right back into hiatus after deeming their effort not up to the quality they were aiming for. Laid off staff are being given severance pay, extended health care and help in finding work. The news on: Destructoid, Rock Paper Shotgun, Gamespot, The Verge.
posted by JHarris at 12:05 AM PST - 22 comments

Apple Vision Pro: I Tried the New Mixed-Reality Headset [ungated] - "At the end of the demo, I took off the headset and felt two things: 1) Wow. Very cool. 2) Did I just do drugs?" [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 12:00 AM PST - 222 comments

Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin (The Debrief, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal*)

* Two former NYTimes reporters on the UFO beat. [more inside]
posted by pjenks at 8:04 PM PST - 267 comments

Former F.B.I agent turned spy Robert Hanssen has died. [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 4:17 PM PST - 19 comments

Einstein a Go-Go (alternative link) was a 1981 UK #5 song by Landscape (formed in 1975). A live performance, some background in this post and comments, and a 1979 feature on Tomorrows World. The extended mix. Also by Landscape: (My name is) Norman Bates.
posted by Wordshore at 2:04 PM PST - 9 comments

Millennials just keep voting (NYT gift). But will they move to the right (NYT gift)? Maybe (WaPo gift), maybe not (New York).
posted by box at 10:03 AM PST - 58 comments

Here's our uncreatively framed Monday free thread. One of these days I'll get it together.
posted by Gorgik at 8:48 AM PST - 68 comments

Gifted comedian, actor, car lover, and .... electrical engineer? [more inside]
posted by ZakDaddy at 8:25 AM PST - 104 comments

Assuming the weather and engineering gods cooperate, a US government-funded satellite Moonlighter will launch [today], hitching a ride on a SpaceX rocket. And in roughly two months, five teams of DEF CON hackers will do their best to successfully remotely infiltrate and hijack the satellite while it's in space. The idea being to try out offensive and defensive techniques and methods on actual in-orbit hardware and software, which we imagine could help improve our space systems. [more inside]
posted by sardonyx at 7:29 AM PST - 10 comments

Being a Gay Game Developer [YouTube] “To all of my fellow members of the LGBTQ+ community, happy Pride. Being queer these days is a whirlwind of emotions, some very positive and hopeful, and others not so much. Our history is one of courage and struggle, a struggle that continues today. And in this fight, it’s essential to learn from the experiences of our queer elders, both to learn what has changed, and what work remains. One such elder is legendary game designer Tim Cain, who has recently published a video discussing his many years in the game industry as a gay man, and his journey from closeted life to being out to the world. Perhaps best known as the creator of the original Fallout games in the 1990s, Tim Cain has had a storied career in the games industry. [...] Though he knew from a young age that he was gay, Cain stayed in the closet for many years, only coming out in the 2000s after The Temple of Elemental Evil. In a recent YouTube video, he documented that journey from closeted to visible.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 6:49 AM PST - 4 comments

Paying employees equally no matter where they live is a reflection of today’s internet labor market—a global landscape of suppliers and buyers who connect as if they were on the same street. “There’s a lively debate in big companies about flat salaries across geography, and, of course, I think everyone should do it,” says Rasch. “People often counter the policy with points about the different costs of living, but put simply, is it fair to pay someone who lives in a poorer part of town a lower salary? No.” from The Company Where Every Employee Earns the Same [Wired; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 6:08 AM PST - 55 comments

This is the gamble every wrestler makes: that someday he or she might be the one flat on their back watching the world collapse upon them. Everyone knows this. Everyone’s seen it. Nobody stops working. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 5:59 AM PST - 3 comments

Happy Pride Month! wowenthusiast reminded me that Jill Sobule [Wikipedia] kissed a girl way back in 1995 and everybody noticed. It's been too many years since then for this post, but what is she up to today? She's written an off-Broadway play! [Playbill] It was really well-reviewed, enough for multiple extensions in 2022 and even a brief revival earlier this year [Off-off review]. Here she talks to GLAAD about the show and her career [15m, annoying musical bed]. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:07 AM PST - 4 comments

Do your part and help set up a game of Minesweeper [flash friday]
posted by DoctorFedora at 1:07 AM PST - 13 comments

Article from Current Archaeology about Aroma Prime, a company which creates historical smells for museums, theme parks and care homes. Their products include the smells of dinosaurs, dodos, mummification, candlemakers, ether, vintage sweets and the Wicker Man.
posted by paduasoy at 11:57 PM PST - 20 comments

“You know, everybody’s taste in art is different. But that’s not the point.” When the Neighbors Don’t Share Your Vision (And Your Vision Includes Giant Transformer Statues). [NYT gift link]
posted by Mchelly at 9:23 PM PST - 41 comments

A large predatory dinosaur related to Spinosaurus may have scooped up prey "like a pelican" by extending its lower jaw, European researchers propose in a new study. But the findings have upset some paleontologists who contest that the fossils were illegally taken from Brazil and should be returned to their country of origin. [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 5:38 PM PST - 8 comments

Amazing what you can do with a banana, a pin, and a comb. Samples and Galleries
posted by BWA at 8:01 AM PST - 15 comments

A delightful thread by a serious amateur cricketer who found themself unexpectedly drafted in to make up the numbers in a village cricket match (Twitter).
posted by tomcooke at 7:16 AM PST - 38 comments

A word survives and thrives because it continues to quench an explanatory thirst; it meets a need or desire. And any word carefully examined will reveal itself to be a wormhole — an ongoing exchange between the past and the present. The prevalence of charisma implies a widespread belief in the power of it, and also in the ability of extraordinary individuals to change history. Weber’s terms still echo: Something magical and dangerous, something unfathomable, is afoot when charisma is present. “The pertinent question,” pondered the cultural theorist John Potts, “is not whether charisma actually exists, but why it exists.” from The Secret History And Strange Future Of Charisma by Joe Zadeh
posted by chavenet at 6:05 AM PST - 9 comments

Happy Pride Month! Longtime MeFi favorite Janelle Monáe has been in process for years. Their newest singles Lipstick Lover [3m26s, possibly age restricted, clean version] and Float continue the unpeeling, unveiling of her current incarnation, a goddess of Pleasure. Janelle sits with Angie Martinez to talk [55m] about where they are now, how they got here, and what they're thinking about with the new album [Jun 9!] and tour. Similarly, here is a print interview with OUT Magazine about this new phase in their presentation. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:06 AM PST - 14 comments

Searching for Meg White - a profile and almost interview of the difficult-to-track-down White Stripes drummer.
posted by Artw at 12:25 AM PST - 68 comments

"Venture capital’s playbook for AI is the same one it tried with crypto and Web3 and first used for Uber and Airbnb: break the laws as hard as possible, then build new laws around their exploitation. The VCs’ actual use case for AI is treating workers badly."
posted by clawsoon at 4:04 PM PST - 123 comments

Matilda dances to Rob Zombie's Dragula (slyt)
posted by fings at 3:09 PM PST - 16 comments

13 secret signals all cat owners need to know – Cats show their feelings from whiskers to tail. Here is how to read their body language and boost their health and happiness (SLGuardian)
posted by ShooBoo at 2:31 PM PST - 46 comments

The Best Known Old Babylonian Tablet? is an essay by Janet L. Beery, introduced by Frank J. Swetz, about leading students through a mathematical problem preserved on a nearly four thousand year old Babylonian tablet, which happens to demonstrate that the Babylonians knew the square root of 2. The cuneiform tablet is kept at the Yale Babylonian Collection under the catalog number YBC 7289, and has been scanned in three dimensions and can even be 3D-printed for classroom use. The Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage released a short video where curator Agnete Lassen describes YBC 7289 and Chelsea Graham explains how it was digitized.
posted by Kattullus at 1:49 PM PST - 15 comments

How a system designed for circus performers and traveling salesmen helps homeless people access services.
posted by Etrigan at 12:27 PM PST - 5 comments

tw: violence, death CDC Report Recognizes Police-Perpetrated Killing as Major Cause of Violent Death [more inside]
posted by paimapi at 12:15 PM PST - 14 comments

With Hannah Gadsby’s ‘It’s Pablo-matic,’ the Joke’s on the Brooklyn Museum - The Australian comedian turns curator in a show about Picasso’s complicated legacy. But it’s women artists the exhibition really shortchanges.

So who should be most brassed off by this show? Not Picasso, who gets out totally unharmed. But the women artists in the museum’s collection dragooned into this minor prank, and the generations of women and feminist art historians — Rosalind Krauss, Anne Wagner, Mary Ann Caws, hundreds more — who have devoted their careers to thinking seriously about modern art and gender. Especially at the Brooklyn Museum, whose engagement with feminist art is unique in New York, I left sad and embarrassed that this show doesn’t even try to do what it promises: put women artists on equal footing with the big guy.

Gift link
posted by Pachylad at 8:52 AM PST - 50 comments

Happy Pride Month! Long-time MeFite obliquicity suggested I introduce Grace Petrie [Wikipedia], with this article [DIVA], which contained this video, Black Tie [5m, RECOMMENDED - if you only watch one thing here, watch this]. What a treat! By way to introduce her as a person, here is Richard Herring interviewing her for an hour [from late 2019, interview actually starts at 5m12s], and she's really a really funny, charming political spitfire. If you want the politics turned up even more, Music And Politics With Grace Petrie [26m] is from Jan 2023, recorded in Australia, and was just two days before the concert in Sydney where these highlights were audience-recorded [33m]. Additionally, here's a pandemic pro-shot set in an empty Leicester Cathedral [48m] with a mostly different setlist. I think she's wonderful. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:03 AM PST - 11 comments

Paragraphica is a context-to-image camera that uses location data and artificial intelligence to visualize a "photo" of a specific place and moment. The camera exists both as a physical prototype and a virtual camera that you can try. Project by Bjoern Karmann [CW: you will be interacting with AI]
posted by chavenet at 4:09 AM PST - 9 comments

Careless Whisper's lick on 100 instruments.
posted by signal at 5:05 PM PST - 25 comments

“Dreamhouses assume that you never have anything you wish was private." Architectural Digest ventures inside the set of an upcoming movie you may have heard of, a "Fuchsia Fantasy" inspired by Palm Springs midcentury modernism which apparently caused an international run on the fluorescent shade of Rosco paint.
posted by gottabefunky at 2:32 PM PST - 35 comments

From Scientific American: Imaginary numbers—the square roots of negative numbers—are an inescapable part of quantum theory (includes the history of imaginary numbers).
posted by ShooBoo at 11:36 AM PST - 73 comments

According to the Washington Post there are at least nine distinct US doughnut regions. (gift link) [more inside]
posted by Rash at 11:08 AM PST - 129 comments

It's Friday. What time could be better for an incremental game? Array game does away with all of the useless decorative paperclips, fish, buses, drugs, llamas, wizards, cookies, elves, rockstars, corn, Rembrandts, skyscrapers, cows and trees that other incremental games have. Just a pure hit of numbers going up, things to make the numbers go up faster, and things that make the things that make the numbers go up faster go up faster. [more inside]
posted by Superilla at 9:34 AM PST - 77 comments

When Carroll High School of Fort Wayne Indiana canceled the school play, "Marian, the True Tale of Robin Hood" because it included LGBTQ+ themes, the students decided to take matters into their own hands.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 9:21 AM PST - 32 comments

Most knitters saw no hint the relationship was in serious trouble. A few of them, now that they think about it, say there were recent warning signs they missed. But in the end, all of them suffered the ultimate betrayal — they got ghosted. The source of their ire? XRX Inc., which — after running one of the biggest American knitting events, Stitches, for more than 30 years — has vanished with minimal explanation. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 8:53 AM PST - 14 comments

Thomas Flight on metamodernism in current media

In this video I dive into what Metamodernism is and what it looks like in film, and chart how the movies have evolved since their modernist origins.

[more inside]
posted by Pachylad at 8:32 AM PST - 26 comments

FastCompany's Chantel Tattoli looks at the troubled history of what used to be everyone's favorite "debunking" site "In the early ’90s, shortly before he helped think up Snopes, the first (and favorite) website for fact-checks, and way before he was banished from the very thing he’d helped build, David Mikkelson was quite a character on message boards. He wasn’t looking for love necessarily, but it found him nonetheless..."
posted by briank at 7:46 AM PST - 36 comments

It's Not Too Late to Demand a Sane Government Response to Climate Change (Adam McKay for Jacobin)
posted by box at 7:07 AM PST - 54 comments

Archie McPhee, Seattle novelty store, wholesaler, manufacturer, and mail order purveyor of weird gifts, the "Outfitters of Popular Culture" with catalogs cool enough to be collected by the Smithsonian, sellers of rubber chickens and devil duckies, is 40 years old. The Seattle Times did a short piece on them and their history. Some of their catalogs are collected on their website. They got a blog, and a podcast called "Less Talk More Monkey" (iTunes, Google Play), which explains why, for awhile, PayPal wouldn't let them sell tardigrade-themed merchandise through their payment service. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 5:08 AM PST - 38 comments

Happy Pride Month! The first queer woman music artist I ever heard of was Phranc [Wikipedia]. Your All-American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger Tupperware Salesperson. I'm sure many have favorite songs, but here I will share Phranc: Full Life Interview [1h12m], which is a 2021 biographic interview that covers just about everything. The Tupperware documentary mentioned in that interview is Lifetime Guarantee: Phranc’s Adventures in Plastic [1h, Vimeo link]. Bonus: Celebrating LGBTQIA Pride Month: A Visit With Phranc [51m], a glorious Pandemic-vision interview aimed at a younger crowd where Phranc shares her life and her art and teaches paper bow tie making. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:01 AM PST - 11 comments

After supposedly stealing 500,000 francs from his bank, the mysterious Victor Dubreuil (b. 1842) turned up penniless in the United States and began to paint dazzling trompe l’oeil images of dollar bills. Once associated with counterfeiting and subject to seizures by the Treasury Department, these artworks are evaluated anew by Dorinda Evans, who considers Dubreuil’s unique anti-capitalist visions among the most daring and socially critical of his time. from Victor Dubreuil’s Cryptic Currencies [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:41 AM PST - 2 comments

Osprey pair accepts artificial home, perched 25 metres (82 feet) in the air. A treetop mission has seen the years-long nesting site of a pair of eastern ospreys rebuilt on the Sunshine Coast after it was badly damaged during storm.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:19 PM PST - 5 comments

Come for a video about manufacturing of cookware in Korea, stay for the closed captions [more inside]
posted by Ned G at 5:34 PM PST - 15 comments

Ben Roberts-Smith, an Australian Victoria Cross recipient, has lost a defamation action he brought against the Sydney Morning Herald and Age, which accused him of being a murderer, a war criminal, and a bully.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:17 PM PST - 26 comments

“The AI then decided that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission – killing SAMs – and then attacked the operator in the simulation... We trained the [AI] – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:57 PM PST - 103 comments

Got some legos, need to do some long-term planning? Guess you could make a billion-year clock.
posted by cortex at 9:43 AM PST - 22 comments

When a police officer stops a Black driver, the first 45 words said by that officer hold important clues about how their encounter is likely to go. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:37 AM PST - 25 comments

Game Studies Study Buddies, the Ranged Touch podcast which covers academic games studies on a text-by-text basis, takes a break from their usual material to cover Obama era time-capsule INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE.
posted by Artw at 8:16 AM PST - 5 comments

Ted Lasso’s third season was unfocused and unwieldy, but it stuck the landing [The Verge] This link and the commentary below the fold contain spoilers about the series finale of Ted Lasso. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:27 AM PST - 44 comments

Happy Pride Month! The 2002 documentary Radical Harmonies [1h27m, Wikipedia, interlacing artifacts] is a thrilling historical document about women making music primarily for women and creating radically equalizing spaces in order to achieve their vision. Featuring a lot of familiar and not-so-familiar faces and voices from across a couple of generations of movers and shakers and musicians. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 4:54 AM PST - 4 comments

I came here in January, wanting to learn more about why America — my adopted home for 16 years — so strangely and uniquely fetishizes its brutal past. Nowhere is this more true than in the American West, and nowhere have I seen it better epitomized than in Tonopah. from In the American West, a Clown Motel and a Cemetery Tell a Story of Kitsch and Carnage by Andrew Chamings
posted by chavenet at 2:34 AM PST - 25 comments

Reddit has announced its pricing for 3rd party app developers to access its API... and it's a lot higher than expected. The creator of the popular iOS Apollo client estimates it'll cost him $20 million/year to pay for all his users' API access, far beyond what he can afford. The change will affect all Reddit clients, with the developer of Android app Reddit is Fun assuming they want all third party apps gone.
posted by adrianhon at 1:54 AM PST - 123 comments

Mexican Music Is Taking Over the World [ungated] - "Artists like Peso Pluma, Grupo Frontera and Natanael Cano have become massive stars who are popularizing Mexican music around the globe."[1,2]
posted by kliuless at 1:11 AM PST - 2 comments

A little process video of setting type (SLYT) in honor of Walt Whitman’s birthday.
posted by janell at 12:41 AM PST - 8 comments