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As the Toronto Raptors make it to the NBA finals this year, there's one clear breakout star -- the entire city has rallied around the team's biggest courtside fan. Of course, I mean Nav Bhatia. The turbaned, 60-something SIkh who has been to every single Raptors home game, never been late and never left early. [more inside]
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 10:18 PM PST - 24 comments

The Pheromones' "YuppieDrone" Could this be the most '80s song that ever '80ed? "Brothers from another mother" Jimmy Pheromone and Alvis Pheromone present a tale of early '80s ennui. [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 10:13 PM PST - 8 comments

Need some psychedelic music getaway, a blend of old and new, long mixes with separate themes? Back in 2008, Amorphous Androgynous / Future Sound of London decided to make the ultimate mixtape. A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind Volume 1: Cosmic Space Music is a 2h40m journey across a varied sonic landscape engineered for your enjoyment. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:35 PM PST - 10 comments

If you've fully tapped Cleopatra Records Occult Box (Bandcamp; discogs) and want some new darkness to descend upon your ears, the German At Sea Compilations label has five volumes of La Danse Macabre on Bandcamp, full of independent gothic, gothic rock, darkwave and related bands: the original, volumes two, three, four and five. Bonus: Goth Box (YouTube playlist, almost completely recompiling the 1996 Cleo Recs VHS, as listed on Discogs).
posted by filthy light thief at 6:11 PM PST - 12 comments

But now the country is in such difficulty, the chance to save money must be top priority Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was in space when the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving no country willing to bring him home. "He asked them to bring him honey in order to raise his spirits. But there was no honey, and instead they sent him lemon and horseradish."
posted by bitmage at 5:27 PM PST - 34 comments

Half the length, twice the fun: the Song of Summer 2012 — So Claybe. [more inside]
posted by KTamas at 2:03 PM PST - 42 comments

"After Stephanie Montgomery says she was raped at the strip club where she worked, she went to the manager and the police. Nothing happened. That’s when she decided to tell her story as big as she could." [CW: Descriptions of sexual assault]
posted by westface at 2:01 PM PST - 6 comments

How To Draw A Horse [SLNYorker]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 1:54 PM PST - 38 comments

How Selfie Culture Ruins the Great Outdoors for Everyone Else: Social media has made natural spaces more popular. It could also destroy them. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:42 PM PST - 36 comments

Why Some Americans Won’t Move, Even for a Higher Salary
posted by strelitzia at 12:20 PM PST - 74 comments

Summer Seasonal Depression Is Real & Can Be 'Dangerous' [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 11:34 AM PST - 99 comments

Campaign Zero built a scorecard to evaluate police in 100 California cities. They just published their findings, including an in-depth explanation of their methodology.
posted by Altomentis at 11:11 AM PST - 9 comments

See You Yesterday [YouTube][Official Trailer] “The new Netflix sci-fi movie isn't concerned with stopping robot uprisings (Terminator), writing a high school history paper (Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure), or reliving the 1980s (Hot Tub Time Machine). Rare for the genre, See You Yesterday imagines time travel as a way to correct a societal wrong, to undo evil of a more on-the-ground variety: Its protagonists, teenage science whizzes Claudette/CJ (Eden Duncan-Smith) and Sebastian (Dante Crichlow), build a time machine to try to stop CJ's brother from being shot by police.” [via: Wired] [**Minor Spoilers Underneath the Fold**] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:45 AM PST - 7 comments

One of the great workhorses in game theory is the prisoner’s dilemma [Wikipedia]. But an as-yet-unsolved question is how exploitation must have evolved in society. Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Yuma Fujimoto and Kunihiko Kaneko at the University of Tokyo in Japan [arXiv]. They use the iterated prisoner’s dilemma to show how one player can exploit the other to get a better payoff. They also show why the exploited player goes along with the exploitation to create a stable strategy. [MIT Technology Review]
posted by ragtag at 10:42 AM PST - 32 comments

Riding along with Lil Nas X as he surprises the students of Lander Elementary (SLTwitter) (volume warning at 1:15) [more inside]
posted by mosst at 10:26 AM PST - 30 comments

The Archigram of Mammoth Bones: Some of the earliest found human dwellings were constructed of interlocking bones of mammoths, what is Perhaps the Oldest Surviving Architecture [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:45 AM PST - 9 comments

“Ninety-eight years ago, one of the worst episodes of violence sparked by racism in America erupted in the heart of one of the most prosperous Black communities in the nation.“ Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, Explained (Teen Vogue) A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 (Smithsonian previously) “This was about Blacks becoming too economically powerful and showing that wealth in a way that anyone would by creating buildings and constructing churches and having property. There was a whistle that blew and then the mass invasion and the destruction of Greenwood began.” (PBS, video and transcript)
posted by The Whelk at 9:41 AM PST - 7 comments

In the mid-thirties, delivering a child had been the single most dangerous event in a woman’s life. By the fifties.... the risk of death for a mother had fallen more than 90%, to just one in two thousand. But the situation wasn’t so encouraging for newborns: one in thirty still died at birth—odds that were scarcely better than those of the century before—and it wasn’t clear how that could be changed. Then a doctor named Virginia Apgar, who was working in New York, had an idea. It was a ridiculously simple idea, but it transformed obstetrics and the nature of childbirth. sl New Yorker, by Atul Gawande
posted by Cozybee at 9:31 AM PST - 9 comments

What’s the weirdest thing your dog ever ate and didn’t need a trip to the vet for? Asking for me. (SLTwitter) [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:02 AM PST - 58 comments

Happy 200th birthday, Walt Whitman! Walt Whitman was born 200 years ago today. [more inside]
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 6:25 AM PST - 24 comments

Hex: A Strategy Guide – Matthew Seymour's online book is a thorough guide to playing the abstract strategy game, from the rules and board to up-to-date, advanced strategy and tactics. It includes annotated games and many wonderful interactive diagrams in-line with the text. [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 4:30 AM PST - 3 comments

While [Eric] Vogel was imprisoned by the Nazis—first in the so-called model camp, Theresienstadt, and then later at the Auschwitz death camp—he and a dozen or so others played in a jazz band called the Ghetto Swingers. There were similar groups at many camps throughout Nazi-controlled Europe: musicians who were forced to perform, on command and under inconceivable duress, for the S.S.

—The Jewish Trumpeter Who Entertained Nazis to Survive the Holocaust by Amanda Petrusich.
posted by Kattullus at 2:12 AM PST - 3 comments

One year ago today, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez debuted her first campaign video online.
A week earlier, I was sitting across from AOC in a Queens diner for an interview. She had just qualified to be on the ballot in her race against one of the most powerful Democrats in the country. This was before anybody outside of her immediate community in New York City knew her name. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 7:29 PM PST - 35 comments

Prof. Maryna Viazovska, head of Number Theory at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), with co-authors Henry Cohn, Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller, and Danylo Radchenko, recently proved that the E₈ root lattice and the Leech lattice (Wikipedia x2) are universally optimal among point configurations in Euclidean spaces of dimensions 8 and 24, respectively ... which is a strong form of robustness not previously known for any configuration in more than one dimension (PDF, Arxiv.org), expanding upon Viazovska's prior solutions to 8- and 24-dimensional sphere packing, which had been studied since at least 1611 (Quanta Magazine). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 4:51 PM PST - 35 comments

We all know statistical bard Jon Bois from his work with SB Nation, most notably Pretty Good and Chart Party. But Jon isn't one to just apply his talents to using numbers and graphical representations to telling stories about sports - in a recent tweet from the NYC DSA, Jon explains with his usual adroitness about why the proposed Good Cause Eviction bill needs to be supported in Albany. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:25 PM PST - 12 comments

How best to thoroughly and methodically review Gamer Goo, the antiperspirant and grip enhancing lotion marketed to the DualShock-handling cohort? I Covered My Entire Body in Gamer Goo
posted by figurant at 4:13 PM PST - 18 comments

Femm women's fertility app revealed to be funded by anti-abortion groups to spread misinformation SLTheGuardian: Femm is funded by the Chiarascuro Foundation, a Catholic not for profit which has been a backer of anti-abortion restrictions. Femm is not the first app to collect women's personal health info and do sketchy things with said data. It is possibly the first to direct users to birth control skeptics (or at least, the first revealed by journalistic investigation), in the spirit of the fake Crisis Pregnancy Centers, now carrying to politicization of women's health into the app world.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 1:24 PM PST - 24 comments

Feminists never bought the idea of the computational mind set free from its body. Cognitive science is finally catching up. [more inside]
posted by Kitty Stardust at 1:21 PM PST - 33 comments

Tawanda Kanhema put Zimbabwe on the Street View map. Then, this spring, he went to northern Ontario and added the James Bay Winter Road. Kyle Williamson added the remote Atlantic island of Saint Helena. Christophe Courcaud put Tahiti and elsewhere in French Polynesia on the map. The City of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador has taken their own street view photography and layered it on top of the Google Maps images. Bermuda's nine parishes have complete coverage, thanks to the local tourism agency's own images supplementing official imagery. Other independent automated street photographers have added images from Heredia, Costa Rica to Burma to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic to Nasiriyah, Iraq to Hanoi.
posted by afiler at 12:03 PM PST - 13 comments

“I have no one,” a man told me quietly over coffee. Outside, an unforgiving wind whipped through the tall grass. “The winters here are killing me.” [more inside]
posted by lattiboy at 10:55 AM PST - 104 comments

Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade. Yale’s experience is not at all unique—indeed, it is commonplace. University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves. [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 10:41 AM PST - 72 comments

Leon Redbone has crossed the river for that beautiful shore. Gone too young at 127.
posted by halliburtron at 10:03 AM PST - 56 comments

How to publish classic books that aren’t just by dead white men [Vox] “As the canon of English literature slowly, gradually opens itself up to books by women and authors of color, Modern Library and Penguin Classics have just launched two new series aimed at rediscovering forgotten books by marginalized people. 1. Modern Library Torchbearers. 2. Asian American Masterpieces from Penguin Classics. Part of how we determine the canon comes from what is available to us as readers, which means what publishers have made available to us.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:47 AM PST - 6 comments

The first teaser for Netflix's "Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance" has arrived.
posted by Ipsifendus at 9:37 AM PST - 54 comments

Historian Sarah Elizabeth Cox, at Grappling with History, looks at the life and disappearance of the Jamaican boxer and music hall artist Hezekiah Moscow, aka Ching Hook. Part One: 1882-87, Part Two: 1888-96, and a postscript. [CW: Reference to racial slurs]
posted by featherboa at 8:41 AM PST - 1 comment

We asked 15 experts, “What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?” Here’s what they told us. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:21 AM PST - 139 comments

I am happier knowing that she is out there. You might be too. It is particularly striking is that she is working with such high morale in a library system that is being systematically starved to death by the English government.
posted by ckridge at 7:47 AM PST - 16 comments

Pretty much the best version of "Lean On Me" you're going to see today. [Yes, it's an ad, in honor of International Children's Day.] [SLYT]
posted by chavenet at 7:25 AM PST - 7 comments

In May 1989 The Cure released their eighth studio album Disintegration. To celebrate the 30th anniversary The Cure perform Disintegration at the Sydney Opera House . The Atlantic. NME. ABC podcast.
posted by adept256 at 6:31 AM PST - 36 comments

[Bullet comments] represent the essence of Chinese internet culture: fast-paced and impish, playfully collaborative, thick with rapidly evolving inside jokes and memes. They are a social feature beloved by a generation known for being antisocial. And most importantly, they allow for a type of spontaneous, cumulative, and public conversation between strangers that is increasingly rare on the Chinese internet.
posted by zamboni at 4:00 AM PST - 15 comments

Can Industry Lifers Change Too? David Bloom writes a short-medium read for IndieWire about the seismic events taking place in Hollywood right now, like right now! "Let’s take a step back and reflect on just how much has already changed, because the first quarter of 2019 hit like a virtual Big One, shaking up just about everything."
posted by hippybear at 11:27 PM PST - 27 comments

San Jacinto Plaza (Wikipedia) was home to live alligators, from the day that three live alligators arrived in 1883 (KVIA), to 1965 after they were attacked (El Paso Times article morgue, with semi-graphic recounting of violence to animals). I couldn't find any video of live alligators in the plaza, but they were featured in a number (PicClick) of old (eBay) postcards (HipPostcards), many linen (Collectors Weekly) and some newer-ish (Flickr). Gators were brought back in 1972 (Texas Tribune) and kept under a protective plastic shell for a few years, but they were then returned to a local zoo. A commemorative statue, Pile o' Gators (Roadside America), was dedicated in June 1993.
posted by filthy light thief at 4:00 PM PST - 6 comments

As part of his work on Tech Solidarity and the Great Slate for the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections, Maciej Ceglowski (previously) flew around the country to brief Congressional campaign teams on good practices to secure themselves against Podesta-style hacks. Here's what he learned on the way.
posted by figurant at 3:25 PM PST - 16 comments

A map of the US in which each city name is replaced by the person from that place with the most Wikipedia traffic. [more inside]
posted by sylvanshine at 3:06 PM PST - 100 comments

𝖂 hen playing Dungeons & Dragons, and a "wild magic surge" is called for, a blast of random magic, do you find the D20 or D100 tables usually supplied for these effects unsatisfying? I would point the interested/sadistic/madcap DM to the Net Libram of Random Magical Effects [PDF] which contains a D10000 table full of concerning, dangerous and otherwise odd results. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 2:55 PM PST - 94 comments

“He’s just like, ‘Why would you be late when you could be early?’” Cushing says of her boyfriend. “And I’m just like, ‘Why would you be early when you could be late?’” Amanda Mull of The Atlantic examines why some people are always late to the airport.
posted by sallybrown at 2:36 PM PST - 202 comments

In Japan this summer there are two highly anticipated anime releases. Weathering With You is the next film by Makoto Shinkai, writer/director of the mega-hit Your Name. Also being released this summer is Children of the Sea. It's also visually stunning, and the trailer doubles as a music video for the film’s theme song, “Umi no Yurei” (“Ghosts of the Sea”) by Vocaloid songsmith-turned-singer Kenshi Yonezu.
posted by zardoz at 2:14 PM PST - 6 comments

Still trying to choose your team for the Cricket World Cup, which begins tomorrow in England? Consider Afghanistan.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:58 PM PST - 11 comments

Two million acres of Achuar land is threatened by GeoPark's imminent exploitation of Block 64. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 11:25 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

In a surprise public statement, Special Counsel Robert Mueller resigned from the DOJ and announced (NBC) that he does not believe it is appropriate to provide information beyond what is already public in any appearance before Congress, emphasizing, “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” (Vox, full transcript). [more inside]
posted by Little Dawn at 10:28 AM PST - 1843 comments

The world is a rapidly changing place. Among the fastest changing aspects are those relating to how people communicate and interact with each other, whether in their schools and workplaces, their neighbourhoods, or in far-flung parts of the world. This year, we deal with three sets of factors: the links between government and happiness, the power of prosocial behaviour, and changes in information technology. This is the 7th World Happiness Report. [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 10:15 AM PST - 26 comments

Death Stranding [YouTube][Release Date Trailer] [Death Stranding Trailers #1-4]

“People have created “Walls” and become accustomed to living in isolation. “Death Stranding” is a completely new type of action game, where the goal of the player is to reconnect isolated cities and a fragmented society. It is created so that all elements, including the story and gameplay, are bound together by the theme of the “Strand” or connection. As Sam Porter Bridges, you will attempt to bridge the divides in society, and in doing create new bonds or “Strands” with other players around the globe. Through your experience playing the game, I hope you’ll come to understand the true importance of forging connections with others.”

Kojima Productions offered a new look at Death Stranding today, as well as a release date. The PlayStation 4-exclusive open-world action game will be released on Nov. 8, 2019. [via: Polygon][Previously.]
posted by Fizz at 9:35 AM PST - 51 comments

American food is increasingly channeled through a handful of companies: Amazon, Walmart, FreshDirect, Blue Apron. What do we lose if traditional neighborhood supermarkets go under? A lot—and Kevin Kelley wants to stop that. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:09 AM PST - 70 comments

The 2000 documentary/musical road film Cuba Feliz follows singer/guitarist Miguel Del Morales "El Gallo" from Havana around Cuba and back again, and is directed by Karim Dridi. In Spanish with English subtitles. (Variety|NYT)
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 8:00 AM PST - 1 comment

Incels are going under the knife to reshape their faces, and their dating prospects.
posted by Frobenius Twist at 5:11 AM PST - 239 comments

Much modern technology is built off ancient technologies and in many cases, we still don’t understand how they did certain things they did: We’ve not yet regained their knowledge. A major difference between ancient technology and modern tech is that the latter is industry-driven, whereas ancient technologies never were. As a result, modern tech is designed not necessarily for use value—much modern tech is entirely frivolous—but for a consumer market, and is designed for early obsolescence. Luxury tech must become unusable as swiftly as the consumer will tolerate. Can you imagine an aqueduct that needed to be replaced every 18 months?
posted by roolya_boolya at 3:45 AM PST - 50 comments

There’s always going to be a stack of films we’ve been meaning to get to. This column is here to make that problem worse. The Savage Stack is (was?) a series of film reviews, currently numbering 85, focusing on B-Movies and overlooked/forgotten mainstream fare. Think horror, sci-fi, cheesy action, pulp exploitation, and obscure oddities. [more inside]
posted by mannequito at 11:11 PM PST - 5 comments

Last Friday, Portland's lovely Northwest Animation Festival screened its last-ever Best of the Fest, pulling together 14 final selections from previous years' Best Of collections; a cross-section of strange, fun, bewildering, heartfelt, and amazing traditional, CG, stop-motion, and experimental work from the last decade of independent animation all over the globe. In loving memory of this remarkable event, you'll find below the fold an exhaustive list of every Best of the Fest selection from every NWAF since 2015, with links to watch (almost) all of them online. [Some NSFW] [more inside]
posted by churl at 10:32 PM PST - 8 comments

"But what bothers me is the assumption than anyone has a right to tell me how I should price my work and the unspoken insistence that the primary way I should find value in what I do is economic in nature." The author of the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque fantasy gaming blog writes about releasing creative work on the internet.
posted by Caduceus at 10:29 PM PST - 40 comments

Smithsonian Magazine writes about lunch boxes, and shares examples from the Smithsonian collection. Also, here's the online Smithsonian collection of lunch boxes. This guy sold his lunch boxes. This guy has a lot more lunchboxes. Here are photos of all those lunchboxes.
posted by hippybear at 8:53 PM PST - 25 comments

My Best Friend and I Did Everything Together — Until He Was Killed in Afghanistan
posted by allkindsoftime at 5:13 PM PST - 13 comments

Pinto prefers to talk about what he has uncovered, and to describe the evolution of European soccer from a varied and distinctive game to a corrupt playground for the international élite, in which only the richest, least scrupulous clubs can thrive. Pinto sees the future currently awaiting European soccer as bland and predictable. “It will be like plastic,” he said. How Football Leaks Is Exposing Corruption in European Soccer [SLNYer]
posted by chavenet at 2:58 PM PST - 3 comments

Tony Horwitz died yesterday One of his last published short pieces was this message of hope.
posted by mareli at 2:51 PM PST - 30 comments

"Hildegarde Howard , (1901-1998) wasn’t the least bit interested in pursuing a career in science. That was, until her first biology class at UCLA where she was inspired by her teacher, Pirie Davidson. She then immersed herself in the subject and obtained a part-time job at the (then) Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art sorting bones from the La Brea Tar Pits." [more inside]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 12:46 PM PST - 2 comments

The Indian Law That Helps Build Walls: The Supreme Court’s legal abuse of Native Americans set the stage for America’s poor treatment of many of its vulnerable populations. Penn Law assistant professor Maggie Blackhawk (@MaggieBlackhawk): "We are long overdue to confront the abuses of Native Americans and the failure of American colonialism. At the very least, no government should be able to cite the violent detention and oppression of Native Americans as justification for harming other vulnerable populations. The court should overturn the plenary power doctrine; the Indian Wars should serve as precedent for nothing." [Via] [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 10:12 AM PST - 7 comments

"Our idea is that suffering is something you should get over — and, as you say, cure it or fix it or find some solution for it.... But here’s the crux: Now and then, there’s a problem that has no solution. It could be an illness. It could be a lost person. It could be something like more everyday ambiguous losses such as adoption, divorce, immigration. Now and then, there are problems that don’t have a perfect fix. And then this idea of holding two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time is very useful for stress reduction." Pauline Boss talks with On Being's Krista Tippett about living with ambiguous losses, and with the unsolvable. (Transcript; audio available at the link.) [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 9:45 AM PST - 20 comments

““According to Nolan, she began with rightwing yet mainstream views such as those presented on Fox News. She then moved on to writing by Ben Shapiro and articles on Breitbart News which bridged the gap to the notorious white supremacist and anti-Semititc propaganda site Stormfront” Shapiro didn’t return requests for comment.” An Indiana Man Who Vandalized A Synagogue With Nazi Symbols Admitted How Far-Right Figures Radicalized Him (CW Nazi imagery, hate speech) More extremists are getting radicalized online. Whose responsibility is that? (Marketplace) “Fun fact about researching Nazis on Facebook? Facebook sorts "like" pages according to when something was liked. So you can literally look and see their progression from liking Fox to liking Breitbart/ @benshapiro to liking pages associated with nazis & the extreme right.” Twitter thread detailing one person’s descent from right-center causes to outright white nationalism and conspiracy theory via Facebook likes (CW: hate speech, antisemitism, etc)
posted by The Whelk at 9:35 AM PST - 64 comments

to heighten the dramatic situation." Over at the Shatner Chatner, Daniel Mallory Ortberg rates the spirited, gay aunts of fiction. [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 9:21 AM PST - 16 comments

The Gender Binary of Computing: Challenging Sexism in Technology by Rahul Zalkikar “Byte magazine was one of the most widely circulated magazines of its kind, reaching an estimated circulation of about 420,000 (third highest of all computer magazines) in the early 1980s. This analysis focuses on Byte’s beginnings, a time where hobbyists discussed ideas, sought help, shared opinions, and planned club events about computing technology. The average hobbyist was relatively young (students to middle-aged adults), relatively wealthy (middle to upper-middle class), and predominantly white.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:18 AM PST - 11 comments

You've played the original first-person shooter game (1993), you've avoided the movie version (2005), now play the retrofitted two dimensional 2DOOM

previously...
posted by Webbster at 9:15 AM PST - 25 comments

Jiemba Sands is a member of a Tasmanian circus family. He's been uploading videos of his stunts since he was 12, and went viral last year. Now he's gone even viraler with a compilation of his stunts: Twitter | Threadreader
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:46 AM PST - 9 comments

It's the end of May and the end of May, but of Brexit bafflement there is no end. With the UK's beleaguered prime minister Theresa May throwing in the towel and triggering a Tory leadership race, the EU parliamentary elections reflecting wild division and disillusion, and all other UK politics at a dead stop, what happens next? [more inside]
posted by Devonian at 8:35 AM PST - 244 comments

Many fruiting plants in the apple family (Rosaceae) have small fruits, such as cherries, raspberries, and roses. These small fruits are easily swallowed by birds, which then disperse their seeds. However, certain trees in the family, such as apples, pears, quince, and peaches, evolved in the wild to be too large for a bird to disperse their seeds. Fossil and genetic evidence demonstrate that these large fruits evolved several million years before humans started cultivating them. So who did these large fruits evolve to attract? [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 8:16 AM PST - 25 comments

Listen To A Movie [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:38 AM PST - 9 comments

Separated by Design: How Some of America’s Richest Towns Fight Affordable Housing In southwest Connecticut, the gap between rich and poor is wider than anywhere else in the country. Invisible walls created by local zoning boards and the state government block affordable housing and, by extension, the people who need it.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:24 AM PST - 59 comments

Western Europe’s tallest skyscraper will be visible from 60km away, unimpeded by much in the way of other buildings, because it's going to be in the middle of the Danish countryside. Elsewhere in the land of Lego and Scandi Noir, buildings grow from fjords, resemble icebergs, recycle, out-lean Pisa, get wavey, look spiky, express themselves, and capture clouds. Danish architecture is on the rise: today, Copenhagen; yesterday, and tomorrow, the world.
posted by rory at 5:08 AM PST - 23 comments

Waiting for a Train (lyrics) was the ninth single by Flash and the Pan, reaching #7 in the UK singles chart in 1983. The group formed in 1976 by Harry Vanda (guitar, keyboards) and George Young (guitar, keyboards, vocals), and were heavily involved in many other Australian music groups and projects (most notably AC/DC, for family reasons).
posted by Wordshore at 2:02 AM PST - 6 comments

Why You Feel the Urge to Jump -- Jessica Seigel looks into the science and philosophy of looking down from a high place for Nautilus, from the way threat modulates perception of looming visual stimuli (PDF, full article, Emory University) to the fact that not everyone can accurately estimate heights, though all individuals studied had roughly accurate horizontal distance estimates (abstract only, Springer). If you've experienced the urge to jump, it doesn't mean you want to die, but may rather imply an urge to live, with a healthy dose of anxiety (full article, Academia.edu).
posted by filthy light thief at 11:37 PM PST - 39 comments

Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers. Robert Macfarlane spends a couple of days and a few thousand words exploring the extensive catacombs of Paris for The New Yorker.
posted by hippybear at 4:04 PM PST - 24 comments

It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning An editorial by Ted Chiang, about the Gene Equality Project. (fictional)
posted by zabuni at 1:33 PM PST - 28 comments

Photographer Miranda Barnes captures the beauty of People of Color in love. I wanted to give this sense of taking back our narrative. I find that when I approach POC subjects and ask to take their photo, they’re like, “Wait, you want to take a photo of me ?” [...] A lot of them have never had a proper portrait taken of them that’s not on an iPhone. Asking to take their photo and validating their existence is, a lot of the time, more important to me than the actual photo. [Vice, Juxtapoz] [more inside]
posted by nightrecordings at 12:18 PM PST - 8 comments

'How much merit do our heroes gain by peacefully seeking out new life and new civilizations if they are incapable of conflict in the first place? Is it really tolerance if the Federation only has to tolerate those who will adopt Federation ideology? Or is the Federation essentially the same as the Borg, the evil cyborgs whose catchphrase is: “We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” What happens when our enlightened Federation heroes encounter someone intolerable, like the Dominion?'
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 82.5 Hours. An episode guide, but mostly an essay about the show.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:00 AM PST - 136 comments

Take some time to learn about the history of abortion in the United States through listening to This is Criminal's episode on "The Clergy Consultation Service, an underground network of ministers and rabbis who wanted to help women access safe abortions." Science Vs. covers "“self-helpers” Carol Downer and Francie Hornstein, who led a movement for safe abortions and education for women by women." Or step inside to listen more about present day experiences. [more inside]
posted by CMcG at 10:46 AM PST - 3 comments

The Guardian picture essay
posted by readinghippo at 9:42 AM PST - 9 comments

“This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.” May marks the 64th anniversary of the founding of Monthly Review, the longest continually published socialist journal in the US. To mark that occasion, here is an essay from thier first issue, “Why Socialism?“ by Albert Einstein.
posted by The Whelk at 9:24 AM PST - 5 comments

Mark Twain The War Prayer ~ Dalton Trumbo Chapt. 10 Johnny Got His Gun ~ Joe Frank War vs. Peace
posted by dancestoblue at 8:11 AM PST - 4 comments

Around the world, amateur astronomers are monitoring a strange phenomenon on the verge of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The giant storm appears to be unraveling. [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 8:09 AM PST - 63 comments

T-Pain & Barkbox present the official music video for "It's My Dog Birthday" from the new album "1UP". (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:26 AM PST - 4 comments

Indie pop band AJR go from I'm Not Famous (and I don't hate it) to success and their own apartment... but Don't Throw Out My Legos (cause they want to move out, but don't want to move on.) [more inside]
posted by evilmomlady at 7:09 AM PST - 10 comments

Ebola is out of control in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the second-worst outbreak in history. The WHO says the national and regional risk levels are very high, and with the number of new cases increasing in recent weeks, the UN is strengthening its response. Neighbouring countries are considering using an experimental vaccine which has shown impressive results in the DRC itself, but the challenge there is dispensing it: health workers are met with mistrust, and work in constant fear of armed attack, with some having to lie about being doctors in order to treat people.
posted by rory at 4:13 AM PST - 10 comments

Going to Space to Benefit Earth - "Bezos then went on to discuss his plan to ship humans off of the best planet in the solar system and send them to live in floating cylinders in space." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 3:45 AM PST - 37 comments

This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest. In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream. [more inside]
posted by Telf at 3:01 AM PST - 41 comments

The new kilogram just debuted. It’s a massive achievement. The new definition represents a victory of humankind over chaos in the universe. Really. (Vox) Nothing changes with what a kilogram is, but rather how it is defined. The International Prototype Kilogram (a.k.a. Big K, or Le Grand K (Atlas Obscura)) had been used since 1889 (BIPM), and had copies around the world (Wikipedia), but mass of platinum-iridium alloy had been losing mass (Science Daily). It was replaced by setting exact numerical values for the Planck constant (h), along with redefinition of six other SI base units (Wikipedia). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:47 PM PST - 43 comments

All 151 Original Pokémon As Gaeilge [Reddit] “"When I started picking Irish up again, I was going through a Pokémon mood," Nathan explains. "Redownloaded Pokémon Go, bought Pearl and started playing it for the first time. I was also looking into seeing what video games were available through Irish. I know there's one or two small Irish Let's Play channels on YouTube, and that TG4 [Ireland's all-Irish television channel] has an Irish Twitch, but I wasn't really aware of any actual video games with Irish language support. "That got me thinking of how easy/difficult it would be to translate an existing game," Nathan continues.” [via: Eurogamer]
posted by Fizz at 7:39 PM PST - 11 comments

An anchorite or anchoress permanently encloses themselves in a cell to live a life of prayer and contemplation. The word comes from the Greek ἀναχωρεῖν (‘anachorein’) meaning ‘to retire or retreat’. Anchoritism emerged in the late 11th century in tandem with a monastic reform movement and a growth in spiritual enthusiasm that is sometimes referred to as the Medieval Reformation. In the Middle Ages in England, as elsewhere in Europe, the practice was not uncommon – there were around a hundred recluses across the country in the 12th century; over the 13th century, the figure increased to two hundred. Women significantly outnumbered men, by as much as three to one.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:59 PM PST - 17 comments

Miami was fucked, and now the word finally sounded right. It described the world Rue experienced every day. The one the grownups in her life seemed bent on pretending didn’t exist. Like if they pretended really, really hard, they’d be okay. Like they’d pretended the Miami seawalls were big enough. Like Nona had pretended that flying on airplanes was fine. They’d closed their eyes and pretended. And now everyone was fucked.

posted by Memo at 5:17 PM PST - 67 comments

...the US Army tweeted, “How has serving impacted you?” As of this writing, the post has over 5,300 responses. Most of them are heartbreaking.
posted by 445supermag at 3:42 PM PST - 59 comments

Tonight (European Time), the votes from the European Parliament elections will be counted, and regardless of what happens, it will be a historic election. Voting began in some countries Thursday, but votes are being counted now all over Europe. Turnout is unusually high, and Eurobarometer survey shows highest support for the EU in 35 years. What to Watch For in the European Parliament Election Results from the NYTimes is an OK overview. The Guardian has great graphics. [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 2:00 PM PST - 103 comments

Joshua Dudley Greer is a photographer based in Atlanta, GA. His new book 'Somewhere Along The Line' distills a road trip of seven years and 100,000 miles.
posted by growabrain at 12:18 PM PST - 9 comments

MegaPixels is a project to document the origin and use of facial recognition datasets. In many cases, datasets generated by academic researchers in the United States (such as one created by Stanford University based on a webcam showing customers at now-defunct San Francisco cafe/laundromat/comedy venue BrainWash) have been used by researchers in countries like China, which as previously noted has been using facial recognition particularly on the Uighur ethnic minority group. MegaPixels is a project by Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace. Harvey’s past projects include facial recognition-jamming disguises CV Dazzle (Previously.) [more inside]
posted by larrybob at 12:03 PM PST - 3 comments

That's Carvel, with a C While looking into all these Captains, both Marvel and Marvel-adjacent, in advance of Captain Marvel, Polygon stumbled across one more from a very unexpected source. Captain Carvel, of the Carvel ice cream franchise.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:47 AM PST - 11 comments

On June 7, Netflix will release the latest installment of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. Official trailer. The original 1993 adaptation of Maupin's books about San Francisco's LGBTQ+ community starred Laura Linney, Paul Gross, and Olympia Dukakis, all reprising their roles in 2019. The new series features Lauren Morelli (Orange is the New Black) as show runner and executive producer; new cast include Ellen Page, Victor Garber, Charlie Barnett (Russian Doll), and Daniela Vega (A Fantastic Woman). Featurette with clips and interviews. Indiewire: As a way to offset the original casting choice [to have cis actress Olympia Dukakis play trans character Anna Madrigal, executive producers Lauren Morelli and Alan Poul have incorporated a pivotal storyline from her past told in flashbacks and starring out trans actress Jen Richards as Madrigal. [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 11:45 AM PST - 16 comments

An astronomers spots dozens of satellites orbiting in a row. Two days ago SpaceX launched sixty Starlink satellites into Earth orbit. Astronomer Marco Langbroek (Twitter) caught them soaring overhead in Europe. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 11:02 AM PST - 54 comments

In a remarkable turn of events Friday, a 35-year-old hiker whose disappearance more than two weeks ago in a Maui nature preserve triggered a massive search and garnered national headlines was found alive and in relatively good health TW: one photo of injuries
posted by gryphonlover at 10:41 AM PST - 29 comments

Boiled in hydrogen peroxide, soaked in fluorosilane and densified in a press , wood can be really, really cool. Like, below ambient cool. [more inside]
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:26 AM PST - 18 comments

"It’s hard to picture my grandfather without a sketchbook in his hands. He was always drawing. Gramps lived for 94 years — long enough to experience the Great Depression and the Great Recession, the birth of both television and virtual reality — and he chronicled the decades in a staggering collection of sketchbooks, each a literal chapter of his life." [NYT Op-Doc] [more inside]
posted by waninggibbon at 7:25 AM PST - 3 comments

This essay is my attempt to explore that question. I look at the ways people have been successful in the past, where their societies invested, who actually got to keep the wealth, and who is trying to copy each strategy today. I touch on Politics, Economics, History, Culture, and Technology — a few of my favourite things — and all play a part in building Wealth. [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 6:51 AM PST - 11 comments

In the BBC's Word of Mouth, Michael Rosen and Dr Laura Wright look into the history, meaning, and pleasures of biscuits, with Anastasia Edwards, author of Biscuits and Cookies, A Global History. (A 30 minute podcast, so go make yourself a nice cup of tea.)
posted by carter at 5:08 AM PST - 4 comments

Nails, Hair, Hips, Heels (SLYT)
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 4:06 AM PST - 34 comments

Dr. Universe tells you about sleeping bees. Photographer Joe Neely took an adorable picture of some.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:42 PM PST - 16 comments

If domestic abuse is one of the most underreported crimes, domestic abuse by police officers is virtually an invisible one. It is frighteningly difficult to track or prevent—and it has escaped America’s most recent awakening to the many ways in which some police misuse their considerable powers. Very few people in the United States understand what really happens when an officer is accused of harassing, stalking, or assaulting a partner.
posted by Cozybee at 8:56 PM PST - 16 comments

For all your sneaky poisoning needs: "A curious late 19th century concoction, using an inconspicuous mid-17th-century volume of theology in a slightly later binding to conceal a miniature chest of drawers with space for four bottles measuring up to ca. 10 cms. The German-language drawer labels bear the names of poisonous plants: banewort, Devil's snare, hemlock, wormwood, henbane and foxglove, among others. The pastedown bears a large memento-mori illustration with a Latin quote from the Epistle to the Hebrews (9:27): "Statutum est hominibus semel mori" ("All men are destined to die once")."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:33 PM PST - 8 comments

On Chance in Artistic Creation - an 1894 essay by August Strindberg paired with paintings by Strindberg. [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 6:24 PM PST - 5 comments

Fortnite is basically a giant, endless advertisement now [Polygon] “Last year, playing Fortnite largely meant hopping onto a make-believe island in the hope of surviving against 99 other players. This year, Fortnite isn’t as divorced from the real world — there are constant tie-ins that encourage people to buy, or at least engage with brands and products. To play Fortnite in 2019 is to be enmeshed in advertisements.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:07 PM PST - 47 comments

According to Julius Caeser, the Gauls had "shields made of bark or interwoven wickers, which they hastily covered over with skins." But no bark shields from the period have ever been found--until now. [more inside]
posted by flug at 2:55 PM PST - 14 comments

The Jibe-iT goat farm in Redding, CT, USA, is hosting what may be the world's first GOAT LARP this June. Not a Live Action Role Playing game (LARP) where you play a goat, but a LARP for the goats: "Goat Larp is a 1 day live action roleplaying event at a goat farm in southern Connecticut. Attend in-costume as any character you want and help run live adventures for the goats."
posted by rmd1023 at 2:45 PM PST - 20 comments

"I slowly began to understand that people in consumption-based societies assemble their identities via stuff, and become very emotional when those identities – and that stuff- is discarded in ways that don’t match their values. Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that consumers actually care more about how their stuff is discarded, than how it is manufactured." Adam Minter discusses where stuff comes from, and how we feel about where it goes, in an interview with Discard Studies.
posted by MonkeyToes at 1:16 PM PST - 44 comments

In which NPR examines the concept of "The Song Of The Summer" and provides a Spotify playlist of their 100 songs of the summer since 1962, plus a list of the top songs (2-6 per year) they they've defined as one of that year's Songs Of The Summer. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 1:14 PM PST - 43 comments

The live-action remake of the Dungeons & Dragon cartoon we’ve been waiting for
posted by bq at 9:25 AM PST - 30 comments

Russian website features weekly long-form profiles of pets (so far two cats and a dog), along with quality photos and videos of the subjects going about their activities. There are sidebars on topics like proper veterinary care, adopting from shelters, and leash-walking cats. [more inside]
posted by larrybob at 8:32 AM PST - 5 comments

A new short story about panic in space by Elizabeth Bear. Each month, Future Tense Fiction—a series of short stories from Future Tense and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives—publishes a story on a theme. The theme for April–June 2019: space settlement. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:15 AM PST - 6 comments

‘Globalisation was rife in the 16th century – clues from Renaissance paintings’
posted by hugbucket at 4:14 AM PST - 18 comments

Colbert invites Conan to join him in the box
posted by growabrain at 11:39 PM PST - 18 comments

Every Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen Movie, Ranked by Surreality
posted by Chrysostom at 7:01 PM PST - 47 comments

"It was around before this Parliament. The hedgehog, and its ancestor, narrowly missed being crushed under the foot of Tyrannosaurus rex. The hedgehog was around long before the human species. It tells us a great deal about British civilisation that my hon. Friend has raised the subject, because the hedgehog is a magical creature. It is a creature that appears on cylinder seals in Sumeria, bent backwards on the prows of Egyptian ships..." [more inside]
posted by Damienmce at 5:09 PM PST - 19 comments

“pssst guys GUYS the coolest thing just happened” is how it all began, back on April 18, when author and MetaFilter favorite Chuck Wendig (previously, previouslier) spotted an elusive fox out behind his writing shed. [more inside]
posted by martin q blank at 4:31 PM PST - 16 comments

Much has happened in the past 30 years to try to give disabled people a life that looks the same as for anyone without special needs. People who would have at one time been institutionalized are living in group homes. Sheltered workshops are closing as people are moving into integrated workplaces that embrace what’s called the “neurodiversity” movement. And social opportunities are growing to include specific dating sites, cruises and proms. But adults with disabilities, like Jones, yearn for more opportunities to socialize. Club 1111 is unique for how often it is held — once a month — and for how many people it draws. Local, state and national advocates are not aware of another event like it anywhere in the country.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:13 PM PST - 6 comments

Cards of folklore in the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive "offer insights into some of the hardships and preoccupations of domestic life in Newfoundland over the past half-century or so. But many of the cards, which date back to the mid-1960s, lack the full names of the women who authored them and signed them as their husband’s wife, nothing more. Archivists grew so irked by this that they recently launched a mission to find out the writers’ true names." Household names: Archivists take on task of identifying women who captured Newfoundland folklore [The Globe and Mail] [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 3:37 PM PST - 7 comments

The great theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann passed away today at the age of 89, after a lifetime of contributions from fundamental particle physics to complex systems theory. NYT obit; Caltech obit [more inside]
posted by Westringia F. at 3:20 PM PST - 26 comments

Troubled treasure "But as much as Burmese amber is a scientist's dream, it's also an ethical minefield. The fossils come from conflict-ridden Kachin state in Myanmar, where scientists can't inspect the geology for clues to the fossils' age and environment. In Kachin, rival political factions compete for the profit yielded by amber and other natural resources"
posted by dhruva at 1:41 PM PST - 2 comments

Oxygen Not Included [YouTube][Trailer] “...developed by highly regarded Canadian team Klei Entertainment, best known for Mark of the Ninja and Don't Starve. It's a sideways-view building and resource management game set inside a giant space rock. I begin the game with three little characters who've been portaled into a small hole inside the rock, armed with nothing more than a box filled with a few days' worth of food and some funky tools for digging. They begin tunneling in order to create more room for themselves, and to yield resources. The inside of this rock is a Battenberg Cake of liquids, solids and gases, as well as organic stuff that is either really useful or absolutely life-threatening.” [via: Polygon] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 1:16 PM PST - 37 comments

Author (and conspiracy theorist) Naomi Wolf went on an interview with BBC Radio as part of promotion of her upcoming book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. She was expecting to have a chance to talk about the thesis of her book, the way sexual expression has been criminalized.

What she was not planning for, however, was for interviewer Matthew Sweet to show, with evidence, that her book was built on Wolf's misunderstanding of the archaic legal term "death recorded". [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:11 PM PST - 94 comments

VITAL UPDATE: my road runner porch-buddy used to run away if I wanted a pic but now when he catches a lizard he KNOCKS ON MY DOOR and then parades his catch around and poses, it’s amazing. Who’s a good boy! Mr Meepmeep! 😍

A woman chronicles being courted by an amorous(?) roadrunner. [Twitter thread with pics and video]
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:50 PM PST - 27 comments

Worker camps make it possible to build infrastructure in remote locations in Canada. Is it worth the human cost? (cw: sexual assault) [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 11:23 AM PST - 10 comments

On May 23rd, Boston Police issued a traffic advisory: Tremont Street was down to one lane. A brood of Boston ducklings had not one but two friendly officers to clear their path, as well as assistance from the Boston Water and Sewer Commission when one duckling fell into a storm drain and needed rescue. Channel 7 had a helicopter on the scene.
posted by Hypatia at 11:11 AM PST - 23 comments

On a bright May morning at Japan’s Idakiso train station, a small cat basked in the sun as her photo was taken by a group of tourists before getting a tummy tickle from a toddler. While the white, tan and black kitten purred and meowed in the arms of a visitor, one of the station workers looked on with a grin, interjecting only to gently reposition the cat’s brimmed conductor hat whenever it threatened to slip over her eyes. “Having her around the station makes everyone happy. I sometimes forget that she is my boss. previously
posted by ChuraChura at 10:58 AM PST - 12 comments

Samsung researchers have developed a GAN-based method for building "talking heads" or animated figures from one or a handful of still photographs (paper). [more inside]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:08 AM PST - 41 comments

A YouTube channel where three Japanese women play classic videogame and anime music on a giant xylophone while wearing themed hats. "Corridors of Time" from Chrono Trigger "Big Chocobo" from Final Fantasy III "Love Song" from Dragon Warrior II
posted by Automocar at 9:05 AM PST - 12 comments

On Wednesday, May 22 Floyd Martin delivered mail for the last time after 35 years at the United States Post Office. @Jennifer_Brett accompanied him and took photos of Floyd saying goodbye to the people on his route (SLT Thread).
posted by mcmile at 8:16 AM PST - 22 comments

"The military-surplus control console had three buttons labeled “Search,” “Track,” and “Destroy”—the last of which was mercifully disabled but often vigorously pushed by young probationers." An inventor of the first ankle bracelet trackers for criminals points out that smart phones will do everything that ankle bracelets will, are actually useful to prisoners re-entering society, and can be loaded with apps that will help prisoners remember court and parole officer dates, detect drug and alcohol use, and reward rehabilitation. [more inside]
posted by ckridge at 7:32 AM PST - 10 comments

Making fractals with recursive nested Powerpoint presentations and slides. How they work. A better way. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 7:08 AM PST - 11 comments

Stephen Colbert plays D&D with Matt Mercer (YouTube) For Comic Relief's Red Nose Day this year Stephen Colbert teamed up with Critical Role's Matt Mercer for a one on one D&D session. Colbert's joy and enthusiasm is infectious, and Mercer offers up a DMing master class in the way he weaves the theme of Red Nose Day into the adventure.
posted by calamari kid at 6:51 AM PST - 16 comments

2 days with Curvy Wife Guy, the most controversial man in body positivity He’s just released a music video called “Chubby Sexy.” Will it silence his internet haters?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:32 AM PST - 44 comments

David Milch's Third Act. The NYer's Mark Singer gives some background on Milch's writing process on Deadwood and interviews him about his current memory problems. "I've always said that he writes novels set like plays, and shot like movies, that air on television," Milch's daughter says. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 4:25 AM PST - 6 comments

A week ago, Transworld Skateboarding released DAEWON, a documentary about the life and 30-year career of legendary skateboarder Daewon Song. It's free to watch on YouTube. [more inside]
posted by ZipRibbons at 3:09 AM PST - 6 comments

Sea otters are bouncing back - and into the jaws of great white sharks The sharks aren’t actually trying to eat the otters, preferring calorie-dense, blubbery prey like seals and sea lions. The bites are merely investigative, with sharks recoiling with a mouth of fur instead of a fatty meal. But such bites often cause mortal injuries to the otters, and they’re now happening more often off California’s beaches. [more inside]
posted by ActingTheGoat at 9:38 PM PST - 12 comments

As the internet continues to evolve at an unprecedented rate, one thing always remains constant — The Pirate Bay
posted by allkindsoftime at 4:04 PM PST - 65 comments

Hi, this channel shows drain cleaning blocked sewer drains using a high pressure water jet machine. The high pressure water hose that cleans the drain has specific nozzles on the end for cutting out tree roots, grease blockages and clearing rubble out of drains. It is a disgustingly dirty and smelly job, but some one has to do it, so it may as well be me. Thanks for taking the time to view my dirty videos. (h/t Miss Cellania)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:01 PM PST - 24 comments

Brexit: The Naked Truth (Dr Victoria Bateman, Cambridge, 2019)NSFW VIDEO CONTAINS NUDITY [more inside]
posted by bq at 3:18 PM PST - 12 comments

Hello! My name is Fitch. I’m a bot (v4.0) learning to ID reptiles & amphibians in pics. Tweet @WhatTheHerp for IDs. Report sightings to http://HerpMapper.org to help. [more inside]
posted by jillithd at 1:00 PM PST - 11 comments

Found Cat - Need Owners ASAP
posted by krix at 12:59 PM PST - 74 comments

Holly Hendron's new album PROTO is, according to Fader, "an engrossing testament to the power of multiple voices singing in unison. One of those voices is a computer named Spawn", an AI trained in live ceremonies in which hundreds of people were gathered to teach it how to identify and reinterpret unfamiliar sounds in group call-and-response singing sessions. The video for Eternal might give some context. [more inside]
posted by signal at 12:11 PM PST - 13 comments

Teaser trailer for Star Trek: Picard. More info on the series at io9.
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:34 AM PST - 188 comments

Mary Bacon took a bullet while pilfering fruit as a child. Mary Bacon dropped out of school in the sixth grade and was pregnant by age 16. Mary Bacon had a romantic relationship with Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Mary Bacon was kidnapped by a stalker. That same stalker later tried to shoot her with a gun. Not all of those sentences are complete horseshit.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:23 AM PST - 5 comments

Terminator Dark Fate [YouTube][Teaser Trailer] Terminator: Dark Fate is the sixth film in the Terminator franchise, but acts as a direct sequel to only the first two movies: Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The other three films are now considered part of an alternate timeline, according to the filmmakers.
posted by Fizz at 10:22 AM PST - 95 comments

"The acclaimed songwriter of hits like Forever Young and Maggie May contacted Model Railroader magazine to talk about his other achievement, Grand Street & Three Rivers Railroad." [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 9:17 AM PST - 24 comments

"Even the most basic liberal democratic right—the right to vote, about which there is no end to sanctimony in this country—has never been equitably put into practice. Gaze upon our system’s vaunted political blessings from the perspective of, say, someone in Puerto Rico, and they look even more mixed than they do from the mainland, where the Constitution places more weight on rural votes and less-populated regions by design." Reclaiming the Future: On the growing appeal of socialism in an age of inequality "The top 0.1 percent of Americans held 20 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2016 (up from 7 percent in 1979) and owned as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Evidence suggests that the threat that the wealthy pose to what Rawls termed the “fair value of political liberty” has become extraordinary." Socialism and the Democracy Deficit "In reality, though, the resurgence of socialism in our time is a tale of dogged organizing against formidable odds of attaining simple cultural and intellectual visibility, let alone electoral success. " The Socialist Network (The New Republic) "But here, the local DSA has exactly the sort of qualities that have long been hard to find in left groups: practicality, organization, and friendliness. What has impressed me most is that they fundamentally care about actually getting things done, and not just engaging in symbolic politics." Why I Love The DSA (Current Affairs)
posted by The Whelk at 9:11 AM PST - 20 comments

Need some more brass music in your life? Try some Meute (official site), a German techno marching band, combining "hypnotic driving techno and expressive brass band music ... just drums and brass, no computers involved" (YouTube profile). They're between the bombast of Too Many Zooz (YT) (previously, twice) and the grandiose scale of Acid Brass (YT) (mentioned previously). But like Acid Brass, it's all covers of techno tracks, like Laurent Garnier's "The Man with the Red Face" (original track; YTx2). If you want your brass mixed with vocals, accordion and other joyful noises, try some Afrobalkan Dance music from South Africa (YT) courtesy of Bombshelter Beast (official site). More of all this below the break. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:48 AM PST - 13 comments

He said he'd been diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s, at age 30, and had never expected to reach his 40s....To finance the life he kept thinking would end at any moment, he had committed increasingly creative and reckless varieties of fraud. He told me in our first conversations that he had faked his own death several times; I couldn’t quite keep track of how many. He had stolen his brother’s identity and faked his death, too, despite the fact that his brother was already dead.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:35 AM PST - 7 comments

Wife sales were located at inns, ratifying pledge cups were quaffed and purchase prices were often in alcohol.
posted by BekahVee at 7:46 AM PST - 9 comments

Out of sight of most New Yorkers, though, was the development underground: a series of tunnels that ran beneath the streets to connect a number of the [Jehova's Witnesses] properties. And though the tunnels began to be filled in two years ago, their fascinating history has recently begun to come to light.

Inside The Lost Jehovah's Witnesses Tunnels Under Brooklyn Heights
posted by griphus at 6:13 AM PST - 26 comments

PLOS has added an opt-in option for authors to publish their peer review history alongside their accepted manuscript. The documentation for each review process will have its own DOI. [more inside]
posted by carter at 5:44 AM PST - 16 comments

Panic have announced a cute new handheld console, Playdate. Costing $149, it will come with a season of twelve brand new games launched weekly from developers like Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy), Bennett Foddy (QWOP), and Zach Gage (Really Bad Chess). The Playdate has an unusual design including a rotating crank controller, and is accompanied by a Mac SDK that works in Lua and C.
posted by adrianhon at 2:28 AM PST - 84 comments

Five minutes of eye-popping video optical illusions, including "Drawing Hands", "Jenga Anamorphosis", and "Umbrella" .
posted by Doktor Zed at 6:22 PM PST - 15 comments

“What I’m saying is that at least now, when people use my last name, they will sure as hell use my first name as well. And that’s a win.” Joss and Jillian Sackler are profiled in Town & Country magazine about their very different approaches to having "the most toxic name in philanthropy." [more inside]
posted by Gin and Broadband at 2:47 PM PST - 64 comments

Repair Of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns Into Long, Strange Trip For Engineer
posted by ActingTheGoat at 1:58 PM PST - 38 comments

The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world. Instead of “climate change” the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” is favoured over “global warming”, although the original terms are not banned. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 1:27 PM PST - 25 comments

Billie Jean King once tried to find a sustainable business model for feminist sports coverage. Then women’s fitness tried to revive the swimsuit model.
posted by Etrigan at 11:20 AM PST - 14 comments

Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina passed away from a stroke last night at the age of 48. He is probably best known in the West for his essay "How To Write About Africa," (video). His memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place (excerpt), describes growing up in Kenya in the post-colonial Kenyatta and Moi era of politics, his experiences as a student in South Africa, and returning to Kenya around the post-election violence in 2007. In 2014, he published a lost chapter, "I am a homosexual, Mum", and he imagined the conversation he would have liked to have had with his father. He was one of Kenya's most vocally out gay men, and was also open about his HIV+ status. [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 10:46 AM PST - 27 comments

The Compleat Gyde To Tolkien Calendars “Time doesn't seem to pass here: it just is.”
posted by Fizz at 9:50 AM PST - 31 comments

Film director Amma Asante came across an old photograph taken in Nazi Germany of a black schoolgirl by chance. Curiosity - who the girl was and what she was doing in Germany - set the award-winning film-maker off on a path that led to Where Hands Touch, a new movie - an imagined account of a mixed-race teenager's clandestine relationship with a Hitler Youth member, but based on historical record.
posted by hugbucket at 8:49 AM PST - 19 comments

On May 15th, 1919, the country — and the world — watched in astonishment as tens of thousands of workers walked off the job in Winnipeg. They demanded higher pay, better working conditions and the right to bargain collectively. Some 35,000 workers took over the running of Canada's third-largest city for six weeks. The Winnipeg General Strike was one of the most important labour events in Canadian history. “Men who had just returned from a horrific war in Europe could not find employment; factories were shutting down and bankruptcies were a common occurrence. Tens of thousands of people in Winnipeg, Manitoba alone lived in substandard housing, where disease was a deadly reality. Working-class immigrants faced deep divisions along ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines.” Lessons From The Winnipeg General Strike
posted by The Whelk at 8:04 AM PST - 10 comments

Yasuke (variously rendered as 弥助 or 弥介, 彌助 or 彌介 in different sources) (circa 1555–1590 CE) (Wikipedia) was an enslaved African taken to Japan in 1579 in the service of the Italian Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano (Beyond Ricci, Boston College), who had been appointed the Visitor (inspector) of the Jesuit missions in the Indies (East Africa, South and East Asia). "When Yasuke got to Kyoto (with Jesuit missionaries), there was a massive riot. People wanted to see him and be in his presence" (Thomas Lockley, quoted by CNN), as he was one of the first Africans seen by many of the Japanese. But he quickly went from novelty to trusted and valued retainer to, and warrior for, the Japanese hegemon and warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1581 and 1582 (Wikipedia). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:45 AM PST - 11 comments

A compendium of abandoned greenhouses
posted by moonmilk at 7:40 AM PST - 19 comments

Someone—no one really knows who—has been disrupting the train system, sneaking into cabs, pulling the emergency brakes, and grinding not just one train, but entire lines in the system to a halt during the busiest hours of the day. And just like that, they then melt into the darkness between the tunnels, waiting to strike again
posted by thecjm at 7:20 AM PST - 78 comments

A violent white supremacist who was believed to have been held in isolation longer than any other inmate, he personified a campaign against solitary as cruel and unusual punishment. Silverstein had been in solitary for 36 years, and was serving three consecutive life terms for the killing of two fellow prisoners and a guard while behind bars. He had been incarcerated continuously since 1975, originally on an armed robbery conviction. He was said to have joined the Aryan Brotherhood, the white nationalist prison gang, while serving time at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. The ACLU cited his case in its campaign against solitary. [more inside]
posted by stillmoving at 7:00 AM PST - 48 comments

If it's raining where you are, you can put on "Sunset Mission," the 2000 jazz noir album by Bohren & der Club of Gore (Youtube, Soundcloud). If it's not raining where you are, you can make it rain, and then put on the album.
posted by rebent at 5:59 AM PST - 9 comments

Y'all wanna hear a story about the time I accidentally transported a brick of heroin from Los Angeles to Seattle? I bet.
Alright, let's do this...
Original twitter thread
posted by AndrewStephens at 5:52 PM PST - 109 comments

Rita Payés, a young jazz vocalist and trombonist, performs Imagina accompanied by her mother, Elisabeth Roma, on guitar. [more inside]
posted by rekrap at 5:02 PM PST - 6 comments

The human genome has never actually been complete, because reading our highly-repetitive centromeres has been "like putting together a puzzle of the Sahara Desert." Paper.
posted by clawsoon at 4:25 PM PST - 14 comments

$40M 'pay it forward' idea is likely to trigger positive 'contagion effect,' researcher says. The exact amount to be covered for the 396 students is still being calculated, Morehouse College President David A. Thomas told CNN on Monday, but the figure will likely be in the tens of millions of dollars. Robert Frederick Smith (born December 1, 1962) is an African-American businessman, investor, and philanthropist. A former chemical engineer and investment banker, he is the founder, chairman, and CEO of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. In 2018, Smith was ranked by Forbes as the 163rd richest person in America. Here's the best reaction to Robert F. Smith paying off the student debt at Morehouse.
posted by kneecapped at 1:54 PM PST - 75 comments

The Story of Spikey. Stephen Wolfram gives an account of the origin and evolution of Mathematica's logo, touching upon geometry, paper sculptures, Kepler, and Brazilian folk art, among other themes.
posted by dhruva at 12:23 PM PST - 5 comments

Latimer originally planted his bottle garden in 1960, sealed it, and let it sit — for twelve years. In 1972, thinking the plant may be a bit too dry after all of those years, he “put in about a quarter of a pint of water.” Then, he resealed the bottle — and it’s remained sealed to this day. [via Kottke]
posted by Chrysostom at 12:17 PM PST - 35 comments

Solutions for a Living Harbor: In Seattle, Singapore, and other waterfront cities around the world, engineers are creating life-enhancing designs to encourage marine biodiversity. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 11:18 AM PST - 10 comments

Hint: There’s a big anniversary coming up. The Chinese government has long been suspicious of Wikipedia. It’s been blocked in China intermittently since 2004, and the Chinese-language version has been blocked since June 2015. Now the government has gone even further. The Wikimedia Foundation released a statement on Friday announcing that it had determined that China blocked all versions of Wikipedia. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:46 AM PST - 4 comments

This Old House (previously) is now in its 40th season, and served as vanguard to numerous other home renovation shows. What continues to set it apart though is its goal "to put skilled tradespeople and the work they do in front of the camera."
posted by borkencode at 10:29 AM PST - 52 comments

It has taken more than 220 years but an order of monks at Grimbergen Abbey, producers of a fabled medieval beer whose brand was adopted by mass producers in the 1950s, have started to brew again after rediscovering the original ingredients and methods in their archives. The Guardian reports on a heady new brew. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 9:51 AM PST - 15 comments

Niki Lauda, who famously bought his way into F1 by way of a bank loan secured against his life insurance policy, became only driver in F1 history to win F1 World Championships for both Ferrari and McLaren. After surviving third-degree burns in a horrific crash in the 1976 German Grand Prix, Lauda returned to racing just 40 days later. His epic rivalry with James Hunt was chronicled in the 2013 Ron Howard directed film, Rush. A life-long pilot, Lauda founded Lauda Air in 1979. In 2012 he was named Non-Executive Chairman of Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team and is credited with helping build the team into the dominant force in F1 today. He died on Monday at age 70 of kidney failure. Previously... 1,2
posted by spudsilo at 9:51 AM PST - 25 comments

'Totally Accurate Battle Simulator' Captures the Goofy Mayhem of Mass Violence [Vice Games] “Totally Accurate Battle Simulator is a silly game. It’s purposefully whimsical, everything about it is built to support its farcical premise of AI fighters stumbling toward each other on various battlefields, swinging weaponry around with the physical comedy that accompanies physics-based animations. Knights wobble and fall over under the weight of their swords, mammoths trample crowds then clumsily topple to their sides as axe-throwers throw axes in hopefully the direction of their targets. It’s mayhem, and it’s undeniably goofy.” [YouTube][Game Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:23 AM PST - 13 comments

Somehow I became respectable. I don’t know how—the last film I directed got some terrible reviews and was rated NC-17. Six people in my personal phone book have been sentenced to life in prison. I did an art piece called Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot, which is composed of close-ups from porn films, yet a museum now has it in their permanent collection and nobody got mad. What the hell has happened? By John Waters
posted by chavenet at 8:09 AM PST - 30 comments

"Our great task today — your task and my task, is to build a labor movement for this new century — a labor movement for all of America’s workers — a labor movement as big and bold as America itself "On May 10, 2019, Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson gave a speech to the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America’s annual Eugene Debs–Lucy Gonzalez Parsons–A. Philip Randolph Dinner. We reproduce the speech here in full, lightly edited for online publication. (Jacobin) "When I mention Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), to people in the labor movement, the response is usually something like: “I would follow her to the gates of hell.” Sara Nelson Is Not Afraid To Strike Back (The Nation) " A few hours of training is not a just transition. The transition needs to begin before the jobs go away. A just transition must ensure pensions and healthcare are protected for workers who spent their lives powering our country in the fossil fuel industries." The Green New Deal Needs Labor’s Support. We Asked Sara Nelson How To Get It. (In These Times)
posted by The Whelk at 7:58 AM PST - 6 comments

Cool philosophy animation showing the fallibility of human intuition. This is a super cool new animation put out by the Center for Public Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz. It talks about a little experiment called "The Rope Around the Earth" and why it shows that human intuition is sometimes overconfidently wrong, and draws conclusions for that about our political and social disagreements.
posted by HiPhiNation at 7:48 AM PST - 45 comments

Private Mohammed Kahn, also known as John Ammahail, was born in Persia, circa 1830. Raised in Afghanistan, he immigrated to the United States in 1861. About two months after his arrival he enlisted in the 43rd New York Infantry Regiment, following a night out with friends who convinced him to join.
posted by Etrigan at 6:02 AM PST - 14 comments

In 1909, the Boston Post newspaper commissioned 700 gold-headed ebony walking canes, and distributed one to the selectmen of every town in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, with instructions to give the cane to the town's oldest (male) citizen. In the '30s, the tradition expanded to include women. More than 500 of the canes still survive, some still in circulation and some in local collections, and volunteers at the Maynard Historical Society continue to search out the whereabouts of the remaining ~200. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 5:27 AM PST - 13 comments

The Making Of Star Wars [49m]
posted by hippybear at 9:22 PM PST - 32 comments

"The Art of Making in Antiquity is an innovative digital project designed for the study of Roman stoneworking. Centred on the photographic archive of Peter Rockwell, this website aims to enhance current understanding of the carving process and to investigate the relationship between the surviving objects, the method and sequence of their production and the people who made them."
posted by jedicus at 8:37 PM PST - 3 comments

Mechanical bulls start off easy enough, then the'll buck you, but Anthony "PRB" Smith makes it look easy, like really easy, hopping back and forth. Here's an interview he did for German TV ahead of his appearance on Germany's Got Talent.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:53 PM PST - 12 comments

Maybe you've heard of the 18xx family of railroad stock-market boardgames? It all started with the game 1829, and today comprises a huge range of games, lasting from 2 to 10+ hours, mostly set in the nineteenth century, in locations all around the world. The market for these games has always been tiny, so there's a thriving niche community of amateur design/printing. Well now, 18xx meets Les Miserables, in a ten song musical version by podcaster Ambie Valdés. [more inside]
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:50 PM PST - 13 comments

Political geographer Anja Kanngieser discusses the movements for climate and environmental justice in the Pacific and building atmosphere through sound recordings. "Many of the [Pacific Islands] activists I spoke with said, "We are doing this not only for us, but for you, because after we go, you go too"." [more inside]
posted by trotzdem_kunst at 7:02 PM PST - 1 comment

Quidditch is so 20th Century. The new hot shit is the wizard sport of Fireball, brought to you by the homebrew adventure tabletop gaming blog A Blasted Cratered Land, with game mechanics written for the GLOG rules-lite homebrew system family. (A Blasted Cratered Land also has a quick rundown of what the GLOG is.) [more inside]
posted by Caduceus at 4:05 PM PST - 6 comments

New Zealand's public education system, as in other countries, is under intense pressure. On 29 May it faces what's being described as a once-in-a-generation mega-strike. Journalist Toby Morris has produced a short comic that explains the crisis from both an individual and a larger perspective. [more inside]
posted by reshet at 3:07 PM PST - 24 comments

Yarn Is Programmable (SLNYT by Siobhan Roberts)
posted by bq at 1:59 PM PST - 15 comments

From Watchdog To Attack Dog: The Story Of Unsuck D.C. Metro [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 12:24 PM PST - 32 comments

Five hours of life inside Janet's Void. Hey The Good Place fans, ever wonder what not-a-person not-a-woman humanoid-appearing sentient database Janet does when she pops back to her void? Wonder no more. Fun fact: When she leaves the void, she returns after exactly 22 minutes. A (SLYT) bit of existential whimsy for your Monday.
posted by zaixfeep at 11:56 AM PST - 11 comments

Using 400 million records from Ancestry.com, researchers have determined that assortative mating (previously; not previously) has an influence on longevity. Their work has lowered the estimate of the impact of genetics on longevity from 15-30% to 7%. Paper. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 10:52 AM PST - 16 comments

The vocal group* 180 Gs released 180 D'Gs to the Future - an entire album of a cappella covers of Negativland songs, in a variety of styles from gospel to work song to just weird. And! They also covered all of The Residents' 1980 Commercial Album. And Cardiac's album Sing to God [previously, previously]! [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 9:53 AM PST - 13 comments

The Lazy Design Aesthetic of Misrepresenting Genetic Conditions [Plenty of Minds]

“In books, films and video games, “mutant” is often used interchangeably with various terms that essentially mean “other”: “freak,” “monster,” “beast,” et cetera. However, it isn’t completely interchangeable because everyone understands that “mutant” has something to do with genetics and biological development. Therefore, the choice to use the term “mutant” implies that there is some biological, likely genetic, basis for why these “monsters” are the way they are. [...] It appears to me that the designers were just cribbing dysmorphic features that occur in real life and applying them to the game’s monsters, then naming them “mutants” and going on their way. Why do they look the way they are? Because they’re “mutants.” No additional thought went into that.”

Michael California draws upon his background as a geneticist to compliment a discussion of Rage 2‘s industry-standard ableism with an explanation of why the “mutant” tropes of disfigurement and disability widely perpetuated in popular media make no scientific sense whatsoever. [YouTube][Rage 2 Launch Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:12 AM PST - 14 comments

Speed Up Your Podcasts for More Efficient Listening
Speeding Up Your Podcasts Won’t Solve Your Problems
Meet The People Who Listen to Podcasts Crazy-Fast
Stop listening to podcasts at 1.5x
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:23 AM PST - 119 comments

"“My grandmother made tacos with peas and with potatoes,” Lopez said, and added it was because she couldn’t always afford ground beef. For some Mexican Americans, this gets at the essence of the way we eat. Pretending otherwise means suppressing our lived realities and histories. I can’t think of a better example of the fraud of authenticity, which is more interested in the aesthetics of poverty than in poverty itself, more invested in the feeling of realness than in any kind of truth." John Paul Brammer for the Washington Post: I’m Mexican American. Stop expecting me to eat ‘authentic’ food.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 7:21 AM PST - 81 comments

Expert trials cyclist Danny Macaskill is looking after his friends' daughter and can't resist taking her for a wee bike ride around Scotland. (No children were involved in these stunts!) [more inside]
posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:52 AM PST - 23 comments

DanceRush Stardom is a rhythm/dancing game from Konami. The machines have a built-in camera that can record movements (and blur out background figures). Unlike Dance Dance Revolution, DanceRush operates on a large, touch-sensitive pad divided into long columns. This allows for a certain freedom of choreography. [more inside]
posted by automatic cabinet at 12:55 AM PST - 7 comments

Do you need 4 minutes of Bill Hader cackling next to John Mulaney without context? Well...There you go. If you want the context, there's the whole hour of Mulaney and Hader at the 92nd Street Y, recorded last week. [more inside]
posted by Cold Lurkey at 7:23 PM PST - 9 comments

Ryan F. Mandelbaum is birder, who took to the hobby as a way to log off and get outside (Gizmodo), as something of a real-life Pokémon adventure. But now he's inside again, paying close attention to Tuca & Bertie (YouTube, official trailer; previously on MeFi) because he's trying to identify All The Birds (io9).
posted by filthy light thief at 6:15 PM PST - 14 comments

The NYU library hosts a public archive of every edition of Freedom, a magazine edited by Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham from 1951 to 1955. They weren't shy about self-posting, but also provided a venue for journalists and artists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alice Childress, Charles White, and Lorraine Hansberry to cover topics rarely seen in the mainstream media. (Via twitter user prisonculture.)
posted by eotvos at 5:30 PM PST - 1 comment

“A lot of 16-year-olds are working and getting taxed ,” said Ema Smith, 19, a freshman at Yale who, in high school, helped lead a successful campaign to lower the voting age for local elections in Greenbelt, Md. “People tend to focus on at 18 you can join the military, but there are a lot of things happening at 16.” (NYT) [more inside]
posted by Little Dawn at 4:06 PM PST - 73 comments

Tony Robbins is the world’s most famous self-help guru. This is the story he doesn’t want you to read. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:27 PM PST - 32 comments

Built during the boom times of American Steel, Martin Tower was seen as the crowning achievement and as a sign of corporate greed all in one. [more inside]
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 12:18 PM PST - 12 comments

Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences..., they couldn’t persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job. The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones by Zeynep Tufekci (previously). Caution: Spoilers for the current season of GoT.
posted by Cash4Lead at 12:01 PM PST - 48 comments

There is no "depression gene". The authors go on to demolish every other "depression gene" connection in the existing literature. They went after the lot. Nothing. No clear evidence for any given gene, in any polymorphic form, with any effect on depression, as either measured by itself or in combination with any other environmental effect. Paper (paywalled). [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 5:54 AM PST - 64 comments

Jon Batiste's 'The Game of Thrones' Song [SLYT]

"Now you, I understand, are a huge Game of Thrones fan, right?"
"No. Never seen a single episode."
"How did you write a song recapping the entire series?"
"Well, I've seen plenty of memes online, so, just put it together like that, you know."
"Oh. That's all you know about Game of Thrones?"
"Yep. But I think I nailed it. Jim?"
posted by kirkaracha at 10:15 PM PST - 18 comments

Start with the name: Series of Unsurprising Results in Economics (SURE). The journal publishes papers with findings that are, well, really boring — so boring that other journals rejected them just for being boring. Its first paper, published Tuesday, is about an education intervention that was found to have no effects at all on anything.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:01 PM PST - 21 comments

What is religion? There's not a convenient or easy answer. [more inside]
posted by aloiv2 at 8:37 PM PST - 21 comments

What lies beneath: Robert Macfarlane travels 'Underland.' "From prehistoric cave paintings to buried nuclear waste, underground spaces record how humans have lived. To explore Underland means voyaging into the deep past – and raises urgent questions about our planet’s future." This is a brilliant essay by Robert Macfarlane on the themes of his book Underland. [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 6:46 PM PST - 12 comments

Rhiannon Giddens and Francisco Turrisi's I'm On My Way, Ten Thousand Voices, and the title track from their new album there is no Other. A live performance of three tracks from the album and an interview from Paste Studio NYC. Giddens, Turrisi, producer Joe Henry, and engineer Ryan Freeland talk about the instruments featured on the album. Giddens and Turrisi in Performance and Conversation on May 1, 2019 (1 hour, 11 minutes). [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:05 PM PST - 8 comments

Butcher Scott Rea makes sausages. Pork & Wild Garlic Sausages. Black Pudding , (blood sausage, be warned). Venison & Stout Sausages. He has a number of from field to table videos, for instance going through the whole process of slaughtering and butchering a lamb. [more inside]
posted by Bee'sWing at 4:04 PM PST - 10 comments

Wildlife tourism isn’t new, but social media is setting the industry ablaze, turning encounters with exotic animals into photo-driven bucket-list toppers. Activities once publicized mostly in guidebooks now are shared instantly with multitudes of people by selfie-taking backpackers, tour-bus travelers, and social media “influencers” through a tap on their phone screens. […] Photographer Kirsten Luce and I set out to look behind the curtain of the thriving wildlife tourism industry, to see how animals at various attractions—including some that emphasize their humane care of animals—are treated once the selfie-taking crowds have gone. (Natasha Daly, National Geographic)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:21 PM PST - 21 comments

Minecraft Earth is Microsoft’s wild shot at the next Pokemon Go-style AR blockbuster [YouTube] “Microsoft today unveiled its previously teased follow-up to Minecraft, a sequel of sorts. It’s a free-to-play Augmented Reality game called Minecraft Earth, and it’s designed for modern Android and iOS phones. A closed beta is planned for this summer, likely to be limited geographically, with a gradual roll-out through the whole world. The game allows players to collect Minecraft blocks as they walk around their neighborhoods, to engage in augmented reality mini-games in public spaces, and to create their own virtual buildings, which can be shared and explored.” [via: Polygon] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:26 PM PST - 36 comments

Hello Dear. I am an artist based in Hertfordshire UK using mostly watercolour and can often been seen out and about painting on the streets and wherever takes my fancy. [NSFW language.]
posted by chavenet at 12:51 PM PST - 11 comments

The merry maniacs at Megabots Inc. surprise Queen of Shitty Robots Simone Giertz with a GIANT version of her chopping machine. Mayhem ensues.
posted by merriment at 11:30 AM PST - 14 comments

100 proofs the earth is a globe. David Morgan-Mar, author of the webcomic Darths and Droids and otherwise qualified person, is spending this year posting 100 short essays with different points of scientific evidence/proofs that the earth is round. [more inside]
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:09 AM PST - 83 comments

Doug Parsons of America Adapts interviews hosts of eight climate change podcasts: Warm Regards, Climactic, No Place Like Home, Climate Ready, Climate One, The Climate and Security Podcast, MIT’s Climate Conversations, and Reversing Climate Change. [more inside]
posted by carter at 5:08 AM PST - 1 comment

In the summer of 2018, BBC cameraman Andy Alcroft was waiting to film an interview at Exeter St David’s railway station, when he was approached by one of Amar’s friends. “You should do a report about him - Amar. The boy who came over from Iraq. Remember him? He’s got an amazing story,” he said. Andy took some contact details and we went to meet Amar in the Devon village where he still lives. We thought we might end up doing some kind of “catch-up” feature. “Whatever happened to the orphan Amar?” - that kind of thing. But when Amar revealed he had been receiving unexpected social media messages from a stranger, the story took an unexpected turn.
posted by satoshi at 2:01 AM PST - 25 comments

In a world of crazy coffee-making contraptions (Espresso Made in Italy) the "cafetière-locomotive" or coffee-making train stands apart (Atlas Obscura), pairing railroad fever (Archive.org) and increased interest in coffee (PBS). First patented in 1861 (Early Tech) by an Italian architect living in Paris, Jean Baptiste Toselli, this bit of "domestic theatre" was reserved only for the very wealthy, as they were never mass-produced.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:41 PM PST - 21 comments

The new glitchless, tool-assisted speedrun of the NES version of Taito's classic arcade hit Breakout clone Arkanoid is 10% faster than the previous record. It was done in an interesting way: the runner simulated the game on a frame-by-frame level in a C++ reimplementation, then used it to brute force a solution to each level, which required a year's worth of CPU effort (split across six cores) to accomplish. Here are full details, including video (12m) of the result played back in an emulator. For extra fun, he made an ASCII-art version of the run!
posted by JHarris at 8:13 PM PST - 27 comments

Virtual Angkor is "a groundbreaking collaboration between Virtual History Specialists, Archaeologists and Historians designed to bring the Cambodian metropolis of Angkor to life. Built for the classroom, it has been created to take students into a 3D world and to use this simulation to ask questions about Angkor’s place in larger networks of trade and diplomacy, its experience with climate variability and the structure of power and kingship that underpinned the city." [Via] [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 6:06 PM PST - 3 comments

It seems that Gmail reads receipts for things you purchase that end up in your inbox, storing them under a 'Purchases' page. It's hard to find where this stuff is stored, and even harder to get rid of it. [more inside]
posted by Quackles at 5:50 PM PST - 96 comments

Democracy is hungry work, so democracysausage.org helps Aussies find a polling place to suit their democratic and saturday barbie needs. It's federal election day in Australia.
posted by adept256 at 4:14 PM PST - 200 comments

Where Should a Child Die? Hospice Homes Help Families With the Unimaginable
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 4:04 PM PST - 11 comments

Need a place to rest your mouse while reading the agenda? Be sure to leave some space for a cursor park. [more inside]
posted by bbuda at 3:41 PM PST - 7 comments

r/confusing_perspective is the place for puzzling perspectives, confusing angles, and missing context.
Cat's face
Runner of the skies
Perfect timing
Pretty nails
Beach baby and Park Baby
Dilma Rousseff
Shadow
Luckily my son grew into his hand [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 2:37 PM PST - 31 comments

A philosopher ponders why advice so often fails to land. She further distinguishes between instruction, advice, and coaching in an illuminating manner. This essay jibes with my self-help journey and ultimate dissatisfaction with the genre. [more inside]
posted by bbrown at 1:23 PM PST - 37 comments

Talk to Transformer - "See how a modern neural network completes your text." (1,2,3; previously; via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:11 PM PST - 69 comments

Angry Birds and the end of privacy [Vox] “Though it doesn’t often come up and is confusing to think through, almost every app on your phone is full of third-party advertising intermediaries — at a minimum, ad software owned by Facebook or Twitter or Google, but often a couple dozen other companies you haven’t even heard of, as well. This includes game apps as innocuous if obnoxious-seeming as Angry Birds and its descendants, like Fruit Ninja (by the Australia-based Halfbrick Studios) and Candy Crush (by Malta-based developer King). These third parties collect information that allows them to keep intricate histories of your behavior, and use it to make money from you in ways you might not expect or even see. [...] The fact that it’s all so confusing is kind of the point, obviously. And as a result, mobile games have escaped the level of scrutiny we’ve applied to social media companies, despite being — as a category — nearly equally popular and far more likely to be used by children.” [h/t Johnny Wallflower] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:59 PM PST - 10 comments

Rising up from the flat, wooded west flood plain of the Mississippi River are four massive concrete and steel structures that would make a pharaoh envious: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ greatest work, the two billion-dollar Old River Control Structure (ORCS). The ORCS saw its second highest flood on record in March 2019, and flood levels have risen again this week to their fifth highest level on record. While the structure is built to handle the unusual stress this year's floods have subjected it to, there is reason for concern for its long-term survival, since failure of the Old RIver Control Structure would be a catastrophe with global impact. [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 12:39 PM PST - 15 comments

Carly Rae Jepsen, queen of [fill-in-the-blank], releases Dedicated today (streaming links) , her follow up album to cult hit E-MO-TION in 2015. Is it a sign o' the times, that pop(ular) music is now a sub-genre of music, directed towards the "highly specific constituency bridging the indie-rock club and the gay video bar"? [more inside]
posted by galleta monster at 12:02 PM PST - 22 comments

One thing that was kind of intriguing was that some of the hormones that are involved in food intake regulation were quite different between the two diets as compared to baseline
posted by hugbucket at 12:01 PM PST - 23 comments

Bill Oakley and his friend Chris Onstad figure out the best frozen foods to cook in your air fryer, and how to cook them.
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:44 AM PST - 16 comments

Bobcat perched atop electrical pole on Alligator Alley crawls down to safety [Fort Myers News-Press, May 9] "How did the bobcat get to the top of the power pole? It climbed there, of course, sometime Thursday along Interstate 75 in Collier County near mile marker 78."
posted by readinghippo at 11:27 AM PST - 17 comments

Defending the jungles, mountains, forests and rivers of Latin America has never been this dangerous. Six of the ten most hostile countries for leaders and communities defending the environment and their ancestral lands are located in Latin America, according to UN Special Rapporteur Michel Forst’s 2016 report to United Nations. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:21 AM PST - 1 comment

"...on Monday evening, at Mr. Colicchio’s restaurant Craft in Manhattan, Mr. Adjepong presented the full menu: “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Through Food,” a dinner that zigzags across the Atlantic Ocean, retracing the forced migration of enslaved Africans and illuminating the deep and lasting global culinary influences of the continent." A Chef Tells the Story of the Slave Trade Through Dinner
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:16 AM PST - 21 comments

The National have released their 8th studio album, I Am Easy To Find. (spotify) The album is accompanied by, and provides the soundtrack for, a 26 minute short film of the same name directed by Mike Mills and starring Alicia Vikander, which depicts the life of a woman. (CW: textual mentions of abuse) [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong at 7:32 AM PST - 15 comments

The Magic Of Estate Sales, Ann Friedman

I’m not anti-Kondo, but you can put me down as a firm skeptic. I believe that the physical things you collect as you move through your life—even those that don’t make your stomach flip with joy—add up to something more than their individual utility or aesthetic appeal or heirloom potential. They aren’t just things, they’re your things. And if you remove yourself from the picture, the stuff you surround yourself with tells a story about you. It is a physical autobiography you write by living. Which is why I love estate sales.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:30 AM PST - 68 comments

n his 2019 Contest entry video, "Erase Me," Christopherson muses about his complicated experience with privilege as a transgender man.
posted by PussKillian at 7:00 AM PST - 7 comments

I. M. Pei, who began his long career designing buildings for a New York real estate developer and ended it as one of the most revered architects in the world, died early Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 102. Best known for designing the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre in Paris, Mr. Pei was one of the few architects who were equally attractive to real estate developers, corporate chieftains and art museum boards (the third group, of course, often made up of members of the first two). And all of his work — from his commercial skyscrapers to his art museums — represented a careful balance of the cutting edge and the conservative.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 6:34 AM PST - 36 comments

On a small rock found in Jordan, Ahmad Al-Jallad, a linguistics professor in the Netherlands, discovered text that he thought could be the oldest known record of literary expression in Arabic.
posted by bile and syntax at 6:02 AM PST - 4 comments

With the words "some days are grumpier than others," the official Grumpy Cat twitter feed announced today that Grumpy Cat (real name Tardar Sauce), possibly the most famous cat on earth, passed away this week from complications of an infection. Despite the grumpy face, little Tardar Sauce was apparently the sweetest of cats, and paradoxically, the grumpiness brought joy to millions. She will be missed.
posted by litlnemo at 5:01 AM PST - 82 comments

An excerpt from The Dreamt Land, a new book by Mark Arax.... This was fertility supercharged by irrigation and the science of the Agricultural College at the University of California—the most extensive and intensive farming experiment in the world. No other landscape in history had been so bent by the designs of man. The Great Central Valley, 450 miles long and 60 miles wide, had resembled in its natural state a rolling savanna not unlike the Serengeti. Then a man named Porteous invented the Fresno Scraper, a five-foot-wide hunk of sheet iron that revolutionized the movement of dirt. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 1:38 AM PST - 6 comments

In Scotland, despite increased opportunities, fathers remain reluctant to take full advantage of work-provided parental leave and support, despite professing to want to be equal partners with mothers in child care, to the possible detriment of their workplaces (Harvard Business Review). Mandatory parental leave for fathers is good for business, as it would level the playing field for women at work and home (Forbes). And after men in Spain got paternity leave, they wanted fewer kids, while women started showing preferences for slightly larger families (Quartz).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:44 PM PST - 31 comments

Did Joseph Heller Base Catch-22's John Yossarian on Julius Fish? A grieving family finds a WWII journal that leads them to discover so much about Julius Fish, how he served his country, and inspired Joseph Heller. Heller was stationed with Lt. Fish on Corsica. [more inside]
posted by narancia at 2:36 PM PST - 9 comments

RIP Bob Hawke - the longest-serving Labor prime minister of Australia has died at the age of 89. [more inside]
posted by decent rooms and a bath at 1:15 PM PST - 38 comments

Rory Sutherland for Entrepreneur Magazine discusses psychological magic tricks in advertising
posted by bq at 1:02 PM PST - 68 comments

Super Mario Maker 2 [YouTube][Announcement Trailer] [Nintendo Direct] “Super Mario Maker 2 is looking like a substantial upgrade over the original build-your-Mario-game. Today during a Nintendo Direct video, Nintendo detailed a huge number of features coming to the Switch game, chief among them co-op play, so that you can build and design levels with another player on the same console. You’ll also be able to play through created levels online with up to four other people.” [via: The Verge] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:55 AM PST - 21 comments

The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived. 1250 words from Sevindj Nurkiyazova for Nautilus.
posted by cgc373 at 11:50 AM PST - 35 comments

Montreal borough mayor Sue Montgomery has been knitting a colour-coded scarf during city council meetings to show how often and for how long men speak compared to women. While men are speaking, she knits with red yarn; while women are speaking, she knits with green. Currently, the scarf is 75-80% red. There is relative parity on city council--31 women and 34 men--so it is not a case of lack of representation; instead, Montgomery attributes it to "an imbalance in the mental and emotional space those 34 men take up...I’ve said, ‘Just make your point and sit down.’ And they say, ‘Well, that’s democracy and we have to debate.’ What they don’t understand is that they don’t have to put on a show." [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:57 AM PST - 41 comments

We asked ambassadors where they eat when they’re homesick. We did not expect Taco Bell and Ikea. Secret Mongolian menus, Candy Saturdays, and a mother's love: the Washington Post is on the case.
posted by duffell at 10:41 AM PST - 28 comments

The high cost of housing – especially of rental homes – is an urgent public policy crisis and a golden political opportunity for progressive candidates and policymakers willing to show leadership. The Data for Progress Homes for All report lays the groundwork for a truly progressive housing policy capable of ending the crisis, as a guide to policymakers and voters alike. (PDF)
posted by The Whelk at 10:33 AM PST - 11 comments

In a longform piece, Deadspin and GQ writer (and Chopped champion) Drew Magary discusses the brain bleed that almost killed him, his road to recovery, the impact of his injury on his family, friends, and coworkers, and his dealing with the effects of it all several months later. (SLDeadspin)
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:41 AM PST - 22 comments

Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls. So the art of debating is one that rewards liars and bullies, is about beating the opponent rather than finding the truth, and is structurally biased in favour of conservative bromides rather than surprising new ideas. If that’s what debate is like, perhaps we shouldn’t aspire to be good at it.
posted by Panjandrum at 9:29 AM PST - 84 comments

The zero-waste movement is about cutting down on packaging, but is it creating more pressure on women? Look at #zerowaste and #zerowasteliving on Instagram and you’ll see mason jars filled with chocolate smoothies and rows of rose-gold straws. You’ll see perfectly organized refrigerators with piles of fresh produce and brown glass spray bottles with homemade lavender-steeped cleaning products. You’ll see perfect kitchens with white subway tiles and bamboo countertops, lined with rows of more mason jars filled with legumes...Zero waste helps us reexamine our relationship with stuff in a way that can seem progressive and anti-consumerist. But the way this movement is promoted and practiced seems to drag us right back into traditional gender roles. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:23 AM PST - 90 comments

Rust Creator Graydon Hoare Recounts the History of Compilers - "It starts with the 1940s-era ENIAC, where 'programming'[0,1] actually involved re-wiring until a team lead by Jean Bartik[2] began storing instructions in memory. 1949 saw the arrival of high-level pseudo codes with software interpreters, and soon Grace Hopper[3,4,5] was converting pseudo-code directly into machine language for the UNIVAC with her A-0 System, which was the first compiler." (slides/carousel ;) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:01 AM PST - 7 comments

Miron Zownir captures the provocative energy and aggressive hedonism of the city in the 80s. Hailed by Terry Southern as the "Poet of Radical Photography," Miron Zownir took up photography in the late 1970s when he arrived in West Berlin. Moved by the spirit of punk, Zownir embraced the utopian vision of anarchy and nihilistic self-destruction that flourished openly on the streets and in the sex clubs, drug dens, and nightlife of West Berlin and London.
posted by bongo_x at 11:45 PM PST - 9 comments

"The goal of the MappingBack Network is to provide mapping capacity and support to members of Indigenous communities fighting extractive industries. Mapping has long been used as a tool for colonial dispossession; MappingBack seeks to reverse this by using mapping as a tool to fight back." Using maps as a weapon to resist extractive industries on Indigenous territories [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:20 PM PST - 9 comments

How one molecule from the cannabis plant came to be seen as a therapeutic cure-all. (SLNYT) "With more than 65 cellular targets, CBD may provide a kind of full-body massage at the molecular level. This biochemical promiscuity is one reason CBD seems so medically promising, according to Yasmin Hurd, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai, in New York. Modern neuroscience often tries to target one pathway or receptor, Hurd told me; that approach is easier to study scientifically, but it may not address what are often network-wide problems. “The brain is about a symphony,” she says. And CBD, she suspects, can “bring the entire symphony into harmony.”"
posted by Little Dawn at 9:01 PM PST - 80 comments

Cervical cancer is the most common cancer in Rwandan women (Modern Ghana), and there were considerable cultural barriers to the vaccination programme – HPV is a sexually transmitted infection and talking about sex is taboo in Rwanda. Added to this, rumours that the vaccine could cause infertility made some parents reluctant to allow their daughters to be vaccinated. Rwanda’s economy and history also made it seem an improbable candidate for achieving high HPV vaccination coverage (WHO). High-income countries had only achieved moderate coverage of the HPV vaccine (The Lancet). How Rwanda could be the first country to wipe out cervical cancer (Mosaic Science) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:34 PM PST - 8 comments

Cat Salesman (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 7:17 PM PST - 22 comments

The Dramatic Story of How Denver Decriminalized Magic Mushrooms. "With a little help from Joe Rogan and the youth vote, the almost unthinkable happened—and set the stage for reform nationwide." On May 7th Denver voters voted to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms, but right now many people seem to be confused about what that actually means. Meanwhile, activists in California are also hoping to decriminalize shrooms in 2020. [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 6:55 PM PST - 43 comments

Universal Game Translator: This Tool Can Translate Japanese RPGs as You Play [Code Dojo] “I’m a retro gaming nut. I love consuming books, blogs, and podcasts about gaming history. The cherry on top is being able to experience the identical game, bit for bit, on original hardware. It’s like time traveling to the 80s. Living in Japan means it’s quite hard to get my hands on certain things (good luck finding a local Speccy or Apple IIe for sale) but easy and cheap to score retro Japanese games. [...] There is one obvious problem, however. It’s all in Japanese. Despite living here over fifteen years, my Japanese reading skills are not great. (don’t judge me!) I messed around with using Google Translate on my phone to help out, but that’s annoying and slow to try to use for games. So I wrote something to do the job called UGT (Universal Game Translator).” [Download available here (64-bit).zip] [via: Vice Gaming]
posted by Fizz at 11:35 AM PST - 11 comments

The Britney Spears conservatorship saga has gone through many twists and turns since it started in 2008. Could it be coming to an end soon? (Spears and conservatorship previously)
posted by Etrigan at 11:15 AM PST - 18 comments

The Avalanches - 'Frontier Psychiatrist'
wiki
Lyrics [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 11:14 AM PST - 48 comments

One of the oldest WWII veterans and Navajo Code Talker, Fleming Begaye Sr. passed away on May 10th [more inside]
posted by brookeb at 10:29 AM PST - 22 comments

Is it a Farm if it Doesn’t Sell Food? Civil Eats on "The latest Census of Agriculture, released yesterday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) [...] The new census shows that nearly 604,000 farms reported sales below $1,000, a slight increase from 2012. It's not known how many of those farms had zero sales, since that data isn't published by the USDA".
posted by readinghippo at 10:23 AM PST - 34 comments

Ruth Cuthland is an artist of Plains Cree, Scottish, and Irish ancestry. In her work, Trading Series, she uses beads to illustrate twelve diseases Europeans brought to North America, and porcupine quills to illustrate the disease that traveled back to Europe. In Don't Breathe, Don't Drink she beaded magnified bacterium and parasites found in the water of the 94 First Nations communities with boil water advisories
posted by ChuraChura at 10:20 AM PST - 5 comments

From humble beginnings as a one-off parody of a goofy Sean Connery line, You're The Man Now Dog (YTMND) grew to become a landmark of mid-00s web culture, with its simple premise of user-generated GIF/image collages paired with text and a looping sound file spawning countless enduring memes and viral fads from the sublime and the mesmerizing to the inane and the ridiculous. While the community declined in the wake of YouTube, Vine, /r/GifSound, and other social media, and creator Max Goldberg grew increasingly ambivalent about its future in the face of medical and moderation problems, the site itself survived as a time capsule of high weirdness from the glory days of web 2.0. But now, one year after shutting down new sign-ups, YTMND has at long last gone offline for good. Punch the "." key, for god's sake, then look inside for an archive of some of the best YTMNDs of all time. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 10:10 AM PST - 53 comments

Americans eat a narrower variety of foods for breakfast than anyone else. It doesn’t have to be this way. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:10 AM PST - 106 comments

Why books don’t work talks about how some media (books and lectures) do not, by default, take advantage of what is known in cognitive science, and wonders what media could be designed that would.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:00 AM PST - 45 comments

Anatomy of the Wife Guy Not every guy with a wife is a wife guy, and not all wife guys have wives.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:39 AM PST - 76 comments

Sometimes, you just need the right person for the job. After only a few weeks, Research Associate Dr. Gerard Cheshire, using a combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity, identified the language and writing system as the only known example of proto-Romance. [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:04 AM PST - 81 comments

"Nothing worse than sleeping at a friend's house and their family has some weird ass thing like calling spaghetti "Billy Dinner" or some shit" quoth HelloCullen on twitter. Twitter delivered many, many, many receipts of weird-ass family recipes and strange names for normal recipes and other alarming family habits.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:55 AM PST - 119 comments

In Lithuania, to get lost while picking mushrooms is a common enough occurrence to have its own word: nugrybauti. [...] You achieve a state of nugrybauti when the thrill of having spotted choice edibles slides into uneasiness, brought on by the feeling that the forest has changed around you. Your sense of direction scampers off, and you trudge around aimlessly over moss, under branches, and around the skirts of spruces, lost—until, much later, you are back on a familiar path, though not where you thought you’d be. [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 8:41 AM PST - 3 comments

May 14th, 2018, was the worst day of my life, when we lost Becky forever. May 13th, 2019, this little baby came two weeks early to remind me what unconditional love is, and to bring the presence of an aunt who I would love to be here, right now. - Kate Beaton (many previouslies, specifically her sister Becky)
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:15 AM PST - 5 comments

Design your own pixel font with Bitfontmaker2 [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 8:03 AM PST - 10 comments

Last Saturday, Harvard announced that it would not be renewing the faculty dean appointment of Harvard Law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. and his wife, lecturer Stephanie Robinson. The decision had been in part due to toxic behavior going back years, but had ultimately been precipitated by student response to Sullivan choosing to join the defense team of sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:24 AM PST - 41 comments

Kolyma - Birthplace of Our Fear (Russian, English subtitles). In late April, Russian Internet superstar Yuri Dud, mainly known for his interviews with celebrities and other public figures, shocked both his 5 million subscribers and the general public by publishing a two-hour documentary about the Kolyma region in Russia’s far northeast that is almost synonymous with Stalin-era repressions, visiting the sites of some of the deadliest prison camps in the area and interviewing historians and local activists, as well as descendants of Gulag inmates. [more inside]
posted by daniel_charms at 2:38 AM PST - 10 comments

NASA's initiative to put a woman on the Moon is named Artemis, after Apollo's twin sister [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 12:34 AM PST - 39 comments

Gender Reveal is a lovely podcast if you've ever wondered about what the hell gender is. Molly Woodstock interviews other queer/trans/nonbinary people about stuff.
posted by Gymnopedist at 12:14 AM PST - 4 comments

'NYPD Blue' Star Bill Brochtrup on How Steven Bochco Pioneered Gay Characters on TV "Steven came up with this idea for a character who was openly and unapologetically gay. That was way ahead of its time," Brochtrup says of the prolific showrunner, who died Sunday at age 74. [Hollywood Reporter, April 2018, in remembrance of Bochco after his death]
posted by hippybear at 9:07 PM PST - 12 comments

Scientists are mapping an underwater region (The Guardian) that connected Britain to Scandinavia and continental Europe (National Geographic), about the size of the Netherlands. Called Doggerland*, the submerged "former heart of Europe" is touted as a northern Atlantis (CBS News), though little is known of the human habitation of the region, even though the sunken area was identified in the early 20th century. Interest intensified in 1931 when a fishing trawler operating east of the Wash dragged up a barbed antler point (Norfolk Heritage). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:59 PM PST - 20 comments

Stanton Friedman (1939-2019) One of the fathers of modern UFOlogy, Friedman was the first civilian investigator of the Roswell Crash, wrote the book on Betty and Barney Hill, fought Philip Klass on national TV, and likely owned many suspenders. He was a tireless speaker on the subject of Flying Saucers- watch this documentary made about him in 2012 to see him in action.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:33 PM PST - 12 comments

The Kentucky Derby: An Oral History
posted by chappell, ambrose at 5:44 PM PST - 10 comments

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Virtual Archaeology Museum - "In the course of oil and gas exploration, BOEM has discovered many amazing shipwrecks. Each shipwreck tells a story of our shared history and provides a mystery to uncover. BOEM would like to share these mysteries with you by providing access to new 3D modeling never before possible using video publicly available from NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research."
posted by thatwhichfalls at 5:09 PM PST - 2 comments

"I got tired of waiting for Weezer to release another good album so I made one myself." That'd be Zerwee, a 4-song EP by not-actually-Weezer musical person Billy Cobb.
posted by cortex at 4:09 PM PST - 24 comments

Art Speculators Bid to Lose [WSJ]- "David Geffen, Peter Brant and other collectors pledge to bid on art they want but new third-party backers[Economist] aim to reap fees by getting outbid; ‘they don’t know what they’re doing’"
Are Auction Guarantees the New Private Sales? Yes, for Art Sellers Who Don’t Want to Get Ripped Off // Why Guarantees Are Actually Good for the Art Market [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:58 PM PST - 14 comments

This Hyperallergic article by Jasmine Weber has still photos of the exhibit by Michael Bradley; visit the Puaki website for the full artist's statement and some amazing and moving videos.
posted by bq at 1:25 PM PST - 5 comments

The Library of Congress has released a set of free to use cat images selected by LOC staff experts.
posted by vespabelle at 1:07 PM PST - 20 comments

Actor and comedian Tim Conway, best known for his work on "The Carol Burnett Show," died on Tuesday morning in Los Angeles, according to his publicist. Conway was 85. [more inside]
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 12:57 PM PST - 85 comments

... what is the taco capital of the US? What is the exact longitude where Chinese food eclipses tacos? What about regional preferences, such as the South‘s affinity for BBQ? We reached out to Google for answers, and they provided an anonymized dataset based on actual restaurant visits. A 2018 exploration from The Pudding, which includes a great interactive chart at the end that allows one to choose from a variety of foods (such as sandwiches vs. Japanese food) and view their relative geographic popularity across the US.
posted by Bella Donna at 12:13 PM PST - 27 comments

Master Carver Barn the Spoon plies his trade, silently carving beautiful spoons from start to finish:
posted by Chrischris at 12:03 PM PST - 12 comments

The Facebook-owned WhatApp messaging app was exploited to spy on a human rights lawyer (NY Times). Coverage in Wired and TechCrunch. [more inside]
posted by exogenous at 11:28 AM PST - 21 comments

“The Tiger King: that’s how [Joe] has marketed himself and lived his life...But here’s the thing with kings—they start to believe they’re above the law.” He called himself the Tiger King and plastered his face on highway billboards in Texas and Oklahoma. He bred big cats, bears, baboons, and more. He lived, with a parade of partners, on the grounds of his private zoo. He threatened a rival with murder—repeatedly, on YouTube—and tried to hire a hit man to do the deed.
posted by xingcat at 11:10 AM PST - 10 comments

Pat and I are sailors. We are adventurers. We are also parents...Spending the summer on a boat was our attempt to knit the disparate parts of our lives together.
posted by mosst at 10:58 AM PST - 5 comments

The New York Times Style section has published a multi-article package on Generation X -- its style talismans and its impact on the wider world. [more inside]
posted by sobell at 10:54 AM PST - 140 comments

Melbourne zoo hatches plan to save southern corroboree frog Containers holding more than 1,600 of endangered species’ eggs placed in remote areas of Mt Kosciuszko national park [The Guardian]
posted by readinghippo at 10:19 AM PST - 1 comment

Garfield, Only He's A Nightmarish Monster Starring In A Game Boy Game [YouTube] “Last year, just in time for Halloween, Lumpy made some short animations based on artist Will Burke’s nightmarish Garfield sketches. Fast forward to May 2019 and he’s just finished work on a complete 13-minute video, presented in the style of the grossest Game Boy game ever made.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 10:01 AM PST - 27 comments

“For most of his twenty-four years as mayor, Hoan lacked a sympathetic majority on the city council. But he won over many colleagues by showing it was possible to both expand public services and balance the city’s budget. In 1932, however, voters installed a leftist majority on the council, and Hoan was emboldened. At a time when many cities resorted to violence to intimidate striking employees, Hoan pushed for a law that allowed the mayor to close any factory if the employer refused to negotiate with the workers. He asked Milwaukee’s voters to support municipal ownership of the city’s electric power system and streetcars. They rejected the idea in a referendum, but other cities around the country embraced it.” What Milwaukee Can Teach the Democrats about Socialism
posted by The Whelk at 9:55 AM PST - 2 comments

Going Critical is Kevin Simler's interactive essay / exploration about the flow of diseases, ideas, and other transmissible stuff.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 8:19 AM PST - 3 comments

Short but sweet, by Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman and Mike Shur [slGuardian]
posted by ellieBOA at 7:56 AM PST - 47 comments

"Taking as our premise that there might be a fascinating food-chain story behind each and every ingredient that goes into all the stuff we eat, we set out to track our daily grub as far back as we could... The goal of this exercise wasn’t to tally food miles or weigh the pros and cons of agribusiness (though obviously those subjects demand constant and exhaustive scrutiny) but simply to trace the origins of things we modern eaters have largely learned to take for granted — and to acknowledge the seed breeders, fish processors, tomato canners, lime importers, and truck drivers who make it happen." Where an Entire Day’s Worth of Food Came From, by Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld, Grub Street).
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:25 AM PST - 3 comments

In a tweet this morning, Adult Swim dropped a teaser trailer for Samurai Jack creator Genndy Tartakovsky’s newest animated series, Primal. (SLTwitter) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:05 AM PST - 21 comments

The Navy’s probe into sky penis
posted by latkes at 10:46 PM PST - 87 comments

Doris Day, the freckle-faced movie actress whose irrepressible personality and golden voice made her America’s top box-office star in the early 1960s, died on Monday at her home in Carmel Valley, Calif. She was 97. “My public image is unshakably that of America’s wholesome virgin, the girl next door, carefree and brimming with happiness," she said. “An image, I can assure you, more make-believe than any film part I ever played.” NYT obit. Doris Day helped America look at AIDS with empathy and love for Rock Hudson. A life in photos. Doris Day: A Hollywood Legend Reflects On Life
posted by gryphonlover at 10:03 PM PST - 56 comments

In today's season 22 premier on PBS, Arthur featured a very special wedding, between Mr. Ratburn and his new husband, aardvark chocolatier Patrick (with special guest star Jane Lynch as Mr. Ratburn's sister). You can watch the full episode here!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:09 PM PST - 17 comments

A comprehensive to Yellow Stripey Things (via reddit) gave Kottke pause. "I don’t know if this [...] is entirely truthful or not — a bumblebee is “actually a flying panda” and a yellow jacket “is just an asshole” — but it is pretty entertaining.Has anyone fact-checked this thing? Ok fine, I’ll do it!"
posted by filthy light thief at 7:42 PM PST - 48 comments

The Philadelphia 76'ers were eliminated from the NBA playoffs recently, but no matter what your fandom, or none, something great came of it. This photo, one should take one's time with it.
posted by wibari at 2:56 PM PST - 39 comments

Australia’s Reserve Bank has confirmed that 46 million $50 notes that entered circulation in October 2018 were printed with a typo that misspells "responsibility" in one of its microprint security features: an except from a speech by MP Edith Cowan, who was Australia's first female member of parliament. The $50 note features Cowan on one side and David Unaipon (Ngunaitponi), an inventor and Australia's first published Aboriginal author, on the other. This is the full text of Cowan's speech to the Australian Parliament (pdf) that's quoted in the microprint. The microprint on the flip side contains an excerpt from Unaipon's Legendary Tales Of The Australian Aborigines.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:44 PM PST - 16 comments

The Trouble With Fathering 114 Kids A suitor on The Bachelorette says he is a sperm donor with 114 kids—is that too many?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 1:22 PM PST - 40 comments

Merriam Webster speaks to eleven authors who published books with single-word titles. Sadly, Stephen King (Misery) really half-asses it.
posted by Etrigan at 11:54 AM PST - 22 comments

Created by Meg Bolger, the Social Justice Toolbox has lesson plans/activity guides for educators and facilitators who want to introduce issues of diversity and inclusion in their classes and workshops. Activities range from low to high trust requirements and topics cover a range of social justice issues including race and racism; what it means (and how to be) an ally; privilege; intersectionality; respectful pronoun use.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 11:14 AM PST - 6 comments

'What if no one can agree about what any type of property is worth? That way lies serious fiscal havoc. For local government to successfully operate police departments, school districts, and other public services, “the tax depends on an agreement about what the basis for market value is,” said Joan Youngman, a senior fellow and chair of the Department of Valuation and Taxation at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, told me. “A new theory has come along that challenges the usual practice, and it needs to be answered.” '
posted by clew at 11:08 AM PST - 49 comments

Obayd Fox is a Welsh kid who lives in Saudi Arabia and practices Islam. He vlogs his adventures with a straightforward enthusiasm: a road trip to Riyadh, performing the Hajj, fasting for Ramadan. Because some of his Saudi viewers believe music to be forbidden he avoids it in his videos, adding to the pleasantly frenetic feel of his editing.
posted by serathen at 10:45 AM PST - 3 comments

Play the original 'Minecraft' in your browser, for free [Minecraft] [YouTube][10 Years of Minecraft]“Minecraft is celebrating its 10th birthday by making its Classic version easily playable on web browsers. You don't need to download any files to make it work, and you don't have to pay a cent for access. Since Classic was only the second phase in the game's development cycle, its features are pretty limited. You'll only have 32 blocks to work with, most of which are dyed wool, and it's strictly creative mode only. But who needs zombies, skeletons and other mobs when you have the version's decade-old bugs to contend with, anyway?” [Click Here to Launch in Your Browser] [via: Engadget] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:50 AM PST - 21 comments

How half a ton of cocaine transformed the life of an island. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:03 AM PST - 14 comments

The Take: The Aperol Spritz Is Not a Good Drink (Rebekah Peppler, NYT) "Served in branded, jumbo wine glasses, the sugary apéritif is paired with low-quality prosecco, soda water and an outsize orange slice, resulting in something that drinks like a Capri Sun after soccer practice on a hot day. Not in a good way." There was, as you might expect, a bit of backlash. [more inside]
posted by fedward at 7:43 AM PST - 116 comments

Jacob Wainwright’s diary is only handwritten witness account of David Livingstone’s death
posted by hugbucket at 6:54 AM PST - 1 comment

Takeesha was standing alone by a trickling fire hydrant, washing her face. She was working, wearing thigh-high faux-leather red boots and leopard-print tights, waving at every car or truck that passed by. She yelled to me, “Hey, take my picture!” [...] I ended by asking her the question I asked everyone I photographed: How do you want to be described? She replied without a pause, “As who I am. A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.” [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 4:01 AM PST - 16 comments

Chris McNair, father of 16th Street Baptist Church bombing victim, dies at 93. Denise McNair would today be 67. WaPo | alternate source, no pictures
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:01 AM PST - 4 comments

This interview with Anne Dudley, from Art Of Noise, is about her 1991 album with Jaz Coleman (Killing Joke), and a bunch of musicians in Cairo -- Songs From The Victorious City. Middle-eastern influenced instrumental music shaped by AON sensibilities but played live. It's brilliant! Side A: The Awakening, Endless Festival, Minarets And Memories [video], Force And Fire, Habebe [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:32 PM PST - 14 comments

Yamaha's Disklavier recording and reproducing pianos (Wikipedia) were introduced to the U.S. 1987, and more recently added internet connectivity (YouTube), which allowed for Yamaha to offer "piano radio" to play on connected pianos. Pianist and coder Dan Tepfer extended this capacity to make an imaginary friend with AI, to respond to his playing (NPR interview; full visual album on YT), and Icelandic modern classical composer Ólafur Arnalds, with the help of a code-savvy friend (NPR), developed two ghostly pianos to accompany him (NPR Tiny Desk Concert).
posted by filthy light thief at 11:09 AM PST - 10 comments

Actress Peggy Lipton, star of ‘The Mod Squad’ and ‘Twin Peaks,’ dies at 72 [more inside]
posted by Bee'sWing at 9:29 AM PST - 41 comments

“Wages for Housework was misunderstood as saying, Give us money so we can stay home, doing the same domestic work. We actually saw wages for housework as a strategy of refusal, as a strategy giving us more options, more power to decide how to organize our lives. We were accused of “institutionalizing women in the home.” But many women we met would tell us that they were already institutionalized in the home because, without any money of their own, they could not go anywhere or they could not leave their husbands even if they wanted to.” An interview with feminist scholar, author, and activist Silvia Federici Every Woman Is A Working Woman.
posted by The Whelk at 9:25 AM PST - 21 comments

"In the early days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union needed a foolproof way to encrypt the messages it sent to its allies....Enter the Fialka" (Anna Borshchevskaya, Foreign Policy). It was an electromechanical wheel-based cipher machine, with country-specific variants, and was used from 1956 to the early 1990s. Want to see this state secret in person? Visit a Fialka at the KGB Espionage Museum in New York.
posted by MonkeyToes at 9:08 AM PST - 5 comments

Historians have largely discarded the lie that the “frontier” was an empty Eden waiting for American expansion—but not David McCullough. When the title of popular-history stalwart David McCullough’s latest book—The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West—was first announced, history Twitter heaved a collective sigh. American historians who take a critical approach to the past have been struggling to strip the glamour from the myth of the “frontier” for decades now....Unfortunately, the book is exactly as advertised. When it comes to representing “pioneers” as isolated and hardworking idealists fighting off “threats” from residents of the land they are taking, this book...is a true throwback. Its success (it is No. 10 on Amazon’s best-seller list for books, as of Friday) shows how big the gap between critical history and the “popular history” that makes it to best-seller lists, Costco, and Target remains. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:26 AM PST - 47 comments

Was the father of English literature...its mother? The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Winkler makes the case for Emilia Bassano, the English daughter of Venetian immigrants, possibly Jewish; a poet; mistress to Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon; and music tutor and educator.
posted by sallybrown at 8:02 AM PST - 71 comments

Comic Alyssa Limperis can be the Long Island/New England mom you never had, or perhaps did.

Mom went to the store
Mom on vacation
Mom visits my apartment
Mom helped me move
Mom on Christmas

(Her own mom films the videos.) [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 7:37 AM PST - 13 comments

"Someday I'll Be Dead and then How Will You feel About It?" / "I Never Asked to Be Born" - Mother-Daughter engraved gold bracelets for Mother's Day, by Leigh Hopkins and Marissa Korbel from McSweeney's
posted by Mchelly at 6:39 AM PST - 5 comments

Hi! I'm 23 and looking to date. Something fun about me is, I like "The Office."
posted by ChuraChura at 4:53 AM PST - 80 comments

Years after she founded Mother’s Day, Anna Jarvis was dining at the Tea Room at Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia. She saw they were offering a "Mother’s Day Salad." She ordered the salad and when it was served, she stood up, dumped it on the floor, left the money to pay for it, and walked out in a huff. Jarvis had lost control of the holiday she helped create, and she was crushed by her belief that commercialism was destroying Mother’s Day. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:06 PM PST - 27 comments

After the success of Phil Collins' songs in 1984 with Against All Odds and in 1985 with White Nights, plus his 1986 Miami Vice appearance as Phil The Shill [DailyMotion link, 50m, presented in mirror vision], the next logical step was the 1988 film Buster. Featuring Collins as the star of the movie and also writing retro-style songs (for both himself and The Four Tops) plus a selection of oldies, and also featuring a score by Anne Dudley of Art Of Noise fame. The song Two Hearts won Collins multiple awards. The movie didn't. Side A: Two Hearts [not the music video, music video] [Phil Collins], Gardening By The Book (Incidental Music), Just One Look [The Hollies], ...And I Love Her (Incidental Music), Big Noise [Phil Collins], The Robbery [Anne Dudley], I Got You Babe [Sonny + Cher] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:29 PM PST - 24 comments

Why are people modding Thomas the Tank Engine into video games? [The Face] “One of the video game modding community’s odder recent crazes is replacing characters in game worlds with Thomas the Tank Engine – the ”Really Useful” children's TV character now owned by toy company Mattel. The first of these highly unofficial mods arrived for Bethesda’s fantasy epic The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in 2013, morphing its roaming dragons into airborne, fire-breathing locomotives. Other victims of the trend include Rockstar’s top-selling Grand Theft Auto V, FromSoftware’s gloomy ninja adventure Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Capcom’s flashy remake of zombie horror classic Resident Evil 2.”
posted by Fizz at 5:37 PM PST - 24 comments

Florida Man Triumphs Over Those Who Would Silence His Truth [The Cut] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:43 PM PST - 51 comments

Princess Wolf and her Life of Darkness contains plant monsters, strange statues, and an excellent technique for dealing with unwanted suitors. “For the past few years, my daughter Bee has been telling me tales about a wild character named Princess Wolf…I decided to collaborate with her to get this epic saga turned into a comic. Every few days—for three-and-a-half months—I’d sit her down, bribe her with a pastry, take frantic notes while she told me chunks of the story, and then draw a couple panels after she’d gone to bed.” By Kristen Haas Curtis, an American cartoonist living in Switzerland, and her daughter Bee. [more inside]
posted by jocelmeow at 1:34 PM PST - 8 comments

There are unlimited problems with the “Let People Enjoy Things” (henceforth abbreviated to LPET) approach to art and culture, first and foremost among them the fact that franchises in question (GoT and Marvel Comics) are multi-billion-dollar corporate entities engineered to entertain in the same way Doritos are made so that you can’t eat just one. These are some of the most profitable media empires in history, and they will plainly not be harmed by a Twitter user posting about why they personally don’t like them.

Kate Wagner (of McMansion Hell fame) fires a salvo in the ongoing Twitter argument: Let people enjoy things, Y/N? [more inside]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 11:22 AM PST - 88 comments

In February 2013, the Prince George Citizen (local paper of Prince George, British Columbia) was running a special offer on classified ads: pay a one-time fee, and your "for sale" ad would run indefinitely until your wares sold. Prince George resident Larry Johnson decided to sell off a hand-carved wooden throne he'd purchased at an antique fair years earlier. With an initial asking price of "$5000 firm" (later reduced to $1000), the ad stayed in the paper for more than six years, beloved by some of the paper's readers and derided by others. Now, the throne has finally been sold to Prince George's BX Pub. Naturally, the Prince George Citizen has the story. The CBC has more, including an audio interview with former Steward of the Throne Larry Johnson.
posted by duffell at 10:46 AM PST - 12 comments

You probably think you would never join the military. Think again. Every year thousands of young Americans surprise family and friends, signing long, legally-binding contracts with an organization they know very little about. Many of them join to pay for college. But what happens when pride and optimism turn into regret and refusal to play a role in war? The Breaking Cadence podcast includes stories of conscientious objectors, a veteran who doesn't like to hear "thank you for your service," a look inside the work of the G.I. Rights Hotline, experiences from a lawyer who represented two conscientious objectors in the Iraq War, and the ethics of war and peace. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:32 AM PST - 9 comments

"You have four minutes to dial this phone number. On that phone."
posted by nevercalm at 7:18 AM PST - 164 comments

Why does Game Of Thrones feel different in this last season? Daniel Silvermint on Twitter explains what probably happened: George R. R. Martin's plan-it-as-you-go approach, where he cultivated a garden of plot seeds with only a vague idea of where each would lead, ran up against the showrunners' need to end everything in 13 episodes.
posted by JHarris at 1:54 AM PST - 125 comments

The 1985 film White Nights had the same director as Against All Odds. Not surprisingly it also had a stellar soundtrack album, including two songs nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song. Side A: Separate Lives (Love Theme From White Nights) [not the music video, music video] [Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin], Prove Me Wrong [David Pack], Far Post [Robert Plant], People On A String [Roberta Flack], This Is Your Day [Sandy Stewart and Nile Rodgers] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:51 PM PST - 18 comments

Weezer's self-titled debut (aka The Blue Album) is 25 years old.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:30 PM PST - 23 comments

Charly Bliss's sophomore album Young Enough came out today. Stereogum says it's ' paradoxically one of the heaviest and lightest albums of the year, wrapping hard truths and vivid pain in layers of bubblegum'. MTV calls it "resilient pop, and achingly nostalgic rock". Paste called their previous albumm Guppy a perfect… 10-track blast of sweetly serrated pop-rock supercharged with punky energy and plentiful hooks. Eva Hendricks, the lead singer and songwriter, writes love songs about her therapist. Their guitarist is Dash from The Incredibles. They might be just what you need right now.
posted by signal at 6:42 PM PST - 14 comments

In Thailand, there's a corgi cafe. That is all.
posted by msbubbaclees at 2:45 PM PST - 23 comments

Northern Spotted Owl Webcam "There are estimated to be fewer than 10 Northern Spotted Owls left in the wild in Canada, but now you have the opportunity to view a pair and a recently hatched chick [...] hatched on April 26, 2019 after 32 days of artificial incubation and 87 hours of hatching, and placed into the nest of its foster parents Skalula and Oregon on May 7." [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 2:43 PM PST - 3 comments

On Stoicism and Sustainability: How can stoicism be used to solve/tackle the problems of climate change? Kai Whiting (@KaiWhiting), a researcher and lecturer in sustainability and Stoicism based at the University of Lisbon, writes on resource use and the practical application of Stoic philosophy, emphasizing its oft-neglected Cosmopolitanism: "given that the ancient Stoics directly connected the good life with living in accordance with the four virtues... Stoicism can certainly do more than support a quest for self-development. In my opinion, it can guide us into a green transition... I believe that Stoicism offers a practical framework that helps you make decisions which bring you closer to the good (and greener) life instead of moving you further from it." [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 2:00 PM PST - 17 comments

On Sunday, The Handel And Haydn Society orchestra was performing at the Boston Symphony Hall. Just after the final rest of Mozart’s “Masonic Funeral Music,” an unseen kid yelled out “wow!” in apparently unvarnished appreciation of what he’d just heard. Everyone laughed and applauded the moment. This is nice on its own merits. A child, caught up in the joy of hearing beautiful music, didn’t sit silently like everyone else in attendance, but broke symphony tradition, which allowed the rest of the audience to follow suit. It gets better, though. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:48 PM PST - 52 comments

When Elizabeth Siegel’s toddler was ready to be potty-trained last year, she didn’t reach for a how-to book, check out advice on mommy blogs or ask her own mother for help. The partner at a visual marketing company hired a toilet-training pro to do her crap work. “I love working with an expert, and I didn’t have the time. My husband and I both work,” she said. “I’m an expert in basically what I’m paid to do, which is my profession. Why wouldn’t I go to someone who understands?” The training took place over eight hours on two consecutive days in Siegel’s Manhattan home in her now-3.5-year-old daughter’s ensuite black marble bathroom. Siegel was there for day one and took notes on a pad, while the nanny supervised the second day. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 1:30 PM PST - 96 comments

Final Fantasy VII Remake [YouTube][TeaserTrailer] “After a long period of development hell, the Final Fantasy VII remake is finally back in the real world, with Square Enix dropping a short teaser trailer today and promising more to come in June. Previously, Square had said that the Final Fantasy VII remake would be episodic, and based on this trailer—which is entirely made up of scenes from the game’s first act, in Midgar—that may still be the case.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 11:43 AM PST - 48 comments

(SLYT) Popular YouTuber CGP Grey (lots of previouslies) found himself in San Francisco with a Tesla and 10 days to go to Moab, Utah and then to Los Angeles. These 51 minutes are the way-more-interesting-than-i-thought-they-could-be highlights.
posted by fjom at 11:36 AM PST - 21 comments

Google has announced that Nest will no longer be an independent division, and that the devices will become "Google Nest" products, requiring a Google account and subject to Google's privacy and data sharing policies. Ars Technica: The Nest ecosystem is dead. Nest accounts are dead. Nest's privacy firewall is dead. Almost all third-party integrations ("Works with Nest") will stop working on August 31. [more inside]
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:30 AM PST - 58 comments

"Old Town Road" is a self-produced song from 19-year-old artist, Lil Nas X. It is the #1 song in America. The story of the song's ascension from a random track on Soundcloud to Billboard 100's #1 hit highlight a tightening relationship between artistic creation and mindful promotion. [more inside]
posted by lubujackson at 11:29 AM PST - 23 comments

Was Hidetaka Miyazaki's brutal classic Bloodborne inspired by Ween's 1997 alt-rock record The Mollusk? Yes, clearly, and here's the proof.
posted by rorgy at 11:24 AM PST - 3 comments

“As to how a changing business model has served to disempower and erase the American working class, Martin posits that a shift in the 1960s and 1970s towards an advertising model aimed at an upscale middle-class readership is the primary culprit. With the rise of television, the newspaper industry grew ever more consolidated and concerned with addressing and reflecting the interests and lifestyles of a predominantly middle-class audience. ” The Real Working Class Is Invisible In The Media (Jacobin) “There is a solution, however, and it’s something that the devils in the corner office would never have dreamed of allowing to happen (they got mad enough when we started unionizing everything). In my estimation, the only true way forward for digital media is to blow it all up, and start again. It’s time for the fourth estate to seize the means of production.” (Commune)
posted by The Whelk at 11:08 AM PST - 8 comments

What It's Like To Work On Ultra-Violent Games Like Mortal Kombat 11 “You’d walk around the office and one guy would be watching hangings on YouTube, another guy would be looking at pictures of murder victims, someone else would be watching a video of a cow being slaughtered,” they said. “The scary part was always the point at which new people on the project got used to it. And I definitely hit that point.”
posted by gusottertrout at 10:50 AM PST - 19 comments

Like many professional funnypeople, Conan O'Brien has been accused of stealing jokes from Twitter. Unlike most of those other people, O'Brien actually got sued for it. And this week, after years of litigation, just before that suit was about to see the inside of a courtroom, O'Brien (and his co-defendants) settled for an undisclosed amount. Conan then wrote a column for Variety explaining why, saying "I decided to forgo a potentially farcical and expensive jury trial in federal court over five jokes that don’t even make sense anymore."
posted by Etrigan at 10:49 AM PST - 9 comments

Indigenous educators fight for an accurate history of California [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:23 AM PST - 9 comments

Danielle Steel: "The author has written 179 books, which have been translated into 43 languages. Twenty-two of them have been adapted for television, and two of those adaptations have received Golden Globe nominations. Steel releases seven new novels a year—her latest, Blessing in Disguise, is out this week—and she's at work on five to six new titles at all times. In 1989 Steel was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having a book on the New York Times best-seller list for the most consecutive weeks of any author—381, to be exact." A 2019 interview with Glamour magazine.
posted by box at 9:52 AM PST - 114 comments

How to braid a challah -With 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 strands. How to braid a 4 strand round. How about with just one strand? [more inside]
posted by Mchelly at 9:10 AM PST - 15 comments

The past music (Bandcamp) of Katie Von Schleicher (Interview) is stark, dark, and just plain weird. Von Schleicher’s new album, Shitty Hits (Bandcamp), although a slight shift from her past work, continues this path. (Pop Matters) Her new album tilts at Portishead covering the Beatles’ I Want You (She’s So Heavy) (YouTube), with some success.... At first, the jauntier, slightly derivative rockers signal strongest, then the darker ballads and self-scouring lyrics lure you in. Nothing (YT) builds to a blank, frazzled catharsis, while Sell It Back (Aquarium Drunkard) is an eerie, epic closer: these are torch songs written with petrol and a flamethrower. (The Guardian)
posted by filthy light thief at 8:51 AM PST - 4 comments

I wrote the book of user centered design. What I see today horrifies me.
posted by w0mbat at 7:16 AM PST - 81 comments

Uber (many previouslies) goes on sale this morning. Why investors can't wait to buy into Uber, a company that's never made money — and maybe never will.
posted by clawsoon at 4:27 AM PST - 90 comments

The 1984 movie Against All Odds [trailer, 1m33s] featured a stand-out, Grammy-winning (for best score) soundtrack album with a Grammy-winning song and a lot of other great material. Side A [the song side, 24m51s]: Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now) [Phil Collins] [MTV video, movie summary video (Ed. note: dear god Jeff Bridges was gorgeous!)], Violet And Blue [Stevie Nicks], Walk Through The Fire [Peter Gabriel], Balcony [Big Country], Making A Big Mistake [Mike Rutherford], My Male Curiosity [Kid Creole & The Coconuts] [video] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:41 PM PST - 47 comments

A cheery 1980s infomercial for Cypress Cove Nudist Resort (NSFW) via
posted by Going To Maine at 8:55 PM PST - 88 comments

A man grapples with his own indoctrination in toxic masculinity After a terrible attack by a family member, NYT writer Wil S. Hylton takes stock of what being a man has meant to him, his family and what it could mean to his children. Trigger warning - violence
posted by lumpenprole at 2:54 PM PST - 87 comments

Sharp suits, thin ties and the coolest musicians on Earth is an appreciation by the Guardian's Richard Williams of BBC Two's Jazz 625 series of concerts, which were all recorded in 1964 and '65, featuring the giants of the jazz scene, from Dizzy Gillespie to the Modern Jazz Quartet. This is a good sampler of music from the show, but a few whole episodes are available online, and I've put links to the ones I found below the cut. [more inside]
posted by Kattullus at 2:54 PM PST - 14 comments

At Jezebel, Esther Wang reports on the close ties forged between conservatives and trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) along with the transphobic legislation they have been able to push through together.
posted by Ouverture at 2:51 PM PST - 56 comments

Specifically, it's been tested by grizzly bears. From Great Big Story, Montana's Bear and Wolf Discovery Center shows just what it means for a cooler or trash can to be bear-resistant.
posted by Hypatia at 1:40 PM PST - 40 comments

"Baseball is a sport rooted in rules and regulations. Everything in the game is standardized, planned, and coordinated, based on a guideline or precedent. Everything, that is, but the park itself: outfield sizes and wall heights vary across the entire league. There are 30 MLB stadiums. No two of them are alike." [more inside]
posted by Hey Dean Yeager! at 1:31 PM PST - 37 comments

The airline industry is a highly competitive one, and Boeing was facing serious competition from its rival, Airbus (Al Jazeera video, transcript). This is the story of how, rather than designing a new airframe from scratch, which could be a long and costly business, Boeing decided to re-vamp its highly successful 737 series, building on new state-of-the-art computer technologies to make the planes more fuel efficient and economical. The new 737 was quickly certified by the FAA, and sold well; but then, some years later, they began crashing in similar ways. Double? No - this is the story of the Boeing NG, and poor manufacturing quality, rush to market, and failed FAA oversight, from 2010.
posted by carter at 12:05 PM PST - 19 comments

The 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup is starting in less than a month. 24 national women's teams will face off in 9 cities around France over 30 days. The video assistant referee (VAR) system will be in use for the first time at the FWWC, as it was for the brother event in Russia last year. Host country France will open the tournament against Korea in Paris on June 7th at 21:00 CEST (3 pm EST) and the final matchup will kick off in Lyon on July 7 at 17:00 CEST (11 am EST). Here's what to watch for. [more inside]
posted by Liesl at 11:48 AM PST - 26 comments

Riot Games employees walk out over workplace harassment lawsuits [The Guardian] “Employees of Riot Games, makers of popular online battle video game League of Legends, staged a mass walkout on Monday to protest against the company’s handling of lawsuits brought against it alleging workplace sexism and misconduct. It is the largest such walkout in video game industry history. Around 150 workers at Riot’s Los Angeles headquarters participated in the protest,” [Previously. Previously. Previously.] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:38 AM PST - 33 comments

On many websites, the "chumbox" [previously] features a Top Gut Doctor exhorting Americans to "throw out this vegetable now!" But who is this doctor, and what vegetable must we expel? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:08 AM PST - 52 comments

“Like Modernism itself, it came from Europe, and it changed everything. You might not have heard of the Frankfurt Kitchen, but if you have neatly organized cabinets, an easy-to-clean tiled backsplash, and a colorful countertop, in a sense, you already cook in one.” How The Frankfurt Kitchen, designed by architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Changed How We Cook—and Live (City Lab)
posted by The Whelk at 11:01 AM PST - 20 comments

Allison Shoemaker of the AV Club asked her readers what substances should go on cereal besides the old standard of cow milk. "We can’t promise we’ll try everything, especially if it seems like you’re just trying to make us ralph up those wholesome Os, but all ideas are welcome." And then she went ahead and tried them. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 10:41 AM PST - 57 comments

Volunteers resurrect a traditional fishpond on the Island of Hawai‘i, strengthening ties to their culture and land in the process. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:53 AM PST - 2 comments

Hindu women in central and southern India, as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and a few other Asian countries, start their day by cleaning the threshold to their home, and, following a centuries-long tradition, painstakingly draw beautiful, ritualistic designs called kōlam, using rice flour (Atlas Obscura). The kōlam is not just a prayer and an exercise in control and reflection; it is also a metaphor for coexistence with nature (S.F. Chronicle), an example of an ethnomathematical practice (YouTube, 19 minutes), and has attracted the attention of computer science (Jstor). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:17 AM PST - 9 comments

An Exploration of the Demonic Themes Present in Scatman John's "Everybody Jam" (slyt)
posted by FatherDagon at 6:42 AM PST - 5 comments

Project 562 "While building curriculum for class, [Matika Wilbur] discovered a serious lack of images of Native Americans taken by Native Americans. That void inspired her to launch Project 562, a Kickstarter-funded pursuit to photograph every federally recognized Native American tribe. The ambitious project’s name came from the number of then-recognized tribes." - from Elle [more inside]
posted by kokaku at 4:03 AM PST - 7 comments

'Change the Subject' Documentary [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by CMcG at 2:24 AM PST - 4 comments

Remember mayochup? The culinary monstersminds at Kraft Heinz have come up with three new condiment combos: Mayomust (mayo + mustard), Mayocue (mayo + barbecue sauce) and the best-named one yet: Kranch (ketchup + ranch dressing). [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:08 PM PST - 154 comments

They gathered outside her home for one final goodbye. Tinney Davidson gave her neighborhood 12 years of warm hellos. And now that she is moving to an assisted living facility, they got together to give her the sweetest surprise goodbye. [Watch the short video for an even better "this is great" level boost!]
posted by hippybear at 9:36 PM PST - 15 comments

It grows rapidly. It’s nearly impossible to kill. It’s terrorized England. And now it’s all over American backyards. Knotweed can grow through cracks in cement, between floorboards, and out from the joints in a stone wall. “You can see it everywhere, along the roadside, in every city,” said Jatinder Aulakh, an assistant weed scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. In the landscapes it has infested, it is impossible to imagine what was there before—and harder still to foresee a future without it. “There is no insect, pest, or disease in the United States,” Aulakh said, “that can keep it in check.” [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 2:39 PM PST - 92 comments

ONE FILM / ONE SHOT is a series in which every Friday I post a different shot that amply represents the film it's from - mashed up with "Canis Lupus" from Alexandre Desplat's Fantastic Mr. Fox score
posted by growabrain at 1:48 PM PST - 4 comments

"A racial category for Chinese was added after railroad companies began importing cheap, exploitable laborers from China. Categories for “mulatto” came after the abolition of slavery caused a panic about the dangers of racial mixing. Questions about mental health and race were first added at the behest of a Southern senator right before the outbreak of Civil War. The results seemed to show that free blacks living in Northern states were on average 11 times more likely to be insane than Southern blacks living in slavery. Such questionable statistics were taken up by Southern politicians to bolster racist theories and argue against abolition." [A longread on Hollerith, eugenics in the US, Nazi Germany and more]
posted by kmt at 1:17 PM PST - 9 comments

RIP David Gordon Wilson, 91, known as the father of modern recumbent bicycles. He wrote the bestselling "Bicycling Science" in 1974, now in its third edition. MIT obituary. Boston Globe (limited articles): obituary, feature story on the unsung inventor of the carbon tax.
posted by Melismata at 11:26 AM PST - 7 comments

Shakedown: Hawaii [YouTube][Game Trailer] “Designer Brian Provinciano’s spiritual successor to 2012’s Retro City Rampage, Shakedown: Hawaii is out today on PS4, Switch, and Vita, and it’s bigger and prettier than its predecessor in almost every way. Its 16-bit sprites flutter in the pixelated winds that blow across its sprawling island, which is several times the size of Rampage’s map. The faded backgrounds and grimy streets of the original have been replaced with electric pinks and balmy palm trees, making the carnage you still leave in your wake feel more like the residue of a gonzo vacation than a Bonnie and Clyde death pact.” [via: Kotaku] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:09 AM PST - 4 comments

“Occupy was in many, many ways a shit show,” Nicole Carty, a Brooklyn activist who was a facilitator at Occupy, told me. “But it deserves props, it really does, for unleashing this energy.” Occupy Wall Street was seen as a failure when it ended in 2011. But it’s helped transform the American left.
posted by The Whelk at 10:56 AM PST - 27 comments

Yes, Buying Alcohol Is Still Illegal in Parts of the U.S.: For an estimated 18 million Americans across the country, Prohibition never ended and they’re still prohibited from buying a drink.
posted by Etrigan at 9:59 AM PST - 119 comments

"At first, Meng hadn’t wanted to get involved in the Resistance. But she made an ideal agent, which is why they recruited her. She traveled a lot for work, and made enough money that she could travel extensively outside of it. ... In 2016, some friends convinced her to start doing them small favors on her travels, little side-trips that wouldn’t take her too far out of her way. Within a year, 25-year-old Meng was planning and executing some of the group’s most ambitious operations while working another job full-time." How an Augmented Reality Game Escalated into Real-World Spy Warfare
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:51 AM PST - 20 comments

After securing much-needed water rights, the co-op farm on the Tohono O’odham reservation is honoring thousands of years of the tribe's farming history. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:50 AM PST - 4 comments

Between 2006 and Aug. 2018, the Center for Family Life helped start fifteen co-ops—ranging from childcare to home repair services—with a total of 534 workers and $11 million in revenue, according to the organization (via Vice | Free Money), with funding from places like the Robin Hood Foundation. In 2016, CFL worked with co-ops to develop their own booking app, to make it easier for customers to engage the service, and it would allow workers to market themselves more easily on social networks. And they would own their own code, with no Silicon Valley “disrupter” skimming profits off the top. When Workers Control the Code (Wired) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:00 AM PST - 12 comments

Toby Keith (and lots of other Country artists) have recently released songs that, rather being about traditional country music subjects, explain to the listener just how "country" the singer is. Because nothing is cooler than authenticity police with a hectoring tone and a checklist.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 7:47 AM PST - 115 comments

How Many Outfits Did Lady Gaga Wear At the Met Gala?
posted by hippybear at 9:35 PM PST - 34 comments

Last week Human Rights Watch released a comprehensive report (3-dozen-paragraph summary, full report) based on a tear-down of the government phone app used by Chinese state security forces in Xinjiang provice in the far West of the country, where ethnic Uyghur Muslims are being rounded up into camps by the millions and oppressed based on their ethnicity and religion in many other ways (previously 1, 2, 3.) The examination revealed details of how mass surveillance works in China and specific types of information sought on individuals. [more inside]
posted by XMLicious at 5:10 PM PST - 25 comments

He once said: “I had no plan, I just met people and people with disabilities awoke my heart.” Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche, whose charity work helped improve conditions for the developmentally disabled in Canada and around the world, has died at 90. In his Becoming Human Massey Lectures he imagines a society in which the gifts of all, particularly those of the weak and the powerless, are an equal, common heritage.
posted by kneecapped at 3:34 PM PST - 20 comments

You May Have Forgotten Foursquare, But It Didn’t Forget You (Wired): You might think you don’t use Foursquare, but chances are you do. Foursquare’s technology powers the geofilters in Snapchat, tagged tweets on Twitter; it’s in Uber, Apple Maps, Airbnb, WeChat, and Samsung phones, to name a few. ¶ In 2014, Foursquare launched Pilgrim, a piece of code that passively tracks where your phone goes using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, and GSM [...] Today, Pilgrim and the company’s Places API are an integral part of tens of thousands of apps, sites, and interfaces. As Foursquare’s website says, “If it tells you where, it's probably built on Foursquare.” [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 2:16 PM PST - 24 comments

...in the realm of Fortnite, there is nothing worse that having a standard character, otherwise known as a “default.”
posted by anastasiav at 1:01 PM PST - 62 comments

What it's like to be queer and an astrology skeptic: Not all queer people believe in astrology — and those who don't often feel alienated from the LGBTQ+ community at large.
posted by zeptoweasel at 12:32 PM PST - 172 comments

Women Who Terminate Their Pregnancies Would Receive Life in Prison. On Tuesday, Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a “fetal heartbeat” bill that seeks to outlaw abortion after about six weeks. The measure, HB 481, is the most extreme abortion ban in the country—not just because it would impose severe limitations on women’s reproductive rights, but also because it would subject women who get illegal abortions to life imprisonment and the death penalty. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 12:21 PM PST - 151 comments

Most of them did the lion’s share of the work and were angry with their partner. Yet many of them told me they were “grateful.” [more inside]
posted by a strong female character at 10:35 AM PST - 147 comments

The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Pokémon [Fanbyte] Jorge Luis Borges’s New and Improved Pokémon Type System

“In his 1942 essay “The Analytic Language of John Wilkins,” Jorge Luis Borges brought a certain taxonomy to the attention of the world. Allegedly derived from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia called the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge translated from the original by Franz Kuhn, it divides all animals into 14 categories. Due to the consistent and intuitive nature of these types, I believe it’s the ideal candidate for a new classification of Pokémon. To demonstrate, I will reclassify the original 151 Pokémon by these new types, and I’m sure you’ll have no trouble figuring out where the rest fit. Such is the nature of the Emporium. Categories are presented in the order in which they appear in the original text.”

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:32 AM PST - 17 comments

Apple claims that AirPods are building a “wireless future.” Many people think they're a symbol of disposable wealth. The truth is bleaker. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:46 AM PST - 127 comments

Cedric and I spent uncountable hours peering into the gloom, and just as I was about to lose all hope, at the side of the road, a faded sign shewed forth:

SHACK OF INDULGENCE
15 MILES

H.P. Loveshack

By John Peck at McSweeney's.
posted by Songdog at 9:15 AM PST - 19 comments

If you're the kind of person that wakes up to a radio alarm clock, you may have noticed something a little different this week. [more inside]
posted by backseatpilot at 8:14 AM PST - 37 comments

The 3D reconstruction of a 99-million-year-old millipede discovered in Burmese amber allowed for the description of an entirely new suborder (Eurekalert), and is just one of the many exciting discoveries in Burmese amber. Burmese amber, mostly coming from the Hukawng Valley (Wikipedia) in Kachin State, northern Myanmar (formerly Burma), is valuable not only for understanding of the Myriapoda fossil record and historical biogeography (ZooKeys, open paper), but also including fantastic fossils of frogs (Nature Science Reports, open paper), bone and feathers from theropod wings (Nature Communications, open paper), a whole bird trapped in amber (National Geographic), and the previously discussed feathered tip of a dinosaur tail. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:51 AM PST - 2 comments

Do Elephants Have Souls? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:49 AM PST - 27 comments

On January 1, 2018, Hungary split the region of Central Hungary, or Közép-Magyarország in Hungarian, into two new regions: the Budapest region (containing the capital of the same name) and the surrounding region of Pest. This decision was made to increase the amount of funding received from the European Union, which dedicates a third of its budget (50 billion euros) to less economically developed regions for investments in infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals.
posted by Etrigan at 7:47 AM PST - 10 comments

I am a Kenyan , an African, someone from the ‘global south.’ It is my job to prove I deserve to travel. It doesn’t matter how talented or smart or wealthy I or others like me are; we need a good passport.
posted by CatastropheWaitress at 6:53 AM PST - 17 comments

Kahoot, a phone-based trivia games engine mainly used in the classroom, has also inspired The Kids to come up with remixes and mashups based on its music. Some examples: Sweet Dreams (with the tempo fixed), All Star, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Real Slim Shady, the Jeopardy theme, a Trap remix, and a Dubstep remix.
posted by divabat at 4:17 AM PST - 8 comments

My husband and I poured everything we had into nurturing an empathetic child. Then, at age 13, he became infatuated with the alt-right.
posted by xdvesper at 2:35 AM PST - 242 comments

Every time you look at a face, a group of neurons behind your ears goes wild with excitation. For a long time, scientists have pondered what it is, exactly, that tickles the very particular fancies of these neurons. Is it a certain eyes-nose-mouth combination that triggers its frenzy? A particular arrangement of colors? What is a face, to a neuron? In a groundbreaking Cell study, scientists found out through an unusual approach: They asked the cells themselves. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:55 PM PST - 11 comments

"Meltdown May has arrived. A whole month at the height of spring when you’re guaranteed to see people lose their shit online." I did not know that this was a Thing or a Holiday now, but I guess in our world this has now become a legit thing, y'all. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:22 PM PST - 32 comments

The audio isn't as good as one might hope, and Maynard's vocals are sort of lost in the mix, but on Sunday night, Tool debuted two new songs. A new album (their first in 13 years) is at the mixing phase, and might be out in just a few months. Excite isn't strong enough a word. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:33 PM PST - 13 comments

"Ignorance is often assumed to be not-yet-knowledgeable. But what if ignorance is strategically manufactured? What if the tools of knowledge production are perverted to enable ignorance?" ... "What’s at stake right now is not simply about hate speech vs. free speech or the role of state-sponsored bots in political activity. It’s much more basic. It’s about purposefully and intentionally seeding doubt to fragment society. To fragment epistemologies." danah boyd: Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation
posted by cashman at 5:16 PM PST - 13 comments

'An amphibious boy in a canvas suit': Charles Dickens's monsters: "The only thing that would prevent this whole passage from appearing in a Warhammer 40,000 novel is that GW's writers could never sustain this level of prose." Joseph Manola of the Against the Wicked City fantasy adventure gaming blog writes about Charles Dicken's powers of description. [more inside]
posted by Caduceus at 2:30 PM PST - 8 comments

The town of Hillsborough has always been at war with the Flintstone house but now files suit against its owner. The Flintstone house is well-recognized by Bay Area drivers as series of terracotta lumps off of the 280 in the wealthy enclave of Hillsborough. Well known for its architecture, the tastemakers of Hillsborough have not extended their favor to the experimental stylings of William Nicholson, the architect who came up with the idea of creating a house by spraying dry concrete over a structure molded from giant aeronautical balloons, wire mesh and rebar. Hillsborough filed suit against the current owner of the "highly visible eyesore" Flintstone house in March, declaring it a "public nuisance." [more inside]
posted by stillmoving at 11:52 AM PST - 130 comments

Norma Miller, 1919-2019, R.I.P.
posted by clew at 11:02 AM PST - 15 comments

The subreddit r/iwanttoapologize catalogues video clips of gaming world glitches that lead to bizarre, absurd and highly amusing moments. In Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V, for instance, a protagonist invites you for a drink and then immediately rams their car into a gas station and explodes. In Bethesda's Oblivion, a sorcerer wishes you a jovial “Farewell”, before a rising floor crushes him in a spike trap. In Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts, Donald Duck waddles to take cover from a snowstorm. “The snowstorm can’t get us here,” he says – then quack-screams as it promptly blows him away. These clips, which players either engineer or come across by chance, are bizarre, silly and gleefully illogical. [via: Wired]
posted by Fizz at 10:11 AM PST - 36 comments

After a catastrophic performance by Bill Barr (Atlantic), the Trump team resists oversight (AP) in a remarkable state of affairs between the executive and legislative branches, unseen in recent times, as Democrats try to break through Trump’s blockade of investigations and exert congressional oversight of the administration. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will vote to hold Barr in contempt (NYT). This is the US Politics megathread. [more inside]
posted by Little Dawn at 9:47 AM PST - 1928 comments

Through the practice and poetry of basketmaking, lives, cultures, and generations intertwine. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:43 AM PST - 4 comments

The Spliter Series On The Future Of Labor “ Her general differences with the current AFL-CIO administration are clear: More agitating, more diversity, more focus on worker power, and less dependence on elected officials in the Democratic Party. She is outspoken in her belief that much of the money that the union world has poured into political donations would be better spent on new organizing, to try to turn around the decline in union membership. “ Sara Nelson Wants to Run That Militant Line All The Way to the Highest Seat in Labor “The relationship (between Unions and Democrats) was flawed from the start, though; the New Deal coalition had a very large, vocal Southern faction that was opposed to unions, mostly on the basis that they could help build racial solidarity among black and white workers.” Labor Needs A Party “Workers, of course, shouldn’t be reduced to using online petitions for basic needs that ought to be mandatory, like paid leave and fair wages, or apps which tell them what meager rights they have.” Labor Apps Won’t Save Us “While the United States has done far less than many peer nations to support social reproduction via the welfare state, there are heartening hints that the tide may be turning” The Revolution Will Be Cooked.
posted by The Whelk at 9:32 AM PST - 22 comments

There's a new Royal Baby™ as of 5:26 this morning. Any questions? The New York Times has you (interactively) covered.
posted by Mchelly at 8:53 AM PST - 51 comments

While fasting (which benefits are now backed with science) seems quite manageable to incorporate to our lifestyles, nowadays, more and more influential people are going into extreme practices that just look like pure sadism, questioning the true meaning of life.
posted by sophieJu at 8:12 AM PST - 55 comments

Quentin and his Birdbox Orchestra is destined to become your new Favorite Music Video Of All Time.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:06 AM PST - 18 comments

The New York Times' Past Tense Blog put together a series of photos of vintage New York in the rain, paired with soundscapes by Craig Henighan. When a hard rain descends on New York, the whole city feels it. Traffic stands still, puddles get deceptively deep and even the most intrepid of us cowers in the wakes of passing cabs. Any object an unsuspecting pedestrian is carrying quickly becomes a makeshift umbrella, and actual umbrellas quickly become hazards themselves, catching the wind or flipping inside out. "When it rains, it’s a whole different scene. Things happen. People forget about you. If they see you, they don’t go putting on airs. They’re the way they are.”
posted by ChuraChura at 7:49 AM PST - 5 comments

The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most successful and devastating membership program: An oral history of the subscription service that changed online shopping forever.
posted by Etrigan at 7:30 AM PST - 65 comments

Scientists reveal one million species at risk of extinction in damning UN report A group of scientists from all over the world have written a damning report about the state of biodiversity on our small planet. Here is a link to the media release from IPBES, the organization behind the report. The title of this post is from The Guardian. [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 7:19 AM PST - 26 comments

Ted Chiang's Exhalation reviewed by Joyce Carol Oates - "'Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully', our narrator explains. 'My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything. . . . Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.'" (previously: 1,2)
posted by kliuless at 6:32 AM PST - 15 comments

Of all the newspaper comic strips ever created, only one is so aggressively neutral that it is endlessly parodyable in countless ways. The latest? Garfeld: The Musical, a 90-minute Garfield parody musical. (Content warning: foul language, sexual references, violence, dog se--wait, that's just sexual references again)
posted by BiggerJ at 4:30 AM PST - 13 comments

The SB Nation video series Weird Rules, and its second season, are generally great, telling us of the time when a basketball team tried to block a free throw, the time a ref in a soccer match scored a goal and it counted, the rule preventing goal-tending against field goals in NFL games, and many other entertainingly ridiculous circumstances. A British player in a bicycle race crashed on purpose to get a restart in the 2012 Olympics, an European League basketball team tried to tie to force the game into overtime because for playoff purposes they wanted to win by at least 11, and Barbados in the Caribbean Cup played to tie once because the overtime "golden goal" used to be worth two points there.
posted by JHarris at 11:14 PM PST - 25 comments

RADwood touts itself as "the premiere automotive lifestyle event celebrating the 80s and 90s," now a world-wide collection of gatherings, where old-ish cars, both fancy and "normcore," are on display (Instagram). Folks revel in the rides (YouTube), and participate in what they see as an expression of resistance (New Yorker). Those are likely members of the Human Driving Association, who see increased computerization in cars, particularly autonomous vehicles, as "the war on driving."
posted by filthy light thief at 7:56 PM PST - 33 comments

50 years ago, the Daily Mail commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the first trans-Atlantic crossing by John Alcock and Arthur Brown with an air race between New York and London. Each runner would start at the top of either Post Office Tower or the top floor of the Empire State Building. Cross the Atlantic and reach the top of the other building. [more inside]
posted by Z303 at 6:54 PM PST - 8 comments

"In 1964, Susan Sontag defined camp as an aesthetic “sensibility” that is plain to see but hard for most of us to explain: an intentional over-the-top-ness, a slightly (or extremely) “off” quality, bad taste as a vehicle for good art. “Notes on ‘Camp,’” her 58-point ur-listicle, builds on that inherent sense of something being “too much,” and also fences it in. Camp is artificial, passionate, serious, Sontag writes. Camp is Art Nouveau objects, Greta Garbo, Warner Brothers musicals and Mae West. It is not premeditated — except when it is extremely premeditated. [...] The essay is also the founding document of this year’s Met Costume Institute exhibit and its attendant gala." The New York Times asks: Is It Camp?
posted by everybody had matching towels at 6:38 PM PST - 39 comments

If you read enough reviews of the music of Bibio one thing you'll come across is repeated use of the word "gauzy". [more inside]
posted by aloiv2 at 11:53 AM PST - 5 comments

Blackpink (stylized BLΛƆKPIИK), the first K-pop girl group to perform at Coachella just added episode 8 (yt) to their group's vlog "Blackpink Diaries" covering their experience at the festival. Be sure to check out their mystery fan at around the ~2 minute mark. [more inside]
posted by forforf at 11:18 AM PST - 19 comments

Jaime Hernandez returns with a new graphic novel, Is This How You See Me? based on his classic Love and Rockets characters Maggie and Hopey, and reflects on life’s changes to Carolina Miranda of the L.A. Times in a thoughtful interview.
posted by larrybob at 11:06 AM PST - 15 comments

Premier Doug Ford has been getting his revenge on anyone who ever told him to drink less, pay attention in class, slow down, stop dealing drugs, pollute less, and watch the kids.
posted by clawsoon at 9:20 AM PST - 59 comments

“The scribe Amennakht, who also seems to have served as a kind of shop steward, negotiated with local officials for the distribution of corn to the workers but this was only a temporary solution to an immediate problem; the underlying cause of the failure in payment was never addressed.” The First Labor Strike in History
posted by The Whelk at 7:51 AM PST - 11 comments

Ground broke on December 27, 1892, and almost immediately it became clear just how many unknowns the project would hold. Workers discovered that - unlike at St. Luke's across the street - there was nothing solid to build on. Excavation revealed loose rock, compressible earth, and underground springs. Workers had to dig 72 feet down before they hit bedrock, by which point said springs had turned the hole into a lake. It would take ten years before they drained the hole and built back up the foundation. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 5:27 AM PST - 11 comments

Sometimes something so entirely foreign at the time influences everything that comes after it. This argument could easily be made about David Byrne and Brian Eno's 1981 collaboration My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Based on repetition and vocal samples, it strongly foreshadows an entire branch of the development of pop music. Back then, it might have been used to clear people out at the end of a party. Today, it feels like it belongs. Side A: America Is Waiting, Mea Culpa, Regiment, Help Me Somebody, The Jezebel Spirit [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:53 PM PST - 40 comments

Microsoft's Official Examples Of "Acceptable Trash Talk" Are A Joy [Kotaku] “Microsoft updated the company’s “Community Standards for Xbox” earlier this week, and while this is normally not news, the content is so damn wholesome that it’s worth a closer look. [...] The company has gone way beyond simply listing rules you should follow, and has provided a ton of examples of not just what you shouldn’t be doing on Xbox Live, but also what you could be doing if you want to be a cool and fun person to be around.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:27 PM PST - 101 comments

Aaron Gordon, transit journalist and author of the MTA-focused newsletter Signal Problems, has ended his newsletter to take a job at Jalopnik. All of the Signal Problems archive is now available
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:01 PM PST - 6 comments

Seanan McGuire writes novels and stories usually classified as urban fantasy. There are 33 novel-length works currently listed on the bibliography page of her website, which is not quite up-to-date and doesn't include her books published under the pseudonym Mira Grant. "The crazy part? She didn't turn to full-time writing until about three years ago."

Middlegame, her latest novel, will be released Tuesday. [more inside]
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 2:47 PM PST - 49 comments

The Murder Accountability Project algorithm has identified a pattern in Chicago: over the last 20 years women, primarily black, were being strangled, with evidence of sexual component, and their bodies dumped. [more inside]
posted by wellifyouinsist at 1:40 PM PST - 24 comments

Rachel Held Evans, who emerged from a conservative evangelical background to become a voice for progressive Christianity, has died at age 37 after being hospitalized in mid-April for flu complications. [more inside]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:47 AM PST - 60 comments

In 2016, Anna Merlan reported from her time At Sea with America's Largest Floating Gathering of Conspiracy Theorists for Jezebel (previously). Three years later, she writes for The Guardian and considers Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories, looking at the rise of Alex Jones, InfoWars and Trump. Related: Why conspiracy theories are getting more absurd and harder to refute, an article by Sean Illing for Vox, interviewing Harvard politics professor Nancy L. Rosenblum. "Democracy requires a minimum amount of mutual trust among citizens, and conspiracism destroys it."
posted by filthy light thief at 10:39 AM PST - 43 comments

Mozilla is very sorry for the inconvenience. Slashdot and Techcrunch also discuss.
posted by Little Dawn at 7:48 AM PST - 226 comments

Crispy-gone-soggy is the finest texture of food there is. Fight me.
posted by Gin and Broadband at 3:13 AM PST - 96 comments

“So Much for So Little,” a 1949 Warner Brothers cartoon. Ten minutes of Chuck Jones-directed public health PSA.
posted by Guy Smiley at 10:52 PM PST - 12 comments

Remember the blue/black/white/gold dress? Here's another one: what colour is this shoe?
posted by divabat at 10:31 PM PST - 70 comments

She was the “queen of the mommy bloggers.” Then her life fell apart. Where Dooce.com founder Heather Armstrong is today.
posted by nevercalm at 2:37 PM PST - 49 comments

“Recently, the popular YouTube channel Boundary Break worked closely with developer Yacht Club Games to do a special episode taking a look at the developer’s beloved Shovel Knight series. What the YouTuber found is that the Shovel Knight games are actually 2D games built in a 3D engine. Seeing a game that looks so retro and very 2D get spun around in 3D is trippy. Yacht Club Games developer David D’Angelo explained that this was because the engine was built before the studio knew exactly what they were going to make. While they wanted to make a 2D game, by making the engine 3D it gave them more options and made it easier to debug the game and bring it to multiple platforms.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 2:33 PM PST - 13 comments

Jaymee Goh considers Variations On A Name: The -punks Of Our Times [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:04 PM PST - 41 comments

Damian Lillard's epic buzzer beater as LEGO animation.
posted by vverse23 at 11:29 AM PST - 20 comments

Working in our billionaires' favor is that—unlike, say, going to Mars—SRM isn't really that complicated: We'd just be dumping some cheap shit up in the sky. Yes, the planes don't exist yet, and some logistics need to be worked out, but almost every estimate of its costs pegs it at the low billions per year—not exactly a dealbreaker for some of the world's tycoons, especially when we place it next to the truly outlandish catastrophes that unchecked warming could bring.

Dave Levitan looks at the possibilities for a motivated billionaire to hack the planet to stave off climate change
posted by MartinWisse at 10:20 AM PST - 75 comments

Men Have No Friends And Women Bear The Burden
posted by backseatpilot at 9:23 AM PST - 192 comments

Elizabeth Hart, a specialist in early literature, writes that in medieval or classical texts, “people are constantly planning, remembering, loving, fearing, but they somehow manage to do this without the author drawing attention to these mental states.” This changed dramatically between 1500 and 1700.... Hart suggests that these innovations were spurred by the advent of print, and with it, an explosion in literacy across classes and genders. People could now read in private and at their own pace, re-reading and thinking about reading, deepening a new set of cognitive skills and an appetite for more complex and ambiguous texts. Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings? (Julie Sedivy for Nautilus) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:18 AM PST - 19 comments

Meow Wolf started as a loose group of penniless punks. Now it’s a multimillion-dollar dream factory... Six years ago, the group was an anarchic collective of artists who were barely known outside Santa Fe, N.M., their hometown. They numbered a dozen, or a few dozen, depending on how you felt like counting, and were known for prankish installations and raucous warehouse parties.< [more inside]
posted by tangosnail at 9:14 AM PST - 17 comments

“I believe that the best candidate for an essential “something” in democratic socialism is the ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community.” The Birth of Social Democracy and the religious origins of European socialism. (Commonweal) “If we, as socialists, adopt this kind of too-snarky, radicaler-than-thou mentality, which obviously we can all slip into at times, we’ll alienate the potential base that could actually make a better country and a better world.” The Editor of Jacobin on the Evolution of American Socialism (New Yorker, Chotiner Q&A) Worker Cooperatives Part 1: Widening the sphere of democracy (58:00) Part 2: Democratic Economy, The Mondragon Corporation and Coperative Jackson (57:00) Inside the “most neoliberal country on Earth”, a Chilean town models actually existing common ownership. “Anyone who is not an owner of the means of production is on our side of the class struggle. ” (Jacobin) Nicos Poulantzas tried to envision how the left could simultaneously champion rank-and-file democracy at a distance from the state and push for radical transformation from within it. (Dissent) [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 8:49 AM PST - 13 comments

For the first time in history, Miss USA, Miss Teen USA and Miss America are all Black women
posted by Etrigan at 7:37 AM PST - 6 comments

"I don't know if you buy a lot of fake vegan meats, but they're all mimicking actual meat– fake vegan chicken, fake vegan pork.... Given that it's all pretend anyway, why not simulate more exotic flesh? We've prepared these rebranding suggestions, just in case you run a vegan meat company." From the manufacturers of Oglaf. [Rebranding link is safe for work if not for lunch, but anything else at their patreon or Oglaf is likely extremely NSFW] [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 7:14 AM PST - 47 comments

Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in Star Wars, has died at age 74. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:47 AM PST - 86 comments

Madonna, yeah, that one, released a new song a couple of weeks ago. Medellín is named after the home town of her duet partner, Maluma, a Colombian reggaton artist and rapper. Here's the video [6m30s]. Here are the lyrics. Here are the lyrics translated to English. It's playful and flirty, and the song seems to be about doing hallucinogens. (Go, Madge!) Maybe you watched their performance on the Billboard Music Awards telecast. Fascinating performance, right? However, if you were actually in the audience that night, it was entirely different.
posted by hippybear at 8:57 PM PST - 23 comments

USA's Center for Disease Control (CDC) has issued their say on washing chicken: Don't the comments went as well as you expect, for something so literally culturally divisive.
posted by cendawanita at 8:14 PM PST - 142 comments

Why the World's Best Mathematicians are Hoarding Chalk , a short video from Great Big Story. The legendary Hagoromo Fulltouch chalk had gained an ardent following among mathematicians, but the company went out of business in 2015. A chalk that lets you do better math? Departments and individuals stockpiled it: Faculty should save this chalk for use only during their most important lectures or when working on their most important theorems. [more inside]
posted by LobsterMitten at 5:07 PM PST - 55 comments

New study confirms 0% transmission of HIV in male couples on treatment. Final results of the PARTNER2 study published confirming zero cases of HIV transmission from condomless sex in almost 1000 male serodiscordant couples, where one partner maintains an undetectable viral load. [more inside]
posted by stillmoving at 5:01 PM PST - 11 comments

On Yom Hashoah, Gabrielle Debinski writes about growing up with stories of Mengele, the sadistic Nazi 'doctor'. Yom Hashoah this year coincides with the 40th anniversary of the death of Josef Mengele, who is known for his gruesome experiments on twins at Auschwitz. He also targeted little persons and Roma. He was never brought to justice. The horrors his victims underwent are not forgotten. Previously: forgiveness, Dr. Gisella Perl, the Ovitz family.
posted by cosmic owl at 4:46 PM PST - 10 comments

This final part of the film is visually eclectic, aurally stunning and philosophically challenging. Many thousands of words have been penned over the decades to try and fathom the meaning of the monolith, and the genesis and future of the space-baby. However, none of this act contains typography, and it is therefore of no concern to us. Let’s skip to the end credits. [more inside]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 4:25 PM PST - 9 comments

Wolves are more willing to help each other than dogs, according to an experiment that involved canines activating touchscreens with their noses. Led by Rachel Dale, an animal behavior researcher at the Wolf Science Center in Vienna, Austria, the study published Wednesday in the journal PloS ONe lends weight to the idea that prosociality in dogs is primarily inherited from their wild ancestors.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:06 PM PST - 11 comments

TurboTax and H&R Block Saw Free Tax Filing as a Threat — and Gutted It: An internal document and current and former company employees show the companies steered customers away from the government-sponsored free option and made them pay. (SLProPublica by Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel)
posted by crazy with stars at 2:18 PM PST - 37 comments

The Origin Of The Term “Gamer” By Kate Willaert [A Critical Hit!] “The term “gamer” predates video games by over six centuries. The first known record of the word was found in the English town of Walsall and dates back to approximately 1422. The town’s Code of Laws, written in Middle English, condemned “any dice-player, carder, tennis player, or other unlawful gamer.” Back then, even tennis and football were considered forms of gambling, and thus were banned on any day but Christmas. And then they banned Christmas. [...] So how did “gamer” come to mean “a player of video games?” Let me tell you a little story. It begins in the world of fanzine fandom…” [YouTube]
posted by Fizz at 1:26 PM PST - 16 comments

@melotime: for my own amusement here's a thread of my fave posts from classics tumblr [twitter]

achilles: when I die, mingle our ashes together so that we may be together for eternity
historians: f is for friends who do stuff together.

@comradeclodius: I’m gonna do a thread of my favourite Classics tumblr posts [twitter]

vergil can't help sneaking his love for bees into it

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:38 PM PST - 32 comments

“I had a 16-inch waist and something on top, too, I sure did, but Barbie’s legs were better than mine.” An interview with Carol Spencer, The Chic Octogenarian Behind Barbie's Best Looks [NYT]
posted by Mchelly at 12:15 PM PST - 12 comments

Hit full-force by spring allergies? In many cities, the bias against female trees, which bear potentially messy fruit in summer and fall, has led to exclusively planting male trees — the kind that release pollen. Which makes many people sneeze. A guest blog for Scientific American by horticulturist Thomas Leo Ogren lays out how and why this came to be. [more inside]
posted by purpleclover at 11:56 AM PST - 21 comments

Inside the world of "make yourself taller" grifting.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:50 AM PST - 96 comments

In recognition of the International Year of Indigenous Languages, Eskasoni First Nation high schooler Emma Stevens sings a lovely cover of the Beatles' Blackbird in Mi'kmaq. Teacher Katani Julian and her father Albert "Golydada" Julian did the translation. There was plenty there to sink her teeth into, she said, noting that lyrics like "Take these broken wings and learn to fly" really resonate with Indigenous experiences in Canada. "The song is just like the type of gentle advice that we get from our elders when we feel defeated and when we feel down," she said. [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:20 AM PST - 11 comments

Enter a measurement, and the Measure of Things will return a list of physical approximations and comparisons. For example, 30 feet is half the length of a bowling lane; 4.5 stone is about as heavy as a Dalmatian; 100 hours is about nine-tenths of the voyage of the Titanic; five billion gallons is roughly 500 times the volume of the Capital rotunda. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 10:15 AM PST - 32 comments

The mozART group is a comedy act that performs music, with twists. [more inside]
posted by Cozybee at 9:29 AM PST - 1 comment

an aquafresh brand-parody tumblr that was posting avengers spoilers was reportedly permabanned for hate speech, but it was actually because the account was tied to a toy story-themed community-led nazi purge

Tweets Brian Feldman. For an explanation of this baffling sentence you have to read his Intelligencer post.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:50 AM PST - 16 comments

But not in a very Gothic way. A Lancet editorial recommends rethinking medical data metaphors and policy. "We propose that health-care data records are digital specimens and should be treated with the same rigour, care, and caution afforded to physical medical specimens." (SLLancet) (via) [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 8:17 AM PST - 3 comments

“Attacking gentrification is only the beginning of a socialist response. We need to reorient our perspective to embrace land not as an extractive resource to exploit, but a part of our community to nurture, a neighbor to live with in harmony. A Green New Deal gives us the opportunity to push for democratic control of the land through policies such as land banks, community land trusts, and the restoration of Native stewardship. Before we get to how a GND must confront land-use, let’s talk about the origin of land-use policy in the U.S” It Begins With The Land: Land use has been a tool of oppression, but it can also be a tool of our liberation.
posted by The Whelk at 8:07 AM PST - 3 comments

Mall Music Muzak - Mall Of 1974 "This music was provided on LP's and was played to the general public in shopping malls, supermarkets, clothing stores and just about any other retail related environment. "
posted by Katemonkey at 7:04 AM PST - 40 comments

Once notorious for her racist and bigoted tweets, Katie McHugh saw the dark insides of the white nationalist movement. A long read from Rosie Gray at Buzzfeed News. [more inside]
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:04 AM PST - 74 comments

“Ecstasy On Maple Mountain” by Nathan Micay. Previously
posted by Going To Maine at 9:53 PM PST - 5 comments

Swarthmore Students Occupy Frat House After Documents Leak With Reference to “Rape Attic” Students at Swarthmore College, a private liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, have occupied a fraternity house on campus after leaked documents allegedly recounted multiple instances of sexual assault by past members. The student protesters have succeeded in getting the fraternity suspended from campus, but they plan to remain at the house until the university shuts down the fraternity altogether. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:07 PM PST - 43 comments

In the 1994 NYT article Capturing The Pounding Pulse Of New York City, Michael Beckerman dissects the 60 seconds of music and visuals of the opening credits for N.Y.P.D. Blue [here from season 3]. The shows creators (Stephen Bochco and David Milch) and composer (Mike Post) discuss the theme in this 1m45s video. Post also created a single-length version of the theme that offers more textures. But still, that original, man boy howdy!
posted by hippybear at 8:38 PM PST - 13 comments

The Wari civilization (Ancient.eu) flourished in Peru between c. 450 and c. 1000 CE., before the Inca. Their superior management of the land also helped them resist the 30-year drought period which during the end of the 6th century CE contributed to the decline of the neighbouring Nazca and Moche civilizations. They held together their territory with military might, and alcoholic festivals. Archaeologists have been trying to recreate that Schinus molle-based recipe from their brewery-busting bash (Science Friday, 2016; audio with brief text summary), after studying Schinus Molle L. (Anacardiaceae) Chicha Production in the Central Andes (BioOne Complete, 2004; paywalled). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:55 PM PST - 4 comments

This article is about how to decode a JPEG image. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 7:44 PM PST - 24 comments

The year was 2009, and Internet Explorer 6 remained a plague on the web. Already nearly a decade old, it was hopelessly outdated, riddled with bugs and security holes, and long since superseded. Yet with nearly 20% market share, web developers everywhere were still under pressure to support its infuriating quirks. The tide finally turned when, out of the blue, YouTube added a banner announcing it would soon be dropping support for the obsolete browser. Ten years on, it turns out that banner was never approved by management. Chris Zacharias reveals how a rogue team of frustrated developers launched the last major offensive of the Browser Wars, and got away with it.
posted by automatronic at 2:51 PM PST - 45 comments

King Alfred and India: an Anglo-Saxon embassy to southern India in the ninth century AD. From the fascinating blog of Dr Caitlin Green.
In the year 883, Alfred sent Sighelm and Athelstan to Rome, and likewise to the shrine of Saints Thomas and Bartholomew, in India, with the alms which he had vowed.
Along the Pepper trail.
posted by adamvasco at 2:46 PM PST - 7 comments

A tweet from a Spanish far-right political party intending to demonize LGBTQ+ people has backfired spectacularly because, in the words of one mefite, they designed an anti-gay ghost that's hella cute. [more inside]
posted by tocts at 1:47 PM PST - 20 comments

A US Army War College instructor analyses the Battle of Winterfell. [more inside]
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 1:19 PM PST - 47 comments

Conner O'Malley is unhealthy invested in Howard Schultz's political run. And by "unhealthy", I mean really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really invested. I mean the guy is sick. (He's also a fan of Beto O'Rourke, for what it's worth.) [not recommended unless you're a fan of grotesque horror-comedy]
posted by rorgy at 12:37 PM PST - 14 comments

Want to see what one digital future for newspapers looks like? Look at The Guardian, which isn’t losing money anymore.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 12:23 PM PST - 17 comments

How Bullet Hell Games Helped Me Work Through Anxiety [Fanbyte] “As appointments with my therapist continued, I realized that the type of games I gravitated towards began reflecting my mental struggle. The pixel-perfect precision bullet hell games demanded of players gave me something to hyper-fixate on besides my anxiety. I wasn’t running away from my real-life issues, either — I was practicing patience, control of a task, and completion, slowly chipping away at my anxiety. [...] Take a deep breath, and somehow figure out how exactly you’re going to finish this paper due next week, how to weave through this bullet pattern, how to beat this boss, how to leave the house after a whole week of staying inside. It takes failure, trying again, and failing, failing, until you get it right.” [YouTube][PBS][Can Bullet Hell Games Be Meditative?]
posted by Fizz at 12:06 PM PST - 17 comments

The Marshall Project Police employ lethal violence in response to perceived threats at vastly different rates across the [USA].
posted by readinghippo at 11:27 AM PST - 41 comments

Earlier this spring, North Bergen High School in North Bergen, New Jersey, USA put on a stage play adaptation of the movie Alien. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:21 AM PST - 21 comments

Although the National Geographic headquarters in Washington, DC usually have nesting ducks in their courtyard (who often lay their eggs too early to survive), this year a pair of Canada geese laid their eggs on a 3rd floor ledge on their campus. When the goslings were too high off the ground to safely get to ground, they were escorted through the National Geographic building, including the elevator! (twitter thread)
posted by ChuraChura at 11:13 AM PST - 31 comments

Tracking the journey of a uranium cube - how did a cube of uranium from a prototype WW2 reactor end up in a lab in Maryland?
Physicists Timothy Koeth and Miriam Hiebert in Physics Today.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 11:13 AM PST - 8 comments

A month after we were definitely, certainly, no two ways about it leaving the EU, here we still are. Chris Grayling is carrying on in the manner to which he has become accustomed, Ian Dunt sounds ever more exasperated, and the Guardian reminds us that, like any number of horror movie villains, Brexit's not dead yet. [more inside]
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 10:08 AM PST - 242 comments

An ethnomusicologist analyzes the origins and the craft of air guitar. From "shadow conducting," to vaudeville, to Joe Cocker, to the rise of heavy metal, air guitar has a century of history you might not know about... along with an international competitive scene.
posted by SansPoint at 9:21 AM PST - 4 comments

"Avengers: Endgame" is not just the culmination of the 22-movie Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also represents the decisive defeat of "cinema" by "content."
posted by sapagan at 8:49 AM PST - 75 comments

Library Extension, a free extension for Chrome and Firefox, shows you which books on Amazon, Audible, Goodreads, Google Books, and Librarything are also available at your local library. 3200 catalogs from Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States are supported.
posted by Iridic at 8:20 AM PST - 18 comments

Donald J. Sobol endeared himself to generations of nerdy kids with the creation of his enduring character Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, who starred in 29 books from 1963 to 2012. But this World War II veteran and father of four shunned the spotlight and preferred to remain mysterious himself.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:47 AM PST - 79 comments

Reds Of Future Past [via mefi projects] On May Day, the American holiday that Americans forgot is our holiday, our own Whelk looks at artifacts of the first Red Scare, when the Espionage Act of WWI was used to suppress dissent.
posted by maxsparber at 6:02 AM PST - 18 comments

Twenty years after a disastrous dalliance with lasers and fifteen years after his last LP, Alan Parsons has released a new album called The Secret. [more inside]
posted by zaixfeep at 4:09 AM PST - 32 comments

A history of pad Thai: how the stir-fried noodle dish was invented by the Thai government.
posted by smoke at 1:59 AM PST - 57 comments