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he can use this maddening awareness to inform you about your credit report [via mefi projects]
posted by kagredon at 10:56 PM PST - 26 comments

California Gov. Jerry Brown signs new vaccination law, one of nation's toughest "The bill, one of the most controversial measures before the Legislature this year, was introduced because of concern about low vaccination rates in some communities and an outbreak of measles at Disneyland that ultimately infected more than 150 people." (LA Times) [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:06 PM PST - 180 comments

What do Mark A. Bedau's Weak Emergence[PDF], Stewart Cohen's Contextualism, Skepticism, and the Structure of Reasons, Paul Benson's Free agency and self-worth, and Michael G.F. Martin's Perception, Concepts, and Memory have in common? They're all Sleeping Beauties. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:57 PM PST - 3 comments

“Happy people don’t need you to say you understand. As an artist I don’t have much to say to happy people. And that works out great because they’re busy being content. For the rest of us, coming to terms with rejection, failure, death, and the fragility of love is very important. Some people are self-conscious about these things and maybe they don’t want to talk about them, but sometimes it just feels good to know you’re not alone. Books and music do this better than possibly anything else."

Author Joe Bonomo explores the sadness, yearning, and warmth of the music of Greg Cartwright. [more inside]
posted by Turkey Glue at 7:35 PM PST - 5 comments

"The idea is that Hannibal is always eating people, regardless of what he’s feeding you. So I wanted it to look like something that could be lamb’s tongue but probably was a people tongue. Lambs’ tongues are so homely, and once you cook them they just look creepy and unappetizing, and what I want more than anything is for the food to look so delicious that you want to reach into the screen and try it, even though you know it’s people. It’s the personification of Hannibal. He’s the Devil. Why do you like him? Why do you want to get to know him? Why do you want to eat these tongues? They’re people!"

How Hannibal's food stylist, Janice Poon, creates hypothetical human meat
posted by Room 641-A at 6:40 PM PST - 89 comments

The New Division has a new album... Gemini. It's very New Wave 3.0 you can stream it here John Kunkel began writing new wave/synth pop songs in 2005 while attending California Baptist University in Riverside, California, heavily inspired by bands such as New Order and Depeche Mode. Over the next few years, the New Division began to develop into a full band, with Michael Janz and Mark Michalski joining Kunkel on synthesizer, and Brock Woolsey contributing guitar. The group gigged heavily around Riverside, developing its modern take on '80s-inspired sounds, and began digitally self-releasing singles and EPs in 2010. start here: Introspection a little darker here: Alive
posted by bobdow at 6:39 PM PST - 11 comments

The Ultra Hal chatbot converses with itself. Ultra Hal is a learning chatbot and virtual assistant from zabbaware, as well as a $29 ticket to an Uncanny Valley of sexism, materialism and banality.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:26 PM PST - 36 comments

Well before Netflix, there was the circulating library. Although circulating libraries large and small were well-established in Britain by the middle of the eighteenth century--some of them, perhaps most (in)famously the Minerva Press, becoming publishing houses themselves--the most powerful circulating libraries came into being during the Victorian era. [more inside]
posted by thomas j wise at 3:09 PM PST - 7 comments

Mighty Mouth Records has just released Volume 2 of The Best of Laurice. Vol. 1 was described as "70's rock meets mainstream British pop in an explosive style fusion of pre-punk, glam, psychedelic and gay themed musical gems." Featuring such catchy titles as "I'm Gonna Smash Your Face In" (as Grudge) and "Flying Saucers Have Landed." From MMR: "Recorded in the early to mid-70's at various studios in London, UK, these tracks, many previously unreleased, demonstrate the versatility and originality of a singer-songwriter who challenged society's rules ..." Vol 2 still available on vinyl. Both also on achem Spotify. Enjoy.
posted by zbsachs at 2:32 PM PST - 2 comments

Comedian Jack Carter has died at the age of 93. The Comic's Comic site has some great clips, as well as a link to the Shit Jack Carter Says tumblr. Also this great anecdote: "William Morris sent Reggie Rose the screenwriter, you know. He came to one of our first meetings and said, 'A sketch has got to have a beginning, a middle and an end.' Larry Gelbart said, 'So does a piece of shit!' And that was the end of Reggie Rose."
posted by anothermug at 1:43 PM PST - 15 comments

DISASTER AT SLAPTON SANDS Scimitar was holed when she was rammed by another vessel and was ordered to return to port. Incredibly, no one bothered to inform the operation commander of this! This left tiny Azalea to act as the sole escort. As events showed, this might have been enough except for one unspotted typographical error in the orders. The American ships were tuned to the wrong radio frequency and could not transmit to or receive from the British ship or coastal stations. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 1:43 PM PST - 12 comments

Full text: The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2014. via
posted by infini at 1:10 PM PST - 24 comments

It starts with a vanguard class of young creative types reclaiming zones of social and economic dereliction, setting up what Ehrenhalt sardonically describes as “projects through which a small coterie of local artists seek to display their sheer edginess to one another”. The hipster pioneers are followed by young couples with bourgeois-bohemian sensibilities – what the French call “bobo” – who breed and fill the pavements with space-age prams. I was that cliché once, wheeling my daughters around Hackney in the gentrificational transition between murder rates falling and Foxtons arriving on the high street. Then come the really wealthy types who like urban edge fully blunted by waves of demographic change. Before you know it a draughty three-bedroom Victorian terraced house in what was once a slum costs more than £1m. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 12:36 PM PST - 30 comments

Are you ready to start using/buying "Artisan Salt"? You can also buy over 100 different kinds of salt at The Meadow.
posted by growabrain at 12:21 PM PST - 86 comments

New research into the pain processing of mice has found male and female mice process pain differently, and the discovery may also apply to other species, including humans. Scientists are now questioning what this means for the future of medical research, which until now, has had a strong bias towards experimenting on male mice. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 12:10 PM PST - 20 comments

Sitting in his surgical gown inside a large medical suite in Reston, Va., a Vienna man prepared for his colonoscopy by pressing record on his smartphone, to capture the instructions his doctor would give him after the procedure. [more inside]
posted by katie at 11:58 AM PST - 110 comments

The Atlantic covers the fight over color TV, the women who helped push it, and how racial bias influenced the evolution of the technology. Of note is the history of bias influencing all sorts of imaging technologies, pushing towards fidelity of reproducing lighter skin tones at the expense of darker ones.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:30 AM PST - 9 comments

50 Shades of Flashheart. The immortal words of Christian Grey put into the mouth of Blackadder's Lord Flashheart. (Single serving tumblr.)
posted by immlass at 11:02 AM PST - 24 comments

For $350K You Can Spend Eternity In Manhattan [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:52 AM PST - 24 comments

Chef Paxx Caraballo Moll is a rock-n-roll chef who creates inventive vegetarian food with the native foods of Puerto Rico.

They're also one of nine individuals profiled in Mala Mala, a feature length documentary exploring the lives of young Puerto Ricans in the trans community that recently premiered at the Tribeca film festival. [more inside]
posted by Juliet Banana at 9:50 AM PST - 8 comments

"A selection of pages from an 18th-century demonology book comprised of more than 30 exquisite watercolours showing various demon figures, as well as magic and cabbalistic signs. The full Latin title of Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros, roughly translates to “A rare summary of the entire Magical Art by the most famous Masters of this Art”. With a title page adorned with skeletons and the warning of Noli me tangere (Do not touch me), one quickly gets a sense of the dark oddities lurking inside its pages." - The Public Domain Review presents illustrations from a 18th century guide to demons and demonology (NSFW illustrated nudity, snakes on bits.)
posted by The Whelk at 9:37 AM PST - 29 comments

Misty Copeland has been promoted to principal dancer of the American Ballet Theater, making the thirty-two year old the first Black dancer to hold such a position. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:23 AM PST - 17 comments

Life in USSR showcases in photos the daily life of the Soviet people.
posted by griphus at 9:18 AM PST - 13 comments

I write a lot of notes to myself these days, but this one is different. Remember the body. A strange thought. How could I forget it? And yet I do.

[...]

I have had MS for a little over a year and this has been the surprising, sometimes embarrassing challenge in my particular case: where does the disease end and where do I begin? What is the illness and what is just my maddening response to it?

Games writer Christian Donlan (previously) writes about neurology, language and life since his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis.
posted by Otto the Magnificent at 9:07 AM PST - 11 comments

I am just about the biggest advocate for “representation matters” there is, but as a white woman I never really felt it applied to me all that much. Watching Fury Road, I realized how wrong I was. I’ve been this way my entire life and I’ve never felt “handicapped.” I’m disabled, yes – there’s shit I just can’t do, but an invalid I am not. For the most part I’ve always approached life with a “figure out how to do it and just get it done” attitude; I am loathe to admit I can’t do anything and I never give up without exhausting all the possibilities available to me. Watching Fury Road, I felt like I was watching my own struggle brought to life (albeit in a very fantastical setting), and I don’t think I ever realized how truly profound that could be for me.

Laura Vaugh talks about her response to seeing a kick-ass woman with the same disability as her on the silver screen. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 8:50 AM PST - 70 comments

“My name is Misty Upham, and someday you will know that name as the best living Native American actress.” This story is about her demise. How she went missing for 11 days. How she was found by folks enlisted by her family, and not by the police. How she was mocked when she most needed help. How she survived rapes. How she inspired kids. And how as an indigenous woman, she was not alone in facing injustice.
posted by goatdog at 7:13 AM PST - 28 comments

For most of US history, our relationship with death was more intimate than it is today. Americans often died at home and remained there until burial, where they were washed, wrapped in shrouds, and laid out on boards while the family made preparations for a funeral feast and an at-home funeral. In addition to family, women known as “Layers Out of the Dead,” helped take care of the immediate tasks following a death. This homespun approach to death largely persisted until the Civil War, when embalming, hospitals and eventually funeral directors changed the way we dealt with our deceased. But now, with home funerals and even green burials slowly regaining acceptance, a new generation of “Layers Out of the Dead,” are emerging.
posted by zarq at 6:36 AM PST - 15 comments

In fashion news, apparently, Merman colour is the next big thing in men’s hair. This styling and particular coloring replaces "man buns" as the in-thing for the man-about-town. Radiant blues and purples predominate, with the occasional green, and the occasional very green. The effect also used on beards and mustaches for that rainbow-hipster identity. Headwear co-ordination is a possibility, and age is not a barrier; neither is being a merman when in a serious boardroom meeting. Yellow is also a choice, and many bright colors at once are possible. For MeFites wanting to make a statement, some do's and dont's. And finally, a personal favorite: you can be very old and still cool.
posted by Wordshore at 9:49 PM PST - 155 comments

"While Friday marked a historic victory for the LGBTQ community, it turns out there’s another advancement to celebrate: Last week, the Oxford English Dictionary released a list of 500 new entries, and among the more notable additions was cisgender. The word —which is defined as 'designating a person whose sense of personal identity matches their gender at birth'— is seen as an opposite and complementary term to transgender." Why the Oxford English Dictionary's Addition of Cisgender Matters (Anna Diamond, Slate) [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:46 PM PST - 204 comments

The Gloria Swanson Saga: Part One

Gloria Swanson wasn’t here to make friends. She wasn’t “just like us.” She didn’t take out the garbage or “wear cotton” or go to the bathroom. Lady had a gold-plated bathtub. She married a Marquis. She was 4’11,” wore a 2 ½ in shoes, and had a waist approximately the size of my neck. She looked most beautiful when frowning. And for a period in the 1920s, she was the biggest star in the world. Swanson wasn’t evil, and she probably wasn’t even a bitch, but she just knew how to run that game. She was of a different set of stars — a different breed than Garbo, Dietrich, and other classic idols — that truly lived like demi-gods. And when Hollywood began to change the way it made and distributed films in the late ‘20s, she was one of dozens destined to remain a relic of an earlier time.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:38 PM PST - 41 comments

In a world-first for conservation a tree kangaroo has been raised by a rock-wallaby surrogate mother [SLYT] When Makaia, a Goodfellow's Tree Kangaroo, was only five weeks old, he lost his mum. He needed a nice warm pouch to grow big and strong in, so Adelaide Zoo tried something that had never been done before... a Yellow-foot Rock-wallaby was found to be his surrogate mum. Up until now this special breeding technique, known as 'cross-fostering', has only been done with closely related wallaby species. (Includes footage of a baby tree-kangaroo unravelling a toilet-roll dispenser)
posted by coleboptera at 7:37 PM PST - 20 comments

After nine years, 222 episodes, 100 panelists and three governments, Sandi Toksvig hosts the News Quiz for the final time (autoplaying video). Sandi is leaving her most dysfunctional family at the New Quiz (autoplaying audio) to help lead the Women's Equality Party. Miles Jupp will be the next host.
posted by gladly at 7:10 PM PST - 51 comments

@Pixel_Dailies gives you a theme or subject every day for you to draw. They retweet and blog their favorites each day. The art club just had its first birthday.
posted by curious nu at 5:54 PM PST - 2 comments

This morning, The New Yorker's Rachel Aviv exposed the case of Louisiana death row inmate Rodricus Crawford, a possibly innocent 23 year old man prosecuted by notorious Caddo Parish assistant district attorney Dale Cox; at the same time, the Supreme Court refused to halt lethal injections in Oklahoma (or, as some had hoped, nationwide) and recently exonerated and freed former death row inmate Glenn Ford lost his life to lung cancer. [more inside]
posted by sallybrown at 5:29 PM PST - 57 comments

"A recurring complaint is that not enough of our young people and adults have the kinds of competence the coming century will require, largely because not nearly enough are choosing careers that require the skills of STEM...The US has all the high-tech brains and bodies it needs, or at least that the economy can absorb."
posted by Lycaste at 3:42 PM PST - 113 comments

On conscience, morality, and Theodore Parker in part. "Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice." -Theodore Parker, 1853.
posted by shenkerism at 2:33 PM PST - 18 comments

Yes co-founder and bassist Chris Squire has died. [more inside]
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:30 PM PST - 109 comments

Spotting real-world architecture in Monument Valley
posted by Artw at 12:00 PM PST - 6 comments

Why Disney Marriages Never Work: [SLYT] What happens after the credit roll is the truly depressing part.
posted by Fizz at 11:59 AM PST - 34 comments

License plates Massachusetts won't let you have.
posted by jessamyn at 11:15 AM PST - 95 comments

How World War III became possible: A nuclear conflict with Russia is likelier than you think (SLVox).
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:38 AM PST - 106 comments

Green is the new black: the unstoppable rise of the healthy-eating guru (slGrauniad) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 10:20 AM PST - 86 comments

In June, 1994, a man goes missing. His wife makes a series of interviews with police. Those interviews form the basis of the recently released title Her Story, an FMV-style game that tasks the player with digging through hours of video to determine what happened, and how, and why. [more inside]
posted by ZaphodB at 9:23 AM PST - 65 comments

The Exit Interview: I spent 12 Years in the Blue Man Group

"In our conversation with Issac Eddy, we found that he was far from silent about his experience as a Blue Man. From the struggles of learning drumming for the audition, to how the behavior of dogs informed his performance, to his portentous final show, Eddy let us in on just about every aspect of his time under the Blue, and why he decided to be a human again."

This is the first in a new series from Atlas Obscura called Exit Interview, where people leaving interesting jobs talk about their work and what they're doing next.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:17 AM PST - 28 comments

This was a world that never quite fit me. I was unnaturally hungry and never found something that could satisfy that hunger. No job kept me. From desks to barns to the muffling din of factories, the concept of a profession was foreign. No drug quieted me for more than a few hours. No friend or lover ever lasted for more than a few days. My family had long since receded into the gray haze of memories.

Thomas Ligotti reviews the new Hot Dog Bites Pizza from Pizza Hut. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 9:09 AM PST - 63 comments

Science with Bez [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:07 AM PST - 11 comments

The headlines are exciting: "Clocks to read 11:59:60 as time lords add leap second" and "Global markets spooked by looming 'leap second'," as June 30, 2015 will be extended for one second to keep Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) close to the mean solar time, or UT1 because the Earth is constantly undergoing a deceleration caused by the braking action of the tides. So why are markets bracing for trouble and some suggesting you avoid air travel at that time? There are always a few more bugs to work out, as seen when the extra second "crashed the web" in 2012, and global outage of computerised check-in systems used by Qantas and Virgin Australia. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:52 AM PST - 76 comments

Unsure of what to do with your CSA share? Enter the Contorni Matrix.
posted by slogger at 7:43 AM PST - 43 comments

Facebook's "authentic name" policy drew protests this weekend. Zip@Medium: A woman responsible for expanding Facebook's gender categories was blocked for using the name she used on the job. Nads@Wired: "All I’ve gotten for my troubles are nearly two dozen emails from Facebook informing Nads about everything she’s missing out on by not logging in, and a request for feedback about my experience." The Guardian: Radical Faeries and #MyNameIs protest Facebook's sponsorship of San Francisco Pride. [more inside]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:23 AM PST - 65 comments

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Transgender Rights is your new go-to on transgender 101. (SLYouTube)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:16 AM PST - 100 comments

Recent genetic discoveries are revealing this is a more accurate analogy for human origins than the "branching tree" model. John Hawks discusses the role of connectivity in human evolution in a clip from the new PBS series First Peoples.
posted by ChuckRamone at 7:08 AM PST - 7 comments

As much as we wish it weren't so, the queer world still exists apart -- discrete, you might say -- from the straight world, and to be a bisexual woman on OKCupid is to travel back and forth between them, bicoastal, bilingual, bicultural, always apologizing to one on behalf of the other.

The Two Faces of Bisexual OKCupid, by Frankie Thomas at the Hairpin.
posted by Stacey at 6:15 AM PST - 37 comments

The launch of Progress M-28M, now set for July 3rd, 2015, 0055 EDT has become critical to the sustained manning of the ISS. [more inside]
posted by eriko at 5:48 AM PST - 62 comments

‘I Don’t Believe in God, but I Believe in Lithium’ My 20-year struggle with bipolar disorder.
posted by almostmanda at 5:30 AM PST - 6 comments

Call of Tutu is a Lovecraftian short film by Aaron Vanek. An old man describes his cat... but is it really a cat? (SLYT)
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:11 AM PST - 6 comments

Please don't think
that I'm begging you for love.
posted by metaplectic at 12:35 AM PST - 2 comments

The Romenesko journalism blog has become aware of some links to nytimes.com.co for some - interesting - stories that are currently getting Facebook 'link juice', including:
WI Gov. Scott Walker Challenges Supreme Court Justices to Fist Fight
Marcus Bachmann Files For Divorce, Fresh on Heels of SCOTUS Ruling
Kanye West Calls Brown v. Board Of Education ‘Best Supreme Court Decision Of All Time’
The unlabeled parody stories are re-postings of material from the equally unlabeled parody site National Report, with over 300 stories going back four months.
Previously, the Newspaper of Record had only taken 36 hours to C&D nytimes.cat [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:22 AM PST - 15 comments

Flaco Jiménez and his Conjunto with Ry Cooder, Austin City Limits - 1975
posted by Lorin at 9:54 PM PST - 7 comments

Giant 800-track alt/indie-focused 90's playlist in chronological order "This is a behemoth of a playlist I put together, focusing primarily (but not exclusively) on the alt/indie/college side of the 90's experience. It's 800+ tracks, about 55 hours, and features plenty of songs that tend to get overlooked in the "remember these 90's hits?" pieces that pop up from time to time. Not definitive by any means, and extremely subjective, but it's a decent chunk of curated history in one convenient place. Also it's a fully chronological playlist, on a week-by-week level. So a track released on May 7, 1994 will come before a track released on May 14, 1994. Time and research went into this. Think of it as the Boyhood of 90's playlists!" (From Mefi's own naju, via MetaFilter Projects.)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:38 PM PST - 92 comments

The resonant frequency of googly eyes [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 7:32 PM PST - 32 comments

They could sometimes admit that women were oppressed (but only by “the system”) and said that we should have equal pay for equal work, and some other “rights.” But they belittled us no end for trying to bring our so-called “personal problems” into the public arena—especially “all those body issues” like sex, appearance, and abortion. Our demands that men share the housework and childcare were likewise deemed a personal problem between a woman and her individual man. The opposition claimed if women would just “stand up for themselves” and take more responsibility for their own lives, they wouldn’t need to have an independent movement for women’s liberation. What personal initiative wouldn’t solve, they said, “the revolution” would take care of if we would just shut up and do our part. Heaven forbid that we should point out that men benefit from oppressing women.

is from the 2006 introduction by Carol Hanisch to "The Personal Is Political" [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:25 PM PST - 9 comments

The Lonely End. "Three months ago in an apartment on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan, Haruki Watanabe died alone. For weeks his body slowly decomposed, slouched in its own fluids and surrounded by fetid, fortnight-old food. He died of self-neglect, solitude, and a suspected heart problem. At 60, Watanabe, wasn’t old, nor was he especially poor. He had no friends, no job, no wife, and no concerned children. His son hadn’t spoken to him in years, nor did he want to again."
posted by zabuni at 4:23 PM PST - 59 comments

"Stanford University scientists have invented a low-cost water splitter that uses a single catalyst to produce both hydrogen and oxygen gas 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
posted by Quietgal at 4:17 PM PST - 63 comments

This is a Nikon COOLPIX 9500 with 83x optical zoom. This is what you can do if you point it at the moon.
posted by SpacemanStix at 4:14 PM PST - 39 comments

"The Matsés Traditional Medicine Encyclopedia marks the first time shamans of an Amazonian tribe have created a full and complete transcription of their medicinal knowledge written in their own language and words. One of the intentions is to stall Biopiracy and at the same time preserve knowledge which up to now was passed orally.
posted by adamvasco at 3:23 PM PST - 9 comments

Watch a Large Scale Deep neural net hallucinate while onlookers supply topics in a chat room. Almost magically, after a few seconds the psychedelic representations of those suggestions begin creeping out of the woodwork into which you infinitely zoom. Jonas Degrave writes about how the thing came to be on his blog. Previously.
posted by smcameron at 1:48 PM PST - 23 comments

Potosí (Silver Mines of Colonial Peru) In 1545, the population of Potosí and its environs stood at around 3,000. Thirty-five years later, in 1580, the numbers had swelled to around 120,000, and by 1650 to around 160,000, making the remote mining center one of the largest urban concentrations in the world. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 1:30 PM PST - 9 comments

As Bethesda is gearing up for the release of a new game in the Fallout franchise, Shamus Young of Twenty Sided considers the writing in Fallout 3. In a five part series, Shamus details the "blistering stupidity" of the concept, the world, the protagonists, the antagonists, and the conclusion. Young has been featured previously on the blue talking about both Skyrim and Star Trek.
posted by codacorolla at 10:15 AM PST - 123 comments

An interview with “America’s Test Kitchen” founder Christopher Kimball on how cooking is like woodworking, the business model behind “Cooks Illustrated,” and the awesome powers of baking soda and gelatin.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:59 AM PST - 73 comments

Peter was surprised to find that vampires actually aren't all that popular, either, as fetishes go. Apparently, they're more of a flash-in-the-pan, while werewolves are a stolid, reliable source of salable smut. "I had assumed that vampires would be popular, but werewolves -- they're the sexy ones. They've been sexy for decades. It's because they're so big and muscley and out of control."

For Cracked, Robert Evans interviews Peter Hayward aka Pandora Box about his career writing female orientated Kindle fetish porn. That is, fetish porn produced for the Kindle, not fetish porn about the Kindle
posted by MartinWisse at 9:00 AM PST - 48 comments

Yesterday, "Surf and Turf" Joey DaSilva slid, slipped, and skipped to the end of a 45-foot-long telephone pole suspended over the water and covered with grease and slop. By grabbing the flag at the end, he became the 2015 Saturday champion of the annual Greasy Pole contest, making him one of the elite crew eligible to compete again on Fiesta Sunday for the rest of his life. It's one of the highlights of the unique St. Peter's Fiesta, an annual festival sponsored by the Italian-American fishing community of Gloucester, MA. The festival is a five-day celebration including a procession of St. Peter's effigy accompanied by bands and Sicilian chants, a Sunday mass on a large outdoor altar, seine boat races, a carnival, food, and drinking - lots of drinking. The annual festival is a defining force in Gloucester's tight-knit community, even as the fishing industry that generated it continues a long decline. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 8:24 AM PST - 6 comments

After more than forty years, humorist and radio personality Garrison Keiller has announced he is stepping down as host of the long-running public radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion. During the 2015-2016 season, Keillor will be phasing himself out and handing over the reins to Chris Thile, best known for his singing and mandolin playing in Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:17 AM PST - 92 comments

ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti is currently living on board the International Space Station for her long duration mission Futura. In this video Samantha shows us how she manages to cook one of her bonus food recipes in microgravity: a quinoa salad with dried tomatoes, mackerel and leek cream, all wrapped in a warm tortilla. [via TwistedSifter]

posted by ellieBOA at 7:21 AM PST - 22 comments

Raw images of Pluto document our progress to the dwarf planet! We are about 15 days away from the close encounter with Pluto. Raw images are being uploaded here, every day. Other information and goodies can be found here.
posted by amy27 at 7:08 AM PST - 46 comments

On the heels of their recent discussion of "Aliens" in their Movie of the Week series, the folks at the Dissolve have put together an impressive list inspired by the last survivor of the Nostromo: "The 50 Most Daring Film Roles For Women Since Ripley"
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:48 AM PST - 53 comments

The Detainee’s Tale by Ali Smith Over the last few weeks, writer Ali Smith has taken part in the Refugee Tales project, a group of volunteers who befriend and support immigration detainees. This is her response:

So: the first thing you remember knowing is that there isn’t any more school. Your mother dies when you are three, you don’t remember. You never see your father, so you can’t remember him. You know, from being told, that your father’s family fought with your mother’s family; his were Hausa, hers were Christian. So you get given by your father’s family to a man in the village and for a short while there’s school under the great big tree, where you sit in the shade on the ground and the teacher sits on a seat and you get taught letters and reading. Then the school has to have money so the man you’ve been given to takes you to the farm. You are six years old. There is definitely no school on the farm.

Story contains descriptions of trauma/distress.
posted by Fizz at 5:27 AM PST - 4 comments

Using a femtosecond laser to create tangible holographic plasma. [SLYT]
posted by Rob Rockets at 3:38 AM PST - 23 comments

Top Of The Pops - The Story 0f 1980 [SLYT]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:09 PM PST - 29 comments

Jack King, voice of Apollo 11, has died. He was 84. King, a former NASA Chief of Public Information and Public Affairs Officer, is remembered for having voiced the commencing countdown of, among hundreds of other NASA launches, perhaps the most famous space launch in human history: the launching of Apollo 11. Named as "the voice of launch control", King's presence and contributions are deeply woven into the beginnings of NASA. Indeed, save for that of Neil Armstrong's, no voice is as indelibly etched in our collective memory of humankind's move to space as Jack King's. Recounting those halcyon days of NASA and the birth of the Space Age, here is one of King's last interviews.
posted by Mike Mongo at 4:38 PM PST - 25 comments

Medical Fat Shaming Could Have Killed Me Sex educator Rebecca Hiles (Frisky Fairy) details the years of being told to lose weight to deal with her persistent cough before doctors finally diagnosed her with lung cancer. Part I of her cancer story.
posted by emjaybee at 3:47 PM PST - 173 comments

A Detailed Look At How ISIS Recruits Young Americans Online [SLNYT]
posted by Itaxpica at 3:26 PM PST - 29 comments

"The only way to play Virtual Boy for any length of time is lying flat on your back with the visor laying on your face and its flimsy stand propped on your chest. Then you just had to hope Teleroboxer didn’t give you eyestrain and nausea-inducing headaches. Outside of kitsch value and the zealous fandom Nintendo inspires, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to play the damn thing 20 years after the fact. When you do, though, there is something unmistakably alluring about Nintendo’s biggest failure. As with a curious stench you can’t stop sniffing, the Virtual Boy is hard to ignore because of how it embodies some of Nintendo’s best qualities. It’s also easy to see how its limited catalog hid some intriguing, forward-thinking ideas about how to make games..." With the Oculus Rift and friends putting virtual reality video games back on the scene and generating buzz, let's take a look back at one of the most beloved, most critically and commercially successful game consoles of all time--and the Virtual Boy. [more inside]
posted by byanyothername at 12:25 PM PST - 33 comments

Explore dead civilizations, write about what you find, and share your stories with the world.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:07 PM PST - 12 comments

a mosquito being hit by a raindrop is roughly the equivalent of a human being whacked by a school bus, the typical bus being about 50 times the mass of a person. And worse, when it’s raining hard, each mosquito should expect to get smacked, grazed, or shoved by a raindrop every 25 seconds. So rain should be dangerous to a mosquito. And yet

why aren't mosquitos hurt or killed by raindrops?
posted by MartinWisse at 8:19 AM PST - 46 comments

This morning a woman named Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole at the South Carolina State Capitol and took down the Confederate flag. [more inside]
posted by orange swan at 7:49 AM PST - 262 comments

Summer Reading Guide [LA Times]

Another summer, another chance to draw up the perfect reading list to see you through those languid, sun-drenched days. Whether you’re stretched out by the pool or nestled in a coffee shop, clutching a hardcover, paperback or e-book, we’ve got more than enough titles to keep you reading through Labor Day.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:10 AM PST - 46 comments

For this weekend only, you can watch the award winning documentary "American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs". "It tells the story of Chinese American and Detroit icon who has spent 70-some years as a writer, activist and philosopher with an eye on social justice and change. The portrait by filmmaker Grace Lee (who is not related) finds Grace Lee Boggs at the forefront of major movements of the past century.." Today, June 27th, 2015, is Grace's 100th birthday.
posted by HuronBob at 3:27 AM PST - 9 comments

Manny is 89 and still building classical guitars. (slvimeo)
posted by bonobothegreat at 9:26 PM PST - 9 comments

Björk has been getting involved with TRI▼ANGLE Records a good bit, after The Haxan Cloak, a notable inclusion on the Tri Angle roster, was involved making Vulnicura, as well as producing a new remix. Back in February, Björk represented Tri Angle on Rinse FM with Holy Other and Celestial Trax, and then in May, she dropped in on Tri Angle's 5th Anniversary/Birthday Party to mix for an hour, and uploaded that set to Soundcloud (if you prefer YouTube, someone uploaded the set in four parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 - set to repeating video recorded from the show). If you'd like some more weirdness for your weekend, Nicolas Jaar recently shared a new, non-syncing version of Pomegranates (previously) as a free download linked through Facebook and Twitter, reposted by Factmag, where you can read some of the extensive liner notes before downloading the file.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:19 PM PST - 8 comments

Hackers was a financial flop, but its hilariously over-the-top early CGI visuals, oddly prescient view on technology, and glam-cyberpunk aesthetic rendered it a cult classic. To honor its 20th anniversary—at a time dogged by newfound fears about what the future of technology holds—we thought it would be fitting to bring together a group of actual hackers to screen and discuss the film. - Hackers watch "Hackers"
posted by Artw at 6:42 PM PST - 86 comments

From the minute the Presidential motorcade pulled away, Marc began recording his reaction to the momentous event that just occurred in his garage. Hear Marc's ongoing reflections in the aftermath as well as a discussion with WTF producer Brendan McDonald about how this happened in the first place. [1h18m] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:47 PM PST - 43 comments

While delivering the eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the South Carolina state senator and pastor who was among those killed at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston last week, Barack Obama sang Amazing Grace (C-Span). From in the congregation. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 5:27 PM PST - 105 comments

"What sorts of things did gay men get up to in the past, and how much did these differ from what we get up to today? Does gay sex have a history, or do the forms of pleasure remain the same across centuries? Have some tastes declined, and new tastes arisen?!" (NSFW for olde style (and slightly hilarious) descriptions of gay sexual activities.) Homosexuality in the ancient Greco-Roman world: "Most of us know that the ancient pagan world was more tolerant of homosexuality than the one god religions that would follow. But how tolerant were the ancient Greeks and Romans? It turns out they weren’t nearly as tolerant as you might like to think." (The next one is a Daily Mail link, but its not their usual fare) "Hidden history of homosexuality: New British Museum guide explores past of gay love hidden among its exhibits."
posted by marienbad at 5:08 PM PST - 29 comments

'Yeti' Crab Grows Its Own Food, Lives in Antarctic Spa There are three known species of yeti crabs, and now, in a new paper, scientists have described the characteristics of one of these species — Kiwa tyleri — for the first time. K. tyleri is the only species of yeti crab known to reside in the Southern Ocean, off Antarctica.
posted by Michele in California at 12:40 PM PST - 13 comments

The Minnesota State Fair has announced the new foods available for 2015. [more inside]
posted by griphus at 10:41 AM PST - 112 comments

Beware, music lovers of a certain age: the time of Uncle Ezra Ray is upon us. Mark McGrath, Kevin Griffin of Better Than Ezra, and Uncle Kracker have joined forces, exploiting the current '90s nostalgia boom to sell us a mid-aughts pop country song. Their debut single "B.Y.H.B. (Bring Your Hot Body)" is out, and God help me, I'm going to listen to the whole thing.

Dave Holmes (previously, previouslier) reviews the debut single from '90s supergroup eldritch abomination Uncle Ezra Ray for Esquire: We've Achieved Peak '90s. [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 10:36 AM PST - 60 comments

Suzy Khimm, The New Republic: The Obama Gap - "Favorable demographics and a charismatic leader aren’t enough to make a majority party. A case study in electoral failure from Florida." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:23 AM PST - 3 comments

“Tim Cook is fighting the sky-high cost of a college education by constructing his own school here without expensive buildings or well-paid deans. Classes are taught in local coffee shops. The administrative staff of two works in a church basement. The Saxifrage School, Mr. Cook's two-year old experiment, is seeking to upend the traditional notion that college students need a sequestered, ivy-covered campus—and will endure the price tag that comes with it. He is gambling that for a nominal tuition—$395 a class—they will use the public library, the neighborhood YMCA and existing apartment buildings to study, play and live in.” [more inside]
posted by switcheroo at 10:13 AM PST - 44 comments

In more innocent days, you could write about cocks and not be misunderstood. Unintentional double entendres.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:56 AM PST - 52 comments

Arts-loving retired baby boomers are hustling to volunteer as museum tour guides—but they sometimes go rogue, touching the art, misstating facts and committing other infractions
posted by almostmanda at 7:19 AM PST - 46 comments

Rape on the Night Shift: Every night, as most of us head home, janitors across America, many of them women, begin their night shift. They are often alone or isolated in empty buildings — and vulnerable to sexual violence. On Tuesday, a PBS Frontline/Reveal investigation explored ways sexual violence against janitors is going unreported and unpunished. All content is SFW, but some may find descriptions in the links in this post disturbing. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:06 AM PST - 10 comments

Jim Obergefell and John Arthur had been together nearly two decades when John was stricken by terminal ALS. With their union unconstitutional in Ohio, the couple turned to friends and family to fund a medical flight to Maryland, where they wed, tearfully, on the tarmac [prev.]. After John's death, however, Jim found himself embroiled in an ugly legal battle with his native state over the right to survivor status on John's death certificate -- a fight he eventually took all the way to the Supreme Court. And that's how this morning -- two years after U.S. v. Windsor, a dozen after Lawrence v. Texas, and at the crest of an unprecedented wave of social change -- the heartbreaking case of Obergefell v. Hodges has at long last rendered same-sex marriage legal nationwide in a 5-4 decision lead by Justice Anthony Kennedy. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 7:03 AM PST - 1225 comments

Krugman battles the Austerians. A little light infotainment for those becoming increasingly frustrated at the counterproductive policies pushed by partisan economists and more disturbingly by whole governments. [more inside]
posted by Beware of the leopard at 6:56 AM PST - 34 comments

"..Research also shows that diverse teams are better at solving complex problems and enjoy more dynamic workplaces. So at Facebook we’re serious about building a workplace that reflects a broad range of experience, thought, geography, age, background, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture and many other characteristics.” Facebook only hired seven black people in latest diversity count.
posted by latkes at 6:32 AM PST - 38 comments

Journalists who work regularly in hostile environments have traditionally belonged to one of two distinct camps. On one side are the staffers, blessed with the relative luxury of a regular pay cheque, proper training and insurance and the financial and logistical back up of a large news organisation. On the other are the freelancers who are able to pick and choose their assignments and sell their material to the highest bidder. [more inside]
posted by Sir Rinse at 6:10 AM PST - 2 comments

The bat-crocodile war. This is real and nature is amazing!
posted by ardgedee at 6:00 AM PST - 11 comments

It’s a story of a Bronx D.J. making his name with a record that began as the soundtrack for a B-movie called “The Thing With Two Heads.” And it suggests that the two most important drummers in rap history might be a guy who spent his career touring behind Neil Diamond and another who played with John Lennon and Eric Clapton before stabbing his mother to death and being committed to a mental hospital.

The DJ was of course Kool Herc, the drummers were King Errisson and Jim Gordon, the record was Bongo Rock and the song everybody now knows from countless hip-hop samples is Apache.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:22 AM PST - 20 comments

Being a teenager can be tough, even if you’re just an average kid dealing with everyday issues and trying to blend in at high school. Being a teenager who is constantly under the microscope and has a ridiculous amount of money, fame and temptations can be quite the experience – good and bad – as well.

posted by ellieBOA at 1:07 AM PST - 6 comments

Not your usual Food Prep short video: To promote the new hot dogs at Norway's Statoil Convenience Stores, they showed how to put one together - using an 8.5 ton excavator.*
BONUS CONTENT: On an Austrian chat show, a demonstration of a better way to open a difficult milk carton... sort of.
*trivial trigger warning: he puts ketchup on the hot dog (which I know some people really hate!)
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:00 AM PST - 17 comments

The Fruit Cutting Championships, a 2008 episode of the TV Tokyo variety show TV Champion 2, complete with commercials. Remarkably entertaining despite the language barrier (due to the visual nature of the competition). Event breakdown/explanation after the fold. [more inside]
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:12 PM PST - 13 comments

Chuck Klosterman with a wide-ranging Billboard article and interview with Eddie Van Halen.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:38 PM PST - 29 comments

Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by a band called Neutral Milk Hotel are the same record. I got nothing to add beyond this is a goddamn beautiful piece of writing and that these two albums stand singular as two of the most extraordinary albums I've ever heard.
posted by maupuia at 8:18 PM PST - 47 comments

"Child actor-turned-maligned-Star-Trek-character-turned-geek-icon Wil Wheaton has been fairly open about his struggles with mental illness and depression. But for those who haven’t heard about that side of his life before, Project UROK spoke with the actor/writer about the way his anxiety affects him and why he eventually chose to seek help. We’re debuting that interview exclusively here on The A.V. Club." By Caroline Siede; direct YouTube link. [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:40 PM PST - 40 comments

“Finding the head is the main scientific result. There’s been lingering controversy about this.” - A new reconstruction of hallucigenia sparsa answers questions about the shape and orientation of the animal, something that was previously so mysterious that scientists in the 70s had it upside down.
posted by Artw at 4:02 PM PST - 28 comments

In Paraguay, there is a special place named Catuera. It is remarkable for several reason, first is that it is the main trash dumping area for the country. The second is that there are about 10,000 people living there, making a living scavenging and reselling parts that they find. Third, they have an amazing orchestra. [more inside]
posted by quin at 3:09 PM PST - 11 comments

Here's what happens when a man eats nothing but food made for women. When I began my exploration of gendered food items, I was hoping for a dramatic payoff.... Instead, I got a pile of cardboard packaging and confirmation of my thesis: marketing something as “for women” -- the pinks and purples, the low-calorie labels, the suggestions that life is just sooooo crazy and women need to take a break with a thumbnail-sized brownie -- is the dumbest gimmick in food marketing.
posted by katie at 2:59 PM PST - 109 comments

You never expect a movie to hurt you. Disappoint? Dismay? Depress? Fine. But when a movie has a field day asserting the humanity of a fake toy bear at the expense of your own, it hurts. I was led to believe, in part by the posters, that I was getting a movie about a character who’d be masturbating or urinating with his back to us. They should’ve turned Ted around since the emissions are aimed at the audience. - Dumber Than Your Average Bear [more inside]
posted by beisny at 2:26 PM PST - 73 comments

When the new TimesMachine re-launched in 2013... it gave those of us interested in design history an additional benefit while perusing each day’s issue. They left the advertisements in. [more inside]
posted by Mchelly at 2:24 PM PST - 3 comments

Patrick Macnee , known for his portrayal of the dapper John Steed in the British TV series The Avengers, has died at the age of 93. [more inside]
posted by Gelatin at 11:59 AM PST - 89 comments

"One of the most terrifying things that ever happened to me is that Keith Moon decided he liked me." Life's Been Good, the Spoken Word Version, by Joe Walsh (SLYT)
posted by bondcliff at 11:45 AM PST - 25 comments

JK Rowling reveals why the Dursleys dislike Harry Potter so much. [The Guardian]

Some readers, Rowling writes, “wanted more from Aunt Petunia during this farewell”. At the start of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry leaves his family behind for good - his cousin Dudley shakes his hand, his uncle Vernon roars “I thought we were on a tight schedule”, and his aunt gives him a final look. Rowling writes in the novel that “for a moment Harry had the strangest feeling that she wanted to say something to him: she gave him an odd, tremulous look and seemed to teeter on the edge of speech, but then, with a little jerk of her head, she bustled out of the room after her husband and son.”

Previously. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:30 AM PST - 183 comments

Neurologists have coined the word "aphantasia" to describe the condition of being unable to form visual mental images, publishing a study (nonpaywalled draft) of individuals with congenital aphantasia after first encountering a subject who described a sudden onset of the condition after an unrelated medical procedure. But how reliable is self-reported introspective data anyway?
posted by yarrow at 11:29 AM PST - 65 comments

Troll Detective: Who set Jessica Chambers on fire? The internet is trying to find out.
Six months ago, a teenager was burned alive in a tiny Mississippi town. Police say they still don’t know who killed her or why, leaving the mystery in the hands of amateur online sleuths who may be doing more harm than good. When does a private tragedy become a public pastime?

Background: Jessica Chambers case: Six months later
posted by andoatnp at 10:59 AM PST - 19 comments

Can Politico make Brussels sexy?

In other words, the appetite for Politico in DC existed before Politico did. The audience for a digital-first gossip-mongering Brussels-based Anglophone pan-European publication does not yet exist, and each one of those constitutive elements presents its own problem. Continental Europeans are not used to a headlong online media culture of breaking news. They remain much more committed than Americans to a separation of serious reportage and entertainment, and they are more inclined to doubt the journalistic value of moral scandal. They view Brussels as, at best, a grey backwater of minor trade quarrels and, at worst, an abscess of smug antidemocratic technocrats bloated with regulatory power. And, finally, there’s the question of whether a “pan-European” outlook can even be said to exist.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:13 AM PST - 15 comments

Inspired by Dwarf Fortress and No Man's Sky, Josh Newland writes about procedural generation of game worlds at Gamasutra and presents his Unity/WebGL game project.
posted by boo_radley at 9:20 AM PST - 15 comments

Jennicet Gutiérrez writes for the Washington Blade on being removed from the White House last night after interrupting President Obama's speech during an LGBT Pride celebration. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:06 AM PST - 160 comments

Real dogs pranked by fake dog (SLYT)
posted by griphus at 8:56 AM PST - 20 comments

The US Supreme Court upholds subsidies on the federal exchanges in King v. Burwell in a 6-3 ruling written by the Chief Justice Roberts. Rejecting Chevron deference, the court decided that Congress actually intended for the federal exchanges to work like the state exchanges.
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:38 AM PST - 298 comments

Bobby Jindal kicked off his 2016 presidential bid yesterday by informing his children first. SLYT
posted by Xurando at 7:27 AM PST - 102 comments

Tama, the feline station master and mascot of Kishi Station, has passed away at the age of 16. [more inside]
posted by Metroid Baby at 7:02 AM PST - 37 comments

How Minions Destroyed the Internet
posted by almostmanda at 5:51 AM PST - 139 comments

Shodo Performance Koshien is an annual competition, held in Ehime, of massive-scale Japanese calligraphy performed live by teams of high school students. (The videos with two-digit numbers in their titles are actual performances.) This year's will be held in Shikokuchuo-shi, Ehime, on July 26. Interested in trying it yourself, but don't feel like breaking the bank on an enormous horsehair brush? Try using a modified mop!
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:10 PM PST - 5 comments

Action Man: Battlefield Casualties is a disturbing spoof toy commercial in a campaign by Veterans for Peace UK to raise the military recruitment age from 16 to 18. Warning: autoplaying video with graphic violence.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:04 PM PST - 18 comments

For PC gamers, the launch of a new AAA game is always occasion to wonder whether the port will be wonderful or agonizing. Some games have needed end-user modding to fix issues that developers ignored, with some games seeing truly heroic efforts from the community. But just as thing seemed to be getting a bit better, Warner Brothers and Rocksteady released Arkham Knight, a game with such serious technical issues (and harsh user reviews) that they have been forced to take the almost unprecedented step of suspending sales on Steam after launch.
posted by selfnoise at 7:35 PM PST - 142 comments

"Inside Out does well when it comes to the interplay of memory and emotion, but the memory basics are a bit misleading." - Jennifer Talarico, Gizmodo
Science Of Sadness And Joy: 'Inside Out' Gets Childhood Emotions Right - NPR
8 Things Inside Out Teaches Viewers About Emotions, Memory and the Mind - Ashley Lee, Time
Inside Out Nails the Science of How Our Memories Function - Alice Robb, Vulture
See also: FanFare
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:27 PM PST - 55 comments

The New Yorker has a profile of Sen. Diane Feinstein and her role in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence "torture report" -- including her conflict with CIA Director John Brennan over his spying on the committee's staff.

I asked [Feinstein] whether she was disappointed in Obama’s lack of support for the torture report. She paused, and replied, “Well, let me say that there are people who don’t want to look at the whole truth. And I don’t know whether the President read our report or not. I certainly haven’t heard from him since.”

posted by grobstein at 5:58 PM PST - 8 comments

From Archive.org: "The A/V Geeks Film Archive is an ephemeral film collection curated by Skip Elsheimer. What started as a hobby more than ten years is now a lifetime commitment. His collection has grown to over 24,000 films gathered from school auctions, thrift stores, closets and dumpsters." Includes such hits as "Wink Martindale Talks about "Year 1999 AD"! Disney's "VD--Attack Plan"! DoD's "Red Nightmare"! [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:27 PM PST - 9 comments

It’s nothing more than “they’re doing that thing right now that I saw that other time.”
posted by Alterity at 5:19 PM PST - 78 comments

In the weeks after the Broaddus family purchased their dream home in Westfield, New Jersey they began to receive mysterious, threatening correspondences from a stranger calling themself "The Watcher". The stranger claims a special connection to the house, which has "been the subject of [their] family for decades." The letters went on to claim of a secret buried within the walls of the house, and that a "second coming" was imminent given an infusion of "young blood". The letters also claim that the sender was familiar with the previous owners of the home, and after some digging, the Broaddus family believes that to be true. They are now suing the former inhabitants for withholding this information during the sale of the house. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 3:15 PM PST - 94 comments

How and why we're running out of helium.
posted by Chrysostom at 2:12 PM PST - 51 comments

A lot of people were intrigued when Venus announced their 15mm ultra-wide macro lens the other day (sample images and video), but ultra-wide macros are possible with any wide angle or ultra-wide lens and a thin extension tube. Clay Bolt and Paul Harcourt Davies have been doing it (very well) for quite a while. They even authored a beautiful (and inexpensive) 93 page eBook on the subject. More sites for information & inspiration? LearnMacro.com ||| Wide Angle Macro Photography Close-ups with Impact (part 1) ||| Part 2 ||| Part 3 ||| The Art of Wide Angle Macro Photography by Shawn Miller ||| [more inside]
posted by spock at 1:37 PM PST - 14 comments

Traumprinz, Prince of Denmark, and DJ Metatron are three pseudonyms used by the most prolific artist on the esteemed, niche record label Giegling, which specializes in vinyl-only releases of melancholic deep house, tech house, and dub techno. In addition to singles, Traumprinz has released a number of free mixes of mostly original compositions that epitomize the Giegling sound and are a perfect accompaniment to your day if you things downtempo, melodic, and chill-outable:

• This is not… DJ Metatron (2015)
• Traumprinz Live at Sender Geibel (2014), Resident Advisor Podcast #387 (“I like the idea of sehnsuchtsorte, a desirable place that only exists in our fantasy,” 2013), This is not… Traumprinz (2012)
• Prince of Denmark Live at Planet Uterus (2014), Little White Earbuds Podcast #152 (2014), Smoke Machine Podcast #90 (2013), and This is not… Prince of Denmark (2012).

[more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 11:35 AM PST - 6 comments

19 years after releasing underrated space-rock masterpiece Fantastic Planet, Failure have returned with The Heart Is a Monster, due out June 30th and streaming now.
posted by Existential Dread at 11:24 AM PST - 14 comments

EL-P of Run The Jewels Interview With Mark Kozelek [Interview took place March 14, 2015]
posted by Fizz at 11:20 AM PST - 10 comments

For less than €3 per campaign, I’m able to get right in front of recruiters, drive them to my website and show them that I can be creative with a tool used in the day to day life of an internet marketer. [more inside]
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:51 AM PST - 24 comments

Class, Capitalism and the Tech Industry
posted by kenko at 10:22 AM PST - 49 comments

It’s stronger than heroin and more potent than OxyContin. It’s also cheap, ubiquitous, and incredibly deadly. Inside the rise of fentanyl. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:09 AM PST - 89 comments

Senate passes TPP fast track The Senate is expected to vote today to give President Obama "fast-track" authority to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal through Congress. The secretive deal involves 12 countries and nearly 40 percent of the global economy. It has come under heavy criticism from labor activists claiming it as one of the harmful bills against labor, environmental, and intellectual property rights.
posted by bodywithoutorgans at 10:01 AM PST - 61 comments

“I have a love of ships. What can I say? They transport food around the planet.” That is a quote from “Grey,” the “Fifty Shades of Grey” book told from Christian’s perspective, but it could equally describe how New Hampshire came up with its state flag.

Every state flag is wrong, and here's why.
posted by jenkinsEar at 9:51 AM PST - 113 comments

Through June 28th you can visit sitcom character Jerry Seinfeld's apartment (ca. season 8) in NYC.
posted by griphus at 8:35 AM PST - 55 comments

21 Things Only 1590s Kids Will Understand!
posted by The Whelk at 8:11 AM PST - 35 comments

A case against "glamping". Unless you are for glamping (especially during music festival season). [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:00 AM PST - 93 comments

This years proposed Worldcon rule changes included one introducing a new Hugo Award, for Best Saga:

A work of science fiction or fantasy appearing in multiple volumes and consisting of at least 400,000 words of which the latest part was published in the previous calendar year.

Initially the new award was coupled with the removal of an old one: Best Novellete. This raised some objections and that part of the proposal was removed. What would the winners of Best Saga Award look like? Brandon Kempner tries modeling it based on The Locus Awards and Goodreads.
posted by Artw at 6:58 AM PST - 93 comments

You're arrested for murder. You didn't do it. But your DNA was found on the dead man's finger. How could that happen? The Surprisingly Imperfect Science of DNA Testing: How a proven tool may be anything but. A longform story by Katie Worth, produced by Frontline, Fusion, and The Marshall Project.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 6:46 AM PST - 12 comments

A hoverboard. The size of a skateboard. Lexus (!) says it works.
posted by jfuller at 6:15 AM PST - 39 comments

Travel is supposed to make us feel more alive so why is the hotel room a place of such loneliness and despair?
posted by ellieBOA at 5:48 AM PST - 42 comments

I have always been drawn to the women who can arouse this kind of vitriol. The kind of hate that seems too big and billowing to be directed at just one woman, the kind that seems like a person or an entire society is vomiting out all its misogyny onto one convenient scapegoat. At some point — after successive Joan of Arc and Courtney Love phases — I started to see this position of feminine abjectness as a kind of superpower. A position from which a woman could offend far more deeply than a man.

Lindsay Zoladz: Yoko Ono and the Myth That Deserves to Die.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:23 AM PST - 96 comments

The man who sleeps in Hitler’s bed Wheatcroft is now 55, and according to the Sunday Times Rich List, worth £120m... The ruling passion of his life, though, is what he calls the Wheatcroft Collection – widely regarded as the world’s largest accumulation of German military vehicles and Nazi memorabilia.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:54 AM PST - 42 comments

Whether you like his stand-up or his HBO show or not, you may appreciate Bill Maher's matter-of-fact laying out of US politics during this Q&A at the Oxford Union Society. [58m]
posted by hippybear at 3:44 AM PST - 39 comments

SLYT: WORLD CHAMPION RC Helicopter pilot Demonstrates his Awesome Skills
posted by TrinsicWS at 12:19 AM PST - 23 comments

Dan Nosowitz, Stanford linguist Penelope Eckert, UCSB linguist Robert Kennedy, and Lookout! Records owner Christopher Appelgren each attempt to explain Tom DeLonge's singing accent and how it may have evolved.
posted by Copronymus at 10:37 PM PST - 35 comments

François Hollande calls emergency meeting after WikiLeaks claims US spied on three French presidents. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 9:19 PM PST - 59 comments

Max the cockatoo hates his !@&!?#$%# carrier. Max does not want to get his !@#?^*! nails clipped. Not the !@$(^#$%@! carrier again! Max will tell you exactly what he thinks about his @%!?@!?*! cage. [more inside]
posted by Kat Allison at 6:56 PM PST - 38 comments

23 Games from E3 2015 with Badass Playable Female Characters - Sam Maggs for The Mary Sue
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:58 PM PST - 41 comments

Watch the joy in this little boy's face when he realizes....
posted by pjern at 5:17 PM PST - 28 comments

Richard Siken (previously) published his second book of poetry, War of the Foxes, in April. Supernatural fans thought it was fanfic - specifically Wincest - and have used many lines to fuel their own slash. Meanwhile, Siken himself has become involved in Sherlock slash. The Awl's Adam Carlson interviews Siken about all this and more, including I Can Haz Siken.
posted by Athanassiel at 5:14 PM PST - 14 comments

The U.S. government will no longer threaten to prosecute families who try to pay ransom to win the release of American hostages held overseas, and the United States will directly negotiate with militants holding them but will not pay ransom, officials said on Tuesday. The change is one of many that are intended to fix what the administration has acknowledged is a broken policy on United States captives, a senior administration official said.
posted by Sir Rinse at 2:23 PM PST - 32 comments

As with anything in this world, excess is excess, but inadequate is inadequate. A writer must know when the weight of the words used to describe a scene is bearing down on the scene itself. A writer should develop the measuring tape to know when to describe characters' thoughts in long sentences and when not to. But a writer, above all, should aim to achieve artistry with language which, like the painter, is the only canvas we have. Writers should realize that the novels that are remembered, that become monuments, would in fact be those which err on the side of audacious prose, that occasionally allow excess rather than those which package a story — no matter how affecting — in inadequate prose.

Chigozie Obioma for The Millions: The Audacity of Prose.
posted by divined by radio at 2:22 PM PST - 9 comments

The 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) report, submitted to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, makes a historic change: for the first time since 1980, the report no longer recommends the restriction of dietary cholesterol nor of total dietary fat. An article published today in JAMA calls on HHS and USDA to heed the DGAC report. The article goes on to praise the report's new emphasis: reducing consumption of sugar and refined carbohydrates, and increasing consumption of whole foods (even those high in fats).
posted by overeducated_alligator at 1:52 PM PST - 121 comments

The Most Metal Deaths in Middle-earth, Ranked
posted by Chrysostom at 1:14 PM PST - 43 comments

The VICE Oral History of Dubstep
posted by azarbayejani at 12:15 PM PST - 40 comments

Reddit, the other front page of the internet, turned 10 today (best comment on the anniversary "We made it 10 years without drama!") and celebrated with a look back. It addition to the most liked posts, it also revealed some other interesting posts and replies. Some of the most gilded ever are well-written responses to Reddit's/the Internet's own problems (links go to responses, not topics): attacks on PUAs/MRAs, racism, and jokes about Asians. Of course, more true to popular form, the most gilded ever are about League of Legends and a NSFW thread that combines pranks with too much homophobic subtext. The most saved threads on Reddit tell you how to get free things on the internet, how to study, and where to go before you die. And, of course, there are good old standbys like "what is the best picture on the internet" and "what gif reduces you to laughter every time." Reddit now faces many challenges for its next 10 years.
posted by blahblahblah at 12:02 PM PST - 69 comments

Better late than never? John Oliver's roughly 16-minute take on online harassment features a 20-year-old AOL commercial, a reworked version of the commercial at the end, and the news (to some of us) that victims of revenge porn may be forced to send pictures of their bodies to the US copyright office in order to get the porn taken down. Oliver's Bing joke occurs at about 13:35.
posted by Bella Donna at 11:58 AM PST - 57 comments

'The Brothers Chaps', creators of the web's iconic Homestar Runner, have been doing odd jobs for Disney's TV toons lately (on "New Mickey Mouse" shorts, "Gravity Falls," "Wander Over Yonder," and "Star vs. The Forces of Evil") and have just begun a series of shorts for the Disney XD website and YouTube Channel: "Two More Eggs (Tuesdays)": Trailer, Introducing Dooble Dooblie Doo, Introducing CGI Palz and a word from a sponsor: Hot Dip: Not For Momz! Not Strongbad, but still part of an absurdist breakfast. (About)
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:19 AM PST - 17 comments

Everyone has that one friend, the one you meet in college before you’re better at choosing friends. The one friend who’s simultaneously fun and exciting and overwhelming and unreliable. Jen is my flaky friend.
...
Once she wore an eyepatch for a month. Never explained why. Classic Jen.

She was a good friend, but her friendship was always a one-way street. She’d call you on the phone, or send you an email, or slip a letter into your shopping bag without you noticing. Inviting her places was a crapshoot; either she wouldn’t show or she would crawl in through the window hours after everybody else had left. Sometimes I wouldn’t hear from her for weeks, and then bam! She’d call me out of the blue to say I’ve got two tickets to the summer opening of the MoMa, do you wanna go? I’d always say yes, partly for the free stuff, and partly to hear her say You’re such a good friend.

It was flaky, but it was friendship. But even friendship has limits. [via mefi projects]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:59 AM PST - 96 comments

What Happened, Miss Simone? [YouTube] [Trailer] Helmed by Oscar-nominated director Liz Garbus (Bobby Fischer Against the World, Killing in the Name), the fully authorized doc incorporates concert footage, archival material, and interviews taking place over three decades. The movie will be available on Netflix June 26. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:16 AM PST - 15 comments

The Green Party's Jill Stein announces her presidential candidacy. She is running as a third-party candidate.
posted by the_blizz at 9:10 AM PST - 105 comments

Creature rises from the deep, befriends children [2] [3]. For several years, chuchos negros have been visiting the small fishing town of San Sebastián de la Gomera, Canary Islands (original article in Spanish). [more inside]
posted by elgilito at 6:13 AM PST - 30 comments

About seven months after pulling her music from Spotify due to low royalties (previously), Taylor Swift posted a note to her Tumblr asking Apple to pay royalties for songs streamed during the free trial of its upcoming Apple Music service. Within 24 hours, Apple agreed.
posted by almostmanda at 6:00 AM PST - 196 comments

Calabrese was using what have become the four principles of procedural justice: first, that people who come before a judge trust that the process is impartial; second, that they are treated with respect; third, that they understand what is going on and what they are expected to do; fourth, that they have a voice. Defendants find the procedure fairer when they are allowed to state their views. Experimental evidence shows that this is true even when they are allowed to speak only after the judge has announced their decision. No one likes to lose a court case. But people accept losing more willingly if they believe the procedures used to handle their case are fair.

How Newark and Red Hook are trying out this one simple trick that could transform US criminal courts for the better.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:54 AM PST - 20 comments

Academy Award-winning composer James Horner died in a plane crash Monday. He was known for the scores to Titanic (the soundtrack for which sold 27 million copies), Braveheart, Apollo 13, and A Beautiful Mind among many others. [more inside]
posted by zachlipton at 12:07 AM PST - 84 comments

Downstairs in a house are three identical on-off switches. One of them controls the lamp in the attic. The puzzle is to work out which switch controls the lamp. The rules are as follows. You are allowed to manipulate the switches all you like, and then you are allowed a single trip to the attic. How do you do it?
posted by growabrain at 6:47 PM PST - 364 comments

Charcoal has become the hot new flavouring in everything from cocktails to meat and mash See also: BURN YOUR FOOD , "Chefs all over the U.S. are bringing the grill indoors with charcoal infusions, vegetable ash, and more creative techniques for getting smoky, charred flavor". Chef Adam Perry Lang's recipe for "Charcoal Salt" from his book "Charred and Scruffed" (reviews) and an "improved" version of the recipe on Instructables.
posted by spock at 6:47 PM PST - 64 comments

"In keeping with James Joyce’s own love of lists, here’s a terribly subjective list of ten books published in this century that are in different ways as inventive as Ulysses was in 1922. These novels aren’t necessarily inspired by Ulysses, except insofar as it has affected every subsequent novel, but like Joyce’s masterpiece they challenge us in ways we never knew to expect. If nothing else, Bloomsday should remind us to pick up some books not despite their difficulty but because of it." (Electric Literature) [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:46 PM PST - 32 comments

RIP, Jobst Brandt. Brandt established a reputation among cyclists first with his book The Bicycle Wheel, later with his promotion of slick-treaded clincher tires for road bikes, and finally with his presence on Usenet, where he and Sheldon Brown (RIP) were the Pillars of Hercules of technical knowledge about bikes, with Brown on the east coast and Brandt on the west, Brown with his jovial personality, and Brandt with what can euphemistically be described as an insistence on intellectual rigor.
posted by adamrice at 4:12 PM PST - 25 comments

David Lebovitz visits the Le Creuset factory in Fresnoy-le-Grand, France.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 3:53 PM PST - 45 comments

The Blog at Improbable Research reports that Don Featherstone, inventor of the iconic plastic lawn flamingo has died. [more inside]
posted by rmd1023 at 3:46 PM PST - 16 comments

Gunther Schuller passed away yesterday. [more inside]
posted by cleroy at 3:17 PM PST - 16 comments

"The spirit of the 60s lives in these trailers, leaning hard on mood and music, not plot. The same is true for the Godfather trailer, as Coppola gives audiences a peak into the Corleone family.

However, the closer Hollywood gets to the age of the blockbuster, the more the modern trailer starts to reveal itself, and it all starts with Jaws -- the film phenomenon of the summer of 1975. [ ... ] It introduced something new to trailers: relying almost entirely on the narrative of the film to advertise it. In 3 minutes and 21 seconds, the entire story arc of the film, save for the ending, is given away. There’s a shark terrorizing the beach on the 4th of July, it’s up to a local sheriff to take care of it, and he teams with a scientist and a fisherman to get the job done."

-- An epic history of the movie trailer, by Matthew Schimkowitz
posted by Room 641-A at 2:09 PM PST - 16 comments

Gaming Your Brain - How to top the leaderboard of Clash of Clans, and how Freemium games rake in billions of dollars from their players.
posted by Artw at 2:01 PM PST - 77 comments

A Linguist Explains How We Write Sarcasm on the Internet (SLTheToast)
posted by NoraReed at 1:32 PM PST - 64 comments

She's such a bitch. The Oral History of Juliana Hatfield Three’s ‘My Sister’ [more inside]
posted by easter queen at 1:08 PM PST - 16 comments

Prison Born. What becomes of babies born to mothers behind bars? Research suggests that having nurseries in prisons leads to lower recidivism rates among incarcerated mothers and better outcomes for their children.
posted by blue_beetle at 12:59 PM PST - 13 comments

What is feminism? Bridget Christie tells you everything you need to know.
posted by howfar at 12:23 PM PST - 15 comments

Euthanasia for psychiatric patients was rare in the early years of the law, but patients complained that they were being unfairly stigmatized: psychic suffering, they argued, was just as unbearable as physical pain. Like cancer patients, they were subjected to futile treatments that diminished their quality of life. Dirk De Wachter, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Leuven and the president of the ethics commission for the university's psychiatric center, said that he reconsidered his opposition to euthanasia after a patient whose request he had rejected committed suicide. In 2004, she set up a camera in front of a newspaper office in Antwerp and set herself on fire.

Rachel Aviv traveled to Belgium, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002, to report on the complications and consequences that surround the practice of assisted suicide and euthanasia for psychiatric patients: The Death Treatment.
posted by divined by radio at 12:07 PM PST - 48 comments

One of my favourite Twitter accounts is the frustrating and important @AfAmHistFail, run by an anonymous (for obvious reasons) docent who gives slavery presentations at a historical plantation. She shares the ups and downs of her job, the struggles to keep composure in the face of racist questions and monologues, and the difficulty of puncturing the romanticization of the antebellum South. She was kind enough to answer some questions for us.
posted by DynamiteToast at 11:35 AM PST - 67 comments

Start-up Costs: ‘Silicon Valley,’ ‘Halt and Catch Fire,’ and How Microserfdom Ate the World

Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs is about the spiritual yearnings and time-frittering activities of youngish coders immersed in the drudgery of the software-development process, and how those activities become an expression of those yearnings. It was published 20 years ago this month, which as far as I’m aware makes it the earliest significant stab by a fiction writer at the Great North American Tech-Company/Start-up Novel. It predates Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, Dave Eggers’s The Circle, numerous other neuroman-à-clefs, score-settling pseudomemoirs and murder-dot-com whodunits,1 as well as tech-sector TV shows like Silicon Valley and Halt and Catch Fire, serials that pick up where the novels leave off.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:43 AM PST - 72 comments

Your lost airline luggage probably ended up at this store You might think that, for such a big store to remain full, there must be an epidemic of lost luggage, but actually just 0.5% of all bags don’t make their way to the baggage carousel [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 9:36 AM PST - 57 comments

Erwin Wurm just received a parking ticket in the city of Karlsruhe. Nothing to write home about, except for the fact that the offending object was one of his artworks. Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has become famous for bending, inflating and twisting cars, trucks and camper-vans in the name of art.
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:26 AM PST - 5 comments

Partick Thistle Unveil New Mascot
posted by alby at 8:38 AM PST - 49 comments

If we regard the Earth as nothing more than a source of resources and a sink for our pollution, if we value other species only in terms of what they can provide to us, then we we will continue to unpick the fabric of life. [more inside]
posted by j03 at 8:19 AM PST - 113 comments

To be thirteen, with a surfboard, in Hawaii.
posted by ellieBOA at 7:08 AM PST - 17 comments

Mrs. Nguyen’s Prestidigitation From a set of 1 through 9 playing cards, I draw five cards and get cards showing 8, 4, 2, 7, and 5. I ask my 6th graders to make a 3-digit number and a 2-digit number that would yield the greatest product... and somehow we end up with lacing diagrams and Python. (The original post on Fawn Nguyen's blog)
posted by Wolfdog at 6:45 AM PST - 18 comments

Svetlana Kapanina does aerobatics (Wikipedia).
posted by elgilito at 5:46 AM PST - 36 comments

Always check your aircraft for cats before takeoff. SLYT
posted by the duck by the oboe at 11:43 PM PST - 90 comments

After reading about the DJ-Kicks series earlier tonight I thought it would be appropriate to talk about a related series: Late Night Tales and its predecessor Another Late Night. [more inside]
posted by ashbury at 10:32 PM PST - 7 comments

Charlie Cox plays the blind superhero Daredevil in the Netflix show of the same name. He has received the 19th Helen Keller Achievement Award from the American Foundation for the Blind. Daredevil is Netflix first show to have have audio descriptions.
posted by adept256 at 9:59 PM PST - 26 comments

Phil Austin has left the bus.
posted by HuronBob at 7:13 PM PST - 41 comments

NPR Ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen says her job brings her "one reliable source of joy: the Monday morning email—there's at least one each week—from a listener outraged by whatever bad taste joke Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! has told on its latest episode." But last week's Monday morning email came in droves, because WWDTM's bad taste joke for the weekend of June 13th was having Kim Kardashian West on the show. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 5:02 PM PST - 307 comments

"Allow us to raise your spirits with a story about the liberating and energizing effects of complete commercial failure." After 12 years, and following the release last month of their critically acclaimed game Sunset, videogame creators Tale of Tales are closing shop.
posted by jokeefe at 4:23 PM PST - 43 comments

Still mourning the loss of walmart.horse? Well, the hot new whimsical mix of corporate identity and new TLDs is mcdonalds.hiphop, which serves up a YouTube playlist of hiphop/rap-themed McDonalds commercials going back 30 years and including non-U.S. content from the UK, Israel, France, Czech Republic, India, Russia and South Africa. From the same merry prankster who brought us nytimes.cat, which got C&D'd in record time, this one has survived a whole week so far (and with some publicity; thanks Mental Floss). But then, Mickey D's has a hiphop history that goes beyond commercials.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:44 PM PST - 11 comments

Just an hour North of NYC there's a nice little hike to be had up the Timp-Torne Trail to the top of Dunderberg Mountain. This is the best way to view the remains of the Dunderberg Spiral Railway. [more inside]
posted by Admiral Viceroy at 3:15 PM PST - 4 comments

Scan of mummified body of Swedish bishop reveals baby hidden in coffin. [The Guardian]

For almost 350 years Bishop Peder Winstrup lay quietly in his coffin in the crypt of the magnificent cathedral at Lund in Sweden, concealing a secret: the body of a tiny baby, tucked in under his feet. The little corpse, believed to be of a baby born several months prematurely, was revealed for the first time when scientists scanned the coffin and the mummified body of Peder Winstrup, believed to be one of the best preserved 17th-century bodies in Europe.

posted by Fizz at 3:02 PM PST - 27 comments

'Star Trek': The Story of the Most Daring Cliffhanger in 'Next Generation' History To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the original airing of the classic cliffhanger, Ron Moore, Jonathan Frakes and more reveal how writing themselves into a corner for "Best of Both Worlds" changed Trek forever: "All of us were quite thrilled they had the balls to leave Picard on the Borg cube."
posted by Servo5678 at 1:59 PM PST - 85 comments

The DJ-Kicks series was born in Berlin in 1995, and lays claim to the title of the first officially licensed DJ mix series available commercially. In the 20 years since it started, the series has covered house and techno, drum'n'bass and downtempo, and genres without convenient names, put together by musical monuments like Carl Craig, Thievery Corporation, and Four Tet to relative newcomers like Gold Panda and Maya Jane Coles. Besides the expected DJs and producers, the series also includes Daddy G (of Massive Attack) in a rare solo effort, pulling out unreleased dubplates for his mix, and Erlend Øye (of Kings of Convenience and The Whitest Boy Alive) providing his own a capella additions to the mix. For the 50th release, the series comes back to Germany with DJ Koze, bringing you his version of a "modern party mix." That's a lot of words about music, so let's hear it already! [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:29 PM PST - 41 comments

A Sea Change in Treating Heart Attacks (NYT) Dr. Mahesh Bikkina, the director of the cardiac catheterization laboratory at St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Paterson, N.J., tells his trainees about the old days: heart muscles that tore, with blood leaking out of holes, and valves that ruptured, leading to sudden death if not repaired immediately with open-heart surgery. “I tell them you will read about these things in textbooks,” Dr. Bikkina said.“You will almost never see them.”
posted by CrystalDave at 12:07 PM PST - 14 comments

Bizarre. Floral. Witty. Futuristic. Avian. Not just for women, either. The hats of Royal Ascot 2015 are stunning works of millinery art. Just the Ladies Day pictures (cute). [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:55 AM PST - 11 comments

Mother rabbit defends her bunnies from a snake. Relentlessly. [slyt]
posted by quin at 11:02 AM PST - 42 comments

"We set a few rules. The ties had to be worn all day. There would be no hiding under sweaters. And they had to be worn in order. I’d work my way down from the top layer to the bottom, taking what the box gave me, regardless of the day’s events. Also, there’d be no excuses or explanations. If asked about a tie that was as wide as a flapjack, I could say only, “It was my father’s.”"
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:57 AM PST - 29 comments

The Other Wounds - "Most Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ injuries didn’t occur during combat. But their ailments have become an enduring consequence of the conflicts." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:37 AM PST - 6 comments

Can any mortal control this foul, pulsating orifice? Stewart Lee on Top Gear by way of HP Lovecraft. Stewart Lee previously on Top Gear
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:41 AM PST - 47 comments

"A design so commonplace you've never thought about it. It's just there. When you ask if you can get some water...when you opt for the combo meal...when you're given a drink in the hospital." That teal-and-purple brushstroke combination that you've seen thousands of times since the early 90s has a designer, and her name is Gina Ekiss. A mystery launched on Reddit, solved by Thomas Gounley of the Springfield News Leader.
posted by How the runs scored at 8:19 AM PST - 54 comments

Thousands of people gathered at Stonehenge this year for the summer solstice.
posted by Sir Rinse at 7:30 AM PST - 13 comments

Bob Moran ("BOB"), the political cartoonist for the Saturday and Sunday Telegraph (e.g., 1, 2, more) had an unexpected journey into fatherhood. A beautiful and touching animated memoir for Father's day.
posted by RedOrGreen at 5:55 AM PST - 9 comments

Beatrix Potter, frustrated mycologist [more inside]
posted by bq at 10:58 PM PST - 7 comments

What F1 Cars Would Look Like if F1 Got Its Act Together
posted by Artw at 9:45 PM PST - 83 comments

The family dog is going to die. From 1999 through 2006 Sony produced Aibo, a robotic dog which while not a true artificial intelligence was artfully crafted to inspire feelings of love and affection in its human owners. Sony stopped producing Aibo in 2006 (previously) but kept up a repair service until last year. Now that parts are getting scarce and Sony isn't fixing them any more, Aibo owners are dealing with new feelings for their robotic pals -- grief and loss.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:02 PM PST - 90 comments

San Francisco City Hall peacocks for its birthday (SLYT) in front of tens of thousands, including the US Conference of Mayors. The projection system will be a permanent donation, complimenting its elaborate LED lighting, used to celebrate holidays, Pride Month, sports victories, etc. The building was completed in time for 1915's Panama Pacific Exposition, and features the 5th largest classical dome in the world, surpassing the US Capitol. A retrofit made it the world's largest base-isolated building, while the grand dome was restored with $500,000 worth of gold foil. The new lighting, combined with the Bay Lights and other projects, have prompted discussion about creating an annual festival of lights.
posted by markkraft at 5:46 PM PST - 11 comments

Here is a list of selected readings that educators can use to broach conversations in the classroom about the horrendous events that unfolded in Charleston, South Carolina this week. These readings provide valuable information about the history of racial violence in this country and contextualize the history of race relations in South Carolina and the United States in general. They also offer insights on race, racial identities, global white supremacy and black resistance. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 3:19 PM PST - 18 comments

Back in the 1980s (and well before), many "serious social critics" in the West decried the influence of popular music as "degenerate", promoting sex, violence and even Communism, right? Well, the Commies/Soviets didn't like them much either, as demonstrated by this 1985 list from Komsomol (aka the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League) of 38 Western music acts with their "types of propaganda". [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:17 PM PST - 71 comments

"I found this song I started working on last year before I started hormones, and I decided to sing a duet with my Pre T self." [more inside]
posted by heatherann at 3:08 PM PST - 30 comments

Mr. and Mrs. B. As a young man, writer Alexander Chee served as a waiter in the house of the William F. Buckleys, and recalls the genteel madness of the Upper East Side.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:53 PM PST - 38 comments

James Salter, a ‘Writer’s Writer’ Short on Sales but Long on Acclaim, Dies at 90 [New York Times]

James Salter, whose intimately detailed novels and short stories kept a small but devoted audience in his thrall for more than half a century, died on Friday in Sag Harbor, N.Y. He was 90. His wife, Kay Eldredge, confirmed his death, saying he had been at a physical therapy session. He lived in Bridgehampton, N.Y. Mr. Salter wrote slowly, exactingly and, by almost every critic’s estimation, beautifully. Michael Dirda once observed in The Washington Post that “he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence.”

Previously. Previously.
posted by Fizz at 1:15 PM PST - 13 comments

"He sent me long emails about how I was a tool of the devil. I pictured him with two computer screens open — one for looking up scripture, and another to Mapquest the location of his next bathroom rendezvous. We were never going to have the cool kind of gay dad." Why I Answered My Dad's Gay Sex Ad by Aussa Lorens
posted by The Whelk at 1:12 PM PST - 83 comments

Duran Duran presents Pressure Off, featuring Janelle Monáe and Nile Rodgers, their first single in four years.
posted by hippybear at 1:11 PM PST - 18 comments

SNUB-TV was an alternative music TV show that began life in 1987 as part of Night Flight on the USA Network. It was subsequently picked up by the BBC, and ran for three seasons (1989-91) as part of Janet Street-Porter’s DEF II ‘Youth TV’ strand. A diligent YouTube user has compiled a playlist of 64 SNUB-TV clips, featuring artists such as The Cure, The Sugarcubes, Fugazi, The Cramps, The Stone Roses, Ride, Sonic Youth, The Breeders, Primal Scream, The Butthole Surfers among many others. Marvel at the strange haircuts and peculiar music from this faraway time… [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 1:05 PM PST - 11 comments

How to get rid of your stash if you are pulled over by the police (SLYT).
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 12:01 PM PST - 39 comments

THE MONGREL COALITION AGAINST GRINGPO
THE MONGREL COALITION AGAINST GRINGPO RESPONDS TO THE LINKS BETWEEN CONCEPTUAL ART AND CONCEPTUAL POETRY
THE MONGREL COALITION AGAINST GRINGPO OFFERS EXTENDED THOUGHTS ON THE TATTERED FLAG OF WHITE CONCEPTUALISM
FOR WHOM THE DRONES FLY: A POETICS OF DISSED RESPECTABILITY / THE MONGREL COALITION AGAINST GRINGPO
The Gold Star Awards… A message from The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo
posted by andoatnp at 10:30 AM PST - 39 comments

America’s first responders, California Task Force Two follows disaster around the world.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:30 AM PST - 1 comment

Detroit's Iconic Fisher Building Is Up For Auction
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 8:35 AM PST - 19 comments

16 teams remain in the FIFA 2015 Women's World Cup as we enter the knockout stages. Let's review the 16 survivors, how they got there, and how far they might go. [more inside]
posted by eriko at 7:16 AM PST - 842 comments

Earlier this week, the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that although medical marijuana is legal, employers have the power to fire workers if they fail company-sponsored drug tests. Monday’s ruling is the latest in a series of decisions around the country denying job protection to state-sanctioned medical marijuana users who medicate off-duty.
posted by Sir Rinse at 5:47 AM PST - 49 comments

Mark Kermode reviews Entourage. [more inside]
posted by feelinglistless at 2:38 AM PST - 31 comments

David Achter de Molen, lead singer of John Coffey, drinks a beer. [more inside]
posted by jimmythefish at 1:43 AM PST - 12 comments

Building a primitive wattle and daub hut, from scratch. [more inside]
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 11:42 PM PST - 38 comments

Sergey Galyonkin, creator of Steam data tool Steam Spy, offers some analysis of use to game developers and of interest to gamers: Some things you should know about Steam.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:36 PM PST - 27 comments

"I think these grill cookies...would be a fun dessert to have at a summer cookout."
posted by Confess, Fletch at 7:53 PM PST - 45 comments

In an new episode of the Charlie Rose Brain Series, the topic of Gender Identity is discussed. Participating in the discussion are Ben Barres, chair of neurobiology at Stanford University, Norman Spack of Boston Children’s Hospital, Catherine Dulac of Harvard University, Melissa Hines of University of Cambridge, and Janet Hyde of University of Wisconsin. (SL Video) [more inside]
posted by beisny at 6:55 PM PST - 47 comments

This Is What Ruby Rose Thinks About The Entire Internet 'Going Gay' For Her - Erin Whitney, Huffington Post | Girl On Girl: Why We Never Talk About Male Sexual Fluidity by Morgan Cohn, The Frisky | We Heart: Ruby Rose on Gender Fluidity - Emma Niles for Ms. Magazine
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:03 PM PST - 46 comments

Jakub Rozalski is a Polish illustrator whose artwork mixes retrofuturism and the Polish countryside of the 1920s (with special appearances of Wojtek the army bear), in a style reminiscent of the Kossak dynasty of realist painters, but with mechs. Note that during WW1 the Russians did experiment with the Lebedenko (aka Tsar Tank), a 12-m high, 60-ton war machine that was barely less fantastic than those painted by Rozalski.
posted by elgilito at 5:34 PM PST - 15 comments

He was a prophet without imprimatur in his own city. Charles Correa, who passed away late on the night of 16 June, was among the great architects of our times. His institutional buildings across the world are all iconic. Yet, Mumbai, his lifelong home, boasts just one* residential tower designed by him – an irony as much as a travesty. Though the cubist Kanchanjunga is eye-catching, it’s still high-rise: a genre caustically savaged by this patron saint of low-slung architecture.

[more inside]
posted by infini at 4:51 PM PST - 4 comments

Science Friday shows us the cutest little octopus.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:18 PM PST - 17 comments

Taming of the Fuckery is graduate design student Sneha Keshav's 100 day project to identify colorful alternatives to the formerly taboo but now all too ubiquitous 'F-Word' and display them creatively. If you don't like it, you can Go Hug a Porcupine, because I Don't Give a Tiny Rat's Buttcrack.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:50 PM PST - 57 comments

Starfish Ruin an Experiment and Reveal a Superpower
posted by latkes at 12:43 PM PST - 27 comments

French magician and juggler Antoine Terrieux created a series of remarkably self-sustaining sculptures using different arrangements of hair dryers, and has also incorporated them in funny ways in his stage performance. He also plays with a diabolo in ways that seem to defy gravity. [via]
posted by a lungful of dragon at 12:16 PM PST - 18 comments

The Daily Overview takes a zoomed out look at our world to give us all a little perspective. There's a daily feed, or a top ten. Some highlights here on It's Nice That.
posted by janell at 12:15 PM PST - 5 comments

The Blight of the Honey Bee by David Wallace-Wells [New York Magazine]

The American honeybee is in peril, you might have heard, if you are the sort of person who likes a ghost story. In the last year, beekeepers lost 42 percent of their colonies, another peak in a string of mass die-offs on the scale of plagues: In the last five years, die-offs have hit 34 percent, 46 percent, 29 percent, and 36 percent. That’s more than one in every three colonies each year — whole impeccably networked societies, as big as small cities. In many areas, the figures were worse, and it was hard not to wonder how a species in crisis could possibly sustain annual regional losses as high as 60 percent without fast approaching extinction. “What are we doing on bees?” the president has been said to interject at the end of Oval Office meetings. “Are we doing enough?”

posted by Fizz at 11:40 AM PST - 27 comments

Django Community Diversity Statement.
posted by signal at 11:30 AM PST - 24 comments

“Etsy seems to be only targeting those items of a pagan/occult nature while allowing items of certain faiths traditionally used for protection like St. Christopher medals, to still be marketed,” said another vendor in an email. “Personally I think it's probably unintended ignorance and failure to consider and think through what banning all spiritual, energetic and magickal claims will really mean.”

Witches are furious at Etsy for banning the sale of spells (Previously)
posted by griphus at 11:23 AM PST - 159 comments

22 Books by Black Authors to Add to Your Beach Bag this Summer In response to recently published summer reading lists from The New York Times and NPR that featured mostly White authors, Blavity shares a list of 22 summer reads from Black authors. [more inside]
posted by aka burlap at 11:11 AM PST - 16 comments

It's Friday, so let's all relax and learn about Colin Riley's Z80 homebrew computer. Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: Interrupts and timers, Part 3: File system, SD Card and VRAM, Part 4: VRAM, display modes and a simple shell, Part 5: Implementing preëmptive multithreading.
posted by boo_radley at 9:52 AM PST - 23 comments

United Passions started out as a FIFA vanity project telling the story of the men who helped found the organization. Then one month before the film's release in theaters, Fourteen FIFA officials were arrested on corruption charges (previously) and president Sepp Blatter announced he would step down from his post. Now, in the wake of incredibly dismal box office and rock bottom ratings on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, Both director Frederic Auburtin and star Tim Roth (who portrays Blatter in the film) have publicly come out against the film and apologized for their involvement.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 9:31 AM PST - 49 comments

Lee McIntyre writes The Attack on Truth for The Chonicle of Higher Education
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:02 AM PST - 47 comments

At Robert Krulwich's NPR science blog, a couple of reflections on nothingness: Building Me and 2 Ways To Think About Nothing.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 7:01 AM PST - 7 comments

How to Love Your Father When He’s in Prison for Child Porn, an essay by Lindsay Popper. SFW. Some may find the content disturbing.
posted by zarq at 6:46 AM PST - 60 comments

I am Geralt of Rivia, a lithe and muscled slayer of monsters and men alike, and I am scudding around the starting area bothering a goose. I have never been happier and I fear I never will be
posted by Sebmojo at 5:47 AM PST - 36 comments

Luftwaffe photo albums, Spain, Norway, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, Greece, Russia, Africa, Italy, Germany
posted by mattoxic at 4:49 AM PST - 25 comments

What better way to relax than to see a guy creating a bird bath in his hands for his pet finch?
posted by MartinWisse at 11:15 PM PST - 28 comments

Kennewick Man - or the Ancient One - has a contentious history (previously and previouslier) that inspired a long legal and moral battle between scientists who said he probably wasn't Native American and wanted to study him, and local tribes who insisted that he was an ancestor and wanted to re-bury him. The scientists won in court in 2005, and a study has now determined from DNA evidence that Kennewick Man "was most closely related to DNA from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, one of the five tribes who originally claimed Kennewick Man as an ancestor."
posted by clawsoon at 8:50 PM PST - 18 comments

BROFORCE is a multiplayer patriotism simulator. Defeat bad guys, devil-horned dudes, giant saw blades, and other... things... while paying homage to your favorite sweaty, bandana-wearing, minigun-totin', chaw-chewin, salty-talkin' action heroes and heroines from the 80's! [more inside]
posted by mrbigmuscles at 8:34 PM PST - 29 comments

"Researchers [at Columbia University] have built devices that harness changes in atmospheric humidity to generate small amounts of electricity, lift tiny weights, and even power a toy car. In the grand scheme of things, that captured energy is not free, but it’s pretty darn close."
posted by Quietgal at 8:15 PM PST - 21 comments

All 6 Star Wars films at once. Has an amazing art-house-like quality. More watchable than the prequels.
posted by schmod at 7:17 PM PST - 33 comments

Living Simply With A Flip Phone [more inside]
posted by aloiv2 at 7:01 PM PST - 86 comments

On Amy Winehouse, Four Years After Her Death [more inside]
posted by beisny at 6:25 PM PST - 31 comments

"What’s compression in the first place? At its most basic, compression is a way of representing data using less space. An emoji is a good metaphor: it represents an entire word or even several words using a single character. Our minds then 'decompress' the character back into the word it represents.

"When hackers see a magical plot-driving compression algorithm, it’s hard to chalk it up as simply a narrative device. After all, universal lossless compression sounds pretty sweet. So, at a recent hackathon, I decided to get to the bottom of middle-out compression."

I Hacked the Middle-Out Compression from 'Silicon Valley' - Alexander Gould, Major League Hacking (Silicon Valley is on FanFare)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:04 PM PST - 46 comments

Reasonable Doubts About the Jury System Trial consultants allow the affluent to manipulate the biases of those who judge them, putting our justice up for sale. via The Atlantic
posted by robbyrobs at 4:32 PM PST - 31 comments

USA: All 50 states fall short of international standards on police use of lethal force. An Amnesty International report today highlights that all US states fail to meet both international standards and often US constitutional standards. Additionally, nine states and the District of Columbia have no laws on the use of lethal force (Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming). Key findings (pdf, 45kb). Executive Summary (pdf, 500kb). Guardian report.
posted by biffa at 1:16 PM PST - 13 comments

I Read The New “Fifty Shades” Book (SLBuzzfeed) (NSFW)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:56 PM PST - 119 comments

In 2004, George W. Bush initiated a war over gay marriage when he was running against Kerry, and Karl Rove helped to extend that battle to states in 2004 and 2006, according to Bush Campaign Chief and Former RNC Chair, Ken Mehlman (previously, twice). GWB won in 2004, and voters passed all 11 bans on gay marriage. The latter shook Tim Gill, a quiet and successful software entrepreneur, who had been a political activist since 1992.

Gill became radicalized. “I got depressed and angry,” he says. “But, in the end, my response was to say, ‘Well, how am I going to fix this? These were political defeats. The way you fix political defeats is through politics. And so I thought, ‘These people are in office. We can’t have that. How do we go about undoing it?’ ”

Bloomberg Politics: America’s Gay Corporate Warrior Wants to Bring Full Equality to Red States. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:36 PM PST - 8 comments

What's happening in Greece? Explaining the Greek Debt Crisis. Latest developments: In the Eurozone, growing support for a Greek Exit. while Greeks are stashing €10,000 bundles in their homes. preparing for what the Greek Central Bank calls a financial collapse.
posted by storybored at 11:05 AM PST - 134 comments

"Actual zookeepers taking photos of themselves doing Chris Pratt's Jurassic World velociraptor taming move is a thing."
posted by Jacqueline at 10:46 AM PST - 54 comments

Do insect societies share brain power? The society you live in can shape the complexity of your brain--and it does so differently for social insects than for humans and other vertebrate animals. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 10:45 AM PST - 19 comments

This is an extract from Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si. Here are some of the early analyses.
posted by infini at 9:56 AM PST - 86 comments

The Los Angeles Angels baseball team found themselves embroiled in controversy recently when Robert Alvarado, the team's Vice-President of Marketing and Ticket Sales, brushed aside concerns about decreased attendance at the ballpark this season by stating, "We may not be reaching as many of the people on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, but those people, they may enjoy the game, but they pay less, and we’re not seeing the conversion on the per-caps,”. This statement by Alvarado prompted this OC Weekly blog headline: Anaheim Angels: We Don't Need Poor Fans, and We Don't Want Them. Alvarado resigned yesterday from the Angels organization.
posted by The Gooch at 9:34 AM PST - 57 comments

A day inside Adult Swim: the craziest TV network in America (slTheGruaniad)
posted by Kitteh at 8:46 AM PST - 41 comments

"Joint flexibility is an oft-coveted trait that provides a special advantage to dancers and athletes, but there can be too much of this good thing. A growing body of research suggests a surprising link between high levels of flexibility and anxiety. A study published last year in the journal Frontiers in Psychology is among the most recent to confirm the association, finding that people with hypermobile joints have heightened brain activity in anxiety regions."
posted by SeedStitch at 8:46 AM PST - 50 comments

How do you get your Frozen-obsessed daughters to try softball? Give the team a Frozen theme..
posted by aabbbiee at 8:00 AM PST - 43 comments

Since April three of the biggest movies in history have opened: Furious 7 (with a worldwide gross of 1.5 billion dollars), Age of Ultron (with a worldwide gross of 1.3 billion dollars) and Jurassic World (with a worldwide gross of half a billion after just one weekend, and heading towards a likely record). With Star Wars down the pike in December, we're looking at a record setting year for the box office, largely on the backs of franchise action/adventure films. Mark Harris writes about the new franchise film economy in Park Effects, and relatedly, Alex Pappademas considers the efforts to create a farm league of indie directors for these new billion dollar movies in Mr. DNA.
posted by codacorolla at 7:28 AM PST - 63 comments

At rest in the fields. "Celebrating childhood's end" at Eloise Woods Community Natural Burial Park, in Cedar Creek, Texas. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 6:35 AM PST - 4 comments

At least nine people are dead in a shooting at Charleston, South Carolina's historic Emanuel AME church. Among the victims is Clementa Pinckney, church pastor and SC state senator. The gunman sat with the church for a while before shooting, and told a survivor that he was letting her live so she could tell the story. [more inside]
posted by Pater Aletheias at 4:50 AM PST - 1129 comments

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has announced that a woman will be joining Alexander Hamilton on the US $10 bill in 2020. [more inside]
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 11:10 PM PST - 111 comments

Google Photos recognizes the content of images by training neural networks. Google Research is conducting experiments on these simulated visual brains by evolving images to hyperstimulate them, creating machine hallucinations - like that image of melting squirrels that's been going around lately.
posted by moonmilk at 10:55 PM PST - 106 comments

The introduction of street lighting to 17th-century London saw an explosion of nocturnal activity in the capital, most of it centring around the selling of sex.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:41 PM PST - 13 comments

Bernie Sanders on income inequality
posted by HuronBob at 10:02 PM PST - 124 comments

The Best Illusion of the Year Contest (previously, previouslier) has announced the 2015 winners. [more inside]
posted by nicodine at 6:40 PM PST - 14 comments

• 1.47 Gigapixel panorama of Barack Obama's 2009 Inaugural Address
• 4-Gigapixel panorama of the surface of Mars
• 34-Gigapixel panorama of Prague
• 152-Gigapixel panorama of Rio de Janiero taken from Sugarloaf
• 272-Gigapixel panorama of Shanghai
• 320-Gigapixel panorama of London
• Currently the largest: this 365-Gigapixel panorama of Mont Blanc. [story]
• GigaPan has a wide variety of panoramas in their gallery.
• Blakeway Gigapixel specializes in sports stadiums in full attendance (where you can tag people you recognize) and National Parks sites like the Grand Canyon

posted by not_on_display at 2:33 PM PST - 26 comments

"In other words this bomb is so sensitive that the slightest movement either inside or outside will cause it to explode." In 1980, a bomb was smuggled into Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe. In an attempt to defuse it, it exploded and severely damaged the hotel. It was the largest domestic bomb to be detonated in the US until the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. And yet, no-one was killed. [more inside]
posted by mkb at 1:33 PM PST - 59 comments

It's E3! As various tech companies demo, talk up and otherwise flog their entries in the great VR headset race, John Walker of RPS suggests they may be wasting their money.
posted by selfnoise at 11:53 AM PST - 158 comments

Taking on the dreamy, compelling sound of the lost soul decades is a damn high bar to set for yourself. Soul revivalists usually don’t get very far in my book, because what’s the point of competing with the likes of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding? Listening to Leon Bridges made me do a 180 on that stance. See, if you actually can hold a candle to legends like Cooke and Redding — and Bridges can — then there’s no reason not to indulge in some nostalgia.

NPR has a first listen of Coming Home, Bridges' debut album, and you can see and hear plenty more of him on YouTube, from a live cover of Cooke's "Nothing Can Change This Love" to a solo performance of "Lisa Sawyer," a reflective song about his mother. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:50 AM PST - 6 comments

Why More Men Are Drinking Pink "You go to a table where people are sitting outside and they're like, 'I'll take a magnum of Bedell,' and maybe it's seven dudes and you're a little surprised. You thought you were going to be talking to them about scotch, but they want some Provence rosé, and that's totally cool."
posted by Shmuel510 at 8:49 AM PST - 258 comments

From waking up in the early hours for a quick bite and sip of water, to the waiting – date in hand – for the seconds to tick by until the call to prayer at sunset, why do Muslims fast and what is Ramadan? -- and why Muslims in Alaska will fast 9 hours more than Muslims in Cape Town (and what 1 scholar is doing about it).
posted by Sir Rinse at 8:35 AM PST - 51 comments

Rock Band Rush Finally Makes the Cover of Rolling Stone | Great interview with Neil Peart.
posted by Nevin at 7:55 AM PST - 123 comments

The Seven Minutes In 2000 When The Clinton White House Considered Endorsing Marriage Equality (SL Longform Buzzfeed)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:39 AM PST - 10 comments

Real-estate mogul and reality-television star Donald Trump said Tuesday he will seek the Republican nomination for President of the United States. [New York Times]

The garrulous real estate developer whose name has adorned apartment buildings, hotels, Trump-brand neckties and Trump-brand steaks, announced on Tuesday his entry into the 2016 presidential race, brandishing his wealth and fame as chief qualifications in an improbable quest for the Republican nomination.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:09 AM PST - 211 comments

More than four decades ago, budding ornithologist Stephen Kress picked up an old field guide, and read that colonies of puffins had once nested on a tiny Maine island called Egg Rock, the last ones disappearing around 1885.

That fact so captivated him, he decided to try something that no other ornithologist ever had – he would attempt to restore a native bird population to the Maine islands where they had once thrived.[Stephen Kress previously] [Bonus Puffin: PUFFIN CAM]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:44 AM PST - 17 comments

archivists recover ‘lost’ 1961 tv documentary on homosexuality
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 5:41 AM PST - 15 comments

After an attempt to return to Olympic glory ended in paralysis, Laís Souza rebuilds her life one movement at a time. [SLNYT]
posted by forza at 4:03 AM PST - 3 comments

There is popular music and popular cinema and there is actually popular sculpture. Much of it is what we would usually call ornaments. Some of it is minis — i.e., miniatures. Minis are sculpture for the masses in the same way as pop is music for the masses. (If you are trying to explain this to someone suspicious with an arts degree you can call them Kleinplastik, which means almost the same thing but is German and therefore a valid intellectual construct.)

For HiLoBrow Patrick Stuart starts a new, ten part series analysing the mini figures and models used in wargames as art. In the first he looks at the constraints that go into designing and manufacturing minis. (Originally published at his own blog.)
posted by MartinWisse at 3:47 AM PST - 25 comments

Some pretty interesting footage of a rabbit tangling with an avalanche on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:33 AM PST - 19 comments

Canada 2020, a progressive think tank, released a blueprint for policy change today: Setting the New Progressive Agenda [PDF].
posted by storybored at 10:12 PM PST - 16 comments

Jaqen H'ghar is a Game of Thrones themed reimagining of Titus Adromedon's breakout hit: Peeno Noir. _{slightly NSFW and slightly spoilery for GOT up to the current season}
posted by codacorolla at 9:23 PM PST - 17 comments

Ever wonder what a record needle looks like as it travels down a groove? What about the surface of a DVD? Even if you haven't, you should still take a look (SLYT)
posted by Hactar at 8:48 PM PST - 15 comments

Léa, four years old, makes her first aerobatic flight with dad.
posted by honestcoyote at 8:03 PM PST - 27 comments

Grist: Seattle: City Of The Future series includes -
Is Seattle a model for sustainable cities, or just a mess?

In reality, of course, change is a complicated and messy thing. With that in mind, the crew at Grist decided a few months back to use our hometown as something of a laboratory. We abandoned our work stations and set off in search of stories that would illustrate how Seattle is changing, for better or worse, and how the city and its residents are coping. It was a chance to get to know the place better, put our theories and prognostications to the test, and see what lessons Seattle holds for other cities.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:59 PM PST - 35 comments

What does it mean to be black if you're a cop? Or Lupita Nyong’o? Or in the STEM fields? Or in the UK? Or China? Or simply black-ish?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:33 PM PST - 29 comments

The New York Times reports that the Dominican Republic will begin deporting thousands of undocumented migrant workers, most of them Haitian, later this week. The Washington Post provides historical context. In The Nation, Greg Grandin reports on the imminent event. Last week, he characterized the effort as "a vicious, anti-black pogrom.” In Harper’s, Rachel Nolan has a detailed letter from the Dominican Republic explaining the situation at length.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:14 PM PST - 15 comments

10 Great Performances from Game of Thrones Actors to Help You Fill the Void (Also on FanFare)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 3:47 PM PST - 62 comments

Stunning photos show why S. Korea is the plastic surgery capital of the world "During the consultation, I realized that all along, I was only thinking of plastic surgery as some kind of magic tool," she says. "From the media, and from my friends, not many people were talking about how plastic surgery was surgery."
posted by Michele in California at 2:54 PM PST - 54 comments

Velociraptors as Disney Princesses. Simple. Clever.
posted by erratic meatsack at 1:57 PM PST - 24 comments

Inspired by Flemish portrait paintings, in which the wealthy would have themselves painted with all their worldly possessions around them, photographer Brittany M. Powell realized that, by photographing indebted people in their households, she was also capturing their debt.
posted by Dashy at 1:03 PM PST - 49 comments

Greg Holden performs his powerful new song "Boys in the Street." [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 12:32 PM PST - 8 comments

Inspired by the view from a train journey in the Netherlands, Google sheep view is a tumblr that is what it says it is. With an added outtakes section.
posted by Wordshore at 12:10 PM PST - 10 comments

The history and future of euchre, "the people's card game."
posted by Iridic at 12:06 PM PST - 82 comments

Love strawberries? Try these six tasty strawberry cocktails from Chicago bartenders. Looking for something a little less fruity with a little more history? How about five essential Southern cocktails?

Neither option appeal to you? Maybe you missed this previous summer cocktail post?
posted by Juliet Banana at 11:44 AM PST - 17 comments

Based on the available scientific evidence and the findings of expert scientific panels, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA or we) has made a final determination that there is no longer a consensus among qualified experts that partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs), which are the primary dietary source of industrially-produced trans fatty acids (IP-TFA) are generally recognized as safe (GRAS) for any use in human food. (79-page PDF)

[more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 11:34 AM PST - 60 comments

With Eye on Fiscal Armageddon, Texas Set to 'Repatriate' Its Gold To New Texas Fort Knox
On Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation that will create a state-run gold depository in the Lone Star State – one that will attempt to rival those operated by the U.S. government inside Fort Knox and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s vault in lower Manhattan. “The Texas Bullion Depository,” Abbott said in a statement, “will become the first state-level facility of its kind in the nation, increasing the security and stability of our gold reserves and keeping taxpayer funds from leaving Texas to pay for fees to store gold in facilities outside our state.”
posted by andoatnp at 11:29 AM PST - 96 comments

Inside Obama's Stealth Startup Their mission: to reboot how government works.
posted by infini at 10:05 AM PST - 63 comments

Last summer, ten months worth of the Houston Astros' confidential notes on trades and acquisitions leaked onto the web. The FBI now thinks the St. Louis Cardinals were behind the breach. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:08 AM PST - 63 comments

The Chicago Blackhawks have won the Stanley Cup, and 24 years after it all began Kimmo Timonen can finally call himself a champion. But before he got to hoist it, the Cup had to get there - it was delayed due to weather. But that's okay - it wasn't in the building when the Blackhawks won in 1938, either.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 7:29 AM PST - 45 comments

The Romantic True Story Behind James Joyce’s Bloomsday [TIME]

The day June 16, 1904, was a big one in the romantic life of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyces’ Ulysses, at least inside his head. In celebration of that day, and Bloom’s fictional perambulations around Dublin during the course of it, James Joyce fans mark the date each year as “Bloomsday.” It is, as TIME explained in 1982, “a sacred date on the calendar of all Joyceans.”

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:16 AM PST - 22 comments

The wetsuitman. Last winter two bodies were found in Norway and the Netherlands. They were wearing identical wetsuits. The police in three countries were involved in the case, but never managed to identify them. This is the story of who they were.
posted by elgilito at 4:49 AM PST - 29 comments

The SundayTimes ran a story a few days back stating that Russia and China had cracked Snowdens cache of documents and that MI6 Agents were being emergency evacuated, lives were at risk! Snowden has blood on his hands!(Paywalled Article here) The article raised a few questions. Here's Glenn Greenwald with opinions [more inside]
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:56 AM PST - 61 comments

Hiroshima bombing survivor Tomiko Matsumoto tells her tale. [more inside]
posted by Admira at 1:21 AM PST - 70 comments

What to do when your country is suffering under a spell of bad luck due to a surfeit of black cats and nobody's winning the lottery jackpot? You send them on holiday to a country where they do bring luck.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:46 PM PST - 30 comments

Computer animator and artist Alan Warburton imagines setting J. S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier to neon lights [via]
posted by a lungful of dragon at 8:08 PM PST - 17 comments

The $5 Billion Battle For America's Dinner Plate
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:56 PM PST - 186 comments

"There has never been a recording artist quite like Marcy Tigner." Marcy Tigner started out as a trombone player but soon created a puppet in her own likeness and used her child-like voice to teach others in Learning to do God's Work. All in all she put out more than 40 albums, and passed away in 2012 at age 90. YouTube: Join the Gospel Express (part of the Incredibly Strange Music series); Christmas with Marcy; Men in the Bible. Recent mention on Cracked.com (scroll down to end of #1)
posted by Melismata at 4:37 PM PST - 22 comments

What did he do in Mark Lawrenson's kitbag ? Ian McIntosh of the Guardian's on-hiatus "Football Weekly" tells the evocative tale of proto-70's legend Robin Friday, soccer's first rock star. (SLGrauniad audio - NFSW)
posted by devious truculent and unreliable at 3:08 PM PST - 3 comments

The radio signal that occupies 4625 kHz has reportedly been broadcasting since the late 1970s. The earliest known recording of it is dated 1982. Ever since curious owners of shortwave radios first discovered the signal, it has broadcast a repeating buzzing noise. Every few years, the buzzer stops, and a Russian voice reads a mixture of numbers and Russian names.
posted by standardasparagus at 2:54 PM PST - 65 comments

In her new podcast, Mystery Show, Starlee Kine solves one small mystery per week. Kine's only rule is that the mystery can't be solved by Googling. The first mystery: a woman named Laura rents a video (Must Love Dogs, if you’re wondering), then returns to the store the very next day to find that it’s been cleaned out and shuttered overnight....Could the store really have disappeared so quickly? If they knew they were closing, why would have they made Laura sign up for a membership, or allowed her to rent anything at all? [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 2:10 PM PST - 71 comments

20 years of space photos: an oral history of Astronomy Picture of the Day
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:24 PM PST - 12 comments

You Can Thank Genetic Engineering For Your Delicious Cheese (io9) Eventually, calf stomachs became a byproduct of the veal industry. But in the 1970s, America’s growing appetite for cheese collided with its mounting aversion to killing newborn cows. Anticipating a crisis of supply and demand, researchers turned to a then-unprecedented technology in food science
posted by CrystalDave at 1:08 PM PST - 56 comments

"Readiness has also become the slogan of the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Rather than a galvanizing declaration of devotion, the slogan is a queasy-making line in the sand. When the legitimacy of the system the president presides over is in question, as racial oppression, capitalism, and police brutality are discussed on a global scale, choosing a president isn’t a royal crowning. The conflation of being “Ready for Hillary” with feminist allegiance brings the worst problems of political fandom, racism, and poor civic awareness to the forefront. Secretary Clinton is portrayed as a fulfillment of a progressive checklist or schedule rather than an individual candidate."
posted by HumanComplex at 12:24 PM PST - 125 comments

Amsterdam is planning out a new steel canal bridge that will be constructed entirely by 3D Printers. Here's a video of these special printers in action.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 11:51 AM PST - 17 comments

A collection of assorted useful kitchen charts (SLTumblr)
posted by griphus at 11:10 AM PST - 105 comments

After Georgia Dunn put Breaking Cat News on hiatus for the birth of her daughter Guinevere, last night she had a special announcement: the broadcast Breaking Cat News returns with a special report. Elvis, Puck, Lupin, and Tommy have returned! [more inside]
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:59 AM PST - 22 comments

An overview of folklore, religion and popular intuition surrounding childbirth, pregnant women, and young infants: abortion by aswang, blood-drinking Lilith, curses from witches, skeletal-faced spirits, and demonic births. content advisory: infant mortality [more inside]
posted by Juliet Banana at 9:41 AM PST - 5 comments

If black lives were as long lived as those of whites, some major elections may have turned out differently. From the article: "The unspoken suggestion is that Republicans know this and will oppose programs that increase Black health and decrease Black poverty in part for the same reasons that they have favored incarceration and permanent disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies."
posted by batbat at 9:39 AM PST - 36 comments

Older shelter cats are often hard to place, and get overlooked at shelters. An Illinois no-kill shelter partnered with a yoga studio to raise money give some kitties more exposure. The results were adorable.
posted by MrGuilt at 9:28 AM PST - 25 comments

All of these stories referred to VNYL in some capacity as “Netflix for vinyl.” Consequence Of Sound did a video interview with VNYL’s founder, Nick Alt, who referred to his service as being like “old-school Netflix.” The idea was that VNYL’s staff would hand-curate a selection of three records for each subscriber (for a fee of $24 per month), and mail out those records to those subscribers, who would have no idea what musical selections they might receive. Then, subscribers would be allowed to keep those records as long as they wanted and return them at any time, at which point, VNYL’s staff would send out a new batch of hand-curated records to that subscriber (...) None of these stories, however, mentioned an element of U.S. copyright law called the first-sale doctrine — specifically section §109(b), popularly known as the Record Rental Amendment Of 1984, which makes it illegal to rent records.

--The comic failings of a Kickstarter project that promised a “Netflix for vinyl.”
posted by almostmanda at 8:17 AM PST - 104 comments

StyleLikeU's "What's Underneath" Project features short videos of people from all walks of life slowly stripping down to their underwear, while giving revealing interviews intended to show that 'style is not the clothes one wears, but spirit, and comfort in one's skin.' Topics covered are as diverse as their subjects, and include beauty, fashion, disability, diseases and chronic conditions including albinism and cancer, career, gender, identity, body image/dysmorphia, abuse, miscarriage, etc. The majority of the subjects are women. Some videos may be NSFW. (Via)
posted by zarq at 8:13 AM PST - 3 comments

The Tumblr blog "Over the Hills and Far Away", aka "Beggars Opera: History, Fashion, Romance and Deadpan Snarking" has researched and collected the Best of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1st and 2nd editions (1785 and 1788 - source material from Google Books).
Part One: Admiral of the Narrow Seas - Breeches ; Part Two: Cackling Farts - Duck F-ck-r ; Part Three: Flash Lingo - Goose Riding ; Part Four: Hopkins - Medlar ; Part Five: Member Mug - Potato Trap ; Part Six: Punk - Sugar Stick ; Part Seven: Tallywags - Welch Rabbit ; All Parts in Reverse Order .
Come for the "Queen Dick", stay for the lower-case 's' that looks like 'f'. ("Boʃom"! "Teʃticles"!)
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:17 AM PST - 34 comments

Elite firms are sidelining the UK's bright working-class applicants in favour of privileged, "polished" candidates, a report says. The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission says these firms draw from a small pool of graduates, who probably went to private or selective schools. This version of talent can be "mapped to middle-class status", it adds.
posted by marienbad at 2:36 AM PST - 88 comments

The LiederNet Archive is the world's largest reference archive of texts and translations of art songs and choral works, currently cataloguing 135,129 vocal pieces and 25,078 translations. [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 9:19 PM PST - 8 comments

Up in Northern Canada, a bit of the Arctic coastline has been smouldering away for centuries.
posted by bismol at 7:19 PM PST - 17 comments

Revisiting Jurassic Park’s Tangled Bookish Roots [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:26 PM PST - 121 comments

“Derelict is an editing project for academic purposes,” explains Willins. “Prometheus wasn’t exactly an Alien prequel, but this treats it as such by intercutting the events of Alien with Prometheus in a dual narrative structure. The goal was to assemble the material to emphasize the strengths of Prometheus as well as its ties to Alien.”
posted by Artw at 4:35 PM PST - 50 comments

Russian urban exploration photographer Ralph Mirebs recently paid a visit to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where inside a giant abandoned hangar are decaying remnants of prototypes from the Soviet space shuttle program.
posted by AstroGuy at 2:38 PM PST - 31 comments

DNA carries traces of past events meaning poor lifestyle can affect future generations Between week two and week nine of an embryo’s development the genetic code is being rewritten to erase genetic alterations from the parents. However the researchers found that the processes does not clear all of the changes. Around 5 per cent of DNA appears resistant to reprogramming.
posted by Michele in California at 1:19 PM PST - 23 comments

Wherein Dave Grohl proves rock and roll ain't dead. Broken leg or not. [more inside]
posted by raider at 1:16 PM PST - 73 comments

As California's drought worsens, those who live in Rancho Santa Fe — one of the wealthiest communities in the US — seem to agree: "We’re not all equal when it comes to water."
posted by a lungful of dragon at 1:05 PM PST - 151 comments

The superpower police now use to tackle crime
Police officers with the rare ability to recognise faces they’ve barely glimpsed are helping identify criminals: take a test to find out if you share their talent.

Could you be a super-recogniser?
posted by andoatnp at 12:20 PM PST - 101 comments

How do you distinguish Americans [from other nationalities]? Students from many different countries at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (Japan) talk about what makes Americans different. (SLYT)
posted by desjardins at 11:41 AM PST - 127 comments

In about a month, on July 14th at roughly 7:50am EST,the New Horizons spacecraft will make humanity's closest approach to Pluto. This will produce the best images we've ever seen of the dwarf planet, its odd system and bizarre collection of moons. In anticipation of this historic event, Emily Lakdawalla of Planetary.org has written a blog post describing exactly what and when to expect photos and other science data from the encounter. [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:11 AM PST - 27 comments

As we approach the final 500 days to the 2016 US presidential election, and with a smorgasbord of POTUS wannabes, John Ellis Bush has revealed, through the medium of the Twitter, his campaign logo. A day before the bid of "Veto Corleone" is launched in Florida, and a day after Hillary Clinton formally launched her campaign through a rally and smalltown networking, Jeb is the betting favorite to be the Republican candidate, with strong showings for Marco Rubio and Scott Walker. He's also raised a bit of money; however, this hasn't been spent on a completely new logo (also here and here and here and possibly here). Parodies are also starting, as are enhancements. Despite this, Hillary remains the clear favorite to be the next POTUS, with George Clooney a 150/1 outsider at several bookmakers).
posted by Wordshore at 10:02 AM PST - 120 comments

What Ten Years in Kenya Have Taught Me
posted by infini at 9:55 AM PST - 11 comments

This is a long, complicated story. I want to take a moment, here in the middle, to remind you that as Champion harassed, stalked, and threatened various members of the literary community, he was, still, interviewing prominent writers, receiving advanced copies of new books (perhaps even from Graywolf), attending industry meeting and parties, writing for national publications. Champion continued the work that, while he loved, put him in contact with people he had already, or would later, hurt.

The exile of Ed Champion: how one man could be both a celebrated member of the NY literary scene and a serial harasser and why he could get away with it. By Molly McArdle for Brooklyn Magazine.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:32 AM PST - 61 comments

ESA's comet lander is awake! ESA's Philae comet lander touched down but lost contact shortly after landing about 7 months ago. The comet it landed on has traveled closer to the sun, allowing the lander to charge it's battery enough to contact Earth. Huzzah!
posted by amy27 at 6:22 AM PST - 73 comments

One of the most intriguing items in the British Library Persian manuscripts collection is a small unexceptional looking volume which contains a personal record, written in his own hand, of 37 dreams of Tipu Sultan, Sultan of Mysore (r. 1782-1799). [Complete translation.]

A figure of continuing interest, Tipu Sultan's depiction in a 2014 parade float was the subject of a minor controversy, revisited expansively this year in a TV news report. A video history lesson for children offers a brief portrait of the ruler, sometimes remembered for his use of rockets against the British and his anti-British mechanical pipe organ (examined carefully here, but here used to play two tunes, including "Rule, Britannia!"). [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 12:20 AM PST - 15 comments

The New Normal: Pieces of Grief, by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, sister of Parks and Recreation's co-executive producer Harris Wittels, who passed away in February.
posted by zarq at 8:58 PM PST - 18 comments

On February 11th, 2011, Rosa Moreno lost both her hands in an accident at a factory in Reynosa, Mexico. Four years later, after her lawsuit against LG Electronics was dismissed on a technicality, she writes at the Guardian about the accident, the lawsuit, and her attempts to support her six children as a single parent and double amputee. [more inside]
posted by galaxy rise at 8:02 PM PST - 37 comments

Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd [Irish Times]

In some ways the fate of Ulysses reflects this openness, at least in the Dublin of today. It seems a work of high modernism, in the manner of a Proust or a Musil, yet it has become a signature element in the life of the city in which it is set. Each year hundreds, maybe thousands, dress as characters from the book – Stephen Dedalus with his cane, Leopold Bloom with bowler hat, Molly Bloom in her petticoats, Blazes Boylan in straw boater – as if to assert their willingness to become one with the text. They re-enact scenes on Eccles Street, on Ormond Quay and in the martello tower in Sandycove. It is impossible to imagine any other masterpiece of modernism having quite such an effect on the life of a city.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:25 PM PST - 22 comments

Feelers is a typographic experiment based on the movement of animal appendages.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 2:14 PM PST - 16 comments

This is supposedly a "free colour vision test". I don't think it is, but it is both fun and only a little bit frustrating as you jab helplessly away.
posted by howfar at 12:10 PM PST - 95 comments

One year later, Wessington Springs High School senior Owen Witte chronicles the story of the tornadoes that descended on his home town and destroyed more than 50 homes and left 77 people homeless. Witte's story artfully conveys the heroism and resilience of his 950-person community.
posted by MrJM at 10:05 AM PST - 5 comments

‘Chunky Knits’ by Anna Mo
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:03 AM PST - 30 comments

Presenting the 1911 Spokane High School Yearbook! Of particular note are the "Ambitions" of each graduating student, from "To marry a single man" to " Murder the faculty." PDF link
posted by The Whelk at 9:32 AM PST - 53 comments

In memory of Denali
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:23 AM PST - 18 comments

In late 2002, less than two years before his death, Marlon Brando held a 10-day acting symposium called "Lying for a Living." "Some memories of the event — like the exact address of the warehouse in North Hollywood where it took place — are a little hazy. It was, after all, 13 years ago. But nobody who was part of that extraordinary 10-day acting workshop ever will forget a single detail about Marlon Brando’s entrance."
posted by Bron at 8:18 AM PST - 25 comments

What does all of this mean to the Davids of the world, the gay assimilationists that want to, wish they could, somebody do something, there's gotta be a way we can, Dignify This Parade? The ones begging: "Can't we get our people to at least DRESS respectfully for one lousy day? Is that too much to ask of our people? " Yes, yes it is.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:12 AM PST - 56 comments

Eating implement, folding, with three-pronged fork, spatula, pick, spike and knife. A.D. 201 — A.D. 300
posted by signal at 8:04 AM PST - 19 comments

The works of Edgar Ende were condemned as degenerate by the Nazi government.
The majority of his paintings were destroyed by a bomb raid on Munich in 1944. Fortunately some have survived. (Click through on the Oeuvre button)
His paintings greatly influenced the writings of his son Michael.
posted by adamvasco at 7:26 AM PST - 7 comments

Instagram's Most Famous Mules 🐴 📷 [more inside]
posted by almostmanda at 6:45 AM PST - 8 comments

Visualizing Police Brutality By Teju Cole. Officer Involved. Data artist Josh Begley’s new project, “Officer Involved,” uses databases on police brutality compiled by the Guardian to present the problem in a new way. The Counted; People killed by police in the U.S. (Guardian).
posted by bukvich at 6:42 AM PST - 15 comments

Barbie Breast Feeding had you drag and drop the baby from the cot to Barbie’s chest where it drinks enough milk that it promptly develops a stomach ache and then requires a leg massage and a nappy change. I assume that might be closer to reality, except instead of wiping a flower which exists in place of your child’s genitals you’re actually dealing with human poop and children can get that EVERYWHERE.

Philippa Warr on the Weird World Of Frozen Pregnancy Games. SLRPS
posted by MartinWisse at 3:13 AM PST - 29 comments

Theater reported like sports! Marcus DeMarcus - 6'7" 275 - commits to Juilliard with a minor in ballet! Claudius and Gertrude? It's a no-brainer. Featuring Steppenwolf theater gains AND losses. Top choice for Ophelia? It's Jenna, 5'7", 132, out of the London Academy. In the crawl: MATCHUPS: Elphaba vs. the Wizard, Land of Oz. MATCHUPS: Montagues vs. Capulets 6PM ET Verona.
posted by goofyfoot at 1:22 AM PST - 4 comments

Incredible balloon animals and some vegetables and stuff by Masayoshi Matsumoto.
posted by moonmilk at 9:45 PM PST - 11 comments

Americans ruin their jokes with two simple letters. Miserable twits. I can’t abide “just kidding.” It’s an exculpatory waiver, a spoiler alert, which bludgeons spontaneity. It regulates humour, robbing us of the joy of discovering it ourselves. Surely we can discern shades of seriousness, unaided.
posted by modernnomad at 9:07 PM PST - 106 comments

Here goes the 787-9 --- in a near vertical take-off The Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner is no tiny flower. The plane holds 280 passengers, has a nearly 200-foot (about 60-meter) wingspan and is over 200 feet in length. It's smaller than a 747, but you still might expect it to be a lumbering creature, raising itself into the air in a gentle arc. The 787-9 is turning out to be the acrobat of the Boeing family. Boeing released a promotional video Thursday that shows off the plane's chops. The most stunning stunt is a near-vertical takeoff featuring the jet cruising along the runway and then climbing into the sky at a startling angle. It's the sort of thing that would have passengers clinging to their seat arms. [more inside]
posted by shockingbluamp at 7:07 PM PST - 76 comments

The day before House Democrats defeated President Barack Obama's request for fast-track authority on trade agreements, The New Yorker's William Finnegan examines the strange bedfellows the Trans-Pacific Partnership has led to and asks Why Does Obama Want This Trade Deal So Badly?
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:57 PM PST - 65 comments

@deathmedieval is a bot that tweets lines from coroner's rolls in England between 1200 and 1500 AD. (related)
posted by curious nu at 5:45 PM PST - 31 comments

Do Androids Dream Of Cooking? The following recipes are sampled from a trained neural net. Happy cooking!
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:59 PM PST - 62 comments

Fans of Richard Pryor (previously) may be interested in a new, free online archive devoted to providing a peek at the Illinois town where the comedian spent his first two decades. “Richard Pryor’s Peoria,” a collaboration between biographer Scott Saul and Stanford University’s Spatial History Project, "digitally unites 200 primary sources—from aerial maps of Pryor’s hometown to his elementary school report cards—for anyone with an internet connection to explore. The site ... presents one of the first full-fledged extensions of a traditional biography onto the web—an affirmation of historian Edward L. Ayers’s suggestion that “history may be better suited to digital technology than any other humanistic discipline.”
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:52 PM PST - 8 comments

Jenny Diski's End Notes A profile of (formerly) Mefi's own, Jenny Diski, and her diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer. [more inside]
posted by jayder at 3:47 PM PST - 18 comments

Terry Pratchett's daughter declares The Shepherd's Crown will be the last Discworld novel. [The Guardian] [Books]

Terry Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna has brought down the curtain on her father’s Discworld novels, declaring that she will not write any more herself, nor give anyone else permission to do so. The comic novels set in a world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle are “sacred to dad”, she said. The author, videogame and comics writer told a fan last week that her late father’s forthcoming novel, The Shepherd’s Crown, featuring teenage witch Tiffany Aching, would be the final Discworld book. And asked by a fan if she would be continuing the series herself, she ruled out the possibility. “No. I’ll work on adaptations, spin-offs, maybe tie-ins, but the books are sacred to dad,” she wrote on Twitter. “That’s it. Discworld is his legacy. I shall make my own.” She added: “To reiterate – no I don’t intend on writing more Discworld novels, or giving anyone else permission to do so.”

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:06 PM PST - 63 comments

‘I shot against Daddy, all men, small men, tall men, big men, fat men, men, my brother, society, the church, the convent, school, my family, my mother, all men, daddy, myself, men. I shot because it was fun and made me feel great. I shot because I was fascinated watching the painting bleed and die…’— Niki de Saint Phalle. [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 1:46 PM PST - 10 comments

On Medium's Cuepoint, MC Big Data analyzed data from all rap lyrics available on Rap Genius to determine the most popular ride in Hip Hop. [more inside]
posted by numaner at 1:26 PM PST - 26 comments

Will Your Job Be Done By A Machine?
posted by infini at 12:42 PM PST - 103 comments

Sir Tim Hunt FRS, who received the The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2001 for "discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle" has resigned from his positions as Honorary Professor at University College London and member of the Royal Society's Biological Sciences Awards Committee after making controversial comments at the 2015 World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul. He said: "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls ... three things happen when they are in the lab ... You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry." [more inside]
posted by James Scott-Brown at 12:19 PM PST - 172 comments

"A bright and shining example of America's modern, young, middle-class housewife is Jane Amberg, 32, of Kankakee, Ill., married and the mother of three." Mrs. Amberg's daily round of work was detailed in photographs in the LIFE article "Occupation: Housewife." See also Mashable. [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 11:56 AM PST - 29 comments

I want to demonstrate how amazing combinatorial explosion is! Please don't stop me.  An animation about numbers that get large. It has a happy ending and possibly even a moral. [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 11:44 AM PST - 21 comments

Two guys show us how to write an Alt-J song while eating rice crackers. [more inside]
posted by btfreek at 11:24 AM PST - 14 comments

How Isis crippled al-Qaida - the rift within the jihadi movement.
posted by Artw at 10:00 AM PST - 38 comments

How Pyrex Turned Every Kitchen Into A Home-Ec Lab [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:57 AM PST - 37 comments

Are the Koch brothers creating a shadow voter list to outmaneuver the RNC? Or is it not that big of a deal? Regardless, I get a little choked up when I see an article so thorough and informative--evidence of why a free press and relative transparency in government are so important.
posted by radicalawyer at 9:30 AM PST - 25 comments

Deer using dog door (SLYT)
posted by griphus at 7:57 AM PST - 42 comments

Now, some organic farmers contend that Whole Foods is quietly using its formidable marketing skills and its credibility with consumers to convey that conventionally grown produce is just as good — or even better — than their organically grown products. Shoppers can choose from fruits and vegetables carrying the designation of “good,” “better” or “best.”
posted by Sir Rinse at 7:21 AM PST - 77 comments

Manhattan 11031 A.D (SL New Yorker humor)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:55 AM PST - 26 comments

Ottawa, June 1990. Alanis, 16, licence in hand, car on the brain, has signed her first record deal. She is now using her MCA money to buy a white Volkswagen Cabriolet. There’s a catch, though. She can’t get the vanity plate she wants, her manager won’t let her. “Why not?” she whines. “First of all, you’re 16,” Klovan says, “and you’re Canada’s pop princess.” So when Alanis drives to the studio, her virgin-coloured “Barbie” car displays a generic mix of numbers and letters instead of singing out the one word she wants it to: RAUNCH.

--Alanis Morissette, before the making of Jagged Little Pill.
posted by almostmanda at 6:28 AM PST - 163 comments

Trials HD was a dirtbike game released for the XBox in 2009, the third game in the Trials series. It featured a truly arcane easter egg/riddle. For the successor Trials Evolution, the designers needed something more, enter the Trials Evolution Riddle, a puzzle spanning four continents and 100 years.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:31 AM PST - 9 comments

In the alpine grasslands of eastern Africa, Ethiopian wolves and gelada monkeys are giving peace a chance. The geladas – a type of baboon – tolerate wolves wandering right through the middle of their herds, while the wolves ignore potential meals of baby geladas in favour of rodents, which they can catch more easily when the monkeys are present.

The New Scientist reports on gelada monkeys domesticating wolves, as discovered by primatologist Vivek Venkataraman.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:06 AM PST - 34 comments

There are hundreds of instructional videos on YouTube, but if you ever wanted to learn how to draw some of your favorite characters, like Spongebob Squarepants and Mario, or build a Jurassic fort or a string art sun clock, then Character Corner and Forts and Crafts are places you could go.
posted by Room 641-A at 11:10 PM PST - 3 comments

While whole States are legalizing marijuana, Canada is still struggling with the medical marijuana issue. Canadian Health Minister Rona Ambrose is outraged by the Supreme Court Ruling as, despite recent court rulings in favour of the use of marijuana, her government maintains that cannabis has never been proven safe and effective as a medicine. The head of British Columbia Doctors Association says doctors across Canada are being bombarded with information on medical marijuana by the same companies producing the drug, a clear conflict of interest. Supreme Court ruling here in case anyone missed the link in first URL
posted by smudgedlens at 10:21 PM PST - 42 comments

Video Essayist Jacob T. Swinney edited 3 dozen supercuts, many of which went viral on Slate and indieWire: Each tackling a single motif from recent movies: The Jonathan Demme Close-Up, Hearing Tarantino (or Paul Thomas Anderson), A Rorschach Test from The Master, Movies’ First and Last Shots, Etc. All 36 videos are on his Vimeo page. Among them is his own 2014 demo reel.
posted by growabrain at 10:02 PM PST - 1 comment

I fell in love with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain the moment I tranquillised a goat and then kidnapped it. [more inside]
posted by grobstein at 7:36 PM PST - 42 comments

Panda Cubs Wrestle with Breeder to Avoid Medication (SLYT)
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:22 PM PST - 42 comments

Procedurally generated Magic: The Gathering cards More example output. Interestingly, the program generating these cards had no hand-coded knowledge of what Magic cards should look like — it learned everything it "knows" from a collection of real cards. And for nerds of the non-MtG variety, here's a fascinatingly thorough post on Recurrent Neural Networks, the technology behind all this.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:57 PM PST - 52 comments

Transportation Studies Weekly Seminar hosted by U.C. Davis.
posted by aniola at 6:53 PM PST - 4 comments

450 painted, sculpted, cut, fired, and sewn artworks made from matchbooks by 225 artists from around the world. More photos at #strikeawayshow on Instagram. Currently on exhibit at Paxton Gate's Curiosities for Kids. (via Lustik)
posted by madamjujujive at 5:25 PM PST - 5 comments

Overloaded by too many happy animals on the internet? Enjoy some sad animal facts.
posted by backseatpilot at 1:13 PM PST - 38 comments

After last month's vow to curb targeted harassment and make the site a safer platform for all users, the admins of Reddit began making good on that promise yesterday by banning five offensive subreddits deemed guilty of doxxing, brigading, and otherwise tormenting others, including /r/fatpeoplehate -- a militantly anti-HAES forum whose attacks had recently extended to the admins of popular image host Imgur. In reaction, the 150K subscribers of FPH and their sympathizers in other fringe subreddits went on a rampage, creating countless clones (all banned), filling the front page with hate posts, and disregarding the veneer of free-speech activism to viciously slander Reddit CEO Ellen Pao personally. The dissenters advocate a mass exodus of the hate subs to Voat.co [obligatory_wonka.gif], a moderation-free clone of Reddit that has already crashed under the traffic. Ongoing coverage by the enlightened popcorn-munchers of SubredditDrama. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 1:08 PM PST - 492 comments

How a history of eating human brains protected this tribe from brain disease After years of eating brains, some Fore have developed a genetic resistance to the molecule that causes several fatal brain diseases, including kuru, mad cow disease and some cases of dementia. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 1:00 PM PST - 25 comments

The fantastic Cornell Lab of Ornithology offers two ways to identify that bird you saw, if you were bird watching in North America, with Merlin. You can download the free app for Android or iPhone and go through a series of prompts to ID that bird, or upload a photo from your desktop, note where and when you took the photo, tag the tip of the beak, the eye and the tail of the bird and like magic (and with use of the eBird database), you can learn about the birds you see.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:52 AM PST - 45 comments

The hard-working son of a plumber, who dined with kings and queens and slept in alleys and ate pork n' beans, the man of the hour, the man with the power, the hit-maker, the record-breaker, who had style and grace, a pretty face, made backs crack and livers quiver, the "American Dream" Dusty Rhodes, a multiple time world champion of professional wrestling, father of two sons who themselves have become talented wrestlers, has gone to his final ten-bell count.
posted by mightygodking at 11:16 AM PST - 39 comments

Jane Marie says, "Don't tell me not to get a fucking neck tattoo." Second generation tattooer Tim Hendricks responds: "Holding a job at a shop that has a long standing good reputation means that you have to follow by certain unwritten laws, a code of ‘tattoo ethics’ if you will. One of these codes is to try and be a good judge of whether or not someone might regret a tattoo or not." [more inside]
posted by Juliet Banana at 10:00 AM PST - 295 comments

Ornette Coleman has died at 85. Free Jazz. Lonely Woman, from "The Shape of Jazz to Come". What Reason Could I Give?. Skies of America, with the London Symphony Orchestra. Gunther Schuller interviews Coleman; Ethan Iverson on Coleman.
posted by kenko at 9:49 AM PST - 102 comments

Michael Erard, in Aeon: "To design metaphors, it helps to have a metaphor for metaphor. I think of it as a room: the windows and doors frame a view toward the reality outside. Put the windows high, people see only the trees. Put them low, they see the grass. Put the window on the south side, they’ll see the sun. Sometimes the room can be empty. Sometimes the views from the room are a bit forced. Or perhaps they’re new and therefore uncomfortable. In those situations, you have to direct people’s attention. You have to give them furniture to sit on that makes your architectural choices unavoidable."
posted by mittens at 7:18 AM PST - 27 comments

Tilting the Streets of San Francisco (Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:10 AM PST - 19 comments

Paul Ford (yes, yes, MeFi's Own) has created a juggernaut of an article / lived experience / beautiful time-sink about coding. At this point I'll shut up so you can pack a lunch and go immerse yourself now.
posted by maudlin at 6:59 AM PST - 92 comments

A fan takes a look at the downturn of Sonic the Hedgehog, and presents some ideas on how to breathe new life into the franchise. [SLYT]
posted by tocts at 6:40 AM PST - 50 comments

RIP Sir Christopher Lee, actor most famous for playing Dracula in numerous horror films but also notable roles as Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit film trilogies [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:58 AM PST - 195 comments

Green Leader, a comic by Daniel Warren Johnson (Single Link Star Wars)
posted by EatTheWeek at 11:29 PM PST - 27 comments

… a solid gold sledgehammer, that Liberace uses to destroy a piano.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:29 PM PST - 30 comments

Tiny hamster becomes a giant monster! Rivals the Goodies' Kitten Kong, and is also much shorter. Previously: 1, 2 and 3.
posted by Athanassiel at 10:16 PM PST - 8 comments

But we would miss much by using identity politics to mock Crawford’s gendered vision. His critique of our so-called knowledge economy is a thoughtful extension of the powerful 19th-century Romantic rejection of the triumphs of modernity. John Ruskin, writing in the 1850s on "The Nature of the Gothic," emphasized that all classes require a "right understanding … of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy." Looking around industrializing England, proudly preening in disruption, he wrote: "It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure." Although he doesn’t cite Ruskin, Crawford is his heir.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:47 PM PST - 32 comments

Workers renovating Emerson High School in Oklahoma City recently discovered slate blackboards, still complete with chalked lessons and drawings, which had been covered up by the installation of new boards in early December, 1917. An additional photogallery (and autoplaying video) can be found here (slightly different versions of that page here and here).
posted by Rumple at 8:38 PM PST - 26 comments

There are two kinds of people. (Those who like minimalist design and those who don't.) There are two types of people in the world. (Those who like Buzzfeed and those who don't.) There are two kinds of people in the world. (Those who like movie supercuts and... well, who doesn't?)
posted by desjardins at 8:26 PM PST - 153 comments

The Great Bagel Manifesto: in which J. Kenji López-Alt—kitchen guru, national treasure, and relatively recent transplant to the West Coast—rants about bagels. [more inside]
posted by Shmuel510 at 5:46 PM PST - 176 comments

A Dutch detective and Berlin police spent months searching for art commissioned by Hitler that went missing after German reunification.
Officials finally recovered the dubious works in raids last week -- here's how they did it.
posted by adamvasco at 5:31 PM PST - 18 comments

Nintendo E3 leak generator
posted by NoraReed at 5:26 PM PST - 26 comments

Abandoned Silverdome Becomes BMX Dream Playground - Watch the final session that will shut down the abandoned stadium outside Detroit. Includes photos. (previously)
posted by Roger Dodger at 4:19 PM PST - 8 comments

"I rediscovered my Jurassic Park dossier when cleaning out a cupboard... At around 14 years old, I tried to charm a girl by saying if she ever wanted to know anything about dinosaurs, she could come to me." (via)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:03 PM PST - 37 comments

"Who wrote this amazing, mysterious book satirizing tech startup culture?" "A mysterious little book called Iterating Grace is floating around San Francisco right now. At least a dozen people have received the book in the mail—or in my case, by secret hand-delivery to my house. (Which is a little creepy.) The artifact itself consists of a 2,001-word story interspersed with hand-drawn recreations of tweets by venture capitalists and startup people like Chris Sacca, Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Sam Altman, and others. The story’s lead character, Koons Crooks, goes on a spiritual quest by contemplating the social media feeds emanating from the startup world. It leads him to a Bolivian volcano and a chillingly hilarious final act with some cans of cat food, a DIY conference badge, and a pack of vicuñas (which are sort of like llamas)."
posted by wuwei at 2:58 PM PST - 54 comments

Things Garry Winogrand Can Teach You About Street Photography An amazing post about the life and work of Garry Winogrand, a street photographer (who HATED that phrase) who took millions of photographs in his lifetime--so many, in fact, that he died without seeing half a million of them.
posted by ColdChef at 2:28 PM PST - 15 comments

All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:29 PM PST - 45 comments

Seven Leading Architects Defend the World’s Most Hated Buildings
posted by Chrysostom at 12:53 PM PST - 163 comments

Anna & Eve is a photo project by artist Viktoria Sorochinski exploring relationships between mother and daughter.
posted by frimble at 12:39 PM PST - 9 comments

Juan Felipe Herrera, From Farm Fields to Poet Laureate [New York Times]

The Library of Congress announced on Wednesday that Juan Felipe Herrera, a son of migrant farmworkers whose writing fuses wide-ranging experimentalism with reflections on Mexican-American identity, will be the next poet laureate. The appointment of Mr. Herrera, who will succeed Charles Wright, comes as the country is debating immigration, a recurring subject of his work, which has been collected in books like “Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream” and “187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border.”

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:24 AM PST - 6 comments

This is hard, this divided attention. But it isn't just an emotional and intellectual focus divided by half. This is no mere doubled consciousness. Race in this country, with each successive generation, with every historical echo, and for all our technological advancement, has become a prism. This new racial prism — this 24-hour access to every horrible, three-dimensional detail of black trauma, requires constant, multiplicitous division. I can anticipate occasional euphoria, but I will always do so with the understanding that injustice will disrupt my joy. That is its own kind of violence, a forced splintering of identity, intellect, and emotion.

On the second day of her successfully crowdfunded trip to the THREAD at Yale program, stacia l. brown wrote an essay on race, consciousness, and black trauma in America as viewed through The Racial Prism. [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 11:19 AM PST - 7 comments

Unmaking Things: A Design History Studio is a creative space for exploring innovative approaches to the study of design and objects. The site is founded, edited, and run by students on the Royal College of Art / Victoria and Albert Museum History of Design MA course and covers a diverse range of topics – from product design to critical theory; from the history of decorative arts to analysis of space. The student editors and site design change annually. New articles are posted every Monday and Thursday.
posted by jedicus at 11:06 AM PST - 1 comment

Elena Ferrante, the author of the Neapolitan Novels, discusses how she shapes her stories, her characters, and her decision to remain out of the public eye
posted by PussKillian at 10:15 AM PST - 9 comments

Aspirational parents condemn their children to a desperate joyless life From infancy to employment, this is a life-denying, love-denying mindset, informed not by joy or contentment, but by an ambition that is both desperate and pointless, for it cannot compensate: childhood, family life, the joys of summer, meaningful and productive work, a sense of arrival, living in the moment.
posted by bodywithoutorgans at 9:34 AM PST - 86 comments

The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has issued a subpoena to Reason magazine, in order to identify anonymous commenters mouthing off about a federal judge. Ken White at Popehat broke the story. [more inside]
posted by suelac at 8:53 AM PST - 71 comments

Anna & Elizabeth do a Tiny Desk concert complete with a crankie...
posted by jim in austin at 8:40 AM PST - 3 comments

As part of their "1995 Week", AV Club has published a special edition of their Expert Witness series focused on the late Columbia House (previously) and their inner workings: Four Columbia House insiders explain the shady math behind “8 CDs for a penny”.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:43 AM PST - 65 comments

Like It’s 1999: On Serena Williams’s Dominance and the Passage of Time It’s so rare, in tennis, to watch a player really grow up. I don’t mean “mellow out” or “stop partying” or whatever grow up usually means in sports; I mean develop a fully adult self...
Every Serena Williams win comes with a side of disgusting racism and sexism In the moments surrounding her win, Williams was compared to an animal, likened to a man, and deemed frightening and horrifyingly unattractive. Previously
posted by OmieWise at 7:33 AM PST - 58 comments

The oldest and one of most prestigious international football competitions, the Copa America, begins Thursday as hosts Chile play Ecuador. [more inside]
posted by lmfsilva at 7:16 AM PST - 12 comments

New U.S. government research indicates that female military veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women and at rates nearly equal to that of male veterans -- a finding that surprised researchers because women are generally are far less likely than men to commit suicide. The findings raise questions about the backgrounds and experiences of women who serve in the United States' armed forces. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:01 AM PST - 39 comments

PREVIOUSLY, on the Aquabats Super Show... (YouTube 4m) Grocery Store Attack - Fighting the aliens from Laserblast - The Thingy [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 6:24 AM PST - 14 comments

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has signed a bill that defunds the entire state's judiciary if it rules against a law he favors
posted by leotrotsky at 6:11 AM PST - 93 comments

De Kort used GPS to plow 150 perfectly straight and symmetrical furrows with six foot high ridges between them. In the valleys, he built mini parks and bike paths. He also incorporated art pieces that drew on the history of the project, like “Listening Ear,” a parabolic dish that is large enough to stand in. The sculpture amplifies the ambient sound, a nod to the park’s purpose of deflecting that noise.

How Schiphol tries to solve noise pollution: landscape art.
posted by MartinWisse at 4:39 AM PST - 17 comments

In 2011 they made Patti Smith cry with their rendition of “Dancing Barefoot”, in 2012 they got a standing ovation from Paul Simon for their version of “America”. Yesterday sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg, aka First Aid Kit (previously), was back at the Polar Music Prize ceremony, performing "Red Dirt Girl" by this year’s laureate Emmylou Harris. [more inside]
posted by Petersondub at 2:57 AM PST - 18 comments

Illustator Walter Molino had an unusually spot-on take of the situations that would provoke maximum anxiety in his viewers.... provided his viewers were terrified of lions. Many parents dread the moment their toddler has to cling to the bumper of a runaway car, or , God forbid, has to fend off an angry lion, or a Nessie,. But who hasn't had a moment of doubt regarding our tightrope walking partner?
posted by biddeford at 12:20 AM PST - 34 comments

Wikileaks unveils the Trade In Services Agreement, covering 50 countries and with potential to affect up to 80% of the US economy. Under the agreement, governments may not be able to regulate staff to patient ratios in hospitals, or ban fracking, or tighten safety controls on airlines, or refuse accreditation to schools and universities. US regulation of Wall Street could be invalidated much the same way that public health policies against tobacco in Africa and Asia were struck down under currently existing international trade treaties. The text was to remain classified for five years AFTER being signed, and the White House is refusing to comment on "leaked negotiating documents."
posted by blankdawn at 10:49 PM PST - 91 comments

Univalent Foundations Redefines Mathematics - "When a legendary mathematician found a mistake in his own work, he embarked on a computer-aided quest to eliminate human error. To succeed, he has to rewrite the century-old rules underlying all of mathematics." (previously) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 10:40 PM PST - 13 comments

Calvin And Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child. Calvin made it okay to be disheartened and disappointed by life and normalized the inherent loneliness that childhood can bring. [more inside]
posted by meowzilla at 9:22 PM PST - 58 comments

The Unknown Fields Division is a "nomadic design research studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to bear witness to alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:50 PM PST - 4 comments

Initially panned by critics and a failure at the box office, Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead has found a second life as a cult favorite.
posted by reenum at 8:24 PM PST - 19 comments

Even clowns need insurance. Sadly, they do not appear to call it "clownsurance."
posted by Etrigan at 8:01 PM PST - 16 comments

"The limb, developed by Professor Hubert Egger of the FH Upper Austria (University of Applied Sciences), allows wearers to tell which surface they are walking on and dramatically improves amputee's balance and coordination. The development could wipe out the phenomenon of phantom pain, where amputees can experience severe discomfort as the brain receives no neural feedback from their missing limb." [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 5:36 PM PST - 5 comments

Archive.org gives us the two part (1) The Threshold of Liberty (II) from the Robert Hughes 1980 BBC documentary Shock of the New.
This episode examined the surrealists' attempts to make art without restrictions. The title is a reference to a piece by René Magritte.
( Unfortunately all the main links in this fine post by Trurl are gone )
posted by adamvasco at 5:26 PM PST - 3 comments

Former NY Post editor and film critic Vincent Musetto has met his own deadline. Vincent, aged 74, was generally acknowledged as the author of the famous tag HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. You can watch an interview with him here.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:20 PM PST - 15 comments

You'll recall that Voldemort killed Harry Potter's parents, fed his enemies to a giant snake, and tortured and killed muggles just for fun. But he's still polling better than Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum, Chris Christie and Donald Trump.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:16 PM PST - 86 comments

Just press the big button in the middle and then the star. Dotty - A short film by New Zealand filmmakers Mick Andrews and Brett O'Gorman.
posted by h00py at 4:24 PM PST - 12 comments

"Hermann Zapf (previously), the designer of fonts such as Palatino, Optima, Zapfino, Melior, Aldus, and the bizarre but much beloved Zapf Dingbats, has died [on June 4] at age 96."

[more inside]
posted by ZeusHumms at 3:21 PM PST - 47 comments

CircleCI presents: It's The Future -Oh no. That’s old school. Heroku is dead – no-one uses it anymore. You need to use Docker now. It’s the future.
posted by CrystalDave at 2:26 PM PST - 104 comments

A Reparations Infographic
posted by aniola at 2:11 PM PST - 41 comments

"In the simulation, an average game [of Chutes and Ladders] lasts 26.5 turns, but it is a right-tailed distribution, so the longest game lasted 146 turns! If only there was a way to give each game a more consistent and shorter length. Then, it hit me. There are nine ladders and ten slides. There is a ladder missing! What if I placed a new tenth ladder on the board that consistently shortened the game? Yes, but where?!"
posted by yeti at 1:44 PM PST - 58 comments

"Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect. ... Today, bibliotherapy takes many different forms, from literature courses run for prison inmates to reading circles for elderly people suffering from dementia. Sometimes it can simply mean one-on-one or group sessions for “lapsed” readers who want to find their way back to an enjoyment of books. [Ella] Berthoud and her longtime friend and fellow bibliotherapist Susan Elderkin mostly practice “affective” bibliotherapy, advocating the restorative power of reading fiction." [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 12:59 PM PST - 4 comments

Will terrible earthquake bring a fuller democracy in Nepal? Amid the rubble and homeless in Nepal, the country's political parties appear poised to finally enact a constitution. Has adversity brought opportunity?
posted by Michele in California at 12:56 PM PST - 1 comment

Hiking from Death Valley to Mount Whitney - the Lowest to Highest Trail.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:48 PM PST - 18 comments

All three Gilmore Girls, (Lorelai, Rory and Emily) plus series creators Amy Sherman-Palladino, Daniel Palladino and a whole bunch of cast members show up for the Gilmore Girls cast reunion at the Austin Television Festival. You can watch a video of the [almost] full panel. [more inside]
posted by CrazyLemonade at 12:26 PM PST - 40 comments

Poem of the Week is a series in The Guardian's books section, originally started by Sarah Crown but quickly taken over by poet, playwright and professor Carol Rumens. Every week she selects, introduces and interprets one poem. The archive has about four hundred poems, with only a few repeat poets, so here are a few favorites, ranging from English-language classics (John Donne, John Keats, Emily Dickinson), contemporary poets (Shazea Quraishi, Kei Miller, Katha Pollit) translated classics (Wang Wei, Horace, Rainer Maria Rilke), translated contemporary writers (Tua Forsström, Zeng Di, Aurélia Lassaque) the unfairly neglected (Adelaide Crapsey, Rosemary Tonks, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), avant-garde (Gertrude Stein, Hugo Ball, John Ashbery) and anonymous (The Lyke-Wake Dirge, The Bridal Morn, This Endris Night). There are hundreds more on all kinds of subjects by all kinds of poets.
posted by Kattullus at 12:24 PM PST - 6 comments

Jewish German Woman, 102, Finally Receives the PhD denied to her by the Nazis.
posted by infini at 11:41 AM PST - 16 comments

Never shake hands with an 8 year old.
posted by HuronBob at 11:29 AM PST - 35 comments

You're sitting down with your friends to play a boardgame, and you find yourself in a conundrum: how do you choose a first player? Sure, you could roll a standard die and take highest number, but what if there's a tie? That could take forever! Besides, wouldn't you rather be mathematically sure that everyone has a fair shot at each spot in the turn order? Of course you would!
posted by tocts at 11:16 AM PST - 57 comments

Teenage American Civil War buff Bill Martin was fascinated by a legend of soldiers at the battle of Shiloh whose wounds glowed an eerie blue-green at night and who subsequently had better recoveries, a phenomenon dubbed "the angel's glow." He knew from his microbiologist mom's work that some soil bacteria were bioluminescent, and wondered if there could be a connection. Turns out, yes there probably was! [more inside]
posted by Wretch729 at 10:59 AM PST - 5 comments

Jerry Seinfeld, in an interview, is unhappy about the current state of comedy. (slESPN) "They just want to use these words: 'That’s racist;' 'That’s sexist;' 'That’s prejudice.' They don’t know what the f--k they’re talking about.” [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 10:45 AM PST - 428 comments

Michael struggles with this sudden loss of privacy. It's too much for him, and he wants to discuss it at the next meeting.

"I don't have time to myself, either, you know," the Replacement says bitterly.

Michael starts to interrupt, but Dr. Kenston reminds him that the Replacement has the talking stick right now. "You've lived a whole life on your own, Michael," it says. "I've never had that. I've never been by myself. Never even existed completely outside of your abdomen."

The New Middle Class, a short story by Dolan Morgan. [cw: body horror]
posted by divined by radio at 10:41 AM PST - 14 comments

Pansy Division: Life In A Gay Rock Band , a documentary chronicling the history of the pop-punk group from 1991 to the present.
posted by frimble at 10:15 AM PST - 20 comments

The Life and Times of Janos Birges
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:05 AM PST - 4 comments

Math edutainer and MeFi favorite Vi Hart reflects on how her beliefs about gender, personal expression, "political correctness," diversity, and sincerity have matured over the years.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 9:10 AM PST - 31 comments

Elizabeth McIntosh died this week. She witnessed Pearl Harbor as a reporter (her account was too graphic to be published), worked for OSS in Asia, tried to go back to journalism, wrote children's books, and became an advocate for and historian about women in the OSS and CIA. [more inside]
posted by julen at 9:10 AM PST - 9 comments

Two studies published this week examine the politics of HIV in the United States and Europe and question the impact of personal responsibility. United States, HIV associated with race: "HIV is a biological phenomena and it is a behavioral phenomena, but in this day and age it is a social and structural phenomena," Perry Halkitis on a longitudinal study of MSM. The study claims Black and Hispanic men "do not appear to engage in more or riskier sexual behaviors compared with their white peers." (Reuters coverage of the study.) Europe, HIV associated with national homophobia: "Our findings suggest that rather than primarily being the result of personal failure, HIV risk is largely determined by national laws, policies, and attitudes toward homosexuality. This study shows that gay and bisexual men in homophobic countries are denied the resources, including psychological resources like open self-expression, that are necessary to stay healthy." (University Daily News coverage. ) [more inside]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:33 AM PST - 13 comments

Scientists have invented a flexible electronic mesh which can be injected into the brain of a mouse. Once injected the mesh unfurls and meshes with the mouse's brain. [more inside]
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 7:45 AM PST - 91 comments

Harry Crews: Guilty As Charged [YouTube]

Examines the life and work of Harry Crews. Appearances by James Dickey, Byron Crews, Maggie Powell, Johnny Fieber and William Schafer. Music by Frank Schaap and Byron Crews. Associate Producers: Robert Morris and Latelle Lafollette. Camera and Lighting by Mike Brower and Arthur Rouse. Edited by Tom Thurman and Mike Brower.

Previously.
posted by Fizz at 7:12 AM PST - 10 comments

In the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, The Hour Record was hotly-contested. The best bike racers in the world tried to be the person to ride a bicycle the furthest on a track in one hour. It's so grueling that Eddy Merckx said it burned three years off of his life. [more inside]
posted by entropone at 6:59 AM PST - 38 comments

Who's the fastest selling Playmobil figure of all time? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a dinosaur? [more inside]
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:53 AM PST - 29 comments

"Yes, depression lies. And it's very hard to not believe it when it's there, because it's very much in the foreground and it totally convinces you. And it's not always that it necessarily lies, but it gives you the very, very worst interpretation of your reality. Yes, so I think time proves that life doesn't always get worse. And also very few things get worse than wanting to jump off a cliff, you know. You're kind of at rock bottom by definition of being suicidal. So it's almost ridiculous that depression says everything's going to get worse from there, because very few things get worse from there." Matt Haig talks to Lynne Malcolm about his experience of depression and the reasons he found to stay alive. [more inside]
posted by Athanassiel at 1:09 AM PST - 38 comments

Brooklyn Republic recently closed the exhibition Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, a mid-career retrospective, going back 14 years, from Kehinde's early styles to the more well-known mix of young black men in casual attire, recreating traditional portrait scenes, with a backdrop of vivid patterns, as seen in the National Portrait Gallery, among other settings. More recently, he has expanded his street-casting to include African American women, as captured in the PBS Arts documentary, Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace. More videos and critical commentary below the break. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:30 PM PST - 8 comments

New York Times:

Mr. Duncan also said the department planned to develop a process to allow any student — whether from Corinthian or elsewhere — to be forgiven their loans if they had been defrauded by their colleges. A special master would be appointed within three weeks, department officials said, to create procedures to apply for relief that are “durable, not just for Corinthian but beyond.”

Previously, previouslier. [more inside]
posted by Little Dawn at 9:52 PM PST - 30 comments

The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too) [more inside]
posted by casarkos at 9:31 PM PST - 18 comments

So why does the Mythos have such draw? Is it because the Mythos is classic?

Absolutely not. It's because, comparatively speaking, it's modern.

The Cthulhu Mythos is almost 100 years old. And it's the most modern part of our mythology that we're allowed to access.

Hugh Hancock on copyright and ownership of modern mythologies.
posted by Artw at 8:41 PM PST - 51 comments

The Mystery of the Margate Shell Grotto [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:40 PM PST - 10 comments

"So last week, when country radio promoter Keith Hill controversially suggested that stations should stop playing songs by female artists, it’s easy to label his actions another example of misogynistic, conservative politics.

However, Hill’s comments are actually indicative of something much bigger and far more troubling: the consolidation of an entire genre of music, and the type of environment this can create. In the case of country, it’s allowed for the repurposing of the genre’s history, and the exclusion of certain individuals."

The Conversation's Clifford Murphy, on why [country radio promoter] Keith Hill’s comments about women in country music cut far deeper than misogyny [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 7:33 PM PST - 105 comments

"Four Twitter bots I've made over the past few months. @man_products: products for men, @lady_products: products for ladies, @likeuberbut, a terrible startup idea generator and @medrobot, which reminds you to take your medications." From Mefi's own NoraReed (previously), via MetaFilter Projects [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:18 PM PST - 37 comments

The BBC's Matthew Sweet explores the gruesome and wildly productive rivalry between two greats of UK horror: A half hour of satisfying radio for anyone who ever stayed up late (or searched, mostly in vain, through a local video store) for "Curse of Frankenstein" or "Vault of Horror": [more inside]
posted by ryanshepard at 3:29 PM PST - 17 comments

Amy Schumer accepts Glamor Magazine's Trailblazer of the Year award (NSFW)
posted by boo_radley at 2:18 PM PST - 44 comments

The last day of dog food week is a blur of kibble, canned and Freshpet. Monday morning, I weigh in. I’ve lost nearly 2 pounds. I get the results of a blood test back from my health clinic. My blood sugar level has dropped to the ultralow end of the ideal range — even better than when I was eating paleo.
posted by storybored at 1:46 PM PST - 102 comments

Kelli O'Hara's 47-second costume change at last night's Tony Awards. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:16 PM PST - 41 comments

“One night we were eating spaghetti and meatballs and it fell out and rolled across the kitchen table. You said, ‘Dad, your eye popped out’ and kept on eating. I’ll never forget it. You must have been seven or eight. He felt so bad about that—for your sake.”
“I don’t think it bothered me,” I say.
“He worried it bothered you.”
The Glass Eye, by Jeannie Vanasco
posted by zarq at 12:12 PM PST - 7 comments

"Have you ever turned white?"
"No."
"Will I ever-?"
"Nope."
"Daddy??"
"Daddy's already white."
"But was he always?"
37 Impossible Questions From My Mixed-Race Son (SLBuzzfeed)
posted by Metroid Baby at 12:08 PM PST - 43 comments

My dad was full of surprises - it was the one thing I didn't like about him - and he always sprang them on you when you weren't expecting them.
posted by exogenous at 11:24 AM PST - 55 comments

Inception-level meta-politics. The Federal Elections Commission, in charge of curbing abuses of our elections laws, is now filing petitions to itself to do its own job. But this is probably an improvement from the chair saying "People think the F.E.C. is dysfunctional. It’s worse than dysfunctional."
posted by jlittlew at 11:02 AM PST - 19 comments

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages. [some pages may contain medieval nudity] [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 10:28 AM PST - 6 comments

Underwater pics mapped. Google Maps teamed up with XL Catlin Seaview Survey, NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, and the Chagos Conservation Trust to put together an assortment of underwater views to explore. Previously. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 10:04 AM PST - 3 comments

...make sure you use common sense and follow appropriate safety precautions if you decide to build your own flamethrower-instrument.
posted by Cookiebastard at 9:44 AM PST - 24 comments

A Compilation of Robots Falling Down at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (SLYT)
posted by griphus at 9:33 AM PST - 49 comments

While FIFA may be in a bit of a getting caught with their hands in the cookie factory, as we're discussing over here the game goes on, as the highest level of international competition has begun in the Women's Game, the FIFA 2015 Women's World Cup. [more inside]
posted by eriko at 9:28 AM PST - 268 comments

The 2015 Nebula Award Winners have been announced. [more inside]
posted by Hactar at 9:18 AM PST - 64 comments

Whatever, forever: an oral history of Clueless
posted by almostmanda at 7:13 AM PST - 95 comments

Do I think the pharmaceutical industry is corrupt? You bet I do. You know what else is corrupt that you’re not talking about when you say “Big Pharma?” The state governments in places refusing to reform medicaid so that poor adults are still going without medical insurance. I had a friend break her foot recently who didn’t want to have to go to the ER, because it was too expensive and she had no health insurance. The fact that medical insurance is so damned expensive that, before Obamacare, I could not afford to pay for it, I couldn’t afford to get diagnosed to prove I was disabled, and I went years suffering with absolutely no treatment at all while going into extreme debt every time I had a medical emergency, which with my diseases happens pretty often.
posted by Kitteh at 7:00 AM PST - 39 comments

All 40 runners failed to finish this year's Barkley Marathons. The Barkley Marathons is a race through Frozen Head State Park in Eastern Tennessee, partly inspired by James Earl Ray's successful escape but unsuccessful flight from prison: he made it 8 miles in 55 hours. The terrain is difficult. [more inside]
posted by entropone at 6:53 AM PST - 21 comments

My Homemade 40W LASER SHOTGUN!!!!!: An array made of eight parallel five watt lasers, a 'choke' made out of lenses, and a 250 amp battery create destruction from the future a guy's garage. [slyt]
posted by quin at 6:42 AM PST - 52 comments

Missouri keeps killing Jennifer Herndon’s clients. So she invented an alternate life.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:26 AM PST - 16 comments

Is Social Rejection the Key to Creativity? Aldous Huxley wrote, “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely,” and upon thinking about it even a little, it quickly becomes apparent that many of history’s creative geniuses have been deeply lonely people.
posted by nevercalm at 4:44 AM PST - 37 comments

The request — to haul four whale sharks in Taipei and two beluga whales in Mexico to Atlanta — was daunting, but UPS had just the man for the job. As one of the company’s cargo load masters, Bland Matthews has made a career out of shipping seemingly impossible items. In his 20 years at UPS, he’s played an instrumental role in moving everything from 2,000-pound whales to China's Terracotta soldiers. Dream up an item, however delicate or colossal, and Mathews will swiftly sculpt a plan of action: he’s a logistical guru.

posted by ellieBOA at 3:10 AM PST - 14 comments

Their vocabulary is extensive, but the most basic concepts are these: A "multiplicity system" refers to the group within the body itself (i.e., "I'm part of a multiplicity system"). The system might consist of two people, or it might consist of 200. The "outer world" is this physical plane that we're all stumbling around in, while "inner worlds" are the subjective realms where their system members spend time when they're not "fronting," or running the body in the outer world. When I speak to Falah, she is fronting, not Lark.

For Vice Tori Telfer looks into the multiplicity activist movement, people who feel they don't so much have a multiple personality disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder as consist of multiple personalities.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:37 AM PST - 60 comments

LA-based photographer Jonpaul Douglass shoots his food, but never captive on a plate. Its forefathers having been imported from Italy centuries ago, and having an ancestor or relative in every nation's cuisine, the North American Thin-Crust Pepperoni Pizza (flatbreadus newyorkus pepperonica) has adapted mightily to the urban landscape of the US. Douglas's photoblog captures the pizzas in the wild, in all their glorious majesty-- sometimes whole, sometimes by the slice. This invertebrate adapts to the shape of its surroundings, but is unable to camouflage itself, and so is vulnerable to predation by pimpled teenagers, ninja turtles, inebriates, and so on. Though of course factory-farmed on a large scale across the globe, these wild specimens are a sight to behold.
posted by Sunburnt at 11:09 PM PST - 13 comments

Weird Copcept Album is, as the title clearly indicates, a concept album concerning two Chicago cops who quit the force to realize their dreams of being rappers, using beats that sample the music of "Weird" Al Yankovic. It also comes in a SFW version. [more inside]
posted by Durhey at 10:18 PM PST - 2 comments

Kalief Browder, held for three years on Rikers Island without charge, has taken his own life. Browder was first jailed at Rikers while he was a minor. All but forgotten by the Bronx District Attorney's office, he was beaten and at times held in solitary while awaiting a trial that never happened.
posted by MeanwhileBackAtTheRanch at 9:00 PM PST - 69 comments

These are the potatoes you can have, in Canada. Everyone likes potatoes, and many people like Canada. Not everyone, but like, a decent amount of people. This ^^ is a list of the potatoes you can have in Canada. All of them. Fambo. Jemseg. Brise Du Nord.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 8:48 PM PST - 37 comments

The Wrongly Attributed Statement (WAS): Our Democratic Poetry
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:20 PM PST - 43 comments

The Vocoder was invented at Bell Labs in 1939 to transmit voice data, rather than to make rock musicians sound like robots. It could also do much more interesting things to your voice.
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:45 PM PST - 12 comments

(SLYT) One girl runs, and the other chases her, through the streets of Atami.

Bonus "behind the scenes" feature.
posted by happyroach at 6:08 PM PST - 30 comments

"Police responding to reported disturbance at a community pool in McKinney, Texas, are seen in a video posted to YouTube aggressively subduing black teenagers and, at one point, pulling a gun on them."

Scott Neuman, NPR [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:12 PM PST - 577 comments

"I can't bring Hitler babies into a corporate atmoshere"! And no bamboo..
posted by shockingbluamp at 5:03 PM PST - 5 comments

You might have seen this image floating around, if you frequent the likes of Tumblr. One of many simple speculative choice pictures - here's eight pills that give you superpowers, which one would you take?

Well, Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex decided to do a write-up about how each choice might go. And how they might go wrong.
posted by kafziel at 4:35 PM PST - 88 comments

"Trap Queen" is our generation's greatest love song.
posted by naju at 4:32 PM PST - 27 comments

The dark side to academia's "suck it up" culture. Rachel Vorona Cote discusses the harm in academia's stoic ethos.
posted by chainsofreedom at 3:29 PM PST - 42 comments

Get the quick and easy fully-loaded wedge salad you need, nay, deserve.
posted by The Whelk at 2:17 PM PST - 68 comments

Untouched cave in South Dakota to provide clues to history The cave's location has been kept secret since its discovery in 2004. Now, it is finally being excavated and its contents catalogued.
posted by Michele in California at 2:12 PM PST - 17 comments

Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life - "Please give this sermon a try. I think it has much in it that will be of interest to a wide range of readers: philosophy, cosmology, evolutionary theory, and science fiction, as well as theology. And nothing in it depends on believing in God at all." Abstract: As an enlightened form of atheism, I turn to teleotheism. Teleotheism is the view that God comes at the end, not at the beginning, where I am defining “God” as “the greatest of all things that can come true.” In this view, the quest to discover what are the greatest things that are possible is of the utmost importance. The best of our religious heritage is just such an effort to discover the greatest things that are possible. (via; previously)
posted by kliuless at 12:21 PM PST - 33 comments

American Pharoah Wins Belmont Stakes and Triple Crown [New York Times]

American Pharoah is the 12th horse and first since Affirmed in 1978 to win three races on different tracks at varying distances over a five-week span. He won the Belmont Stakes by five and a half lengths, the Derby by one length on May 2 and then romped to a seven-length victory in the rainy Preakness two weeks later before demolishing his rivals Saturday. [via: CBC]

posted by Fizz at 9:08 AM PST - 63 comments

Americans were angry when Wall Street’s greedy and risky behavior triggered a global financial crisis in 2008. They were angrier still when the government had to borrow and spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest banks and the insurance company AIG. They were outraged when they found out that executives at those enterprises were continuing to receive big salaries and bonuses.

So just imagine how it outrageous it would be if some Wall Street sharpies went to court to argue that they didn’t benefit enough from the bailouts and that taxpayers should pay them tens of billions of dollars more. In fact, they did. And, according to legal observers, they just might prevail.

The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein analyzes the pending lawsuits.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:43 AM PST - 112 comments

PROTECTIVE RAIN HAT. PATENTED. MADE IN AMERICA.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:14 AM PST - 72 comments

It struck me as absurd that one could amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college. Having opened a new life to me beyond my modest origins, the education system was now going to call in its chits and prevent me from pursuing that new life, simply because I had the misfortune of coming from modest origins. [more inside]
posted by melissasaurus at 5:01 AM PST - 112 comments

The Dø - Despair, Hangover & Ecstasy is a fun video from this Finnish-French outfit that evokes angsty 80s movie mandancing around a passenger jet. Here's some more of the The Dø
posted by JauntyFedora at 2:45 AM PST - 8 comments

Scientists say we should stop making fun of bass players.
posted by goatdog at 7:54 PM PST - 110 comments

"Turks go to the polls on Sunday in the closest parliamentary election in more than a decade, one that could pave the way for President Tayyip Erdogan to amass greater power or end 12 years of single-party rule for the AK Party he founded." [more inside]
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 6:50 PM PST - 31 comments

Joseph Frank 'Buster' Keaton (1895-1966) was best known for doing extreme physical comedy with a a consistently stoic, deadpan 'Great Stone Face'. Stringing together some of his greatest stunts (including some less-familiar ones), you see less 'pratfalls' and more real heroics.
Trigger Warning: '80s pop music soundtrack
via longtime linkblogger The Presurfer
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:09 PM PST - 23 comments

"I used a brush to paint on Modge Podge, smoothed out the paper as I went, adding small strips to cover all the metal. When the glue dried, I covered it with three coats of Modge Podge, waiting for about 15 minutes between each coat. I let this harden completely before spraying the whole thing with Krylon triple thick glaze to seal it." Things I Make - The Decoupage Bike [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:41 PM PST - 10 comments

Searching for a real-estate investment? Bedrock City, a Flintstones-themed amusement park outside of Valle, Arizona, is for sale (Hanna-Barbera licensing rights not included). Comments below give a flavor of what it was to visit the park (see also: VICE). This tour (YT, 4:51) reveals a daylight-nightmare place devoid of all life and meaning. But these ladies seem to have a good time (6:26).
posted by Countess Elena at 2:14 PM PST - 44 comments

"Gosh" - music by Jamie xx, something of an homage to early 1990s UK club culture, with visuals of a slowly terraformed Mars by Erik Wernquist, who was seen on MetaFilter before for "Wanderers," a similarly gorgeous, realistic film of space exploration.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:41 PM PST - 22 comments

"The average monthly income in Ethiopia is about $300-$400, less after taxes. She is running to take $4,000 home. You do the math. All I am going to take home are some sore legs, a cheesy medal, and a fierce hangover from partying with my brothers. I got nothing to lose so I let it all hang out. We don’t speak the same language, but running is universal, like music."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:28 PM PST - 14 comments

When hackers take millions of records from the Office of Personnel Management, clearly the solution to the problem is more online surveillance. (Reuters)
posted by Lycaste at 1:19 PM PST - 15 comments

Trading Gold: Why Bronze Age Irish Used Imported Gold “The results of this study are a fascinating finding. They show that there was no universal value of gold, at least until perhaps the first gold coins started to appear nearly two thousand years later. Prehistoric economies were driven by factors more complex than the trade of commodities – belief systems clearly played a major role.” [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 12:33 PM PST - 4 comments

Deavid Soul ("The Avid Soul") aka "Rich & Famous" are a Japanese duo who make house/disco/funk and, more recently, world music. You may remember them from such Dreamcast darlings as Jet Set Radio and Jet "Grind" Radio. Their style is an instantly recognizable mix of 90s house and classic disco with copious samples from hip hop, disco, R&B, reggae and 80s/70s film. For their latest album, they've collaborated with Exotic Light Orchestra to add a Latin American fusion sound to their already eclectic aural soup. They're real good. [more inside]
posted by byanyothername at 11:57 AM PST - 9 comments

Understanding e to the pi i - "An intuitive explanation as to why e to the pi i equals -1 without a hint of calculus. This is not your usual Taylor series nonsense." (via via; reddit; previously) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:42 AM PST - 28 comments

End of life planning is hard. There are checklists, like this set from Get Your Shit Together. There are practical tips for making things easier for whoever's dealing with your estate after you're gone, like the tech tips in this previously from MeFi's own Jessamyn. But in the murky middle between living completely independently and being incapable of managing everyday tasks lies a subtler and more difficult question: how to organize and manage your money when financial competence is one of the first areas to decline on the slide from mild cognitive impairment to dementia. SeekingAlpha contributor PsychoAnalyst has a surprisingly nuanced analysis of the steps self-directed investors can take to protect their finances from the underestimated risk of their own declining ability to make good financial decisions, and raises some points worth thinking about for folks beyond the site's investor wonk audience.
posted by deludingmyself at 10:03 AM PST - 26 comments

First Wave at Omaha Beach On June 6, 1944, the Allies invaded occupied France. S. L. A. Marshall Nov. 1, 1960 [The Atlantic]

When he was promoted to officer rank at eighteen, S. L. A. Marshall was the youngest shavetail in the United States Army during World War I. He rejoined the Army in 1942, became a combat historian with the rank of colonel; and the notes he made at the time of the Normandy landing are the source of this heroic reminder. Readers will remember his frank and ennobling book about Korea, The River and the Gauntlet, which was the result of still a third tour of duty.

posted by Fizz at 8:55 AM PST - 24 comments

Van has a reputation for being difficult. But as the man himself says, ‘People who say others are difficult are usually difficult themselves’. [more inside]
posted by maupuia at 1:21 AM PST - 22 comments

Daniel Rozin is an artist who makes, among other things, mechanical mirrors like pompom mirror and penguins mirror [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:46 PM PST - 15 comments

Everyone is convinced that someone else is getting a better deal, that somewhere a horde of Kansans are gaming the system and preventing the truly needy from getting help. It’s a sentiment that Brownback eagerly exploits when attacking Medicaid expansion and other forms of public assistance. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 10:06 PM PST - 56 comments

The Lesson of the Saggy Burrito in my Pants
posted by lonefrontranger at 9:21 PM PST - 96 comments

Four dads bring it home (SLV) For most kids growing up it just seems your parents are never as cool as you want them to be. They usually don’t like your style of clothes or your choice in music. But for these dads they’ve set out to show you just how cool they are. [more inside]
posted by shockingbluamp at 6:17 PM PST - 26 comments

Rocking out at Walmart on a toy guitar
posted by jpdoane at 3:45 PM PST - 35 comments

"If you were to compile a list of the greatest sketch comedy shows of all time, there are a few obvious choices that you'd want to include. Naturally, Britain's influential Monty Python's Flying Circus would probably top the list, followed closely by the equally iconic Saturday Night Live and SCTV, with Mr. Show, In Living Color, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Chapelle's Show, and even modern-day favorites like Key & Peele somewhere in the mix.

"One entry you should definitely include, and probably would want to rank fairly high on said list, would be the Canadian-born sketch show The Kids in the Hall, which ran on television both in the Great White North and here in the states for six or seven seasons and had a definite influence on comedy in the late '80s and early '90s."
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 2:55 PM PST - 150 comments

industrial robot vs sword master (SLYT)
posted by OverlappingElvis at 2:36 PM PST - 46 comments

Sales Pitches at the Fair (1985) Product pitches - a form of performance art, a secular evangelism (1979), and a time-honored fair tradition. You won't believe your eyes when you see the Micro Steamer, Grill Mat, EZMop, ShopSmith, Salsa Maker, Squirmles, Shu Nu, Ultimate Hose, Steam Mop Plus, VitaMix, Slushy Magic...
posted by Miko at 1:43 PM PST - 23 comments

Evan Young is 18 years old, and the valedictorian at his high school in Colorado. Evan was barred from making his valedictory speech, and stripped of his title, when his principal learned that Evan planned to mention the fact that he was gay, in a speech centered around the idea that you must learn to respect people even if you disagree with them. Although he was never allowed to give that speech, and although his school outed him to his parents, Evan did get his chance to speak, at a fundraising event for OutBoulder.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:25 PM PST - 50 comments

Computer science professor Jordan Boyd-Graber is currently working on a National Science Foundation grant for "Bayesian Thinking on Your Feet: Embedding Generative Models in Reinforcement Learning for Sequentially Revealed Data." At first glance, this might not sound like fun, but in the paper, Besting the Quiz Master, Boyd-Graber showed how machine learning could be used to create a quiz bowl version of the Terminator that can take all human comers. This weekend, that proposed machine finally played a nervewracking 200-200 tie game against a team of four Jeopardy! champions (Kristin Sausville of single contestant Final Jeopardy fame, teacher tournament winner Colby Burnett, professional poker player Alex Jacob, and underdog Tournament of Champions winner Ben Ingram).
posted by jonp72 at 1:19 PM PST - 4 comments

The Unacceptably High Cost of Labor – How a deeper dive into our supply chain led to a new Migrant Worker Standard. Patagonia started auditing their supply chain in 2011 and uncovered the dark side of migrant-worker relations in Taiwan.
posted by blue_beetle at 1:05 PM PST - 11 comments

Windows 10 will be available as a free upgrade for millions of current Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1 Update users, for a year (specs). This offer is extended to people with Genuine and non-Genuine Windows copies (Chinese pirates and others). As details a-plenty flood the internet, there is also the news that this will be the last Windows "version" as Microsoft shifts gears for its OS and moves to a subscription model. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:45 PM PST - 129 comments

Regular Human Basketball: A QWOP-like multiplayer game for Mac/Windows/Linux in which you play basketball as God and James Naismith intended—with the slight addition of thrusters, a magnet arm, and all-terrain wheels. Comes with realistic basketball commentary from real human commentators!
posted by Cash4Lead at 12:37 PM PST - 4 comments

Hallucination, or Divine Revelation? Emma Green of The Atlantic speaks to Andrew Scull, author of the recently-published Madness in Civilization. Scull on "Madness and Meaning" in the Paris Review. [more inside]
posted by mittens at 12:37 PM PST - 2 comments

Our friends, the ribbon worms, have made another appearance in southeast Asia. (warning: kind of gross) Nemertea previously.
posted by theodolite at 12:19 PM PST - 17 comments

Discogs user gatogato makes lists of record covers with elements in common. If you've ever wanted to see 716 covers that feature chairs, 254 showing the Eiffel Tower, 98 depicting flowers next to instruments, 645 with cats of all kinds, or 335 picturing people standing by the ocean, you've found your Mecca.
posted by vathek at 12:14 PM PST - 6 comments

By this point, you're probably wondering if you're secretly a hypersensitive covert narcissist masquerading as a sensitive introvert. Without further ado, here are 23 items that will allow you to gain greater insight into your personality.
posted by the hot hot side of randy at 11:52 AM PST - 61 comments

What not to do when covering a woman running for President
posted by cashman at 11:00 AM PST - 13 comments

The Drone - Trailer #1 (2015) (slyt) "It's like something out of a dream." [more inside]
posted by fuse theorem at 9:00 AM PST - 28 comments

Here's literally every single thing that goes into one night of running a Russian restaurant in Portland, Oregon: One Night at Kachka
posted by zarq at 8:10 AM PST - 53 comments

"It’s very nice to have my story go out there, and if it’s in a different form, I want the thing to mutate slightly." Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro discuss genre, escapism, copyright and how stories expand over time at The New Statesman. (via io9)
posted by thecaddy at 7:17 AM PST - 22 comments

"Let’s have a year of publishing only women." ~ Kamila Shamsie [The Guardian] [Books]

It is clear that there is a gender bias in publishing houses and the world of books. Well, enough. Why not try something radical? Make 2018 the Year of Publishing Women, in which no new titles should be by men.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:12 AM PST - 90 comments

Unseen Cuba: First aerial photographs reveal island's spectacular beauty
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:03 AM PST - 16 comments

His career contained all the phases of 1970s art-rock history, though not in the same order: a proggy occult phase, a glam phase, a Bryan Ferryish lounge pop phase, a Brian Enoish ambient phase, a David Bowieish decadent nightclub phase; Bonjour, Biqui, Bonjour! was his punk phase. Debussy and Ravel (not to mention Poulenc, Fauré, Milhaud and others) may have written grander pieces. But while they were busy with concertos and sonatas, Satie was working on surreal pop operas, shadow plays and lo-fi Gesamtkunstwerken, experimenting with film, flirting with Dada and hanging out with the couture crowd.

Nick Richardson talks about Erik Satie.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:34 AM PST - 22 comments

The Taman Shud case has been one of the world's great unsolved mysteries. Is an amateur enthusiast now on the verge of finally cracking the case? [more inside]
posted by Chrysostom at 5:31 AM PST - 48 comments

A Complete Taxonomy of Internet Chum (John Mahoney for The Awl)
posted by box at 5:09 AM PST - 33 comments

In Europe, Fake Jobs Can Have Real Benefits (SLNYT)

The concept of virtual companies, also known as practice firms, traces its roots to Germany after World War II, when large numbers of people needed to reorient their skills. Intended to supplement vocational training, the centers emerged in earnest across Europe in the 1950s and spread rapidly in the last two decades.

posted by frimble at 2:05 AM PST - 18 comments

New Zealand has more gang members per capita than any other country. But the largest is the Mongrel Mob. More than 1 in 10 prisoners is a member. [more inside]
posted by aychedee at 12:28 AM PST - 26 comments

Edward Snowden believes there is reason to be hopeful about mass surveillance (SLNYT).
posted by andrewpcone at 10:14 PM PST - 84 comments

"I need to tell you about the Cirque of the Unclimbables. Ever since I went there, I’ve tried to describe it to friends and family, tried to explain its power and its perfection. It is, I tell people, the best natural campsite I have ever visited. It’s also among the most beautiful eyefuls of landscape I’ve ever seen — its rock walls more overpowering than Zion’s, in Utah, its evening light more perfect than Hawaii’s, its peaks more menacing than Denali, and its stillness more complete than the deep rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. It’s a place that forces me to reach for comparisons from fiction: It’s “Lord of the Rings,” I tell people. It’s Mordor crossed with the Shire."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:08 PM PST - 8 comments

Red Wolves are one of two species of wolves in North America. "The red wolf is one of the world’s most endangered wild canids. Once common throughout the southeastern United States, red wolf populations were decimated by the 1960s due to intensive predator control programs and loss of habitat. A remnant population of red wolves was found along the Gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana. After being declared an endangered species in 1973, efforts were initiated to locate and capture as many wild red wolves as possible. Of the 17 remaining wolves captured by biologists, 14 became the founders of a successful captive breeding program. Consequently, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service declared red wolves extinct in the wild in 1980." On May 2nd a litter of pups was born at the Wolf Conversation Center in New York. This is a live feed of the den. Turn your speakers on, even when the pups are quiet and sleeping, the sound will bring peace and smiles.
posted by HuronBob at 9:53 PM PST - 8 comments

...an interactive map that shows both the median rents in [some] New York City neighborhoods right now as well as their evolution in those areas over the last seven years—a period that has been marked by significant new development

Mapping New York Neighborhoods Hit Hardest by High Rents
posted by griphus at 5:28 PM PST - 42 comments

Originally proposed to American audiences in a 2011 video, Dutch-style Protected Intersections have recently gained traction in the US as an effective means to protect cyclists and pedestrians in busy intersections. Four such intersections are under construction in the US; a similar intersection opened in Canada last year; and more are certain to follow, as protected bike lanes become commonplace in American cities.
posted by schmod at 3:26 PM PST - 51 comments

“Critics say the improvement might only be modest, but oh what I would give for even a modest improvement,” The advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration voted 18 to 6 that the drug, flibanserin, be approved. All of those who voted yes said approval should come only if certain measures are taken to reduce the risks of side effects. [more inside]
posted by TheLittlePrince at 3:00 PM PST - 69 comments

The definitive internet videos demonstrating the Coriolis Effect, which makes water drains counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere (by SmarterEveryday) and clockwise in the southern hemisphere (by Veritasium). Necessary to watch them in with youtubedoubler.
posted by numaner at 2:52 PM PST - 26 comments

In their paper ("A New Horned Dinosaur Reveals Convergent Evolution in Cranial Ornamentation in Ceratopsidae"(pdf)) released today, Caleb Brown and Donald Henderson describe Regaliceratops peterhewsi, a new species of dinosaur. They called it Hellboy, and not just because of the horns. [more inside]
posted by nubs at 2:23 PM PST - 11 comments

Supreme Motivational Machine Shia LaBeouf motivates thugs, balcony guy, distracted student, Francis, HAL, Batman, Neo, Frodo, Luke Skywalker, Anakin, Death Eaters, Hitler, Brad Pitt, The Avengers, Cameron, iphone hater, babby, Taylor Swift, gamer, Chernarus Survivor, store drunk, AMERICA !!
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:05 PM PST - 25 comments

Too many films are blighted by lacklustre music - Ennio Morricone Ennio Morricone, 88, asserts that contemporary soundtracks are ruined by "amateur" composers and "synthesized" sounds. Is this just attention-grabbing comments for his upcoming tour, old-school vs. new wave, grumpy curmudgeon on the porch ranting? Or does the OST for Mad Max: Fury Road suck? [more inside]
posted by lesChaps at 1:18 PM PST - 55 comments

In the wake of its split from eBay, online transaction service PayPal will be changing its policies on July 1st, 2015. Under the new arrangement, U.S. based users may opt-out from using PayPal or "consent to receive autodialed or pre-recorded calls and text messages from PayPal at any telephone number that you have provided us or that we have otherwise obtained. [more inside]
posted by Smart Dalek at 12:26 PM PST - 122 comments

While the status of Obama's "American College Promise" initiative that proposes two free years of community college for "everybody who's willing to work for it" (announced back in January) is far from certain, The Washington Post identified seven countries -- Germany, Finland, France, Sweden, Norway, Slovenia, and Brazil -- where Americans can study at universities, in English, for free (or almost free), and BBC's News Magazine recently detailed how this works in Germany, both from the side of a new student from outside of Germany, and what Germany gets out of the situation. But if you want to stay in the US, TIME identifies 25 colleges where you can get a tuition for free (with a number of caveats, of course).
posted by filthy light thief at 12:04 PM PST - 12 comments

The intelligence of octopuses is increasingly recognized, but nature is more creative than us glorified chimps ever realize on first blush. You see, octopuses are just full of neurons, but their nervous structure raises all kinds of uncanny questions--What is "intelligence" for an octopus? What is it like to be an octopus?--because most of them are in its arms. [more inside]
posted by byanyothername at 12:03 PM PST - 26 comments

The Scottish play movie trailer: Starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.
posted by Cash4Lead at 11:51 AM PST - 35 comments

A full-time minimum-wage job won't get you a 1-bedroom apartment anywhere in America. (slVox)
posted by Kitteh at 11:29 AM PST - 46 comments

I Have Been Sitting on Manspreaders For the Last Month and I Have Never Felt More Free (Previously)
posted by Jacqueline at 9:28 AM PST - 429 comments

Crossrail is a 70 ish mile railway currently being built right through the centre of London. Take drone flight through some of the tunnels and watch the giant mechanical Shai Halud chomp through walls.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 9:24 AM PST - 7 comments

12 ridiculously adorable baby falcons have hatched atop 3 NYC bridges. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:14 AM PST - 25 comments

Sơn Đoòng 360: A series of 360° panoramas allows anyone with an internet connection to experience Vietnam's Son Doong cave, one of the planet's biggest. [more inside]
posted by almostmanda at 7:47 AM PST - 6 comments

In-Canon Star Wars Comic Just Did Something Completely Insane [Comic Book Resources] [spoilers]

Back in "Star Wars" #4, writer Jason Aaron introduced a figure wearing a cloak and mask who had arrived at Mos Eisley in search of Han Solo. The mystery person took out the knees of a group of Rodian ruffians using a voice-activated blaster mounted under a table, evoking a certain scene from 1977's "Star Wars." In today's "Star Wars" #6, artist John Cassaday finally got the opportunity to take off that character's disguise and reveal their identity.

Spoilers lie ahead for those of you that aren't caught up with the series, so look away now. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:34 AM PST - 112 comments

Octopus carries coconut halves as portable shelter
posted by NoraReed at 6:33 AM PST - 33 comments

This Is What It’s Like To Get Fit For A Bra At Six Different Stores: Kristin Chirico goes on a bra crawl. (SLBuzzFeed, lots of bra photos) [more inside]
posted by Metroid Baby at 6:29 AM PST - 83 comments

I'm fat," Daniel P. Finney wrote in an April 12 column in the Des Moines Register. "Scratch that. I'm morbidly obese." Finney, the Register's Metro Voice columnist, was 39 years old and weighed more than 500 pounds. Facing excruciating pain, type II diabetes, and concern that he would soon lose the ability to walk, he decided to make a serious effort to lose weight. He has been chronicling that effort in a blog, Making Weight. [more inside]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:03 AM PST - 14 comments

"I amused myself for over a year thinking about the impacts of different toilet seat administration policies and how to measure them – doing calculations in my head, considering ratios of Standing events to Sitting events, and I slowly began to understand some of the specific differences in the basic policies that know to be administered most often. Finally, I decided to perform a probabilistic analysis". Essential Toilet Seat Analytics.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 6:02 AM PST - 73 comments

The little-known story behind a pair of young newlyweds in post–World War II Manhattan who launched the era of the supermodel.
posted by ellieBOA at 4:23 AM PST - 3 comments

"‘big’ decisions turn out to have much less impact on a life as a whole than the myriad of small seemingly insignificant ones.” When a NYT columnist asked readers to share how they found their purpose in life, a surprising theme emerged: a re-examination of the scale of our lives, and the source(s) of happiness therein.
posted by mecran01 at 4:10 AM PST - 23 comments

The Definitive History of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Greatest Action Movie Quips.
posted by veedubya at 2:51 AM PST - 28 comments

Gender Trouble was written about 24 years ago, and at that time I did not think well enough about trans issues. Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person’s felt sense of gender was therefore “unreal.” That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel, how the primary experience of the body is registered, and the quite urgent and legitimate demand to have those aspects of sex recognized and supported.

Judith Butler talks to Cristan Williams about feminism, gender and the hostility of some within radical feminism towards trans people. Judith Butler is a prominent gender theorist & philosopher whose book Gender Trouble (1990) is arguably one of the foundation text of modern queer theory but which has sometimes been (ab)used to disappear trans experiences.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:05 AM PST - 28 comments

A conversation with Ilya Ponomarev, an exiled dissident Russian State Duma Deputy living in San Jose - "When the Russian government voted to annex Crimea last year, only one member of parliament stood in opposition—Ilya Ponomarev. The final tally was 445 to 1, with Ponomarev wanting the world to know that the annexation did not have unanimous support. He is now barred from returning home to Russia. First elected to Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, in 2007, Ponomarev became a leader of political protests that shook Moscow before Putin's return to the presidency in 2012. Now, the Russian parliament has voted overwhelming to strip Ponomarev of the immunity from prosecution granted to lawmakers by the Russian Constitution. How long can this government maintain control by silencing these voices of opposition? With elections scheduled for next year, what is the future of Putin's government and Russia's relationship with the United States?" [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:01 AM PST - 13 comments

"Why so Poky? The scourge of terrible canonical children’s books." by Gabriel Roth, Slate

Reading to one’s children is, as everyone knows, one of the great pleasures of parenthood. I love the creaturely warmth of my daughter snuggled up close and the feeling of giving her something intrinsically human and necessary. And Eliza loves being read to. She enjoys the stories and the pictures, but more than that, I think, she responds to the mental intimacy: the knowledge that she and I are looking at the same pages and interpreting the same sentences. It’s a balm for the terrible isolation that arrives around age 2, along with language and self-consciousness—the knowledge that one’s experience is inescapably private. And so the time I spend reading to her can feel, for both of us, like communion.

[more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:21 PM PST - 40 comments

IN 1969, WE PUT A MAN ON THE MOON. IN 1982, WE INVENTED THE INTERNET. IN 1998, WE DISCOVERED THE FULL ANATOMY OF THE CLITORIS.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:03 PM PST - 11 comments

I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me. Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones. Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.
posted by hank_14 at 10:01 PM PST - 154 comments

Cyborg isn’t just an emasculated man, but an emasculated black man, and as one of comics’ higher profile black superheroes — starring in his own movie in distant 2020 — the unspoken fact of his castration is demeaning. The racist narrative of black man as sexual threat is served by the idea of a character who is rendered heroic in the same event that symbolically renders him sexually unthreatening. (Genitals do not define gender or sexual power, but they are often tied to an individual’s relationship with their sexual, gender, and cultural identities.) The Re-Masculation of Cyborg asserts that DC Comics may be correcting the problems that blogger Robert Jones Jr. identified in his essay Humanity Not Included: DC’s Cyborg and the Mechanization of the Black Body.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 8:24 PM PST - 31 comments

What Twitter Can Be.
I believe in Twitter. The company itself is improving, not worsening. The stock market doesn’t get that because Twitter has failed to tell its own story to investors and users. Here is how I think that story could unfold:
posted by andoatnp at 8:04 PM PST - 43 comments

Just under 2 weeks after the Finale of "The Late Show with David Letterman" and 13 weeks before the Debut of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert", we have been given the first hints of what we can expect from the Former Parody Pundit: The Show's Official Website (colbertlateshow.com), the first episode of a podcast with Stephen and members of his staff behind the scenes, and a Very Special Video with the New Stephen and The Colbeard. (SPOILERS: Contains references to Hitler, the Amish, Wolverine and Camptown Races)
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:56 PM PST - 16 comments

Ben Garrison is the most trolled cartoonist in the world. His trolls love him so much, they recreated him in their own image. [via]
posted by brundlefly at 6:08 PM PST - 56 comments

White ignorance refers to

the connection between privilege, ignorance and denials of complicity. It is Charles Mills, however, who has drawn special attention to the epistemology of ignorance. Mills’ work is guided by the question, ’How are white people able to consistently do the wrong thing while thinking that they are doing the right thing?’

[more inside]
posted by eviemath at 5:12 PM PST - 5 comments

The controversial form of scheduling locks staff into shifts that can be canceled at the last minute, with no pay. [more inside]
posted by dotgirl at 3:38 PM PST - 69 comments

Pluto and its moons just got a whole lot stranger A new analysis of data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that Pluto's four smallest known moons have been thrown into chaos because of Pluto's relationship with its largest moon Charon. They're a bit codependent.
posted by Michele in California at 3:26 PM PST - 17 comments

Marbles, magnets, and sand - the hypnotic art of Bruce Shapiro [via]
posted by a lungful of dragon at 3:21 PM PST - 7 comments

The Visual Effects of Mad Max: Fury Road - Visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson said: “I’ve been joking recently about how the film has been promoted as being a live action stunt driven film - which it is, but also how there’s so little CGI in the film. The reality is that there’s 2000 VFX shots in the film. A very large number of those shots are very simple clean-ups and fixes and wire removals and painting out tire tracks from previous shots, but there are a big number of big VFX shots as well.” [more inside]
posted by hoodrich at 12:03 PM PST - 169 comments

Sheryl Sandberg reflects on the sudden, tragic death of her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, thirty days ago. [more inside]
posted by New Year at 11:58 AM PST - 40 comments

Now that Tidal has given us a CD quality streaming service, NPR Music Editor Jacob Ganz and some co-workers have put together a quiz to help figure out if it's worth paying for: How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? (Tidal has its own test, if you want something different.) "Danceable cables" come from an old Gizmodo review.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:22 AM PST - 67 comments

You might find Tesla (and all of Elon Musk's businesses) to be excitingly Geektastic (or not), but you may have wondered if there's anything more to it than just a lot of cool engineering. Does any of it actually have the potential for real positive change? If you want some information and a framework to help answer that question, check out this post, which investigates Understanding Why What Tesla Is Doing Is Important. [more inside]
posted by Ickster at 10:57 AM PST - 49 comments

Susie Cagle writes about California's drought impact on the people of Porterville
posted by boo_radley at 10:21 AM PST - 17 comments

Historie of Beafts combs through Medieval bestiaries to bring you the finest in olde-tyme animal facts. [more inside]
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:16 AM PST - 31 comments

How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti ­and Built Six Homes. Even as the group has publicly celebrated its work, insider accounts detail a string of failures [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 9:38 AM PST - 53 comments

Today, Gawker editorial staff vote on whether to unionize with Writers Guild of America, East, saying that transparency in compensation and fair health benefits are among the issues that have led them to organize. [more inside]
posted by univac at 9:29 AM PST - 17 comments

A lot of people argued that [tampon use] was not only inappropriate because it might break the hymen, but it might be also pleasurable and might be a way for girls to experience orgasmic pleasure.

A history of the tampon, in the Atlantic. In related news, as of July 1, feminine hygiene products will no longer be subject to federal sales tax in Canada.
posted by jeather at 9:00 AM PST - 106 comments

Pop stars of yesteryear sell their souls with style.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:50 AM PST - 20 comments

A short explanation of why an Australian state's parliament officially declared Eddie McGuire to be a boofhead. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 8:47 AM PST - 19 comments

Bethesda Softworks has released the official trailer for the highly anticipated Fallout 4. [SLYT]
posted by Timmoy Daen at 8:08 AM PST - 367 comments

Lahore Landing, an interactive documentary. "It all started when Taahira went to Karachi for a journalism internship ... Over Skype calls, she shared with us her experience – from underground indie rock concerts to alfresco BBQ nights. It surprised us. It seemed that all the media shared about life in Pakistan was a world of violence and terrorism when it was a lot more than that." [more inside]
posted by undue influence at 7:48 AM PST - 2 comments

To Live and Dine in L.A. is a multi-platform project of The Library Foundation of Los Angeles based on the extraordinary menu collection of The Los Angeles Public Library.

The entire project, which includes a book, an exhibition, and a variety of city-wide public programs and media events, is dedicated to curating and mobilizing the Library’s collection of historic L.A. menus in order to explore both the food history of the city and the city’s contemporary struggles with food insecurity, food deserts, and youth hunger.

(You can also navigate the collection via the Archive page.)
posted by Room 641-A at 7:31 AM PST - 4 comments

HuffPost would rather not fire people, since that often comes with severance, so it torments them into leaving whenever possible. One editor was barred from all but slideshow management because she accidentally crossed a friend of Arianna’s. Others have been stripped of all responsibility, with reporters or staffers they oversee reassigned. Another favored tactic is for people to be suddenly told that they are miserable failures and given stringent story quotas and harsh warnings. The ending is almost always the same. Driven mad, people flee.

Hell Is Working at the Huffington Post
posted by griphus at 7:27 AM PST - 27 comments

"There are times where I have my good day and my bad days, where I forget things," he said. "There are times where I get the headaches, and the nose bleeds. I won't even let my lady know because I don't want her to be worried about it."

--Tracy Morgan speaks about his injuries, the loss of his friend "Jimmy Mack" McNair, and the recently settled lawsuit against Wal-Mart. [more inside]
posted by almostmanda at 6:12 AM PST - 46 comments

Simon James is an artist who turns record albums into Penguin-esque book collections. He also has a handful of half-forgotten classics & recession books. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:45 AM PST - 12 comments

This weekend, the seminal Beijing band Chui Wan will launch their (self-titled) second album after an extensive U.S tour. Their new single, The Sound of Wilderness, debuted on NPR last week - quite possibly a milestone for the Chinese indie scene. The album's highlights include the seven-minute closer "Beijing is Sinking", a swirling, chaotic song about staying afloat in a torrent of change. An apt metaphor, perhaps, for all the musicians in Beijing's fiercely iconoclastic indie underground. Initial reviews for the album are buoyant. It's seen as a coming-of-age moment for the band, for its influential record label Maybe Mars, and perhaps even for the small, vibrant Beijing indie community. So let's turn back the clock to the early 2000s, to post-SARS Beijing, and see how we got here. [more inside]
posted by beijingbrown at 12:59 AM PST - 17 comments

The Straight Parents’ Guide to How Not to Raise a Homophobe — and How to Be a Better Ally by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie for "Outward" at Slate.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:16 PM PST - 22 comments

The Subculture of Embattled Abortion Workers. [more inside]
posted by John Cohen at 10:29 PM PST - 14 comments

Since Aug. 9, 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department shot and killed Michael Brown, Mckesson and a core group of other activists have built the most formidable American protest movement of the 21st century to date. Their innovation has been to marry the strengths of social media — the swift, morally blunt consensus that can be created by hashtags; the personal connection that a charismatic online persona can make with followers; the broad networks that allow for the easy distribution of documentary photos and videos — with an effort to quickly mobilize protests in each new city where a police shooting occurs.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:58 PM PST - 20 comments

"In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist." While the article at Sciencedaily.com may be a bit breathlessly excited about it, even the more somber source article in Nature agrees that this "may call for a reassessment of basic assumptions in neuroimmunology"
posted by rmd1023 at 5:54 PM PST - 92 comments

Al-Jazeera has recently taken on the topic of legal guardianship, in which a US citizen deemed incompetent to manage their own finances becomes a "ward of the state." When judges can take away senior citizens' basic rights (aired 5/26/2015) tells the story of Dorothy Luck, and a related written piece dated 6/1/2015 gives a detailed account on the story of John Stout, a Texas minister who helped "send Bibles to the moon" was declared incompetent after trying to give away some of his land. [more inside]
posted by aydeejones at 4:11 PM PST - 11 comments

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. [Toronto Star] [Autoplay Video]

A heart-wrenching and damning report culminates a six-year examination of residential schools that oversaw the ill-treatment of aboriginal children for more than a century. It pieces together a horrifying history that has been repeatedly dismissed or ignored.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:54 PM PST - 25 comments

Scores of low-flying planes circling American cities are part of a civilian air force operated by the FBI and obscured behind fictitious companies, The Associated Press has learned
posted by hydropsyche at 3:50 PM PST - 101 comments

The Iceman List, by Tim Carmody. Classic movie antagonists who were pretty much right all along.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 3:24 PM PST - 85 comments

Scientists in Queensland have discovered two new species of carnivorous marsupials, and raised another from subspecies to species status. Unfortunately, the little guys are at risk from climate change and habitat loss. Also: the males are screwing themselves to death. [more inside]
posted by kanewai at 2:36 PM PST - 19 comments

The vote of 67 - 32 will move the measure to President Obama's desk. Previous reports suggest that he will sign it immediately.
posted by mr_bovis at 2:12 PM PST - 42 comments

David Sedaris talks about surviving the suicide of his sister Tiffany
posted by a lungful of dragon at 12:30 PM PST - 78 comments

'Bittersweet Me': Michael Stipe discusses his career with Grantland's Steven Hyden.
posted by box at 12:18 PM PST - 25 comments

Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck. Musings on the potentially devastating economic impact of self-driving trucks. Previously.
posted by Ella Fynoe at 12:08 PM PST - 231 comments

In South Korea, 2 people have died of MERS, with 18 people becoming infected over the past 10 days, resulting in nearly 700 people being placed in quarantine. A man broke quarantine and traveled to China, subsequently testing positive for China's first confirmed case of MERS. Untill recently, all cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) had been linked to countries in and near the Arabian Peninsula. Right now, there is no vaccine for MERS and no treatment.
posted by needled at 11:03 AM PST - 21 comments

After the Thrill is Gone: Has a director ever gotten so bad you start to wonder whether you were wrong to love their earlier movies?
posted by gwint at 9:38 AM PST - 377 comments

Are you a central San Francisco resident who is too busy to get your trash out to the curb on time once a week? Well your worries are over with TrashDay. Heck, maybe you're too busy for everything. No time to feed yourself because you need to lock down that seed round term sheet with your AngelList syndicate? Here Comes The Airplane.
posted by GuyZero at 9:09 AM PST - 85 comments

Batteriser is a simple metal sleeve that promises to give consumers up to eight times more life from their disposable batteries. [more inside]
posted by monospace at 9:08 AM PST - 53 comments

"Thank you dear sister, greatest of all sisters, without whom I'd never survive."
The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show aired on Saturday mornings on the CBS network from 1983 - 1986. Only 18 episodes were ever produced. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 9:03 AM PST - 25 comments

Joanna Rutkowska is the creator of the Qubes OS, one of the preeminent security researchers on virtualization security, and CEO and founder of Invisible Things Lab. [more inside]
posted by bfranklin at 8:43 AM PST - 13 comments

The Agency is every online community member's worst fears come to life: a real honest-to-goodness troll/noise factory where dozens of employees using hundreds of accounts post thousands of highly targeted and coordinated attacks as awful comments on Twitter, Facebook, and forums in order to sway public opinion about geopolitics. From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities...
posted by mathowie at 7:55 AM PST - 76 comments

Klaus, a new film in development by Sergio Pablos Animation Studios, uses traditional hand-drawn animation and secret compositing techniques to bring its world to breathtaking, painterly life.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:45 AM PST - 9 comments

Games have the opposite problem: an elitism defined by the absence of taste, or simply by bad taste [...] Stepping into games is like arriving at a cheese-tasting party where most of the crowd is angrily murmuring that cheddar and swiss are always and objectively the best cheeses on grounds of utility and pleasure, that assholes offering a plate of mold-laced bleu are an affront to any real cheese-lover, that brie may simply be too soft to be a real cheese.

A Lack of Taste (via Offworld)
posted by griphus at 7:15 AM PST - 38 comments

Lumière and Company was a project realised in 1995 to mark the centenary of the Lumière brothers’ first movies. Forty directors were given the use of a restored Lumière Cinematograph and asked to make a film under 1895-style constraints: (1) the films could be no longer than 52 seconds; (2) no synchronized sound was permitted; (3) no more than three takes were allowed. Any editing had to be done in-camera. Nearly all of the completed shorts have been compiled into a YouTube playlist. Please note that some of the clips contain nudity: treat this post as NSFW. Les Frères Lumière previously: 1, 2. [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 6:59 AM PST - 8 comments

UCL Press University College London is pleased to announce the launch of UCL Press, the University’s in house publishing arm, on 4 June 2015. UCL Press will be the first fully Open Access university press in the UK with all books, journals and monographs freely available online, creating a diverse and accessible global knowledge resource.
posted by Segundus at 6:55 AM PST - 5 comments

The Messy Business of Reinventing Happiness. The story behind FastPass+ at DisneyWorld. [more inside]
posted by blue_beetle at 6:53 AM PST - 40 comments

"If you love old books, you've come to the right place." Quill is a project by Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel and librarian/photographer Giulio Menna, detailing the laborious process of creating a manuscript before Gutenberg. Learn what a "quire" is, and the origin of the term "watermark." [more inside]
posted by Hargrimm at 6:52 AM PST - 2 comments

Charles Kennedy, the former leader of the Liberal-Democrats, dies aged 55, one month after he lost his seat in the 2015 UK general elections. The police are treating his death as not suspicious. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 6:09 AM PST - 37 comments

Duke Nukem Forever. Earthbound and Donkey Kong 64 on Virtual Console. DnD RPGs and LucasArts adventure games on GOG.com. What an age we live in, in which vidya games we were once denied are suddenly no longer denied. And now, Chip's Challenge and its fabled sequel, classic puzzle games long thought permanently unrereleasable and unreleasable respectively due to copyright issues, have finally been released on Steam (and let's not forget its spiritual successor from during the drought, Chuck's Challenge 3D). But why stop there? Fans have created a bunch of free extra levels for the original game, including three epic collaborative level packs, and a free program (first version, newer version) capable of running them. The latter version also has a convenient bundle including all three level packs and an intro pack that serves as a tutorial. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 5:30 AM PST - 7 comments

Joe Stiglitz on Inequality, Wealth, and Growth: Why Capitalism is Failing (video; if you don't have 30m, skip to 20m for discussion of political inequality, wealth, credit and monetary policy) - "If the very rich can use their position to get higher returns, more investment information, more extraction of rents, and if the very rich have equal or higher savings rates, then wealth will become more concentrated... economic inequality inevitably gets translated into political inequality, and political inequality gets translated into more economic inequality. The basic and really important idea here is that markets don't exist in a vacuum, that market economies operate according to certain rules, certain regulations that specify how they work. And those effect the efficiency of those markets, but they also effect how the fruits of the benefits of those markets are distributed and the result of that is there are large numbers of aspects of our basic economic framework that in recent years have worked to increase the inequality of wealth and income in our society... leading to a society which can be better described, increasingly, as an inherited plutocracy." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 2:02 AM PST - 27 comments