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Pristina: An Airport Too Far. In 1999, an incident at Pristina airport in Kosovo almost brought NATO into open conflict with Russia. This is how Michael Jackson (not that one) and James Blunt (that one) helped prevent a war. — by Metafilter's own garius
posted by Major Clanger at 4:24 PM PST - 17 comments

Tom Sachs would like you to break off a five dollar bud, and load the car, because you know that she is a Reefer Lovin' Woman who has access to the bong hit station. On cannabis culture being masculine. Sometimes consuming cannabis is just a way to pay the bills, and women 'weedtubers' are present to break the stigma.
posted by SkinsOfCoconut at 2:51 PM PST - 11 comments

Why We Should Teach Kids to Call the Robot ‘It’: As a new generation grows up surrounded by artificial intelligence, researchers find education as early as preschool can help avoid confusion about robots’ role (non-paywalled WSJ) [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 2:21 PM PST - 33 comments

"Friends" hasn't aged well but here's the thing — this show has always been awful. by Scaachi Koul [Buzzfeed] “...as someone who lived through the first round of Friends’ cultural reign, who was conscious for at least half of it, and who participated in it in real time, I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you all of the truth: Friends, a show about white people being thin and having the pointiest nipples in the continental Americas — and a show that I, at one time, watched and enjoyed — is absolute garbage. [...] There’s been some ongoing online discussion about the strange dissonance between Friends nostalgia and the reality of the show’s poor quality. But still, overwhelmingly, audiences seem fine pretending that Friends was any good at all.”
posted by Fizz at 2:05 PM PST - 217 comments

Self-Made Métis. Canadian scholar Darryl Leroux's research on "raceshifting" looks at the rise of groups and lawsuits claiming indigenous identities in eastern Canada, many as a strategy to contest the rights of recognized Indigenous peoples.
On Twitter, Leroux shared some explanations entered as court testimony:

Q: So, tell us what makes you "Métis" [Indigenous]?
Bob: Well, when I was young, we used to play "Cowboy and Indians... And, well, I always wanted to be an Indian.

Q: For the game?
Bob: I wanted to be an Indian. I read the "Last of the Mohicans" comic book over and over at the library, and I wanted to be one of the characters, I forget his name, but I'd say, "I want to be that Indian". [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:58 PM PST - 9 comments

As the global wellness industry tops $4.2 trillion, Dr. Jen Gunter is on a mission to arm women with science-based advice in hopes of stanching the spread of health misinformation. Increasingly, she’s been sounding the alarm about how confusion surrounding women’s bodies fuels larger efforts to control them. Dr. Jen Gunter wants to protect your vagina from Gwyneth Paltrow, and from politicians trying to regulate your body with pseudoscience. (Mother Jones) Part of spreading accurate information is the ability to talk about anatomy, but Twitter, Facebook and Instagram recently blocked ads with the words "vagina," "vaginal" and "ob-gyn." (MSN) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:22 PM PST - 8 comments

I’m the Dad Guy … duh. Bonus parody version for extra merriment: with lyrics by Google Translate. Bonus non-parody cover in tango style. (YouTube links) Have a good weekend!
posted by bitteschoen at 10:33 AM PST - 8 comments

Deaths and devastating injuries. A litany of labor violations. Drivers forced to urinate in their vans. Here is how Amazon’s gigantic, decentralized, next-day delivery network brought chaos, exploitation, and danger to communities across America.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 9:36 AM PST - 84 comments

Many Disney movies share a curious detail. Where are the protagonists' biological mothers? Little wooden puppet Pinocchio is carved and cared for by his "father" Geppetto. Peter Pan is forever a motherless lost-boy. The mothers of Belle (Beauty and the Beast), Jasmine (Aladdin) and Pocahontas from the eponymous film are all either absent or deceased. -- Why are so many Disney parents missing or dead?, by Leighann Morris [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 9:00 AM PST - 69 comments

"I despise this synthetic milk. How can I get some real fresh milk? And the answer came: the only place you can get fresh milk from is a cow." "A cow? On the moon?" "Why not, I said to myself — why not build a cow?" Hi Diddle Diddle: an entertaining short story by Robert Silverberg (writing as Calvin M. Knox) in Astounding Science Fiction, 1959. Scanned images or plain text (search for "knox" to scroll down to this story).
posted by moonmilk at 8:28 AM PST - 12 comments

To the horror of decent writers everywhere, The Associated Press has issued new guidance on the use of hyphens, upending the normal order of things, and precipitating the decline of Western Civilisation.
posted by Cobalt at 7:50 AM PST - 81 comments

Black Bears Adapting To City Living (2003), Urban Bears "Live Fast, Die Young" (2008), Missoula Urban Bears (2009), Bears Of The Last Frontier (2011, Anchorage), You've Heard of Urban Coyotes. Urban Bears Could Be Next (2012) Map of Anchorage Bears (2015, includes earlier data), Miserable Urban Bears Reconnect With Nature (2016) Home Video Of Urban Bears (Asheville, 2018)
posted by hippybear at 5:39 AM PST - 15 comments

Today I learned that the most common street name in U.S. is Second. First is the third, Third is the second with Fifth being the sixth most common. (Single reddit comment link)
posted by growabrain at 5:27 AM PST - 55 comments

"this idea that courts are there for revenue generation” "These places have one thing in common: They issue a lot of tickets, and they finance their governments by doing it. Like many other rural jurisdictions, towns in south Georgia have suffered decades of a slow economic decline that’s left them without much of a tax base. But they see a large amount of through-traffic from semi-trucks and Florida-bound tourists. And they’ve grown reliant on ticketing them to meet their expenses." [more inside]
posted by frumiousb at 11:40 PM PST - 65 comments

Two minutes of balls settling into a lattice [YouTube] [more inside]
posted by noneuclidean at 4:17 PM PST - 24 comments

The Toronto District School Board released their revised Student Dress Policy today. They have explicitly stated that “pasties” are underwear and thus not currently appropriate for the classroom.
posted by saucysault at 4:01 PM PST - 59 comments

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account was hacked on Friday afternoon by a group that calls itself the Chuckle Squad. The hackers tweeted racial slurs from Dorsey’s account. Some offensive tweets were up for about 10 minutes, though not long after the hack began, those tweets were being deleted. [more inside]
posted by roolya_boolya at 3:19 PM PST - 28 comments

The group is hoping to win over millennials — and replace Planned Parenthood. Earlier this year, Obria received a $1.7 million federal grant through Title X, a program aimed at providing family planning services to underserved Americans. The program was designed, in part, to help people get affordable contraception like birth control pills and IUDs. But critics say Obria clinics don’t actually provide those things. Instead, the group encourages “natural family planning,” a method of birth control that relies on tracking the monthly menstrual cycle and is generally less effective than hormonal contraception. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 2:51 PM PST - 23 comments

The Climate Trail is a free multi-platform game about climate refugees fleeing ever worsening conditions after inaction on climate has rendered much of the USA (and the world) uninhabitable. (Win/Mac) - More info
posted by Memo at 2:46 PM PST - 14 comments

Using machine learning facial prediction to create absolutely Cronenbergian nightmare extrapolations of low-resolution emoji.
posted by cortex at 12:43 PM PST - 15 comments

3.8 million-year-old hominin skull fills in “a major gap” in the fossil record | Humans may have reached Europe by 210,000 years ago; by 40,000 years later, Neanderthals had taken over the site | Neanderthals’ history is as complicated as ours; new study hints at Neanderthal population turnover in Siberia 90,000-120,000 years ago. | Stone tools suggest the first Americans came from Japan | Not vikings this time — New archaeological layer discovered at L’Anse aux Meadows || All articles by Kiona N. Smith for Ars Technica. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:40 PM PST - 11 comments

Click, whir, ping: the lost sounds of loading video games [The Guardian] From the Apple II to the ZX Spectrum, the aural experience of loading a game from a cassette, disc or cartridge was all part of the fun.
posted by Fizz at 12:14 PM PST - 28 comments

In May, the magazine Strange Horizons published a discussion on "the way religion is depicted in much of the genre" among Zen Cho, Aliette de Bodard, Ben Jeapes, Daniel Heath Justice, Liz Williams, Tajinder Hayer, Mimi Mondal, Michael A. Burstein, Ken MacLeod, and Farah Mendlesohn. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 8:34 AM PST - 43 comments

“In press releases and interviews, fast-food corporations don’t call consumers “customers”; instead, they’re “fans.” Meanwhile, these gimmicks do nothing to ameliorate the larger issues surrounding the fast food economy, from environmental degradation to union-busting. According to PayScale, the average Popeyes employee makes $9.15 an hour. With this sandwich frenzy, they’ll be overworked with no increase in compensation.” The clamor over Popeyes’ new chicken sandwich is just the latest example of how fast-food marketing infiltrates our lives. (Outline) 'I was working like a slave': Exhausted Popeyes employees describe a harrowing situation amid chicken-sandwich chaos, including working 60-hour weeks and shifts with no breaks (Business Insider) “The fast food industry is the most unequal in the country, with employees occupying the position of the lowest-paid American workers, while the CEOs are some of the highest paid.” Could we imagine a Democratic Socialist fast food system? (Jacobin)
posted by The Whelk at 8:33 AM PST - 48 comments

We surveyed more than 12,000 people (and counting) about the most contentious border question in the U.S. to reveal the true geography of America’s midsection.
posted by Etrigan at 8:08 AM PST - 121 comments

The National Aquarium of New Zealand names and shames the Naughty Penguin of the Month. Also, the Good Penguin of the Month. For the most recent honoured and shamed penguins, see the aquarium's facebook page [FB obviously].
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:09 AM PST - 7 comments

Christian Picciolini is a former white supremacist who now works to de-radicalize people. He co-founded Life After Hate, a non-profit organization to help people leave white supremacy groups, and later founded Free Radicals Project, a global extremism prevention and disengagement network. Under the Obama administration, this de-radicalization work was awarded federal grants that were then rescinded under Donald Trump. Free Radicals is now launching a fundraising campaign to help expand its outreach, at hateisnotahoax.com. More recent coverage and interviews with Picciolini: [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 6:47 AM PST - 17 comments

Hurricane Dorian is aimed at the east coast of Florida. It is currently pegged to make landfall as a category 4 storm in the area of Lake Okeechobee, the site of an earlier major disaster. The possibility of landing on Labor Day recalls another horrific storm. [more inside]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:16 AM PST - 109 comments

New single from Neil Young & Crazy Horse, “Milky Way,” from their forthcoming LP Colorado. Previewed on his Spring/Summer 2019 tour, along with the dynamite “Rainbow of Colors” and “Think of Me.”
posted by porn in the woods at 5:26 AM PST - 11 comments

Former CIA-backed guerrillas — rivals of Chairman Mao Zedong — are now embracing the tourism industry, years after setting up the arteries and networks that sustain the Golden Triangle drug trade to this day.
posted by Blasdelb at 4:38 AM PST - 6 comments

Fascinated and horrified – like passing the scene of a car crash and craning your neck to see more – I dug deeper in some of these conversations, and found that this view is bound up in ideas of domination. There is actually something in the very destructive nature of digging great big holes in the ground, pulling up rocks and burning them, consequences be damned, that suggests greater strength and power to some people than harnessing the energy of the wind and sun. From this perspective, a plan to phase out coal and power Australia 100% with renewable energy is seen as a challenge to the view of this country as a place of rugged masculinity.This goes even more for nuclear power. In this understanding of the world, what could be stronger, what could demonstrate “man’s power over nature” more than our ability to split the atom? The idea that this is dangerous and has the capacity to make great big explosions is part of the attraction, not a mark against it.

Do Nuclear-Powered Electrons Have Balls?, an essay by Tim Hollo of the Green Institute, exploring the connections between domination-oriented conceptions of masculinity and national identity and opposition to ecological technologies (including electric cars and renewable energy), in particular in relation to Australia's coal-dominated energy debate.
posted by acb at 2:04 AM PST - 38 comments

My name is Sarah Conner. August 29th, 1997, was supposed to be Judgement Day. But I changed the future, saved 3 billion lives. Enough of a resumé for you? No. [Terminator: Dark Fate [previously] official trailer was released today, 2m33s]
posted by hippybear at 9:55 PM PST - 74 comments

Whether you know the red-eared slider or the closely related, equally popular — and often invasive — yellow-bellied variety, or any of the names these reptiles are given around the globe: They breathe air, spend most of their time in water, and lay their eggs on land, but they aren’t amphibians. They are Testudines, but are they really turtles? [more inside]
posted by terrapin at 5:50 PM PST - 20 comments

Given that modern life is so regularly baffling, it can sometimes feel like the only explanation for it all is that we’re collectively experiencing a Sims playthrough as directed by some sadistic cosmic being. But what if there was a way to pull back the curtain — to gain another perspective on the high-definition simulation we call reality, and to unravel the physical mysteries of our world? A small but quickly growing online community believes that transforming randomly generated numbers into clusters of location data could help us tunnel out of reality. Their name for themselves: Randonauts.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:38 PM PST - 69 comments

[CW: frighteningly massive erect cock] While the country and government fall apart, people in rural England are keeping themselves occupied by lovingly cleaning the shaft and balls of a 36 foot - or 432 inches - erect penis, using a lot of chalk dust. This happens once every ten years, though climate change may require more frequent penis attention. The completely naked man also has noticeable abs, large nipples, and a 120 foot club. The carefully planned hand job, involving a team of volunteers, is expected to take two weeks to reach a satisfactory conclusion.
posted by Wordshore at 4:05 PM PST - 49 comments

The "Reasonable" Rebels: Conservatives say we’ve abandoned reason and civility. The Old South used the same language to defend slavery. — Eve Fairbanks on the striking similarity between the rhetoric of leading figures in "intellectual dark web" / "alt-right" circles and that of those who defended slavery in the antebellum South. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 2:07 PM PST - 45 comments

For Post Your Animal Month: Dogs and their puppies (sl 3-year-old listicle)
posted by dogmom at 1:35 PM PST - 6 comments

When you’re a very active person and you make movies, shit will happen to you. What I say to film schools is making movies is not all blow jobs and sunglasses. Every shot is grunt work. And happily, there’s nothing I would have rather done. In Conversation: Joel Schumacher [CW: sex, the 60s, the 70s, AIDS, Woody Allen, Batman & Robin, &c.]
posted by chavenet at 12:19 PM PST - 35 comments

Ann Lowe was one of the most sought-after midcentury American designers, but since she was black, her name was virtually unknown to the general American public. Born in 1898 to a family of dressmakers (her grandmother made clothes for her plantation mistress as a slave), she began completing commissions when she was only 16. She went on to create dresses for some of the most elite members of New York society, though she did not receive credit for many of her most famous pieces (The wedding dress and attendant’s dresses for Jackie Bouvier’s wedding to John F. Kennedy; Olivia de Havilland’s 1946 Oscar dress). Her dresses can now be found in collections at the Met (2,3,4) and The National Museum of African American History and Culture, among other museums. [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore at 11:17 AM PST - 20 comments

For almost forty years, architectural critic and photographer John Margolies (1940–2016) photographed the most remarkable examples of American roadside buildings and signs. The Library of Congress purchased his archive and lifted all copyright restrictions on the photographs. Public Domain Review presents a selection of highlights.
posted by zamboni at 11:16 AM PST - 18 comments

A conspiracy (collective noun for lemurs) of endangered Madagascan ring tailed lemurs are helping yoga fans de-stress and connect with nature in the United Kingdom's Lake District (SL YouTube). [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:14 AM PST - 6 comments

The Devastation
Amazon fires deepen a split between Brazil’s evangelicals and their fellow Christians.
On the ground in Porto Velho "There are hundreds of different tribes around here but in this reservation there were two very remote tribes that had almost no contact with outsiders and they seem to have just disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to them. I think they might have just killed them all.”
Brazil's environmental changes under Bolsonaro who has a history of controversy.
Pre last years election the Atlantic pointed out The Rise of the Brazilian Evangelicals who are Are Gaining Power.
posted by adamvasco at 11:06 AM PST - 10 comments

In 1991, a red-tailed hawk settled in New York City. Dubbed Pale Male by birdwatchers, he went on to establish a dynasty of urban hawks - now over 20 individuals strong - who have so embraced city living that they display many distinct behavioral differences from other red-tails. But is Pale Male still alive? There are passionate arguments on both sides of a debate that has been described as "the third rail of the birding world."
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:36 AM PST - 11 comments

New evidence that Neanderthals got surfer’s ear suggests our extinct relatives spent a lot of time in the water. They probably weren’t catching sick waves, but instead they were perhaps hunting fish, mollusks or other marine resources, a new study in the journal PLOS One shows. “We're going beyond whether we share their genes, or whether they gave rise to us, to ‘let’s try to understand them as people," [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:35 AM PST - 12 comments

Cardboard cutout cats help real cats get adopted!
posted by ersatzkat at 9:39 AM PST - 13 comments

World of Warcraft Classic is a step back in time [PC World] “Blizzard Entertainment’s “newest” game is essentially the popular massive multiplayer online roleplaying game exactly as it played in 2004, right down to molasses-paced quest text, a dearth of quest markers, and enemies so tough that you feel compelled to group up with other players to beat them. [...] it’s important to remember that Classic isn’t a hard reset—a reboot that gives us a truly new game with wildly different storylines with content patches. So far, at least, Classic looks as though it’ll be the same World of Warcraft we knew all those years ago with roughly the same patch schedules and combat class nerfs, although hopefully with fewer bugs.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:39 AM PST - 54 comments

Home health aides care for the elderly. Who will care for them? [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:28 AM PST - 9 comments

water and fans
posted by Cozybee at 9:10 AM PST - 3 comments

Meet 6-year-old Olympic-style weight-lifter, Rory van Ulft.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:29 AM PST - 10 comments

“American Conservatism has changed in some fundamental ways over the past few decades, getting steadily more paranoid and less attached to reality; consider the move drift from George H. W. Bush’s conservative Realpolitik to Trump’s model of international relations as reality show, surprise twists and all. Bizarrely, the course of Clancy’s books mirrors and anticipates this shift, with their slow but steady move from “here’s a story about action between rivals in the late part of the Cold War” to “here’s the latest combination of unrelated international terrorists and malefactors who have cobbled together an unlikely scheme to stick it to America.” Parts of The Hunt for Red October read like something put together to teach submarine crew members how to do their jobs; most of Debt of Honor reads like it was jointly written by Lou Dobbs and Jim Cramer as they worked their way through a large bag of cocaine.” Gender essentialism, traffic obsessions, Cold War blue balls, and understanding the Boomer Dad Mindset though the works of Tom Clancy.
posted by The Whelk at 8:25 AM PST - 77 comments

'Fastest Woman On Four Wheels' Jessi Combs Killed In Jet-Car Crash
posted by Etrigan at 7:58 AM PST - 26 comments

Wheeking: anticipation or excitement, particularly about being fed. Purring: contentment. or maybe annoyance? Popcorning: excited or playful. Chirping: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by wheek wheek wheek at 3:29 AM PST - 14 comments

MY BBY 8L3W (2014): Overly cutesy collage of YouTube videos in which women over-enthusiastically introduce their pets to the world. They all openly declare their love of their pedigree dogs and cats. (NSFW)
NEOZOON is a female art collective based in Berlin and Paris. Their work focuses on the relationship between animals and humans, and how modern societies deal with both dead and living animals. Neozoon actions take place in public spaces: city streets, public institutions and the web. Their artistic mediums range from collage to installations and film. Recycling found footage is also a recurring element in their work, where the group often employs amateur videos from YouTube.
(Text from IFF Rotterdam description on YouTube.)
posted by Going To Maine at 12:09 AM PST - 17 comments

Bears were perhaps created by The Advocate. "Bear" is certainly an identity that runs deep and can be written passionately about [longish read]. It can take some work to find acceptance [yet longer read]especially if you identify with the bears but you aren't a bear. And like, people write seriously about the bears [super long read]
posted by hippybear at 9:32 PM PST - 23 comments

The Survival of Iggy Pop -- An inventor of punk rock on his long career, the future, and swimming in Miami. Also, in addition to sharing how he continues to stay up-to-date with new and interesting music (archive of past playlists) for a weekly BBC 6 radio show, he muses on his radio host voice, which he thinks used to sound like Shrek; plus a nice summary of Iggy Pop's life to date (interview with Amanda Petrusich for The New Yorker).
posted by filthy light thief at 9:16 PM PST - 12 comments

Madilyn Bailey wrote a song only using hate comments from her YouTube channel.
posted by roue at 7:40 PM PST - 19 comments

For Pacific Mole Crabs It's Dig or Die | Deep Look [YouTube, has subtitles] and article from KQED Science. [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 2:02 PM PST - 13 comments

A huge hoard of silver coins dating to the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings was found in the Chew Valley, north-east Somerset. Lisa Grace and Adam Staples, who unearthed the bulk of the hoard, said: "We've been dreaming of this for 15 years but it's finally come true." [more inside]
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 11:33 AM PST - 34 comments

The Tiny Art of Coin Cutting - getting to the essence of the thing.
posted by caddis at 11:30 AM PST - 9 comments

Doorbell-camera firm Ring [*] has partnered with 400 police forces, extending surveillance reach – The doorbell-camera company Ring has quietly forged video-sharing partnerships with more than 400 police forces across the United States, granting them access to homeowners’ camera footage and a powerful role in what the company calls the nation’s “new neighborhood watch.” Washington Post, Drew Harrell, August 28, 2019. [*Owned by Amazon (founded by Jeff Bezos and also owner of WaPo)]
posted by cenoxo at 10:18 AM PST - 121 comments

Ophidiophobia is one of the most common phobias, and yet… Ophiolatry, the worship of snakes, is common across many ancient cultures (not to be confused with the Brazilian death metal band). [more inside]
posted by supermedusa at 9:38 AM PST - 13 comments

Almost a year ago, residents of Chevy Chase, MD spent $137,000 to turn an unused muddy piece of property into a dog-run. Today, what should have been a nice place for mutts to go and sniff butts has become a flashpoint for neighborly tensions among some of the most powerful people in the world. From the Washington Post's Jessica Contrera.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:07 AM PST - 79 comments

Several high-profile game developers publicly accused of sexual assault. And more may be named. [The Verge] “Things started with a lengthy blog post from artist and game designer Nathalie Lawhead, bluntly titled “calling out my rapist.” In it, she accuses Jeremy Soule, a longtime game composer behind series like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and The Elder Scrolls, of rape while the two were working together at an unnamed games studio in Vancouver in 2008. [...] Following Lawhead’s post, others started speaking up. Zoe Quinn — developer of games like Depression Quest, author of Crash Override, and a focal point of the misogynistic Gamergate movement — posted a harrowing account on Twitter, recounting alleged abuse from indie developer Alec Holowka, best known for his work on Aquaria and Night in the Woods.”
posted by Fizz at 8:45 AM PST - 76 comments

“ ... thousands of Harvey survivors remain displaced or live in damaged homes. Thousands more relive their trauma with each rain, making mental lists of what to grab if they must evacuate or comforting family members troubled by memories of rising water. And, two years after the storm, residents have been given precious few reasons for optimism. Not in the progress of programs to repair and rebuild flood-damaged housing. Not in projects aimed at lessening the risk of future floods.” Hurricane Harvey, Two Years Later (Houston Chronicle)
posted by The Whelk at 8:19 AM PST - 15 comments

Joao Pereira de Souzaspotted a starving Magellanic penguin drenched in oil on the beach near his house. "He stayed with me for 11 months and then, just after he changed his coat with new feathers, he disappeared," But a few months later, Dindim returned and found Pereira de Souza. And here's a video.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:57 AM PST - 15 comments

Al Haynes, pilot who made the "impossible landing" of United 232, has died at 87. [more inside]
posted by bondcliff at 7:05 AM PST - 55 comments

Peter Holoda is an amazing pole dancer.
Short intro via this twitter post.
NSFW
posted by growabrain at 6:49 AM PST - 5 comments

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has asked the Queen to suspend (prorogue) Parliament in September before a Queen's Speech on October 14th. House of Commons Speaker John Bercow noted, "it is blindingly obvious that the purpose of [suspending Parliament] now would be to stop [MPs] debating Brexit and performing its duty in shaping a course for the country." Many politicians have criticised the move as a constitutional outrage and a gov.uk petition against proroguation has already attracted 200,000 signatures. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 5:41 AM PST - 1040 comments

DeForest Kelley tours the sets of Star Trek: The Next Generation (September 27, 1990)
posted by Servo5678 at 5:28 AM PST - 12 comments

(reminder: add links, make it more interesting) The latest collaborative shot-by-shot reanimation is out. Content warning: mental illnoh god what was that sound. oh god it's right behind me no no no send help SEND HEVH")$@PObrapye3ohgwkjrnbv Ahem. The curious art of reanimation has redrawn many a situation. But this particular reanimation is oh-so-very... NAUUUUUUUGHTY. (A warning regarding content: I regret to inform you that there is, quite early on, a bare bottom. And a rather familiar one at that.)
posted by BiggerJ at 12:24 AM PST - 11 comments

Critiques by journalist Emily Yoffe and others blame women for speaking out. It’s no surprise that one response at this particular point in #MeToo has been to argue that while the movement is valid, it has gone too far. This was the subtext of Jane Mayer’s recent New Yorker investigation into the allegations against former Sen. Al Franken. (Previously) And in a recent story in the libertarian magazine Reason, Emily Yoffe makes the critique more explicitly, arguing that allegations against former Los Angeles Times reporter Jonathan Kaiman reveal deep flaws in the movement. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:58 PM PST - 68 comments

Hasegawa Takejirō was a late 19th century Japanese publisher, specializing books for Western audiences. Kyoto University of Foreign Studies has a gallery of his woodcut chirimen-bon (crepe paper books). Some of the books feature distinctive calligraphic English brushwork text, now turned into a typeface.
posted by zamboni at 8:39 PM PST - 6 comments

A thirsy-one pernif joking / dozen-five pernif serious argument for base six, and not base 12, gross, from the conlang critic YouTube channel (self-described as "the most superficial commentator on con-languages since the idiotic B. Gilson"), which usually critiques constructed languages like IS, Novial, Dothraki, Zese, Skyrim's Dovahzul, Na'vi, Klingon, and his favorite Toki Pona, among others; also featuring a history of w and, uh, whatever this is.
posted by fleacircus at 8:22 PM PST - 8 comments

Unseal the infinite majesty of the Fortune Teller Fish, aka everyone's favorite novelty use of sodium polyacrylate. Can it really read your mind? Science says: absolutely not! This little miracle fish may have been around since the 1800s--it's definitely been spotted since 1900 as a free giveaway with your purchase of (what else?) baking powder--and has made appearances all over the world. So: are you passionate, jealous, indifferent, or a dead one?
posted by capricorn at 7:01 PM PST - 9 comments

Benthic (meaning “bottom-dwelling”) macroinvertebrates are small aquatic animals and the aquatic larval stages of insects. From highly sensitive stoneflies to those much more tolerant of pollution, like hydropsychid caddisflies, what bugs you find in your local streams tells you how clean the water is as they serve as bioindicators. [more inside]
posted by hydropsyche at 4:58 PM PST - 11 comments

Watch 23 one-day old ducks jump out of a box! [more inside]
posted by just_ducky at 4:22 PM PST - 26 comments

The Strange Life of Garden Eels "Garden eels live a strange life. They anchor themselves to the ocean floor using their own mucus, and contort into strange shapes and positions to catch plankton. Find out more about these weird and wonderful stay-at-home fish." Adorable! (SLYT)
posted by GoldenEel at 3:30 PM PST - 14 comments

When Your Boss Is Also Your Boyfriend “How about instead of pretending I’m miraculously going to start cooking and shopping one day, we admit that you’re ‘doing work’ and not just ‘being my girlfriend,’ and I start paying you to do it.” I said, “How much?”
posted by emjaybee at 12:49 PM PST - 69 comments

Every baseball team has a "wet" guy now .
posted by chrchr at 12:13 PM PST - 27 comments

From the moment in 1991 when he jumped into a young Chelsea Clinton's arms after her piano lesson [citation needed], Socks the cat led a charmed life. [more inside]
posted by box at 11:58 AM PST - 20 comments

Chocolate, cocoa, chocolatey, coffee, old, wood or burnt (The Guardian)? Musty, mossy or mushroomy (Science History)? Coal fire, old inn, fish market or dirty linen (Heritage Science Journal)? [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:28 AM PST - 10 comments

An old man with a bushy white beard and his bear, Maria (Flickr), were a regular fixture in the Tajik capital for the over 20 years, strolling along streets, posing for photos, even riding public transport (Pikchaz blog). In 2015, Tajik social media users wanted to raise money to build a statue of "bear man" Talabshoh Sheikhov and Maria, both of whom died in 2013. (RadioFreeEurope / RadioLiberty) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:15 AM PST - 5 comments

Old school episodes of Doctor Who everyone should watch. An old but still good article from 2012 that does what it says on the tin. [more inside]
posted by zooropa at 10:52 AM PST - 48 comments

In preparation for its October airing, Adult Swim has released a two minute trailer for Genndy Tartakovsky's new miniseries, Primal. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:28 AM PST - 40 comments

Andrew Luck is a 29-year-old multimillionaire who recently decided not to continue to punish his body and his brain (transcript) for the entertainment of the 28th largest U.S. media market. Those who've faced Andrew Luck's choice know why he made it.
posted by Etrigan at 10:15 AM PST - 77 comments

The vanishing art of fishing with otters. And since three and a half minutes of otter fishing surely isn't enough, here's another video on the subject.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:03 AM PST - 3 comments

The hippos that time forgot ... in Leeds [The Guardian, 2010]. Why the hippo that time forgot is at centre of Armley Town Street mural and Introducing The Armley Hippo [West Leeds Dispatch]
posted by readinghippo at 9:44 AM PST - 5 comments

A taste of Americana in its most portable, edible form - food on a stick, from bacon-wrapped riblets to a Caprese salad to a deep-fried Twinkie — at the Iowa State Fair. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:34 AM PST - 43 comments

Farmers don't normally name their poultry and livestock, but that rule doesn't apply at Caenhill Countryside Centre, an educational farm in Wiltshire, UK. Chris Franklin lets the gang out of the barn to start a new day and greets each one of the ducks, geese, chickens, and goats by name: Bunson, Bo, Cuthbert, Owen, Jean, Cee Cee, Catherine, Gilbert and Sully, Bumblebee, Lucy, Socks (the kitten), Kenny, and the rest. Thank you, Kenny! [more inside]
posted by Miss Cellania at 9:09 AM PST - 6 comments

European-derived antisemitism functions by locking Jews into middle agent roles: once some Jews have climbed to the middle rungs of society’s ladder of race and class privilege, then, during times of economic downturn and social instability, Jews as a group “can be perceived as the ones ‘in charge’ by other oppressed groups,” who are encouraged to “fix [their] gaze on an imagined group of greedy, powerful Jews at the root of the world’s problems.” Ben Lorber for the Jewish Current on April Rosenblum’s influential pamphlet.
posted by bq at 9:02 AM PST - 9 comments

(Twitter thread). Lots of baby animals getting weighed! This involves some zookeepers holding the babies (the BIG BABIES) some babies in bowls, some babies in cups, and some babies holding stuffed animals that look like their moms.
posted by xingcat at 8:14 AM PST - 9 comments

Emperor penguins, the largest penguins living today, stand 48 inches tall. Mere fleas next to their ancient cousins the extinct penguin family Palaeeudyptinae which could grow 6.5 feet tall and weight 253lb. But even these are small compared to the giant penguin roaming clearwater in 1948. Giant footprints were spotted near waterfronts and rivers over a period of years. The giant penguins were sited repeatedly and a naturalists estimated based on the size and spacing of its tracks that the penguin was 15 feet tall and likely weighed 2000 pounds. The tracks stopped appearing in 1957 and "Florida Three Toes" as the penguin was named, did not emerge again until 1988.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:55 AM PST - 6 comments

There's A Latinx Void At The Heart Of Video Games [Kotaku] “Latinx art abounds: I found music I could listen to, books I could read, movies I could watch as I put myself back together to face the world and do my part. Here’s what messes me up: I didn’t know where to look for that in video games. It’s not that there aren’t spaces, people working towards making video games a more distinctly diverse place. [...] Latinx folks are out there. Yet the video games that have broken into the wider public consciousness—in the biggest games and the biggest studios—do not seem to care all that much.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:14 AM PST - 15 comments

Bishop's Palace in Wells, Somerset has a 150 year old tradition of swans training humans to provide bread on demand at the ring of a bell, but recently ducks have been muscling in on the bell ringing action. Keep up with the latest swan news here.
posted by quacks like a duck at 6:40 AM PST - 9 comments

The US House of Representatives has called for an investigation [Guardian] into whether the spread of Lyme disease had its roots in a Pentagon experiment in weaponising ticks. The House approved an amendment proposed by a Republican congressman from New Jersey, Chris Smith, instructing the defence department’s inspector general to conduct a review of whether the US “experimented with ticks and … insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975”. [more inside]
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:42 AM PST - 47 comments

Quartz analyzed the data, and this is a trend with legs. In the last week of December 2018, just eight of the 200 songs on Spotify’s top 200 streaming songs were either all uppercase or all lowercase. In 2019, more than 30 songs in a typical week have non-standard capitalization. The rise of all-lowercase and all-uppercase song titles [Quartz] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:23 AM PST - 18 comments

Part of a series about cooking in Europe and some other places This video is about Lyon, but also about men and their friendships and one man's relationship with his son. The whole series is great, and not at all about men [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 2:56 PM PST - 13 comments

The California Photograph "Recently I have become interested in a different kind of California Photograph, which is a genre devoted to the landscape decimated and plundered and improved upon to the point of desecration."
posted by mecran01 at 12:18 PM PST - 21 comments

In the wake of the arrest of Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson and some of his associates in connection with a fight outside of a Portland bar on May Day, a video surfaced showing Gibson and others planning the attack. The video was captured by a D.I.Y. undercover operative who joined the Patriot Prayer movement to report on their activities. “I think every person should try to infiltrate these groups, if they’re in the position to do so," he said.
posted by chrchr at 12:09 PM PST - 102 comments

China’s spies are waging an intensifying espionage offensive against the United States. Does America have what it takes to stop them?
posted by Mrs Potato at 11:26 AM PST - 25 comments

Originally created from a Huntley and Palmers biscuit experiment in Reading, England, iced gems started out as just tiny round biscuits, which gained their distinctive frosting a few decades later. They may be slightly less ubiquitous now, but generations of kids from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore (among others) remember snacking on these tiny, round biscuits with a dollop of hard icing that mostly tasted of sugar. [more inside]
posted by PussKillian at 10:59 AM PST - 35 comments

" . . . This is why I found Deadspin’s recent article about racism toward Native American lacrosse teams within the Dakota Premier Lacrosse League (DPLL) particularly vital. The way Curtis Waltman laid out the bigotry experience by Native American teams expelled from the league in his piece illustrated why there needs to be a shift in the reporting of Native American athletics. Other than basketball, coverage of Native sports is underrepresented, and the pressures and abuses that come from failing to shed light on these sports will only continue unless they become part of our everyday sports consumption." How to Cover Native American Sports [more inside]
posted by flug at 10:19 AM PST - 7 comments

"In climate change, many of these elite white men might be experiencing their very first brush with imposed change, with a force beyond their control upending their lives; that might make them particularly ill-equipped to envision what’s next, let alone lead us there. The story of climate change, both its history and its future, needs to be told by people who have already experienced injustice and disempowerment, people who are justifiably angry at the way the system works. And some of those stories are beginning to be told." [Amy Westervelt, Popula] [more inside]
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 10:06 AM PST - 30 comments

Ninja Rat! Kangaroo rats, found in the southwestern deserts of the United States, perform acrobatic (Youtube) kicks, twists (Youtube) and spins in midair (Youtube) to avoid striking rattlesnakes. The small -- 3.5 to 5.5 inches (8 -14 cm) -- rodents are highly adapted to the desert, living on moisture found in seeds, not by drinking water. Nija Rat is a group of student researchers (ninjarat.org) studying terrestrial vertebrates, including kangaroo rats and the "exciting universe of adaptation hidden in the split-second sliver of time in which rattlesnakes attempt to consume kangaroo rats by launching at them from hiding and injecting venom." (CW: no rats killed or eaten by snakes in videos) [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 9:36 AM PST - 12 comments

William the Hippo at the Met "In 1917, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a small ancient Egyptian faience hippopotamus. Created in a captivating blue, the little hippo quickly won people's hearts. He received his now-famous nickname, William, in 1931."
posted by readinghippo at 9:34 AM PST - 14 comments

The Evangelical church has gained a huge amount of political power in Cuba, and LGBTQ people are dealing with the consequences. A year ago, most LGBTQ Cubans would have been eagerly anticipating the expected legalization of same-sex marriage. In July 2018, the Cuban National Assembly proposed a new constitution that included amended language (Article 68) that would make same-sex marriage legal. But that December, the government withdrew the amendment from the draft, largely because of strong backlash from evangelical churches...The new evangelical alliance is gearing up for a renewed fight against marriage equality: In 2020, the government will reconsider the “Family Code” within the constitution.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:50 AM PST - 18 comments

"Given an ordered list of MP3 files hosted elsewhere on the web, Fourble serves them up as a podcast, with a frequency and start date of your choice. You can use Fourble to make a public or private podcast from audio files that you've found or uploaded somewhere else online—it's particularly well suited to mining the rich seams of archive.org at a manageable rate." [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 8:35 AM PST - 17 comments

A photography project celebrates the small-scale and family-run farms that produce 70 percent of the world’s food. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 8:34 AM PST - 2 comments

I'm sorry, I've let all you (in the U.S.) down -- National Waffle Day was Saturday, complete with free waffles (iHeart), though there may be some left-over freebies on Monday and Tuesday. But this isn't just to say "sorry I'm late," but to celebrate a possibly neglected kitchen tool. You probably have a waffle maker (or waffle iron) tucked away somewhere in your kitchen, neglected and sad in the darkness of a far cabinet. I say, pull it out and put on the counter with pride! I Replaced My Oven With a Waffle Maker, and You Should Too (Scott Gilbertson for Wired, Aug. 24, 2019), which highlights MetaFilter's own Daniel Shumski, aka veggieboy, and specifically his book, Will it Waffle? (MeFi Projects) as the gem it is.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:32 AM PST - 18 comments

Hasbro, one of the largest toy manufacturers in the world, has closed a deal to purchase Entertainment One, a Canadian conglomerate that owns such family fare as Peppa Pig and PJ Masks. The $4 billion acquisition represents a distinct shift for Hasbro into the media space, and analysts think that it may trigger even more media mergers and consolidation. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:33 AM PST - 23 comments

You've been played: when your kids start beating you at video games [The Guardian] “There is a moment in parenthood when your child discovers you are not infallible, that you can be beaten. The first time a kid wins a game of tennis against their mum or dad, or solves a maths problem their parents can’t even begin to understand, it is profoundly bittersweet. While it is wonderful to see your child growing up and becoming independent, when they get good at things, they are a little bit less yours, and you are a little bit less heroic. It is sometimes hard to be the grownup in that situation and not deal with it childishly. I discovered this on Saturday when my eldest son and I were playing Apex Legends.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:41 AM PST - 39 comments

Hooked on Swing. [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 11:04 PM PST - 5 comments

It's National Dog Day! Here are a few links in celebration of the best animals ever:

• View the results of a National Dog Day Survey
• A crew of Canadian service dogs watched a live musical as part of their training
• For National Dog Day, meet the 2020 hopefuls running for America's First Pooch
• Dunkin’ prepping for pups on sweet ‘National Dog Day’
• An annoying Bark Box commercial
• Dog hugs (everyone needs one)

(NDD previously)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:00 PM PST - 15 comments

On August 9, 2019 we sailed through a pumice field for 6-8 hours, much of the time there was no visible water. It was like ploughing through a field. [more inside]
posted by Transl3y at 7:08 PM PST - 41 comments

We asked Angelo to illustrate and describe the many incredible inventions made by prisoners that he had made, seen, or heard about over the years. These inventions are attempts to fill needs that the restrictive environment of the prison tries to suppress. The inventions cover everything from homemade sex dolls, condoms, salt and pepper shakers to chess sets, privacy curtains and ways of communicating between cells.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 2:31 PM PST - 8 comments

Lizzo challenged the internet to do a ballet routine to her song Truth Hurts, and dancers delivered. And how! On point(e)! Here’s a short list of links to notable performances so far, from wow to perfect to cute and all degrees in between: [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 2:02 PM PST - 22 comments

"My grandmother passed away. Her funerals were today, but here I'd like to talk about the most important thing I couldn't spend too much time on in her eulogy: her love for Dungeons & Dragons. She started very late, at 75, only a little over a year ago . . ."
Twitter thread, including fan art of her beloved gnome druid and his goose friend. Threadreader.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:45 PM PST - 21 comments

Over this Bank Holiday weekend, BBC Radio 4 is airing Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time in 10 episodes running to about nine hours in total. With a starry cast headed by Derek Jacobi as the Narrator, the adaptation is written by U.S.-born, UK-based playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker. [more inside]
posted by YoungStencil at 1:42 PM PST - 24 comments

A Wall Street Journal investigation found 4,152 items for sale on Amazon.com Inc.’s site that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by federal regulators—items that big-box retailers’ policies would bar from their shelves. Among those items, at least 2,000 listings for toys and medications lacked warnings about health risks to children. Amazon Has Ceded Control of Its Site. The Result: Thousands of Banned, Unsafe or Mislabeled Products [WSJ, may be paywalled; additional related articles below] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:10 PM PST - 40 comments

An octet of octo-videos, beginning with an octopus saying to a shrimp: gotcha! [more inside]
posted by tocts at 11:22 AM PST - 9 comments

The greater grison is Central America's answer to the honey badger. (It is largely greater in relation to the lesser grison, which lives a ways further south.) Grisons have been difficult to study on account of small heads and thick necks, making radio-collars especially difficult. Unusually for a mammal, the grison seems to be mostly diurnal. They are said to be relatively tameable as pets, and are undeniably adorable when young. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 10:26 AM PST - 20 comments

The largest flyway for birds of prey anywhere in the world is in a narrow stretch of Veracruz State in Chichicaxtle. So many birds fly through this area during migration periods that it's been dubbed the River of Raptors (video). [via]
posted by jessamyn at 10:24 AM PST - 7 comments

It all started on Feb 12, 2007 with a t-shirt. Which led to a website. Which led to another website [Flash required, safe to use]. Which led to audio recordings and other websites and on Feb 14 My Violent Heart was "leaked" [Happy Valentine's Day!] and then on Feb 15 Survivalism was released... it was obvious we weren't dealing with anything ordinary. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:09 AM PST - 15 comments

A twitter thread delving deeply and nerdily into the background images you see when you log into a Chase bank account.
posted by mygothlaundry at 9:54 AM PST - 28 comments

Comment on this Twitter post: I added Aerosmith ft. Run DMC to this video of the shadow of a millipede walking and it has amused me more than it should have done. [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 9:28 AM PST - 16 comments

And why some civil rights groups are worried that the bill doesn’t go far enough. The bill aims to “affirmatively proscribe” — as in, explicitly limit — the instances when police officers can use deadly force, changing the standard from one based on a “reasonable belief” that the officer or another person is in imminent danger to one that requires police officers to use deadly force only when necessary. The legislation — AB 392, or The California Act to Save Lives — came as the result of months of negotiation between law enforcement lobbying groups and civil rights organizations, and some advocates of police reform view the new law as a watered-down effort. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:26 AM PST - 20 comments

Trailer. Note the Hank and Gomez memorial plaques on the wall outside the interrogation room.
posted by porn in the woods at 7:48 AM PST - 28 comments

What lurks in the pages of a library book? Knowledge, entertainment... and disease? [more inside]
posted by metaquarry at 6:08 AM PST - 28 comments

In the 1980s fairy penguins were down to one colony on Phillip Island in Australia and that colony was shrinking fast. On the penguins’ breeding ground, 190 structures — mainly homes — were built as part of Summerland Estate, with plans for hundreds more. And so, over a period of a decade, the state government halted construction, bought back all the homes and removed the suburb. Today Phillip Island Nature Park is home to 31,000 penguins and a thriving tourist destination. Viewing the annual Penguin Parade is draw for tourists and a right of passage for local children.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 5:40 AM PST - 18 comments

Randall Reeves is some 270 days into The Figure 8 Voyage, a solo circumnavigation of both the American and Antarctic continents in one season. This is his second attempt at the journey, the first curtailed by knockdowns resulting in significant damage to his vessel MOLI. His blog is updated most days. You can follow his progress on a map. He frequently has conversations with the windvane. He also posts infrequently to his YouTube, for example how he makes coffee at sea.
posted by jackmakrl at 11:28 PM PST - 12 comments

Before the pool boy, mailman or milkman was the working class Lothario, in the time before refrigeration, New York’s ice-delivery men inspired raunchy jokes, songs, and movies (Gastro Obscura). The first song was "How'd You Like To Be The Iceman?" (circa 1899; sheet music from LOC), which lead to a few response records, including "All She Gets From The Iceman Is Ice" (sheet music from UMaine). There were also a few short silent films, released in 1899 and 1900 (IMDb x2), though neither of those appear to be online.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:26 PM PST - 35 comments

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.
posted by reductiondesign at 9:12 PM PST - 112 comments

Yo-Yo Ma and James Taylor at Tanglewood, August 11, 2019
posted by HuronBob at 8:09 PM PST - 5 comments

What if Kool & the Gang toured with Quiet Riot?
+Kool & the Gang - Celebration
+Quiet Riot - Bang Your Head (Metal Health) [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 6:30 PM PST - 19 comments

"No matter where you dive or who you dive with there will be someone, Instructor, photographer or your average diver, who will be raving about Nudibranches. What are they? Why do they have such a dedicated following? And, indeed, why are they so awesome?" [more inside]
posted by a humble nudibranch at 5:12 PM PST - 25 comments

The Art Gallery of Ontario hosts the Thomson collection of model ships, many of which were carved from bone by French prisoners of war during the Napoleonic wars. [more inside]
posted by yarntheory at 3:05 PM PST - 19 comments

Feeding stingrays in their natural habitat: the deserts of Arizona. [more inside]
posted by jjray at 2:32 PM PST - 13 comments

'Matt Chats With Cats'... Reacts to 'Cats'. Matt (previously) narrates the 'Cats' trailer (previously). Posted because Matt finally appears on-camera so you can see the face that goes with That Cat-Chatting Voice. (SLYT)
posted by zaixfeep at 1:37 PM PST - 17 comments

This genius photo experiment shows we are all just sheeple in the consumer matrix — Images from the same exact spot for two hours at a time... Photographer Hans Eijkelboom has spent more than 20 years cataloging the ways that globalized culture manifests through apparel. [From TimeLine by Rian Dundon; related interview (with some NSFW images) at Phaidon]
posted by cenoxo at 12:03 PM PST - 89 comments

On invite-only Facebook pages, people gamble real money on the prospect of winning impossible-to-score goods — like an Iberian octopus and A5 Wagyu beef
posted by Etrigan at 11:51 AM PST - 12 comments

NASA is currently looking into what may be the first instance of crime in space. Also of interest: the first protest in space (2017), the first strike in space (1973).
posted by brecc at 11:03 AM PST - 60 comments

Three years ago, the famous orange dinosaur residing on Route 1 in Saugus, MA, was saved from extinction when the developer who bought its former mini-golf home agreed to keep the fiberglass statue so beloved it was immortalized in beer. In March 2019, the dinosaur was given a giant, illuminated donut courtesy of Kane's Donuts, which was soon removed for running afoul of the city's zoning ordinances. [more inside]
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 10:17 AM PST - 10 comments

A June Hog is the name for an oversized Chinook salmon. While there's still some debate about why we don't see as many of these fish as we used to, there are still some large fish out there.
posted by jessamyn at 10:16 AM PST - 10 comments

This man is not the adult in the room at the former Gawker Media, just as Kendall Roy was not the adult in the room at Vaulter and Alden Global Capital executives are not the adult in the room at any of the 100 newspapers they are destroying. Sending a copied-and-pasted company handbook, issuing vague edicts about becoming sites for “enthusiasts,” and making inexplicable changes for the sake of making changes are the professional equivalent of a small boy dressing up in his father’s suit: He is role-playing, deluding himself but no one else.
posted by sammyo at 10:05 AM PST - 23 comments

The Mandalorian [YouTube] [Trailer] Live-action Star Wars is returning to TV with The Mandalorian, the first non-animated Star Wars TV project since the infamous Caravan of Courage. Now, we finally have a look of what to expect from Disney+ and Jon Favreau’s mysterious tale of a wanderer on the outer rim of the galaxy far, far away. [via Gizmodo]
posted by True Final Boss at 9:55 AM PST - 49 comments

The Kalmiopsis Wilderness has crystal clear rivers, native salmon and steelhead and the rarest of plants. After wildland fires destroyed the trails of the Kalmiopsis, people said they'd never be rebuilt. One young couple refused to accept that answer.
posted by vespabelle at 8:10 AM PST - 2 comments

If social media is an addiction machine, the addictive behaviour it is closest to is gambling: a rigged lottery. Every gambler trusts in a few abstract symbols – the dots on a dice, numerals, suits, red or black, the graphemes on a fruit machine – to tell them who they are. In most cases, the answer is brutal and swift: you are a loser and you are going home with nothing. The true gambler takes a perverse joy in anteing up, putting their whole being at stake. On social media, you scratch out a few words, a few symbols, and press send, rolling the dice. The internet will tell you who you are and what your destiny is through arithmetic likes, shares and comments. A long read from The Guardian published August 23, 2019. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 8:00 AM PST - 31 comments

When Kiki DuRane and Herb performed their farewell show at Carnegie Hall, the evening turned into a 2h30m+ orgy of wide-ranging cabaret covers spanning their career and covering the story of their lives from their beginnings in clubs in the 1950s and through to that night on stage in 2004. Some friends drop by across the evening, too. I won't link each of the 31 tracks, but here is a YouTube playlist [2h36m].
posted by hippybear at 7:47 AM PST - 4 comments

The Russian spy who posed as a Canadian for more than 20 years – The Guardian talks to Elena Vavilova, who acted the part of a Canadian woman named Tracy Foley, an identity stolen for her by the KGB, for two decades. It’s the first time any of the deep-cover illegals has spoken to non-Russian media since their return to the country. Her family’s story was the inspiration for the TV series "The Americans". [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 5:48 AM PST - 13 comments

Over the past 30 years, Cindy Stirling has fostered runaways, orphans, teen sex workers, abuse victims and cancer patients. Portrait of a supermom. (Luc Rinaldi, Toronto Life) [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:15 PM PST - 8 comments

Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America (SLLATimes). "Police use of force accounted for 1.6% of all deaths of black men between the ages of 20 and 24"
posted by splitpeasoup at 8:13 PM PST - 15 comments

I knew the end of Agile was coming when we started using hockey sticks. Every morning, at precisely eight o'clock, the team of developers and architects would stand around a room paneled in white boards and would begin passing around a toy hockey stick. When you received the hockey stick, you were supposed to launch into the litany: Forgive Father, for I have sinned. I only wrote two modules yesterday, for it was a day of meetings and fasting, and I had a dependency upon Joe, who's out sick this week with pneumonia.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:12 PM PST - 64 comments

It took SPCA employee Carol O'Connell three years to get close enough to pet a stray cat that had been coming by her home every now and then. Then she borrowed a chip scanner from work and discovered Tiger had been missing for eleven years.
posted by jocelmeow at 5:53 PM PST - 8 comments

And it uses entangled Microwave photons. Almost all the advances in quantum computing, cryptography, teleportation, and so on have involved visible or near-visible light. This team has used entangled microwaves to create the world’s first quantum radar. [more inside]
posted by aleph at 5:42 PM PST - 20 comments

“Here are some smitten, moony-eyed, genuine and heartfelt songs about men who just make you want to go . . . HER?“ An Oh No They Didn’t original post by user zazie_toujours, featuring Dave Coulier, Donald Trump Jr., and other . . . unexpected muses.
posted by sallybrown at 2:53 PM PST - 33 comments

Some part of me craved pain as proof that I was already a good mother, long-suffering, while another part of me wanted to reject hardship as the only possible proof of devotion. (CW: disordered eating, pregnancy) But as it turned out, pregnancy wasn’t a liberation from prior selves so much as a container holding every prior version of myself at once. I didn’t get to shed my ghosts so fully. It was easy to roll my eyes at people saying, “You don’t look pregnant at all,” and harder to admit the pride I felt when I heard it. It was easy to call my doctor absurd when she chided me for gaining five pounds in a month (rather than four!), and harder to admit that I’d honestly felt shamed by her in that moment.
posted by stillmoving at 1:46 PM PST - 8 comments

It is well known that persons protect themselves with all kinds of rationalizations when they have a buried image of themselves which the facts of their status do not support. [PDF] In this classic paper, Erving Goffman draws parallels between cooling the mark out -- providing fraud victims with "instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss" -- and other social situations in which one person is given the distasteful task of letting another down easy. It's the kind of structure you can see evidence for everywhere, from the sifting and winnowing of people in education to the techniques that psychics use to avoid scrutiny.
posted by eirias at 12:40 PM PST - 24 comments

Experience: I was swallowed by a hippo [Paul Templer in The Guardian, 2013]
posted by readinghippo at 11:43 AM PST - 30 comments

Dave Hebb is on an epic quest to find all of Greater Boston's Signtronix signs. From Atlas Obscura, who joined Dave on his quest: Signtronix, a California-based sign manufacturer, caters to small businesses across the United States but as Boston continues to expand and build, these signs are increasingly being abandoned. [more inside]
posted by capricorn at 11:20 AM PST - 16 comments

A Brief History of Peeing in Video Games [Slate] “Gamescom 2019 kicked off in Cologne, Germany on Monday night, and as usual, the annual trade fair has been full to bursting with announcements, trailers, and exciting new details about upcoming games. But one development is making a bigger splash than the rest: Visionary video game auteur Hideo Kojima’s next game, Death Stranding, will feature the kind of hyper-realistic urination gameplay action that gamers crave. Drench your eyeballs in this leaked footage from Gamescom’s opening night stream to see Death Stranding star Norman Reedus take the most lavishly digitized piss in video game history.” [Death Stranding - Extreme Peeing Action][YouTube]
posted by Fizz at 11:16 AM PST - 30 comments

"Zehnder has been walking across the hard-packed snow for about 40 minutes, each step a small negotiation requiring delicacy, concentration, and luck—one can never tell when a hidden crevasse will snap your ankle or swallow you altogether....Forty-two hours later, when the Russians found him frozen to death nowhere near the penguins, the legend of Bruno was born. Never famous while he was alive, in death he became the latest in a long line of outsize polar adventurers whose obsession with the ends of the earth cost them their lives." The author investigates Zehnder’s secretive, playboy life in New York City; rumors of C.I.A. or K.G.B. ties; and the questions surrounding his icy grave.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:08 AM PST - 4 comments

How a fusion of at least four cuisines created a beloved and misunderstood dish.
posted by Etrigan at 11:00 AM PST - 31 comments

Keith Comstock played on four major league clubs as a journeyman reliever, but his professional career is most often remembered for one thing: a ball to the crotch. Thirty years ago -- in what otherwise would have been a forgotten minor league set -- Comstock appeared on one of the most memorable baseball cards ever made. Here's the story of how it came together, in his words. 'You're the guy with the ball to the crotch': The inside story behind the funniest baseball card ever made (ESPN) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:51 AM PST - 21 comments

“Cock And Balls”: A Photo Study Of Rock Gods’ Packages In Very Tight Trousers [NSFW-ish]
posted by chavenet at 9:53 AM PST - 56 comments

Someone in Oxford County, ON has made off with $187,000 worth of cheese, after they used forged documents to steal the shipment. [more inside]
posted by RhysPenbras at 9:12 AM PST - 41 comments

Matt "Numberphile" Parker builds logic gates out of dominos. Matt then builds (with much help) a 3- and then 4-bit adder out of dominoes at a science museum. Here's another persons' text-based explanation of binary domino logic; here's yet another written explanation, with interactive diagrams. (See also this 2008 MeFi post.)
posted by cortex at 9:01 AM PST - 11 comments

Dorktown returns to video as Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein take a look at the 2010 San Diego Chargers, and show that a team that topped the league statistically can nevertheless find themselves out in the cold come playoff time. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:41 AM PST - 2 comments

Breaking: Something Bad Is Happening in Virginia [Updated]. "To commemorate the quadricentennial anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in America, we imagined what it would be like to cover that late August day when the first slave ship landed on the shores of the place now known as Hampton, Va." [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 8:10 AM PST - 11 comments

Phil Jamesson is a comedian who makes short (between 30 seconds and two minutes) sketch comedy videos, like The Reward, Teaching a Board Game, Clue and The Genie.
posted by JDHarper at 7:59 AM PST - 8 comments

Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opened in Disneyland earlier this year to rave reviews of its immersive theming, role-playing “cast members”, and, uh, $200 custom lightsabers. But fans have had a disturbing lack of faith in the new addition, leading to lower-than-expected attendance numbers. Disney blames high hotel prices and, surprisingly, its own even-higher ticket prices, while others find the rides underwhelming compared to the more ambitious original plans. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 7:17 AM PST - 43 comments

David Koch, billionaire conservative, (previously, previously) has died at age 79. He is survived by his brother Charles.
posted by sotonohito at 7:13 AM PST - 160 comments

A man makes himself a 'best customer poster'. Someone responds...
posted by Ned G at 2:10 AM PST - 49 comments

Missy ‘Misdemeanor’ Elliott has released a new five-song EP, Iconology, and a new music video for one of the tracks, “Throw It Back”. It’s a good way to start Friday!
posted by Going To Maine at 9:46 PM PST - 16 comments

Bernie calls for a World War II-style mobilization to reverse global warming. Mr. Sanders unveiled his proposal one day after Gov. Jay Inslee announced he was dropping out of the 2020 race. His plan calls for 16.3 trillion federal investment dollars and the creation of 20 million jobs. [more inside]
posted by xammerboy at 9:27 PM PST - 159 comments

Python wars: the snake epidemic eating away at Florida "There are tens of thousands of pythons in the Florida wild, attacking animals and damaging ecosystems – and the quest to stop them has become a collective crusade. [. . .] "the FWC (Florida fish and wildlife conservation commission) and the South Florida water management district each created independent python removal squads in 2017 of hardy, civic-minded individuals who are skilled at capturing the non-native constrictors" (SLGuardian) (CW: of course, some pictures of snakes plus some of the links in the article lead to possibly disturbing videos or articles.)
posted by soundguy99 at 5:43 PM PST - 28 comments

Only one woman had completed the American Ninja Warrior City Finals course in the history of the show, and that was Kacy Catanzaro in 2014. [more inside]
posted by COD at 11:41 AM PST - 55 comments

Zac leans into the pair of sneakers in his hands and takes a great big whiff—the sort of noisy inhale typically reserved for fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies and the heads of newborn babies. Zac is a sneaker authenticator at Stadium Goods [... and they] are entrusting Zac’s nostrils to safeguard their investment. Today, he is eagerly hoovering the vapors from a pair of Nike x Supreme SB Dunks from 2002 that have been on a long and telling voyage—one that says a lot about the booming, and still-growing, sneaker resale industry. How a Single Pair of Sneakers Explains the Booming Billion-Dollar Sneaker Resale Industry -- Inside the wild, shockingly lucrative world of sneaker reselling. (Cam Wolf for GQ) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:17 AM PST - 25 comments

Mission to Zyxx is an improvised science fiction podcast following a team of ambassadors as they attempt to establish diplomatic relations in the remote and chaotic Zyxx Quadrant. What elevates it above other improv podcasts is an obsessive dedication to professional sound design and editing, with each 30-45 minute episode requiring up to 80 hours of post-production work. Read about the team's process here - and then get listening.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:36 AM PST - 14 comments

Believe it or not, life as a travelling theater actor making $225 a week performing Shakespeare for high school students isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
posted by Etrigan at 9:12 AM PST - 33 comments

Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times (NBC News) [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 8:50 AM PST - 25 comments

"Now, as it marks its 50th anniversary — after 4,526 episodes, not to mention specials, movies, albums and more — the legacy of “Sesame [Street]” is clear: It impacted the music world as much as it shaped TV history, inspiring countless fans and generations of artists. And the show is still innovating, finding ever more ways to sing out loud." (SLNYT) [more inside]
posted by skycrashesdown at 8:34 AM PST - 35 comments

With the relaunch of the XFL in February 2020 drawing closer, the nascent league has announced their initial eight team lineup. Needless to say, the release has resulted in panning of the new team logos, along with comparisons to the original XFL roster. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:15 AM PST - 79 comments

Earlier this month, Ellie Pell won the Green Lakes Endurance Run 50K, finishing in 3:58:37. Pell took both the 1st Place Overall and 1st Place Female trophies, but because the overall winner was wrongly predicted to be a man, there was no 1st Place Male trophy available for Richard Ellsworth, the second place finisher. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 7:05 AM PST - 68 comments

“She also records the early advent of being online, lovingly, like a relative with a camcorder at the internet’s birth, before it grew into a brute. It helped in return to birth her voice, intense and lewd and personal, the sound of someone ripping off the tastefulness that afflicts American letters, performing the literary equivalent of that tablecloth magic trick. Though we had never met, listening to the book created the uncanny sensation I had already spoken to Lockwood for ten hours and sixteen minutes, so it felt perfectly natural when she did not offer much in the way of hellos. It just … began.” A Tortoise Stakeout With Patricia Lockwood - The Paris Review catches up with the ‘Poet Laureate Of Twitter’ while NY Mag’s The Cut talked to her about her cat’s internet fame. (Lockwood previously Previously)
posted by The Whelk at 3:27 AM PST - 9 comments

Headlights; Toward Happy Civilization; Olingiris; The Size of Things; Irman; Father Christmas Spends the Night; My Parents and My Children and To Kill a Dog are short stories by the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Daniel Alarcón, Kit Maude and Brendan Lanctot. "The Grimm brothers and Franz Kafka pay a visit to Argentina in Samanta Schweblin's darkly humorous tales..." blurbs J. M. Coetzee.
posted by misteraitch at 3:20 AM PST - 3 comments

The Shitpost Sampler (patterns on gumroad) takes the finest affirmational neo-dadaist shitpost stylings and creates patterns so people can immortalize them through cross stitch. For example: When I want an opinion I'll read it in your entrails. Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people. I refuse to die until things get better and that is a threat.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:46 PM PST - 35 comments

A Fireball to the Skull: a love story about mental illness and RPGs. "I’m convinced those rulebooks played an important role in my recovery. I think it’s because there’s order and optimism in RPG rulebooks. Rulebooks are the marriage of the natural order inherent in story structure and math, and pure, wild imagination." From the blog Robot Goblin: Overthinking Role Playing Games Since 1983. Robot Goblin is also on Twitter.
posted by Fuzzy Monster at 6:51 PM PST - 2 comments

Amendment 13 isn’t responsible for the death of dog racing. The sport has been in decline for nearly three decades. In 1991, the total amount of money gambled on dog races in the United States was $3.5 billion. By 2014, it had dropped to $500 million. . . It wasn’t until 2017 that Tom Lee, a Republican state senator from Tampa, proposed amending the state constitution to get rid of dog racing entirely. That effort became Amendment 13, and now card tables no longer need to tether their game to dog racing. The track owners got to keep the cards and get rid of the money-draining races.
posted by Carillon at 3:45 PM PST - 37 comments

The Quest to Find a Lost Arctic Explorer’s Buried Soup An "Arctic mystery" may lead to a future of food under the permafrost. [Atlas Obscura]
posted by readinghippo at 3:30 PM PST - 9 comments

The Pee-wee Herman Show, recorded live at the Roxy Theatre for HBO in 1981. (SFW but naughtier than Pee-wee's Playhouse.)
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 2:42 PM PST - 24 comments

Recently, David Lesh (owner of the Virtika sportswear company) purchased a 1979 Beechcraft Bonanza. Yesterday, August 20, he crashed it in to Half Moon Bay, California. He and his passenger were unharmed, and Coast Guard SAR picked them up about 45 minutes after the accident. Here he is talking with Aviation YouTuber Matt Guthmiller about the crash, including video of the crash itself. [more inside]
posted by backseatpilot at 1:46 PM PST - 11 comments

The U.S. federal government issued revisions to some key economic indicators this morning: First, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its job growth figures for the past year downward by about 500,000 jobs, the largest revision since 2009. Second, the Congressional Budget Office adjusted its projection of the budget deficit in 2019 upwards by $63 billion, for a total of $960 billion, while noting that interest rates remaining lower than expected over the next decade could make up some of the difference. Third, the CBO also estimated that Trump’s planned tariffs could render U.S. GDP 0.3% lower than projected in 2019.
posted by sallybrown at 8:54 AM PST - 77 comments

Marine biologist Shanee Stopnitzky is on a mission to spend as much time under the ocean's surface as possible. To achieve her goal, she bought two used and broken submarines, and is fixing them up, making them functional again, learning as she goes (Wired Video, 10 minutes with English captions) She's not alone in this effort, and to that end she founded the Community Subermersibles Project, a 300-strong cooperative of volunteer engineers and fabricators dedicated to upgrading the machines and piloting them at sea, supporting the goal of submarines for the rest of us (MakeZine). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:38 AM PST - 62 comments

The lines on the map display the orientation of all airport runways in color gradients from north-south axis (blue) to east-west axis (yellow).
posted by Etrigan at 8:07 AM PST - 29 comments

Peter Fonda, the son of Old Hollywood royalty who helped usher in New Hollywood with Easy Rider fifty years ago, died last week at age 79. In those fifty years, he worked mostly on the fringes of Hollywood, though he experienced a notable resurgence in the late 90's with The Limey and Ulee's Gold (for which he was nominated for an Oscar).
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:08 AM PST - 30 comments

Lana Wachowski is writing and directing a fourth Matrix movie starring Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, with production rumoured to begin early next year. While Lilly Wachowski will not be involved, concept artists Geof Darrow and Steve Skroce are both set to return.
posted by adrianhon at 6:47 AM PST - 133 comments

In trying to make sense of Facebook and the numerous scandals that have engulfed the social media giant, it has been difficult to find a good analogy for the firm. As part of a collection of writings on alternative visions of the internet, Bryan Menegus argues that the best comparison is to the slumlords who created the tenements of the Gilded Age - and how the horrific and unsafe living spaces they created were only fixed through regulation. (SLGizmodo)
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:45 AM PST - 9 comments

20 ways to pay attention (sl medium)
posted by Cozybee at 5:03 AM PST - 45 comments

“Beginning in the mid-20th century, the modern suburb was designed as a comfortable hideout for white America: a low-density environment with many of the conveniences of city life, but none of the friction of heterogeneity or shared space. Roads for cars replace public transit, “lifestyle” affiliations are established through consumer choices, and outsiders are barred, if not through explicitly racist rental policies then through policing. Today, one of the best predictors of one’s political orientation is the density of the neighborhood they live in; people who live in the suburbs are also more likely to get their news from broadcast and local television.“ Outer Limits: Conservative movements thrive when social media connect the suburbs (Real Life) Race And Class In The Liberal Suburbs (1:59:00) How conservative and liberal postwar suburbs have more in common then not. Dan interviews Lily Geismer, the author of ‘Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party.’ [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 9:48 PM PST - 13 comments

NBA legend, bicycling enthusiast and longtime Deadhead Bill Walton announces a recent White Sox game, and we learn the record for the most strikeouts in a single inning (spoiler alert: it's three), and that rainbow is a flavor.
posted by vverse23 at 9:41 PM PST - 16 comments

1972's Genesis was, well, it was Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, Steve Hacket, and Phil Collins. It was deeply prog. Every track was an adventure. And thus we were given Foxtrot (discogs). Perhaps it's a love you've forgotten about. Perhaps you've never heard it. It's worth a listen either way. It's... well, it's 1972 Genesis. Side A: Watcher Of The Skies, Time Table, Get 'Em Out By Friday, Can-Utility And The Coastliners [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:48 PM PST - 32 comments

Marvel and Sony end their partnership. The character’s cinematic future suddenly looks bleak at best.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:42 PM PST - 78 comments

A behind-the-scenes and above-the-dome tour of the University of Chicago carillon, second largest in the world, with Rob Scallon and carillonneur Joey Brink. Come for the fascinating history and trivia (there are 600 of them), stay for the improvised minor-key jam. [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 8:01 PM PST - 14 comments

Amid ongoing criticism of high-end restaurant guides like the Michelin Guide [The New Yorker] and the Worlds 50 Best Restaurants [Eater] list, Food & Wine and Travel + Leisure have teamed up to release their own, one that aims to celebrate different cultures and cuisines found across the world.

The list, along with commentary on each restaurant, is split between articles for North America, South America and Africa/Middle East [Food & Wine] and Asia/Australia and Europe [Travel + Leisure]. [more inside]
posted by noneuclidean at 7:10 PM PST - 15 comments

By Banning Protest Signs, Major League Soccer Is Trying To Lobotomize The Fandom It Asked For. "MLS and its clubs are currently embroiled in a fight against their own supporters over what the league claims are violations of its anti-politics rules. Over the last two weeks, multiple fans in multiple stadiums have been ejected for banners that run afoul of the league’s Fan Code of Conduct. There has also been a blanket ban on imagery pertaining to the Iron Front, an anti-fascist supporter group that spans across clubs." (SLDeadspin)
posted by Lyme Drop at 6:14 PM PST - 21 comments

Every year, Massachusetts offers residents a weekend free of sales tax. During this year's tax holiday, one man bought a game on Steam, but was was surprised to discover that he had been charged sales tax on the transaction anyway. He inquired with customer service as to why. They replied dutifully, citing Massachusetts General Law regarding the decision. [more inside]
posted by Mayor West at 5:23 PM PST - 33 comments

On the 7th of July 2017, Air Canada flight 759 lined up to land on the taxiway instead of the runway at San Francisco International Airport, in the process coming just seconds away from causing what might have been one of the worst aviation disasters in history.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:35 PM PST - 32 comments

In Sickness, In Health—and In Prison A Nebraska couple fighting to marry behind bars wouldn’t be the first: Three decades ago, two prisoners took their bid to marry all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. [The Marshall Project] [Co-published with Longreads]
posted by readinghippo at 3:27 PM PST - 2 comments

The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists. Art is for everybody. Keith Haring did much more than provide cute cartoons. He was publicly minded. His art faced outwards. He wanted to inform, to start a conversation, to question authority and convention, to represent the oppressed.
posted by stillmoving at 3:07 PM PST - 20 comments

Though VAR, in the grand scheme of global politics, is not that consequential, it perfectly encapsulates this contradiction at the heart of liberal politics. Is there any better example of our present historical moment than an automated system that strives for perfect fairness in a match between a team worth billions, backed by a petro-state, and a small, community owned club facing bankruptcy?

Sam Wetherell writes about how Video Assisted Refereeing is taken the fun out of football.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:20 PM PST - 28 comments

Charles Sanders Peirce was a brilliant philosopher, mathematician and scientist. His polymathic work should be better known (Daniel Everett, Aeon).
posted by sapagan at 12:58 PM PST - 17 comments

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition: Piece in the Atlantic on the psychic cost of constructing a meritocracy. "A person whose wealth and status depend on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job. Instead, she must approach work as an opportunity to extract value from her human capital, especially if she wants an income sufficient to buy her children the type of schooling that secured her own eliteness. She must devote herself to a narrowly restricted class of high-paying jobs, concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine. Whereas aristocrats once considered themselves a leisure class, meritocrats work with unprecedented intensity." [more inside]
posted by bodywithoutorgans at 12:53 PM PST - 50 comments

Inside San Francisco's high stakes underground dice scene [more inside]
posted by backseatpilot at 12:04 PM PST - 13 comments

Sing As The Crow Flies is "a set of nine vocal tracks re-voicing the rural landscape, surrounding reed beds and marshes on the Norfolk/Suffolk border" by Laura Cannell and Polly Wright. It includes "One For the Rook One for the Crow," a "vocal instant composition recorded inside Raveningham Church in Norfolk in Spring 2019." The Guardian: "Cannell and Wright take as their source material a terrifying sounding 19th-century book: The Norfolk Garland: A Collection of the Superstitious Beliefs and Practices, Proverbs, Curious Customs, Ballads and Songs of the People of Norfolk." Sing As The Crow Flies on Youtube.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:40 AM PST - 3 comments

The Large Hadron Collider was turned off for a short period of time because a piece of baguette was found in the machinery. When he was bored [former American president] Calvin Coolidge used to ring a bell to summon his bodyguards and then hide from them under the Oval Office desk. There is an original Picasso that no-one will ever see because it was eaten by his dog. In 2008 the University of Bath invented a 3D printer that could print a copy of itself. Within three minutes that copy had copied itself to make a third copy and today nobody knows how many of these printers exist in the world.This is a complete list of all the facts presented on episodes 1-142 of the podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, hosted by the researchers from the UK trivia game show QI.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:36 AM PST - 29 comments

Where Atlantic writer Devin Gordon argues that Joe Rogan just *understands* modern men... "Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys." He warns, The rest of the country should start paying attention...
posted by Dressed to Kill at 8:58 AM PST - 220 comments

When it comes to vegetables, it's all good: secondary edible parts of vegetables (University of Florida Department of Horticulture); how to prepare roots, ends and leaves (SF Gate); 11 delicious vegetable [and fruit] parts you should stop throwing away (Plated Morsel); don't trash the best part of the melon [well, maybe not best -- tl;dr: roast the seeds, they're tasty!]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:26 AM PST - 66 comments

New York Magazine's "I Think About This A Lot" is dedicated to those little private fixations that play forever in our minds. In this case, about Dana Schwartz's fascination with that time Robert Pattinson made up a story on the Today show about watching a clown explode.
posted by Navelgazer at 7:29 AM PST - 29 comments

Nearly 200 chief executives, including the leaders of Apple, Pepsi and Walmart, tried on Monday to redefine the role of business in society — and how companies are perceived by an increasingly skeptical public. Breaking with decades of long-held corporate orthodoxy, the Business Roundtable issued a statement [PDF]on “the purpose of a corporation,” arguing that companies should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders. Instead, the group said, they must also invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers. Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top C.E.O.s Say [NYT] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:26 AM PST - 35 comments

Dicey Dungeons is a new roguelike deck-building game where you're a walking dice from Terry Cavanagh, a single-person game developer best known for VVVVVV and Super Hexagon. Terry shares the Girls Aloud-adjacent inspiration behind Dicey Dungeons and unfinished game prototypes going back to 2002. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 6:45 AM PST - 12 comments

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music was one of the early influential web-based guides to electronic music, spanning decades and dozens of genres. It was also an early Flash app that provided a visual interface to music and how different genres were influenced by each other with samples of prominent songs in each genre. Ishkur has updated the guide for 2019 with a new interface AND has a 2 GB 3.5 hour mix that spans decades and multiple genres.
posted by gen at 2:06 AM PST - 57 comments

The mysteries of space can be tragically unreachable for all but a select few. While you may not meet the requirements to be counted among their number, that's no reason to fret: if you have a compatible computer, an Xbox, or the ability to wait for the game to appear on other platforms, you can just play Outer Wilds instead. Originally discussed here in 2015, several critics agree that you should probably play the game before learning too much about it, so consider whether you'd like to watch the trailer or try it yourself before clicking through. [more inside]
posted by jsnlxndrlv at 11:58 PM PST - 19 comments

The mission of the San Francisco Disco Preservation Society is to collect, restore, digitize, preserve, and present historic audio and video recordings pertaining to DJ and nightclub history in San Francisco and internationally, as well as educate, inform, and entertain the public and future generations through its archives, public events, screenings, and online access to its resources. Hours and hours of themed disco! ENJOY! (Via WFMU)
posted by Capt. Renault at 9:50 PM PST - 4 comments

A proposed flag for each planet of the solar system. (SLReddit)
posted by escabeche at 3:33 PM PST - 59 comments

Aerial Magic: an ongoing webcomic by the creator of Always Human. It has an apprentice witch learning a form of day-to-day magic, shifting viewpoints, a wisecracking bird-shaped familiar, background music and many feels.
posted by signal at 3:32 PM PST - 10 comments

Revenge of the clothes moths: as numbers boom, can they be stopped? [The Guardian]
posted by readinghippo at 2:41 PM PST - 48 comments

"It's our job to push institutions forward and create art that reflects the world we want to see.” Ally Schmaling, Boston-based queer and gender nonbinary photographer, created a portrait series exploring queer and nonbinary identities — people living without limits and refusing to identify with traditional male and female gender labels. They started as a wedding photographer, where they honed the ability to find pockets of joy, and have since moved into portraiture.
posted by stillmoving at 1:46 PM PST - 33 comments

London artist Max Siedentopf shows us the surreal world happening just outside the frame of the humble and functional passport photo.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:31 AM PST - 31 comments

Federation for American Immigration Reform (Southern Poverty Law Center), NumbersUSA (Right Wing Watch) and the Center for Immigration Studies (SPLC) are three major Washington, D.C.-based immigration-restriction organizations stand at the nexus of the American nativist movement. Although on the surface they appear quite different, they are fruits of the same poisonous tree, founded and funded by John Tanton, a retired ophthalmologist who operates a racist publishing company (SPLC). Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, had a passion for birds and was environmental-minded, but also provided funding to help Tanton push his racist policies and get national traction. Why an heiress spent her fortune trying to keep immigrants out (NYT). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:52 AM PST - 37 comments

Alister MacQuarrie looks back at two decades of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (Eurogamer). With innovative gameplay concepts like 3D terrain, customisable units, planetary terraforming, and a richly-developed sci-fi setting complete with seven faction characters and an official novel-length prequel story, Alpha Centauri remains beloved amongst strategy gamers. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 6:40 AM PST - 41 comments

by jimmy.something (SLInstagram, sound). Explanation via Reddit.
posted by carter at 6:29 AM PST - 7 comments

Mud is not a lucrative business. This might seem simultaneously self-evident and strange: It’s mud, but it’s an essential piece of a multibillion-dollar business, a feature without which an official baseball game cannot be played. Mud Maker: The Man Behind MLB’s Essential Secret Sauce
posted by chavenet at 4:51 AM PST - 31 comments

How the right wing fell for its own fables about the working class (WaPo) "...this isn’t just a story of a clever guy outwitting lax fact-checkers and revealing a site’s conservative biases. It also sheds light on the way right-leaning commentators depend on the voice of an imagined white working class to legitimize and advance their own viewpoints — viewpoints that are often opposed to those of the real working class. And it’s not just websites like Quillette that fall for that hoax. Politicians and voters buy into this imagined narrative, too." [non-paywall archive link]
posted by bitteschoen at 4:49 AM PST - 34 comments

Oklahoma driver's license, meet smartphone Oklahoman drivers will soon have access to their own digital identification cards. Beta testing for the first 1,000 people began last month through a smartphone app developed by Idemia, the same company that already manages much of the ID card infrastructure for Oklahoma and 34 other states. Meanwhile, Oklahoma will likely miss the October 2019 deadline for compliance with the REAL ID Act, which then will require additional identification for access to federal buildings, courthouses and military installations, and for commercial airline travel. [more inside]
posted by TrishaU at 4:33 AM PST - 26 comments

The Archive of Our Own wins the 2019 Hugo for Best Related Work. Naomi Novik, one of the original founders, accepted the award with several Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) staffers on behalf of all the fans who've helped build, maintain, pay for, and even more importantly use and enjoy the AO3 since its inception, asking for the lights to be raised and anyone in the audience who felt a part of the moment to stand up and be part of the acceptance. [more inside]
posted by current resident at 10:00 PM PST - 54 comments

Brioche Stitch is a website dedicated to knitting brioche, with references to different variations of one, two, and three color brioche stitches. Experiment with increasing and decreasing, figure out how to cast on with two colors in the round, and then check out a few of the patterns on Ravelry. [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore at 7:57 PM PST - 12 comments

How “Peanuts” Created a Space for Thinking: Charles Schulz’s beloved comic strip invited readers to contemplate the big picture on a small scale.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 5:37 PM PST - 14 comments

Summer School is now in Session. You won't watch most of the shit on this list, and that's totally fine. But I hope you'll find a few doors you never even knew you wanted to walk through: films you'd never heard of, people whose names you didn't know, and references which you might not even have known were references. And once you know who that diva was, or what the film was called, you can read more, and watch more, and study more, until you're flinging out references like RuPaul on a podcast.
posted by Stewriffic at 3:27 PM PST - 17 comments

How a recording-studio mishap shaped '80s music (SLYT), an ode to gated reverb drums and explaining the sound of a decade. This is one of Estelle Caswell's delightful, engaging, and informative videos that center around music and culture for Earworm. Now on it's second season, Estelle and the Earworm team have covered everything from Radiohead and Captain Beefheart to Bruno Mars and Migos in short, well researched videos. [more inside]
posted by yeahwhatever at 2:24 PM PST - 25 comments

While preparing an upcoming anthology its "golden age", Marvel Comics reached out to comic book artist Art Spiegelman to provide an introduction. However, towards the end of his essay Spiegelman had a sentence critical of the current president, and Marvel asked him to remove it, claiming that Marvel wanted to stay "apoltical". Instead, Spiegelman has withdrawn the entire essay. (Fortunately UK outlet The Guardian has shared it.) [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:57 PM PST - 23 comments

Reason? “Desire to lease the unit at a higher rental rate” Musiy Rishin, 87, escaped Nazi bombs in Ukraine, re-settled in Uzbekistan, and fled political turmoil there in 1996, finally settling in Alameda. Now, a property management company wants him evicted so they can have higher-paying tenants in the goldmine that is the Bay Area housing market.
posted by stillmoving at 11:58 AM PST - 85 comments

It’s a political move with major consequences. The Trump administration caused an uproar Wednesday for proposing a policy that would give certain federal contractors the right to discriminate against people who don’t share their employer’s religious views...The proposed rule from the Department of Labor dramatically transforms the government’s decades-old policy that bars federal contractors from discriminating against employees based on their race, sex, religion, disability, or national origin. It would instead weaken these protections by expanding the policy’s one exemption: the religious exemption.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:11 AM PST - 30 comments

One can no longer argue that equality can be achieved by simply waiting for young female scholars to emerge at the end of the academic “pipeline.” “The increase in women at later stages of the pipeline is the consequence of a slow ‘pull’ provided by the expanding pool of women at the beginning, not because of an effective ‘push’ that reduces attrition during career advancement.” Strengthening this push, however, means addressing the sexist practices that “push” men along the cursus honorum, because these practices tend to be the very same mechanisms that oust women from the academy. The zero-sum nature of this problem makes it difficult to discuss, let alone redress. Ugly small-brained misogyny explains only part — albeit an important part — of this result. More insidious are banal sexist practices that reinforce one another to compose a vast ramshackle machinery that elevates men to the pinnacle of the ivory tower. This durable, unjust structure largely depends on the attitudes and practices of three social groups: male scholars, male students, and male romantic partners.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:20 AM PST - 32 comments

And how do you write a good one? A definitive guide on how to describe the beginning or introduction of a news story, and most importantly, on the best way to write one, no matter how you spell it.
posted by bitteschoen at 3:44 AM PST - 38 comments

When non-Jamaicans attempt to make reggae, the resulting music, sometimes termed ‘cod reggae’ (cod in this context meaning ‘faux, ersatz, false, counterfeit or synthetic’) often ends up smelling a bit fishy. But not always. John Doran at The Quietus challenged ‘crate digger extraordinaire’ Bill Brewster to compile a playlist using only the freshest of cod reggae fillets. [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 12:32 AM PST - 71 comments

The Atlantic created a 10 minute documentary detailing the Verrückt waterslide tragedy. [ Schlitterbahn Indictment Previously ]
posted by benzenedream at 5:22 PM PST - 38 comments

"In 1976 Adrienne Rich wrote, “We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world. . .sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy, will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed.” The fight for abortion rights is a fight not only for women’s bodily needs, but for their creative power."
posted by Lycaste at 4:03 PM PST - 2 comments

On Reddit today, /u/watercookerch writes: "I made a map showing the locations of 675 video walks around the world." Direct link to Google Maps. The SlowTV and walking sub-reddits.
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:02 PM PST - 10 comments

"'You're not a thing at all,' or 'The political implications of Dunbar's Number.'" is a sermon that Doug Muder (the Weekly Sift guy) presented on May 12, 2019. It's about cooperation, stories, parts we play and expect, Tolstoy, Disney, gender, inadequate and obsolete scripts, and the ideal of the perfect rulebook. "We want to belong, but we also want to be individuals .... I think we need to recognize that no matter how necessary it might be to simplify our experience somehow, there's always going to be an injustice in putting people into categories and dealing with them through roles and scripts. That's an injustice that we both suffer and inflict on others." [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 1:30 PM PST - 8 comments

"Researchers have begun to report preliminary but stunning evidence that mammalian embryos with abnormal chromosomes have the remarkable ability in some cases to “self-correct” during early development, either by editing out cells that possess chromosomal irregularities or isolating them in the placenta....Gleicher took the podium at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the largest professional society of IVF doctors in the U.S. He announced, for the first time in a public setting, that the transfer of abnormal embryos had produced normal human babies."
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 1:28 PM PST - 10 comments

Amazing Squirrel Grand Prix Furmula 1 Obstacle Course "Oh well, if you like squirrels, and weird and wonderful obstacle courses accompanied by a rather silly commentary from an eccentric/mad* Englishman, then this is the channel for you." via the dodo [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 11:44 AM PST - 12 comments

Want to feel happier? Talk to a stranger. (SLNPR)
posted by ferret branca at 10:58 AM PST - 56 comments

“Schmidt, a grandfather living on disability benefits from his war-related injuries, had no history of theft or fraud. But he found himself the target of an extraordinary alliance between private insurers and public law enforcement agencies — one that transforms routine claims into criminal evidence, premium-paying customers into suspects, and the justice system into a hired gun for a multibillion-dollar industry.” Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their Own Customers (Buzzfeed News)
posted by The Whelk at 10:56 AM PST - 22 comments

Portland prepares for city's largest far-right rally of the Trump era (Guardian, yesterday) Trump stokes tension over far-right rally (Guardian, today). [more inside]
posted by box at 10:41 AM PST - 51 comments

"If the Free People are going to defeat Sauron, you need to let go of your elitist attitudes and choose someone who can appeal to the moderate orc vote. That’s why I support Saruman the White to lead the Council of the Wise."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:28 AM PST - 43 comments

Art crime expert Noah Charney on forgery, why forgers defy typical criminological classification, and how he's not found any female forgers. [more inside]
posted by Gin and Broadband at 8:46 AM PST - 14 comments

Months away from release, Disney’s live-action Mulan is facing political backlash. Disney’s upcoming live-action version of its animated 1998 film Mulan is still months away from its March 2020 release. And as has often been the case with the studio’s live-action remakes, the project has not been without some backlash since it was announced. But amid the ongoing political unrest in Hong Kong, 2020’s Mulan is also now a target of protesters there — for reasons that have little to do with the movie. Instead, it’s Mulan’s Chinese American star Liu Yifei’s public support for the controversial Hong Kong police force that has instigated a growing call to #BoycottMulan entirely.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:26 AM PST - 20 comments

Port and Sweep Solitaire is a new twist on the classic game of peg solitaire. The goal is to reach the position with a single peg, or counter. Two simple moves, one of which allows you to stack the counters like checkers, lead to all kinds of consternation. Start playing immediately (the interface lights up legal drag-and-drop moves) or read the interactive tutorial and get some strategy hints first. If you want a different game, there is [more inside]
posted by TreeRooster at 7:39 AM PST - 1 comment

Snopes investigates. Republicans are more likely to believe the Babylon Bee. Democrats are more likely to believe the Onion, but not quite as much. People are much less likely to believe articles which are labelled satire.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:36 AM PST - 16 comments

Between Seasons on the North Head Trail [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 6:48 AM PST - 10 comments

The dealmaster in chief wants to buy some prime real estate, but no one is selling Thursday, WSJ broke the news that Trump has expressed interest in buying Greenland. It's behind a paywall, but the other news outlets were fast to bring their own stories (CNN) [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 5:33 AM PST - 157 comments

Fragile Minds [audio only] is a PEN lecture by Australian journalist Erik Jensen about the state of journalism, how it handles criticism, and often fails readers who aren’t white men. His focus is Australia but his points are widely applicable. The lecture is introduced by the president of PEN Melbourne, Arnold Zable. The two speak afterwards and take questions from the audience. If you don’t have time to listen to the whole hour, Jensen goes over much of what he has to say in a 13 minute interview with Philip Adams.
posted by Kattullus at 1:18 PM PST - 5 comments

Impulse! Records is releasing a heretofore unheard set of recordings for John Coltrane made for a film project between Crescent and A Love Supreme. All but one are reworked versions of previous songs except a track called Blue World, which is pretty damn fine (SLYT). Happy Friday everybody.
posted by cross_impact at 12:47 PM PST - 7 comments

Four years after the release of No Cities to Love and one month after drummer Janet Weiss left the band, Sleater-Kinney released its new album today. Called The Center Won't Hold it's a clear collaboration with Annie Clark (St. Vincent) and for better or worse, a clear departure from their older material. What it means to Listen to Sleater-Kinney now. (track listing inside) [more inside]
posted by dinty_moore at 12:35 PM PST - 54 comments

You're a member of the family, you gotta do something to keep this place tidy. Even you, chameleon, you have some work to do. Max the cat, don't just lay around (or do, and I'll put you to work). But Jesse the Jack Russel Terrier, the most helpful dog in the world really tackles chores with gusto (bonus Jesse clips: useful dog tricks #1, #2, #3). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:39 AM PST - 20 comments

What It's Like To Stage In A Michelin-Starred Restaurant In France: The French brigade system and the ritual of staging has defined what it means to train as a fine dining chef for more than a century — and it broke me after a week. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:34 AM PST - 63 comments

"Even though there are different place associations that probably mean more to you as an individual, such as a neighborhood, street, or the block you live on, the zip code is, in many organizations, the geographic unit of choice. [...] The problem is that zip codes are not a good representation of real human behavior, and when used in data analysis, often mask real, underlying insights, and may ultimately lead to bad outcomes." Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:23 AM PST - 38 comments

Arsenal For Democracy Radio’s summer series, Lend Lease, has dropped its most ambitious episode yet: an overview of American anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a focus on theory and the IWW. Part 1 And a discussion of US government repression of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism from the 1880s to the first Red Scare of the 1920s, as well as the controversial Propaganda of the Deed theory of violence, the role of immigrants in the movement, and the Sacco and Vanzetti trials. Part 2. It comes with over 20 pages of notes and citations.
posted by The Whelk at 9:12 AM PST - 5 comments

21 Comics About ADHD By A 29-Year-Old Artist That Only Got The Right Diagnosis A Year Ago, featuring the work of Pina, an artist from Germany who makes comics about her life as an smart, quiet, introverted woman with Attention Deficit Disorder.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:48 AM PST - 66 comments

"As listeners to the Football Weekly podcast already know, I’m a laugher not a fighter. I would much prefer not to be writing this and to exist in a world where my transition did not require any comment. But since we do not yet live in that world, here I am. All I ask is for respect and kindness – for me and for transgender people in general – at a time when those commodities seem to be in ever‑shorter supply." Guardian football (soccer) journalist Nicky Bandini comes out as transgender and the reaction in both the comment section and on Twitter is an "outpouring of love".
posted by bitteschoen at 7:23 AM PST - 10 comments

enter a world of pupy where jumping and digging are as easy as pressing some buttons on a keyboard, a world where forest animals will give you moonstones in exchange for completing quests, a world where everything is okay and spike pits and lava can't hurt you. [more inside]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 7:04 AM PST - 23 comments

Throughout a number of sexual harassment and assault cases involving girls in recent memory, the press has been using a specific term of art to describe the victims - underage women. Writing for The Atlantic, Megan Garber discusses how this term affects how we see these crimes, and what it says about our cultural views of women and girls. (SLThe Atlantic)
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:00 AM PST - 18 comments

New Leech Found in D.C.-Area Swamps "America has a new leech -- new to science, that is. In fact, the big orange-bellied bloodsucker has been lurking around the nation's capital all along..." I do get a science satire site in my RSS feed, so I initially thought this was from them. To my surprise, it's actually real.
posted by kathrynm at 5:46 AM PST - 22 comments

Elliott Spencer. A short story by George Saunders (SLNewYorker)
posted by Mchelly at 4:53 AM PST - 7 comments

You Only Need One Outfit
posted by ellieBOA at 3:28 AM PST - 115 comments

A Walk in Hong Kong. The ongoing Hong Kong protests have made world news. What is it like to be in the middle of it all? Maciej Cegłowski, aka Idle Words, gives an immersive first-person account of his experience as a sweaty Polish-American in Hong Kong, marching along with protesters and experiencing surprises at every step.
posted by flod at 2:08 AM PST - 25 comments

The detectives, monsters, and racist waterfowl who’ve changed our world. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:42 PM PST - 55 comments

Why wasn't the bicycle invented much earlier?
posted by Chrysostom at 10:02 PM PST - 39 comments

When most people think of the Internet of Things (IoT), they think about light switches, voice controllers, and doorbell cameras. But over the past several years, another class of devices has also gained connectivity—those used for sexual pleasure. One such device, the Lovense Hush, advertised as the “world’s first teledildonic buttplug,” became the subject of a Sunday morning DEF CON talk this year after a hacker named “smea” managed to exploit not only the device and its associated computer dongle, but software used with it for social interaction (read: people remotely playing with each other’s buttplugs).
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:57 PM PST - 29 comments

Korean youtuber Foodie Boy provides a 19 minute documentary on the wares of Hotdog Chopchop, a restaurant in Seoul that deep-fries things like hot dogs on sticks. [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 6:37 PM PST - 18 comments

"On August 15, 2014, an angry 20-something ex-boyfriend published a 9,425-word screed and set in motion a series of vile events that changed the way we fight online." How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War: the New York Times opinion section looks at five years of Gamergate. [more inside]
posted by zachlipton at 3:01 PM PST - 35 comments

Thursday is the best day

You heard me.
posted by Etrigan at 1:31 PM PST - 111 comments

"A Sestina for January 20, 2017." by Lanna Michaels: "... things change and not always for the better, show / me something that stays constant, low / tide becomes high tide, the equal row is an optical illusion, and isn't real. So / .... I'm the fourth son, you must begin for me now ..."
posted by brainwane at 12:14 PM PST - 10 comments

Adam Zand and Greg Peverill-Conti base their office-less PR company out of whatever public library they happen to be near; they've been to over 200 so far. So, they welcome you to their side-project, LibraryLand! Their ongoing mission: to visit all 483 libraries in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (and some in other states) and rate them on eleven criteria, sometimes providing reviews, while also collecting stories and learning lessons about exploring and working from libraries. [via who else but jessamyn]
posted by not_on_display at 11:16 AM PST - 27 comments

Born in 1952, Abou Joudé grew up at a time when Lebanon overflowed with cinemas. He says there were over 50 cinemas in Beirut alone. Joudé would attend the movies three to four times a week, watching everything from Aladdin to Kubrick. He loved the splashy, thrilling posters, depicting electrifying romps and grandiose fantasies, but over time he noticed that certain images would repeat again and again. “I discovered that those films, or the posters of those films about Arabs, continued the imagined picture of what was thought about Arabs in the 18th and 19th centuries,” he says. “The desert, the tent, the belly-dancing, the haram, the sultan, the king. Stereotyped images continued through the posters.” The Middle East as Old Hollywood Saw It (Atlas Obscura) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:05 AM PST - 5 comments

Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, who has died 19 July 2019 at the age of 90, was a Holocaust survivor, a dissident under Hungary’s communist regime, and one of the great modern political thinkers. Citation for Prof. Heller written and read by Judith Friedlander. Remembering Agnes Heller on the Philosopher's Zone. NYT obit. FT obit. [more inside]
posted by dmh at 10:51 AM PST - 2 comments

Research on First Nation land often exploits the people who live there. What discoveries could come out of true collaboration? [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:24 AM PST - 5 comments

Utsvulten is a "warm and intimate" desktop browser game about holding hands and feeding a friend. [more inside]
posted by inire at 8:37 AM PST - 14 comments

What is says, and a bit more go read it.
posted by mumimor at 6:13 AM PST - 68 comments

Mini model of Stonehenge could reveal how the ancient monument SOUNDED. [more inside]
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 1:31 AM PST - 29 comments

Noam Chomsky: “Worship of Markets” Is Threatening Human Civilization (Truth Out) An Hour with Noam Chomsky on Fascism, Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, Julian Assange & More (Democracy Now) Current Affairs - A Chat With Chomsky (transcript) “The Task Ahead Is Enormous, and There Is Not Much Time” (Jacobin) There are reasons for Optimism (Catalyst)
posted by The Whelk at 11:32 PM PST - 8 comments

The group says it will leave rather than follow the Trump administration’s “domestic gag rule.” Patients could suffer. The Trump administration earlier this year finalized a rule banning organizations that get money through Title X — the nation’s only federal funding program dedicated to family planning — from providing or referring patients for abortions. Now Planned Parenthood, which serves 40 percent of the country’s 4 million Title X patients, says it will be forced to leave the program next week unless courts act to block the regulation, known by some as the “domestic gag rule.”
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:34 PM PST - 25 comments

Letter of Recommendation: Stuffed Animals. SLNYT. "Every night I spend a few minutes catching up with my friends. I saw them during the day — maybe one rode along with me on my long commute, or relaxed nearby while I worked from home. But this last check-in closes the evening nicely. I talk to them, imagine what they might be thinking. I pick them up and play out their whims. These friends include Sloth, who is wise and handsome; Patricia the Couch Pigtato, who has a job writing TV criticism; and Mameshiba, who knows many facts about beans. There are tens of others. I squeeze them. I become overwhelmed by their cuteness..."
posted by storybored at 6:40 PM PST - 38 comments

Canadian artist Micah Adams uses a jeweller’s saw to surgically disassemble coins into tiny clippings, collages and collections. More at designlines.
posted by oulipian at 2:53 PM PST - 15 comments

The Sahara has depressions, below sea level or else relative to their surroundings. Ever since its geography was put to map, proposals have been made to flood the areas, terra-forming the desert, perhaps making it more livable. A similar project has been proposed in Tunisia. (Also, Wikipedia.) [more inside]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:57 PM PST - 42 comments

Security researcher Joseph Tartaro (a.k.a. droogie) decided to play a prank on the California DMV by registering the vanity license plate "NULL" -- a programming term for items without a specific value. The prank, as Tartaro has explained in a recent DEF CON talk and to WIRED, has resulted in him erroneously receiving over $12,000 in traffic fines. (Previously.)
posted by Cash4Lead at 1:04 PM PST - 115 comments

Malinda Herman is a Thai lady who owns a beer bar. At home, she plays acoustic guitar (and piano) and sings to one or another of her small dogs. Sometimes the cat has a word.
I Love You to Want Me
500 Miles
Yesterday Once More
More Than I Can Say
There is more at her Youtube page and on her Facebook. [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 12:45 PM PST - 15 comments

Why does it take so long to make videogames? Polygon explores what goes right and wrong when games like Diablo 3 take a decade and how you can spend 18 months on getting a character to hop a fence.
posted by adrianhon at 12:37 PM PST - 17 comments

The Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge is made up of 2,400 islands and reefs that stretch across the Bering Sea, and is home to 40 million seabirds. A dozen of the islands have rat infestations which have devastated the seabird populations in those environments. On Saint Paul Island, the largest in the Pribilof chain, a solitary rat is being hunted by a local Paul Melovidov, a member of the Unangan nation (colonial label: Aleut people) and ecosystems coordinator for the island. [more inside]
posted by zenon at 11:08 AM PST - 12 comments

It was worth it just for this paragraph: This black hole is huge, even by cosmological standards. The team say at a conservative estimate, it is 40 billion times more massive than the Sun. By comparison, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is only 4 million times more massive than the Sun. Original article
posted by aleph at 11:06 AM PST - 59 comments

Last week, the Danish lender Jyske Bank started offering home buyers 10-year mortgages at an interest rate of -0.5 percent.... This highly unusual condition may be good for Danish home buyers, but economists say it’s an alarming sign for the global economy. Several major governments and more than 1,000 big companies in Europe are now able to effectively borrow from global financial markets at a negative interest rate. For Jyske Bank, that means it can then turn around and lend money at a subzero interest rate, too. Banks are paying people to borrow money. That’s alarming news for the global economy. (David J. Lynch for Washington Post, Aug. 14, 2019 | Archive/copy on MSN Money) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:04 AM PST - 28 comments

Flagrant Foul: Benching Teen Moms Before Title IX
posted by Etrigan at 11:00 AM PST - 7 comments

Women’s bodies, you realize, are the true classical tradition: for millions of years, on macro and molecular levels, we’ve done intergenerational labor of preservation, replication and loss that dwarfs scribes’ transmission of a few hundred texts. You never treated your flesh like a temple, those summer afternoons you drank life and mimosas to the fullest; never thought of chromosomal decay all those nights in smoky pubs or long-haul flights. But all that time, you’d been a secret library, tending and discarding ancient ciphers just in case one zygotic codex — like the Veronese manuscript that rebirthed Catullus — might someday burst forth, be fruitful, and multiply.

–Not Bringing Home a Baby by classicist Dr. Nandini Pandey.
posted by Kattullus at 10:51 AM PST - 16 comments

"The idea of the Anthropocene inflates our own importance by promising eternal geological life to our creations. It is of a thread with our species’ peculiar, self-styled exceptionalism—from the animal kingdom, from nature, from the systems that govern it, and from time itself. This illusion may, in the long run, get us all killed."
posted by brundlefly at 10:40 AM PST - 31 comments

Bob Hicok, a straight, white male "establishment" poet, comes to peace with and wistfully celebrates the end of his straight, white male privilege. In the world of American poetry, at least.

"And unlike any other group I can think of, poets have turned a corner in approaching a more egalitarian way of being, and are successfully pushing at the structural barriers and traditions of bias that have limited success in our little world mostly to people who look like me. In that sense, I wish all Americans were poets."
posted by cross_impact at 10:20 AM PST - 11 comments

“We just had to put the egg in front of one of them, and he knew just what to do,” Mr. Jäger said. “He took his beak and put the egg on his feet and then put his stomach over it, which is the normal thing penguins do.”
posted by kathrynm at 9:45 AM PST - 10 comments

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. The 1619 Project, New York Times.
posted by Think_Long at 7:41 AM PST - 17 comments

Financial writer Frances Coppola responds to a reader’s suggestion that the Christian New Testament story of the Good Samaritan is about the wisdom of saving money. “Foolishness is at the heart of Jesus' teaching. The Samaritan is foolish, the priest and Levite are sensible - but it is the Samaritan's behaviour that Jesus commends. . . . Saving your life by leaving others to die is contrary to Jesus' teaching: so is saving your surplus while others starve.” [more inside]
posted by sallybrown at 7:33 AM PST - 46 comments

Two tiny (dollhouse) home makeovers from Young House Love: one and two.
posted by warble at 6:25 AM PST - 10 comments

MANIFESTO (2014-2015): Artist Julian Rosefeldt worked with Cate Blanchett to create monumental video installations distilling and interpreting various artistic manifestos - FUTURISM - DADAISM - POP ART- SURREALISM - FLUXUS - CONCEPTUAL ART, and more
posted by The Whelk at 11:12 PM PST - 15 comments

In which the r/Portland subreddit has a post about a territorial parking spot enforcer, and then the entire city loses their f****n minds. (NSFW language) [more inside]
posted by slagheap at 10:40 PM PST - 148 comments

Radiolab turns its Radiolab style toward their series G, which explores ideas surrounding intelligence, the possible measuring of which may be a dangerous idea. Beginning with The Miseducation Of Larry P [1h6m] - "We begin Radiolab Presents: “G” with a sentence that stopped us all in our tracks: In the state of California, it is off-limits to administer an IQ test to a child if he or she is Black." [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:36 PM PST - 10 comments

Fake autism treatments show the lengths parents will go to “cure” their kids . Bleach is one fake autism “cure” that has flourished online. [Warning: disturbing content]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:26 PM PST - 31 comments

It's called sexy pavement lichen and tonnes are supposedly available for supply but there's little proof to back up claims it can treat impotence – and plenty to be worried about.
posted by noneuclidean at 7:30 PM PST - 25 comments

On Laurie Anderson's upcoming Songs From The Bardo, she narrates from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with improvisations by Tenzin Choegyal (HP) and Jesse Paris Smith (HP). They've released a 7-minute excerpt, "Lotus Born, No Need to Fear (YT)" . [more inside]
posted by sylvanshine at 7:10 PM PST - 9 comments

If others see me cleaning the ocean, they would probably think: ‘An old guy can do it, why can’t we?' With 30 years of diving experience under his belt, Mr Chan intends to raise public awareness of the impact of ghost nets, and inspire more people to join his cause. Since retiring... he has been hunting ghost nets for the past five years, and has conducted some 150 clean-up dives, collecting about 80 tonnes of the material from local waters. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 4:57 PM PST - 3 comments

How YouTube Radicalized Brazil. New Study Demonstrates YouTube’s Role In Far-Right Radicalization, Spread Of Conspiracies In Brazil.
ArsTechnica suggests YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users and Hacker News says The problem is not the algorithm. [more inside]
posted by adamvasco at 4:06 PM PST - 65 comments

Long-form deep dive by Wired into the last three years of turmoil at Google.

ON A BRIGHT Monday in January 2017, at 2:30 in the afternoon, about a thousand Google employees—horrified, alarmed, and a little giddy—began pouring out of the company's offices in Mountain View, California. They packed themselves into a cheerful courtyard outside the main campus café, a parklike area dotted with picnic tables and a shade structure that resembles a giant game of pickup sticks. Many of them held up handmade signs: “Proud Iranian-American Googler,” “Even Introverts Are Here,” and of course, “Don't Be Evil!” written in the same kindergarten colors as the Google logo.

posted by octothorpe at 4:04 PM PST - 16 comments

Mercury Maze, a game "designed by Loncraine Broxton & Partners in England in 1978. [...] The aim of the game is to rotate and tilt the puzzle to get the silver blob of mercury into the centre of the maze." Record of Object: Maze Puzzle at Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum of Childhood collection. [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 3:22 PM PST - 22 comments

This bathroom is so upsetting [SLTwitter]
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:30 PM PST - 140 comments

Erin no-last-name-known, better known as the Bus Lane Hero, caused a bit of a stir on social media after she was recorded directing cars out of a bus-only lane in downtown Seattle last week. Despite the haters, folks inspired by her rallying cry have made flags (multiple!) and buttons. One group even installed a quiver of flags at the bus stop for the public to use for their own citizen-led enforcement efforts. [more inside]
posted by mosst at 1:05 PM PST - 56 comments

This is the crux of the leftwing critique of remainism: the charge that remainists are fixated with Brexit at the expense of everything else – and that rather than seeking to transform the country for the better, they just want to turn back the clock to the time before the referendum when they didn’t have to think about politics because it didn’t impinge upon their privileged bubble.

‘Loud, obsessive, tribal’: the radicalisation of remain, by Daniel Cohen for The Guardian's Long read.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:04 PM PST - 24 comments

“Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. "It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress. "I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all," added little Amy, with an injured sniff. The Little Women may not get Christmas presents, but we'll get Greta Gerwig's version of Little Women! [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 11:32 AM PST - 47 comments

Circuit Bent Smoke Alarms is an album of 26 short recordings of circuit bent smoke alarms by Dylan Sheridan. For my money, call_5, call_10, and call17 are the can't miss tracks, though msg_9 is how I feel inside a lot of the time.
posted by cortex at 10:43 AM PST - 13 comments

The Mississippi Delta's History of Black Land Theft: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:19 AM PST - 4 comments

In May, Foodora workers in Toronto launched a campaign to join the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, which could make them among the first gig economy workers to unionize in Canada. Foodora has pushed notifications to its workers reminding them to vote no. The vote ends today, but there may be a legal fight coming on whether the workers are classified as employees under Ontario law.
posted by clawsoon at 10:17 AM PST - 10 comments

With banjolele in hand, Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq. has been delivering his own brand of musical humour across the UK since 2016. His performances charm audiences with a unique mix of original material, singalong classics and a sharp vintage wardrobe. (NSFW) [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 9:42 AM PST - 7 comments

Here is a curated list of links on fermentation: Beers, Mead, Rice-based Beverages, Wines, Bean Ferments, Blogroll, Crocks and other Equipment for Fermentation, Dairy Alternative ferments, Dairy Ferments, Fermentation Art and Ideas, Education, General Links, Small Scale Producers, Food Activism and Advocacy, Food History and Anthropology, Grain Ferments, Lightly Fermented Beverages, Kombucha, Nutrition Information, Plants and Herbalism Links, Recipes, Vegetable Ferments, Vegetarian Resources, Vinegar, & Wild Foods
posted by aniola at 9:36 AM PST - 16 comments

The duality arises from the word: line. Line suggests a sense both mercurial and typographic. A line is poetic and literal; where the hope of intention meets the reality of the page. Line editing is the ultimate union of writer and editor; the line-edit means we cede control, and the pen, to someone else. It is a gift of trust, and it must go both ways. "A great teacher is a gift. A great line editor is a miracle.". [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 9:20 AM PST - 18 comments

City flags are notoriously bad, and Seattle's is no exception. So last month alt-weekly The Stranger ran a contest for replacement designs, got a lot of cool submissions, and then, well, then came the jackassery.
posted by hishtafel at 8:45 AM PST - 54 comments

Ámbar Past, an American-born Mexican poet, came to the Central Highlands region of the Mexican state of Chiapas in 1973. She stayed with some Mayan women and taught herself Tzotzil, one of the local Mayan languages, and she realized the women sometimes spoke in poetry, "breathtakingly beautiful verses, sometimes echoing verses and phrases spoken or written 500 years ago" (New York Times, 2005). Some words resembled ones in the Popol Vuh (PDF, translated into English), the Mayan creation story. In 1975, Past worked with indigenous women and created Taller Leñateros, Mexico’s first and only Tzotzil Maya book- and papermaking collective. They are publishing the first Maya works in over 400 years (Atlas Obscura, 2019). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:26 AM PST - 5 comments

"...exactly half of [Yankee's second baseman Gleyber] Torres’s 26 home runs this season have come against one team, and Orioles play-by-play announcer Gary Thorne has been there for every one of them. Thorne’s home run calls work even better, however, in a more literary form. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic here by saying that the following 13-stanza poem, created entirely from Thorne’s words, is the finest piece of baseball verse since “Casey at the Bat.” [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 8:20 AM PST - 3 comments

Ohio recently legalized the cultivation of hemp, up to a THC level of 0.3 percent. However, few crime labs in Ohio can test the actual level of THC. Some prosecutors — including the City Attorney of Columbus, the state capital — have said that, in the absence of precise testing, possession of marijuana is effectively legal now.
posted by Etrigan at 5:42 AM PST - 45 comments

The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism (NYT): How foreign state and nonstate actors have helped to give viral momentum to a clutch of Swedish far-right websites.
posted by adrianhon at 5:41 AM PST - 11 comments

Heather Heyer's mother, Susan Bro, on Heyer's life, her activism, and Susan's own struggle to carry on her daughter's legacy two years after her death. Predictably, white-supremacist shitnoodles continue to go out of their way to make this task even more draining than it would already be. A difficult, worthwhile read.
posted by peakes at 5:38 AM PST - 1 comment

Regardless of how one feels about filmed violence, there's no denying action movies are the lifeblood of popular cinema. With it being a year ending in a nine, Jonah Jeng, writing for the Mubi Notebook, gets an early start on remembering the decade by looking back at the best action scenes from around the world. His selections aren't ranked but looked at in depth, covering shots, cuts, and a little about the bodies of work from those involved. Part 1 Part 2
posted by gusottertrout at 2:05 AM PST - 25 comments

The owners of Wordpress are purchasing Tumblr for less than $3 million. (Yahoo originally bought it for $1.1b.) Verizon is happy to offload it to the first bidder "have found the perfect partner in Automattic." WSJ notes that Automattic will keep 200 staffers; Ars Technica mentions that the porn ban will remain. (Previously. Previouslier. Previousliest.) [more inside]
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 7:38 PM PST - 83 comments

"1. You encounter a strange, cult-like group that lives in almost total isolation from the outside world. They jealously guard their arcane knowledge and practice some exceedingly cruel rituals. You observe or participate in at least one incredibly awkward sex act. Very strange things happen, sometimes under the influence of narcotics, but you ultimately feel at home there because they give you a sense of family."

Is it a critically acclaimed horror film of the 2010s or your Ph.D. program?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:31 PM PST - 38 comments

A similar thing happened last year. And this year "residents in the Hampshire neighborhood on the west side of Richmond, VA, woke up to a bizarre sight: Old CRT TVs, left portentously on their doorsteps or front lawns." This time around, security camera footage shows that the culprit was “a guy dressed in a jumpsuit with a TV for a head. It’s the weirdest thing. He squats down, puts the TV there and walks off.”
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:13 PM PST - 45 comments

Former Collection Agency Executives Start Charity To Buy And Forgive Medical Debt - Craig Antico and Jerry Ashton, founders of RIP Medical Debt, decided to use their expertise to forgive medical debt instead of collecting it. So far, their company has abolished hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. They want to reach a billion by 2020.
posted by rude.boy at 3:18 PM PST - 18 comments

Money-Making Schemes That Ensnare Prisoners and Their Families [The Marshall Project]
posted by readinghippo at 1:24 PM PST - 6 comments

A Person Paper on Purity in Language, by Douglas Hofstader: a Swiftian satire of linguistic sexism in English. Most of the clamor, as you certainly know by now, revolves around the age-old usage of the noun "white" and words built from it, such as chairwhite, mailwhite, repairwhite, clergywhite, middlewhite, Frenchwhite, forewhite, whitepower, whiteslaughter, oneupuwhiteship, straw white, whitehandle, and so on. The negrists claim that using the word "white," either on its own or as a component, to talk about all the members of the human species is somehow degrading to blacks and reinforces racism. Therefore the libbers propose that we substitute "person" everywhere where "white" now occurs. Sensitive speakers of our secretary tongue of course find this preposterous. There is great beauty to a phrase such as "All whites are created equal." Our forebosses who framed the Declaration of Independence well understood the poetry of our language.
posted by MiraK at 12:21 PM PST - 125 comments

Joey Purp listens to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme for the first time. [more inside]
posted by SpiffyRob at 12:16 PM PST - 32 comments

How Fiery Desert Chilis Can Protect Us from Climate Change [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:02 AM PST - 15 comments

Miriam Follin is a Swede who fell in love with a Chinese man, and in the process fell in love with rural China. Her videos document her life in the forests, mountains and farm villages of Qinghai and Shaanxi provinces. They have a dreamlike quality layered on top of an intense curiosity and devotion to nature and family. [more inside]
posted by serathen at 9:25 AM PST - 3 comments

Chesses is eight new kinds of chess. Eight new chesses, as it were. What if gravity pulled pieces to the bottom of the board? What if moving a piece left a clone behind? What if every capture was mutual destruction? And so forth? Thanks to delightful games-smith Pippin Barr, now you can find out. [more inside]
posted by cortex at 9:04 AM PST - 31 comments

The internet's gynecologist Dr. Jen Gunter on incontinence.

Many women also tell me they are too embarrassed to buy incontinence pads because it makes them think of “diapers” and that is what “old women” need. And there is nothing worse in our patriarchal society than being an “old woman.” Women get diminished and men, distinguished. I’m always fascinated by the lack of public discussion about incontinence."

[more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:44 AM PST - 28 comments

Jan Hakon Erichsen hates balloons single-link Twitter video
posted by Etrigan at 5:22 AM PST - 26 comments

There are 80 days until Brexit. It seems increasingly likely that the UK will 'crash out' without a deal, with extremely serious and damaging consequences. Increasingly, it appears that one of these could well be the end of the UK itself... [more inside]
posted by deeker at 4:59 AM PST - 102 comments

Do you want to see cute Australian animals in the snow? Australian Geographic on Twitter: "Snow covered whiskers and paws alert!" (They are a quoll, a Tasmanian devil, a potoroo and a wallaby, clockwise.) Australian Geographic on facebook: video of kangaroos bounding in the snow. [Credits: Lachlan Gilding/Aussie Ark for the photos, and Stephen Grenfell for the videos] [more inside]
posted by freethefeet at 4:38 AM PST - 5 comments

Was E-mail a Mistake? — From The New Yorker, Cal Newport, August 6, 2019: “...With the arrival of practical asynchronous communication, people replaced a significant portion of the interaction that used to unfold in person with on-demand digital messaging, and they haven’t looked back. The Radicati Group, a technology-research firm, now estimates that more than a hundred and twenty-eight billion business e-mails will be sent and received daily in 2019, with the average business user dealing with a hundred and twenty-six messages a day. The domination of asynchronous communication over synchronous collaboration has been so complete that some developers of digital-collaboration tools mock the fact that we ever relied on anything so primitive as in-person meetings.”
posted by cenoxo at 12:59 AM PST - 87 comments

"I was waiting for a moment alone / Sat beside you when you got home / I took a breath and you took out your phone / So I just did the same / I just did the same." A poignant, beautiful music video for Lauren O'Connell's song "Shimmering Silver" from her 2018 album Details. [more inside]
posted by Caduceus at 9:27 PM PST - 2 comments

"In that vein, citizen oversight juries could also be powerful tools for improving election regulations at the state level, reining in the excesses of gerrymandering and helping to prevent situations like the debacle in Georgia last November, when a gubernatorial candidate was tasked with overseeing his own election. Especially now that federal courts are forbidden from doing so, citizen oversight juries should wield veto power over districting decisions. More generally, they should review election policy and scrutinize interactions between lobbyists and legislators—precisely the sort of tasks that officials elected under the current system are unlikely to perform." Give Political Power to Ordinary People (Dissent)
posted by The Whelk at 4:59 PM PST - 68 comments

When Indigo Girls decided to release their first (and so far only) self-produced album, the result was the wide-ranging, sonically challenging political statement that was 1997's Shaming Of The Sun. which featured musician friends and adventurous arrangements across a wide range of styles and topics. Coinciding with their participation in Lilith Fair, it was one of their most political albums to date. The work struggles with themes that continue to echo strongly now, over 20 years later. Cassette Side A: Shame On You [music video of album track, alternate music video, backing vocals by Steve Earle, bonus: live performance on David Letterman, 4-29-1997], Get Out The Map [ed. note: how does this song not have a video?], Shed Your Skin [backing vocals by Ulali bonus: Tom Morello remix Stephen Nikolas club mix edit], It's Alright, Caramia, Don't Give That Girl A Gun [backing vocals by Michael Lorant] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:06 PM PST - 23 comments

For the bibliophiles: - Let's explore Palestinian writing.
At the Intersection of Dystopia and Technology in Palestinian Life, The Surreal, Virtual Worlds of Palestinian Science Fiction.
Marcello di Cinto, author of ‘Pay No Heed to the Rockets,’ recommends novels and memoirs by Palestinian writers. "Over the course of many trips to the region, I’ve long wanted to write a different story about Palestinians — something outside the narrative of anger and loss. [more inside]
posted by adamvasco at 2:51 PM PST - 4 comments

It's not easy to find a tour guide in Gaza. Even clerks at the local Tourism Ministry, a vestige of the 1990s that remarkably still exists, struggle to recommend professional guides, before suggesting a man who hasn't led tourists around for 20 years. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 1:54 PM PST - 9 comments

Anoice (interview) is a Tokyo based cinematic instrumental music group formed by multi instrumentalists; Takahiro Kido, Yuki Murata, Utaka Fujiwara and Tadashi Yoshikawa, who have been collaborating on modern classical, post rock, ambient, and similar sounding recordings, as iterations on the group, and as solo artists, via their Ricco label, which has most of their work on Bandcamp. Anoice's latest album, is a piano-focused instrumental album titled Ghost in the Clock, while RiLF's debut, Ferris Wheel, is vocal alt.post rock. And a freebie (or pay what you like): Piano Fantasia+, a two track solo piano single from Yuki Murata.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:52 PM PST - 2 comments

What happens when progressive-seeming brands have Trump-supporting investors? Some brands have an immediate association with a political stance. Chick-fil-A, for instance, has long had a contentious reputation when it comes to LGBTQ issues — the company’s foundation and its CEO’s family have donated millions to anti-gay groups. But it can be particularly surprising to consumers when brands that have cultivated progressive and inclusive images are found to be associated with campaigns or causes that stand for the opposite. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:47 AM PST - 67 comments

Last winter, Tom Davies AKA "GeoWizard" attempted to cross an entire country on foot in a straight line. He chose a route traversing Wales: 33 miles of fences, hedges, gorges, lakes, rivers, menacing landowners and awful weather. As he walked, he narrated a monologue to his Go Pro (part 1, part 2, part 3 and more to follow). For entertainment value it helps that Davies is not really a Bear Gryls type - and that his many encounters with thorns and barbed wire are as full of swear words as you might imagine. [more inside]
posted by rongorongo at 4:12 AM PST - 42 comments

Soundies: Black Music from the 1940s*

* With one exception

A potpourri of je ne sais quoi [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 12:13 AM PST - 13 comments

The singing of the free and joyous. A flash mob in a Hong Kong mall, circa 2013.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:40 PM PST - 13 comments

Jean Savage is a 95-year-old fan of Glass Tiger, a Canadian rock band known for their '80s hits "Someday" and "Don't Forget Me (When I'm Gone)". On Friday, the band performed "Someday" for Jean at an assisted living home in Mayerthorpe, Alberta. Somebody was there to record it in vertical mode! CBC News coverage, with the same video. (The song's 1986 video.)
posted by sylvanshine at 10:21 PM PST - 30 comments

Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors, Sit Down. "The Old South may be your American Downton Abbey but it is our American Horror Story, even under the best circumstances it represents the extraction of labor, talent and life we can never get back. When I do this work, it drains me, but I do it because I want my Ancestors to know not only are they not forgotten but I am here to testify that I am their wildest dreams manifest." Michael W. Twitty discusses his work honoring his ancestors. [more inside]
posted by lazuli at 7:12 PM PST - 43 comments

PyOhio is a volunteer-run, free-to-attend regional Python (computer programming language) conference. Their 2019 edition recently took place, and the talk videos have started to pop up on Youtube. Here are some of the talks that stand out to me as relevant to anyone, not just Python coders (though the presentation will resonate more if you are in tech):

• Opening Keynote: "Changing Lives through Open Source, Passion and Mentoring" - Kattni Rembor

[more inside]
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:55 PM PST - 10 comments

Jezebel Investigates: Why Are RVs So [...] Hideous?
posted by Etrigan at 1:46 PM PST - 103 comments

“The Divided Soul of America” (42½min video, .mp4, magnet) Racism, intolerance and xenophobia have always existed in the USA. But under Donald Trump, America has become a bitterly divided country and the scene of a fierce cultural struggle for the nation's future.—Deutsche Welle English's DocFilm profiles the state of politics and society in the US. [more inside]
posted by XMLicious at 10:49 AM PST - 10 comments

Earlier this week, after its first front page headline about Trump's response to the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings sparked a furious backlash, the New York Times amended it for the second edition and executive editor Dean Baquet explained the first headline as more of a technical mistake than a matter of bad judgment, while Trump praised the original headline and Politico's Jack Shafer took issue with the "Twitter multitudes... swinging caltrops and battle axes in protest". But is the furor only about a headline? Or is it an expression of an increasing frustration with the media’s coverage of Trump’s rhetoric, as encapsulated in the words of Beto O’Rourke, "members of the press, WTF?" Is political coverage in the Trump era, as described in a much-retweeted thread by Heidi N. Moore, in a crisis? And if so, what are the solutions? [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 10:31 AM PST - 99 comments

Some movies are just good, others so bad they’re good. But what about the movies which are genuinely good with terrible ratings? Those movies that were panned by critics and loved by audiences or loved just by you – let’s celebrate them. [more inside]
posted by Margalo Epps at 9:40 AM PST - 246 comments

How several former vegans and vegetarians across the country came to see meat as their calling. [slNYT]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 9:39 AM PST - 49 comments

Atop One World Trade Center, New York City's tallest building, a fragrance carrying hints of citrus, beech trees and red maples wafts through the glass-enclosed observatory deck. "The quickest way to change somebody's mood or behavior is with smell," says Dr. Alan Hirsch, neurological director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. [more inside]
posted by kathrynm at 9:28 AM PST - 7 comments

What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
posted by davejay at 9:24 AM PST - 21 comments

"The Worst Thing In The World", from September 2012, by Cliff Pervocracy. On the lengths we will go to when we believe that the end of a relationship would be The Worst Thing In The World. (Content is safe for work, except that the blog title "The Pervocracy" is in big letters at the top.) (previously)
posted by brainwane at 9:21 AM PST - 5 comments

The "fronterizo indie-pop fusion band" (their words) The Chamanas (official site) come from the El Paso, Texas/Juárez , Mexico part of the border and the music the members create is fueled by the intense history and human drama of their hometowns. The band's name is a alternative vocalization of "shaman," a spiritual person with healing energies. The Chamanas (NPR, 2017) is definitely living up to the name.... [The band] has released a series of impressively creative videos (YT channel) with imaginative visual stories and stellar photography. "If You Build It, We Will Break It," however, breaks with tradition and shows the band performing in a rehearsal space. The Chamanas new single confronts the U.S. immigration debate (NPR, April 2018)
posted by filthy light thief at 8:32 AM PST - 2 comments

The George Michael Collection Online Auction. [NSFW] [more inside]
posted by rikschell at 7:05 AM PST - 2 comments

We can't rely on anyone to take care of us but us - Master Mark + Sifu Paul Davis.
posted by carter at 6:56 AM PST - 5 comments

With Drownproofing it is possible to survive almost indefinitely with minimal effort. You don't even need to know how to swim. Drownproofing is a water survival technique that was invented by Fred Lanoue, swimming coach at Georgia Institute of Technology from 1936 to 1964. Coach Lanoue believed that everyone should be able to survive in water and developed a simple technique that was easy to learn and did not depend on physical strength or intensive training. During his time at the Tech, Fred personally taught his method to 20,000 students. It's pretty much what it says on the tin, a simple site describing the technique, and the value of it. Previously on MetaFilter.
posted by dancestoblue at 5:52 AM PST - 45 comments

People are riffing off of people using your private data to sell you bad t-shirts.
posted by signal at 5:45 AM PST - 64 comments

How Bloomin' Onions are made (SLYT)
posted by growabrain at 4:04 AM PST - 21 comments

Five years ago, yesterday, on August 9, 2014, Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old recent high school graduate, was fatally shot by 28-year-old Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. from MeFi Projects
posted by otherchaz at 2:04 AM PST - 11 comments

How to make the bass sound As explained by a leading bass guitar player in the jazz world; [more inside]
posted by mightshould at 6:48 PM PST - 6 comments

The County Highpointers Association provides descriptions of 3,143 county highpoints in the USA. It tracks members' journeys to visit as many as possible and you can read narrative reports about visits to the highpoints: lowest state highpoint in America in Florida or the highest in Alaska. And here's a charming one about trying to find and visit the true highpoint in the urban county of Arlington, Virginia. (Don't forget to read the FAQs and rules.)
posted by skynxnex at 12:37 PM PST - 24 comments

Sean Gallagher: Photographing generations of my family's tools and telling their stories. (IG link) [more inside]
posted by bondcliff at 12:01 PM PST - 14 comments

The Mystery of the Channeled Scablands. In the middle of eastern Washington stands what was once the largest waterfall in the world. It is three miles wide and 400 feet high—ten times the size of Niagara Falls. Today there is not so much as a trickle running over the cataract’s lip. What could have caused this landscape? It was a question hotly debated for several decades, and the answer was as surprising and dramatic as Dry Falls itself. So was the source of that answer: a high school science teacher named Harley Bretz.
posted by roger ackroyd at 10:24 AM PST - 69 comments

Today, the Second Circuit handed down a mandate to unseal a large tranche of documents with regard to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell from the defamation lawsuit between the latter and Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre. Releases include the ruling from said lawsuit, along with documents listing witnesses to Maxwell's conduct and a deposition of Epstein's former house manager. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:50 AM PST - 465 comments

Voices from Whale Cove: An Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic was created through forced relocation; six locals share their family stories. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:48 AM PST - 4 comments

“The dread this creates is the opposite of what a conspiratorial worldview supposes: it doesn’t postulate a cabal that orchestrates evil, but points to a series of essentially unrelated cultural circumstances that converge with one another to exponentially increase the damage done by their individual effects. If conspiracies are comforting because they’re a narrative where bad actors have agency, and can perhaps be overcome if they are exposed, now it feels more like people with good intentions are hopeless to change the effects already in motion. You might be familiar with this feeling from the cliffhanger at the end of issue 11 of Watchmen.” The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest On Alan Moore’s last comic book, the current state of things, the perils of imagination, conclusions, and the cosmic horror of Disney.
posted by The Whelk at 9:45 AM PST - 2 comments

Elizabeth Warren is Surging. This One Big Question Looms over Her. (Aaron Blake, WaPo) For as long as she’s been talked about as a presidential hopeful, one potential problem has loomed over her like Joe Btfsplk’s perpetual rain cloud: electability. Surging in Polls, Warren Has Clear Path to Nomination (Ed Kilgore, New York) If she gets that one-on-one competition with Biden, the question may be whether Democratic voters want her to be president enough to take a bit of a risk. Warren probably has a plan to make that happen. [more inside]
posted by box at 9:00 AM PST - 437 comments

"She had legions of friends and a contract offer for $200,000 to play basketball in Japan that would have made her one of the richest players in women's basketball." Now "Sister Rose Marie will never leave the monastery, unless there's a medical emergency. She'll never call or email or text anyone, either. The rules seem so arbitrarily harsh. She gets two family visits per year, but converses through a see-through screen. She can write letters to her friends, but only if they write to her first. And once every 25 years, she can hug her family."
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:36 AM PST - 68 comments

Rachel Sugar at Vox dives into the history, appeal, and future of the escape room phenomenon as it matures into a steady industry, with 2350 facilities across the US alone. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 8:22 AM PST - 31 comments

Katy Perry's "Roar," but it's John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," but it's smooth jazz. [more inside]
posted by saladin at 7:36 AM PST - 19 comments

In Cairo, Dakar, Harare or Luanda; over heated debates, raised voices, spilled drinks in roadside bars with beer, pepper soup and cigarettes; in living rooms with the television at full volume, with brothers, sisters, parents fixed to it while navigating the tension of supporting opposing teams; in office cafeterias and university hostels, the quiet of which will be inevitably be upset, glory comes to mean the same thing: A round leather ball kicked successfully into a net...Football has enormous, far-reaching, often paradoxical powers. It has fostered community amongst the most unlikely people. It has been leveraged as a call for national and continental unity; our differences pale in comparison to football, the tie that binds us together, the thing we all have in common. African Arguments explores the beautiful game. [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 7:31 AM PST - 1 comment

Don Pettit's guide to fine dining etiquette in space:

When you live in an isothermal environment, it can be a real treat to serve your guests a bag of cold water

For special occasions -- perhaps after a space walk -- you can serve drinks in a "Zero-G cup" made from scrap material

Now is the time to break out the best thermal-stabilized meal pouches you've been hoarding

Clean the food scissors and always have a loaner spoon available

Displaying dirty duct tape is exceedingly rude to your guests; always put out new, clean tape.

[more inside]
posted by autopilot at 7:10 AM PST - 8 comments

Following a Twitter thread, Lifehacker asks, "What's the Most Basic-Ass Life Skill You Never Learned?"
posted by ellieBOA at 5:04 AM PST - 330 comments

"One is Chinese. One is American. How a journalist discovered and reunited identical twins." [SL LA Times]
posted by Charity Garfein at 9:42 PM PST - 16 comments

Welcome to SubwayNut.com, a website that is dedicated to rail based transit systems and trains in the United States and Canada, and whose goal is to have a photo essay of every station on every system. A very Web 1.0 site, capturing the sights and sounds of these systems. Sorry, no coverage of Mexico City Metro, the second largest metro system in North America (Wikipedia x2), or any other systems in the west. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:14 PM PST - 16 comments

Siobhan Carroll, "For He Can Creep" (Tor.com, July 10, 2019): "The devil sighs and examines his claws. He is simultaneously a monstrous serpent, a mighty angel, and a handsome black cat with whiskers the color of starlight. The cat's whiskers are singed, the serpent's scales are scarred, and the angel's brow is heavy with an ancient grievance, and yet he is still beautiful, in his way. 'But more of this later. Jeoffry, I have come to converse with you. Will you not take a walk with me?' Jeoffry pauses, considering. Do you have treats?" Christopher Smart's cat Jeoffry previously. Further appreciation of Jubilate Agno at The Public Domain Review. Siobhan Carroll previously and previouslier.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:29 PM PST - 16 comments

Welcome...to theclub.zone, a lofi MMO where you can listen to music, be a ghost, chat with canned phrases, dance to music, be a stickman, and be at the club.
posted by cortex at 7:58 PM PST - 20 comments

A spoof of a fiction within a fiction fronted by a fictional prop? "[He] knew just what he wanted when he sought a fake TV Guide cover to feature in his movie “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” His art direction read: “Smirking Jake Cahill [sitting] on a horse, who is also smirking. There is a mule in tow … eyes are bulging and legs are buckling under the weight.” [more inside]
posted by notsnot at 7:21 PM PST - 3 comments

Uber lost more money this spring than it did in any previous quarter, revealing on Thursday a dramatic $5.2 billion deficit in the months before and after its disappointing initial public offering. Uber has never been profitable.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 6:15 PM PST - 120 comments

Lizzo performs at NPR's Tiny, tiny, little-ass Desk [more inside]
posted by carsonb at 4:12 PM PST - 16 comments

Next season, on the 31st anniversary of the film, the Yankees and the White Sox will play a game at the site of the Field Of Dreams-inspired farm / baseball diamond, kind of. I doubt they're playing for nothing.
posted by MorgansAmoebas at 3:38 PM PST - 8 comments

“The singer and I never “made love,” but we did make love, coax it from the air around us, render it in our folded hearts. . . . These days we have dozens of names for people we have sex with without any corresponding affection. We call them hook-ups or one-night-stands. We call them fuck-buddies or friends-with-benefits. But unrecognized in our vocabularies is the inverse: What do we call the people with whom we have authentic, passionate intimacy, but no actual sex?” by Aubrey Hirsch for Roxane Gay’s Gay Mag.
posted by sallybrown at 3:37 PM PST - 25 comments

Over the years, a lot has changed in Geoguessr, the Google Street View game where you're dropped somewhere on the planet and have to deduce where you are. (Introduced here on MeFi in 2013.) The social aspect of the game has improved, with timed challenges and player generated maps. The image quality and reach of Google Street View has also improved: zooming in can now reveal significant details. Of course, it wouldn't be 2019 without a healthy dose of live streaming for your entertainment pleasure. Yes, you too can now watch Geoguessr superstars on Twitch take their sweet, methodical time hunting for that perfect 25,000 score. However, there are some dark clouds on the horizon, so you may want to get your game on soon. [more inside]
posted by jeremias at 3:34 PM PST - 17 comments

The extremophile Thermus scotoductus, previously known from hot springs and hydrothermal vents, is nearly ubiquitous in household water heaters. (Wilpiszeski, R.L., Zhang, Z. & House, C.H. Extremophiles (2019) 23: 119. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-018-1066-z). [more inside]
posted by clew at 3:06 PM PST - 8 comments

Meet Orville Peck, Country Music’s Anonymous Masked Musician. Songs from his 2019 debut album Pony include "Turn to Hate," "Hope to Die," "Big Sky," "Buffalo Run," and "Dead of Night." A recent live KEXP performance, and a live cover of Bobby Gentry's "Fancy" in Brooklyn and Vancouver. Orville Peck on his influences, which include Lavender Country (previously: The Saint of Dry Creek and Don't Sneak).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:11 PM PST - 12 comments

The Partition Archive has been preserving oral histories of the 1947 Partition since 2010 through crowdsourcing and through collection by scholars. Over 7,500 oral histories have been preserved on digital video. Many are available on the Partition Archive's Youtube channel or through the archive's partnership with Stanford University. The generation that still remembers the birth of modern India and Pakistan are now elderly men and women, and it's a race against time to record as many stories as possible. “That segment of the population is disappearing really, really fast,” said Guneeta Singh Bhalla, the Berkeley, Calif.-based executive director and driving force of the archive, speaking by telephone. “Within the next five years the vast majority of what's remaining is going to be gone." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:17 PM PST - 2 comments

When I speak before Western audiences about my years covering the war in Iraq as a journalist for McClatchy Newspapers, someone inevitably asks, “What was it like to be a woman over there?” [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 12:13 PM PST - 3 comments

Private prison contracts have been canceled in Denver thanks to the efforts of one woman. [more inside]
posted by sotonohito at 10:28 AM PST - 23 comments

A new paper explores what “supercentenarians” have in common. Turns out it’s bad record-keeping.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:55 AM PST - 80 comments

“Amazon has built a vast logistics empire by subjecting its workforce to extreme forms of technological discipline — designed to keep workers isolated, fearful, and maniacally productive. This piece sets out to surface the “weapons of the weak” wielded by workers to resist this regime. I talked to current and former Amazon employees, spoke with warehouse worker organizers, read exit interviews on Indeed and Glassdoor, and visited online forums where Amazon workers congregate to complain, commiserate, shoot the shit, and seek and offer advice. I learned a great deal about the regime of total surveillance and bodily control that Amazon has built to manage its growing logistics workforce. And I learned about the counter-strategies that workers deploy to resist the dehumanization, boredom, pain, and mental anguish that Amazon’s disciplinary apparatus exacts.” Surviving Amazon
posted by The Whelk at 9:27 AM PST - 24 comments

Chase cancels all outstanding debt for Canadian credit cardholders. The error was apparently entering the Canadian market in the first place. Now, to get out of the market, Chase is simply cancelling all the debts owed by their Canadian cardholders.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:21 AM PST - 27 comments

“An interesting paradox of the reënactment scene’s obsession with authenticity and historical accuracy, this “getting it right,” is that accuracy is measured in terms of the minute details of a particular event, which does not necessarily amount to historical accuracy in the broader sense … When I went to Tombstone for the first time, with my family—all of us born in Mexico—we quickly noticed that there were no Mexicans being portrayed in the reënactments. No Native Americans, either. Non-whites seemed to have been completely erased from the popular narratives.” Valeria Luiselli on the re-enactors of Tombstone (The New Yorker) [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 7:48 AM PST - 12 comments

Do you like Baklava? You are not alone.
(Some of those posts get 100,000 likes)
posted by growabrain at 6:07 AM PST - 35 comments

They Call Her The Savant Is It Possible to Stop a Mass Shooting Before It Happens? [cw: descriptions of crime / violence / sexual assault] [more inside]
posted by hilaryjade at 5:48 AM PST - 35 comments

The world is a mess. “Cleanfluencers” are here to help. [The Atlantic] Meet the 'cleanfluencers', the online gurus who like things nice and tidy. [The Guardian] [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 3:35 AM PST - 20 comments

The arctic fox population worldwide is doing fine, but in the mountains of Scandinavia it's under threat. However, conservation and restoration measures have been taken and seem to be effective. This PDF from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research gives a good overview. As individuals, arctic foxes are robust creatures, shown by this GPS-equipped individual that walked from Norway to Canada in 76 days. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 at 12:32 AM PST - 8 comments

Nicolas Cage on his legacy, his philosophy of acting and his metaphorical — and literal — search for the Holy Grail. (NYT)
• I would hope there are ways of teaching nouveau shamanic acting that don’t involve acquiring ancient artifacts.
• The cat — a friend of mine gave me this bag of mushrooms, and my cat would go in my refrigerator and grab it, almost like he knew what it was. He loved it.
• I don’t know if I’m going to say that’s why I bought the Rhode Island property. But I will say that is why I went to Rhode Island, and I happened to find the place beautiful. [...] What I ultimately found is: What is the Grail but Earth itself?
posted by CrystalDave at 11:23 PM PST - 42 comments

Families "Are Scared To Death" After A Massive ICE Operation Swept Up Hundreds Of People (BuzzFeed). ICE arrested about 680 people in a series of workplace raids at agricultural plants in Mississippi. Children of those arrested were "left alone in the streets crying for help" as local schools instructed bus drivers to ensure they weren't dropping off children at empty homes. This is a topical US politics thread focusing on immigration. [more inside]
posted by zachlipton at 10:01 PM PST - 102 comments

Eleanor Lutz (July 29, 2019): "To make this map I used data from Stellarium, an open-source planetarium software ... Some of my favorite constellations were the Stars of Water, Rabbit Tracks, and the Hippopotamus, and I also really liked the star names The Oath Star, Lady of Life, and The Hand of the Mouse." Image. Source code. See also Lutz's ongoing series of maps covering Mercury, Martian topography, Martian geology, the Solar System, and more. Lutz previously. Stellarium previously.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:28 PM PST - 4 comments

13 years since their last release, TOOL has released the first song from their new album Fear Inoculum.
posted by adept256 at 7:52 PM PST - 55 comments

The beloved poet and singer-songwriter returned this year with a new album and was about to begin touring.
posted by misterbee at 4:35 PM PST - 61 comments

Kitboga is the streamer who exposes callcenter scammers. Over the years, he's role-played at Edna, Nevaeh, Chad and others characters pretending to fall victim to scammers but ultimately exposing them on live streams. Like today's stream where Kitboga played two characters in conversation, "drove" to Walmart Walgreens and discovered that Edna had a totally not fabricated grandson who lives in... Idaho, New York. Enjoy his best clips and Youtube channel. Obviously there's a remix or two to listen to.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 3:39 PM PST - 4 comments

introducing Phoenix, the world’s first hijab-wearing champion wrestler
posted by Mrs Potato at 1:37 PM PST - 6 comments

“There may come a time in the not-too-distant future when investors don’t expect to collect fixed interest payments from sovereign debt obligations, nor do they expect to earn anything from parking their cash in a savings account.” Brian Chappatta of Bloomberg explains a blog post by Joachim Fels proposing “It is no longer absurd to think that the nominal yield on U.S. Treasury securities could go negative.”
posted by sallybrown at 1:25 PM PST - 35 comments

My In-Laws Are Careless About My Deadly Food Allergy! Ask Polly (Heather Havrilesky) goes off on what she dubs the worst in-laws ever.
posted by larrybob at 1:01 PM PST - 215 comments

The high price of avocados in the US this summer is caused by a combination of an increasing demand plus California's smallest crop in over a decade, partly due to last year's heat wave. This has caused some taquerias to resort to surreptitiously substituting avocado in their guacamole with Mexican grey (or calabacitas) squash and tomatillos. [more inside]
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:31 PM PST - 50 comments

An ambitious new high school, concentrating on practical application. A $10 million grant from Steve Jobs' widow. A mayor and school district that had bought in. So what went wrong?
posted by Etrigan at 12:18 PM PST - 10 comments

How to explain the pervasive power of cute? What accounts for the persistence of Pokemon, Minions, emojis, depressed egg characters, fingerless Japanese kitties as a phenomenon? Is it the cuteness response that draws out our natural tendency to protect and nuture? Or is it a bit darker, fudging familiar boundaries like childhood and adulthood, or a play to subvert our own sense of power?
posted by cross_impact at 11:27 AM PST - 7 comments

There is something of the jealous monogamist about fandom, something of the checker for digital traces of the beloved’s secret life. Who hasn’t been there? But wouldn’t it be better if we hadn’t? A short essay by Emily Ogden on fandom and amateurism. [more inside]
posted by gusottertrout at 10:54 AM PST - 22 comments

The artisans of Aleppo keep plying their ancient trade, one bar at a time. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:37 AM PST - 7 comments

“It is perhaps this undercurrent of moral logic that made fairy tales such ripe fodder for British socialists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the recent collection Workers Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain, editor Michael Rosen notes that fairy tales show their politics “less overtly, often as personified social conflict.” The literary tales gathered in Rosen’s collection, by contrast, were adapted and written purposefully to “alert, reform, enlighten, provoke, and educate.” Seizing the Means of Enchantment: What Fairy Tales Can Teach Us About Class and Wealth in the Age of the Mega-Corporation (Catapult)
posted by The Whelk at 9:21 AM PST - 12 comments

Ever wanted to roll your own trivia quiz? Get advice from quizbowl master Yogesh Raut or get it from professional quiz-writer Paul Paquet.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:12 AM PST - 12 comments

Starting 40 years ago, before it was common in the age of digital photos, blogs and social media, Jamie Livingston took one Polaroid photo a day, until the day he died in October 1997. The collection was a private archive until Hugh Crawford digitized the images and posted them online. "Initially it wasn't meant to be looked at by anyone. A group of us were putting on an exhibition of the photos and the site was a place where we could look at the pictures while we talked on the phone." Because it's a site for friends, and a posthumous collection, there aren't descriptions or even captions, just a timeline and the photos. Other people found the site, and discovered Jamie Livingston's life through his photos (Mentalfloss, 2008). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:01 AM PST - 5 comments

The Brick Experiment Channel does wordless, lightly-annotated build experiments with lego bricks and gears and motors. How fast a wheel? How heavy a weight? What if you built a submarine inside a plastic pitcher? [more inside]
posted by cortex at 8:54 AM PST - 4 comments

The Surreal Story of a Trump-Loving Artist’s War With the Smithsonian. In which an evangelical artist turns pro se litigant in his quest to display his Trump mural at the National Portrait Gallery.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:15 AM PST - 38 comments

A visual novel-esque smartphone game conducted via text chats, phone calls, and social media feeds, BTS World sees you manage the South Korean boy band BTS in its early days. "After winning a ticket to see the band in concert, you find yourself whisked back from 2019 to 2012, the year before the group’s debut ... What struck me the most while playing, however, was how much the game itself reads like straight fanfiction."(Polygon)
posted by adrianhon at 7:20 AM PST - 13 comments

So, each episode of the Simpsons is dubbed into two different versions for French markets. There's a Quebec French version, and a France French version. Fans of the Quebec dub hate the European dub, and vice versa. [more inside]
posted by Orange Pamplemousse at 6:46 AM PST - 71 comments

The benefits of adopting a senior pet: This series of print ads from The Animal Protective Association of St. Louis featuring shelter animals has an adorable and silly theme: “Grown-Ass Adult." Along with the hashtags #grownassadult and #adoptadult, this campaign showcases all the reasons why adult animals make great companions. I used to volunteer at the Humane Society of Huron Valley in Ann Arbor and fondly remember the day that someone adopted three bonded elderly kitties that needed a new home together. Here's to our companion animals and all the ways they make our lives better. [more inside]
posted by wicked_sassy at 6:06 AM PST - 41 comments

"I’m excited to share with you the design process behind Buttsss, the most daring collection of round and beautiful butt illustrations in the universe. You can use these graphics in your pitch deck, product screens, marketing campaigns, business presentations, and motivational speeches." Intro video.
posted by jklaiho at 12:26 AM PST - 34 comments

Full House of Mustaches
posted by oulipian at 6:36 PM PST - 24 comments

Researchers Document First Known Case of Dolphin Mom Adopting Whale Calf [Smithsonian.com] [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 4:01 PM PST - 4 comments

Björk has released a video for losss, from 2017's Utopia, featuring the work of Tobias Gremmler.
posted by boo_radley at 2:38 PM PST - 12 comments

The making of images was at the heart of Kiarostami’s work from the start; in his 1974 feature “The Traveler,” the young protagonist raises money for a bus ticket to go see a soccer match by setting himself up as a local portraitist, and scams residents out of change by taking their pictures with no film in the camera. Yet, soon, Kiarostami would go further, rendering his own image-making central to his movies. [slNYer]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 12:25 PM PST - 5 comments

So, here's what happened: A guy on Twitter tried to make the argument that he needed an assault rifle in order to stave off the "30-50 feral hogs" that allegedly swarm his yard within 3-5 minutes every time his kids play outside. The idea that this man was fighting off upwards of 50 hogs every time his kids went outdoors sent Twitter into a meme frenzy, and just about everyone had a Feral Hog Tweet™.
posted by Etrigan at 10:37 AM PST - 299 comments

RF Jurjevics: My Mother, Myself: To My Mom, Who Wrote For Allure About Parenting Me in 1991. In 1991, when she was 47 years old and I just seven, my mother, Laurie Colwin, published an article for Allure Magazine titled “My Daughter, My Self.” In it, she wrote of parenthood, of her attempts to raise an independent and free-thinking little girl in a world of Barbie dolls and television — both banned from our household — and the other gendered pressures of modern life in the 1990s. Just a year later, however, nearly everything in my world would change: I would be eight, and my mother would be gone, dead from a sudden aortic aneurysm two months after I started the third grade. Gone, too, would be most traces of the daughter, as I emerged into the summer of ’92 a husky, short-haired boy named Felix.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:32 AM PST - 21 comments

A group of fishermen make a friend. Next time they visit her, they come prepared. [more inside]
posted by brook horse at 8:56 AM PST - 15 comments

More than a century ago, the discovery of a hidden bird refuge in the Everglades led down a path of greed, vanity, and murder. And that’s just the beginning of the story. The Price of a Feather (National Parks Conservation Association, 2015) || In the late 19th century, there were no limits to how many birds a plume hunter could kill. In Cape Cod, 40,000 terns were killed for the hat industry in one summer. In Florida, the slaughter was often indiscriminate and senseless. One popular pastime among tourists visiting the Everglades was to shoot critters from the comfort of boats, plinking alligators and birds with no intention of ever picking up their carcasses. The Most Dangerous Job: The Murder of America's First Bird Warden (Mentalfloss, 2018)
posted by filthy light thief at 8:44 AM PST - 2 comments

“Hawley, for his part, inveighed against “multinational corporations” as responsible for “flat wages . . . lost jobs . . . declining investment and declining opportunity” in middle America. Left unmentioned: Hawley opposed a minimum-wage increase on the campaign trail in 2018 and supported Missouri’s draconian right-to-work ballot initiative that would have stripped workers of their basic right to unionize—a proposal that Missourians voted down last year by an overwhelming margin.” Flirting With Fascism (Jewish Currents) “Hawley’s bill isn’t about helping disadvantaged students gain valuable skills. It’s about dismantling a class of enemies—his “cosmopolitan consensus”—who he believes, “look down on the common affections that once bound this nation together: things like place and national feeling and religious faith.” Josh Hawley Wants to Break Higher Education to Own the Libs (The Bulwark) Josh Hawley Is A Fraud (Splinter)
posted by The Whelk at 8:33 AM PST - 13 comments

(SL The Urbanist) explains how rent control is more nuanced than earlier analysis suggests, though it's not a panacea on its own. An excerpt : "Economic analysis often focused on market distortion and did not placed a value on the sociological benefits of housing stability – things like being able to keep kids in the same school or maintaining social support networks. A recent paper by Columbia professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh measured those ancillary benefits within New York City’s rent-controlled housing stock and found dramatically different results."
posted by splitpeasoup at 7:31 AM PST - 55 comments

Toni Morrison, the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, has died at 88. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Beloved in 1988. She authored 11 novels and was a professor of literature at Princeton from 1989 until her retirement in 2006. Her vivid descriptions of the black American experience were groundbreaking, and her powerful prose influenced countless readers and writers. [more inside]
posted by mai at 7:09 AM PST - 100 comments

The Longform Podcast is a refreshingly honest and direct look at the art, practice, and business of longform writing. Hosted by Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky, and Evan Ratliff, the podcast has featured Metafilter favourites including Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing, Wesley Morris on pop culture, Tom Bissell on games writing, Elif Batuman on Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah on The Making of Dylann Roof, Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Case for Reparations, and Susan Orlean from The New Yorker.
posted by adrianhon at 6:55 AM PST - 7 comments

America has a housing segregation problem. Seattle may just have the solution. - "Economist Raj Chetty found the program has 'the largest effect I've ever seen in a social science intervention.'"[1,2] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 5:55 AM PST - 13 comments

Not just a personal story about Christian Science This is a Guardian long read, an excerpt from Caroline Fraser's book: God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church which is now coming out in a new 20th anniversary edition. [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 5:50 AM PST - 28 comments

Kalev Leetaru on how Computer Science Could Learn A Lot From Library And Information Science.
posted by metaquarry at 5:50 AM PST - 14 comments

This brand claims you can wear the same socks for six days straight. Should you? [slVox]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:50 AM PST - 50 comments

"Like most cultural shifts in language, the rise of white, upper-middle class women who call themselves “mama” seemed to happen slowly, and then all at once. And like most cultural shifts in language, the rise of “mama” is about power and discontent. "The rise of Mama
posted by mippy at 2:43 AM PST - 98 comments

Part I: This story starts with my research team currently deploying alligators* (3 total, 2 – 2.5 meters in length) at three different sites 2000 meters deep in the Gulf of Mexico.
Part II: Giant isopods eating an alligator in the deep sea.
[more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:52 AM PST - 10 comments

China is letting the yuan weaken and boycotting U.S. crops in retaliation to the Trump administration's latest round of tariffs (despite its July statement that it would not respond with competitive currency devaluation to Trump's tweets about its monetary policy). In consequence, the Dow has tumbled nearly 770 points at close today, and overnight trading in stock futures indicates the Dow is now set to fall 630 points on Tuesday, as markets are bracing for a surge in volatility. A Cowen FG analyst describes China’s central bank's decision to let the yuan fall to a more-than-10-year low against the dollar, "on a scale of 1-10, it’s an 11". Morgan Stanley predicts that if the situation escalates, a global economic recession will come in the next nine months. [more inside]
posted by Doktor Zed at 7:48 PM PST - 125 comments

The United States Navy has filed a series of patents for technologies that have a whiff of the science fictional about them. These include room temperature superconductors, a high power electromagnetic field generator, and a Hybrid Underwater Aerospace Craft craft that uses an "inertial mass reduction device" for locomotion. All of the patents are written by Salvatore Cezar Pais, who might be a real person. Does this have anything to do with the Navy's UFO sightings? (previously) (previously) [more inside]
posted by chrchr at 4:11 PM PST - 64 comments

Heading into the hottest part of the year, the folks at 24/7 Wall St have put together an essential list of the best ice cream parlor in each state, perfect for planning a sweet respite. (SL24/7 Wall St)
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:23 PM PST - 79 comments

What can an octopus hold? [more inside]
posted by faethverity at 12:33 PM PST - 49 comments

Wild dogs have returned to the famed Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. The first puppy litters were not far behind. (slnyt) [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 12:06 PM PST - 17 comments

'Way ahead of the field': inside Trump's unprecedented social media campaign (Guardian) Donald Trump spent more than $11.1m on Facebook and Google ads alone in the first six months of 2019 Trump is using Facebook ads to lie about his opponents (Popular Information), Trump is using stock video of 'supporters' (Gizmodo), Donald Trump has run roughly 2,200 Facebook ads using the word 'invasion' since May 2018 (Newsweek)) [more inside]
posted by box at 11:39 AM PST - 40 comments

The making of Look Around You, the weirdest comedy show in British TV history. (Previously)
posted by Vesihiisi at 11:08 AM PST - 58 comments

11 (very) short stories by diverse authors. Bustle provides a list with links to eleven excellent short stories by authors from five different countries—eight written by women and six by people of colour. Authors include Zadie Smith, Sofia Samatar, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jamaica Kincaid, Roxane Gay, Ken Liu, Lydia Davis, Dorothy Parker, Fredric Brown, Danielle McLaughlin, and George Saunders.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:19 AM PST - 5 comments

Citing the need to respond to a long-running insurgency in the disputed region of Indian-controlled Kashmir, India’s Hindu nationalist BJP government has followed through on a campaign promise to eliminate Article 370, the Constitutional provision that allowed for a semi-autonomous special status for the Muslim-majority region. The area is now under lockdown, with additional military troops deployed, curfews imposed, universities shuttered, internet disabled, and prohibition against the assembly of more than four people. Two of the region’s former chief ministers have been placed under house arrest.
posted by darkstar at 9:13 AM PST - 55 comments

“My mother worked, my mother dreamed, but these alone did not afford her financial stability. The lottery is another of America’s promises for economic mobility that it has no intention of keeping. As Jonathan Cohen, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia studying Amerian lotteries, told Bloomberg last year: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that state lotteries started emerging in the 1970s and 1980s when rates of social mobility in the traditional economy stagnated and then declined.” IT’S TIME TO GET RID OF THE LOTTERY (Outline)
posted by The Whelk at 8:21 AM PST - 60 comments

Dubbed an “Aeronautical Disneyland,” the billion-dollar proposal ultimately never left the ground. But 50 years later, [some people in] the city of Cleveland is still wondering what could have been. Remembering that time NASA wanted to build a floating airport on Lake Erie (Popular Mechanics). The closest any of the Great Lakes ever got to a floating airport was Meigs Field (Wikipedia), a single runway airport in Chicago that was in operation from December 1948 until March 2003, on Northerly Island, an artificial peninsula on Lake Michigan. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:06 AM PST - 9 comments

The Philadelphia Phillies filed a lawsuit on Friday against the New York company that created the team’s beloved mascot, the Phillie Phanatic, after the company threatened to make the Phanatic a “free agent” if a contract signed in 1984 was not restructured. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:52 AM PST - 17 comments

Use your mouse or your finger to fling your tiny pixelated soccer/football person goalward? ballward? skyward? backward? in A Small World Cup, a hilarious wee ludumdare 38 game by Rujo Games. (Hat tip to RPS.)
posted by cortex at 7:46 AM PST - 23 comments

Emerging protest tactics in Hong Kong. Antony Dapiran (City of Protest) describes the ways protestors organize against authorities, with a nod to Bruce Lee. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 6:48 AM PST - 31 comments

After Macmillan announced plans to severely restrict lending of new eBooks (at least partly based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how public libraries work), libraries are fighting to preserve your right to borrow them (Mefi's own Jessamyn). The CEO of Overdrive also weighed in, contradicting Macmillan's claims and data.
posted by adrianhon at 6:35 AM PST - 73 comments

What women’s workwear standards reveal about our attitudes toward class, gender, and body type. Part of The Walrus' Beauty Conversation Series: [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:47 AM PST - 54 comments

r/tinyanimalsonfingers is a small photo sub-reddit (38,000 members) of Tiny animals on fingers (SLR)
posted by growabrain at 12:43 AM PST - 7 comments

A little over a year ago, British-guy-living-in-Japan-youtuber Chris Broad/Abroad in Japan revealed an ambitious plan to undertake a 2,000 km Journey Across Japan on bicycle. While the journey has been complete for a while now, his painstaking editing process has meant that the final instalment has only recently been completed. The whole thing is available to watch now in this playlist. [more inside]
posted by juv3nal at 10:49 PM PST - 5 comments

Paper Planes but every time there's a gun shot it's a musket
posted by Bugbread at 10:45 PM PST - 25 comments

Martys are googly-eyed robots working at Stop & Shop grocery stores and are designed to warn unsuspecting shoppers of dangers such as adversarial bottle caps or cilantro. Martys aren't, however, sophisticated enough to actually clean shit so they need assistance from their hominid colleagues. At least they only cost 35K each.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:16 AM PST - 116 comments

The women fish sellers of West Africa. This 6 min video from China Dialogue Ocean shows how global demand for fishmeal (mainly used to feed farmed fish) affects locals in the Gambia. According to the Gambian ministry of fisheries, the establishment of Chinese fishmeal factories on the coast is part of the difficult calculus for national development. But women looking to feed their families, see it quite differently: "exporting fishmeal doesn't benefit us, it makes us suffer... we Gambians should have access to the fish before the factory."
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:02 AM PST - 3 comments

Following the end of the devastating conflict, children of East Prussia went to great lengths in order to survive. Via
posted by Mrs Potato at 9:11 AM PST - 11 comments

The New York Times profiles the outsider Democratic candidate somehow admired by the far left and right—and supported by Putin's propaganda machine and his American apologists. She's received the endorsements of Twitter's Jack Dorsey (who maxed out his contributions to her campaign), Ron Paul, Steve Bannon (who set up an interview with her and Trump for a Cabinet position), former Klansman David Duke, and white nationalist Richard Spencer. So what does she really believe? [more inside]
posted by OnceUponATime at 9:06 AM PST - 63 comments

Emily Post’s great-great-granddaughter wrote a book about cannabis etiquette — a thing you never thought you’d need. Lizzie Post is the great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, the legendary etiquette expert responsible for sculpting the transactional courtesies of an entire generation of Americans. She’s also, in her words, a “classic stoner.”...Post’s recently published guidebook, Higher Etiquette, reflects a national turning point. For weed-curious amateurs, the book serves as a life raft for the next time you’re not sure what to do when a joint makes its way around a party. For aficionados like Post, it offers guidance on how to comfortably introduce the plant to their less seasoned friends.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:14 AM PST - 71 comments

Banana Hill is a goodlarious cartoon about food, a zany misunderstanding and 90's-era technology. Its sequel, which will go heavy on the 90's-era technology by way of an online virtual world, is in progress, but its background character designs need YOUR help! As was done twice with the first episode, a contest is being held for retro virtual world avatar designs, at least some of which will be featured in the episode. Anything goes, but the aesthetic smacks of Worlds.com, Active Worlds, and the aesthetic of Hypnospace Outlaw. Hard-and-fast rules: None (multiple submissions were allowed last time and probably this time too). Deadline: August 29th. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 6:35 AM PST - 2 comments

An extensive history of early US water and sanitation infrastructure, by Morris Pierce, based on the 1888 Manual of American Water-Works (archive.org), but with much added material, and links to online historical resources. There's a lot on the site, but you can start to drill down by location here
posted by carter at 5:48 AM PST - 8 comments

some works of instagram artist alberto_sting
posted by Cozybee at 4:27 AM PST - 2 comments

One of John Peel’s indie darlings, The Delgados were a Scottish indie band from Motherwell. Highlights from their five albums include The Light Before We Land (used as the theme for anime Gunslinger Girl), Woke From Dreaming, Child Killers, American Trilogy, and Coming In From The Cold – ranging from achingly beautiful melodies to dramatically dark ballads. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 3:59 AM PST - 16 comments

With the Evolution 2019 fighting game tournament going on this weekend, now is the perfect time to learn about how, and why, to watch a fighting game. Even if you can't play them, they can make a great genre to enjoy as a spectator once you understand some basics!
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:26 AM PST - 11 comments

Descended from Semba, Kizomba is a dance form which originated in Angola. While historical accounts tend to be oral, and vary slightly, it is generally described to have originated in the 1980's and 90's as dancers began dancing Semba style to the slower pace of Kizomba and Zouk music. [more inside]
posted by meinvt at 9:19 PM PST - 10 comments

Earlier today, a 21 year-old white male Trump supporter attacked an El Paso Walmart with an automatic rifle, killing at least 20 and injuring over two dozen in the deadliest shooting of 2019. According to a manifesto posted on the notorious imageboard 8chan, he committed these atrocities in “response to [the] Hispanic invasion of Texas”. If this manifesto is authentic, it not only echoes the anti-immigrant "invasion" rhetoric of Donald Trump, but it also would be the third mass shooting announced in advance on 8chan in less than five months. As 8chan's /pol board continues to radicalize mass shooters, investigative journalism website bell¿ngcat examines the El Paso shooting and the gamification of terror. [more inside]
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:41 PM PST - 720 comments

It's been a hard year for new media blogging empires, which has reaped a bumper crop of case studies on how millenial-targeted, VC-funded media properties, rise, fail, and fall. In addition to the G/O Media / Spanfeller case [covered here yesterday], join the HuffPo on the shuttering of Mic and The Cut on the collapse of Babe.net, breaker of the Aziz Ansari #metoo story.
posted by workingdankoch at 6:39 PM PST - 10 comments

There is thus no shortage of potential cowboy myths in the western world. And, in fact, practically all the groups I have mentioned have generated macho and heroic semi-barbarian myths of one kind or another in their own countries and sometimes even beyond. But none of them has generated a myth with serious international popularity, let alone one that can compare, even faintly, with the fortunes of the North American cowboy. Why? [previously]
posted by Evilspork at 5:51 PM PST - 8 comments

The Birth of the Semicolon

The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks.

[more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 2:03 PM PST - 52 comments

What exactly is a 100 year flood? An explanation of the statistics behind the term, courtesy of the USGS.
posted by storybored at 11:01 AM PST - 8 comments

"Things People Say to Their Dogs" by Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist who studies dogs, in The New York Times. Dr. Horowitz discusses things she has heard people say to their dogs, and what we are doing when we talk to dogs. Examples: "Somebody has a bagel, and it’s not you. And it’s not gonna be you with that kind of behavior." and "Let's lead! Leader! YAY!"
posted by brainwane at 9:32 AM PST - 47 comments

Palaeoartist and palaeontologist Mark Witton was asked by the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs charity to write notes about the various statues of extinct animals, only four of which are dinosaurs, in London’s Crystal Palace Park. Witton fleshed these notes out in a series of four blog posts where he shares his findings and thoughts about the mid-19th century depictions by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins of ancient, long-gone animals, and the scientific understanding at the time. Part 1: Marine reptiles, Dicynondon and "Labyrinthodons". Part 2: Teleosaurus, Pterosaurs and Mosasaurus. Part 3: Megalosaurus, Hylaeosaurus and Iguanodon. Part 4: The Mammals of the Tertiary Island. [Mark Witton previously: 1, 2]
posted by Kattullus at 6:13 AM PST - 3 comments

The Sooner You Kill Me, the Happier I'll Be. An oral history of the best death in the history of movies about genetically engineered marine predators.
posted by gottabefunky at 2:12 AM PST - 33 comments

Astronomers Discover Super-Fast Star Thrown Out Of The Center Of The Milky Way - "Many stars orbit near Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way... If our friendly neighborhood supermassive black hole is indeed the culprit, the star was probably kicked away with a velocity of roughly 1,800 kilometers per second (over 4 million miles per hour) and has been slowly slowing down on its travels for about 4.8 million years. The star, which is a standard hydrogen-fusing or 'main sequence' object, is located roughly 30,000 light-years from Earth." [1,2,3] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:49 AM PST - 16 comments

Go back to twenty years ago with Summer Mix 99 - Hard Knock Life - Hit Me Baby One More Time - No Scrubs - Steal My Sunshine - Miami - Mambo No. 5 - I Want It That Way - All Star - Livin La Vida Loca (Extended: Millennium - I Try - If You Had My Love - Take My Picture - My Name Is - What's My Age Again?)) Charli XCX & Troye Sivan - 1999 [Official Video] - Remember 1999 (Previously)
posted by The Whelk at 10:23 PM PST - 41 comments

I don't really know how to explain how awesome this website is. It's Web 1.0. It's relevant. It's analog in the digital age. It's Space Jam, it's what u want. [more inside]
posted by nikaspark at 8:43 PM PST - 14 comments

"Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project – a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity."
posted by Lycaste at 7:18 PM PST - 41 comments

He’d been kept alive with breathing and feeding tubes, and until a month before his birthday party in January 2016, he’d been known only as “Sixty-Six Garage.” That was the name on his hospital bracelet, the name on the door to his room, the name on the sign above his bed, the name the state of California used to pay the nursing home for his care. It’s the name he probably would have been buried with if Ed Kirkpatrick, director of the Villa Coronado Skilled Nursing Facility, hadn’t let me into Room 20 — Garage’s room.

Joanne Faryon in the LA Times: Who is he, and is it possible he's conscious? (via)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:28 PM PST - 15 comments

Thousands of people have come together to create the most moving experiences of the year. Kind Words, a game that invites you to write about something that worries you, and other members of the community are encouraged to send you a kind response - all to a lo-fi beat. Watch a playthrough.
posted by dinty_moore at 4:54 PM PST - 8 comments

Victims, Families and America’s Thirst for True-Crime Stories "It was a Friday in June, the first day of CrimeCon, an annual true-crime festival sponsored by the TV channel Oxygen." [The Washington Post]
posted by readinghippo at 4:48 PM PST - 12 comments

ProZD (aka Sungwon Cho) makes the internet’s most geekily delightful ultra-low budget videos, from when you have a REALLY good turn in a card game, games where your choices don't actually matter, to cutscenes that keep the stupid clothes you put on your character, and the classic harem anime where everyone but the protagonist is sentient furniture. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 4:07 PM PST - 21 comments

Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: six reasons why Moby-Dick is the novel for our times [more inside]
posted by betweenthebars at 2:47 PM PST - 51 comments

Photographer and storm chaser Mike Olbinski spent two years capturing the footage shown in this absolutely stunning short film. Via kottke.org: "We often talk about the damage we are doing to nature, and as often about the catastrophes this is bringing across the globe. And well we should. But we have to also remember that even when it looks enraged, nature is also worth our admiration."
posted by westface at 1:52 PM PST - 11 comments

An uptick in the inability to reproduce recent scientific conclusions, aka the Replication Crisis, is calling into question the practice of using significance testing to make inferences. Some think we should use Bayes' Theorem instead to make inferences and quantify uncertainty.
posted by cross_impact at 11:10 AM PST - 30 comments

In the 50s and 60s, Syracuse's 15th Ward was a thriving working class black community. Then the calls for “urban renewal” came, and the 15th Ward was destroyed to make way for Interstate 81. Today, the Syracuse portion of I-80 is at the end of its useful life. To determine what comes next, the city must come to terms with what the highway destroyed. But can tearing it down fix the sins of the past? [more inside]
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:22 AM PST - 25 comments

A recent episode of the near future sci-fi anthology show Black Mirror depicted a story involving pop icon Ashley O (played by Miley Cyrus). With Trent Reznor's blessing, the NIN classic Head Like a Hole was turned into an alternate universe version of itself: the high energy electro-pop chart topper On a Roll. The original lyrics about cruelty and corruption in modern society have been replaced with affirmations of success:

I'm stoked on ambition and verve / I'm gonna get what I deserve

posted by demiurge at 9:47 AM PST - 71 comments

After Trump cites Amazon concerns, Pentagon reexamines $10 billion JEDI cloud contract process The White House has instructed newly installed Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper to reexamine the awarding of the military’s massive cloud-computing contract because of concerns that the deal would go to Amazon (Washington Post) [more inside]
posted by box at 9:33 AM PST - 51 comments

"When Jim Spanfeller and a private equity firm called Great Hill Partners took over G/O Media—formerly Gizmodo Media Group—in April, their stated goal was to make the company profitable. It was a welcome refrain for employees all too aware of how the company had languished under Univision’s doomed ownership. But as Spanfeller began to implement his vision, that hope was replaced by employee frustration and skepticism over his hiring practices and interference with the company’s journalism." Deadspin's Laura Wagner writes a blistering report ofnDeadspin's parent company leadership.
posted by Ragged Richard at 9:23 AM PST - 20 comments

For small family farmers and beginning ranchers, successful YouTube channels can pay more than their crops. Zach Johnson, who grows corn and soybeans in Minnesota, is known in YouTube circles as MN Millennial Farmer. It’s a role, he says, that’s provided him and his wife, Becky, about five times more in earnings than he can make on the family farm in the last year. (Bloomberg, July 2019) If you don't know enough about farming to vlog about it, you could always make your own phone farm (Vice, Aug. 2019), using dozens of phones to view ads constantly. Everything (AllAdvantage review, circa 2000) old ("Get paid to surf", 2000) is new again. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:38 AM PST - 7 comments

DSA's 2019 convention starts in Atlanta today. DSA member Andrew Sernatinger has written a breakdown of the convention, as well as given an interview about his piece. [more inside]
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 8:25 AM PST - 73 comments

Reviewing All 9 Entries for Chili Dogs on the Sonic the Hedgehog Wiki [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:00 AM PST - 6 comments

Historian Eleanor Janega sheds some enlightenment about bodily hygiene in the so-called Dark Ages.
posted by drlith at 6:54 AM PST - 67 comments

UC Berkeley law professor Rebecca Wexler writes in the LA Times about "a cluster of new and proposed state and federal laws" that strengthen consumer privacy protections. Unfortunately, the new wave of legislation offers broad exceptions for law enforcement requesting access to data from third-party companies in the course of an investigation--while similar access is denied to defendants trying to prove their innocence. Writes Wexler: "Just as the privacy interests of poor, minority and heavily policed communities are often ignored in the lawmaking process, so too are the interests of criminal defendants, many from those same communities." Further detail provided in a recent paper.
posted by sugar and confetti at 6:48 AM PST - 3 comments

These Chaotic Games Are a Referee's Worst Nightmare Have a look at these totally mad sports photos. I'd totally attend more sporting events if they looked like this. Someone should try it - massed synchronized swimming, 400 a side football!
posted by maxcelcat at 12:00 AM PST - 18 comments

"NEOM does not really exist yet, but from descriptions of the plans, it sounds like something a nine-year-old might dream up. There will be robot dinosaurs and robot cage fights. There will be “a genetic-modification project to make people stronger,” and cloud seeding to make it rain in the desert. It will “supplant Silicon Valley in technology, Hollywood in entertainment and the French Riviera as a place to vacation.” The beaches will have “glow-in-the-dark sand.” One prince involved with the project said: “I don’t want any roads or pavements. We are going to have flying cars in 2030!” A giant artificial moon will be raised in the sky each night. (It is unclear why the actual existing moon will not suffice.)" “NEOM” MAY BE OUR FUTURE (Current Affairs) Saudi Arabia’s crown prince turned to U.S. consultants for help imagining a massive new city-state in a barren section of his kingdom (WSJ)
posted by The Whelk at 9:35 PM PST - 53 comments

"First, parents turn over guardianship of their teenagers to a friend or relative. Then the student declares financial independence to qualify for tuition aid and scholarships." (ProPublica Illinois)
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 9:19 PM PST - 38 comments

On the recent episode of A24's podcast, directors Ari Aster (Midsommar, recently released) and Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse, coming soon) name-dropped 42 movies. We compiled every film mentioned — from Andrei Rublev to Conan the Barbarian to a whopping 18 Bergman films — into an annotated watch list for those of you that have approximately 87 hours to kill.
posted by mannequito at 9:00 PM PST - 20 comments

Many Autistic adults say childhood ABA training (Applied Behavioral Analysis) is abusive and left them traumatized. ABA was developed by Ivar Lovaas, who contributed to the creation of conversion therapy, and is derived from the same principles. The goal, as Lovass said, is to make the Autistic child look "normal". Learning to behave as most children do will theoretically help allistic (non-autistic)  children feel more comfortable with (and less likely to bully) the Autistic child. No mention is made of the fact that when an Autistic person is forced to behave 'normally', they experience ongoing, intense discomfort, and often pain.  [more inside]
posted by ruetheday at 6:57 PM PST - 56 comments

From Brown and Tsinghua University in Nature Communications: "Researchers from Tsinghua University and Brown University have discovered a simple way to give a major boost to turbulent heat exchange, a method of heat transport widely used in heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. In a paper published in Nature Communications, the researchers show that adding a readily available organic solvent to common water-based turbulent heat exchange systems can boost their capacity to move heat by 500%. " Orig paper
posted by aleph at 4:48 PM PST - 14 comments

It started as a good day. As usual, Kevin Langergraber got up at dawn to follow and observe the chimpanzees of Ngogo, in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. An anthropologist from Arizona State University, he has been studying the group for 19 summers. This year, food has been scarce, and so have the chimps. But yesterday Langergraber found a group of 30 adults playing and relaxing, with infants crawling all over them. “It was just me and 30 chimps,” he says. “I was so happy. And it just turned so quickly.” Later in the day, the chimps were on the move, traversing a familiar route between two stretches of forest. Shortly after they reentered the trees, Langergraber, who was right behind them, heard one of them scream. He thought they had stumbled onto a buffalo or an elephant, but when he ran up to them, he was shocked to see two people. Poachers. Ed Yong writes for the Atlantic about the poaching of a chimpanzee. [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 4:38 PM PST - 8 comments

The rural grandfather built the legendary seventh-generation Luban stool, which is so powerful. (SLYT)
posted by zengargoyle at 3:18 PM PST - 12 comments

A jury has found Katy Perry and her music-writing team liable for copying the underlying beat of Marcus Gray’s 2008 Christian rap song “Joyful Noise” for her 2013 hit single “Dark Horse” in a verdict handed down on Monday (July 29, 2019) in Los Angeles federal court. While musicians copying one another is not uncommon, the hook in question is so basic that many music professionals are both confused and alarmed at the implications.
posted by smokysunday at 2:49 PM PST - 69 comments

“One thousand pounds in the 4 per cents, which will not be yours till after your mother’s decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to,” says Mr. Collins to Lizzy Bennet. But 4 per cent of what? Notes on Liberty explains bonds, Consols, yields and 18th century English financial planning through Pride and Prejudice. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 2:47 PM PST - 19 comments

A video showing how a community can work together to create a sounder environment. With help from the neighboring island of Pemba, and its Community Forests International organization, Kokota is rebuilding its forest. We the people can create change. Don't wait for the big bosses to initiate. (But do apply for money when you are ready).
posted by mumimor at 1:28 PM PST - 4 comments

Richard McGary lost his home because he wasn’t able to clean his yard. hen McGary lived in Portland, Oregon, a city inspector decided he had too much debris in his yard and cited his home as a “nuisance” property under the city’s local nuisance ordinance. McGary, who was living with AIDS, asked volunteers from a local AIDS project to help. But before they could clear the yard to the city’s satisfaction, McGary was hospitalized with AIDS-related complications. His patient advocate informed the city that McGary was an individual with a disability and requested more time, but Portland refused. The city issued a warrant for violating the city’s chronic nuisance ordinance, and charged him $1,818.83 for the cost of clean-up. When McGary couldn’t pay, Portland claimed rights to his home — and forced McGary sell it to satisfy his debt to the city.
posted by xingcat at 12:40 PM PST - 29 comments

The MLB trade deadline came and went, and what started with a whimper ended with the bang of Zack Greinke's trade from the D-Backs to the Astros. While at least one author compares it unfavorably to the NBA trade deadline, there's questions on why some contenders (Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals) didn't buy. [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 12:02 PM PST - 18 comments

The title explains it. Admire and despair!
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:11 AM PST - 9 comments

This math equation is dividing the internet, and no one can agree on an answer
posted by allkindsoftime at 10:59 AM PST - 174 comments

Shock Treatment in Court Stun belts are intended to keep control in the courtroom, but some judges use them to inflict punishment. [The Marshall Project]
posted by readinghippo at 10:41 AM PST - 23 comments

In Middle Eastern and Islamic cosmology, the djinn/jinn are a class of spirits that inhabit a hidden world, al ghayb. Belief in them predates Islam and they feature in folklore and religion both in a variety of shapes and forms - A twitter thread (Threadreader version) by Ali A. Olomi, historian of the Middle East and Islam, and host of the Head on History podcast. [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 9:13 AM PST - 13 comments

A simple and provocative interactive from The New York Times that uses your income to assess whether or not you are rich within your current (USian) community: "Are You Rich?"
Net worth is probably a better way to assess your richness.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:07 AM PST - 79 comments

As the Newport Folk Festival turned 60 this year (Providence Journal), Rolling Stone recapped their favorite moments, including ♀♀♀♀: The Collaboration (Dolly Parton and The Highwomen [prev], and many more!) and Kermit the frog with Jim James (audience recording). RS recapped last year, too, when Jon Batiste’s Songs for Change Singalong closed out the festival (full show from NPR), and from 2017, when there was an unannounced tribute to Bill Withers (audience recording of Grandma's Hands Band performing Lovely Day).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:28 AM PST - 3 comments

Abbott set out to concoct some escapist entertainment for her young wardmates , a game that left behind the strictures of the hospital ward for an adventure that spoke to their wants: the desire to move freely in the pursuit of delights
posted by BekahVee at 8:07 AM PST - 6 comments

Esquire ranks all 104 Bond villains. Every single henchman, rogue Russian general, SPECTRE assassin, murderous seductress, and, of course, mad supervillain intent on destroying the world unless they get their ONE MEEEELION DOLLARS. Bonus -- just one page, not a bunch of click-to-advance ad bait. And, obviously, you will disagree with their #1 pick and probably every other pick, but that's why we love listicles, isn't it?
posted by briank at 7:26 AM PST - 37 comments

Morgan Enos (Other Houses) talks bonding with his dad over rock & roll’s flops and misfires.
posted by josher71 at 7:26 AM PST - 20 comments

Sixty-five year old Sato san wears a crisp canary yellow uniform, reflective vest and polished white helmet. His job is to guide rush hour commuters through confusing and hazardous construction areas. When Sato san realised he needed more than his megaphone to perform this duty, he took it upon himself to make some temporary signage. With a few rolls of duct tape and a craft knife, he has elevated the humble worksite sign to an art form. (previously)
posted by Etrigan at 6:47 AM PST - 22 comments

Is it time for a sleep divorce? “While there are benefits to sleeping together, one partner’s troublesome sleeping or annoying bed habits can affect the other and increase production of the stress hormone cortisol, thus causing issues that impact the couple as a whole” [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 6:02 AM PST - 89 comments

Birth of the cool: The story behind the ice cream sandwich, an icon at 120 : "Aug. 2 is National Ice Cream Sandwich Day, surely a holiday worth celebrating. And this year marks the ice cream sandwich’s 120th birthday. Or maybe it doesn’t."
posted by carolr at 4:29 AM PST - 20 comments

After the fire at Notre Dame, billions in pledges arrived from some of the wealthiest people in France. Now that the bills have come due, the actual money is coming from small donations, with equal amounts coming from the United States and France. [more inside]
posted by Hactar at 1:38 AM PST - 17 comments