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Which firms profit most from America's health-care system - "Surprisingly, the worst offenders are not pharmaceutical firms but an army of corporate health-care middlemen." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:11 PM PST - 29 comments

Tom Lehrer is still not dead, but he doesn't mind if you think he is*. He's a rare bird, one who falls into a tiny category of celebrities who packed it in at the peak of their careers; as he points out, “There’s me, Garbo, Salinger, and Deanna Durbin.” With around 70 recorded songs to his name** (though he only recognizes or claims 37), the prodigy who entered Harvard at 15 released two studio albums and three live albums between 1953 and 1965, and after 109 concerts, he called it quits. Since then, he's been pretty quite and generally elusive (previously), taking just enough time to grant 2 Chainz permission to sample his work, while keeping it cheeky in his reply. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:12 PM PST - 47 comments

My name is Pup [more inside]
posted by QuakerMel at 9:18 PM PST - 18 comments

When 20-year-old Jade Vendivel went [to see The Quiet Place] with her roommate on Monday, she told The Washington Post she thought they were just going to be watching “another scary movie.” Vendivel admitted she was wrong, describing a theater that went “dead silent” after the previews ended. “It got to the point where I could only put a piece of popcorn in my mouth every 10 minutes whenever the sound would get high enough,” said Vendivel, who lives in Los Angeles. “Even then, I would have to hold the popcorn in my mouth until it was soft enough to chew without making any noise.” (alternate link)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:18 PM PST - 42 comments

Morning Dew is a post-nuclear protest song, written in 1961 by Canadian Bonnie Dobson who was living in LA at the time (it was the first song she wrote). "I was at a girlfriend's house discussing nuclear destruction; everyone was very gloomy long before the Cuban Missile Crisis. We believed atomic annihilation was imminent." Dobson has stated that the initial inspiration for Morning Dew was the film On the Beach which is focused on the survivors of virtual global annihilation by nuclear holocaust. There has been some dispute over the song's authorship; the power of the song is evidenced by the vast number of covers over the years. [more inside]
posted by parki at 7:47 PM PST - 27 comments

The dangerous currents were all underwater, but the surface was smooth. We were successful roommates and occasional lovers, but never precisely friends. In a curious way what we shared was neither passion nor affection but a certain aesthetic sensibility. I liked to cook elaborate dinners, and he liked to arrange flowers. We were popular hosts. He was supportive and kind after Nate died—for that, I have nothing but gratitude—but after the first terrible weeks when my heart broke and broke, after I fixed my face for going out in public again, after I went back to work, our home life returned to its old rhythms, and I felt, more than anything else, alone. A dog, at least, would liven things up. [more inside]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 7:16 PM PST - 6 comments

How "Blue Velvet" is a better expression of faith and grace than most Christian movies.
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:29 PM PST - 10 comments

“It used to be that everybody wanted out,” Watkins says. “But the city has changed a lot in a 30-year time period, to where I don’t hear that now from people. I wanted this team because I wanted my daughters, who I’m raising here, to have something to be proud of.” He looks around the restaurant. It’s filled with businessmen and women from the surrounding office park, a normal set of buildings that you could easily mistake for Scottsdale or Houston if it weren’t for the huge pyramid, ferris wheel, and fake Eiffel Tower looming in the distance as you get onto the highway. “T-Mobile is this little part of the Strip that’s ours, that’s for locals,” Watkins says. “Every other part of the Strip is for them. It’s made for them and for tourism. That part is made for us.” The Golden Knights are for Las Vegas, and Las Vegas only
posted by everybody had matching towels at 2:11 PM PST - 55 comments

Gov. Scott (R) signed three bills on the steps of the capitol in an outdoor ceremony attended by supporters and opponents of the bills. The governor had been opposed to gun control bills in the state until the arrest in Fair Haven two months ago when a massacre was averted. He spoke passionately about how important these bills were for the safety of the citizens of the state. [more inside]
posted by MtDewd at 1:24 PM PST - 39 comments

Astral Weeks is widely regarded as one of the best albums in the rock ’n’ roll canon. Martin Scorsese claims the first 15 minutes of Taxi Driver are based on it. Philip Seymour Hoffman quoted it in his Oscar acceptance speech. Elvis Costello called it “the most adventurous record made in the rock medium.” Legendary music critic Lester Bangs declared it the most significant record in his life, a “mystical document.” It is also an album that was planned, shaped, and rehearsed here, in and around Boston and Cambridge. This fact has been a sort of secret kept in plain view. [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 10:50 AM PST - 37 comments

How Los Angeles Banned Some of its Most Popular Buildings [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:36 AM PST - 31 comments

maybe this meme will die overnight and we can get back to tweeting about our chickens and crop rotations "Welcome all other museum social media accounts, welcome to our #masterclass on using a thicc boi to change your public image in a freak event which will be difficult to replicate but let's try anyway and oversaturate the meme market and make the public despair of us" The Museum of English Rural Life finds Twitter fame in the form of very round sheep.
posted by PussKillian at 10:34 AM PST - 19 comments

In the course of renovating the old Dayton's department store in downtown Minneapolis, workers have been uncovering many long lost objects in the building's crannies. Last week, however, they found something highly atypical in the building's air ducts...the remains of a monkey. [more inside]
posted by Esteemed Offendi at 10:14 AM PST - 43 comments

At the Denver Post, successive waves of layoffs have reduced a once-great news team from 250 to fewer than 100, with another 30 in the works. The paper is owned by Digital First Media, which is controlled by a secretive hedge fund called Alden Global Capital. On Sunday, the paper's editorial team launched an insurrection by publishing an editorial titled "As vultures circle, The Denver Post must be saved." Not only that, but the editorial, in full-page format, led off a 6-page section including 9 more anti-Alden opinion pieces. [more inside]
posted by beagle at 9:52 AM PST - 40 comments

Virtual robots that teach themselves kung fu could revolutionize video games [MIT Technology Review] “In the not-so-distant future, characters might practice kung-fu kicks in a digital dojo before bringing their moves into the latest video game. AI researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created virtual characters capable of imitating the way a person performs martial arts, parkour, and acrobatics, practicing moves relentlessly until they get them just right. The work could transform the way video games and movies are made. Instead of planning a character’s actions in excruciating detail, animators might feed real footage into a program and have their characters master them through practice. Such a character could be dropped into a scene and left to perform the actions.” [Example-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning of Physics-Based Character Skills][YouTube]
posted by Fizz at 9:36 AM PST - 9 comments

I have nothing against gays, but do you have to do it in front of my kids? [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 9:07 AM PST - 37 comments

Mitzi Shore, owner and founder of the prestigious Comedy Store in Los Angeles, standup career broker extraordinaire, and mother of Pauly Shore, passed away this morning aged 87.
posted by infinitewindow at 8:40 AM PST - 15 comments

Scuttlebutt is a a decent(ralised) secure gossip platform whose documentation is written not just as a how-to manual or an API reference but as a philosophical/political examination about what social media is good for and how the commons of that platform might be affected by the way the technology is designed. [more inside]
posted by eustacescrubb at 8:22 AM PST - 27 comments

As inequality soars to record highs at home and abroad, people increasingly demand solutions. The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein asked 12 people thier ideas for addressing the inequality crisis:

I. Massive expansion of local housing stock (Will Wilkinson, Niskanen Center); II. Universal access to child care, funded by a tax on capital (Heather Boushey, Washington Center for Equitable Growth); III. Ship the 1 percent to Venezuela (David Azerrad, Heritage Foundation); IV. A big boost to union rights, universal social wealth fund (Matt Bruenig, People's Policy Project); V. Create a trust for every American baby (Darrick Hamilton, the New School); VI. Pick up the antitrust stick and wield it (Marshall Steinbaum, Roosevelt Institute); VII. Dramatically expand Social Security (Valerie Wilson, Economic Policy Institute); VIII. Give every American a federal savings account (Ernie Tedeschi, former Treasury economist); IX. Rein in Wall Street, crack down on white-collar crime (Stephanie Kelton, Stony Brook University); X. A national infrastructure program, funded by the 1 percent (Robert Frank, Cornell University); XI. Get government out of the way, repeal rules and regulations (Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform); XII. A federal tax credit for first-time home buyers (Signe-Mary McKernan, Urban Institute).
posted by The Whelk at 8:13 AM PST - 47 comments

Shohei Ohtani has been tearing it up as both a pitcher and a hitter for the L.A. Angels this season, inviting comparisons to the most famous two-way player in baseball, Babe Ruth. But as Jay Jaffe notes, two-way players have a long history in the sport. This is especially true if you include the Negro Leagues, where some of the greatest players of all time plied their trade. Mike Duncan (previously) discusses some of the great two-way players from that era.
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:22 AM PST - 6 comments

Have you ever thought to yourself that hey, I really like the queer afrofuturist musical stylings of Janelle Monáe, but I wish it could be just a little bit more queer? Also, what's up with ehr and Tessa Thompson?

Well.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:36 AM PST - 40 comments

The beginning of life and the beginning of death have such similarities. In Buddhism, we say the entering and leaving of a life is with great pain and with disruptions in the brain. In the beginning, we leave behind all memories of the past, in the end, we revisit the past before we move onward. This story is not a Buddhist one, but it reminds me of a Buddhist description in the science of what reflex and reaction in babies and those close to the end of life does suggest the entry and exit of life to be similar in brain.
posted by Yellow at 5:33 AM PST - 8 comments

Tour of the Moon in 4K (slyt)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:15 AM PST - 7 comments

What's the intersection between (1) sports fan (2) bird lover and (3) graphic designer? It's Michael Taylor's ‘Other Birds as the Orioles Logo’. Originally an April Fools joke, the Twitter account has gotten thousands of Followers and Likes for the Flamingo, Atlantic Puffin, Pteranodon and Egg. Baltimore media took note, as did SBNation in an interview where the artist considered another MLB mascot to do variations on... the San Diego Padres 'Swinging Friar'.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:16 AM PST - 16 comments