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Police Are Killing Fewer People In Big Cities, But More In Suburban And Rural America [more inside]
posted by queen anne's remorse at 8:12 PM PST - 13 comments

A treasure chest hidden in the Rocky Mountains for a decade has finally been found. (CNN, June 7, 2020) [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 7:19 PM PST - 26 comments

Stranger Fruit was created in response to the senseless murders of black men across the nation by police violence.
posted by ColdChef at 6:25 PM PST - 7 comments

Canadian Julie Nolke makes YouTube sketch comedy. One of her sketches is Explaining the Pandemic to My Past Self - in which Julie from April 2020 went back in time to explain the pandemic to Julie in January 2020. In the latest update on her time-travelling self, she posted Explaining the Pandemic to My Past Self Part 2, in which Julie from June 2020 goes back in time to talk to Julie from April. It's a tricky balancing act - comedy and tragedy - and I think she nails it. Like many of her commenters, I hope there's no need for a third installment.
posted by Mogur at 4:35 PM PST - 28 comments

Inspector Gadget for 8 cellos
Imperial March (Darth Vader theme) for 8 cellos
Knight Rider for 8 cellos
Thudercats for 8 cellos
by Samara Ginsberg
posted by fings at 3:39 PM PST - 7 comments

Milbern, a Korean-American who identified as queer, was a well-known advocate and organizer for disability justice and in particular for insisting on the importance of decentering whiteness and heterocisnormativity within the movement. In her last few months, she worked on organizing mutual aid and support for the homeless in the face of the coronavirus, as well as serving as impact producer for the recent Netflix documentary Crip Camp. "Oftentimes, disabled people have the solutions that society needs,” Ms. Milbern told the San Francisco public radio station KQED. Stacey Milbern, a Warrior for Disability Justice, Dies at 33 [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 11:43 AM PST - 26 comments

"We have become so accustomed to looking at life through a racial lens that we imagine that all societies and all ages have done so, too. That is not so. It was only with the emergence of modernity that both the scientific concepts and the political language underlying the concept of race came to be developed." Kenan Malik (previously) talks about the origins of white identity, from the counter-Enlightenment to the alt-right. [more inside]
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth at 11:40 AM PST - 4 comments

Pero's Bridge is a pedestrian footbridge that spans Bristol's floating harbour, and was named in honour of Pero Jones, who came was forced to live in Bristol as the slave of John Pinney. On June 7, 2020 at 4:03pm BST, a statue of Edward Colston, a Bristolian slave trader commemorated by many of the city's institutions was dropped into the harbour off Bordeaux Quay at the foot of Pero's Bridge, 80 minutes after having been toppled from a podium outside The Hippodrome theatre.
posted by ambrosen at 10:00 AM PST - 92 comments

Pierre Imans was a French mannequin manufacturer in the 1920´s.
Les Cires de Pierre Imans were disturbingly lifelike and gender-bending.
Here is a further selection.
How Mannequins mirror society. Silent Partners - a short video.
posted by adamvasco at 8:57 AM PST - 9 comments

The human mind has long grappled with the elusive nature of time: what it is, how to record it, how it regulates life, and whether it exists as a fundamental building block of the universe. This timeline traces our evolving understanding of time through a history of observations in culture, physics, timekeeping, and biology. [SL Quanta Magazine]
posted by ellieBOA at 7:54 AM PST - 42 comments

The big video games of summer 2020 [Polygon] “The summer of 2020 is shaping up to be one of the most unusual seasons for video games. It’s an atypically busy summer, in part thanks to a series of delays that have pushed AAA video games like The Last of Us Part 2 and Ghost of Tsushima to the summer months. Summer 2020 is also when video game fans will get to experience blockbuster movie properties as games: There are no major Marvel Studios movies this summer, but there is a pair of major Marvel games, one starring Iron Man and the other the full team of Avengers. And in the absences of the massively delayed Fast & Furious 9, we have an original Fast & Furious video game from the team behind Project CARS. It’s a summer full of big adventures, including a new Paper Mario game and the highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077. (Nintendo Switch owners who don’t dig Paper Mario have plenty of ports to play to this summer: BioShock, Borderlands, and XCOM collections just dropped, as did the massive RPG Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition.) And much more.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:48 AM PST - 34 comments

Majorana: Genius and Mystery
In the early twentieth century, in the years preceding World War II, the young physicist Ettore Majorana made several profound discoveries, including a relativistic wave equation that rivaled that of Paul Dirac and predicted a world of Majorana particles - and now it is believed that Majorana predicted the neutrino and much of its oddness. The impact of and controversy around his work haunts Physics to this day. Enrico Fermi considered him one of the most brilliant physicists of the age, a new Galileo or Newton.
But, in 1938, Majorana suddenly cleared out his bank account, boarded a ship and was never seen again. What happened to this young genius? Where did he go? It is an enduring mystery that has fascinated generations of journalists and writers and one which may have now been solved… [more inside]
posted by vacapinta at 2:48 AM PST - 9 comments