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Gold Ornaments & Precious Stones Adorn Tender Portraits by Tawny Chatmon. More art by Tawny Chatmon at this link. "Often centering her portraiture on adolescents, Chatmon is visionary, imagining a time when children are living in peace, being safe, being protected, being free of stereotypes, living freely and joyously, being treated gently by the world. This dream is rooted in a long-held desire for young Black people to be recognized as inherently valuable and significant, visualized through the artist’s signature glimmering embellishments."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:11 PM PST - 7 comments

Back in the spring of 2022, professor of linguistics David Pesetsky was talking to an undergraduate class about relative clauses… Before long a student, Kanoe Evile ’23, raised her hand. “How does this account for the ‘whom of which’ construction?” Evile asked. Pesetsky, who has been teaching linguistics at MIT since 1988, had never encountered the phrase “whom of which” before. “I thought, ‘What?’” Pesetsky recalls. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:29 PM PST - 126 comments

US surgeons are killing themselves at an alarming rate. One decided to speak out “I was the top junior tennis player in the United States,” she began. “I am an associate professor of surgery at Harvard.
“But I am also human. I am a person with lifelong depression, anxiety, and now a substance use disorder.”
The room fell silent.
posted by dfm500 at 4:54 PM PST - 37 comments

Again and again, we search for the moderate streak in the extremist, tell ourselves we can find common ground with people who are explicit in their desire to do us harm.
posted by bq at 1:32 PM PST - 21 comments

Consider the impact of bad management: Having a bad manager at the helm of a team can mean employees don’t have clear goals, or they have the wrong goals, or there are no checks in place to monitor progress against those goals. It can mean people don’t hear what they’re doing well or where they need to improve. It can mean problems fester, initiative is snuffed out, strong workers aren’t retained, and poor performers stick around for years while the good ones are driven off. So given how important good management can be, why are so few managers trained well? Ask a Manager's Alison Green tackles the question for Slate.
posted by sciatrix at 1:02 PM PST - 70 comments

Chants of Sennaar [Launch Trailer] “Chants of Sennaar is a language-based puzzle game based on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In this retelling, your character makes their way through five floors of a tower, each of which is home to a different community with a different language. Using a pictorial journal, you assign every word you find to a picture, slowly piecing together each language as you go. You use the words you learn to solve other puzzles, navigate the tower, and understand what others are saying. All this is made possible through decoding language — and I can’t overstate how fun the process is.” [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 9:52 AM PST - 20 comments

Nothing Is Better Than This: The Oral History of ‘Stop Making Sense’

This stuff does make you scratch your head. Why choose this? And it’s just sort of like, “Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s just part of the entertainment factor.”

[more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 9:31 AM PST - 34 comments

One of the most famous photographers of whom you may not have heard -- but whose work you likely have seen -- Henry Diltz, is being honored with a lifetime achievement award. Diltz has shot more than 250 album covers and thousands of publicity shots in the ‘60s and ‘70s. [more inside]
posted by terrapin at 9:07 AM PST - 9 comments

Dropout is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Dropout, a streaming service born from the ashes of CollegeHumor, is dropping the CH brand altogether; its CEO, Sam Reich, talked about the site's indie rebirth on Vulture and on Polygon, the latter alongside Dropout's resident dungeon master and socialist folk hero, Brennan Lee Mulligan. Apart from the channel's Dimension 20 D&D series (sample episode here), Dropout is best known for the improv-heavy game show Game Changer, in which players imitate mac and cheese, combat unruly lie detectors, improvise full musicals, harsh the vibes, name birds, and generally cause undue amounts of chaos. (Several full episodes are available here.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:47 AM PST - 26 comments

But there was a darker side to his innovation. What it meant in practice was that rather than burrowing into a mountain, following a rich seam of ore deep into the earth, miners would now essentially demolish the entire mountain to extract its metal. This was not just mass production, but ‘mass destruction’. from The Discovery of Copper
posted by chavenet at 4:41 AM PST - 18 comments