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Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster and editor of Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, writes about community, resistance, hope, and the power of the people at Meditations in an Emergency. [more inside]
posted by kristi on Apr 11 at 8:49 AM - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Doctors in Quebec are leaving the public system in record numbers. Advocates of public healthcare are concerned after 780 doctors left the public system in Quebec in 2023, compared to just 14 in the rest of the country. Critics say it could be a warning for the rest of Canada.
posted by asnider on Apr 11 at 8:43 AM - 0 comments - Post a Comment

When Waugh published his time machine (it took five months to write in total, after some wrangling about army leave), the reviews were thoroughly mixed. Behind the scenes the literati sniped about its ornate style and rococo syntax. Old-fashioned. Florid. Too many semicolons. (So many semicolons). When Waugh was young, he had written viciously funny books: they loved him for his dark and wicked satire. Now, he seemed to have gone gooey. from Evelyn Waugh’s Decadent Redemption
posted by chavenet on Apr 11 at 12:05 AM - 7 comments

The artist Michael Landy destroyed all his possessions in 2001. In 2019, Charlotte Higgins interviewed him about the whether he regrets it. He talked about the process in 2002. There was a MetaFilter post about it at the time.
posted by paduasoy on Apr 10 at 11:26 PM - 27 comments

Lizard rescued from drink can by sharp-eyed outback mates. Travelling along a dusty road in north-west Queensland, a strange sight caught Finn Cain's attention. A drink can was running across the road ahead.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on Apr 10 at 10:34 PM - 3 comments

Mechanical Gift Box [via mefi projects] MetaFilter's own churl ("engineer, builder, learner, lover") posted this 20-minute video documenting his 10-month project: handcrafting a beautiful mechanical gift box of wood and brass. Super cool to watch his process and try to figure out where he's going at each step. Nice closeups of his painstaking detail work, plus ASMR goodness. Or just skip to the 19:00 mark to see the heartwarming reaction of the recipient. Congratulations, churl and Robin! [more inside]
posted by mpark on Apr 10 at 4:50 PM - 14 comments

The Dali Museum has realized the mustachio’d maestro’s unproduced 1937 screenplay using Google’s Veo 2 generative video model. Here is a preview.
posted by Lemkin on Apr 10 at 1:47 PM - 38 comments

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the release of A Goofy Movie, Disney has released a documentary on the production of the film, along with several fun shorts celebrating the film. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum on Apr 10 at 12:27 PM - 24 comments

2,863 Prescription Pills and Candy Cycle Through a Satirical Animated Short [Colossal]
posted by chavenet on Apr 10 at 11:05 AM - 6 comments

Via TimeOut, the 100 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time. Top 10 are inside. [more inside]
posted by cozenedindigo on Apr 10 at 8:35 AM - 158 comments

In a far-flung country the CBC is often the main source of basic, daily news in rural and remote communities. (slTheTybee) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh on Apr 10 at 7:28 AM - 47 comments

Viet Thanh Nguyen's newest work is an essay collection of his Norton lectures meditating on the role of the other and literary writing, and is also a call for radical, expansive, political solidarity. [more inside]
posted by toastyk on Apr 10 at 7:24 AM - 2 comments

A happy tech consumer report, for a change. While "better DRM" might not top everyone's list of "how tech has gotten better," this is a fun read, with worthwhile comments. And the retro pic made me smile. [more inside]
posted by rabia.elizabeth on Apr 10 at 2:21 AM - 22 comments

[CW: adult humour] Joe Lycett is a Birmingham comedian, social media user, prankster, poet and frequenter of TV shows. One of his identities is/was Rhubarb Bikini. Other identities led to problems when trying to establish a new gay village in Birmingham to raise the value of his house. Also, on local accents. In Joe's forthcoming TV show, he travels around the USA visiting various places named Birmingham.
posted by Wordshore on Apr 10 at 2:01 AM - 9 comments

Since she didn’t actually live in a singles complex, the novel could be described as a phony fiction about a phony woman duped by a phony culture selling what Lasner calls “the promise of sex, love, and companionship.” Needless to say, such phoniness, and such phony promises, are as active today as they were fifty years ago—even more so in our internet culture—which is one reason why Maiden is no period piece. It is less a realistic novel than a daringly innovative postmodern invention, written by a woman when experimental fiction was mostly a boy’s club. from Rescuing Cynthia Buchanan’s Maiden by Steven Moore
posted by chavenet on Apr 10 at 12:01 AM - 2 comments

Boa constrictor on the loose in Sydney's south, locals on alert. The large snake was spotted slithering down a footpath onto sand near a Sylvania bridge in Sydney's south. Red-tailed boa constrictors are not native to Australia and are typically found in parts of Central and South America. It is illegal to own or keep boa constrictors as pets in Australia, as they are considered a prohibited invasive animal under the Biosecurity Act. One of the primary concerns with the boa constrictor is the chance of it carrying viruses such as inclusion body disease, which are fatal for Australian snakes.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on Apr 9 at 8:24 PM - 5 comments

"When it was hinted that Rex, a noted child prodigy, had read the Bible by the age of two or the Iliad in the original Greek before he was born, Ruth would point out that she’d read everything Rex had, only she had read it first. “I don’t want to be remembered as Rex Stout’s sister,” she said. “I want him to be remembered as Ruth Stout’s brother." She’s gotten her wish."
How an American Radical Reinvented Back-Yard Gardening' (New Yorker) [ ungated]
posted by clavdivs on Apr 9 at 6:45 PM - 13 comments

Sarah Vaughan, reissued in 1991 as Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown... was Vaughan's own favorite among her works through 1980. ... The Penguin Guide to Jazz selected this album as part of its suggested "Core Collection," stating "it is very difficult to find any flaw in what should be recognized as one of the great jazz vocal records," and awarded it "crown" status.*
posted by Lemkin on Apr 9 at 5:07 PM - 7 comments

'It was a translation, into literature, of a painful and half-articulated life experience of my own: specifically, the dawning realization, in my mid-thirties, that it isn’t actually O.K. to be an unattached woman who cares too much about work. It makes other people anxious. That’s the point in the book when I swore undying loyalty to Sayaka Murata, whoever she was. Also: who was she? The publicity copy called the novel “the English-language debut of an exciting young voice,” but surely this hadn’t been a first book?' Sayaka Murata's Alien Eye, by Elif Batuman in the New Yorker. [more inside]
posted by mittens on Apr 9 at 2:31 PM - 10 comments

Penguin Press announced that they will be publishing a new novel by the famously reclusive American master this fall. The novel, his first since 2013’s Bleeding Edge, is titled Shadow Ticket, and clocks in at a supremely reasonable 384 pages. from Thomas Pynchon is publishing a new novel this fall [LitHub]
posted by chavenet on Apr 9 at 12:32 PM - 36 comments