75 yo Tom Waits performs "Tom Traubert's Blues" for Italian television, as part of the documentary Ultima Fermata, broadcast in February 2025. Here he plays it 48 years earlier. [more inside]

In reality, their operation came off like bad fan fiction, albeit with some seriously close calls for me and my family — and, as it turns out, some scary moments for random bystanders who were misidentified as being linked to me. from “Let’s hire an ISIS suicide bomber to blow him up in the street!”: Europe’s most wanted man plotted my murder — and that of my colleague [The Insider]

"Originally conceived as a double-album by guitarist Mick Jones who had tried to harness more creative control of the band, Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg was eventually skimmed down and remixed into a more commercial single-disc, their seminal 1982 album Combat Rock. Unlike other Rat Patrol bootlegs, this reconstruction follows Mick Jones’ actual track order found on his rough cut of the double-album. Also my reconstruction uses a number of sources to provide the most complete, pristine and dynamic album possible, including remastered bootleg tracks and a needledrop vinyl rip of an original pressing of Combat Rock. As always, all tracks are volume adjusted for a cohesive listening experience." (previously) [more inside]

Xyla Foxlin's "Hardest Video" A year ago Xyla Foxlin (previously featured on the Blue many times) posted a video "my IUD tried to kill me" in which she detailed mental health problems due to her IUD. A viewer reported her to the FAA who pulled her medical clearance to fly. In a new video, she details the review process, the mental health climate around flying and how she's working with the Pilot Mental Health Campaign to update FAA rules to foster treatment, not the current system of subterfuge practiced by pilots and air traffic controllers.

“This is a fast for accountability. A fast for justice. A fast for a future where corporations do not bow to pressure at the expense of marginalized communities,” reads a message on targetfast.org. “Turn your dollars into data, power, and change.” [SLap]

*approved by the Office of Patriarchal Subversion Revenge of the ‘childless cat lady’: New research shows single women are the happiest people in the world (slTOStar) [more inside]

This is a SLBlueSky thread collecting the examples spotted so far. I haven't seen any of these for myself yet, but I'll keep looking. They're pretty good.

Three short pieces of memoir by Babylon (previously), about fraught conversations that go okay, about growing up Mormon, and about crossing ideological divides. "i wondered if there was something on my face, and she just kept looking at me, and then the penny dropped and i realized she was trying to work up the nerve to break up with me." "My grandpa finds the sleepiest, sunniest, coziest field and takes a nap there, figuring if the elk have any decent taste they’ll come there at some point." "i’ve befriended enough grumpy old men that i’ve got a sort of momentum to it now - you know how it is, when you meet someone that reminds you of someone else you really like." [more inside]

Transgender Reps Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell delivered powerful speeches on the Montana House floor on Thursday. “When the sponsor closed on this bill, he said, this bill is needed… and I quote his words… ‘because transgenderism is a fetish based on crossdressing.’ And I am here to stand before the body and say that my life is not a fetish. My existence is not a fetish. I was proud within a month ago to have my son up in the gallery here. Many of you on the other side met him. When I go to walk him to school, that’s not a lascivious display. That is not a fetish. That is my family. This is what these bills are trying to come after… not obscene shows in front of children, we have the Miller test for that, we have laws for that. This is a way to target the trans community, and that is in my opinion, and in the speaker’s own words.”

French senator Claude Malhuret comments on recent developments and suggests responses.

From Orban to Trump, Part II With Trump, the other metaphor I keep using, and I forget if I said this in our first conversation, but if you think of the government as being like a fish tank. And all these different fish are swimming around and, you know, maybe it's a little chaotic looking, but sometimes they swim in patterns, but it was a fish tank. And Trump comes in and he's just very visibly sticking a blender into the fish tank, right? And he's making fish soup. And so the problem is that, first of all, everyone can see it. So there is much more pushback, there's much more alarm, including from Republicans and so on. But the second problem is: it's much harder to recover the aquarium when you've made the fish soup, you know? < [more inside]

Tasmanian devil gives woman on toilet a big surprise. A snake catcher uses tactics usually reserved for unwanted reptiles after a Tasmanian devil took shelter from pursuing dogs behind a toilet — while a woman was sitting down. No devils or humans or dogs were harmed.

L.A.'s Jazz-soul vibraphonist Roy Ayers, most known for his influential 1976 hit Everybody Loves the Sunshine, has passed away at 84. [more inside]

I have spent my adult life grateful to this man for loosening and livening up journalism, freeing us from that damned “inverted pyramid” (which frontloads all the facts in an ugly crush on the assumption that no one will read to the end) and the obligatory “nut graf,” placed early to tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em. He preferred suspense. An elegant trickster, he bent journalism toward the rhythms of literature. Now I am wondering if, in the process, he killed democracy. from Who’s Afraid of Tom Wolfe? [The Common Reader]

“There is fundamentally no way to do this that doesn’t end up treating women’s bodies as a tool.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus (previously) examines the demographic transition: the decline in childbirth alongside the growing number of elders. A long read, grounded in South Korea's experience.

Anne Carson on writing with Parkinson's: "When I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a symptom particularly mortifying to me was that my handwriting disintegrated. I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day after day, year after year. Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks just embarrassing. Or, Barthes would say, stupid. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame."

A waka, or Polynesian voyaging canoe, has been discovered in the bank of a creek on Rēkohu (Chatham Islands). It is astonishingly complete, with elaborate carvings, obsidian decorations, and even intact parts of sails and rope. [more inside]

"A contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century." [more inside]

It begins as a shuffle but soon becomes an unstoppable march. What ska had imbibed from American jazz and R&B was a musical ESP about where to put the emphasis and where to leave some space. It called out for a new way of moving—picture someone strolling down a city street who suddenly breaks into an agitated, quasi-military trot. Reggae was a slow skank, feeling the earth between your toes; ska was Saturday-night show-out and exuberance—lean, jangled, calisthenic. Like they did with Northern soul and rockabilly, British youth took this elsewhere music and made it over according to their own exacting style diktats. from An Unstoppable March [Harper’s; ungated]

ABC shuts down FiveThirtyEight and pulls the plug on its website. The last 15 or so employees of the once influential data aggregator are set to be laid off by Disney’s ABC News Group, according to a Tuesday report by the Wall Street Journal. (Archive.ph) The main URL already redirects to ABC News.

Anosmia, or loss of the sense of smell, is a frequent consequence of COVID-19. Most people recover spontaneously in weeks. However, some do not, and for them anosmia has high impact on quality of life. For the latter there is now hope in a new treatment: Platelet-rich Plasma. [more inside]

BBC: Denmark's state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century. The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company's letter service. Denmark's 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear from the start of June. Guardian: PostNord Denmark will deliver its last letter on 30 December ... The government said it would still be possible to post letters despite the changes. The Local: Sending letters internationally from Denmark will therefore probably mean using a global courier such as UPS or DHL and sending the letter as part of a small package.

Saul Steinberg, as a figure in American art, is poised to evaporate. A specificity or worked out theory of admiration for Steinberg, from the rare few who even bother to profess admiration towards the work, is neglected, because not much is said beyond occasional measured and brief praise. Where is Steinberg in contemporary illustration, art or even culture itself? A stroll through visual America today shows little appetite for Steinberg's thought through line, and his status as a public, albeit graphic, intellectual seems deeply foreign to our times. The mere notion of him: a compressed entity of an idea, a thinking artist in the metropolis, whose mental expressions were tangled, dense and then excreted with a signature perfection. [more inside]

It is March 30, 1992. Right Said Fred’s "I’m Too Sexy" has begun its descent from the pinnacle of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs sweeps the Academy Awards. And WordPerfect Corporation, producer of the industry-standard word processing software, fires its Chief Operating Officer. [more inside]

The Humber estuary is a challenging place to navigate. At high tide, its wide expanse of open water conceals a constantly-shifting network of mudflats, through which ships must follow a uniquely twisting, meandering path marked by a series of floats, to avoid running aground. The mud shifts so rapidly that new charts are published every two weeks. The crew of the H&S Wisdom apparently got it wrong, and must now spend the next month sitting on one of those mudbanks. They were assisted by Humber Rescue, one of the UK's independent local lifeboats.

Many people struggle to make tradeoffs between present wants and future wishes, resulting in the tendency to overly discount the value of future rewards. To explain such behavior, past work has pointed to future self-continuity or the perceived connection between a person’s current and future selves. Yet, most of this past work has been conducted on small-to-medium size convenience samples, and as such, little is known regarding the population-level statistics of future self-continuity or how its link to important financial health variables like saving behavior and financial well-being play out in a nationally representative sample. Here, we use a nationally representative sample of over 6,000 Americans to investigate the generalizability of future self-continuity and its connection to financial outcomes such as savings behavior and global financial well-being. from Exploring the distribution and correlates of future self-continuity in a large, nationally representative sample [Cambridge University Press]

When you’ve spent years watching how some tech bros break the rules in pursuit of personal and economic power at the expense of safety and user protections, all while wrapping themselves in the flag of “innovation,” you get pretty good at spotting the pattern.

Endangered eastern quolls released into wild in Tasmanian conservation project. An ambitious conservation effort to boost declining eastern quoll populations in Tasmania is underway, with 24 of the animals released onto a 5000 hectare property. Eastern quolls are marsupial carnivores about the size of a small domestic cat, with adult males measuring 53 to 66 cm (21 to 26 in) in total length, including the 20 to 28 cm (7.9 to 11.0 in) tail, and having an average weight of 1.1 kg (2.4 lb). Females are significantly smaller, measuring 48 to 58 cm (19 to 23 in), including a 17 to 24 cm (6.7 to 9.4 in) tail, and weighing around 0.7 kg (1.5 lb).

As they politely remind us here, ca 2017, I'm sure we remember why. As I run into things that might help us all I will try to keep them up here.

REI's worker union is asking members to vote "withhold" on all Board candidates Unionized employees of REI, a US-based coop store that sells outdoor gear, are asking members to mark “withhold” on their ballots after a Seattle activist and a top Greenpeace leader were excluded from the ballot. [more inside]

Cozy Dumpster Fire [via mefi projects]

The Timeless Appeal of Olivetti’s Industrial and Minimalist Design Style [more inside]

The Healthy Technology Act of 2025 would amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to allow AI and machine learning to qualify as practitioners eligible to prescribe drugs if authorized by the state involved and approved, cleared, or authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for other purposes. (MedScape)

Just as the so-called “socialism of fools” comes from a truncated analysis of capitalism, resulting in national socialism (i.e., fascism), the feminism of fools, if you will, arises from bad materialism, a diagnosis of the sex/gender system that is fatally foreshortened. This leads it to form a wounded attachment to ontological womanhood. The feminism of cisness, for example, has spread like a pogrom. Today, it is unsurprising to find self-described feminists at the forefront of policymaking to deny gender-affirming health care, or to make bathrooms and sports lockers cissexual at all costs, in the name of women’s rights. from Feminist Fascisms A conversation with Sophie Lewis [The Baffler; ungated]

New Australian dinosaurs and the oldest megaraptorid fossils in the world. Australia’s first carcharodontosaur fossils unearthed along Victoria’s Cretaceous coast.

The SAVE Act, if passed, would represent substantial barriers to voting for not only transgender adults but also for more than 140 million Americans who do not have a passport, as well as 21 million Americans who do not have access to their birth certificate or other documentation or the millions of Americans, including 69 million married women, who have changed their legal name [americanprogress]

Amidst a trade war with American's neighbors and partners, and a crashing economy, US President #47 will address a joint session of the US Congress starting at 9p.m. ET (watch live on YouTube)

NHK World presents A Cat's-Eye View of Japan, 42 5-minute episodes showing various places in Japan as seen by the cats who live there.

Because somebody might need this today: Rick Astley covers Chappell Roan's Pink Pony Club.

How Covid Remade America (David Wallace-Wells, NYT gift, archive.is)

What do you do with your unclosed browser tabs? I find that they take up a lot of screen space. So this week I figured out how to run pong inside mine.

George Lowe, iconic baritone voice of cult TV classic Space Ghost Coast to Coast, dead at 67 [more inside]

I stumbled across this documentary: Tom Petty: Somewhere You Feel Free - The Making of Wildflowers, and I can't recommend it highly enough. The insights you get from Tom, the band, and producer Rick Rubin are fascinating. [more inside]

The Tariff Wars have started. (slCBC) [more inside]

Could time flow in both directions rather than just moving forward? A groundbreaking study from the University of Surrey suggests that under certain quantum conditions... [spacedaily/nature]

With their uniformity and certainty, calendars feel like periodic tables of time. You can see the last days of the previous month and the first days of the following month at the beginning and end, looking a little embarrassed to be caught in a picture in which they don’t belong. But while next year’s calendar might feel full of promise (who knows what I might be up to on August 7th next year?), the next millennium’s calendar registers as eerie. I do not know what cataclysms, invasions, and extinctions will have occurred by September 20th, 3025 but I do know that it will fall on a Tuesday. from "Time" is the Most Common Noun in the English Language

The Elements of Typographic Style is a book on typography and style by Canadian typographer, poet and translator Robert Bringhurst. ... A history and guide to typography, it has been praised by Hermann Zapf, who said "I wish to see this book become the Typographers' Bible." Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones consider it "the finest book ever written about typography." ... Because of its status as a respected and frequently cited resource, typographers and designers often refer to it simply as Bringhurst.* [more inside]

Greater gliders' spectacular recovery after Blue Mountains bushfires. The endangered marsupials' population in part of the southern Blue Mountains has increased by 45 per cent since before the fires began in 2019. (Australia).

A song by Chumbawamba that isn't Tubthumping Chumbawamba is often thought of as a one hit wonder, but there's a lot more to them. They're anti-fascist, pro-union, and loved to do protest songs. This one is even more relevant now.

Its design is a chef's kiss. It can scale from love note to embracing the world. And it united countries and continents in the aftermath of war. In this short SLYT, mathematician Hannah Fry explains why she adores A4. [more inside]