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Although artifacts do need upkeep from time to time, some might look strange with a pristine exterior. Most people don’t expect a bronze cannon used at the Battle of the Alamo to be shiny, for example...
posted by jim in austin on Aug 13 at 6:44 PM - 10 comments

Wisconsin's primary election on Tuesday, August 13th was the first held under the new legislative maps that provide fairer competition where 'the party that wins the most votes will win the most seats.' While the nature of primary elections makes it difficult to assess the impact this will have on a general election, there may be clues to what Wisconsin voters are looking for come November. [more inside]
posted by brook horse on Aug 14 at 4:23 PM - 10 comments

Disney wants wrongful-death suit thrown out because widower bought an Epcot ticket and had Disney+ (CNN, BBC, NPR) Court documents show that the company is trying to get the $50,000 lawsuit tossed because the plaintiff, Jeffrey Piccolo, signed up for a one-month trial of the streaming service Disney+ in 2019, which requires trial users to arbitrate all disputes with the company. Company lawyers also claim that because Piccolo used the Walt Disney Parks’ website to buy Epcot Center tickets, Disney is shielded from a lawsuit from the estate of Piccolo’s deceased wife, Kanokporn Tangsuan, who died of a reaction to severe food allergies.
posted by box on Aug 14 at 2:28 PM - 30 comments

We Bought Everything Needed to Make $3 Million Worth of Fentanyl. All It Took Was $3600 and a Web Browser. (slReuters; interactive)
posted by Kitteh on Aug 6 at 5:01 AM - 47 comments

United Auto Workers files federal labor charges against Trump, Musk (WaPo) After Trump said, in an interview with Musk, “You walk in, you say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s okay. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’” In a statement, UAW president Shawn Fain said “When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean. Both Trump and Musk want working class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.” [more inside]
posted by box on Aug 13 at 10:48 AM - 71 comments

The promise will be kept. Two entire eras after introducing it, gorgeously retro puppet show The Creatures of Yes (previyesyes) will return this fall to finally resolve the storyline from the epic Splintered Mind saga in its first feature-length movie, whose trailer dropped less than two weeks ago. Will Tom finally... COME ON BACK? [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ on Aug 14 at 11:45 PM - 3 comments

2024's Hugo Award winners have been announced. Complete voting statistics and a report from the Hugo administrators are available as PDFs. The video of the award ceremony is currently online without a live feed, so the ceremony begins at around -01:52:00 and a short presentation by John Scalzi begins at -01:48:00. Also this weekend, Los Angeles was selected to be the site of Worldcon in 2026. Meanwhile, Glasgow 2024's programme guide is currently still online, showing some kinds of things that happen at Worldcon, while Seattle 2025 continues gathering panel suggestions.
posted by Wobbuffet on Aug 11 at 4:43 PM - 54 comments

James David Vance, a junior United States senator from Ohio elected in 2022 and author of a 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, who has previously said in reference to Donald Trump, "I'm a never Trump guy", "never liked him", "terrible candidate", "idiot if you voted for him", "might be America's Hitler", "might be a cynical a-hole", "cultural heroin", "noxious", and "reprehensible", has just been announced as Trump's running mate for 2024.
posted by orange swan on Jul 15 at 12:37 PM - 359 comments

Lawrence O'Donnell delivers a scathing rebuke of the media's failure to hold Trump accountable for his lies and non-answers given throughout his recent hour-long press conference at Mar-A-Lago. [more inside]
posted by xedrik on Aug 9 at 1:55 PM - 85 comments

The Olympic Village has free healthcare. The United States, of course, does not:

In the days following her victory, US rugby player Ariana Ramsey made appointments with the Village gynecologist, dentist and ophthalmologist. “Like, what?” she said in a post on TikTok describing her new discovery. The Village also offers cardiology, orthopedics, physiotherapy, psychology, podiatry and, of course, sports medicine—all at no cost to the athletes. Ramsey came to Paris as a rugby player, she is leaving as a universal free healthcare advocate.

posted by autopilot on Aug 9 at 10:52 AM - 81 comments

The Anime Where a Man [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker on Aug 14 at 8:42 AM - 9 comments

Early mammal could help answer one of biology’s biggest question, say experts. Krusatodon kirtlingtonensis, which lived 166 million years ago, "a piece of the puzzle" explaining mammals’ success.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on Aug 14 at 12:29 PM - 4 comments

Two short fantasy stories about journeys, meant to provide care, that go in unexpected directions. "Median" by Kelly Robson (published March 2024 in Reactor (formerly Tor.com)): a horror story in which "a professional caregiver’s commute takes an unsettling detour when car trouble forces her to pull over on the highway, where she begins receiving distressing phone calls from strangers…" (Via Jason Sanford who said it "left me completely unsettled.") And "A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places" by Marissa Lingen (published May 2024 in Beneath Ceaseless Skies): "When I had taken leave from the Archives to go on this pilgrimage, no one had expected that a pilgrimage to the god of high places would cure me. Friends expressed shock that I would even try."
posted by brainwane on Aug 13 at 11:42 AM - 10 comments

Tsung-Dao Lee (November 24, 1926 to August 4, 2024) shared his Nobel with Chen Ning Yang. Many say the experimentalist Chien-Shiung Wu who validated Lee and Yang's hypothesis should have also shared the prize. That the laws of physics don't work in a mirror image universe (parity violation) came as a big surprise.

...Nobel-prizewinning physicist Isidor Rabi, said at a press conference: “A rather complete theoretical structure has been shattered at the base and we are not sure how the pieces will be put together.”

posted by Schmucko on Aug 12 at 10:48 AM - 14 comments

Military attack on drug dealers, close the border, deport millions of people. What could possibly go wrong? Some details about what could go wrong as result of interlocking bad policy. Mexico is a major trading partner these days.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz on Aug 11 at 8:57 AM - 64 comments

Reported by The Guardian. Five supporters of the Just Stop Oil climate campaign who conspired to cause gridlock on London’s orbital motorway have been sentenced to lengthy jail terms. Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were found guilty last week of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance for coordinating direct action protests on the M25 over four days in November 2022. Hallam received a five year sentence on Thursday, while the other four were each sentenced to four years. All five had spoken on a Zoom call trying to recruit potential volunteers for the actions, which involved activists climbing motorway gantries at strategic points on the motorway, which encircles London and is a key road transport link.
posted by AlSweigart on Jul 18 at 9:02 AM - 82 comments

NINA mortgage and a decade of work turn into an actual place and business. There’s an accordion. It’s in Arkansas. It also sounds like what I would like Hallmark romcom movies to be.
posted by clew on Aug 11 at 7:45 AM - 13 comments

An ecological/epidemiological assessment of pesticide use patterns and cancer risks suggests that pesticides exposure ranks as dangerous as smoking for some cancer types (via, healthline, forbes). As a bonus, pesticides increasingly contain PFAS aka forever chemicals., and so does drinking water. [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges on Jul 29 at 1:54 PM - 23 comments

Thousands of Taylor Swift fans flooded museums in Vienna over the weekend after multiple institutions waived entry fees after three of the singer’s concerts were cancelled due to security threats.(...)The Albertina fully embraced the moment, waiving its €19.90 regular entrance fee (€15.90 for visitors under 26 years) for more than 20,000 Swifties between Thursday, August 8 and Sunday, August 11. “On a normal and regular weekend, we would have, I would say 2,000 a day,” spokesperson Nina Eisterer told ARTnews, noting that these types of visitor numbers are usually for blockbuster exhibitions like the one for Claude Monet in 2018.
posted by bq on Aug 13 at 2:33 PM - 15 comments

Rival monkey gangs terrorise Thai city, mugging and assaulting schoolkids and tourists. Thousands of long-tail macaques are following increasingly aggressive ringleaders into attacks on tourists and schoolkids, and now they're wising up to the "Anti-Monkey Unit's" tactics, leaving the town no choice but to try and round them up before they storm another police station.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on Aug 10 at 9:49 AM - 35 comments