MetaFilter

Yummiest font ever. Olin College of Engineering students make a machine that "prints" pancakes.
comment posted at 2:53 PM on Jan-20-16

At Brandeis University, students are petitioning the school to take well regarded adjunct sociology professor Jillian Powers on as a tenure-track professor, after learning how tenuous her status is. A Slate article on the matter discusses why the student petition will most likely fail, and the incredibly broken system used to hire new tenure-track professors without any real consideration for their ability to teach.
comment posted at 12:39 PM on Jan-20-16

Christian Ott, a young astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, fell in love with one of his graduate students and then fired her because of his feelings, according to a recent university investigation. Twenty-one months of intimate online chats, obtained by BuzzFeed News, confirm that he confessed his actions to another female graduate student.
comment posted at 6:54 AM on Jan-20-16

There are benefits to exploring a new city on a bus tour—you get ferried around to all the best sites, you have an overly enthusiastic guide who will regale you with fun facts and helpful information, and, at the end, there will be a great place to buy souvenirs. The downside? The point when you realize you’re one of those people who take bus tours.
comment posted at 8:06 AM on Jan-19-16

Glenn Frey of the Eagles has passed away at 67. A founding member of the Eagles - with whom he won 6 Grammys, as well as a popular solo artist, Glenn Frey passed away today from a combination of complications from rheumatoid arthritis, acute ulcerative colitis, and pneumonia.
comment posted at 3:31 PM on Jan-18-16

The life-changing magic of not giving a fuck.
comment posted at 2:39 PM on Jan-18-16

In the 2016 elections, the goal of the Koch network of contributors is to spend $889m, more than twice what they spent in 2012.
Dark Money though prominent is not confined to the political right.
How dark money affects elections.
comment posted at 6:53 AM on Jan-17-16

The Official Donald Trump Jam (SLYT)
comment posted at 2:18 PM on Jan-14-16

The San Francisco sewer system is an amazing feat of engineering. Almost entirely gravity-run, it directs both stormwater and wastewater into a combined system of pipes that flow to wastewater treatment facilities. In the Life of Poo, you can type in an address in San Francisco and see where your toilet waste flows.

comment posted at 11:49 AM on Jan-14-16

‘‘Alice used a writing style that today you can’t really use in the social sciences.’’ He sighed and began to trail off. ‘‘In the past,’’ he said with some astonishment, ‘‘they really did write that way.’’ The book smacked, some sociologists argued, of a kind of swaggering adventurism that the discipline had long gotten over. Goffman became a proxy for old and unsettled arguments about ethnography that extended far beyond her own particular case. What is the continuing role of the qualitative in an era devoted to data? When the politics of representation have become so fraught, who gets to write about whom?
comment posted at 1:14 PM on Jan-13-16
comment posted at 5:11 PM on Jan-13-16

The ’70s counterculture and women’s movements had derailed all kinds of assumptions about American family life and sexuality, and, in their wake, a collective nightmare had emerged
comment posted at 10:22 AM on Jan-13-16

Bug Man Pete and I are out on the front porch at Hank Dietle’s Tavern, the last roadhouse in Montgomery County, watching the traffic crawl by on Rockville Pike. An exterminator by trade, he’s finished battling vermin for the day and is ready for a few cold ones. A pitcher of draft beer is on the table, and a lit Maverick cigarette is in his hand. He’s feeling good, as he usually is at Dietle’s. [He] has been coming here for almost half of his 56 years. But people like him have been coming to Dietle’s for a century. They were here when the Pike was a rural toll road. They were here when cold, cheap beers were illegal. They were here when Metro dug its tunnels underneath and when a gleaming new mall went up across the road. Now that the mall has been shuttered, they’re still here. -- Washingtonian Magazine on the Last Roadside Divebar in Suburbia.
comment posted at 6:13 AM on Jan-13-16
comment posted at 8:09 AM on Jan-13-16

You won the big Powerball, you're going to want a new house. There's no investment like real estate. How about the Playboy® Mansion?
comment posted at 12:37 PM on Jan-12-16

Over the past year, the [Boston] Globe spent time with an East Boston heroin addict as she struggled through recovery and the prospect of losing her children to the state. Nearly every key moment was witnessed by a Globe reporter or photographer. Brave, broken, loving, at a loss, this is Raquel and her story.

Warning: Does not end terribly, but does not end well.
comment posted at 7:18 AM on Jan-12-16
comment posted at 11:15 AM on Jan-12-16

Why the British Tell Better Children’s Stories by Colleen Gillard [The Atlantic] Their history informs fantastical myths and legends, while American tales tend to focus on moral realism.

If Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn were each to represent British versus American children’s literature, a curious dynamic would emerge: In a literary duel for the hearts and minds of children, one is a wizard-in-training at a boarding school in the Scottish Highlands, while the other is a barefoot boy drifting down the Mississippi, beset by con artists, slave hunters, and thieves. One defeats evil with a wand, the other takes to a raft to right a social wrong. Both orphans took over the world of English-language children’s literature, but their stories unfold in noticeably different ways.

comment posted at 11:04 AM on Jan-10-16

A secret visit with the most wanted man in the world. By Sean Penn
comment posted at 1:40 PM on Jan-10-16

"When defined in terms of social identity and affect toward copartisans and opposing partisans, the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased...Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters’ minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. We further show that party cues exert powerful effects on nonpolitical judgments and behaviors. Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, doing so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. " (PDF).
comment posted at 7:38 AM on Jan-9-16
comment posted at 10:02 AM on Jan-9-16

After more than 100 women and girls came forward with reports of sexual assault and robbery by gangs of men in the German city of Cologne on New Year's Eve, Cologne's police chief has been removed from his post.
comment posted at 5:51 AM on Jan-9-16

GOPLifer writes Why I Live In A White Neighborhood
comment posted at 11:23 AM on Jan-8-16

Jennifer Moss on Fashion Photography: With this renewed awareness, I started noticing that it can be as subtle as the pose. I, myself, told models to hunch their shoulders, lean forward, angle the head. Industry standard. But why was it industry standard?
comment posted at 5:52 AM on Jan-8-16

Space 1970 :: Journey with us back to the days when special effects were created by skillful hands and spaceships were detailed models, when robots were obligatory comedy relief, when square-jawed heroes and cloaked villains battled among the stars -- and the future was fun!
comment posted at 1:10 PM on Jan-7-16

Quakers pioneered social enterprise. They were also the first to fail: How hard was it to opt out of the slave economy in the U.S. before the Civil War? Pretty hard, as the "free produce" movement discovered: In 1829... the members of [the Female Association for Promoting the Manufacture and Use of Free Cotton] reported their contractors had spun 2,515 pounds of cotton. Compared to the approximately 78 million pounds of cotton produced across the country in the year 1800 alone, it was a drop in the bucket. The economics of slavery previously.
comment posted at 12:57 PM on Jan-7-16
comment posted at 12:58 PM on Jan-7-16

According to new US dietary guidelines, you can drink up to 5 cups of coffee per day.
comment posted at 11:20 AM on Jan-7-16

"In an age when the line between childhood and adulthood is blurrier than ever, what is it that makes people grown up?"
comment posted at 10:21 AM on Jan-7-16

Why do male authors and subjects dominate history books? Digging into bestselling history books in the United States. (SLS)
comment posted at 10:43 AM on Jan-6-16
comment posted at 11:33 AM on Jan-6-16
comment posted at 3:54 PM on Jan-6-16

"This summer will mark 35 years since the first reports of AIDS. Additionally, two decades have now passed since combination antiretroviral treatment began to transform a health crisis into a more manageable public health concern. "
comment posted at 10:15 AM on Jan-6-16

Baltimore's City Paper came out today with a list of all 344 people murdered in the Baltimore City this year with a small description of each incident. "The editorial staff at City Paper looked to the Vietnam Memorial for inspiration this week for the following reasons: Because almost every day the police department announces the latest homicide, because every week the paper runs the death tally in Murder Ink, because there were more homicides this year than in the previous 22, because the numbers keep rising, because each single homicide is the story of a life with a ripple effect on a family and neighborhood, because we wish we could do a proper obituary for each person killed but lack the editorial resources, because we wish to acknowledge each death, because we are hopeful that cumulative murders and the visual impact of sheer numbers and names will move readers to action, because we have faith in this city and its ability to do so much better than it does, because we hope people will be shocked out of their complacency, because something has to change, we have dedicated this entire issue to a list of the 344 murders in Baltimore this year. There will be no arts coverage, no columns, no photos. We are in mourning."
comment posted at 8:25 AM on Jan-6-16
comment posted at 9:45 AM on Jan-6-16

My great grandmother Rose
mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina
it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of
pecans a braid of Roses hair
comment posted at 11:31 AM on Jan-5-16

"For most of us, thread is something we think about only when it breaks — a lost shirt button, a ripped hem, a dangling end waiting to be trimmed. But for Natalie Chanin, thread is the tie that binds her to Southern textiles and to the relatives who worked at Florence’s Sweetwater Mill during the industry’s heyday." Kristi York Wooten writes about the history and resonances of Alabama Chanin, a "homegrown fashion line," for The Bitter Southerner.
comment posted at 7:31 AM on Jan-5-16

No diet, no detox: how to relearn the art of eating, by Bee Wilson, author of the weekly column, The Kitchen Thinker. "All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it’s all up for grabs. From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse. But we haven’t paid anything like enough attention to another consequence of being omnivores, which is that eating is not something we are born instinctively knowing how to do. It is something we learn."
comment posted at 5:38 AM on Jan-5-16

Over the weekend, Saudi Arabia executed 47 people of "terrorism-related offenses", including Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shi'ite cleric who supported protests against the Sunni government. In response, protestors in Tehran set the Saudi embassy on fire, and the Saudi and Bahraini governments cut diplomatic ties to Iran, ejecting Iranian diplomats and closing their embassies in Tehran. The United Arab Emirates recalled their ambassador to Iran as well.
comment posted at 8:35 AM on Jan-4-16

An armed right-wing militia has occupied a federal building and plans to stay for "years." Here is a bit of background to this issue, which has been brewing for years in rural Oregon. Social media has taken note of the response both from authorities and the general media to this action, drawing out the disparities between the response to black vs. white civil disobedience.
comment posted at 12:31 PM on Jan-3-16

Sci-Fi Author (and Metafilter's own) Charlie Stross has an interesting thought experiment: Could you get to a technological society without the use of writing? And if so, what would that look like?
comment posted at 7:13 AM on Jan-3-16

Two years ago today I last got shithoused. It was the closing night of the Lincoln Lodge, a fantastic comedy venue in Chicago in the back of a now-closed diner. They’ve since moved, but after that show, I thought I should take a breather from drinking... I’ve learned a lot in two years, so I thought I’d share that with you, in case you’d like to take a break from the booze cruise.

Andy Boyle writes about lessons learned from two years without alcohol.
comment posted at 6:24 AM on Jan-3-16

Over 50, Female and Jobless by Paticia Cohen [The New York Times] A new study found that the employment prospects for women over 50 darkened after the Great Recession, as many now earn far less and use many fewer skills than they did before.
comment posted at 1:24 PM on Jan-2-16

Wow -- New Year's Day again already? Didn't we just do this? Why does time seem to speed up as we get older? Brian Resnick at Vox provides some food for thought.
comment posted at 12:28 PM on Jan-1-16

Here’s what I’ve learned since I haven’t been drinking. Please note that I don’t say, “Since I got sober,” or even “Since I stopped drinking.” I say, “I’m not drinking right now.”
comment posted at 1:25 PM on Dec-30-15

Predictions for Journalism 2016
comment posted at 9:54 AM on Dec-29-15

In the 1960s, riots and the Black Power movement sparked a furious white backlash. In April 1965, 28% of non-Southern whites thought President Lyndon Johnson was pushing civil rights “too fast.”

By September 1966, after riots in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cleveland, and the S.N.C.C.'s turn from racial integration toward Black Power, that figure had reached 52%.

This time, however, the opposite is happening.
comment posted at 3:32 PM on Dec-29-15

High-end malls are doing just great. It’s malls in middle-class communities geared to middle-income customers that are suffering from high vacancy rates and failing tenants.
comment posted at 6:28 PM on Dec-23-15

🎶the singularity won't save you, there's not a thing that you can do, and you and me and us we're all gonna dieeeeeeeeeeeeee! 🎶(SLYT)
comment posted at 1:58 PM on Dec-23-15

Over the past 25 years, the giant meatpacking company Tyson Foods has taken a lead in pushing for changes in workers’ comp in state after state—often to the detriment of workers. ... Tyson’s story also tells a broader one about American politics: How time after time, one determined company, facing a challenge to its profits, can bend government and the law to its will. Over the past year, ProPublica and NPR have examined how many states have been quietly dismantling their workers’ comp systems.
comment posted at 2:45 PM on Dec-22-15