Bookmarks (952)

How Three American Women Translated One of the World's Most Popular Qurans (inspired by chavenet's recent post)You can compare translations here.

Super Bunnyhop (03/28/2025), "Kriegsspiel! How Napoleon Accidentally Invented Strategy Games": "Napoleon's contribution to game history means getting into gaming's ideological history ... Strategy games are the most immediately obvious example of how games are political." Related: Play Ludus Latrunculorum online. Browse the International Kriegsspiel Society's collection of rules, videos, Tabletop Simulator modules, inclusiveness info, and Discord info. Consider other meanings of miniatures games in...

Last month was the 15-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act being signed into law. Which means that anyone born this century probably has no idea what life was like for anyone with a body before the ACA. So let me tell you!

LinkMe, April '25: Come across an interesting link recently that you'd like to share, but don't want to work it up into a full post? Share it here for our perusal, nbd. And if you'd like to post something but need some inspiration, check out the links here to see what other members have found interesting and would like to read more about! Just...

The annual 'Great Lakes Whale Migration 2025 Begins on the Old Mission Peninsula' has begun. 2023. 'Great Lakes Whale Migration Begins – 2 Whales Spotted in Old Mission Harbor' 2021. 'Humpback Spotted in East Bay, Great Lakes Whale Migration Begins'.

A Working Man left me thinking: Where would Statham single-handedly taking down a human trafficking operation fall on the list of his greatest accomplishments? Obviously, the only way to get to the bottom of this mystery is to blog through it. Join me for a thought exercise that has plagued scientists since the aughts: What is the most impressive thing Jason Statham has ever...

Livestream of Senator Cory Booker's Filibuster on the Senate Floor This was linked in the previous US politics post but I thought it was worth posting separately.

"I feel like any job, any creative enterprise, that's the thing you do after the "chore"—you know there's the thing that's paying the rent and there's the thing that just for kicks —those kinds of jobs always have a spirit to them that's ineffable. It's just a great, spirited way to work, and you're just having fun. You can sense it." John Flansburgh and...

"brands and a holiday dedicated to hoaxes are rarely a winning combo." Starting a post to collect "real or not real," well done prank websites, and possible confirmation of what's actually really happening today (sigh).Why we're no longer doing April Fool's Day. Are we too suspicious of a fake story? Tom's Guide prank roundup. USA Today prank roundup. Ad Week Weirdest Brand Stunts. Washington...

This beautiful filming of a performance of Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007 would be worth watching even with the sound off. But it also features superlative playing by Lucia Swarts of the Netherlands Bach Society.The Dutch Bach-ery continues with this performance of Invention No. 13 in A minor, BWV 784 by the 9 year old Anna Kuvshinov, who's so...

Marine Le Pen, populist leader of France's National Rally (RN, formerly the National Front or FN), was found guilty on Monday of embezzlement of EU funds and barred from standing for office pending appeal, making it unlikely that she will be able to run for president in 2027. Le Pen was sentenced to a €100,000 fine and four years in prison, with two suspended...

Following the Executive Order of 1 March, President Trump announced today that the English language is to be officially renamed "American". "America is a very popular country," the President said, "when people understand that this is our language, I think you're going to find a lot more of them are going to want to speak it. A lot."Vice-President Vance added "The USA is where...

Eric Ralls (3/30/2025) on "Space missions and human kidneys": "These important organs could face more trouble than previously assumed, including a higher risk of stones and lasting damage." Keith Siew et al. (6/11/2024), "Cosmic kidney disease": "spaceflight associated changes in urinary biochemistry favour kidney stone formation" (also, "the kidney is an exquisitely radiation sensitive organ"). Citations. Wikipedia's list of notable stone passers, e.g. Montaigne,...

Frozen penguin among millions of specimens moved to new home at CSIRO's National Collections Building. The collections include 99 per cent of Australia's native birds as well as exotic bird species, skeletons, mammals, reptiles stored in ethanol, eggs and frozen tissue. (The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is an Australian Government agency that is responsible for scientific research and its commercial and industrial...

One of the best baseball videos our friends Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein (of Secret Base) ever made is "How to Score 10 Runs in the First Inning and Lose". It explores what happens when a team gets blown out in the first inning but pulls out a commanding win via their (arguably) worst player having the game of his life.The video description from...

The bats look funny. And they definitely look weird. In fact, some players didn't even think that they were real, at least on first glance.

Anton Solomonik (LitHub, 03/21/2025), "Realistic Fiction": "What I mean is slice-of-life type writing in which it's just people's feelings and observations and no one does anything, there's no plot, no conflict ... My father was a scientist ... he liked to read police and spy novels." And in the Evergreen Review (Spring / Summer 2025), "The Most Dangerous Game": "Magic: The Gathering is a...

What are your beliefs about the nature of reality? Take this quiz to find out (It's a Substack post, so not the greatest format, but a good survey of possibilities)

The origins of many technologies have a somewhat spiritual dimension, and so it is with the Vermont-born industrialist Robert G. LeTourneau, who had the greatest impact on the development of the bulldozer. LeTourneau was an eccentric evangelical Christian who believed that he created his machines in collaboration with God. "God," he declared, "is the chairman of my board." A gifted engineer, he was responsible...

There seems to be 3,187 days between Christmas and Easter holidays this year - but the calendar says there are just 116. Is the calendar wrong? Does time seem just ... the same? Or does it seem non-linear, stretched or compressed? Have there been instances in your life where your sense of time has become warped, unreal, never-ending or accelerated? Or talk about what's...

Vulnerable bird builds ingenious nests to survive bushfires. A vulnerable population of ground-dwelling malleefowl survived bushfires that tore through one of its few remaining refuges in Victoria, but the remaining hatchlings now face a new challenge.

"Elaine May set out to use her genius and the overlapping brilliance of Cassavetes and Falk to articulate brutal, profound truths about the joy, horror, and complexities of human experience, as illuminated by the strange codes of a certain subset of insecure, violently overcompensating, crime-prone American men, and a tortured conception of friendship as a messy combination of hatred, love, and everything in between....

Fragments of a rare Merlin manuscript from c. 1300 have been discovered and digitised in a ground-breaking three-year project at Cambridge University Library. A fragile 13th century manuscript fragment, hidden in plain sight as the binding of a 16th-century archival register, has been discovered in Cambridge and revealed to contain rare medieval stories of Merlin and King Arthur.

There is folklore about the sounds of auroras, but auroras occur about 80-100km above the surface of the earth, too high for any sound to reach the ground. Finnish Aalto University Professor Unto K. Laine has determined that there are auroral sounds, but their source is only 70m above the ground. His paper: Sound producing mechanism in the temperature inversion layer and its sensitivity...

Ellmann saw Wilde's shift from female to male lovers as a 'reorientation'. I would argue that a more accurate term to describe Wilde's sexuality was that he was bisexual. Interviewed in Marjorie Garber's Vice Versa (1995), the academic Jonathan Dollimore reflected similarly: 'My feeling about Oscar Wilde is that he was certainly bisexual, and there is a sense in which I do deplore that...

"Is there another part of the bar I don't know about—a V.I.P. section?" you ask, hearing your sadly engrained millennial thirst for hierarchy and ostracism. "Oh, yes," he replies. "Your party is right this way." from The Millennial Exit [The New Yorker; ungated] by Laura Steinel

"Blues drenched and rhythmically compelling, Wes Montgomery's approach has attracted me ever since I first heard The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery in 1960. Using his right thumb rather than a pick, he generated a unique sound and almost always employed octaves in his solos. He also incorporated harmonic modifications that beautifully complemented his conception." - Noal CohenHe had the smile of a...

[Original post removed at poster's request. Topic was: https://forward.com/culture/707599/bintel-brief-advice-antisemitism-gaza-war-israel/Advice column "A Bintel Brief" responds to a Jewish student worried about antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus]Other links: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bintel_Brief https://slate.com/culture/2014/06/liana-fincks-a-bintel-brief-reviewed.html# https://www.myjewishlearning.com/2014/04/23/the-beginnings-of-a-bintel-brief/ https://www.leshp.org/blog/bintel-brief/

CocoRosie have released their 8th studio album, Little Death Wishes Comprised of sisters Sierra Rose "Rosie" and Bianca Leilani "Coco" Casady, their music is a heady mix of lo-fi avant-pop, freak folk and hip-hop with an often strident political, radical feminist messaging.Beginning with 2003's La Maison de Mon Rève, composed in a Paris apartment bathroom using traditional instruments and various improvised instruments such as...

This extraordinary little looseleaf binder — undated, though one page makes reference to 1965 — may be among the the most revealing items in the collection. It's a (seemingly but not really) random collection of quotes, thoughts, observations, and other bits of prose, mostly likely just Didion's "I might want to use this" file. (They're mostly typewritten, though one bears the handwritten addition "what...

The trailer for the Encampments - a documentary produced by Watermelon Pictures and Breakthrough News, following student organizers at elite universities as they take a historic stand against their institutions' investments in the Gaza genocide. The documentary features currently detained activist Mahmoud Khalil, who is currently facing deportation. Hip hop star Macklemore is executive producer, and he explains to Democracy Now! why he got...

"Like electric sparks": Sharks recorded making sounds underwater. Sharks were thought to be silent, but scientists have recorded a New Zealand species making a clicking noise.

God's Angry Man is a 1981 documentary film directed by Werner Herzog about Gene Scott, a U.S. pastor and Stanford PhD who served for almost fifty years as an ordained minister and religious broadcaster in Los Angeles.*

Jitsuvax gives the 11 main psychological reasons (so-called attitude roots) why people believe in misinformation about vaccination. It guides you on what to say when confronted with misconceptions. You will find examples of responses to over 60 misinformation themes. Back to the Vax is a website started by two former anti-vax moms. Their free information booklet.Former anti-vax parents on how they changed their minds...

Survey shows trans adults fear losing health care, concerned about being too open about their gender-identity. Which, considering current federal policies, is probably a rational fear.On the first day that Trump took office, he signed Executive Order 14168, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government", whose purpose was to declare that the official policy of the United...

' "It's a monster from folklore!" The voice from the forest that calls out for help, or that sings a song that's seductive and sweet? But don't you go there... Yes, if sparrows could talk, the shrike would be their Dracula, their Grendel. 'This, an essay on shrikes from Crooked Timber. Or previously, a particular shrike.

The wildness also made me sentimental. Or: in need of something, and it showed. I didn't know the drink the person in front me had at the Café Allegro. A new astringent concoction, espresso, seltzer, ice, tinctures, cream. I felt a surge of wild gratitude, to be alive in this year, after everything, to have survived to see this. I think she understood. "You...

Start here, because everyone knows about the Wii Shopping Channel, and everyone loves to shop on it every Wednesday. Nirvanna The Band The Show is a project by comedians Matt Johnson (perhaps known more widely as the co-writer and director of BlackBerry ) and Jay McCarrol. It started as a web series in 2007, and then was picked up by Viceland and expanded into...

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student and Fulbright Scholar, was taken by ICE agents Tuesday and transferred out of state to an ICE Processing Center in the town of Basile, LA. Thousands turned out last night to protest her abduction.Like Mahmoud Khalil, Ozturk was targeted for her political work. Ozturk helped author an op-ed that appeared in The Tufts Daily last March where...

You like design blogs? You like the word of God? (Allegedly.) Have I got something for you.

Spooky the OG. Spooky is originally an instrumental song performed by saxophonist Mike Sharpe (Shapiro), written by Shapiro and Harry Middlebrooks Jr, which first charted in 1967 hitting No. 57 on the US pop charts and No. 55 on the Canadian charts. Its best-known version was created by James Cobb and producer Buddy Buie for the group Classics IV when they added lyrics about...

In 17th century Mughal India a unique set of spectacles were crafted from an approximately 200 carat diamond. Named the Halqeh-e Nur, or Halo of Light, the now 25 carat lenses are flat and set in a frame that is set with multiple rose cut diamonds. Another set of spectacles, Astaneh-e ferdaws, meaning "Gate of Paradise", was made with slices of an emerald instead...

Because much of this book hinges on the idea that there is no urgent need to settle space, here we'll try to convince you that most of the pro-settlement arguments are wrong. Some of these arguments may be unfamiliar to you, but all of them have at least some powerful advocates in government, military, or business settings. Elon Musk is probably too busy wrecking...

Kylie Minogue announces "I am a typeface" in a 1997 song she made with producer Towa Tei. As this lyric suggests, the techno-pop track in question, "GBI (German Bold Italic)", is delivered from the perspective of a font. Minogue's breathy, almost robotic vocals bring the absurdist premise to life, reciting declarations of design compatibility over a minimalist reverb-drenched beat. from Whitney Mallett on When...

Live view of the eruption in Halemaʻumaʻu, from the northwest rim of the caldera, looking east [V1cam] [V2cam] Kīlauea volcano, Hawaii (east Halemaʻumaʻu crater) Episode 15 of Kīlauea eruption biggest yet with lava fountains more than 700 feet tall