~metafilter | Bookmarks (954)

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...