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Marie du Deffand. "Biographies of the obscure -- history's "lesser lives" -- often have a fixed agenda: either they are bent on telling the other side of a story hitherto dominated by a famous protagonist (and hardly ever to the advantage of said protagonist), or they propose to right history itself by rehabilitating figures it has unjustly chosen to ignore." 'Oh, Shut up, Voltaire'...

Ukraine today pulled off one of the most audacious attacks of the war — a coordinated attack on four Russian air fields and a naval base by a special operation called Spiderweb. This one is right up there with the sinking of the Moskva and the truck bomb attack on the Kerch Bridge.Ukraine's special forces launched at least 116 of them from inside trucks...

Welcome to the first Pride Month LGBTQIA+ News Post. We're all beautiful on our own way.. Let's get things started with a list of pride festivals across the world!The Bad News The Special Rapporteur for Violence against Women and Girls for the United Nations, Reem Alsalem, has released an interim report claiming that being allowed to self-identify gender is "the biggest barrier to ending...

Conflict in South Sudan has devolved from the 2018 R-ARCSS, a peace agreement ostensibly unifying two warring sides (the reigning South Sudan People's Defence Forces and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army- in Opposition), to a state of disorganized regional and ethnic conflict, stoked by internal and external actors for their own benefit. Jousha Craze, interviewed on American Prestige (previously), provides a detailed breakdown of...

You're in a rush and you need to grab a bottle of wine for a special occasion. You've got $40 and no preference for red or white, but you like wines with animal labels. Which wine are you buying? from The pour-igin of species [The Pudding]

The Video Game History Foundation (previously) has unveiled a collection of over 100 hours of video from Cyan's history, including interviews and production footage, from the original Myst game (1993) all the way to Myst V: End of Ages (2005.) They also posted a highlight video.In the blog post announcing the collection, the VGHF notes that it was prompted by Philip Shane's work on...

Possible subspecies of endangered Leadbeater's possum found in New South Wales. Forest ecologist Professor David Lindenmayer says the shock discovery of critically endangered Leadbeater's possum is likely a new subspecies. (Australia)(Incidentally, this is my 1000th post on Metafilter.)

Corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard (corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard)

'The bot asked me four times a day how I was feeling': is tracking everything actually good for us? (Guardian)

Blaxell writes transness. She writes transly. And writing transly means more than writing a body. It means writing a world in which world and body are kin. This transness doesn't turn backward toward a body's past or away from the gazes of others, back into solitary orbit. When Blaxell does transness—and she's not just writing transness; she's doing transness—it turns outward. It lives. It...

Farmers already pleased with arid land rehabilitated with native seeds. Pastoralists in the far west of New South Wales are trialling new ways to manage arid landscapes by re-introducing native seeds to make the environment more rain-ready. (Australia)

AI Hallucination Cases Paris research fellow Damien Charlotin is compiling misuse of AI from legal decisions around the world. "This database tracks legal *decisions* in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings." Click the arrows...

May 31st 1985 Tornado Outbreak During the evening hours of Friday, May 31, 1985, just as people were getting ready to enjoy a late Spring weekend, one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks in United States history took place. A total of 43 tornadoes carved paths of destruction across the Northeast U.S. and Canada.These tornadoes affected eastern Ohio, western and central Pennsylvania, western New York,...

Say what you will about the uneven expansion of Medicaid, it created a natural laboratory to study its cost effectiveness: "Mortality reductions accrued not only to older age cohorts, but also to younger adults, who accounted for nearly half of life-years saved due to their longer remaining lifespans and large share of the low-income adult population. [...] Our findings suggest that lack of health...

Telling Lies was released as a downloadable track, which sold over 300,000 downloads, all the way back in 1996. A year later, the Earthling concert would be "cybercast" online, in an era when most home internet connections could barely handle streaming audio. These moves were groundbreaking, at the time, but also exactly what you might expect of a major artist trying to reach fans...

For more than two decades Hu Anyan was one of the 300 million internal migrant workers who are the lifeblood of the world's second-biggest economy. For nearly 10 years he recorded his observations on a second-hand Huawei phone, an early Chinese-made rival to the first generation of iPhones, with a clunky Android operating system and a screen resolution about one-fifth of the quality of...

Preschoolers soak up lost language like sponges. Darkinjung was considered a lost Aboriginal language, but community elders on the NSW Central Coast hope a new program for preschool students will change that. (Australia)

Dallas was one of the last big cities in America where a working family could buy a house. No longer. And it's not because of zoning policy—it's because of corporate consolidation and private equity.The biggest failure of the last administration — and arguably the primary reason that voters "threw the bums out" and put Trump in office — was the cost of housing. The...

Hi, all. Metafilter is electing a new Board to run the site and replace its Interim Board. Currently we have a three member Board, but the new Bylaws being discussed and amended here include a possible range of 3-12 members. While we're figuring exact details (like the process for holding an election being discussed here), it would be helpful to know how many MeFites...

"We Jam Econo catches a lot of what made the Minutemen great, from Boon's jagged riffs to Watt's laser-focused aesthetic vision. But unlike so many other behind-the-scenes rock-docs, it's haunted not by band conflict, but by the massive loss to music and the culture at large when Boon was killed."Has not aged a motherfucking day.

A man famous for his love of style, and idolised for his own, was in fact guilty of crimes against it. His thousand delicious turns of phrase and snaps of dialogue are real and redeeming. But they're a part of a whole for which the words "too far" don't go far enough. At risk of flirting with the talent myth, it had once seemed...

Quolls ignited couple's love and lifelong fight to save the animals. Joel and Andrea Little's love of eastern quolls brought them together more than two decades ago. They now run their own sanctuary to help protect the species. (Article also contains several cute photos of quolls.)