May 9
so i guess we're arresting mayors of major cities now
mayor baraka of newark, new jersey, arrested at ice detention center he has been protesting. [more inside]
I am always amused, surprised and happy that punk rock is still alive
Being around the early punk scene was a lot of fun, but putting out a magazine called PUNK became a big challenge. None of the New York bands wanted to be a “punk rock” band. They had learned lessons from all the “folk rock,” “acid rock,” and other labelled bands from years before. Bands like the Ramones, Heartbreakers, and The Dictators wanted to be “rock ‘n’ roll” bands, or even mainstream Heavy Metal acts. No one thought punk rock was going to become a big thing. from Comical Funnies: An Interview with John Holstrom [3:AM]
Corgi racing
Last year’s annual corgi race at Canterbury Park saw a photo finish.
coconut definitive
Malaya's timeless design "It was its colour—actually, the lack of it—that first caught my attention. A dull brownish purple, the dullest colour I could imagine, on a small rectangle of paper. It sat quietly amidst a riot of bright reds, greens and blues in a large book titled "Stamp Album"." [via]
Renewable energy is reviving abandoned mines
Abandoned outback mines sit lifeless, but renewable energy is reviving them. Here's how. They can be an eyesore, but end-of-life mines in the outback prove to be an attractive prospect in an unlikely relationship. So how are renewable energy companies repurposing mine shafts to help decarbonise the region?
"Burning like a silver flame"
Some time in the next 24 hours a fifty-year old Venus probe will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. The lander is about one-half tonne in mass, aerodynamically designed to withstand the temperatures and pressures of Venus' atmosphere, so it's likely survive (at least in part) all the way to the ground. [more inside]
📚 Canadian small presses #9 (The Day We Hit the Coast edition) 📚
Under the fold, West Coast small presses Douglas & McIntyre, Greystone Books, and Nightwood Editions. [more inside]
The People v. Donald Trump
Can the President Refuse To Spend Money Authorized by Congress? - "[Russ] Vought is a self-described radical with roots in the Tea Party movement who views budget cutting as a key part of the culture war. He has also told Congress, on the record, that both he and Trump view the Impoundment Control Act as an unconstitutional limitation on executive power."[1] [more inside]
in your warm breath a flower grows
"Rising temperatures will drive the global spread of a killer fungus that infects millions of people a year, according to new research on how climate change is stoking severe disease threats. The Aspergillus family could expand its reach to more northerly swaths of Europe, Asia and the Americas, underscoring the stealthy menace of moulds already estimated to be a factor in 5 per cent of all worldwide deaths." -- Killer fungi to spread as climate heats up (FT; archive) [more inside]
Most magazines are stuck in an exhausting dance
I love a good bit of hyperbole, but I prefer data. And the data we see at Chill Subs, our platform that tracks thousands of literary magazines and submission calls, paints a pretty clear picture: submission fees aren’t the exception anymore, they’re the rule at the top. Across all the literary magazines we track, about 13% charge fees. Zoom in on Brecht De Poortere’s top 1000, and that number jumps to 24%. Narrow it further to just the top 100 most popular magazines, and it spikes to 56%. That’s not a slippery slope. It’s a cliff. The higher the prestige, the more likely it is that writers are paying just to be considered. from The Rise of the Submission Industrial Complex [LitHub]
May 8
A Hollow Narrative
Globalization did not hollow out the American middle class. "...the master narrative of protectionism is simply much more myth than fact. Yes, Chinese import competition hurt America a bit in the 2000s. But overall, globalization and trade deficits are not the main reason that manufacturing’s role in the U.S. economy has shrunk. Nor has globalization hollowed out the middle class — because in fact, the middle class has not been hollowed out."
From Port Sudan to the ICJ Civilians are Caught in a Nightmare
Sudan’s civil war has intensified as the RSF launched drone strikes on Port Sudan, targeting military and civilian infrastructure. The attacks disrupted humanitarian operations and prompted the UN to suspend aid flights. In response, Sudan severed diplomatic ties with the UAE, accusing it of supplying weapons to the RSF—an allegation the UAE denies. Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice dismissed Sudan’s genocide case against the UAE, citing a lack of jurisdiction. [more inside]
You can't say that! ... Oh man, the league is ready for this
Carl Nassib opens up on his football journey & coming out as NFL's first gay player [The Pivot] [more inside]
Pope chimney live cam
Because of course there is. And yes, you can bet on it if you want to, because of course you can. [more inside]
Kenji López-Alt‘s All-Day Red Sauce
MeFi favorite J. Kenji López-Alt: “This is the kind of sauce that restaurants in Little Italy rested their reputations on—back when Little Italy restaurants had actual reputations to maintain. We're talking all-day sauce here. The kind of sauce that starts with the simplest ingredients—some canned tomatoes, a few aromatics, some olive oil, and maybe some basil—and alchemically transforms them into something so good that families can be built around it.”
Remote Wongalara sanctuary using fire to protect native wildlife
Remote Wongalara sanctuary using fire to protect native wildlife. In the Northern Territory outback, Wongalara sanctuary is successfully reducing wildfires and lowering pest numbers using strategic burns. (Australia)
📚 Canadian small press hat-trick #8 (Bluenose edition) 📚
Under the fold, Nova Scotian small presses Conundrum Press, Nimbus Publishing, and Pottersfield Press. [more inside]
Camarada!
The Nakba, Cont'd
The west's shameful silence on Gaza [ungated] - "Trump announced an outlandish plan for Gaza to be emptied of Palestinians and taken over by the US... Senior Israeli officials have since said they are implementing Trump's plan to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza." (previously) [more inside]
You can never read a Pynchon novel too many times
His often uncannily prescient novels are known for their dense interwoven strands of plot, conspiracy and character, often peppered with musical numbers. Blinkered knuckleheads have unfairly branded him “mysterious” and “reclusive” because he opted out of the celebrity machine in order to let the work stand on its own. Some consider him America’s Greatest Living Writer, while others consider him The Greatest Writer America Has Ever Produced. He’s our Dostoevsky, our Joyce, our Homer, but, y’know, funnier. from (Don’t Fear) Thomas Pynchon by Jim Knipfel [more inside]
May 7
Turning down streetlights at night shown to reduce light pollution
Turning down streetlights at night shown to reduce light pollution and carbon emissions.
An adaptive lighting project in Canberra, which reduced the brightness of streetlights by up to half, showed a 25 per cent reduction in light pollution. The project used around 30,000 smart streetlights in Canberra during off-peak times, and also found a reduction in carbon emissions.
White Smoke: Can you become Pope without losing your soul?
US TV’s first lead cartoon hijabi
I created the hijabi mom character in #1 Happy Family USA. How she wears it is part of her personality – so I knew I had to get it right By Mona Chalabi
Grab your hiking pack & get your nerd on; we’ve got a lot to talk about
Stories are cultural artifacts, whether it’s epics on clay tablets or big-budget films. Those artifacts can tell us a lot about the time and culture that made them if we take a few minutes to shake them and see what falls out. To that end, an independent scholar goes rogue from academic respectability, wanders out into the wild, and talks to the trees and rocks about science fiction and its place in historical study.
[more inside]
What’s actually happening is uncanny
The work is intended to distill the content of the most popular YouTuber in the world down to one of its core motifs: the promise of the next number being even bigger: Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money (Abridged version) There is also an unabridged version. by morry kolman
Dorian Film Awards
A few months ago, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics announced its Dorian Film Awards for films released in 2024. The Substance (discussion on FanFare) won several Dorians; I Saw the TV Glow (FanFare) won two, Will & Harper (FanFare) won two, and Challengers (FanFare) also won two. "Unsung LGBTQ+ Film of the Year" went to The People's Joker, described in GALECA's press release as a "trans-empowering Batman spoof".
If you don't like the status quo...
The New Brunswick mystery neurological syndrome solved?
An independent assessment determined the condition is attributable to well known conditions. In 2019, NB Public Health monitored 40 patients with symptoms similiar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare and fatal brain disease. It did not appear to be C-J, but of an unknown origin. It seemed to centre on Acadian Peninsula in northeast New Brunswick and the Monction region in the southeast. [more inside]
Footprints uncovered on school foyer boulder date back 200 million years
Footprints uncovered on school foyer boulder date back 200 million years.
Scientists say the discovery of 66 footprints on a rock at a Queensland high school are a huge breakthrough in understanding early Jurassic dinosaurs.
”Steering is a tiller, pointed directly at my face.”
Aging Wheels is the YouTube channel of a funny guy who likes weird cars—Reliant Robin, Trabant, you name it. Recently he bought two models of Spira, a car so light and economical that the door comes open at highway speeds. (YT 43:19, but it is immediately funny) [more inside]
Fred Dibnah, steeplejack
Let's go back to Bolton, Lancashire, 1979. Everyone speaks with a fantastic Northern accent and uses words like "mither" (to annoy). Nobody wears safety equipment, or even knows what it is. Steeplejack Fred Dibnah, soon to become a national celebrity, is featured in a BBC documentary, dangling precariously from giant chimneys while nonchalantly smoking, and scoffing cheese sandwiches with soot-blackened hands. [more inside]
Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
📚 An interlude for some American small presses 📚
The National Endowment for the Arts is slated for the chopping block in Trump's budget. It has just cut off funding (paywalled, sorry) to, amongst others affected, many of the US's best small presses, including (but not limited to) Arte Publico, BOA Editions, Four Way Books, Hub City Writers Project, Milkweed Editions, Nightboat Books, Red Hen Press, Transit Books, feminist presses Alice James Books and Aunt Lute Books, and presses dedicated to translations, the Center for the Art of Translation, Deep Vellum, Open Letter Books, and Three Percent. [more inside]
So I ended up there...
The architect of the debauchery
To a visitor sitting with him in this bucolic setting that doubles as his backyard, the world he describes can be disorienting. This affable guy, who does odd jobs to supplement his Social Security checks and lives quietly on the fringe of society, did what? from The King of X [Texas Monthly; ungated]
May 6
you can be confused and you will still laugh and cry and live and die
T'shuva. A translator for the Angels. Fake artifacts. Clowning. The four winners of the 2024 Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award), and the Long List of five additional works, are speculative fiction stories that expand and explore our understanding of gender. You can read two of the stories - “The Flame in You” by L. Nabang, and “Scarlett” by Everdeen Mason - online. The Otherwise Award previously. [more inside]
Endangered little tern has experienced one of its best breeding seasons
Incredible comeback for endangered shorebirds. The endangered little tern has experienced one of its best breeding seasons in decades, with the highest-ever number of fledglings recorded by scientists. (Australia)
The devious Republican plan to cut NIH’s budget
The NIH budget is on a fast track to disaster. As someone working at NIH, I lay out the insider view of what Republicans seem to be doing, what could play out in Congress, how changes within NIH are designed to produce budget cuts, and how people who care about medical treatments and cures might now respond.
The theory does not say where the quantum weirdness is supposed to stop
The cat’s cultural appeal lies in the ‘what if’ questions it provokes. It encourages us to ponder the consequences of our very human choices. What if we choose not to look? If we don’t look, can the cat really be said to exist at all? Our decision to lift the lid is much like encountering a fork in the road. We choose a path. Like the American poet Robert Frost, we may choose the path less travelled by. But what if we had taken the other path? from The cat that wouldn’t die [Aeon]
Stories for Mob keeps culture alive, engages adults learning to read
Stories for Mob keeps culture alive, engages adults learning to read. A Koori writing group is helping meet a need for more books with storylines Aboriginal people can relate to, and which inspire them to keep reading. (Mob is a colloquial term identifying a group of Aboriginal people associated with a particular place or country, eg Noongar country. It is used to connect and identify who an Aboriginal person is and where they are from. Mob can represent your family group, clan group or wider Aboriginal community group.)
The LGBTQIA+ News Post, Sooner Than Expected: May 6, 2025
Time moves fast, and the news gathers. But here we go with another news post. And no matter what, Don't Give Up. [more inside]
📚 Trois petites presses canadiennes #7 📚
Mr. Carney goes to Washington
Following his election win, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is visiting Washington, D.C. for preliminary negotiations with U.S. regime leaders. [more inside]
May 5
The Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Incompetence (and Corruption)
Telemarketers Are Using a Weird Trick to Sell Bare-Bones Health Plans [ungated] - "How a former TV comedy writer's fake-job loophole could blow up Obamacare." [more inside]
A superposition of fraud and genius
In a recent column about "narrow banking" and the crypto ecosystem, Bloomberg's Matt Levine quoted an old (2011) blog post by Steve Randy Waldman at Interfluidity that tries to answer the question Why is finance so complex?
"Our belief in the mission of the Hugo Awards ... guides our actions"
File 770, back on April 7: "2025 Hugo Finalists - Where to Read Complete Works or Samples for Free." But also, uh, today, "Seattle Worldcon 2025 Hugo Administrators and WSFS Division Head Resign"; May 5 (item 5), "SOMEBODY STILL WANTS TO RUN A WORLDCON? The Brisbane in 28 Worldcon bid woke from its ordinary social media slumber to leave this announcement ..."; May 2, "Seattle 2025 Chair Apologizes for Use of ChatGPT to Vet Program Participants"; May 2, "Seattle Worldcon 2025 ChatGPT Controversy Roundup"; April 30, "Responding to Controversy, Seattle Worldcon Defends Using ChatGPT to Vet Program Participants." Seattle Worldcon 2025 has a blog for news and announcements. Incidentally, File 770's awards tag leads to news about other awards, e.g. the 2025 Locus Awards Top Ten Finalists were announced on May 2.
Homes built after 2010 twice as energy-efficient as older homes
Homes built after 2010 twice as energy-efficient as older homes. CoreLogic data shows the 6.27 million homes built pre-2010 have a median 2.8-star energy rating, while the 1.5 million built post-2010 have a median 5.9 rating. (Australia).
Any big plans for your FREE time in May?
It's May! It's springtime!* It's another Free Thread! Is the nice weather inspiring you to take on fun / exciting / bothersome / necessary plans? [more inside]
The Beauty Hidden in the People Around You
Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet. Henrik Karlsson reflects on discovering true friends.